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C 2016 Phi Alpha Theta

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BOOK REVIEWS
EDITORIAL OFFICE: Elliott Hall IV, Ohio Wesleyan University;
Delaware, OH 43015. Telephone: 740-368-3642. Facsimile: 740-368-3643
E-MAIL ADDRESS: [email protected]
WEB ADDRESS: http://go.owu.edu/~brhistor
EDITOR
Richard Spall
Ohio Wesleyan University

REGIONAL SUB-EDITORS
Douglas R. Bisson Betty Dessants
(Early Modern Europe) (United States Since 1865)
Belmont University Shippensburg University
Susan Mitchell Sommers Paulette L. Pepin
(Britain and the Empire) (Medieval Europe)
Saint Vincent College University of New Haven

SENIOR EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS

Jackson Hotaling Daniel L. Coutcher Andrew Stock
Kyle Rabung

EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS
Alyssa DiPadova Jonathan Oberschlake Amanda Sisler
Kelsey Heath Jason Perry Henry Sloan
Haley Mees Merritt VerSteeg

WORD PROCESSING: Laurie George

C 2016 Phi Alpha Theta
V

AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST

Daughters of the Trade: Atlantic Slavers and Interracial Marriage on the Gold
Coast. By Pernille Ipsen. (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2015. Pp. 288. $49.95.)

This fine book makes multiple contributions to race relations, sexuality and mar-
riage, social history, the African Diaspora, and Atlantic history. It achieves this
remarkable range through an enchanting forensic historical work constructed
around two relationships, united by marriage and race. The location of the place
in the historical narration is Fort Christiansborg, the slave port in eighteenth-
century Ghana. The book yields tremendous insights on this fort and society, yet
it is not about the fort but about its traders and merchants, including the last
governor, Edward Carstensen, a notable figure. His character yields considerable
insight into the transatlantic trade—specifically how the Danish slave traders
conducted their business. The second principal character, Severine Brock, a Ga
woman, was Carstensen’s wife. Their marriage in 1842 forms the central story,
allowing Pernille Ipsen to trace back interracial marriages between Ga-speaking
women and Danish traders and merchants for 150 years before the Carstensens.
To locate the significance of this fascinating account, it is important to note
that interracial marriage was illegal in the European colonies in the Atlantic
world. However, in West Africa, the Danish turned it into a practice, thus
allowing Ipsen to track a record of no less than five generations of marriages
between Danish men and African women, through which hundreds of children
were produced.
A hybrid Euro-African culture emerged, which Ipsen connects with the
requirements and needs of the Atlantic slave trade. Both races benefited from
the social transactions, which became connected with the economic. For the
Africans, trading families could use the marriages to forge alliances with Euro-
pean merchants. In spite of the prohibition of interracial marriages, the unions
were official, and the children were legitimate, which meant that they could
inherit and set up their own trading businesses. For the Europeans, the practice
became known as the cassare—that is, keeping a house, which enabled access
to African women and their relations, ensuring labor and trust.
Ipsen frames the relations and privileges in contradictory terms. On the one
hand, in the larger context of the Atlantic world, racism remained deeply
embedded in most relations and practices. Thus, marriages to white men did
not confer privilege or erase the stamp of racism. Yet on the other hand, within
their local areas in the Gold Coast, the marriages brought European names and
BOOK REVIEWS 735

connections, thereby conferring wealth and status. The historical narrative is

clear about the slave trade and violence and how it affected everyone.
In the married world of Severine and her husband, Ipsen successfully reveals
complexities at various levels: that of stratification in the Gold Coast, as people
were divided by access to wealth; at the level of Euro-African relations where
racial difference was critical to all forms of interactions; and at the level of
commerce where participants used all possible means to gain advantage.
Ipsen has written a highly readable book, impressive for its insights on the
impact of conjugal relationships, its emphasis on the role of women in the
world of business and politics, and its richer understanding of the foundation
for the distinctive identity of those of mixed race in West Africa.
University of Texas at Austin Toyin Falola

The Last Refuge: Yemen, Al-Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia. By Gregory D.
Johnsen. (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2014. Pp. v, 356. $27.95.)

This new book is for anyone seriously interested in contemporary US foreign

affairs and its “War on Terror.” It covers the original rise and demise of al-
Qaeda in Yemen from the 1990s to the early 2000s and its striking revival
since 2006. The rise of al-Qaeda in Yemen is convincingly connected to the
recruitment of young Saudis and Yemenis to wage jihad against Soviet fighters
in Afghanistan in the 1980s, to their return home in the early 1990s, and to
Osama bin Laden’s rise and his creation of al-Qaeda in 1989.
Although Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh, deposed in 2012, is a major
part of this story, the marriage of convenience in 2014 between Saleh and the
Huthi rebels and the growing involvement of Iran and Saudi Arabia in Yemen
are beyond the book’s timeframe. However, Gregory D. Johnsen’s epilogue
does sketchily bring things down to Saleh’s weak successor and the latter’s
endorsement of the US air campaign against al-Qaeda in early 2014. It ends
ominously: “The more men the US killed . . . the stronger al-Qaeda seemed to
grow” (292).
The author’s primary focus is on the leaders of al-Qaeda in Yemen—their
personalities, styles, goals, and efforts. (Indeed, it includes a four-page invento-
ry of “principal characters.”) Special attention is given to Abu Ali al-Harithi,
the original builder of al-Qaeda in Yemen in the 1990s, and Nasir al-Wihayshi,
the leader of its revival after 2006. What becomes clear is a picture of Yemen’s
al-Qaeda that does not conform to the oft-asserted analogy to one of
736 THE HISTORIAN

McDonald’s cookie-cutter franchises. As portrayed by Johnsen, al-Qaeda in

Yemen is sui generis—shaped and driven by its local leaders.
Johnsen knows of what he speaks. Beginning in 2003, during al-Qaeda’s
demise, he spent a few years in Yemen researching and immersing himself in
politics, often in productive “qat chews.” Very thoughtful and well written, the
book nonetheless does not appear “academic.” For one thing, it lacks foot-
notes. (There are, however, detailed notes and a good index at the end.) It
reads more like a novel or historical fiction, full of colorful, evocative writing.
For example, Afghanistan is described as having “long, colorless winters and
bleached deserts that cracked and crumbled underfoot” (6).
The book has weaknesses, often going into unnecessary or irrelevant detail,
sometimes disproportionately so. In contrast to his description of the towering
bin Laden, Johnsen, in one page, provides excessive detail about three minor fig-
ures: One “a frumpy [officer] . . . with a protruding gut and a thick mustache”;
another “an overweight official in his fifties”; and the last with “a well-groomed
black beard that partially masked a protruding jaw” (54, 55). Also, his tendency
to attribute very specific thoughts to characters at very specific moments suggests
a blurring of the line between fact and imagination. These flourishes suggest that
within Johnsen there may lurk a novelist, a fiction writer.
Still, Johnsen is a fine scholar and a serious student of Yemeni politics—the
author of a book well worth reading.
University of Washington Robert D. Burrowes

Empire and Power in the Reign of S€uleyman: Narrating the Sixteenth-Century

Ottoman World. By Kaya Şahin. (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press,
2013. Pp. xviii, 290. $104.99.)

The Ottoman sixteenth century known as the “classical age” is traditionally

viewed as the apex of the Ottoman state-building project and hence a critical
period in the empire’s history. Nevertheless, exacting studies of the period are
lacking. In this new study, Kaya Şahin addresses this lacuna while offering an
alternative reading of this important moment in Ottoman history. Rather than
the traditional view of the Ottoman classical age as “the outcome of a Near
Eastern/Islamic/Turkish historical Geist that realized its political and civiliza-
tional potential” during the early sixteenth century, Şahin argues that “it [was]
a creative answer to a global crisis that radically changed the political, cultural,
and religious landscape of early modern Eurasia” (6). By situating the Ottoman
BOOK REVIEWS 737

experience within a broader early modern global-historical context, Şahin seeks

to challenge both Eurocentrism and modern Turkish nationalist apologetics
concerning Ottoman state formation and imperialism.
Şahin’s revisionist history utilizes as its lens the career of Cel^alz^ade Mustafa
[1490–1567], a scholar who began as a secretary of the Ottoman imperial coun-
cil and rose through the ranks to occupy the important position of nişanci within
the Ottoman bureaucracy. As bureaucrat and author of several important histo-
ries, he was lauded as an “ideal Ottoman Litterateur” and became “one of the
most prominent voices of Ottoman imperialism” (2, 89). Citing as contemporar-
ies the Safavid Qadi Ahmad Qummi, the Mughal Abu’l fazl ibn Mubarak, the
Englishmen Thomas Cromwell and William Cecil, and Francisco de los Cobos of
the Habsburgs (among others), Şahin justifies his focus on Mustafa’s career
because it exemplifies the sixteenth-century trends towards “Eurasian expansion
in bureaucratic action” (5). Through close readings of Mustafa’s extensive
writings—including his celebrated works concerning the reigns of Sultans Selim I
[1512–1520] and S€ uleyman the Magnificent [1520–1566]—Şahin successfully
demonstrates the ways in which Mustafa participated in the “first relatively orga-
nized Ottoman thrust at establishing more expansive administrative structures
and more sophisticated cultural and ideological discourse” (11).
Şahin’s book consists of two sections. The first offers a revisionist political
history of the early sixteenth century—the period when a new imperial synthe-
sis was in the making and bureaucratization was underway in the Ottoman
Empire. Şahin offers a meticulous and detailed political biography of Mustafa’s
career and his involvement in Sultan S€ uleyman’s campaigns of conquest in Rho-
des, Hungary, and Iraq during the first half of the sixteenth century. Part 2
draws on recent trends in historical studies that seek to reevaluate positivist
approaches to the reading of literary texts (such as the histories composed by
Mustafa). The author charts the evolution and development of an Ottoman
imperial ideology, highlighting the centrality of conflicts with both Safavid Iran
in the East and the Hapsburgs in the West in its formation.
Drawing on an impressive bibliography, which includes early modern history, New
Historicism and literary theory, empire studies, Ottoman and Islamic studies, and
social theory, Şahin offers a clearly written and thorough reexamination of Ottoman
“Great Power” status that will be of great interest primarily to Ottomanists but also to
those interested in comparative empires and early modern world history.
College of the Holy Cross Sahar Bazzaz
738 THE HISTORIAN

Emperor Haile Selassie. By Bereket Habte Selassie. (Athens, OH: Ohio University
Press, 2014. Pp. 147. $14.95.)

This slim volume by distinguished Ethiopian scholar Bereket Habte Selassie is

part of Ohio University Press’s “Short Histories of Africa” series. This offering
evinces the OUP’s progression from its usual focus on South African
personalities.
Unquestionably, Emperor Haile Selassie is among the preeminent figures of
twentieth-century Africa, although today’s students know little of him. Excel-
lent biographies exist of the emperor, including a dictated two-volume autobi-
ography, but need for a work oriented specifically for students in introductory
courses on world and African history remained. Bereket Selassie’s offering fills
that void. As an insider, Bereket possesses intimate knowledge of the emperor’s
administrative style but also finds himself at odds with the pace of change and
the emperor’s Eritrean policy. Bereket’s personal recollections may appear self-
serving to some, but overall they are more instructive than detracting.
Editorial restrictions undoubtedly limit Bereket’s breadth of content and
analysis of issues, but he has done well in capturing the essence of the man and
the challenges he confronted. An earlier generation perceived the emperor as a
stoic, enigmatic character intent on modernizing his country while defending it
against the last vestiges of European colonialism. The younger generation
knows little of this, and its references to Ethiopia revolve more around images
of drought, famine, Live Aid, and Jamaica’s Ras Tefarians.
As successor to visionaries like Tewodros and Menilek II (some would include
Lij Iyasu), Haile Selassie conceptualized modernization more by what his Europe-
an travels suggested than by any deep understanding of the complex processes
involved. For that, he placed great faith in the Ethiopian youth he would educate,
trusting in their knowledge, experience, and loyalty. He could be harsh on and
admonishing of those who failed or resisted his charge. Building upon a rudimen-
tary Italian inheritance, he brought considerable change to administrative and tax
structures and expanded communications by air, land, and electronics. But agricul-
ture and land reform were largely untouched. The capital, Addis Ababa, generally
reflected his legacy: a record that was rather spotty—more façade than reality. His
constitution, though introducing limited democracy, nevertheless left him firmly in
charge; he seemed genuinely surprised and aggrieved by the failed 1960 coup and
by the subsequent student movement questioning Ethiopia’s progress.
Even after the disaster of the Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–1941), he remained
committed to collective security, supporting the United Nations’ efforts with
BOOK REVIEWS 739

Ethiopian troops in Korea and the Congo. He embraced the American Peace
Corps early on; widely admired, they too became a target and fulcrum for the
emerging student movement. Inspired by Ethiopia as a symbol of pan-African-
ism, the emperor utilized his prestige to establish the Organization of African
Unity (now African Union) headquarters in his capital, although he certainly
found Nkrumah’s vision for the continent suspect.
The emperor’s vision of modernization, commitment to collective security,
and methods of utilizing authority are all fundamental issues that ideally pro-
mote student intellectual engagement; Bereket Selassie carefully frames the
basic issues of Ethiopian historiography for debate. Despite omissions, this
work should stimulate broader discussion and therefore be widely recom-
mended to student examination.
Radford University Charles W. McClellan

THE AMERICAS
Earth Politics: Religion, Decolonization, and Bolivia’s Indigenous Intellectuals. By
Waskar Ari. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. xii, 262. $24.95.)

The author of this study traces the lives of four twentieth-century Aymara intel-
lectuals who were forebears of contemporary decolonization politics in Bolivia.
Toribio Miranda, Gregorio Titiriku, Melit on Gallardo, and Andres Jacha’qullu
were part of the Alcaldes Mayores Particulares (AMP) movement that gained
influence across the Bolivian altiplano in the first half of the 1900s. Alcaldes
Mayores, roughly “senior mayors,” recovered a colonial designation for indige-
nous authority. Particulares (particular, or, sometimes, non-state) indexed
efforts to contest state laws, schools, and institutions. Embedded in Andean
spirituality, they were also known as phawajrunas, or flying men, who traveled
widely and established vast political networks. Yet AMP strategies were hybrid,
moving between making claims based on colonial titles, engaging republican
legal processes, and imagining more radical autonomy. In Earth Politics, the
author refers to the spiritual side of these struggles, the efforts to return to a
relationship with the mother earth, and ritual practices of place-making and
claiming that this entailed. Richly documented political biographies merge with
social and political history for a fascinating read.
Introductory chapters set the historical stage. The dispossession of Indian
lands initiated in 1874, and the civil war of 1898 and 1899 yielded a genera-
tion of Aymara intellectuals. Using the concepts of coloniality and racialization,
740 THE HISTORIAN

Waskar Ari narrates the AMP’s struggle as a decolonizing project that sought
to dismantle institutional and discursive foundations of the Bolivian state. Ari
argues, convincingly, that these “actors provided alternative understandings of
nation making in modern Latin America” (3).
In chapter 3, Ari explores Toribio Miranda, an AMP founder. Miranda was
one of many Aymara imprisoned in the late 1930s and 1940s amid the rise of
resistance across the altiplano. Upon his release, Miranda pursued an Indian
Law, an attempt to establish a body of rights rooted in Andean spirituality and
social organization that would challenge the racist legality of the state. Miran-
da crafted an early version of “multiethnic nationalism.” Yet this was as much
a challenge against racial hierarchy as it was for ethnic particularity. Ari does a
fine job of detailing the dimensions of these efforts in an age of foot and animal
travel and the violence of a racist state and society.
In chapter 4, Ari engages Gregorio Titiriku, whose struggles unfolded in
large part in the urban spaces of Bolivia. In the cities, apartheid-like segregation
was challenged by growing Indian migration. Ari traces the politics of race,
space, and dress, as the category of cholo (a more acceptable urban Indian)
emerged between jaq’i (Quechua or Aymara) and q’ara (mestizo or white). The
claim for a right to the city, as jaq’i in traditional dress, was a direct challenge
to colonialist racialization.
In chapter 5, the author examines Melit on Gallardo, an organizer of the
1940s. Gallardo was transformed from a mestizo child into a radical leader of
the AMP, a dismantling of internalized colonialism that was fueled by Gallar-
do’s experience in the Chaco War. After being asked to die for Bolivia but later
treated as mere indio once out of uniform, Gallardo (re)turned to the earth pol-
itics of the AMP.
Finally in chapter 6, Ari addresses another unexpected activist, Andres
Jacha’qullu, who was transformed from a cholo policeman into an AMP leader.
In the context of the Bolivian revolution of the 1950s, Jacha’qullu marked the
globalization of struggle. He engaged the International Labor Organization in
the 1950s and would, for a time, even convert to the Baha’i religion, then in
ascendance in rural Bolivia. As the state sought to “peasantize” the Indians, the
AMP resisted by celebrating traditional clothing and challenging mestizo-
dominated peasant unions. Yet the period saw the decline of the AMP as the
struggle gave way to the logic of unions and political parties.
Ari’s work is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the longer his-
tories of indigenous revitalization in Bolivia. Although readers unfamiliar with
Bolivia might find it daunting, students of Latin America should read it closely
BOOK REVIEWS 741

to gain a fuller understanding of both the complexities of indigenous political

projects and the stubborn durability of the colonial foundations of the Latin
American state.
Washington University in St. Louis Bret Gustafson

The Secret Coalition: Ike, LBJ, and the Search for a Middle Way in the 1950s. By
Gary A. Donaldson. (New York, NY: Carrel Books, 2014. Pp. xii, 244. $34.95.)

This book is a well-written narrative that explains how Dwight Eisenhower

and Lyndon Johnson worked out moderate legislative policies during the mid–
1950s and how that process eventually fell apart. This tacit alliance, as author
Gary Donaldson rightly points out, was a peculiar one in that it did not involve
high–level meetings between Eisenhower and Johnson to negotiate compro-
mises, or even much contact between their respective staffs. The “Secret Coali-
tion,” as Donaldson dubs it, was much more a detente than an accord, in
which the Eisenhower White House would send proposed bills to Congress
where Johnson, as Senate majority leader from 1955 to 1960, would amend
them enough so as to make them acceptable to centrists in both parties.
Donaldson is perhaps most insightful when he considers the dilemmas faced
by moderately conservative Republicans of the Eisenhower era in dealing with
resistance not just from liberal Democrats but also from the GOP’s right wing.
Influential in the Senate, so–called “rock–ribbed” Republicans often disliked
Eisenhower’s centrist legislative agenda and especially his support for expand-
ing Social Security and maintaining New Deal-era policies, such as farm price
supports and high and progressive income taxation. As Donaldson reminds us,
the Republicans controlled Congress only during the first two years of Eisen-
hower’s two–term presidency, and even then by only wafer-thin margins. Thus,
Eisenhower and his aides from the start, and especially after the Democrats
gained control of Congress in January 1955, were obliged to rely on support
from centrist Democrats in order to get legislation passed.
One especially appealing feature of this book is that it puts the story in
broader historical context by beginning with an account of the national politi-
cal scene of the later 1940s. By letting the reader see how the Eisenhowerites
came to win the 1952 presidential nomination battle, Donaldson makes clear
the roots of their dilemma in governing once the former general was elected
president in November 1952. The Eisenhower forces did not so much convert
the GOP as take it over in 1952, with many of those on the losing sides
742 THE HISTORIAN

powerfully represented in Congress thereafter. This is a complicated tale that

often confuses students of the era, but Donaldson’s discussion is consistently
clear, insightful, and persuasive.
The book also closes well by explaining how big Democratic gains in the
off–year elections of 1958 so expanded the ranks of the Senate liberals as to
make the detente of the mid–1950s steadily less workable. Donaldson argues
that the polarization that has come to define American politics in recent deca-
des began then, and although he may overstate the speed of the change, his
basic argument appears sound. This book is recommended for undergraduates,
educated general readers, and scholars new to the topic.
Ohio State University David Stebenne

A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783–1867. By
Max M. Edling. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Pp. xxi, 318.
$45.00.)

As its evocative title suggests, this author’s study of public finance in the early
United States locates the basis for modern US military power (“Hercules”) in
the policy decisions of the early 1790s (the nation’s “cradle”). By replacing the
feckless Articles of Confederation with the more robust Constitution and then
implementing the recommendations of Alexander Hamilton’s “Report on Pub-
lic Credit,” the founding generation established a military power able to throw
its ever-increasing weight around. The author asserts that “in contrast to what
the founding fathers claimed and modern historians have often repeated, the
early federal government was designed for war, not peace” (237).
To support this argument, Max Edling takes readers through the financing
of the American Revolution, War of 1812, Mexican-American War, and Civil
War. Though the details can be overwhelming, Edling explains such arcane
matters as debt funding strategies with amazing clarity. His basic story is actu-
ally straightforward: Hamilton’s system called for the federal government to
rely on tariff revenues in peacetime and loans in wartime and then to pay debts
down quickly to preserve the nation’s borrowing capacity for future wars. The
system had flaws, particularly the vulnerability of tariff revenue to the goodwill
of the European naval powers, but Edling is more struck by an irony: that its
putative opponents deployed it most aggressively. He maintains that “it was
the self-proclaimed enemies of central government and public indebtedness,
politicians in the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian antistatist tradition, who made
BOOK REVIEWS 743

the most extensive use of the federal government and its capacity to raise mon-
ey in order to realize policy objectives” (14). These objectives involved expan-
sion: Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, Madison’s War of 1812, and Polk’s war
with Mexico.
Treating this outcome as irony depends on taking the politicians’ antistate
rhetoric at face value, as Edling does. Yet the fact that their modern successors
act on the same pattern—big spending and borrowing by Republicans, retrench-
ment by Democrats—suggests that “irony” may not be exactly the right word.
There are other issues. Edling does a much better job of describing than
accounting for his story of public finance. Oddly, the nation’s economic structure
is almost entirely missing, especially acutely when Hamilton’s system is credited
for the contrast between American strength and Mexican weakness in the 1840s.
He lavishes attention on partisan rhetoric but neglects other crucial aspects of poli-
tics in this period (such as slavery), and there is an inescapably old-fashioned ring
to his repeated descriptions of expansionist violence as the “pacification” of Indi-
ans. There is also significant interpretive exaggeration. Albert Gallatin’s sale of
long-term bonds for the War of 1812 undoubtedly was “the most advanced meth-
od of war finance available” at the time, but to treat Gallatin’s actions as “a sig-
nificant step on the nation’s road to world dominion” because the same financial
strategy “has underpinned the unequaled war-making capacity of the United States
for the last two centuries” seems a bit much (119–120).
University of California, Berkeley Robin Einhorn

The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship
in Antebellum America. By Corinne T. Field. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of
North Carolina Press, 2014. Pp. xiii, 243. $32.95.)

One cannot study nineteenth-century America without occasionally coming

across both overt and subtle references to white women and blacks as childlike
dependents. Too often, such statements can be attributed to the structures of
domestic patriarchy. Corinne T. Field would not disagree, but she envisions the
problem as broader, more complex, and more nuanced. Historians’ tendency to
separate the private and public spheres when considering citizenship has led to
a historiography that has overlooked the political significance of adulthood in
framing both private and public hierarchies. Having employed race and gender
for so long in their efforts to interpret antebellum reform movements, they
have neglected the rhetoric that bound feminists’ and abolitionists’ reform
744 THE HISTORIAN

efforts—that of a shared infantilization. For Field, attention to the fight against

infantilization exposes how “understandings of adulthood shaped claims for
democratic rights and freedoms and . . . how democratic ideals have shaped
what it means to grow up and grow old” (4–5).
Field is most interested in the antebellum women’s rights movement, which
“fought the persistent association of women with children, protested the praise
lavished on girlish beauty rather than on female wisdom, and demanded the
right to develop their talents as they aged,” but her incorporation of abolitionist
thought and rhetoric beautifully enhances her argument about adulthood by
demonstrating how structures of age permeated thinking about enslaved blacks
(2). Hers is a cultural history that blends the intellectual and the social to
uncover how reformers sought to meet their goals, and her analysis of thought
is meticulous and enlightening. Though resting on a strong historiographic foun-
dation, it is curious that she did not engage works like William Goetzmann’s
Beyond the Revolution or Daniel Walker Howe’s Making the American Self,
which are purer intellectual histories that would have provided even larger con-
texts for her study. For example, she notes Mary Wollstonecraft’s plea for wom-
en to “unfold their faculties” without seemingly understanding the construct of
faculty psychology—the model of balance between reason, prudence, and pas-
sions that permeated the age (and upon which Howe constructed his study) (2).
Still, this study engages the reader in the constellation of ideas that con-
stricted white women’s and blacks’ quests for equality. In time, reformers’
appeals to adulthood became problematic as the more privileged among
them—white women, black men, and black women—reverted to the language
of infantilization to assert their own maturity over their comrades in the fight
for equality. This, according to Field, led to the failure of the equal adulthood
movement.
The obligatory reviews included on the book’s back cover celebrate Field’s
contributions to our understandings of early feminism and abolitionism, but
this reviewer would add that the author illuminates as well readers’ conceptual-
ization of antebellum American manhood and its intimate relationship to the
evolution of citizenship. In fact, beyond rooting the women’s rights and aboli-
tionist movements in a deeper intellectual history, Field’s most significant con-
tribution may be that she demonstrates how white manhood—and, to an
extent, black manhood—was also shaped by the ideology of adulthood.
University of North Carolina Craig Friend
BOOK REVIEWS 745

The History of American Higher Education: Learning and Culture from the Found-
ing to World War II. By Roger L. Geiger. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2014. Pp. xviii, 564. $35.00.)

Ezra Cornell is reported to have said, regarding his aspirations for higher edu-
cation, “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in
any study” (288). Cornell University did much to embody that wish, and it rep-
resents well—at least as regards teaching, whatever might develop regarding
research or outreach—the kind of institution that has come to dominate Ameri-
can higher education. That it was, however, by no means the norm until well
into the twentieth century offers a key measure of what had to change along
the way to get to the present.
A half-century ago, Frederick Rudolph produced a synthetic exploration,
The American College and University: A History [1962], and much more
recently John R. Thelin has done so in A History of American Higher Educa-
tion [2004 and 2011]. Now comes Roger L. Geiger, developing the story in far
greater detail than any previous effort, from the founding of Harvard College
to the eve of World War II—or more or less where Rudolph left off in his
much earlier work, and before Ezra Cornell’s ideal grew to dominance through-
out the nation.
Geiger explores change and continuity in three broad areas of inquiry: the
students in higher education, the institutions themselves, and the contours of
knowledge consumed or produced in those settings. Two triptychs carry much
of the narrative. In one, the author deploys the concepts of culture, careers, and
knowledge to get at the changing operations and roles of various types of insti-
tutions. In the other, he traces three “revolutions”: the land-grant movement
(which rippled out from the Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862, altering
both access and curriculum), the academic revolution (where the focus is on fac-
ulty and research), and the collegiate revolution (here the emphasis turns to the
students, including intercollegiate athletics). The author explores both the influ-
ence of broad patterns of society, culture, and politics on the trajectory of
higher education and the reciprocal influence of higher education on society.
So detailed and lengthy is Geiger’s book that one hesitates to ask for more,
but some topics could stand greater attention. One such topic is a shift during
the last few generations of his study from segregation of men from women
even in classrooms at superficially coeducational schools, as well as female
exclusion from a great many institutions, programs, and roles, to at least some
access by female students to graduate and professional programs of study. So
746 THE HISTORIAN

magisterial is this work that one is occasionally startled to encounter an error

of fact or presentation, or a citation either missing or extraneous, but these are
few. There is no bibliography, but notes are at the foot of the page.
All in all, this latest book to traverse the history of higher education in America
brings to bear a lifetime of scholarship, and it provides an integrated and nuanced
interpretation of the place of higher education in the nation’s history. Still missing
is a comparably wide-ranging consideration of the story since 1940.
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Peter Wallenstein

Founders as Fathers: The Private Lives and Politics of the American Revolutionaries.
By Lorri Glover. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Pp. x, 324.
$30.00.)

The image of the American Revolutionaries as “Founding Fathers” emerged

before the revolutionary generation itself had passed. In this work, Lorri Glover
considers several Revolutionary leaders’ actual roles as fathers. Examining the
“connections between family values and revolutionary politics” in the lives of
the era’s five most prominent Virginians—George Mason, Patrick Henry, George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison—Glover argues persuasively
that fatherhood was “central” to their political careers, though their understand-
ing of family and politics experienced subtle but important changes (4, 3).
Before 1774, Glover’s subjects each aspired to the status of a colonial patri-
arch. Family, plantation, and hierarchy stood at the center of their identity;
politics mainly provided a means to promote their families’ well-being. None
expected the controversy with Great Britain to lead to independence, and as
conflict mounted each remained preoccupied with personal crises, ranging from
Washington’s stepson’s profligacy to Mason’s wife’s death. Still, “family
provided the framework for understanding and then redefining the colonial-
imperial relationship,” and the responsibility to defend their dependents ulti-
mately drove them to independence (38). Ironically, the time needed to lead a
revolution set their political duties in conflict with family obligations. Each
proved ambitious, but all remained committed to “core family values—owning
land, commanding slaves, growing estates, and protecting relatives” (56). Fami-
ly circumstances also shaped their course. With smaller families and no children
of their own, Washington and Madison became national figures. However,
Mason and Henry—each the father of several children—remained locally
focused, confining their contributions to their state. Jefferson appeared to be
BOOK REVIEWS 747

headed in a similar locally oriented direction until his wife’s death changed his
course.
Virginia’s founders remained patriarchs, but independence altered under-
standings about family obligations. As hierarchy weakened, they accepted soci-
ety as a “new civic family” of equal “American brothers” (49). Successful men
made their mark on the public stage, so character became more important for
preferment than family connection. Education stressed that worthy offspring
had to choose to act virtuously. When sons and nephews proved irresponsible—
as often happened—patriarchs found more deserving men to support, such as
the young army officers who surrounded Washington. Continuing presumptions
about “natural” differences limited women’s contributions to their duties as
republican wives and mothers. Likewise, none of the founders freed their slaves,
because emancipation “would have destroyed their power as planter-patriarchs
and devastated their family wealth” (54). Disturbed by the next generation’s
failure to act virtuously, Glover’s subjects were obsessed with preserving their
legacy for future generations. Their descendants subsequently assumed responsi-
bility for protecting their reputations and portrayed them as ideal fathers while
shaping their idealized image as founders.
Founders as Fathers presents a fascinating new perspective on Virginia’s
Revolutionary leaders and on the private and public impact of the Revolu-
tion. Throughout the story, Glover offers perceptive insight on her subjects’
private lives, such as Jefferson’s relationships with his white and black fami-
lies, Madison’s and Washington’s frustrations with their stepsons, and the
disappointment of talented women like Martha Jefferson Randolph. Useful
for scholars, this book’s clear writing also makes it suitable for undergraduate
courses.
Berry College Jonathan M. Atkins

Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics. By
Terry Golway. (New York, NY: Liveright/W. W. Norton, 2014. Pp. xxiv, 367.
$27.95.)

The author of this book tells a great story, from which he extracts a grand theory
explaining Progressivism, the New Deal, and the emergence of modern American
politics. The story is about Tammany Hall and how a Jeffersonian political club
became the notorious political machine of Boss Tweed fame. Terry Golway cor-
rects the more lurid versions of Tammany’s history—it never had iron fisted
748 THE HISTORIAN

control over New York City, for example, and it was not always kind to the
Irish—reminding us in the process how fragile American democracy has been at
various moments in our history. For one thing, America might have suffered the
fate of Northern Ireland had it not been for Tammany’s astute management of
Catholic-Protestant relations at the end of the nineteenth century.
The grand theory is that Tammany’s outreach to the immigrant poor made
it a prototype of modern Progressivism, specifically the project of economic reg-
ulation in the name of social justice. Golway reminds readers, “Before Franklin
Roosevelt . . . there was Al Smith” (240). Helping the poor came naturally to
Tammany leaders—many of them had grown up poor themselves—but it was
also good politics in a city with so many poor voters. So the organization doled
out favors in return for votes. This enraged members of the respectable classes,
many of whom (E. L. Godkin of The Nation, for example) were generating
their own “Progressive” critique of the Gilded Age and of the American eco-
nomic order that produced it.
Meanwhile, Tammany politicians were coming to see the need for broader leg-
islative responses to the problems their voters faced; housing reform would go fur-
ther than Christmas baskets. But to accomplish this, Tammany would need those
Protestant and upper crust do-gooders who were in the vanguard of “reform”—
most of whom, as it happened, hated immigrants, and especially Irish-Catholic
ones. Golway argues that it was men like Al Smith and Robert Wagner, along
with Progressives like Frances Perkins and Robert Moses, who achieved the
improbable: a grand coalition of Tammany Democrats and Protestant, Progressive
reformers, who together devised a new style of government with an appeal far
beyond Tammany’s Irish precincts. And thus the New Deal was born.
The problem with this theory is that Progressivism was always concerned
with matters far beyond helping poor people pay their rent. Its aim was to
undermine and “transcend” the Constitutional founding and the politics that
founding made possible, especially the boisterous, partisan, and thoroughly
democratic politics of the states and cities. From the New Deal perspective, the
problem was not simply that Tammany and other “political machines” were
often corrupt; worse, they were inefficient and ineffective. National problems
called for national solutions, and so federal bureaucrats would dole out the
help that Tammany ward heelers once gave to their voters. States and cities
would lose much of their significance (as would local elections, which have
never been as interesting as they were in the heyday of Tammany Hall); party
conventions would be replaced by direct primaries; and mass democratic
BOOK REVIEWS 749

politics would take a back seat to interest group lobbying and “public interest”
litigation.
What New Deal Progressives dreamed of was far removed from Tammany’s
street-corner politics, and it was not long before the sources of Tammany’s
strength dried up. Local political organizations suffered the same fate every-
where. Golway is right to notice how much has been gained in this transition;
but when one reads his book, one may also appreciate how much has been lost.
Boston College Dennis Hale

The Politics of Giving in the Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata: Donors, Lenders, Sub-
jects, and Citizens. By Viviana L. Grieco. (Albuquerque, NM: University of New
Mexico Press, 2014. Pp. ix, 298. $55.00.)

By examining the historical, political, social, and economic significance of the

donativos, or donations offered by individuals and corporations to the Spanish
crown in the late years of colonial rule, this book makes a significant contribu-
tion to the understanding of some of the mechanisms that sustained Spanish
imperial rule. Viviana L. Grieco analyzes four donativos collected in the Viceroy-
alty of Rio de la Plata between 1793 and 1810. Every sector of Rioplatense soci-
ety gave donativos: males and females, individuals and corporations, ecclesiastics
and lay people, Indians and Spaniards, and even slaves. The first two donations
were collected to help with the expenses of the war against the French Conven-
tion [1793–1795] and the naval wars against England [1799–1802]. The third
and fourth donativos were called for after the British invasions of Buenos Aires
in 1806 and 1807 and after the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in
1808. Although the first two contributions were made mostly by wealthy individ-
uals and corporations with vested interests in the imperial system, a significant
proportion of the rosters of the last two donativos included not only members of
the racially diverse militias but widows receiving pensions and freedmen as well.
The author interweaves economic, social, political, and cultural history in a
rather effective way to argue that, despite conventional representations, the
Spanish Catholic monarchy developed a sharp commercial and financial edge.
In relation to this, Grieco makes several revisionist (and convincing) arguments
regarding the operations of the Spanish Empire. She demonstrates that imperial
power was neither as absolute nor as rapacious as traditional historiography
would have it. She shows that, contrary to the common assumption, these don-
ativos were not seen by the inhabitants of the empire as predatory fiscal devices
750 THE HISTORIAN

but as opportunities for profit for a range of investors. Through a novel analy-
sis of the quantity and quality of donativos, along with the individuals who
made those contributions, she challenges many of these conventional notions.
Still more important is her analysis of the political and cultural assumptions
that sustained these donations, something that significantly enhances our com-
prehension of the Spanish Empire’s mechanisms of rule.
The bargaining that went on between different individuals and corporations,
on the one hand, and the crown, on the other, which led to the concession of a
donativo, is situated by the author in a long political tradition of negotiation
that went back to the origins of the Spanish Empire in the New World. In so
doing, her study contributes to blurring the distinction that traditionally has
represented the Spanish Empire as the opposite of the British colonies, the for-
mer being ruled despotically and the latter being characterized by political rep-
resentation and a large degree of self-rule. The other significant aspect of this
work is the use of the insights of cultural history to reach a fuller understand-
ing of certain economic aspects of the Spanish Empire. One of Grieco’s most
thought-provoking arguments is that though the fiscal mechanism of the dona-
tivo was very successful in capitalizing the existing mercantile and financial net-
works, it was not as effective at draining specie from the Spanish American
region, since only a fraction of the funds collected left the viceroyalty.
Grieco’s study also contributes to the historiography of the independence of
colonial Spanish America, as it helps readers better to comprehend the under-
pinnings of the revolutionary movement in the Rio de la Plata region. By show-
ing that the revolutionaries drew heavily from the assumptions and principles
of the political culture of the Spanish Empire in order to sever their ties with
the mother country, her study contributes to the historiographical current that
maintains that the independence of Spanish America owed more to Spanish
imperial political culture than to outside influences such as the Enlightenment
or the French Revolution.
University of Maryland Alejandro Ca~
nequs

Doughboys on the Great War: How American Soldiers Viewed Their Military
Experience. By Edward A. Gutierrez. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas,
2014. Pp. x, 308. $34.95.)

Unlocking the ways soldiers view their military experiences comes with a host
of methodological issues. Wartime letters, often censored or self-censored, are
BOOK REVIEWS 751

not an adequate measure of men’s morale and oftentimes focus on the temporal
discomforts of life on campaign. More problematic are memoirs. Written after
the events they describe, memoirs are subject to changing times; they are per-
sonal narratives of the past altered to fit the needs of the present. How can a
historian get at the heart of how soldiers, indeed how armies, feel about the
wars they fight?
The American doughboy is remembered in terms of stereotypes created by
Lost Generation writers in the 1920s. Disillusionment, that misapplied and mis-
understood concept, is the generational narrative taught in American schools,
an unfair and deeply problematic lens for viewing millions of men who served
in the Great War. If doughboys were not disillusioned, then what were they?
Edward Gutierrez offers a key to unlocking this mystery. Fourteen years of
interest and research on this question led him to read 30,847 military service
records and veterans’ surveys, which provided him with candid reflections on
how American soldiers viewed their war experiences in the years directly follow-
ing the Great War. What Gutierrez reveals is a generational portrait of men
who believed strongly in the old abstractions lamented by Hemingway and his
cohort: Namely, doughboys emerged from a clearly defined culture of heroic
masculinity and fought out of a sense of duty and patriotism. “Men who fought
in the Great War were inspired by the courage of their Civil War ancestors,” he
writes (17–18). They went to war because it was what was expected of them.
How did their patriotic and masculine ideals meet the challenge of the
trenches? Did doughboys face a Fussellian disconnection between their experi-
ences and the realities of combat? The answer is yes and no. Doughboys over-
whelmingly agreed in Sherman’s maxim that “war is hell,” and most found
combat on the Western front brutal. But in reflection, these men who had sur-
vived through some of the most difficult and bloody campaigns of the First
World War were still proud to have done their duty for cause, comrades, and
country. Duty, not disillusionment, is the great conclusion of this book.
Gutierrez’s research is superb. The breadth of his sources is simply
unmatched on this topic. The book is awash with lively and interesting quotes
from servicemen. Their voices are clearly heard in every chapter, on every
theme. Yet, there could be more engagement with some of the historiography
of his themes in order to offer a more keenly honed analysis of these sources.
Patriotism, soldier experiences and disillusionment, literary representations and
culture, masculinity, killing and trauma theory, memory studies—these are all
theoretical themes that are introduced in this work, and they each have estab-
lished literatures that could be better incorporated into his overall narrative to
752 THE HISTORIAN

demonstrate the breadth of his secondary research, which is apparent from the
bibliography but not discussed in great detail. This is likely both to keep the
book focused on the primary research and to keep its narrative lively.
In Doughboys on the Great War, Gutierrez has written a landmark study of
soldiers whose living memory has now faded, but whose voices are preserved
within these pages.
Gettysburg College Ian Andrew Isherwood

Duncan Hines: How a Traveling Salesman Became the Most Trusted Name in
Food. By Louis Hatchett. (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2014.
Pp. 352. $19.95.)

Once viewed as the most trusted source of information about restaurant dining
in America, Duncan Hines has not fared well. His fusty insistence on clean
kitchens and the provincialism of his reviews have relegated the masticating
moralist in a motor car to the footnotes of food history. And so it is curious
that Louis Hatchett’s biography of Duncan Hines, first published by Mercer
University Press in 2001, has been reissued by the University Press of Kentucky.
In this food fetishizing moment, when anyone with a smartphone is a potential
restaurant reviewer, the grandfather of American restaurant reviews seems
starchy and outmoded.
Duncan Hines was born in Kentucky in 1880 and found success as a travel-
ing salesman in Chicago. With expense accounts and automobiles, traveling
salesmen were experts on restaurants. The reviewer’s parents dated-by-dining
in the 1960s and received most of their culinary recommendations from sales-
men. Hines’s friends, knowing that he had created a list of over seven hundred
restaurants and approving, as many Americans did at the time, of his penchant
for simple American food, pestered him for dining advice. In 1935, in an effort
to forestall further inquiries, he published Adventures in Good Eating. Over
the next twenty-seven years, he sold more than five million guides.
Hatchett’s account is workmanlike, but his admiration is passionate. Though
Hines earned a living from his guidebooks and signs advertising his endorse-
ment, Hatchett admires Hines’s efforts to safeguard his integrity. Hines
remained as anonymous as celebrity allowed; he never accepted free meals,
refused advertising, and had no compunction about striking a restaurant from
his guide if it no longer met his standards. Even when he eventually lent his
name to a line of products, it was not for the “modest royalty” but rather
BOOK REVIEWS 753

because Roy Park, the man behind the brand, convinced Hines “he would be
doing his country a favor by directly influencing and upgrading American eat-
ing habits” (191).
Such integrity makes Hines a man worthy of admiration, but Hatchett’s
veneration conjures up an image that is often as cardboard as the cakeboxes
on which Hines’s face once appeared. Hines lived, wrote, and ate at a pivotal
moment in the history of American dining. Racial segregation in restaurants
was being challenged; men like Hines were competing with women for cul-
tural and culinary authority; and more people were eating out than ever
before. Hatchett ignores race and treats Hines’s sexism and elitism as pecca-
dillos isolated from historical time or place. And yet, Hines’s influence, as
well as the historical significance of Hatchett’s biography, is predicated on
his capacity to communicate across lines of race, gender, and class to shape
Americans’ understanding of their cuisine. However, his refusal to eat ham-
burgers and his dismissal of barbeque joints (in Hatchett’s words) as
“roadside hellholes” ensured that the red guidebook, discontinued in 1962,
had a short life (130).
Hatchett’s spadework has made it possible for others to reconsider Hines’s
influence on American foodways.1 But before one relegates this hagiography to
the footnotes, we might be well served by revisiting it. As today’s journalists
lose audience to bloggers who accept financial incentives to endorse products,
Duncan Hines’s integrity is something to be emulated. Hines was the “most
trusted name in food,” as Hatchett reminds us, for some very good reasons.
University of Southern Mississippi Andrew P. Haley

A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life. By Allyson Hobbs.

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Pp. 371. $29.95.)

Enriched by the quality of its prose and the sheer variety of historical and liter-
ary sources, this work is an important contribution to American cultural history.
Taking as her focus the phenomenon of racial passing in slavery and in freedom,
the author has written an engaging work that is as valuable to an understanding
of the intersection of race and identity as it is to the complex narrative of the
search for authenticity and what theologians call the “true self.”

1. For example, Damon Talbott, “Senses of Taste: Duncan Hines and American Gastronomy:
1931–1962” (PhD diss., University of Kansas, 2013).
754 THE HISTORIAN

“Passing,” Allyson Hobbs notes in a summary observation, “offered count-

less freedoms,” but it also involved “an anxious decision to break with a sense
of communion” with the larger African American mainstream (159). Liberty
was the lure, understood only in its association with whiteness. As the author
makes clear, whether in slavery or in the long century following emancipation,
the personal decision to abandon one’s people and “place” to assume a new
identity brought unimagined possibilities and perilous pitfalls if the deceit was
uncovered.
A “dogged desire for freedom” encouraged “fashioning a new self” and
what the author repeatedly refers to as “racially ambiguous men and women”
(29, 35). The word “ambiguous” may not adequately capture the complicated
emotional and social tensions at play. Ultimately, and perhaps unceasingly,
each individual who did cross over the color line had to resolve the all too
human questions of “who am I?” and “who are my people?” “A history of
passing,” the author aptly states, “opens a window onto the complexity of the
human experience” (267).
Although A Chosen Exile covers both the pre- and post-emancipation eras,
the greater part of the book understandably centers on the phenomenon of
racial passing after ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery.
Not surprisingly, the rich anecdotes and personal stories focus on the literate
elite. It also is worth noting that with a few exceptions the vast majority of
human subjects made the physical decision to leave the American South, thus
doubling the effect of movement found—across cultures and space—throughout
the narrative. The chances for freedom by crossing the color line were often
complemented by the decision to move northward.
Hobbs is attentive to historical context and conveys a sense of development
over generations. One critical moment, in her telling, came in the 1820s, when
“the fluid and cosmopolitan Atlantic world began to give way to a new racial
regime” in the slave South (41). Another came in the waning days of Recon-
struction as violence and Jim Crow segregation redefined anew the terms of
freedom. Hobbs’s chapters on the period 1890–1940, including the heyday of
the Harlem Renaissance, are particularly effective in weaving together litera-
ture, the fine and performing arts, and the musings of public intellectuals.
Equally welcome to this reader is the author’s inclusion of so many well-
known and less familiar individuals whose personal narratives add to the rich-
ness of a very complex and intrinsically fascinating work of cultural history.
Millersville University Dennis B. Downey
BOOK REVIEWS 755

Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion. By Harold
Holzer. (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2014. Pp. xxxi, 735. $37.50.)

Abraham Lincoln understood the power of the press and made every effort to
use it to further his political career and presidential policies. In his day, most
American newspapers were highly partisan and sometimes linked to political
parties through patronage as well as ideas. Early on, Lincoln the politician rec-
ognized that newspaper coverage was the key to name recognition and positive
public opinion. Throughout his career, he would do what he could to influence
newspaper coverage. Lincoln the president would go so far as to use his power
either to reward newspaper editors or punish them.
Harold Holzer brings new light to the many-faceted relationship between
Abraham Lincoln and the press. He focuses on the relationship between Lin-
coln and the three most powerful editors of his time: Horace Greeley of the
New York Tribune, James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald, and
Henry J. Raymond of the New York Times. In so doing, Holzer tells the story
of the press from the 1830s through the 1860s, explaining its political nature,
the development of the penny press, and the rise of large-circulation urban
newspapers whose reach would extend across the nation.
The author provides extensive detail and insight as he proceeds year by
year, exploring the rise of Lincoln, Greeley, Bennett, and Raymond, culminat-
ing in Lincoln’s ascent to national prominence, the 1860 election, and the Civil
War. During the conflict, the federal government and the military tried to con-
tain the news by controlling the telegraph lines and sometimes pressuring,
coercing, and even jailing newspaper editors. Holzer discusses these issues thor-
oughly and pictures the president as caught between his belief in the Constitu-
tion and his determination to win the war and unite the nation. He concludes
that despite the “censorship and suppression [that] would continue, off and on,
throughout the war . . . many newspapers flourished during the Civil War, vast-
ly increasing their coverage, circulation, and influence, and in some cases earn-
ing huge profits in the bargain” (357–358). He adds that “rather than kill the
press during the Civil War, the conflict and the Lincoln administration in effect
gave it new life—especially if its practitioners were pro-Union and pro-
Republican” (358).
As the war continued, Lincoln developed the technique of writing “public
letters” to individuals and releasing them to the press. Holzer explains that “in
doing so, he revolutionized the art of presidential communications,” adding,
“Lincoln had come to realize that he could control ‘public sentiment’ best by
756 THE HISTORIAN

bypassing the editors and going directly to their readers. . . . He transformed

the so-called public letter into a weapon of mass communication” (448).
Holzer is a brilliant historian, a marvelous storyteller, and a fine writer. His
attention to detail provides much that will surprise historians of both Lincoln
and journalism, and the flow of his words makes his story accessible to a wide
range of readers. This is a masterwork. It is a beautifully written and serious
history that should make its mark as both a unique exploration of Abraham
Lincoln and an extraordinary history of the American journalism in his lifetime.
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga David B. Sachsman

The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s Amer-
ica. By John Kasson. (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2014. Pp. 384. $27.95.)

Shirley Temple rose to fame during the Great Depression and was arguably one
of the greatest child stars in history. In this cultural history, the author argues
that Temple provided a type of new “emotional currency” for America and her
success was “symbolic of the emotional necessity” of entertainment during the
Depression (3). John Kasson aims to place Shirley Temple and the fans that
propelled her to stardom in the context of the Roosevelt administration and
the politics of the New Deal. Adding to the historiography on Hollywood and
the entertainment industry during the Depression, Kasson insists against view-
ing Hollywood and films as simply a form of escapism. Temple’s characters
functioned as emotional healers for adult problems, and her films, products,
and endorsements helped to create and propel forward a new consumer econo-
my during the Depression. Kasson’s account of Temple’s career and the envi-
ronment in which it thrived is thoroughly researched and provides an excellent
overview of Hollywood and New Deal politics during the Depression.
Central to Kasson’s argument is the assertion that the Depression was as
much an emotional crisis as a financial and economic crisis. Though Kasson is
largely focused on Temple’s career in the 1930s, he also explores figures such as
Franklin Roosevelt and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. He argues that the
“emotional resiliency” embodied by the smiles of Roosevelt, Temple, and Rob-
inson is often overlooked and that “they yield important insights into the char-
acter of American life” during the Depression (3). Kasson explores the ways
Roosevelt’s personality and charm were instrumental in restoring confidence
and the ways that Robinson’s smile and on-screen characters, although contro-
versial in the African American community, may have suggested “what the
BOOK REVIEWS 757

emotional possibilities of full citizenship in America might be” (97). Using Tem-
ple’s career in the 1930s as a vehicle, Kasson provides an analysis of the role
and “circulation of a new emotional currency” during the Great Depression (3).
The author also discusses the role of the emerging Hollywood star system
and the ways it served “as a key agent in a larger consumer system” (116). Stu-
dio executives worked tirelessly to craft and perpetuate the image of the
“beloved child star,” and as a result Temple became a favorite among children
and adults both in the United States and across the world. Using an array of
fan magazines, newspapers, and memoirs and drawing on the historiography
about fandom and consumer culture, Kasson shows how Temple’s films, prod-
ucts, and endorsements “collectively stimulated the American consumer econo-
my at a crucial time” (150).
Kasson’s study is an approachable and well-written cultural history of
Hollywood during the Great Depression. His work is a new perspective on a
well-developed topic, and he skillfully puts forth an examination of the role
Hollywood played in crafting films, stars, and ultimately a consumer culture
built on an “emotional currency.”
George Mason University Amanda Regan

Forging Capitalism: Rogues, Swindlers, Frauds, and the Rise of Modern Finance. By
Ian Klaus. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Pp. viii, 287. $30.00.)

The blame for the 2008 financial crisis was attributed to lax regulations and a
lack of supervision. The officials in charge had a fundamental faith in unregulat-
ed markets, financial and otherwise. Against this background Ian Klaus shows
how the events of 2008 continued a history of finances plagued by episodes of
fraud and crisis. He studies the permanent fight between fraud and efforts to
avoid it during the halcyon centuries of British imperial economy, from the end
of Napoleonic rule to the First World War when all lights went out.
The prerequisite for free markets was, according to Adam Smith, a prudent
individual endowed with justice and concern for other people and rewarded by
reputation and respect. In the same venue, game theorists suggest that trust
enables cooperative behavior and commercial interactions foster trust:
“Capitalism does not merely make us wealthier, healthier, and taller; it also
civilizes. It allows virtue to grow, thus enabling trust” (2). Klaus makes clear
that such an endorsement is contradicted by the notion that a “free market” is
a controversial construct and by the facts of nineteenth-century capitalism such
758 THE HISTORIAN

as slavery, indentured servitude, and appalling labor conditions that contribut-

ed to the “wealth of the West” (267).
Since the 1820s, demographic increase, technological innovation, transporta-
tion, urban growth, and global interactions reached unprecedented levels of
complexity. In this new arena of business, reputation was not enough and risk
management became essential. The book begins with the story of Lord
Cochrane in 1814, spreading rumors to manipulate the City of London. The
need to control risk became clear. During the 1850s insurance companies hired
detectives and medical examiners, like Arthur Conan Doyle, to screen applica-
tions and to monitor agents. The police began fingerprinting; they published
guidebooks explaining how to examine financial instruments as well as finan-
cial papers exposing fraudulent schemes. Despite the improvement of communi-
cations—telegraph, oceanic cable, newspapers—and new procedures, it seems
that there was always a loophole for malfeasance like the swindle perpetrated
by Knight, Yancey & Company in 1910. This Alabama concern was engaged
with dealing cotton futures through bills of exchange and lading, “which is to
say, they were in the business of trading representations of cotton rather than
the real thing” (204). To their dismay, bankers in the United Kingdom, France,
Germany, and New York realized that they had bought and sold forged bills of
lading worth in excess of $5 million from Knight and Yancey. There was a trial
for “fraudulent use of mail,” but “Knight walked out of the Huntsville court-
house a free man” (226).
This is a remarkable book of economic history. The author in vivid prose
weaves historical sources with the literary works of Dickens, Melville, Trollope,
Conan Doyle, etc., and deftly discusses economic, political, and legal issues. He
casts a new light over Victorian and Edwardian eras in a global context. Facul-
ty and students—both graduate and undergraduate—as well as general readers
will learn and enjoy much from Ian Klaus’s book. It is an excellent and pleas-
ant book.
University of the Pacific-Stockton Arturo Giraldez

Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic. By Heather
Miyano Kopelson. (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2014. Pp. xi,
416. $45.00.)

The author of this study makes an important contribution to a growing conver-

sation about race and religion in the puritan Atlantic world. She casts doubt on
BOOK REVIEWS 759

the conventional wisdom that, by the seventeenth century, English puritans had
drawn clear racial lines between Christians and non-Christians, effectively mak-
ing nonwhites “hereditary heathens” who, because of their race, could not be
included in the body of Christ (6). She contends that excluding people from
Christian fellowship based on skin color happened gradually and unevenly in
the puritan Atlantic.
The book is divided into three parts. The first three chapters address differ-
ent notions of the body held by Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans.
Heather Kopelson takes a non-Eurocentric approach by focusing on Africans
and Native Americans and telling the stories of those on the margins of society
without excluding the stories of white puritans. She notes how each group
viewed the relationship between the body, the visible world, and the unseen
world and how these relationships shaped their worldviews. Kopelson contends
that all of these groups—Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans—found
common ground in trying to balance hierarchy and equality in their interpreta-
tions of how the metaphor of the body served to describe social relationships.
The second section “considers an array of religious practices that in some
way challenged English puritan conceptions of the body of Christ” (18). Kopel-
son maintains that the religious practices of Quakers and Irish Catholics—not
their race—excluded them from the body of Christ. She also argues that King
Philip’s War served as a turning point for how New England puritans viewed
Native Americans. After 1676, Native Americans were seen as non-Christian
despite the fact that many of them had adopted Christian beliefs and practices
and considered themselves to be part of the body of Christ.
The final section “focuses on . . . legal performance that regulated sex in the
body of Christ. Unlawful sex was a key vector of ideas about race, religion, and
the boundary between insider and outsider” (19). She traces the uneven shift in
how New England and Bermudian puritans categorized sexual offenses, which
were traditionally tied to religious rather than racial attitudes. Her evidence sug-
gests that Bermudians were always willing to consider people of color Christi-
ans—even when their race clearly put them in a lower social class—whereas
New Englanders developed an increasingly narrow view of whom should be
counted among the faithful. Challenging the conventional wisdom, Kopelson
argues that in Bermuda and New England, interracial unions were not always
singled out as being bad because they were interracial—they were bad because
they violated religious injunctions regarding sex outside of marriage.
By focusing on southern New England and Bermuda, Kopelson demonstrates
how cultural and regional contexts influenced the path to racism, how New
760 THE HISTORIAN

England puritans gradually accepted race as a dividing line between Christians

and non-Christians, and how Bermudians did not draw racial distinctions when
counting the faithful. Her focus on the body and bodily practices invites some
interpretive speculation on her part, which she addresses in the first chapter,
but it is grounded in an honest effort to unearth and examine the few sources
that do exist. In the end, she persuasively argues that religion, not race, should
be at the heart of these discussions about who was and who was not excluded
from the body of Christ.
University of North Carolina at Pembroke Scott Billingsley

Sovereign Sugar: Industry and Environment in Hawai’i. By Carol A. MacLennan.

(Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014. Pp. 342. $39.00.)

Anthropologist Carol MacLennan combines field work with extensive historical

documentation to show how sugar as a large-scale industry affected Hawaii’s
environments and communities. Her book is an extremely valuable one that
complements older social histories like Ronald Takaki’s Pau Hana: Plantation
Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835–1920 and oral history interviews that mostly
focus on the work and recreational activities of plantation workers, their fami-
lies, and small communities.
MacLennan’s scope is much broader, explaining the dynamics of sugar’s
ecology and how Hawaii’s industry compared to other production centers in
the Pacific (such as Fiji, Australia, the Philippines, and Java) and the Americas
(including Louisiana, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Peru). In analyzing the corporate
organization of sugar production in the islands, she deftly reveals the intercon-
nectedness of four families of missionary descendants who—along with other
businessmen from the United States, Britain, and Germany—became the “Big
Five” firms of Alexander & Baldwin, Castle & Cooke, C. Brewer & Co.,
Theo. H. Davies, and American Factors (formerly Hackfeld & Co., a German
company seized during World War I by the federal government and sold to
investors from the other four firms). Like other scholars, MacLennan explains
how the industry was powerful enough to bring about the overthrow of the
Kingdom of Hawaii in 1893 and eventually the annexation of the islands to
the United States in 1898 (albeit by a domestic joint resolution of Congress
and not an internationally recognized treaty).
In the early twentieth century, new federal and territorial land policies and
the move away from homesteading initiatives allowed sugar firms to secure
BOOK REVIEWS 761

ever larger tracts of land—and thus reinforce the centrality of the industry to
the islands’ political economy. The landscape was radically changed, as shown
in US Geological Survey maps and University of Hawai’i studies. Aside from
urban areas, sugar (and, to a lesser extent, pineapple and ranching) made up
an overwhelming percentage of arable land—second only to forest reserves that
planters might have encroached upon were it not for agricultural scientists and
federal officials who stressed the importance of these reserves for the replenish-
ment of water supplies.
The bulk of the study ends in the 1930s with an island-by-island tour that
shows how sugar impacted each locale differently depending upon environmen-
tal factors and other competing uses of land and natural resources. MacLennan
provides some information on recruitment and labor issues—areas already cov-
ered more extensively by social historians like Takaki, Edward Beechert, and,
more recently, JoAnna Poblete. Hawaii’s plantations were highly efficient in
terms of yield per acre and the availability of adequate sunshine, water, and
fertile soil. By the 1980s, however, rising labor costs made sugar less profitable
when compared to agribusinesses in Asia and Central America. As of 2014,
only one sugar plantation, Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Company on Maui,
survives.
Neatly organized appendices on sugar productivity, land ownership and use,
business and family networks, and other variables provide useful summary data
and a thumbnail sketch of numerous and varied materials that MacLennan has
combed through. Sovereign Sugar is a substantial and detailed study that is a
“must read” for any serious researcher of the sugar industry or the history of
Hawaii at large.
University of Hawai’i at Manoa John P. Rosa

Commander Will Cushing: Daredevil Hero of the Civil War. By Jamie Malanowski.
(New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2014. Pp. 290. $26.95.)

Born in Delafield, Wisconsin, the tenth of eleven children, but raised in Fredo-
nia, New York, William Barker Cushing entered the United States Naval Acad-
emy in 1857. Described by a boyhood friend as “pugnacious,” Will Cushing
lived up to his reputation. According to the author, Will “liked the Naval
Academy,” but apparently not enough to obey the rules or study. Academically
he was a “consistent underachiever,” best remembered for his pranks and
“buffoonery” by which he became “the senior class’s reigning demerits leader,”
762 THE HISTORIAN

resulting, not surprisingly, in his dismissal from the academy. At that point,
Cushing might well have faded into anonymity had it not been for intercession
by influential relatives, the Civil War, and Secretary of the Navy Gideon
Welles. At the request of a kinsman, Captain Joseph Smith, Welles met with
Cushing barely three weeks before the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter. Once
the war began, Welles rightly concluded that “in the emergency of that
moment” the navy could ill afford to lose a man with such “perseverance,
enthusiasm and zeal.” Welles reinstated him in the navy, appointing him mas-
ter’s mate (at age 19) aboard the USS Minnesota.
Cushing’s wartime career gives full justification for Jamie Malanowski’s
description of him as a “Daredevil Hero.” Young, dashing, handsome, and
brave, Malanowski’s Cushing is also irreverent, insubordinate, and irrepress-
ible. Among his many exploits during the war, he is best remembered for
destroying the Confederate ironclad ram Albemarle. Built near Edwards Ferry
on the Roanoke River, Albemarle was launched in the spring of 1864. Well
armed, she was to seize control of the river and support a Confederate attack
to retake the city of Plymouth. On 19 April 1864, she steamed down the river
and in quick succession sank the USS Southfield, severely damaged the USS
Miami, and drove off the remainder of the Union force. With command of the
river in Confederate hands, Union forces surrendered Plymouth on 20 April.
Coming so late in the war, Albemarle’s stunning victory was more an
embarrassment to the Union Navy than a significant threat; nonetheless, she
had to be destroyed. Cushing offered a plan to lead a daring night attack on
the ram. On the night of 27–28 October, Cushing maneuvered towards the
ram in a small steam launch armed with a spar torpedo and a Dahlgren gun on
the bow. Although discovered and taking heavy fire, Cushing continued his
approach, striking Albemarle. The torpedo exploded and the ram went to the
bottom. Two months later Cushing exhibited similar daring during the Union
assault against Fort Fisher on the Cape Fear River.
Cushing remained in the navy after the war. Promoted to commander at age
30, he served in both the Pacific and Asiatic squadrons. His health, however,
was in decline, his wife noting upon his return from duty in 1873 that he
looked to be twice his age. Cushing spent his final years in the navy as execu-
tive officer of the Washington Navy Yard. When illness forced him from his
post, he was admitted to the government hospital for the insane, where he died
on 17 December 1874. Cushing’s passing was national news. The secretary of
the navy announced his death, and, as was fitting, Cushing was honored with
an elaborate military funeral after which he was interred in an elegant marble
BOOK REVIEWS 763

tomb placed prominently in the cemetery of the academy from which he had
once been dismissed. Inscribed on the monument are the words “Albemarle”
and “Fort Fisher.”
Malanowski presents the reader with a rollicking and well-written biography
of an American hero, but as a scholarly effort it has shortcomings. Though the
author mentions a variety of sources, he offers no specific citations. Quotes
abound but without notes. In his “Note on Sources,” the author writes, “When
I set out, I did not intend this book to be a work of original scholarship.” He
then continues, however, to describe original material that he found that
changed his course and led him in a scholarly direction. Scholarship, however,
requires that the author leave a clear trail (i.e., footnotes, complete bibliogra-
phy), but in this volume there are no footnotes, and the list of “Documents
and Papers” at the end of the book contains no specific information about
sources other than a general reference to institutions. Considering the vast bib-
liography of secondary Civil War material, the bibliography of printed material
is brief.
Northeastern University William M. Fowler

Empress San Francisco: The Pacific Rim, the Great West & California at the
Panama-Pacific International Exposition. By Abigail M. Markwyn. (Lincoln,
NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. Pp. xi, 335. $35.00.)

This lively and readable work on the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Expo-
sition (PPIE) adds to the growing literature on world’s fairs in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries in general and in particular to the flurry of
publications and exhibitions designed to commemorate the centennial of the
San Francisco fair. In contrast to previous interpretations of the PPIE as a uni-
fied expression of American imperial ambitions and social Darwinist assump-
tions about progress, race, and gender, Abigail Markwyn offers a case study of
local and regional constituencies—the PPIE Woman’s Board, the Hawaiian del-
egation, working-class San Franciscans, labor unions, and Asian Americans,
among others—to demonstrate that the fair’s official narrative about race, gen-
der, and politics contained contradictions. These alternative voices offer a more
nuanced glimpse at what she calls “the lived reality” of San Franciscans and
visitors to the fair (24).
As a historian of the Progressive Era, Markwyn is especially apt at isolating
relatively minor or understudied moments at the fair and inserting them within
764 THE HISTORIAN

the dense and layered discourse of both local politics and national debates
about such vexing issues as immigration, labor rights, colonialism, and wom-
en’s suffrage. In Chapter 1, “The Spectacle of the Fair,” for example, Markwyn
delves into the Hawaiian Commission’s staging of the “Night in Hawaii” on
the lagoon of the Palace of Fine Arts. The spectacle itself, including a white
American socialite queen who ruled over five princesses representing the terri-
tory’s five principal islands, men in native costumes rowing outrigger canoes,
and musical accompaniment, forms the backdrop of the chapter that ranges
in its scope from the PPIE’s Palace of Education and Social Economy exhibits
promoting eugenics to local debates about integration, California’s anti-
miscegenation laws, and US intentions in the Pacific (23).
“Women Take the Political Stage,” the subject of chapter 7, is the most fully
realized case study in the book, which is not surprising given Markwyn’s par-
ticular scholarly interest in the politics of gender. The chapter is framed by the
massive “Pageant of Peace” staged in the fair’s Court of Abundance and covers
topics including local, regional, and national suffrage; the role of women at
previous world’s fairs; San Francisco Waitresses Local 48; the Woman’s Party;
Crystal Eastman and Alice Paul; the so-called suffrage envoy that made a cross-
country journey from San Francisco to Washington, DC, to present suffrage
petitions to Congress; the Panama Canal; and Pan-Americanism. Markwyn
casts a wide net and, by doing so, allows many of the “alternative voices” to
be heard loud and clear.
Markwyn’s nuanced reading of many different historical and cultural
“texts” under the umbrella of the 1915 World’s Fair is a fine example of the
author’s scholarly alacrity and breadth of knowledge as well as the foundation
of a well-told story. The only texts that remain surprisingly unattended to are
the many illustrations for which the author likely spent no small amount of
time and money securing permissions.
University of Arizona Sarah J. Moore

Collaborators for Emancipation: Abraham Lincoln and Owen Lovejoy. By William

F. Moore and Jane Ann Moore. (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press,
2014. Pp. xi, 196. $40.00.)

Scholars have long scrutinized Abraham Lincoln’s views on slavery and race,
positioning him along a spectrum from conservative to moderate to radical.
This book analyzes Lincoln, portrayed as “a radical pragmatist,” alongside
BOOK REVIEWS 765

Illinois congressman Owen Lovejoy, described as “a pragmatic radical” (8). At

first glance, significant differences seem to separate Lincoln and Lovejoy; how-
ever, the authors, who are codirectors of the Lovejoy Society, assert that the
two had much in common. As radicals, Lincoln and Lovejoy shared “a firm
moral commitment” to destroying slavery; as pragmatists, they adopted
“flexible, realistic means” for accomplishing this objective (1).
In their new study, William F. Moore and Jane Ann Moore outline the grow-
ing convergence between Lincoln and Lovejoy from 1854 to 1864 as their anti-
slavery principles, grounded in moral absolutes, brought them into close
ideological agreement. Two-thirds of the book covers the antebellum years, a
period in which their limited personal interaction and public differences over the
best means to end slavery masked the similarities of their private convictions. In
1854, both men deplored the Kansas-Nebraska Act and its threatened extension
of slavery into the territories, but political necessity forced Lincoln, the careful
Whig politician who supported enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, to keep
his distance from the Congregationalist minister who trumpeted his involvement
in the Underground Railroad. However, the process of fusing together several
diverse political factions to create the Republican Party in Illinois drew these
two opponents of slavery into a common orbit. Nevertheless, they remained at
arm’s length for some time. In 1856, Lincoln lamented Lovejoy’s securing the
Republican nomination for US Congress because of his more radical agenda.
Two years later, when Stephen Douglas branded him a “Black Republican” and
compared him to Lovejoy thirty-seven times during the debate in Ottawa, Lin-
coln adeptly dodged the abolitionist epithet while maintaining the backing of
Lovejoy’s supporters. In 1860, political prudence still compelled Lincoln to pro-
vide only covert assistance to Lovejoy’s reelection campaign by publishing an
anonymous letter, but Lovejoy actively canvassed on Lincoln’s behalf.
This book’s latter third covers the war years, when both men worked active-
ly to crush slavery. Some Radical Republicans considered Lincoln too hesitant
and slow-moving in dealing slavery its death blow, but Lovejoy appreciated the
president’s antislavery initiatives and considered him “as radical as any of his
Cabinet” (156). Indeed, by the time of Lovejoy’s premature death in March
1864, the two respected each other’s contributions to the struggle against slav-
ery, and Lincoln candidly expressed heartfelt “affection” for his “most gener-
ous friend” (xi).
By highlighting parallels between Lincoln and Lovejoy, the Moores have
added nuance to the president’s relationship with the Radicals. Some congress-
men blamed Lincoln for restraining their policies, but Lovejoy sufficiently
766 THE HISTORIAN

understood pragmatic politics and worked with the president to accomplish

their mutually shared goals. In some cases, such as Lincoln’s reliance on scrip-
ture to condemn slavery and his increased use of providential language during
his presidency, the authors strain their argument for collaboration with Lovejoy
by equating similitude with influence. Nevertheless, their book is a welcome
addition to Lincoln scholarship and gives Lovejoy his due prominence in the
battle for freedom.
The Indiana Academy Sean A. Scott

Two Armies on the Rio Grande: The First Campaign of the US-Mexican War.
By Douglas Murphy. (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2014.
Pp. x, 320. $45.00.)

The legacy of the 1846 US invasion of Mexico could hardly be more obvious.
Twenty-one months of combat and negotiations resulted in the transfer of
almost half of Mexico’s national territory to the United States, including Cali-
fornia, Nevada, Utah, and most of Arizona. But the war with Mexico, deficient
in the high principles that Americans like to believe drive their nation to arms
and overshadowed by the Civil War fifteen years later, is largely forgotten
north of the Rio Grande. Military historians have shown more interest in the
conflict than political, social, or cultural historians, but they have generally
focused their attention on a series of dramatic US victories in 1847 rather than
the early battles of the war. They have also, with few exceptions, relied on
sources in English. As a result, the reigning military narrative of the war
presents an active US Army subjugating a largely passive Mexican foe deep in
Mexican territory, rather than a nuanced picture of battle as a shared creation.
Douglas Murphy, park historian at the Palo Alto Battlefield National Histor-
ical Park, attempts to rectify these oversights in a compelling narrative history
of the run up to war and first battles on the Rio Grande that gives equal time
to Mexican voices, goals, and actions. The initial movements of the US Army,
from its occupation of the Rio Grande through the capture of Matamoros in
the spring of 1846, have failed to garner the same attention as the battles of
Buena Vista, Veracruz, Churubusco, or Chapultepec in 1847, in part because
of the lack of involvement of volunteer regiments and the embedded journalists
who chronicled their movements. But Murphy makes the argument that “events
before and during the first battles of a war” often “provide real insight into the
policies, perspectives, and preparations of the armies and nations involved” (8).
BOOK REVIEWS 767

Murphy is modest about the scope and goals of this volume, but his narration
and evidence largely support this thesis. The result is a volume with surprising-
ly broad implications for the history of the war.
Though this is primarily a military history, Murphy is above all else a skilled
storyteller who appears equally at home with political machinations. Shots are
not actually fired until the conclusion of chapter 4, and his treatment of US-
Mexican negotiations and the run up to the war in each country is both com-
pelling and convincing. Mexican sources allow him to illuminate the role of
Mexican officers in establishing the initial theater of war and timing of battles,
enabling him to ask some good questions that generally go unasked in US-
centered narratives of the war. For example, rather than focusing on the inten-
tions of General Zachary Taylor, commander of the American forces, Murphy
asks why Mexican forces failed to attack US troops when the latter first crossed
into disputed territory south of the Nueces River.
Those unfamiliar with this conflict might want to start with an overview of
the war before moving on to Murphy’s volume, but all readers will likely gain
a greater appreciation for the complexity of issues and battles that in retrospect
have appeared almost as foregone conclusions. In his ability to question
US-centered narratives and locate and fully utilize Mexican sources, Murphy
sets a high standard for future military historians of the US-Mexican War.
Penn State University Amy S. Greenberg

The Global Republic: America’s Inadvertent Rise to World Power. By Frank Ninko-
vich. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Pp. 368. $30.00.)

This new book stands out as a must read for anyone interested in the ongoing
debates about the history of American foreign policy. A highly respected histo-
rian who has written a wide array of thought-provoking works, Frank Ninko-
vich explains how scholars have continued to misconstrue the conduct of
US foreign policy from 1776 to the present. Attempting to carry out a
“conceptual” revolution in the field of US foreign relations, Ninkovich argues
that America’s response to the larger process of globalization better explains its
rise to “global preeminence” than a “deep sense of historical mission” aimed at
leading the world toward “peace, prosperity, and democracy” (1). By paying
close attention to “sociocultural and political” factors, Ninkovich argues, read-
ers will see that America’s unique approach to foreign policy has flowed from
its desire to “preserve and nurture . . . a global society” (4).
768 THE HISTORIAN

Ninkovich’s reconceptualization of US foreign policy advances a number of

bold arguments. He describes the “unexceptional” nature of American conti-
nental expansion and how the “republican ideology of the Founding Fathers”
had little impact on the conduct of US foreign policy (8). For Ninkovich, a cru-
cial change took place in the wake of the US Civil War when American elites
began to digest just how much the forces of industrialization and globalization
had begun to create a “global society.” Adapting to these new “global
currents,” Americans started to embrace “liberal” ideas designed to help the
United States become a major player in creating a more peaceful and coopera-
tive world. Building on this insight, the author makes reasonable cases for the
innovative nature of William Howard Taft’s “dollar diplomacy” and why
“Wilsonianism” represents an anomalous strand of US foreign policy.
The author also explains why World War II represents another important
turning point. After a vigorous internal debate, the United States embraced the
task of nurturing and protecting a global society that had shown itself capable
of collapsing. When viewed in this light, the United States did not “win” the
Cold War because of its superior military power or the global appeal of Ameri-
can freedom. Instead, the conflict came to an end when private citizens and
leaders in the communist bloc like Mikhail Gorbachev came to see the benefits
of participating in global society and having the “normal” consumer choices
that their Western counterparts took for granted.
This short review cannot do justice to the complexities and nuances of Nin-
kovich’s arguments. He explains why the steps that the United States has taken
to protect the “globalization process” since the end of World War II undermine
suggestions that it has behaved like an “empire” or an “ordinary” nation. He
also provides a useful reminder that globalization may not serve American
interests in the future like it often has in the past. Much to this reviewer’s
delight, Ninkovich advances convincing arguments about the limitations of
relying on calculations of power and social scientific theories to explain histori-
cal change.
For all its strengths, The Global Republic has some limitations. Ninkovich
has a tendency to write dense prose that may turn off some general readers.
The emphasis that he places on analyzing US behavior during the Cold War
through the prism of ideology and culture may strike some as pushing major
events like the Vietnam War too far into the background. Ninkovich’s frame-
work also invites the question of just how much policymakers internalized the
“objective . . . process” of globalization in the ways that he describes (see 277–
278 for a summary of this debate). Despite these small critiques, Ninkovich has
BOOK REVIEWS 769

written an excellent study whose arguments may very well transform the ways
that scholars conceive of and write about US foreign relations.
Ferris State University Christian Peterson

A Commercial Republic: America’s Enduring Debate over Democratic Capitalism.

By Mike O’Connor. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2014. Pp. xii,
287. $34.95.)

At first glance this book appears to be a regular academic monograph from a

strong university press. In fact, A Commercial Republic is a kind of extended
essay engaging a problem in a series of thematic chapters that are both learned
(for the specialist) and thoroughly accessible (for the general reader). This is a
feat not often attempted by scholars, and it is one too often discouraged (if not
discounted) by academic scorekeepers. In the present case, Mike O’Connor has
succeeded on both fronts, producing a crisp, clear survey of a large and bur-
dened subject that is a pleasure to read and surely as informative as anything
like it in the neighborhood bookshop.
O’Connor frames his work around the simple fact that Americans cherish
democracy and capitalism, even though we often misremember our own experi-
ence and seldom think clearly about either. The United States was born at a
moment when two stars converged in the cultural heavens: popular self-
government and small-scale free enterprise capitalism. Americans quickly
embraced liberty and equality as touchstones for their national experiment, and
some form of liberalism (in governance and in enterprise) has marked our
national experience ever since. But capitalism, democracy, and their relation-
ship to each other all were problematic at the beginning and have evolved in
surprising ways in the 240 years since. These chapters offer experienced histori-
ans a useful survey of that evolution while providing curious nonspecialists a
handy introduction to important things about which they ought to read more.
Chapter 1, “Stewardship,” explores Alexander Hamilton’s famous economic
reports as a way of introducing the extensive commitment to government spon-
sorship and guidance that obtained in the founding generation. Chapter 2,
“Divorce,” charts the deterioration of that original vision and the turn toward
a Smithian ideal of laissez-faire in the Jacksonian period. A chapter on
“Property” maps the triumph of property rights over nearly every other cultural
value in the post-Civil War era as well as the bestowal of said rights on fictive
individuals called corporations. A long chapter on “Employment” picks up
770 THE HISTORIAN

Progressive-era concerns for worker and citizen welfare, carrying on through

the Great Depression and the Keynesian revolution in economic thought. Chap-
ter 5, “Inequality,” traces New Deal liberalism through the postwar 1950s and
into the 1960s campaigns for equal rights and general welfare. Next comes
“Taxes,” centered on the anti-New Deal backlash that resulted in our persistent
“rage against taxes.” A brief conclusion neatly ties up loose ends without the
scolding one might expect after such an insightful and extended sermon.
Critics may fault O’Connor for mining existing literature instead of report-
ing the fruits of extensive archival research, but this book does something our
literature desperately needs: It offers up an invitation to explore what otherwise
must seem a daunting and impenetrable shelf of specialized tomes. Kudos to
the author for daring to do it.
Purdue University John Lauritz Larson

Harry Hopkins: FDR’s Envoy to Churchill and Stalin. By Christopher D. O’Sulli-

van. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. Pp. x, 200. $35.00.)

This concise work argues persuasively that Harry Hopkins played a crucial role
in the World War II antifascist alliance. Hopkins forged personal ties with Win-
ston Churchill and Joseph Stalin and conveyed to both of them that Franklin
Roosevelt understood their difficulties and would provide significant help. Hop-
kins was willing to stay up late into the night with Churchill at the sacrifice of
his health. Stalin was impressed by the sickly Hopkins’s willingness to travel to
Moscow shortly after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Hopkins helped to
create productive meetings of the Big Three. He also maintained ties with the
government of Chiang Kai-Shek and Free French leader Charles de Gaulle.
Hopkins’s influence stemmed from many sources. He was Roosevelt’s confi-
dant and emissary, shared Roosevelt’s values, had an engaging personality, and
displayed a broad strategic vision. He evaluated all proposals on the basis of
whether they contributed to winning the war.
This volume is an easy read that will be of value to general readers seeking
a balanced scholarly introduction to its subject. Among the book’s strengths is
the inclusion of stories about Hopkins’s marriages, parenting, and health.
Following chapters on Hopkins’s early background and role in the New
Deal, there are six chronological chapters on his wartime activities and a con-
cluding chapter on “The Lost Peace.” An introduction summarizes the text’s
arguments and counters postwar critics of Hopkins. Christopher O’Sullivan
BOOK REVIEWS 771

argues that criticisms diminished Hopkins’s reputation in part because his death
in January 1946 at age fifty-five prevented him from completing his memoirs or
answering his critics. In the context of the Cold War, moreover, Hopkins’s rep-
utation as a proponent of cooperation with the Soviet Union made him a
target.
O’Sullivan argues that the peace was lost because the chief proponents of a
cooperative postwar relationship with the Soviet Union, Roosevelt and Hop-
kins, were gone and that the duo had not successfully institutionalized support
for such a policy. When he was at the peak of his influence, however, Hopkins
had placed many proteges in leading positions. More attention might have been
paid to the contradiction between Hopkins’s approach and the more anti-
Soviet views of proteges such as W. Averell Harriman. Among matters given
little attention are US plans for the postwar economic order and the reasons
why Hopkins helped “engineer Truman’s ascent” to the vice presidency (137).
The author fails to examine why, in July 1942, Roosevelt deferred to
Churchill’s opposition to a cross-Channel invasion but a year later overrode
Churchill’s objections. Another unexplained contradiction is the intense pres-
sure Hopkins put on Stalin over Soviet actions in Poland compared with acqui-
escence in British actions in Greece, though he told both Stalin and Churchill
about the negative reaction of US public opinion on these matters.
Numerous points are asserted rather than effectively argued. For example, the
author asserts that Hopkins’s focus on winning the war “inevitably disappointed
New Deal allies who suddenly found him indifferent to using his influence for
liberal objectives,” but he provides no examples of any such comments (55).
Henderson State University Martin Halpern

Dreams and the Invisible World in Colonial New England: Indians, Colonists, and
the Seventeenth Century. By Ann Marie Plane. (Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. xi, 237. $59.95.)

In this new study, the author examines dreams and dream reporting in
seventeenth-century New England to argue that the struggles of colonialism
extended beyond waking hours into the “invisible world” of both Indians’ and
colonists’ dreams. Recording or retelling dreams became a way for historical
actors to substantiate, elaborate, and understand their challenges in waking
life. Ann Marie Plane writes in the vein of interdisciplinary trailblazers
Anthony C. Wallace and Kenneth A. Lockridge, but she distinguishes herself by
772 THE HISTORIAN

having received professional training in the theory and practice of clinical psy-
choanalysis. Fortunately, Plane’s psychoanalytic background informs rather
than overwhelms her study. In lesser hands, interpreting the dreams of Puritans
and eastern Algonquian people might degenerate into fiction. Plane’s success
rests in her ability carefully to situate each dreamer and dream at a specific
time within a specific cultural context. She demonstrates that focusing on
dreams allows readers to see how religion, politics, culture, and, not the least
of all, emotions were inherently and inextricably linked for both Indian and
English people of this time.
Plane opens with an excellent overview of Puritan and Indian cultural tradi-
tions of dream interpretation. Though Puritans were ambivalent about when to
attribute significance to dreams while Algonquians saw dreams as a place to
commune with the spirits and learn truths, both cultures believed important
messages could arrive in a dream. Plane, building on David Hall’s notion of
“lived religion,” contends that most English dream reporting drew on a combi-
nation of Puritan beliefs and older folkways. Her useful inclusion of Quakers
and their belief in dream “knowledge” (information, including divine messages,
that arrived through dreams) highlights a tension for colonists. Puritans
opposed the Quakers’ belief in direct revelation yet could not entirely dismiss
the possibility of dream knowledge. Plane also emphasizes the richness of
dream reporting in the eastern woodlands, based on a variety of historical,
archaeological, anthropological, and tribal sources. Plane uses examples such as
a Boston magistrate who dreamed about the death of loved ones and the threat
of a French attack to argue that dream reporting enabled people to manage
their fears while at the same time revealing these fears to historians.
Accounts of dreams come from a variety of sources—diaries, court records,
published tracts—which speaks to Plane’s point that dream reporting crept into
many corners of colonial society. The sources for indigenous dreamer accounts
are, as Plane understands, more problematic due to English filters. The limited
accounts of Indian dreams in the early to mid-seventeenth century are of a par-
ticular sort because English colonists recorded only those from major events
including first contact episodes and warfare. Her use of the 1727 book Indian
Converts by missionary Experience Mayhew (a man who grew up bilingual
and himself dreamt in the Wampanoag language) makes for her most compel-
ling interpretations of Indian dreams. With these examples, including a report
of the Christian God speaking in Wampanoag to a Christian Wampanoag
woman, Plane provides another way to study native cultural resistance to colo-
nialism. Plane’s well-executed, interdisciplinary work will tempt researchers to
BOOK REVIEWS 773

puzzle over, rather than dismiss, any dream report they may happen upon in
their own research.
University of Delaware Julie A. Fisher

Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle Against the Colonization
Movement. By Ousmane K. Power-Greene. (New York, NY: New York Univer-
sity Press, 2014. Pp. xxi, 245. $40.00.)

For an organization that proved to be a dismal failure in practice, as well as one

whose goals managed only to unite its disparate opponents of northern blacks
and southern planters, the American Colonization Society (ACS) has received a
good deal of scholarly attention of late. Perched uneasily on the far right of the
broad antislavery spectrum, the Society enjoyed the support of Senator Henry
Clay, Chief Justice John Marshall, and at least until late 1862, President Abra-
ham Lincoln. In the last decade, Eric Burin and Beverly Tomek have crafted
thoughtful studies of the Society’s ideology, though Marie Tyler-McGraw and
Claude Clegg have chronicled those African Americans—most of them from the
Chesapeake—who grew weary of American racism and fled to Liberia. All of
these important studies touch upon the black activists who denounced coloniza-
tion, but Against Wind and Tide is the first monograph to focus on the long,
internal debate within the black community as to whether to stay and fight or
quit the land of their birth and take their chances in a distant land.
Ousmane K. Power-Greene’s nuanced discussion of the black response to
the question of migration draws a critical distinction between colonization and
emigration. Because the Chesapeake politicians who ran the ACS stubbornly
refused to admit that their organization’s chief goal was to end slavery by erad-
icating the black presence in the young republic, the vast majority of northern
blacks condemned the ACS and expressed grave doubts about the colony of
Liberia. (Having fewer options, most African Americans who left for Liberia
hailed from the southern states; among them was Susan Vesey, who sailed for
Monrovia following the execution of her husband.) But by the 1850s—a
depressing decade that began with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act and
ended with the Dred Scott decision—a number of black activists began to con-
sider voluntary emigration to Haiti or Central America. No less than Frederick
Douglass, long a vocal critic of both colonization and emigration, decided to
investigate conditions in Haiti in early 1861. Only the guns of Fort Sumter led
him to cancel his voyage.
774 THE HISTORIAN

For blacks who wished to remain in the land of their birth and battle for
equal rights, white attacks on internal migrations and support for forced
removal served as frightening reminders of racism in all corners of the nation.
Politicians in Illinois and Wisconsin advocated new state constitutions that
banned free blacks from entering those states, and in the case of Ohio and Indi-
ana, legislators called for the deportation to Liberia of blacks already residing
there. The Indiana assembly was hardly unique in passing legislation that
helped fund colonization to Liberia.
Although elegantly written and thoroughly researched, Against Wind and
Tide occasionally suffers from production glitches, a problem too common in
these financially strapped times. As far as this reviewer can tell, not a single
citation in the index is correct. Dozens of people appear in the text who do not
grace the index, and those who do never correspond to the right page. Typical
is Samuel Cornish, who earns five listings in the index, yet he does not appear
on any of those pages, or indeed any pages nearby. Despite the fact that the
volume, including the index, stops on page 245, Eric Burin and Abraham Lin-
coln are listed as appearing on pages 290 and 294, respectively.
Le Moyne College Douglas R. Egerton

The Settlers’ Empire: Colonialism and State Formation in America’s Old North-
west. By Bethel Saler. (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
Pp. 392. $45.00.)

Wisconsinite Frederick Jackson Turner discovered the genius of American

democracy in the history of the Old Northwest, his native region. The author
of this new book turns Turner on his head in The Settlers’ Empire, a study of
state formation and state creation in Wisconsin. These apparently synonymous
terms evoke radically different narratives. For Turner, it was the drafting of a
state constitution in 1847–1848 and Wisconsin’s subsequent admission to the
Union that signified the emergence of a self-created, new state, “a kind of set-
tler parthenogenesis—a process engineered by the recently established white
inhabitants” (259). For Bethel Saler, state formation on the expanding periph-
ery of America’s “domestic empire” was a protracted, dynamic, and contingent
process that depended on the federal government’s coercive capacity and the
rapid dispossession or assimilation of the region’s native inhabitants (14).
Revisionist historians invoke the democratic values that supposedly define Amer-
ica to condemn American crimes against Indians. Saler’s impressive achievement is
BOOK REVIEWS 775

to show how Turner’s conception of frontier democracy was inextricably linked to

the ongoing process of imperial expansion. “‘History’ in the process of state for-
mation,” she writes, “provides coherence to the political body that constitutes the
broader ‘state’” (287). For Turner, “frontier spaces generated . . . a more egalitarian,
individualist, and self-governing ethos”; for Saler, that ethos enabled Wisconsinites
to imagine themselves as a distinct, democratic people and therefore as
“Americans” (307). Democracy was a technology of incorporation and control,
crucially important for the fulfillment of the new nation’s imperial destiny.
America’s imperial project had a less benign face for colonized and displaced
subjects. Saler’s most original contribution is to reconstruct the “emergent, tran-
sitional, ‘treaty polity’” that established US sovereignty in the region in the deca-
des before statehood (7). With a small white settler population of only
11,683 in 1836 and limited conventional state capacity, federal officials none-
theless successfully “constructed [the government’s] colonial authority over
Native societies as a legally contracted paternalism” (71). Treaties constituted
temporary arrangements, famously subject to renegotiation, but nonetheless
offering some degree of security and financial support and providing “an orga-
nizing framework that shaped Indian peoples’ actions” (110). As it secured land
cessions and fostered and arbitrated divisions among Indians, the treaty polity
proved to be a dynamic, adaptive, and “self-regenerative system” (74). Well
before the arrival of large numbers of white settlers (totaling 155,277 by 1846),
federal negotiators opened up vast stretches of the future state for development.
The articulation of property rights coincided with hardening definitions of
racial categories. Missionaries played a crucial role in race making, regulating
sexuality and family life, and inculcating Euro-American standards of cleanli-
ness and hygiene that refashioned “the bodies of their Indian subjects” (185).
Indians creatively adapted in different ways to new political, legal, and behav-
ioral imperatives: “over its territorial period and after statehood, Wisconsin
witnessed a multiplying rather than a diminishing of Indian identities” (209).
But the cumulative effect of these adaptations was to subvert any sense Indians
might have had that they constituted a single people.
Disaggregated, dispossessed, and demoralized, Indians were erased from
Turner’s narrative, as if by some “natural” process. This was the reverse, mir-
ror image of the self-created, self-governing “democracy” he celebrated. Turn-
er’s conception of democracy, Saler persuasively argues, enabled him to project
a glorious future for the United States on the world stage.
University of Virginia Peter S. Onuf
776 THE HISTORIAN

The American Revolution of 1800: How Jefferson Rescued Democracy from Tyranny
and Faction—and What This Means Today. By Dan Sisson and Thom Hartmann.
(San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2014. Pp. vii, 299. $29.95.)

This book first appeared in 1974 with an introduction by the political theorist
Harvey Wheeler and no subtitle. Now it appears as a fortieth anniversary edition
in abridged form (with condensed text and notes and without its original intro-
duction, first chapter, or epilogue), with a presentist subtitle, subheads every few
paragraphs, and a new introduction and afterword by the anticorporate polemi-
cist Thom Hartmann. The reviewer has two obligations: to assess the book’s the-
sis and to ask whether the new version succeeds as a work of history.
The first version of The American Revolution of 1800 (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1974) was based on Dan Sisson’s dissertation, which was written at
Claremont Graduate School under the supervision of the legendary Douglass
Adair, who studied political thought’s interaction with political action in the
late eighteenth century. Sisson’s affectionate introduction included one of the
best word-portraits of Adair as a teacher; he also acknowledged his indebted-
ness to Wheeler’s work on the concept and practice of political revolution.
In the 1970s, Sisson’s book met a rough reception from scholarly critics—
perhaps because he challenged a central preoccupation of historians in the
1960s and 1970s: the origins and development of political parties. Indeed, the
eminent historian Richard Hofstadter’s The Idea of a Party System elegantly
addressed this question, within conventional assumptions, that a party system
was what was supposed to emerge and that American politicians succeeded or
failed in approaching or straying from that result.
By contrast, Sisson viewed the problem within a diametrically opposite set
of assumptions, focusing (after Adair) on what historical actors actually
thought, said, and did, rather than on what modern assumptions dictated they
should be thinking, saying, and doing. Instead of assuming that politicians
were fighting their way into devising a party system, Sisson asked what they
thought they were doing. Following the approach of Wheeler, who maintained
that the process of revolution required revolutionaries to build a competing
vision of a social and political order and a structure within the existing polity
incarnating that vision as a tool of revolution, Sisson took seriously Thomas
Jefferson’s boast that he had led a “revolution of 1800” as profound as the
original revolution of 1776. The result was a challenging book built around an
innovative methodology for investigating the early republic’s politics. In partic-
ular, taking Jefferson’s vision of revolution seriously, Sisson argued that
BOOK REVIEWS 777

Jefferson as well as his allies and followers had staged a democratic revolution
against the elitist Federalist politics of the 1790s, finally prevailing in 1800.
The book’s one flaw was its choosing of sides—its embrace of Jeffersonians
and its corresponding criticism (to the point of caricature) of Federalists led by
John Adams and Alexander Hamilton. The central message of Sisson’s 1974
book, however, retains its importance: We ought to look forward from the per-
spective of that era’s politicians, assessing their assumptions about politics, their
means of conducting politics, and their political goals, to see what they produced.
Unfortunately, the fortieth anniversary edition of The American Revolution of
1800—the book now under review—loses much force, precisely because it has been
recast as a study of the history of the “American Revolution of 1800” and a
polemic addressing the politics of the 2010s. Just as Sisson’s account cast heroes
and villains, Hartmann caricatures historical figures and their ideas to support his
repackaging for today of Sisson’s reading of Jefferson as a political revolutionary,
his reading of Jefferson’s adversaries as akin to today’s corporate oligarchs, and the
author’s claim that Jefferson’s democratic enterprise gives today’s anticorporate acti-
vists a political model to reclaim American politics in a new American revolution.
As the historian John Phillip Reid has taught us, forensic uses of history
have limits. When they ignore differences between past and present, they mis-
lead the reader seeking illumination of past and present.
One point that did not emerge in the discussion of Sisson’s book in 1974 is
glaring today—the role of slavery in Jefferson’s vision of democracy and the
clash between his egalitarian ideology and his practice as a slaveholder. Readers
would never know from this book that Jefferson’s revolutionary zeal stopped
short of revolution against slavery and for those held in captivity. This omission
damages the credibility of this book’s interpretation of Jefferson and his theory
of democratic revolution. In sum, this new edition of The American Revolution
of 1800 conscripts the past in the service of the present. Readers ought to seek
out the original edition on the used-book market and learn from it.
City College of New York and New York Law School R. B. Bernstein

Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North Ameri-
can Slavery. By Katrina Dyonne Thompson. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
Press, 2014. Pp. xii, 244. $30.00.)

This book challenges the assertion that “minstrelsy was the foundation of
American entertainment culture” by centering on an earlier set of performances
778 THE HISTORIAN

that prefigured the appearance of the blackface minstrel. Spotlighting the often
compulsory singing and dancing of diasporic Africans throughout the long his-
tory of the North American slave trade, Katrina Dyonne Thompson argues that
the staging of black bodies as entertainment helped to fashion a desire for the
types of black caricatures later seen on the theatrical stage.
Thompson borrows the language of theater to structure her book. Her first
substantive chapter, “The Script,” investigates travel narratives to reveal not
only the European fascination with African dance but also how the dances
themselves were taken as evidence of immorality (and the necessity of the civi-
lizing presence of Europeans). In “Casting,” Thompson chronicles how slavers
required that captives dance as a form of exercise and, in select cases, sing to
entertain the crew. “Onstage” centers on performances on southern planta-
tions, where enslaved musicians performed for their owners. In “Backstage,”
the author offers a perspective into the frolics that occurred in slave quarters
wherein captives sang and danced for their own amusement and, at times,
employed music to foment rebellious energy. “Advertisement” accounts for
how black men, women, and children were required to sing merry songs as
they marched through towns en route to auction. The final chapter, “Same
Script, Different Actors,” provides a conventional history of the rise of black-
face minstrelsy from Charles Mathews to Thomas D. Rice.
The typical vantage point on these performances within the book is that of
white slaver or plantation mistress, whose whiteness, privilege, and literacy
allowed them to record their impressions of everyday life in diaries and letters. On
occasion, the perspective is that of the freed or former captive. Through these first-
person accounts, the bleakness of the lives of black bondsmen is made evident.
Thompson offers plentiful examples of how slave singing and dancing were inte-
gral to the harsh realities of slavery. Plantation owners could require their captives
to dance for their amusement even after exhaustive labor in fields earlier in the
day. Female captives, selected to sing or dance on slave ships or plantations, fre-
quently found that their acts served as a prelude to sexual assault.
The book succeeds in pointing to the appearance of black performing bodies
as entertainment. A potential criticism is that Thompson infrequently analyzes
the actual songs sung or dances danced, especially in the first half of the book.
Certainly, this limit is the result of incomplete archives and personal accounts
by witnesses who elected not to describe in detail the movements and sounds
that were presented before them. Overall, Thompson demonstrates how North
American slavery provided countless entertaining scenarios involving diasporic
BOOK REVIEWS 779

Africans and, perhaps, may have whet appetites for the later appearance of the
black body on stage.
Northwestern University Harvey Young

Forgotten Fifteenth: The Daring Airmen Who Crippled Hitler’s War Machine. By
Barrett Tillman. (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2014. Pp. xvi, 320.
$29.95.)

This book is a narrative history of the experiences and campaigns of the US

Army’s Fifteenth Air Force in World War II. The book is divided into nine
chapters, each covering several months of the war starting in November 1943
and ending in May 1945. The author’s purpose is to bring to light the history
and achievements of the Fifteenth Air Force, which was based in Foggia, Italy.
In his preface, the author notes that “this, however, is the first full-length histo-
ry of the ‘Forgotten Fifteenth,’ which conducted the southern half of the Allied
strategic bombing campaign in Europe.” Barrett Tillman correctly observes that
the history of the Fifteenth Air Force has been completely overshadowed by the
numerous historical works on the “Mighty Eight,” which flew out of the Unit-
ed Kingdom under the leadership of General Jim Doolittle.
This book is not a study of doctrine or technology. It is not a study of the
effectiveness of the strategic bombing campaign. It is also not a study of the
arguments between the Americans and British over bombing methods, targets,
and the effectiveness of night area bombing, the British practice, versus daylight
precision bombing, the American practice. In other words, Tillman’s work does
not advance the historiography on the critical issues of the Allied strategic
bombing campaign. He accepts the major arguments advanced by other histori-
ans and airpower theorists and relies heavily on secondary sources.
Tillman’s book is in large part a summary of the numerous missions flown
against Nazi Germany by the Fifteenth Air Force in Eastern Europe. He intro-
duces his readers to the technologies employed, to the bombers, and to the
fighters; to the methods they adopted and changed, such as high and low alti-
tude bombing and radar bombing; to the targets they fought to destroy, such
as oil production facilities, aircraft production facilities, and others; and to the
leaders and men who conducted the missions and campaigns. Still, none of this
is new. What is new are the numerous stories of the exploits of individuals—
their achievements and failures, the stories of bomber crews and fighter pilots,
men who earned Medals of Honor, men who survived German POW camps,
780 THE HISTORIAN

the stories of how these men lived and died in the air over places whose names
were foreign to them, and the stories of men who jumped out of burning air-
planes and survived. These stories and others make this book worth reading.
The author’s method is to weave together historical vignettes—short stories,
most just a few pages in length, with their own titles—about particular subjects
or individual exploits. This method works in narrative history; however, it is
disruptive to have, for example, three topic headings in two pages. What is
missing from this book are pictures, maps, diagrams, and illustrations. There is
nothing to show the areas of operations, the landing fields, the technologies
employed, the routes flown, the targets destroyed, or the individuals who led,
fought, and died—nothing. Given the abundance of materials available and the
willingness of air force and army historical centers to provide them, this is
completely unnecessary. Still, the book is a good read.
University of Kansas Adrian R. Lewis

Connecticut Unscathed: Victory in the Great Narragansett War, 1675–1676. By

Jason W. Warren. (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. Pp. xiv,
249. $29.95.)

This fascinating and powerful book makes a compelling argument that challenges a
number of historians’ ideas about what we all assumed was a well-known event: King
Philip’s War. Jason Warren says that the war has been misnamed. It ought to be called
“The Great Narragansett War,” because the fight was a longstanding one between the
colonial powers in southern New England and the Narragansetts, the largest and most
important tribe in the region. It was, he argues, the culmination of decades of rivalry
and unrest. He also argues that historians have missed two important perspectives on
the war: that of Connecticut, which came through the war without the kind of trauma
and destruction that Massachusetts suffered, and that of the indigenous population,
which was less concerned with the issues that plagued Philip and far more concerned
with the balance of power between the Narragansetts and the colonies. Lastly, Warren
refutes the traditional understanding of warfare in North America’s colonies. Colonists
did not abandon European ways of war, he says, and take to the natives’ “skulking
way of war,” but instead employed a hybrid strategy in which native scouts and fight-
ers were allowed to keep their traditions, while colonial armies employed traditional
methods bolstered by native information and planning.
The several prongs of Warren’s argument contest nearly every aspect of the
usual narrative with respect to King Philip’s War. This study finds myriad holes
BOOK REVIEWS 781

in the rich historiography of the war. Certainly one might be skeptical of a

monograph that asserts historians are calling the event by the wrong name,
that they have not obtained the whole story, and even that the wisdom about
tactics is more myth than fact. And yet, the author is utterly convincing.
Warren begins with a discussion of the historiography and the founding of the
New England colonies. He deftly guides the reader into an understanding of
colonial-native relations and the complexities of contact. He explains in chapter 1
the nuances of alliances, which preceded and emerged from the Pequot War, rear-
ranging the balances of power in the region. The next two chapters focus specifically
on Connecticut and its unique role in the war as well as why its experiences in the
war differed so much from those of its neighbors. In chapters 4 and 5, Warren looks
back across the Atlantic at Europe to explain Connecticut’s military approach.
The author’s argument is fleshed out in these later chapters. He maintains
that Connecticut’s management of the war with enemy Indians helped the colo-
ny emerge virtually unharmed in comparison to its neighbors. This manage-
ment strategy was based on a nuanced understanding, a symbiotic approach,
between colonial officials and tribal leaders.
The author brings a unique perspective to his subject. Not only did Major
Jason Warren graduate from West Point and become a Second Lieutenant in
the Military Police Corps. He then served as a strategist and training officer for
the 3rd Infantry Division in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and was awarded the
Bronze Star Medal. He is a strategist and the Director of Concepts and Doc-
trine at the US Army War College’s Center for Strategic Leadership and Devel-
opment and received a PhD in history from Ohio State University. Combining
both of his fields of knowledge, strategy and historical research, Warren uses
his ability to write dynamic prose to produce a book interesting enough to
assign to advanced undergraduate classes and engaging enough to attract even
a general audience of history buffs. Most significantly, he has contributed a
work that will shape the historiography of early colonial encounters.
Central Connecticut State University Katherine Hermes

Restoring the Chain of Friendship: British Policy and the Indians of the Great
Lakes, 1783–1815. By Timothy D. Willig. (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska
Press, 2014. Pp. xiii, 374. $30.00.)

From the perspective of officials in the newly independent United States, Britain
loomed over the continent’s Great Lakes region like a malevolent puppeteer,
782 THE HISTORIAN

pulling the strings of simple but easily incensed Indians and setting them
against hapless American frontiersmen. Modern historians studying the region,
such as Reginald Horsman and Colin Calloway, have shown that this image
was a mirage. Britain, they found, pursued a reactive Indian policy, concerned
almost exclusively with defending Canada. British officials seeking Native
American support sometimes made reckless promises but just as often broke
them. Timothy Willig shows that Anglo-Americans’ perception of Indians as
simple or easily riled was equally distorted. Rather, the disparate nations in the
lakes country pursued multiple agendas and perceived the British in ways that
varied with their own circumstances and goals.
Richard White famously characterized the Great Lakes region (The Middle
Ground, 1991) as a world of fragments and villages. Willig, though, observes
that one can organize the region’s native peoples into three regional groups,
not arbitrarily but by virtue of their shared economic circumstances and cultur-
al ties. In the southern lakes country, the Shawnees, Wyandots, and their
neighbors renewed the Revolutionary-era alliance with Britain, which they saw
as a shield against American aggression. When British commanders abandoned
the regional Indian confederation to Anthony Wayne’s army in 1794, the local
chain of friendship nearly snapped, and few Indian leaders in the region
trusted Britain again. Fifteen years later, though, socioeconomic stress and
American expansion engendered a new “nativist” confederation, whose leaders
Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa formed an alliance of convenience with British
Canada.
In the northern lakes region, the Anishinaabeg and the Wisconsin nations
enjoyed a much warmer relationship with Britain, sustained by gift exchanges
and an active fur trade. Willig argues that British Indian agents and traders,
taking advantage of Anishinaabe decentralization, became de facto chiefs of
Ojibwa and Odawa communities, an assertion this reviewer might challenge—
the Anishinaabeg had a much more robust cadre of local leaders than the
author acknowledges (97, 110–111). In fairness, the best study of this sub-
ject—Cary Miller’s Ogimaag [2010]—appeared two years after Willig’s book.
Regardless, the region’s native peoples, though they quarreled with their Indian
neighbors to the south, remained staunch allies of Britain.
In Willig’s third region, the Iroquois of Grand River, under their leaders
Joseph Brant and John Norton, struggled to overcome Britain’s classification of
them as “dependent allies” (132). They pressed British officials to recognize
their land ownership rights within their reserve and tried to build a new alli-
ance with the Mississaugas and southern lakes Indians.
BOOK REVIEWS 783

Though one is reluctant to apply Kathleen Duval’s label “native ground” to the
Great Lakes country, Willig convincingly shows that its Indian peoples remained
determined to choose their own fates and that the British had to respect those
choices if they wanted to preserve their fragile postrevolutionary empire.
Indiana State University David A. Nichols

ASIA AND THE PACIFIC

The Visitor: Andre Palmeiro and the Jesuits in Asia. By Liam Matthew Brockey.
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014. Pp. 528.
$39.95.)

This is a comprehensive study of an important Jesuit by a historian with a mas-

terful knowledge of Portuguese sources. It involves one of the first great global
cultural conflicts of the early modern world. The “Chinese Rites Controversy”
was, in essence, a conflict between Europeanized Christianity and Christianized
Asian culture. It was initiated by European global expansion that placed a
remarkable group of Jesuits in China. Confronted by a superior nation, Matteo
Ricci led the Jesuits in forging a mission policy of accommodation. After Ricci’s
death in 1610, the struggle between the Catholic Europeanists and the Chinese
accommodationists intensified, causing the Jesuit superior general in Rome to
send Andre Palmeiro of Portugal to Asia in 1617 to resolve this dispute.
When he was called, Palmeiro was a distinguished Jesuit academic who had
spent thirty of his forty-nine years isolated at the University of Coimbra. After
first dealing with problems in India, Palmeiro travelled on to Macau where,
except for a trip to Beijing in 1628–1629, he spent the last nine years of his life
[1626–1635]. He faced a collapsing mission in Japan where the Jesuits and
their many converts were being persecuted by the Tokugawa shogunate. In Chi-
na, he faced a mission that, unlike Japan, had experienced disappointing
growth in the number of converts (only six thousand versus three hundred
thousand in Japan). He tried to resolve disputes cautiously and judiciously by
seeking some middle ground between the polarized sides. Jesuit accommoda-
tionists—led by A. Vagnone—sought to use the traditional Chinese terms
Shangdi (Lord on High) and Tian (Heaven) for the Christian God while Jesuit
purists (led by N. Longobardo) believed in the necessity of transliterating (cobi-
tas) holy terms into Latin or Portuguese. Palmeiro banned both extremes and
instead sanctioned Tianzhu (Lord of Heaven) as a translation of the Christian
God. This proved his skill as an academic administrator; however, he neither
784 THE HISTORIAN

knew Chinese nor understood Chinese culture and this limitation would under-
mine the force of his decisions.
The greatest flaw in this otherwise admirable book is Liam Brockey’s almost
hagiographical treatment of and reluctance to criticize Palmeiro. Perhaps the
author’s bias reflects the shared expertise that he and his subject have in Euro-
pean (Portuguese and Latin) as opposed to Chinese texts. This bias extends to
the Portuguese Jesuit Jo~ao Rodrigues, who represented the perspective of the
Jesuits in Japan (323–325). In China, the Europeanized Christian Palmeiro
encountered Jesuits who had spent twenty or thirty years there and been
changed by Chinese culture. Here is the crux of this conflict, which this bio-
graphical study presents in such remarkable detail. Palmeiro failed to resolve
this conflict, but no one could have. It was a battle that had to be played out
over several centuries as two very different cultures (European and Chinese)
struggled to share a common form of spirituality. This battle continues in the
struggle between Rome and Beijing even today.
Baylor University D. E. Mungello

Government by Mourning: Death and Political Integration in Japan, 1603–1912.

By Atsuko Hirai. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014. Pp.
xviii, 464. $49.95.)

In this study, the author explores the Tokugawa shoguns’ political use of death rit-
uals, particularly their injunctions against playing music in the aftermath of some-
one’s passing. Through an examination of Shogun Tsunayoshi’s Edict on
Mourning and Abstention [1683] and of its revised version produced under Yoshi-
mune [1736], Atsuko Hirai makes two provocative claims. First, she argues against
the notion of domain autonomy and resurrects the long-defunct theory of the
Tokugawa state as a case of “centralized feudalism” (8). Second, she posits that
mourning injunctions fostered “a sense of nationwide Japanese community” and
a general awareness of the existence of the emperor, thus paving the way “for a
unified Japan under the Meiji regime” (16, 11). Though the focus is on
Tokugawa-era practices, in the final chapters Hirai also looks at the transition
into Meiji. Because the laws on mourning had already created a sense of shared
“national” space and time, she sees a continuity between Tokugawa and Meiji.
There are some strengths to this book: Hirai’s attention to status and geog-
raphy (and, if less, to gender) as well as to how laws that emanated from above
played out on the ground, her treatment of the final fifteen years of the
BOOK REVIEWS 785

shogunate as a time apart (chapter 10), her choice to focus on the obedience of
the “outer lords” to gauge the authority of the Tokugawa, and the inclusion of
a translation of Tsunayoshi’s edict. Moreover, the book is clearly written and
easy to read.
Despite the abundance of informative anecdotes, Government by Mourning
is problematic and ultimately unconvincing. The centrality that Hirai affords to
mourning edicts—including the assertion that they encapsulate the essence of
Tokugawa orthodoxy—appears exaggerated, particularly in light of the fact
that she (admittedly) pays scant attention to the role religious institutions and
custom may have played in directing mourning practices and eschews the possi-
ble connections between Tsunayoshi’s edict and his laws of compassion writ
large (9). Also missing is a discussion of the shoguns’ complicity in sustaining
various cases of “legal fiction,” such as the falsification of death reports (87).
Hirai cites examples of this “accommodating stance” on the part of the Toku-
gawa but ultimately concludes that lords and commoners alike “accepted their
obligations willingly and quietly” (236, 265). Seemingly irrelevant asides such
as the disquisition on the difference between Jindo and Shinto (on pages 29–
35) as well as the entirety of chapter 6—a gallery of people in mourning—
make the book longer than necessary. A discussion of music moratoria, the
alleged focus of Hirai’s analysis, does not appear until chapter 7.
Readers interested in the clever power plays between domains and central
government, including the management of dead bodies, are much better served
by reading Luke Roberts’s Performing the Great Peace [2012], and those look-
ing for evidence that a sense of shared space (but not quite “nation,” a term
Hirai uses liberally) existed in early modern Japan should read Mary Elizabeth
Berry’s Japan in Print [2006] instead.
University of Tennessee Laura Nenzi

The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics. By Ayesha
Jalal. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014. Pp. xii,
435. $35.00.)

This valuable addition to the author’s substantial body of scholarly work brings
together her insights on Muslim representations in colonial India and on the
contestations for power in postcolonial Pakistan. Ayesha Jalal traces the trajec-
tory of Pakistani politics from its origins in the politics of representation of the
Muslim minority of undivided India to present-day tussles for power and
786 THE HISTORIAN

legitimacy in the face of geostrategic concerns. She offers a periodization of

this history through a compelling focus on the successive personalities that
took the helm, from Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan to Asif Ali
Zardari, Imran Khan, and Nawaz Sharif. The claims of Muslim nationalism
and the actual achievement of statehood posed stark contradictions, a fact that
Jalal explores by considering the competing representations of the ulama, the
judiciary, the army, and populist leaders in the face of global political change.
Confronting “unceasing speculation about Pakistan’s imminent collapse,” Jalal
takes an unflinching look at the inimical personalities that led the body politic,
the patterns of their compromises with each other and their allies, and their
respective failures (384).
This study will be of greatest benefit to those seeking a foundational under-
standing of Pakistani political history. Sparsely footnoted, the narrative carries
the reader through history up to the present, rejecting teleological narratives of
state failure and Islamization. In chapters 1 and 2, the author treats the politi-
cal foundation for the immediate aftermath of partition. Jalal reminds the read-
er that “the right to opt out of the Indian union was given to provinces and
not communities” (40). Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the role of the military in
the period leading up to 1971, describing the geopolitical climate and budget-
ary exigencies that enabled the military to dominate political decisions,
yet allowing that “there was nothing inescapable about the collapse of the
political process in Pakistan” (75). In chapter 5, Jalal separately considers the
political exclusions and economic decisions that led to an increasing Bengali
hostility towards the West Pakistani establishment and the final secession of
East Pakistan. Chapters 6 through 10 consider the successive eras of Zulfikar
Ali Bhutto’s populism, Muhammud Zia-ul-Haq’s martial rule, the democratic
to-ing and fro-ing between Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, Pervez Mushar-
raf’s rule, and finally the “entangled endgame” of Benazir’s death and the most
recent election in Pakistan in 2013.
It is no easy feat to cover close to one hundred years of a country’s prehisto-
ry and history in a single cogent narrative, but Jalal succeeds in doing so by
focusing on competitions for power and global entanglements, dismissing the
view that this history was shaped by religious longings, state failure, or a nar-
rowing set of political possibilities. Jalal offers a comprehensive and accessible
historical survey of a country whose political history is all too often dismissed
in shallow and unthoughtful terms.
University of Massachusetts, Boston Sana Haroon
BOOK REVIEWS 787

Military Transition in Early Modern Asia, 1400–1750: Cavalry, Guns, Government

and Ships. By Kaushik Roy. (London, England: Bloomsbury, 2014. Pp. ix, 285.
$120.00.)

The author of this book revisits a long-debated and well-worn theme in mili-
tary historiography—namely, the rise of the West in the early modern period
and its impact on Asia. Kaushik Roy finds the existing scholarly debate about
the subject as encompassed in the military revolution versus military evolution
debate to be stultifying and Eurocentric in its approach. Roy points out that
the claim that the lack of Western-type developments in Asia is a sign of back-
wardness creates an unequal hierarchy in any comparison between the West
and Asia.
Roy seeks to create an Asian-centered narrative that emphasizes the linkages
between the Asian states’ militaries with the Western Europeans as a
“background.” The book considers four Asian empires: the Ottoman Turks,
Safavid Persia, Mughal India, and China (Ming and Manchu dynasties). Howev-
er, Safavid Persia is only mentioned in passing with the bulk of the narrative
devoted to the Ottomans, Mughals, and Chinese. The first chapter gives a survey
of warfare before 1500 in three of the four systems. Chapter 2 examines the role
of firearms and field artillery in land battles fought in these regions. Chapter 3
looks at siege warfare and the use of siege artillery. Chapter 4 continues the
theme of gunpowder-based artillery but looks at it in the naval context. Chapter
5 looks at the economic factors behind the military systems of these regions.
The author relies largely on secondary sources and published primary sour-
ces. Given that this study is a synthesis, this is not a significant drawback.
However, the structure of the book does present considerable problems. The
various chapters, which are structured as independent narratives, lack the the-
matic coherence outlined in the book’s introduction. If there is a theme, it is
the rise of Islamic gunpowder empires. China appears tacked on as an after-
thought. Furthermore, despite the author’s intent to leave Europe in the back-
ground, several sections utilize European comparisons. For example, in the
chapter on siege warfare and siege artillery, the author uses Western develop-
ments such as Geoffrey Parker’s thesis on the primacy of the trace italienne
style of European fortifications as the primary comparative tool in analyzing
the Asian military systems.
Overall, the book lacks the necessary analysis and synthesis that could make
it fulfill the author’s original thesis as presented in the introduction. The chap-
ters are largely isolated papers with little transition amongst them.
788 THE HISTORIAN

Nevertheless, in spite of these drawbacks, the book provides another useful

stepping stone to further studies of military relations between the West and
Asia in the early modern period.
University of Nebraska at Kearney Pradeep Barua

The Past Before Us: Historical Traditions of Early North India. By Romila Thapar.
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. xvii, 758. $58.00.)

In a groundbreaking work, the author of this study has shown, through her
analysis of some important ancient Indian texts, how untenable it is to believe
that India, in its two millennia of ancient history, had no sense of historical
writing. In early texts, Romila Thapar stresses that historical consciousness is
to be found in an embedded form and has to be prized out. Historical con-
sciousness in societies lay in the manner in which they perceived and wished to
present their pasts. Events were placed within a chronological framework, and
although the chronology did not carry dates, people were conscious of past
events relevant to the society of their times.
This book has five parts. In part 1, “Search for a Historical Tradition,” Tha-
par points out that many texts reflect a consciousness of history, and it is up to
the reader to understand the way in which the past is perceived, recorded, and
used. An understanding of the Puranic and Sramanic (Buddhist and Jaina) as
well as poetic texts has to begin by relating them to their social functions and
being aware of what is selected and what is left out. History is the viewing of
the past from a particular perspective wherein the past is constructed, recon-
structed, and represented in particular ways. Essential to history is the shape
and accounting of time. Even in cyclic time, the present is not a repetition of
the past; each cycle records change.
In part 2, “The Embedded Tradition,” Thapar uses the Vedic narratives to
show how a historical tradition is evident in them, though they cover a vast
period with an uncertain chronology, mainly as a result of their specific referen-
ces to historical persons and events. The Mahabharata, for example, being an
epic, is not composed as a formal literary genre but carries an element of
embedded history. Not a history per se, it incorporates fragments of narratives
pertaining to what was believed to have happened. It was based on oral tradi-
tions in which the story could be added to or subtracted from through various
renderings. The text was not frozen until it was written, and even then it could
be added to.
BOOK REVIEWS 789

In part 3, “Interlude: The Emerging Historical Tradition,” the author studies

genealogies to establish the presence of a historical tradition. The Puranas
marked a new phase in this tradition since they claimed to be links to the past
as seen in their continuous genealogical construct of lineages. The genealogies
became important at points of historical change with the entry of new social
groups or factions.
Thapar calls early inscriptions (up to the sixth century AD) historical state-
ments that come in various kinds: royal edicts, votive inscriptions, records of
gifts, biographical statements, eulogies of rulers, and records of particular
events, etc. These inscriptions in and of themselves, she believes, do not consti-
tute a historical tradition but reflect a sense of historical consciousness.
In part 4, “Alternative Histories,” the author refers to the Buddhist and Jai-
na traditions and particularly to the role of monks as historians. Buddha was
written about as a historical person whose life was seen as a turning point in
history. Monasteries had records meant to check the veracity and validity of
the original teachers, and with biographical proofs.
Part 5, “The Historical Tradition Externalized,” presents details about his-
torical biographies, like the Harsacarita and the Ramacarita. Cyclic time was
not emphasized in these in part because the concern was with historical and
contemporary events.
In the conclusion, Thapar states that the intent of her work is to broaden
the current definition of history. She calls for a reading of the texts from the
specific focus of how writers and compilers understood past societies and the
actions of persons believed to have been historical. She holds the view that
the past is constructed in ways different from what one conventionally regards
as historical, that a sense of history and historical consciousness existed in
India, and that there were historical traditions emerging from diverse histori-
ographies that occasionally took the form of historical writing (701). In the
interface of cyclic and linear, there is a potential of more than just two con-
cepts of time.
After over seven hundred pages of engrossing analysis of ancient Indian texts
(epics, genealogies, inscriptions, and plays), Thapar does make a valid and con-
vincing point. But this reviewer needs more convincing about how embedded
history in ancient texts can firmly establish these texts as historical in the gener-
ally accepted sense of the term.
Loyola University, Maryland Charles Borges
790 THE HISTORIAN

EUROPE

The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered. By Laura Auricchio. (New York, NY: Alfred
A. Knopf, 2014. Pp. xxvi, 409. $30.00.)

The author of this book writes well, and the biography proceeds in a fast-
paced, novel-like manner. She notes Lafayette’s classical education, his expo-
sure to the literature of the Roman Republic, and his early involvement in
Masonry. For Laura Auricchio, Lafayette’s idealism was a significant motivator
that impelled him to sail to America in 1777. His love of glory was also a fac-
tor. Auricchio defines glory as it was defined in French dictionaries of the era:
a “‘reputation’ garnered through ‘virtue, merit, great qualities, good actions
and beautiful works’” (xxii). Lafayette sought this brand of glory.
As for his service, both military and diplomatic, during the American Revo-
lution, Auricchio gives Lafayette his due. However, she slights the Virginia
Campaign, omitting important actions that paved the way for the siege and vic-
tory at Yorktown. For example, Auricchio omits the act that best demonstrates
Lafayette’s growing maturity. After the French West Indies Fleet arrived in late
August of 1781, and Admiral de Grasse landed three thousand French troops
to augment Lafayette’s forces, de Grasse, impatient to defend French interests
in the islands, urged Lafayette to attack Yorktown. Lafayette refused. Notwith-
standing the opportunity to achieve a large share of the “glory” for himself, he
would wait for Washington and Rochambeau and the numerical superiority
that their forces would create.
Auricchio’s reportage of the early stages of the French Revolution up to the
zenith of Lafayette’s influence and power, the F^ete de la Federation on 14 July
1790, is balanced and fair. She also offers a fair appraisal of Lafayette’s subse-
quent role. Although the steady drumbeat of negative propaganda in the radical
press and the king’s flight to Varennes while ostensibly under Lafayette’s con-
trol as Commander of the Parisian National Guard had severely damaged
Lafayette’s reputation, the “massacre” at the Champ de Mars in July of 1791
struck it a blow from which it has not yet recovered in France. In describing
this event, Auricchio gives each side—Lafayette’s version and the Jacobins’—its
due. Regardless of what actually happened, Lafayette’s reputation in France
was irreparably damaged, and his moderate position for constitutional monar-
chy based on representative government was no longer viable.
Auricchio pays little attention to the later stages of Lafayette’s life, covering
his role during the Hundred Days, his career in the Chamber of Deputies, the
Farewell Tour [1824–1825], the Revolution of 1830, and his death all within
BOOK REVIEWS 791

thirty pages. Moreover, she omits most of Lafayette’s nineteenth-century

human rights work: his abolitionism, his support of revolutions and
revolutionaries in Europe, his efforts to expand suffrage in France, and his
advocacy against solitary confinement and the death penalty.
In sum, The Marquis is a great read that offers a measured and fair apprais-
al of Lafayette the man, who was the “Hero of Two Worlds.” As Daniel Web-
ster said to Lafayette during his Bunker Hill oration on 17 June 1825:
“Heaven saw fit to ordain that the electric spark of Liberty should be con-
ducted through you, from the New World to the Old”; and it was. Auricchio is
a worthy contributor to Lafayette’s legacy.
American Friends of Lafayette Alan R. Hoffman

Pericles of Athens. By Vincent Azoulay. Translated by Janet Lloyd. (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 2014. Pp. xiv, 291. $35.00.)

A historian might examine this new book and wonder how anyone could write a
biography of Pericles. Is there really enough evidence? The short answer is no. Vin-
cent Azoulay characterizes the source material as abundant but heterogeneous;
however, all the ancient evidence could be appended to this volume if today’s pub-
lishing trade allowed. The sources comprise the three great speeches and some
comments in Thucydides’s writings, miscellaneous gossip and invective, and a com-
plete life by Plutarch, who lived centuries after his subject. Many ancient historians
assume that Plutarch used valuable sources we can hardly imagine, and Azoulay
relies heavily on his information. Yet the author warns us to beware “of drawing
overhasty conclusions that are based solely on a reading of Plutarch” (35). Does
this mean that an anecdote in Plutarch, when supported by Aelius Aristeides and a
fragment of Stesimbrotos of Thasos, really yields something useful?
Azoulay is aware of these limitations. He still hangs his own portrait of Peri-
cles on this meager hook but notes how scholars have offered radically differ-
ent estimates based on the same material. His book exposes many unfounded
assumptions. Two valuable chapters at the end discuss how in later times Peri-
cles went through centuries of disgrace (fifteenth to eighteenth) and of rediscov-
ery (eighteenth to twenty-first)—often for ideological reasons but also because
of the evidence—the nastier attacks on Pericles, his family, and his associates
were given greater or lesser weight.
Like any good biographer, Azoulay begins with his subject’s early life (494/
493 BC to the midcentury). Events in this period to which Pericles’s name is
792 THE HISTORIAN

attached reveal little—even his famous involvement with Ephialtes in the

“reform” of the Areopagus Council. But the author uses these to portray the
young man as a crafty politician in the making. When Pericles finally emerges
from the shadows in the 440s, he begins his remarkable fifteen-year career as
one of the ten generals (strategoi) who were elected by the demos and not cho-
sen by lot. Azoulay explains why it is absurd to say that Pericles “ruled” Ath-
ens in any real sense. However, here again absence of evidence becomes the
basis of an argument. Pericles’s name does not appear on a single ancient
decree, and yet this fact and various anecdotes supposedly suggest a clever
strategy to influence events from behind the scenes.
Unfortunately, without reliable evidence it remains a stretch to say we know
much at all about his influence on Athenian imperial ambitions. A weird chap-
ter on the erotic messaging of Periclean democracy does not seem so strange
when one recalls that in his funeral oration of 431 BC Pericles urged the Athe-
nians to become lovers (erastai) of Athens. Pederastic associations are implied
but not elaborated: Pericles was urging citizens to love the young democracy.
This is a thought-provoking book. For nonspecialists, much background
material is provided to review the history necessary to understand Pericles. The
problem is that the effects of time and perhaps a conscious strategy keep the
man just out of view.
Providence College John M. Lawless

Unseen Enemy: The English, Disease, and Medicine in Colonial Bengal, 1617–1847.
By Sudip Bhattacharya. (Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, 2014. Pp. xii, 245. $81.99.)

This study is a richly archival work that looks into the world of early European
doctors in Bengal to study their take on indigenous diseases. The book is, as
the author admits, “not the story of Tropical medicine” (x). Rather, his goal is
to examine individual European doctors in Calcutta who often resorted to local
remedies as a survival strategy in a place where death was a regular visitor.
Using medical treatises left behind by these men, the author argues that prior
to 1857, when colonial attitudes towards the “natives” had not yet thoroughly
hardened, one notices a progressive appropriation of indigenous knowledge by
European doctors. As a result, colonial Calcutta emerged as a seedbed of chal-
lenging clinical opportunities, from Francis Balfour’s solunar theory to the set-
ting up of a Mesmeric Hospital by James Esdaile.
BOOK REVIEWS 793

Sudip Bhattacharya builds up his case studies with much focus. He begins
with the disease ecology of colonial Bengal as it was featured in European writ-
ings. The menacingly high mortality rates among European settlers from dysen-
tery, cholera, and “prickly heat” confirm the “environmentalist paradigm.”1 As
instruction manuals to endure long sea voyages, we come across John Wood-
all’s Surgeon’s Chest or John Wade’s treatise Prevention and Treatment of Dis-
orders of Seamen and Sailors in Bengal. Local knowledge was always drawn
upon. For instance, surgeons like John Holwell documented approvingly local
inoculation methods to treat smallpox successfully, while Woodall recom-
mended use of “Malabar tamarind” for stomach ailments (39). At the same
time, Bhattacharya draws attention to eight anonymous “black doctors” in Pat-
na who interrupt colonial narratives but then disappear without a trace.
The author skillfully depicts the flow of knowledge from colony to metro-
pole and vice versa. Perusing the stories, we see how the colony became a hub
of laboratory medicine where Balfour could test his own solunar theory and
others practice Brunonian Doctrine that had died out in England. Though
many of these medical practitioners added a new quantum of knowledge to the
pharmacopeia, the medical community in England often dismissed their works.
A useful survey, the book however leaves some questions unanswered. For
instance, what was the role of the colonial state in such experimentations? The
author does not provide much intellectual engagement with larger questions of
“tropical disease.” It is also not clear why the book is entitled, “Unseen
Enemy,” when the enemy—disease—was omnipresent and glaringly visible in
colonial India. The absence of footnotes makes it difficult to navigate, and the
complete lack of Indian voices renders the book a monologue. Regardless of
these omissions, the methodology is novel. The book grows out of the author’s
wanderings in South Park Street cemeteries as he then follows the trajectory of
these men who faced untimely deaths in Calcutta. Unseen Enemy will be of
much use to anyone interested in early Orientalism, Company Raj, histories of
disease and medicine, colonial knowledge formation, or the history of Bengal.
Georgia College and State University Samiparna Samanta

1. David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-
Century India, London: University of California Press, 1993; Mark Harrison, Climates and
Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India 1600–1850, New
York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
794 THE HISTORIAN

Politics and Foreign Policy in the Age of George I, 1714–1727. By Jeremy Black.
(Farnham, United Kingdom: Ashgate, 2014. Pp. xiii, 279. $119.95.)

The author of this book, the most productive and consequential student of Brit-
ish diplomatic history during the long eighteenth century, and arguably—with
his magisterial study of George III—the leading biographer of the post-1714
royal family since James Pope-Hennessy, has now, not for the first time it must
be admitted, turned his attention to the reign of George I. Building on the
scholarship of Nick Harding, Brendan Simms, Torsten Riotte, and Andrew
Thompson, amongst others, Jeremy Black very much views the post-1714 state
as an “Anglo-Hanoverian” concoction with mutually supportive (or not) Lon-
don and electoral ministers attempting to carry out, extend, or modify the
desires of their king-elector.
Black is conscious throughout the study—if not of the primacy, then certainly
the significance—of British domestic politics over foreign policy. He continually
tests the role that Parliament, national general elections, and, especially, Whig,
Tory, and Jacobite newspapers and periodicals played in the calculations of
George’s ministers and of French, Swedish, Austrian, Prussian, and Spanish
policymakers. It is this emphasis upon multiple discourses that distinguishes
Black’s interpretation of the reign from the otherwise authoritative biography of
George I by Ragnhild Hatton. Thus he convincingly illustrates how traditional,
confessional, and ideological interest groups involving Catholics, Anglicans, and
Dissenters, or Jacobites and Whigs, were as important in setting the national
mood as any realist theory of British/Hanoverian policies.
The wider and sometimes complicated story Black tells is of a Whig Party
that reached its political maturity under William III and Anne as anti-French,
pro-Dutch, anti-Catholic, favoring aggressive war against the universal monar-
chical ideals of Louis XIV, and opposing successful Tory attempts to strike a
more or less compromise peace at Utrecht. Then, when after 1715 the whole
apparatus of government power fell into the hands of the Whigs, they adopted
a pro-French foreign policy that was somewhat contemptuous of Dutch power
and that endured for nearly a quarter century.
Black, as is his usual modus operandi, profitably compares events during
George I’s reign with parallel developments earlier or later during the long
eighteenth century; for example, the Anglo-Spanish settlement of 1720 reminds
him of the Nootka Sound crisis of 1790. He is also insightful at elucidating the
sometimes tortuous foreign policy priorities of such diverse European players
as the papacy, Frederick William I, Peter the Great, Charles XII, and Elizabeth
BOOK REVIEWS 795

Farnese. He is never shy about hitting the reader with novel ways to examine
the foreign policy of the period. Hence, Black suspects that, contrary to the
general British historiographical tradition, France really won the War of the
Spanish Succession of 1702–1713. Or that Britain, after a somewhat inglorious
seventeenth-century role on the European stage, became, after the Glorious
Revolution, as much an unpredictable and troubling upstart to the balance of
power as was Peter the Great’s Russia.
Although this volume inexplicably lacks any maps, the reader will certainly
applaud that the editors allowed generous dollops of footnotes rather than the
less accessible endnotes. Also, somewhat oddly, there is no discussion of either
the domestic or foreign policy implications of George I’s controversial will.
University of Illinois at Chicago James J. Sack

Infidel Kings and Unholy Warriors: Faith, Power, and Violence in the Age of Cru-
sade and Jihad. By Brian A. Catlos. (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2014. Pp. xvii, 390. $28.00.)

The author of this book tackles one of the most popular topics in both contem-
porary world affairs and medieval historiography: conflict between the Chris-
tian and Muslim worlds. He is not seeking to answer a question but to
undermine facile contemporary perceptions of the “age of crusade and jihad,”
particularly the notion of a “clash of civilizations” among Christian, Jewish,
and Islamic communities. He does so, reducing religion to one of a number of
“identities” that medieval people inhabited (warriors, tradespeople, citizens,
and poets) and by emphasizing that the most potent conflicts were often
between groups within religious communities, rather than between them. This
lively and engaging book gives the reader a sense of the complex interactions
among the diverse religious communities of the eleventh- and twelfth-century
Mediterranean and mini-histories of the most cosmopolitan regions.
Infidel Kings and Unholy Warriors is clearly intended for a broad audience.
There are no footnotes, and the chapters are written to engage, with descriptive
tableaux of various historic events—such as El Cid’s widow Ximena looking
back over “lush plain, fields on undulating wheat punctuated by the iridescent
white of almond bloom” at the burning city of Valencia as she flees the city
ahead of its Almoravid capture (70). Brian Catlos uses such evocative stories to
illustrate five complex, interreligious cultures of the medieval Mediterranean,
often using exemplary figures as anchors: eleventh-century Spain through the
796 THE HISTORIAN

figures of El Cid and the Jewish wazir, poet, and warrior Isma’il ibn Naghrilla
(also known as Shmuel ha-Nagid); twelfth-century Sicily through the eunuch
admiral Philip of Mahdia; the Fatimid Caliphate through the Armenian wazir
Vahram; and the Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem through the adventurer Rey-
naud de Chastillon. A reader might notice that the exemplary figures are all
male and all (except Isma’il) Christian. There is of course some nuance to this
statement: Philip of Mahdia had been born Muslim and, as a eunuch, arguably
occupied a different gendered role than the other figures in the list. And the
book includes accounts of a number of the powerful and influential women of
the era, from Melisende of Jerusalem and her sisters to briefer references to the
Fatimid princess Sitt al-Mulk—yet none are focal figures.
The men are also all warriors, just as Catlos’s larger narrative focuses on
war, conflict, and political intrigue. It is curious that a book that has taken reli-
gion as a central theme (as signaled by “infidel” and “unholy” in the title and
“faith,” “crusade,” and “jihad” in the subtitle) does not include any central
characters who were religious actors. For Catlos, religion is a red herring. To
understand “power” and “violence,” it turns out that “faith” is not important
at all. In both its focus on politics and its minimization of religion, the book
runs counter to the broader trends in contemporary scholarship, which has
moved away from political history and has taken religious claims and motiva-
tion as a central part of an understanding of the past focused on social and cul-
tural subjects.
Dartmouth College Christopher MacEvitt

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. By Eric H. Cline. (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2014. Pp. xx, 237. $29.95.)

The year 1177 BC, like AD 486 in the history of the Roman Empire, is a con-
venient date for the convulsions that ended a cosmopolitan period in the east-
ern Mediterranean region called the Late Bronze Age (LBA). In this book, the
author addresses two interrelated questions: How did this prospering LBA civi-
lization collapse, and why? This is not the first monograph-length study of its
type, but it is the most analytically satisfying, accessible, and of course up-to-
date treatment of one of the great enigmas of the ancient world.
The book is structured around a theatrical conceit. Chapters are “acts,” and
a list of dramatis personae is included at the end of the book. The narrative is
introduced with a prologue: an epic account of an invasion of “Sea Peoples”
BOOK REVIEWS 797

into Egypt as recorded in the commemorative inscriptions and temple iconogra-

phy of Ramses III. For nearly a century, the Sea Peoples have been held respon-
sible for the collapse of LBA civilization, but Eric H. Cline asks to what extent
the Sea Peoples have obscured a more complex process of rapid decline. The
drama unfolds chronologically from the fifteenth century BC in Act I and ends
in the early twelfth century BC with a detailed account of widespread devasta-
tion across the eastern Mediterranean in Act IV.
The extent to which LBA civilization collapsed is the extent to which the
empires and kingdoms of this region had become culturally, commercially, and
politically interconnected in the world’s first “globalized” political economy.
Acts 1–3 are an account of this interconnectedness and focus on the military
campaigns, commercial enterprise, and diplomatic missions of different tiers of
geo-political power, ranging from the empires of the Egyptians and Hittites and
their subject kingdoms (e.g., at Ugarit and Byblos) to the peripheral societies of
the Minoans and Mycenaeans in the Aegean. The crux of Cline’s argument is
that the legitimizing strategies of ruling elites became dangerously over-reliant
upon distant communications (in particular commercial exchanges), leaving
them vulnerable to any disruptions caused to these networks. A “perfect
storm” of disruptive events is examined in the last chapter, including evidence
for climate change and earthquake storms in the late thirteenth and early
twelfth centuries BC. These triggered a systemic collapse that Cline analyzes
with applications of complexity theory. The Sea Peoples are finally put into
perspective: more of an effect than a cause of systemic collapse.
Writing a single-authored monograph like this takes courage, not least
because the study relies on the expertise of so many archaeological, philologi-
cal, and art historical disciplines. As such, most of the book reads like a sec-
ondary literature review, and experts will inevitably find errors and other
disappointments as the sweeping narrative passes by their area of expertise.
Cline is also unabashedly presentist in his outlook. His is a cautionary tale to
be sure (for the vulnerability of the global world we live in today), but some
readers might take issue with the regular use of terms like “international” or
“globalization.” In the end, such a book needed to be written and probably
does not need to be written again. This can be read as praise for Cline but also
as frustration with a kind of archaeological and historical narrative writing
that is more at home in the twentieth century than it is in the twenty-first.
Freie Universit€at Berlin Christoph Bachhuber
798 THE HISTORIAN

The Gestapo: Power and Terror in the Third Reich. By Carsten Dams and Michael
Stolle. (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xvi, 234.
$27.95.)

The authors of this short volume have synthesized recent research on the Gesta-
po, the Nazi regime’s political police force. This volume will be of interest to
scholars and students seeking a concise, up-to-date survey of this notorious
organization’s history. Carsten Dams and Michael Stolle begin by tracing the
Gestapo’s origins and its centralization under the control of SS chief Heinrich
Himmler. Influenced by the legal scholar and SS officer Werner Best, Himmler
and Reinhard Heydrich defined the organization as the “doctor to the German
national body” responsible for protecting and “disinfecting” the “people’s
community” (30). Hence, the Gestapo’s authority emanated not from the state
but from the needs of the people. It followed that there could be no legal
restrictions on the fulfillment of this responsibility.
A description of the Gestapo’s evolving structure and leadership precedes an
assessment of lower-level officials. The authors again call attention to the influ-
ence of Best, whose recruitment efforts brought a significant number of young,
middle-class, and highly educated men into mid-level leadership positions. For
them, the Gestapo and SS Security Service (SD) offered steady work, frequent
promotions, and the opportunity to exercise real political power in the service
of the racially defined “people’s community.” As for the vast majority of lower-
level Gestapo officials, the authors claim that there was no representative type,
though “typical was the officer who neither screamed nor bullied, who did not
use physical violence, but who took pains to fulfill the tasks set him” (53).
Dams and Stolle stress that the Gestapo was neither “all-knowing” nor “all-
powerful” (57). Yet its powers in Germany were practically unconstrained. The
Gestapo was particularly effective in recruiting informants to infiltrate pockets
of political resistance. As for the much-debated question of voluntary denuncia-
tions by ordinary Germans, the authors conclude that denunciatory practices
were not as important to the Gestapo’s operations as some have argued.
Instead, they stress that the potential for repression and violence was an impor-
tant tool of social control and emphasize the fact that most Germans supported
the regime while “the fate of others” remained of little interest to them (88).
The fate of others was the Gestapo’s central concern throughout the twelve
years of Nazi rule, and the authors provide a concise overview of its role in
persecuting the left, Jews, foreign slave labor, non-Jewish religious communi-
ties, homosexuals, and “asocials” in Germany. The following chapter follows
BOOK REVIEWS 799

the Gestapo into German-occupied Europe, where there were even fewer con-
straints on its ability to act against perceived enemies; the lines between it and
other police units, such as the SD and the SS, became virtually indistinct.
The authors conclude with a chapter on the Gestapo’s legacy after 1945.
Most of the organization’s officers and employees evaded legal prosecution and
rebuilt their lives. The skills and contacts of the Gestapo’s policemen and
administrators proved easily transferable to changed circumstances, and most
adapted quickly to the social market economy of liberal democratic West Ger-
many or the Stalinist dictatorship of East Germany. A Cold War climate of for-
getting only facilitated this smooth collective transition.
City University of New York, Steven P. Remy
Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center

Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature. By Robert Darnton. (New York,
NY: W. W. Norton, 2014. Pp. iii, 316. $32.95.)

In this unique study of censorship, the author focuses on three states in three
different centuries, detailing their situations and practices. The first is Bourbon
France and centers on privilege and impression in the eighteenth century. Legal-
ly, a book existed by virtue of the king’s pleasure; as

the book was a quality product, it had a royal sanction, and in dispensing
that sanction, the censors vouched for the general excellence. Censorship
was not simply a matter of purging heresies. It was positive—a royal
endorsement of the book and an official invitation to read it. (29)

These were the deemed heresies: anything offensive to religion, morality, or

the state. Furthermore, censors reacted to the orthodoxy of the book’s ideas, its
organization, the quality or quantity of its details, the adequacy of its research,
and its aesthetic qualities. Texts that met these various standards were
approved; those that did not were rejected. In current terminology, they were
censored.
There were loopholes in the legal system, a series of categories having been
devised by officials to permit publications without official endorsement. As the
system evolved—becoming more bureaucratic and the number of censors
increasing—the possibility for errors and cheating increased. Robert Darnton
provides examples of problem cases and censorial behaviors.
The second state that Darnton considers is British India in the contexts of
liberalism and imperialism. Despite having defeated the Indian soldiers in the
800 THE HISTORIAN

Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, the British Raj perceived their power and prestige as
being threatened by the impressive increase in the number of books and period-
icals printed and by a growing reading public. A significant censorship catalyst
was the publication of an English edition of a fictional Bengali melodrama, Nil
Darpan, which attacked the planters. The author asserts that the book
“dramatized the evils of the indigo system so effectively that it became known
as the ‘Tom’s Cabin of Bengal’” and that “the Nil Darpan affair was the most
dramatic case of censorship—censorship overlaid with protests denying its
existence—in the British Raj during the nineteenth century” (98, 101).
Darnton states that “protests against British rule expressed a spirit of pas-
sionate nationalism, sounding like a summons to rise in revolution” (118).
“Out of control” colonial disturbances defined the Indian situation as sedition
to the British. Given the behavior of the police and the judges, the “natives”
were maligned and assaulted and justice suborned. Darnton notes that “the ver-
dicts look like foregone conclusions” (127).
The third state examined is communist East Germany, with emphasis on
planning and persecution. Darnton’s investigation of censorship in the German
Democratic Republic (GDR) was initiated at a most opportune time in history:
1990. East Germany was at the point of dissolution. The Berlin Wall fell on
9 November 1989; “the government fell apart, the Party splintered, the state
collapsed, and nothing remained of the censorship system, except the censors
themselves” (227). The two officials interviewed, loyal members of the East
German communist party, denied the existence of censorship—it was forbidden
in the constitution, which guaranteed freedom of expression. Their chief con-
cern “was to make literature happen—that is, to oversee the process by which
ideas became books and books reached readers” (148). The anticipated moral
concepts and activities matched the ideals of the GDR. The process of book
selection and book editing seemed like a constant evaluation of features of each
proposed book to conform with the party line.
University of Wisconsin—River Falls Nicholas J. Karolides

Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the
Soviet Union, 1921–1941. By Michael David-Fox. (Oxford, United Kingdom:
Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xii, 396. $29.95.)

In the 1920s and 1930s, some 100,000 foreign visitors came to the Soviet
Union from Europe and the United States, among them tens of thousands of
BOOK REVIEWS 801

intellectuals, writers, artists, filmmakers, musicians, and scientists. The itinerar-

ies of such luminaries as Theodore Dreiser, George Bernard Shaw, and Beatrice
Webb are well known to biographers, and historians often recite their vivid
impressions (ranging from the enraptured to the irascible) as colorful vignettes
to illustrate larger points in passing. Michael David-Fox, however, shifts focus
from the anecdotal to the structural, arguing that cultural diplomacy ought “to
be seen as central to early Soviet and Stalinist culture, ideology, and politics”
(1). David-Fox maintains that the formation of the Soviet system, traditionally
viewed as a purely domestic affair, must be understood in an international con-
text and that the ongoing and ever-shifting exchanges between Western visitors
and their Soviet hosts across the interwar period reveal “the interaction
between the internal and external dimensions of the Soviet system” (313).
Cultural diplomacy emerged as a tool of modern statecraft in the twentieth
century, as increasingly robust state bureaucracies mobilized new forms of
media power to tout the cultural and technological achievements of their
respective regimes. The fledgling Soviet state embraced these new diplomatic
opportunities, creating and funding agencies like the All-Union Society for Cul-
tural Ties Abroad (VOKS), which was charged with cultivating friendships
with prominent foreigners and sympathetic Westerners whose favorable impres-
sions of the international socialist homeland might influence the hearts and
minds of audiences in the USSR and abroad. Yet, as they had ever since the
court of the Muscovite tsars first came under Western eyes, “sentiments of
superiority and inferiority deeply informed the interactions between those who
showcased the Soviet Union and those who visited it in the 1920s and 1930s”
(323). Declassified documents from the former Soviet archives show that even
the gamest of fellow travelers gave private voice to scruples, doubts, and hesita-
tions when they confronted the realities of Soviet life in person. For their part,
Bolshevik elites regarded the West as both a bounty of technological and indus-
trial models from which they might freely borrow and a dangerous source of
potential ideological contamination. This balancing act, ever precarious, gave
way by the late 1930s to what David-Fox dubs the “Stalinist superiority com-
plex,” an all-pervasive ideological gloss that elevated Soviet achievements to
positions of unquestioned global primacy (285). It is no accident that the rush
of Western visitors ground to a virtual halt by decade’s end, as the Stalinist
regime intensified its search for enemies within and the VOKS leadership fell
victim to the Purges.
David-Fox has produced a deeply researched and original book that invites
readers to rethink or revisit some big historiographical questions: continuity
802 THE HISTORIAN

and change across the dividing line of 1917, the nature and origins of Stalin-
ism, and the connection between internal and external factors in national devel-
opment. Of obvious interest to historians of modern Russia, this book also will
be read with great benefit by scholars interested in cultural, political, and trans-
national history.
University of Montana Robert H. Greene

Freedom’s Price: Serfdom, Subjection, and Reform in Prussia, 1648–1848. By S. A.

Eddie. (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. xx, 356.
$110.00.)

Winner of the Economic History Society’s First Monograph Prize and the Royal
Historical Society’s 2013 Gladstone Prize, this is one of those rare books that
utilizes superb archival research and sound reasoning truly to transform conven-
tional thinking on a subject. Debunking the Marxist interpretation of serfdom as
a system of pure subjection, exploitation, and economic coercion, S. A. Eddie
provocatively challenges our understanding of serfdom in Prussia between 1648
and 1848 by asserting that the relationship between noble and serf was mutually
beneficial. This work thus focuses on the complex and related issues of the con-
dition of serfdom in Prussia and the abolition of serfdom during the Napoleonic
and post-Napoleonic eras. Eddie divides the monograph into two parts. The first
concerns Prussian manorialism and feudalism during the “Second Serfdom,”
which lasted from the end of the Thirty Years’ War to the collapse of “Old
Prussia” in 1807 following Napoleon’s conquest of Prussia.
In part 1, Eddie argues that serfs in Brandenburg-Prussia in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries enjoyed a higher quality of life than free peasants due
to the reciprocal obligations that existed between them and the noble estate
owners. Central to Eddie’s interpretation was the availability of capital, both
to the landowner and the serf, but especially the former’s responsibility to sup-
ply it to the latter, mainly in times of bad harvests or disasters, a duty called
Konservation. For the author, capital serves as the key ingredient of the pre-
capitalist economy. Similar to the medieval period when peasants accepted per-
sonal subjection in return for the martial protection of the local lord, peasants
during the Second Serfdom submitted themselves to the authority of the lord
for his economic protection. Eddie concludes that in terms of costs and bene-
fits, the resulting social contract provided many benefits for both noble and
serf. The nobles gained by investing capital to repopulate farms and villages
BOOK REVIEWS 803

that had been devastated or abandoned during the Thirty Years’ War, thus
restoring the profitability of their holdings. Peasants benefited by entering a
relationship with the noble in which they were protected by property rights
(Besitzrechte) and gained access to capital. The serfs’ ability to accumulate and
provide their own capital determined the amount of rent they paid, the rights
they enjoyed, and how long they remained in personal subjection, as purchas-
ing their emancipation remained a viable option. Eddie points to the absence of
peasant uprisings in Prussia, as opposed to France, as evidence of a more
humane form of Prussian manorialism and feudalism.
In part 2, Eddie maintains that in terms of Prussian reform following defeat
at the hands of Napoleon in 1807, the real losers were the nobles rather than
the peasants. This conclusion contradicts the long-accepted interpretation of the
October Edict of 1807 being a victory for the nobles because it liberated the
Junkers from the responsibility of the Konservation and permitted them to
enclose farms. Again, Eddie views capital as the crux of the argument. Seeing
that the war-ravished estates of the nobility could no longer generate the capital
needed by the peasants or the government, not to mention creditors, the archi-
tects of the Prussian Reform Movement introduced change that benefited the
peasants. The Edict of 9 October 1807 emancipated the serfs, allowing a man
“to move without penalty, to choose his farm, raise debts against it or sell it,
and bequeath it to an heir of his own choosing. His children no longer had to
work for the lord compulsorily, and he also now had a free choice of wife and
trade” (2). The purpose of this was to revitalize agriculture by introducing a
market economy: “The Free movement of capital was to be attained by loosen-
ing the impediments to its free flow through the Prussian economy” (2). While
peasants held onto their farms, 45 percent of noble estates passed to nonaristo-
cratic owners who possessed the necessary capital. According to Eddie,

the October Edict symbolized not just an end to feudal dependence, but
also of a fundamental change in mentality—from a conservative system
seeking to preserve such scarce capital as already existed to a more
dynamic one with inbuilt incentives positively rewarding risk taking.
Rather than being slaves to labor dues, Lassiten would now be (in
Steuart’s phrase) “slaves to their own wants.” (331)

Eddie uses archival research in the form of peasant and noble petitions and
letters as well as official reports to conclude that the subsequent reforms of
1811 likewise favored the peasants as well but that the 1816 reforms also
restored a degree of balance between the nobles and the peasants. He
804 THE HISTORIAN

ultimately concludes that “after the 1820s depression, all Prussians profited to
some degree” (309).
Not all will agree with Eddie’s conclusions, and the book itself is a “heavy”
read. Nonetheless, the tremendous research and logical arguments will make
Freedom’s Price a force to be reckoned with for decades to come.
University of North Texas Michael V. Leggiere

The French Revolution and the Birth of Electoral Democracy. By Melvin Edelstein.
(Farnham, United Kingdom: Ashgate, 2014. Pp. xiv, 365. $149.95.)

The author of this study has spent most of his career studying elections in the
French Revolution. He has published his results piecemeal over the years, and
now he brings them all together in a major book that appears simultaneously
in English and in French—a rare distinction. In writing it, he has tracked down
electoral documents from all over France and struggled impressively with sub-
jecting them to coherent analysis. Given their wild inconsistencies and uneven
survival in the archives, this is a notable achievement. He presents his evidence
and conclusions in terse, unadorned language completely free of obfuscating
jargon, and they are full of originality. Despite the consistent commitment of
the French revolutionaries to representative government, their various attempts
to establish it and make it work have always been controversial. For the Revo-
lution’s critics, electoral participation rates—low by modern standards—have
demonstrated how little popular support it had. Mountainous majorities in suc-
cessive constitutional plebiscites have also always aroused suspicions of wide-
spread manipulation.
From this perspective, most voting during the French Revolution seemed like
a pitiable sham. Friendly interpreters, on the other hand, have seen the begin-
nings of modern democratic practice and excused ambiguous, disappointing, or
frankly incredible results by pointing to the difficulties of setting up electoral
democracy from scratch in eighteenth-century conditions. Melvin Edelstein is
clearly in this camp. It is absurd, he believes, to judge revolutionary elections
by later standards. Much more relevant are comparisons with elections in other
states at the time, such as unreformed Great Britain or the infant United States.
He draws parallels with these throughout the study, and generally the new
French practices emerge as much the most democratic, even if still lacking the
underpinning of a culture of political pluralism, organized parties, or campaign-
ing by candidates. Much of the argument is couched in the form of testing the
BOOK REVIEWS 805

conclusions of the two most recent preceding historians of revolutionary elec-

tions, Malcolm Crook and Patrice Gueniffey. Crook emerges largely unscathed;
but Gueniffey—the most prominent disciple of the late François Furet, who
saw the Revolution as doomed to dictatorship—is repeatedly challenged. Unlike
Gueniffey, Edelstein finds little evidence of electoral manipulation by the Jaco-
bin clubs or fraud by returning officers. He also challenges Gueniffey’s statistics
of returns and participation, offering figures of his own that should now
become standard.
Not enough attention, he also contends, has been given to elections below
the level of successive revolutionary legislatures. Voting for local government
bodies and for justices of the peace played as much of a part in laying the foun-
dations of a culture of electoral democracy as more eye-catching national polls.
The most original part of Edelstein’s work is on voting up to and including the
1793 plebiscite on the constitution. His treatment of subsequent practice is
briefer and, as he admits, largely based on secondary sources, but it under-
scores his central point, which is that a voting culture had been firmly estab-
lished. No period of the revolution saw more elections than the Directory, and
even Napoleon felt obliged to underpin his legitimacy by plebiscites.
University of Bristol William Doyle

The Schlieffen Plan: International Perspectives on the German Strategy for World
War I. Edited by Hans Ehlert, Michael Epkenhans, and Gerhard P. Gross. Trans-
lation edited by David T. Zabecki. (Lexington, KY: University Press of Ken-
tucky, 2014. Pp. vi, 577. $75.00.)

Alfred von Schlieffen was responsible for all German Army operational planning
as chief of the Prussian General Staff from 1891 through 1905. Immediately upon
retiring, he wrote “Memorandum for a War Against France” on the assumption
of larger forces than Germany had then or in 1914. He sketched a concept for
sweeping through neutral Belgian and Dutch territory to outflank, roll up, and
crush the French. (One foldout sheet reproduces the overall operational map found
with Schlieffen’s memo, although its exact provenance is unclear.) Russia figured
not at all; it was strictly a one-front idea. Not truly a plan in the general staff
sense, it has nevertheless come to be widely identified as “The Schlieffen Plan.”
In August 1914, Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, commanding Germany’s
armies in a two-front war, attempted his western offensive in a manner some-
what resembling the think piece’s concept. It fell short, much as Schlieffen had
806 THE HISTORIAN

warned was likely to happen in such circumstances. Moltke’s plan also is often
called the “Schlieffen Plan.” After Germany’s defeat, some surviving military
leaders blamed the deceased Moltke, claiming he perversely ignored a plan for
sure victory that Schlieffen supposedly left. They present somewhat varying
descriptions of this claimed perfect “Schlieffen Plan.”
Following Germany’s reunification seven decades later, further documents
were discovered in formerly closed archives. Terence Zuber exploited these and
other overlooked sources to argue that postwar claims were fraudulent and
that others had failed to note the discrepancies, resulting in very misleading
accounts of August 1914. This ignited a protracted and frequently rancorous
controversy; the present volume is one product of this, a translation of the pro-
ceedings of a 2004 conference convened by the German Army’s military history
center to “discuss Zuber’s pertinent theses and perhaps convince him to modify
them” (9). In the event, the dispute has remained frozen.
The eleven-decade-old papers fall into two groups. Those by Annika Mom-
bauer, Robert T. Foley, and Gerhard Gross are contra-Zuber. His response, as
well as much further discussion by him and others (including Mombauer,
Foley, and Gross), are to be found not here but among seventeen articles pub-
lished between 1999 and 2014, primarily in War in History (and one in Journal
of Strategic Studies), and three books by Zuber. The older contributions here,
all of which are recapitulated elsewhere, thus are almost entirely redundant.
Essentially, Zuber finds no evidence of Schlieffen’s supposedly surefire plan
prior to 1920 nor that it ever had real substance. The others variously contend
that it was available in one form or another in 1914 and that it was largely
identical to Schlieffen’s memo.
Many of the remaining eight chapters in this volume are fresher and more
valuable. Klaus Hildebrand surveys civil-military interactions in the decisions
that led to war, stressing the alliance system (without clarifying how the
abstract “system” impinged on concrete decision making).
Dieter Storz goes far to disentangle conflicting accounts and claims regarding
the action at the left end of the German line in the initial offensive, while at
the same time illuminating the fraught issue of the German command problems
in August-September 1914. Nine detailed maps are included on one of the fold-
outs. G€ unther Kronenbitter explores the complex relationships between war
planning by Germany and her Austro-Hungarian ally. Stefan Schmidt and Jan
Kusher examine The Entente closely from French and Russian perspectives,
respectively, pointing up its destabilizing tendencies. Hans Rudolf Fuhrer and
Michael Olsansky contend that German failure to breach Swiss neutrality had
BOOK REVIEWS 807

as much to do with German-Swiss cultural affinities and German hopes of vol-

untary Swiss support as with military factors. Hew Strachan analyzes connec-
tions between Britain’s establishment of an army general staff and the shift to a
continental commitment, contrasting British and German general staff concepts.
Luc de Vos reviews the history of Belgium over the century following the Con-
gress of Vienna and how the plans for defense prior to 1914 arose.
A transcription of recently discovered notes sketching otherwise lost German
Guard Service deployment plans from 1893 to 1914 occupies 35 percent of the
text. These are not always clear, absent the sketch maps, which are omitted
here. Maps for 1903 and later are reproduced (along with summaries of and
commentaries on the plans) in Zuber’s The Real German War Plan, 1904–14.
Like many collections, this is quite uneven. It adds little regarding its ostensible
subject but contributes to an understanding of the action on the German left
wing in 1914, the interaction of German and Austro-Hungarian planning, and
the strategic implications of The Entente.
Falls Church, Virginia William D. O’Neil

Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia: A Study of Manuscript Transmis-

sion and Monastic Culture. By Felice Lifshitz. (New York, NY: Fordham Univer-
sity Press, 2014. Pp. xxiv, 349. $55.00.)

The author of this study discovers feminist resistance to misogynistic Carolingi-

an reform in the Guntza and Abirhilt group manuscripts produced in mid- and
late-eighth-century Karlburg and Kitzingen, two convents near W€ urzburg. Both
houses exemplify syneisactism—a religious life characterized by chaste friend-
ships among monks and nuns—gender egalitarianism, and recognition of the
major contributions of consecrated women to the church’s mission. Felice Lif-
shitz emphasizes the influence of the English missionaries, most notably Boni-
face and his kinswoman Leoba, in implanting syneisactism in the area east of
the Rhine in the early Carolingian period, a region she calls the “Anglo-Saxon
cultural province in Francia.” Describing this region in this manner, however,
tends to obscure the prevalence of the syneisactic tradition among aristocratic
Franks, including the Carolingians, who were richly endowed and entered com-
munities like Karlburg and Kitzingen. Indeed, a major theme in this book is
Carolingian rejection of this tradition, despite the major contributions of reli-
gious women to the church’s development in the Frankish kingdom during the
seventh and eighth centuries.
808 THE HISTORIAN

In the later eighth century, Carolingian reform strengthened an increasingly

authoritarian ecclesiastical hierarchy that insisted on strict enclosure of nuns
and deprived their communities of resources. Yet, as Lifshitz demonstrates, the
nuns of Karlburg and Kitzingen refused to accept the reform’s gender hierarchy
passively. Their learned female scribes mounted a feminist “resistance” to
reform’s “patriarchal ideas, particularly as they concern women,” in manu-
scripts whose content affirmed their spiritual worth and the leading role of
female saints in society’s Christianization (xix). This feminist stance appears in
illuminations of biblical and patristic texts, the deliberate editing of texts to
eliminate traces of misogyny, and the selection of texts for florilegia and collec-
tions of saints’ lives highlighting the public role of religious women in the
church. The sheer number and quality of these scribal interventions make Lif-
shitz’s argument convincing.
The author attempts a difficult feat in this book, a discussion of manuscripts
that will engage both general readers and specialists in the field. Although she
advises nonspecialists to skip it, Lifshitz’s detailed discussion of the manuscripts
in chapter 3 repays careful study, especially if reference is made to the Guntza
and Abirhilt manuscripts themselves in the digitalized Virtuelle Bibliothek
W€ urzburg. Readers unfamiliar with manuscripts can learn a great deal about
them and their importance as sources of cultural history. Whether specialists or
not, readers will find in this study a stimulating exposition of the cultural
achievements of early medieval consecrated women, important insights into
Carolingian reform’s attempt to suppress an alternative tradition of a gender
egalitarian church, and a persuasive case for the existence of feminism in the
early Middle Ages.
Pace University Mary Alberi

The Whispers of Cities: Information Flows in Istanbul, London, & Paris in the Age
of William Trumbull. By John-Paul Ghobrial. (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford
University Press, 2014. Pp. 208. $99.00.)

The study of global connections is an area of increasing historical research.

This coincides with an emerging revisionist account of the historical relation-
ship between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. John-Paul Ghobrial’s new book
contributes a valuable methodological approach to these areas of inquiry. By
focusing on what he describes as the “actual mechanics of everyday
communication,” Ghobrial examines the flow of information from Istanbul to
BOOK REVIEWS 809

London in the late seventeenth century (6). He argues that “by studying infor-
mation flows in their particular social, cultural and historical context, it
becomes possible to explore how the connections that linked Europe and the
Ottoman Empire were rooted in small-scale exchanges taking place between a
defined circle of individuals based in particular urban centres” (17).
Ghobrial’s detailed study draws from the rich collection of private letters
and diaries of William Trumbull, the English ambassador to Istanbul from
1687 to 1692. Using Trumbull as the center of a transnational network of dip-
lomats, merchants, and intermediaries, Ghobrial examines the circulation of
information between Istanbul, Paris, and London. He examines various modes
of oral and written expression, including printed publications, private corre-
spondence, official diplomatic reports, and newsletters. Focusing on the every-
day aspect of communication, he describes the “process through which
information obtained through personal relationships in Istanbul managed to
circulate around audiences in Europe” (126). He argues that a significant
amount of printed material in London about the Ottoman Empire originated in
these interactions. As such, this is also a valuable contribution to the history
behind orientalism, as well as studies of circulation, which often focus on com-
modities rather than information.
A main challenge to the study of history from an interconnected perspective
is reconciling the general to the specific. The strength of this book lies in the
latter; Ghobrial carefully documents the process of information gathering in
Istanbul and its dissemination to London. For example, chapter 5 shows how
Trumbull’s diplomatic dispatches regarding the deposition of Sultan Mehmed
IV were based on newsletters produced by the English diplomat Thomas Coke.
These were, in turn, drawn from oral communication networks in Istanbul.
This detailed analysis offers a rare glimpse into the stories behind diplomatic
reports.
Although this book offers a technical discussion of the structures behind
communication, its main focus is not on the greater social and political signifi-
cance of the contents of the information itself, since this has been treated else-
where. Instead, this study offers detailed insight into the mechanics of
information flow from Istanbul to London. A detailed study of the reverse,
which would be an early modern account of how information traveled from
London to Istanbul, remains to be undertaken. As Ghobrial notes, the challenge
to such a study is the availability of sources.
Whispers of Cities is a valuable contribution to the study of European-
Ottoman exchange and greater questions of global connections. In an era
810 THE HISTORIAN

where global history is becoming increasingly important, Ghobrial provides

concrete examples of transnational information flow in the early modern
world.
University of California, Los Angeles Lela Gibson

Augustus: First Emperor of Rome. By Adrian Goldsworthy. (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2014. Pp. viii, 598. $35.00.)

The Roman Empire and its motley array of rulers has never relinquished its
powerful hold on the popular imagination, and it is a great irony that its foun-
der is essentially unknown outside the academy. Augustus created the imperial
system, ruled over it for nearly half a century, and thereafter enjoyed the undy-
ing affection and respect of generations of Romans. He is indisputably one of
the truly remarkable individuals of history. Yet no Shakespeare plays, films, or
TV series celebrate his life.
Adrian Goldsworthy’s thorough and meticulously researched book, timed
for the two thousandth anniversary of Augustus’s death in AD 14, seeks to rec-
tify this anomaly, which is a truly daunting task. To no small degree, Augus-
tus’s obscurity reflects his own baffling inscrutability. The institution he created
was no less ambiguous. He presented the empire as simply a rejuvenated repub-
lic, but it was in reality a monarchy subject to the whims of individual emper-
ors—good, bad, and sometimes downright wacky.
As Goldsworthy shows, when Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC, his great
nephew, who would become Augustus, was an unknown, rather sickly thirteen-
year-old. Yet within months of the dictator’s assassination in 44 BC Augustus
was a serious contender to succeed him, and by defeating Antony and Cleopatra
at Actium in 31 BC he became incontestably the most powerful man in the
Roman world; his elevated status was confirmed by the title of “Augustus” in
AD 27, where historians conventionally place the birth of the empire.
His career trajectory would have been impossible without a bloodthirsty
determination, and Goldsworthy, although an admirer, does not shy away
from his callous brutality, vividly describing the proscriptions (mass murder)
that accompanied his rise to power. The great conundrum is that once in
power, Augustus supposedly underwent a transformation into a liberal, even
enlightened, statesman. Goldsworthy shows persuasively that Augustus in
reality was not transformed; however admirable, he remained a warlord—one who
had mellowed, but still a warlord. And he remained so right to the end: A mere
BOOK REVIEWS 811

two years before his death, he destroyed the writings of Titus Labienus, who com-
mitted suicide in protest, and at about the same time Augustus charged the pam-
phleteer Cassius Severus with treason and exiled him (460–461).
Goldsworthy writes elegantly and conveys complex historical issues engag-
ingly and comprehensibly. The polished narrator does sometimes prevail over
the sober historian, and he often omits to caution against the reliability of the
ancient sources. Hence stories of Augustus rewarding a Greek poet who wittily
responded to an imperial prank, or generously defending an Actium veteran
who sought legal support, reek of flattering literary distortion but are presented
as fact.
With that very minor caution, this book can be confidently recommended to
both students and interested lay readers. It is a fine achievement. The picture of
Augustus that emerges in its almost five hundred pages may not be complete,
given the scanty and unsatisfactory source material, but Goldsworthy has pro-
vided as complete a picture as we are likely to get.
University of British Columbia and University of Heidelberg Anthony A. Barrett

Siberia: A History of the People. By Janet M. Hartley. (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2014. Pp. xx, 312. $38.00.)

When people hear the word “Siberia,” they commonly imagine a vast space of
ice and snow devoid of human life—a place where the Russian government
sends its criminals and political dissidents against their will. Janet M. Hartley’s
work provides a more accurate and nuanced image of Russian Siberia. She
presents a social history of the region that illustrates how the majority of the
people who ended up in Siberia from the sixteenth century to the present chose
to move there in search of a better life. She argues that even though Siberia
came to be more culturally and economically similar to European Russia over
time, it nevertheless has significant differences—from its land to its diverse pop-
ulation—and is therefore worthy of examination and study in its own right.
Hartley is not the first to write a survey history of Russian Siberia. There
have been notable studies by Benson Bobrick, W. Bruce Lincoln, and Alan
Wood. These books, including Hartley’s addition to the literature, generally
follow a similar chronological path. They start with the Russian Empire’s con-
quest of Siberia and then turn to imperial government policies of management,
exploitation, and exploration. After this, they explore the implementation and
consequences of the Soviet Union’s modernization project and end with the
812 THE HISTORIAN

collapse of the USSR and the post-Soviet situation. All of these works also
focus more on the Europeans who settled in Siberia than on the indigenous
peoples who have lived there for centuries.
How then does Hartley’s book contribute to Siberian history? It especially
does so in the way that she examines “how people lived” (xiv). Though the
book is largely based on secondary sources, it is peppered with bits of archival
material that she uses to tell very specific stories of individuals that bring Sibe-
rian history to life. For example, in the three chapters that explore villages,
towns, and military garrisons, one can learn about a forty-nine-year-old priest
with nine children, three serfs who tried to escape factory bondage, wealthy
merchant families who dominated specific trades, and bored Cossack frontier
guards who entertained themselves with heavy drinking and petty crime. In her
chapter “Religion and Popular Beliefs,” the author investigates the experiences
of persecuted religious groups, whose members sought refuge from authorities
in Siberia, and in her chapter “The New Soviet Citizen,” the author details life
in a large apartment building in a typical industrialized Soviet city. These fasci-
nating and entertaining stories allow the reader to gain a more substantial
understanding of what it was like for an average person living in Siberia at dif-
ferent times.
Hartley’s book is nicely written and enjoyable to read; it contains useful
maps and an informative timeline. Specialists and a general audience will have
much to gain from this book.
Saint Joseph’s University Melissa Chakars

The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors. By
Dan Jones. (New York, NY: Viking, 2014. Pp. xxiii, 392. $36.00.)

In this sequel to his The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who
Made England [2013], the author has continued the story of late medieval
English politics. Following an introductory chapter that begins with a vignette
concerning the long life of Margaret de la Pole that sets a context for the entire
sweep of the work, the book is divided into four parts. The first, “Beginnings”
[1420–1437], jumps right in with an account of the marriage of Catherine of
Valois to Henry V and continues on to chronicle the ebbing fortunes of the
English in France following the death of the great warrior king and later his
brother John, Duke of Bedford. Author Dan Jones’s word portraits of the key
characters in his tale, including in this section a portrait of “Oweyn Tidr,”
BOOK REVIEWS 813

generally drawn from contemporary sources, add depth to his narrative, which
otherwise covers familiar ground.
In part 2, “What Is a King?” [1437–1455], readers are introduced to the
young King Henry VI, as well as those vying for control of his government, the
dukes of Suffolk and York. The chaos of this period, embodied not only in
Cade’s Rebellion but also the loss of England’s French holdings and the descent
of the king into mental incapacity, is vividly told in an evenhanded manner
avoiding the partisanship that has been present in historical writing about this
period from the fifteenth century to the present.
In the third section of the book, “The Hollow Crown” [1455–1471], the
actual course of the sporadic violence known now as the Wars of the Roses is
chronicled. The battles are vividly portrayed, and the political machinations of
the primary antagonists are also followed in considerable detail. It is with a
sense of relief that the reader greets the return of Edward IV to his throne.
The fourth and final section, “The Rise of the Tudors” [1471–1525], begins
with a vignette illustrating the travails of the fourteen-year-old Henry Tudor in
1471. Jones does a fine job throughout this section of the book in reminding
the reader just how tenuous Tudor’s claim to the throne was and how very
close he came to meeting a premature end repeatedly throughout the first three
decades of his life. The second reign of Edward IV is recounted as well as the
rise of his brother, Duke Richard of Gloucester, who is presented in a very pos-
itive light prior to his usurpation. But this usurpation seems to come out of the
blue in Jones’s account, and it makes the reign of Richard III difficult to assess,
making the ultimate triumph of Henry Tudor almost inevitable—which it was
certainly not. An epilogue follows, bookending the tale with the death of Mar-
garet de la Pole.
Students will find the maps and genealogical tables helpful, and there is a
select bibliography at the end. All in all this is a well-written survey of a turbu-
lent period in English history, and students will find an engaging introduction
to the main characters and events of the Wars of the Roses.
Baylor University J. S. Hamilton

Stalin: Volume 1, Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928. By Stephen Kotkin. (New York,

NY: Penguin Press, 2014. Pp. xiii, 947. $40.00.)

This is the first volume in a three-volume study of Joseph Stalin. The author
has produced in this exhaustively detailed study what will be the yardstick for
814 THE HISTORIAN

assessments of Stalin for some time to come. His main concern is political rath-
er than biographical, and from the start he looks to set Stalin in a broad con-
text of the crisis of Russia from tsarism to provisional government to Lenin’s
Soviet Union. To Stephen Kotkin, the revolution was a matter of high politics
and ideology. It was, moreover, inextricably tied up with geopolitics. This gives
his study a scope and breadth often lacking in studies of the revolution, even if
some of the accounts of international affairs are schematic.
At times, Stalin recedes into the background as Kotkin navigates through
the complexities of internal and international politics. A core argument is that
the Soviet leaders boxed themselves into a corner of their own making by play-
ing a double game in their relations with other powers, seeking diplomatic rec-
ognition and access to the technology needed for industrialization, while at the
same time conspiring with revolutionaries to overthrow the regimes with which
they were trying to do business. The strong implication is that these powers
would have followed a realist line and traded happily with a USSR that fol-
lowed international norms of behavior. There is something in this argument,
but it probably underestimates the way that ideology—in this case anticommu-
nism—could shape other states’ policies as well.
Kotkin argues forcefully that paranoia was baked into the Bolshevik state
and was not a reflection simply of Stalin’s warped personality. However, he
takes issue with those who see Stalin as produced by the situation: It is Stalin’s
(and the other Bolsheviks’) ideology that produced the situation—Stalin both
made and was made by it.
Kotkin is critical of other Bolshevik leaders. The failure of Trotsky, Zinov-
iev, and Kamenev to match up to Stalin’s political skills is sharply drawn. Kot-
kin acknowledges, however, the ambiguous nature of the way Stalin was
viewed by his colleagues. Though Kotkin questions the idea that Stalin was
“necessary,” he indicates quite clearly that Stalin’s comrades valued his skill set
and indeed could not envisage how things would continue in his absence. In
addition to being two-faced, vengeful, self-pitying, and rude, they found Stalin
hardworking, decisive, and painstaking in his attention to detail.
Kotkin takes us from Stalin’s youth and fractious home life up to his consol-
idation of power. He ends with the first indications of Stalin’s controversial col-
lectivization of agriculture. A final coda points towards the controversies to
come and makes some broad and argumentative statements about whether it
was all necessary, with pungent swipes at the likes of E. H. Carr. Kotkin’s
answer is that it was not; if only the Bolsheviks had escaped from their ideolog-
ical straitjacket and embraced the smallholding peasant and eschewed the
BOOK REVIEWS 815

endorsement of revolution in countries with which they were trying to build

trade relations. The key to Kotkin’s Stalin is not personal murderous pathology
but his total commitment to the ideology, the constant theme that holds this
dense study together. The odd, annoying colloquialism aside—something hap-
pening in the middle of the night is always in “the wee hours” (and there’s
going to be a lot of that in volume two)—this is a superb book. If it matches
this standard, the next volume will be worth the wait.
Brunel University London Martin H. Folly

Mixed Matches: Transgressive Unions in Germany from the Reformation to the

Enlightenment. Edited by David M. Luebk and Mary Lindemann. (New York,
NY: Berghahn Books, 2014. Pp. 246. $95.00.)

This collection unites eleven thought-provoking essays on marital norms and

transgressions in Germany from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.
In his introduction, David M. Luebke emphasizes the plurality of marriage
forms throughout history—particularly nonnormative unions, as these highlight
the constructedness of marital norms. The essays cover a variety of “unions
that violated some sort of taboo—be it religious, social, ethnic, or related to
kin” (3).
In a provocative essay, David M. Whitford examines Martin Luther’s opin-
ions regarding bigamy, including the case of Philipp of Hesse and his two
wives. Whitford demonstrates that Luther based his advice more on personal
considerations than on theology. Wolfgang Breul discusses clerical marriage in
Hersfeld in 1523, when the town council and the populace effectively banned
concubinage, against the ecclesiastical authorities’ wishes, thereby normalizing
marriage for priests. Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer ascertains that married nuns
and monks in the early Reformation were met with official ambivalence and
viewed by society as transgressive; married monastics accordingly suffered from
financial insecurity and loss of social status, despite the Protestant theological
promotion of marriage.
Ralf-Peter Fuchs examines lawsuits regarding marriage and defamation
heard by the Reichskammergericht between 1525 and 1805. He finds post-
Reformation matchmaking fraught with risks to one’s honor (disproportionate-
ly to women’s honor), with defamation lawsuits representing a means of rein-
stating one’s honor—an essential asset on the marriage market. Michael Sikora
investigates remedies for socially unequal marriages via concubinage, bigamy,
816 THE HISTORIAN

morganatic marriage, and mesalliance. Focusing on the religious upbringing of

children in religious mixed marriages, Dagmar Freist examines various models
available to parents of differing denominations in the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries, finding that these models offered a “limited emancipatory
effect on gender relations” (116).
Daniel Riches convincingly analyzes the arguments for and against the pro-
posed marriage between Queen Christina of Sweden and Elector Friedrich Wil-
helm of Brandenburg; arguments regarding rank, nationality, gender roles, and
religion ultimately created a productive discursive space through the “rhetoric
of difference” (127). Alexander Schunka focuses on “cross-confessional dynas-
tic marriages” around 1700, exploring how religious exogamy affected irenic
hopes for theological reconciliation and political alliances between the Angli-
can, Lutheran, and Calvinist royal houses in London, Hanover, and Berlin,
respectively (134).
Antje Fl€
uchter uses travel literature to analyze relationships between Euro-
peans and non-Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She
finds that these “transethnic unions” negotiated various cultural norms, with
ethnic difference being much easier to negotiate in this period than unequal
social status or religious difference (150). Claudia Jarzebowski examines
sixteenth-century incest discourses, especially conceptions of love and the Ref-
ormation reevaluation of marriage. Mary Lindemann impressively analyzes a
mid-eighteenth-century case of incest by reading polemic case-related docu-
ments alongside contemporary public discourse; she demonstrates that the
Enlightenment promotion of women’s reading and increased familial intimacy
could develop, as the case participants alleged, into debauchery and incest,
thereby revealing the ambivalence of the Enlightenment project. Joel F. Har-
rington’s afterword consolidates the strands of thought running throughout
the essays.
This excellent volume covers a wide array of “transgressive unions” and
their influences on the construction of the concept of marriage, although some
types of non-normative relationships such as same-sex contacts or prostitution
are not represented. Overall, these well-researched, thought-provoking essays
are important contributions to the cultural history of marriage and sexual
behavior and will interest scholars of cultural studies, gender studies, history,
and literary studies.
Mississippi State University Edward T. Potter
BOOK REVIEWS 817

Ridicule, Religion and the Politics of Wit in Augustan England. By Roger D. Lund.
(Farnham, United Kingdom: Ashgate, 2012. Pp. 248. $104.95.)

One might expect a book on the politics of wit and the significance of ridicule
in public discourse to begin with the third Earl of Shaftesbury on “ridicule as
the test of truth.” However, not only does the author of this study reveal that
Shaftesbury never used that phrase himself, but we have to wait until chapter 4
for a discussion of Shaftesbury’s claims that subjecting even the most sacred
subjects to wit and ridicule was both a mark of gentility and an important phil-
osophical tool. Instead, obscure writers, such as the Irish cleric Philip Skelton,
and unfamiliar texts, such as Mary Astell’s Bart’lemy Fair rather than her Seri-
ous Proposal to the Ladies, emerge as the real exemplars of eighteenth-century
attitudes towards wit, irony, innuendo, and ridicule. In this study, the fruit of
many years of work on heterodox thinkers from Hobbes to Paine, Roger Lund
significantly revises what had become an accepted view of eighteenth-century
culture: the notion that all subjects could be freely discussed in an atmosphere
of politeness within the secularized public sphere.
In his markedly lucid final chapter on “The Hermeneutics of Censorship and
the Crime of Wit,” Lund demonstrates through detailed readings of the trials
of Thomas Woolston in 1729; William Rayner, the printer of The Craftsman
in 1731; and Thomas Paine in 1792 and 1797 that, despite the lapse of the
Licensing Act in 1695, the state continued to exert powerful control over het-
erodox writings through accusations of either seditious or blasphemous libel.
Crucial to those trials was an understanding of wit that had evolved over the
eighteenth century from the Restoration onwards.
What is wit and why does it matter? Hobbes calling it “celerity of imag-
ining” made it sound like a condition to which one ought to aspire, but the
New Foundling Hospital for Wit dubbed it “profaneness, indecency, immorali-
ty, scurrility, mimickry, buffoonery; abuse of all good men, and especially of
the clergy” (15). Both the users of and the uses to which wit was put rendered
it at best suspect and at worst seditious. Its employment by Restoration liber-
tines and punning playwrights gave it such bad associations, argues Lund, that,
“[a]s if describing some rhetorical version of reefer madness, Hobbes’s critics
insist that even the most casual contact with his wit leads inevitably to the
harder substances of infidelity and atheism” (34). In an era in which an attack
on the established Church was tantamount to an attack on the state, even play-
ful mockery of clergymen could be read as seditious libel and a threat to law
and order.
818 THE HISTORIAN

Moreover, heterodox writers protected themselves by camouflaging their

meaning with irony and ambiguity, leading Bishop William Warburton to ful-
minate against “‘illimited, UNDISTINGUISHABLE IRONY, which affords no
insight into the author’s meaning, or so much room as to guess what he would
be at’” (119). Accordingly, defenders of church and state had to acquire the
skills of literary criticism to penetrate the ambiguities and innuendos of the
“Titans of Wit.” Lund clearly demonstrates that style is substantial; literary
form is political. Lawyers, philosophers, and historians all need to be adept at
stylistic analysis.
Royal Holloway, University of London Judith Hawley

The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World. By
Adrienne Mayor. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Pp. xiv, 483.
$29.95.)

The author of this volume outlines the phenomenon in antiquity of the Ama-
zons and the related issue of female warriors in general. Her “Encyclopedia
Amazonica” (if we may) will engage the interests of both dedicated and casual
devotees of female belligerence with a wealth of detailed exposition. It is worth
noting that the thumbnail sketches in part 3 examine in depth various mytho-
logical and historical characters (e.g., Penthesilea) touched on earlier in the
work. Scholarly readers will find a thorough amalgamation of ancient evidence
(even if its archaeological ambit may occasionally strain relevance), a solid bib-
liographical foundation, and much sensible description, but may well balk at
times at some individual historical judgments and even hesitate over the coher-
ence of the very concept of the Amazon. The nature of the evidence and the
structure of the work will encourage readers to select individual chapters to
suit different purposes and tastes.
Scythian female warriors, with whom Adrienne Mayor equates Greek Ama-
zons, waged mounted warfare—as did nomadic male fighters of the Asian
steppes and the Caucasus—in fundamental distinction from Greek war-making.
Mayor is following the lead of J.H. Blok’s The Early Amazons: Modern and
Ancient Perspectives on a Persistent Myth (Leiden, 1995)—an important
authority for her throughout the book—in noting Queen Amazon of the Nart
Sagas of the Caucasus as an analogue. Concomitantly, Mayor skillfully
debunks other etymologies of the term “amazon,” especially the derivations
from mazos (mastos) or “breast” that render these warriors the “breast-less.”
BOOK REVIEWS 819

There is naturally an audience for reconstructions of social settings where

some gendered dichotomies in male “preserves,” like hunting and fighting, are
mitigated. Mystery-shrouded cultures like the Scythians or Sarmatians offer
ample opportunities for such revisionism, although there is, on occasion, too
much conjecture. Mayor has some good reasons to protest the pervasive invo-
cation of the Greek construction of the “other,” where Amazons can be
reduced to surrogates for the Persians, themselves considered effeminate adver-
saries of the Greeks. However, the complexity of Greek views on cultural vari-
ation and its role in identity formation (be it sexual, panhellenic, or ethnic)
ends up rather underappreciated, and much more could be said about the treat-
ment of Herodotus alone (as in his account of the Scythians in book 4 of his
Histories). Moreover, a major problem surrounds the archaeological data from
steppe cultures on the burial of weapons with elite women or even the evidence
for their deaths from wounds made by weapons, inasmuch as it seems incom-
mensurate with the phenomenon of Greek literary or aesthetic amazonianism.
Where scholarly disagreement can be deep and complex, for the sake of wider
appeal Mayor passes over nuances. Rather than grapple with ancient Greek gender
and ethnological sociology, she focuses on the sweep of the archaeological, anthro-
pological, and literary material for a most readable account. Her skill as a narrator
has produced an excellent addition to popular ancient history that ranks highly for
its commitment to educating general readers and its interdisciplinary approach.
Rutgers University Ian McElroy and Thomas Figueira

Greasepaint and Cordite: How ENSA Entertained the Troops During World War
II. By Andy Merriman. (London, United Kingdom: Aurum Press, 2014. Pp. xvi,
304. $15.99.)

Maintaining the morale of armed forces at war is important but often difficult.
This was clearly true in World War II, when millions of men were torn from
civilian life and often sent to distant and perilous places, sometimes separating
them from home and family for years. Frequent mail from home was probably
the most effective means of keeping up the spirits of combatants, but supplying
suitable entertainment could be a valuable supplement. Andy Merriman exam-
ines one such effort made by wartime Great Britain. His thesis, if the book can
be said to have one, is that the effort was by and large successful.
“ENSA,” or the Entertainments National Service Association, was estab-
lished at the outbreak of war in 1939 under the leadership of theater
820 THE HISTORIAN

impresario Basil Dean. By 1946, when ENSA was demobilized, it had pre-
sented, according to the author, over 2.5 million theatrical performances and
film showings to audiences totaling over five hundred million. The statistics are
impressive, but this book is likely to be of limited interest to US historians. It is
written for a general audience, and a British general audience at that. There are
no footnotes or endnotes. The author’s sources seem to be primarily interviews
with surviving ENSA members, as well as memoirs and biographies of
participants.
The reader will learn something about ENSA’s organization, its recruitment
of entertainers, and its rivalries with competing organizations, as well as the
personalities of its leading figures, particularly the autocratic and womanizing
Dean. Much space is given over to descriptions of performances, from slapstick
comedy to opera, classical ballet, and plays by Shakespeare, with performers
ranging from unknown amateurs of little talent to the likes of No€el Coward,
John Gielgud, and Laurence Olivier. The incidence of relatively low-quality
entertainments gave rise to the somewhat overdrawn witticism that ENSA actu-
ally stood for “Every Night Something Awful.” The names of many perform-
ers, even those well known in the British entertainment world, will be
unfamiliar to most American readers. A few, however, advanced their careers
through ENSA performances and became internationally prominent after the
war. Two who became well known to American audiences were Peter Sellers
and Terry Thomas. Readers will encounter the occasional humorous anecdote,
such as the experience of a female vocalist who sang “Bless This House” to an
audience of patients in a military hospital. The line “bless the folk who dwell
within, keep them pure and free from sin” was received with uproarious laugh-
ter. She later learned that she had been performing in the hospital’s VD ward
(250)!
Beyond providing diversion to troops far from home and providing enter-
tainers with the satisfaction of having contributed to the British war effort,
ENSA, the author argues, exposed thousands of men from humble backgrounds
to cultural experiences that they otherwise would not have had. Some came
away from their military service with an appreciation for opera or theater that
they would not have developed in peacetime. A social historian might be
able to make something of this, but this book has more entertainment than
academic value.
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville James J. Weingartner
BOOK REVIEWS 821

Women’s History in Russia: (Re)Establishing the Field. Edited by Marianna

Muravyeva and Natalia Novikova. (Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. Pp. xxvi, 253. $76.99.)

This volume marks a milestone in the development of women’s history in Rus-

sia. It reflects the accomplishments of scholars in this field since the late 1980s
and expresses concern about the politicization of gender issues in Russia today.
The introduction, by Marianna Muravyeva and Natalia Novikova, and first
two essays, by Natalia Pushkareva and Irina Iukina, trace the history of the
scholarly study of women’s history in Russia. They note the political con-
straints that inhibited the study of women—the “traditionalism and patri-
archalism” of the Imperial era, the narrow focus on women’s roles in the
struggle to build socialism in the Soviet era, and the resurgence of conservative
values under the Putin government (7). Despite those limitations, the authors
affirm the significant accomplishments of Russian scholars of women’s history.
They have recovered substantial information about women in the past; they
have integrated the research and theoretical frameworks of Western colleagues;
and they have built centers for gender studies, especially in provincial locales,
where opportunities for innovation are greater.
Seven chapters present original investigations of topics in Russian women’s
history. Some are novel: Muravyeva’s analysis of the categorizations of sex
crimes in Imperial Russian law is particularly cogent. Svetlana Filatova’s study
of provincial women’s businesses, Maksim Kail’s depiction of the ways a wom-
en’s monastery coped with early Soviet rule, and Alexander Ermakov’s presen-
tation of the Nazi assessment of Soviet policy in regard to women all open new
topics, hinting at potentially rich directions for further research. Other topics
have already been explored by Western scholars: Imperial-era prostitution,
women partisans in World War II, and the celebration of International Wom-
en’s Day. These essays present new details and some thought-provoking
insights but tell a familiar story.
Despite the volume’s title, three chapters concern contemporary social science:
homosexuals’ perception of their circumstances, women’s and men’s roles in
food acquisition and preparation, and children’s rights. These chapters advance
the volume’s goal of critiquing attitudes prevalent in post-Soviet Russia.
Published in English, this volume is directed both to the Anglophone com-
munity of Russianists who have an interest in gender and to scholars of gender
who study countries other than Russia. By reaching for both audiences,
however, the volume does not hit either square on. The often lengthy
822 THE HISTORIAN

presentation of familiar background in some chapters may bore specialist read-

ers. For readers unfamiliar with the Russian situation, however, some chapters
provide insufficient contextualization. The original articles were written in Rus-
sian, and the translations are uneven—excellent in some chapters but somewhat
stilted in others.
An additional contribution to scholarship lies in the volume’s extensive bibli-
ography, including many primary and secondary sources that will be new even
to experienced researchers. Further valuable references are found in the exten-
sive endnotes.
All the authors connect with Western publications on their topics, to a
greater or a lesser degree. Western scholars also assisted in the preparation of
the volume for publication. This speaks to the creation of a single international
scholarly community of specialists in Russian gender studies—a very welcome
development.
University of Kansas Eve Levin

Making Yugoslavs: Identity in King Aleksandar’s Yugoslavia. By Christian Axboe

Nielsen. (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2014. Pp. xi, 388.
$34.95.)

We are lucky that the author of this book found the unusual scholarly silence on
King Aleksandar’s dictatorship (in Yugoslavia, from 1929 to 1935) to be a
“salutary irritant,” for an excellent and often surprising account of that dictator-
ship was the result (ix). Though the readiness of scholars to sidetrack the dictator-
ship was unfortunate, there is plenty of room in the historiography of the region
and its peoples for more groundbreaking research—the attention paid to Yugosla-
via’s collapse should not blind us to the need for the less glamorous scholarship.
This study begins as traditional political history, summarizing the period
from the late nineteenth century to 1928. The 1920s dominate, and they have
always resisted clear exposition. The plethora of coalitions that characterized
the Parliament of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes through the
decade, without much to show in the way of effective governing, have left a
couple of common signposts—the Vidovdan Constitution, the murder of Stje-
pan Radić, and of course the dictatorship—to stand in for the period as a
whole. Christian Axboe Nielsen does a better job than most of his predecessors
at summarizing that frustrating period. His conclusion is nuanced but not new.
The end of parliamentary democracy in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and
BOOK REVIEWS 823

Slovenes was inevitable given the conflicting, incompatible visions and goals of
the various national groups in the state, especially the Serbs and Croats.
The dictatorship of King Aleksandar has typically been reduced to two or three
key features: the renaming of the state to Yugoslavia, the reorganization of the
state into banovine, and (less commonly) the prohibition of expressions of nation-
ality (“tribalism” in the lingo of the dictatorship). All of these are examined in this
book, and each in its way hints at the seemingly exotic nature of the enterprise.
Yet was it all so exotic? Nielsen makes a point of noting similarities with other
right-wing phenomena in interwar Eastern Europe. He also, conversely, notes that
the dictatorship looked an awful lot like a rehash of earlier Serbian-centered gov-
ernments in interwar Yugoslavia. And those newfangled banovine could be viewed
through the prism of the various Yugoslav nationalisms or (“tribalisms”) to look
like reward or punishment, depending on one’s (tribal) perspective. Put differently:
Nielsen effectively brings the dictatorship into the mainstream after a century of its
being treated as exceptional and perhaps even inscrutable.
The most novel chapters in Making Yugoslavs are those that address the
“moulding” of Yugoslavs and the use of surveillance to enforce the regime’s
vision. In both cases, similarities to the methods and goals of the Tito regime
after the Second World War suggest possible areas of new research. And those
chapters also exemplify Nielsen’s extensive research in numerous archives scat-
tered throughout former Yugoslavia. Generally, Making Yugoslavs is a compel-
ling read for specialists on Yugoslavia, interwar Europe, and national identity.
It is likely too specialized to reach a general audience.
Boise State University Nick Miller

A Question of Duty: The Curragh Incident, 1914. By Paul O’Brien. (Dublin, Ire-
land: New Island Books, 2014. Pp. xii, 164. $17.99.)

The crisis arising from the refusal of a majority of British Army officers sta-
tioned at Curragh Barracks in County Kildare to support the implementation
of Home Rule in Ireland, if military action were required in Ulster, has fasci-
nated observers for a century. What happened in March 1914 heightened
republican and loyalist militancy with consequences that would be seen in the
Irish war of independence a few years later and marked an unusually overt
clash in civil-military relations in the history of the modern United Kingdom.
The complicated web of events, perceptions, and consequences involved in the
Curragh affair—technically not a mutiny, since no direct orders were issued or
824 THE HISTORIAN

disobeyed—has been examined by historians on many previous occasions and has

long been a focal point in studies of modern Ireland and histories of the British
Army. This does not mean, of course, that a fresh approach cannot yield interest-
ing new facts or interpretations. Unfortunately, this is not that kind of book.
The publisher has done the author no favors through bad copyediting. At various
stages, officer ranks and military terminology remain mixed up or misspelled;
nobody bothered to alphabetize the index; footnotes refer to British government files
as being held in the Public Record Office even though this repository changed its
name to the National Archives more than a decade ago; and there are a number of
factual glitches—the assertion that the British Expeditionary Force was fighting off
an Austro-Hungarian as well as a German invasion of France, for example—that
ought to have been caught before the book went into print (151).
This sort of thing might matter less if the author had offered something new
in the way of a thesis. Initially, he seems to be gearing up to do so, suggesting
that the crisis was one of the key “what if” moments in Irish history and posing
the question as to whether “the events at the Curragh have any effect on the
army’s morale and its ability to fight the Great War?” (xi). Alas, this intriguing
possibility is never again alluded to, and the probable consequences of military
intervention in Ulster are never explored. In reference to the Irish Republican
Army assassins who eight years later gunned down Sir Henry Wilson—an officer
deeply involved in the Curragh affair and actively Unionist in sympathy—Paul
O’Brien does hint that “it is possible that their resentment against Wilson may
have come from their [British Army] service during the war,” but then admits
that “it is difficult to determine the thoughts that went through the minds” of
the two men involved (146). The observation that the Curragh incident did
nothing to defuse Irish militancy is not open to challenge. The assertion made in
the final sentence that subsequent events in Ireland marked “the beginning of
the end for the British Empire” is more open to debate (155).
University of South Carolina S. P. MacKenzie

Robert the Bruce: King of Scots. By Michael Penman. (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2014. Pp. 456. $45.00.)

Robert the Bruce of Scotland has been known to appear in the most unexpect-
ed places. That a marche des soldats de Robert Bruce is still used by the French
military on ceremonial occasions is a reminder that his stature is not confined
to the country he rescued from the threat of foreign domination, a country he
BOOK REVIEWS 825

ruled with the genius of a born legislator and whose reputation he raised
abroad by his remarkable diplomatic gifts. King Robert, then, is an important
historical figure, and Michael Penman’s new, immensely detailed, and subtly
argued biography does justice, not before time, to the whole of the king’s reign
instead of allowing his stunning victory over the English at the Battle of Ban-
nockburn in June 1314 to be the sum total of his achievements.
It is a measure of Penman’s intention to give a fully rounded account that he
examines the effects of Scotland’s succession crisis—following the death of Alex-
ander III in 1286—not only upon Robert, whose violent seizure of the throne in
1306 created its own long-lasting problems, but upon the fractured and already
disparate political and social community of Scots as well. The author also
widens our horizons by situating these events within the broader context of
fourteenth-century Europe. Little, in fact, escapes him. His account of the king’s
long, debilitating decline in health, for example, and Robert’s grim determina-
tion in the midst of this decline to secure Scotland’s independence—finally real-
ized by treaty just a year before his death—is typical of the comprehensiveness
with which Penman illumines these crucial decades of Scottish history. So, too,
is his discussion of where Robert was born: Ireland or England? Surviving
evidence allows no definitive answer, but the discussion itself reminds us with
what remarkable ease people at the time could pass from one social and politi-
cal grouping to another, adapting their allegiances to suit changing circumstan-
ces. It was just such a fluidity in psychological outlook that would have enabled
Robert to cope with and seek to rule successfully the constantly shifting alli-
ances that made up Scottish society, as well as encouraging him in his efforts to
bring Scotland a greater sense of cohesion and unified nationality.
The king did not do this alone, of course, and Penman discusses the impor-
tant part played by the church, such as that of Robert Wishart, Bishop of Glas-
gow, who may have stimulated and encouraged Robert with his own passion
for a united, independent Scotland, as well as Robert’s own personal religious
devotion, which formed a major constituent of his character. Indeed, it is on
this note that Penman finishes his book, writing, “Ultimately, Robert’s consis-
tent return to . . . private and civic acts of worship, reveals his struggle to secure
the throne and thrive as King to have been a test of faith” (331). This book,
then, is a triumph. The research behind it is both new and complete—witness
the detailed notes and extensive bibliography—and the reader can thus enjoy
the excitement of discovering Robert as a rounded, believable individual.
University of St. Andrews P. G. Maxwell-Stuart
826 THE HISTORIAN

English Country Houses. By Vita Sackville-West. (London, United Kingdom:

Unicorn Press Ltd, 2014. Pp. 92, $14.95.)

This charming and compact publication is a reprint of a book that was first
published in 1941. It gives a broad overview of the development of the English
country house from the Middle Ages to the mid-twentieth century and includes
mention of their owners from the squirearchy to the aristocracy. The houses
described range from fortified manor houses to great baroque mansions, such
as Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard. Vita Sackville-West argues convincingly
that the English country house is “essentially part of the country, not only in
the country, but part of it, a natural growth” (8). The history of the country
house is told in chronological order, although Sackville-West outlines the diffi-
culties of applying rigid rules with regard to the dating of houses, and her sur-
vey is not just confined to houses. She makes reference to castles as well. Given
the relatively short nature of the monograph, she manages to mention a healthy
percentage of houses by name; having grown up in the labyrinthine Knole in
Kent, she was intimately acquainted with many of the places she describes. The
nineteenth century is glossed over with relatively few words, which is typical of
the prevailing feeling at the time that it warranted little serious study.
The book is written in an easy-going, almost chatty style that takes the read-
er on a journey through the centuries. It is like a slow perambulation around
an English country garden in the company of a knowledgeable gardener, which
indeed Sackville-West became. There are even touches of humor; talking of the
two great ducal castles of the north and south, she says: “. . . Arundell and Aln-
wick, in a word, were large and largely fakes” (21).
At the time of writing, the future of the English country house was in the
balance, and this adds a certain poignancy. Many of the houses she describes
were given over to the war effort, and in its aftermath, hundreds, if not thou-
sands, of houses were demolished. Today, the picture is very different, and we
are privileged to witness a revival of its fortunes with many in better shape
than ever before.
The book is illustrated with ten pleasant pen-and-ink drawings, most of
which show details of specific houses. The reviewer would question whether
the original text loses some of its “punch” by removing the original twenty-
nine plates that accompanied the text when it was first published as part of the
“Britain in Pictures” series by William Collins. There is a nod to the original
dust jacket with a handsome wrought-iron gate also appearing on the front
cover of the new publication.
BOOK REVIEWS 827

Taken on its own merits, English Country Houses is a welcome addition for
the shelves of anyone with an interest in English history. Although the country
house landscape has seen some major changes over the last seventy years or so, its
history remains the same, and the skillful way in which Sackville-West pulls all the
strands together makes this book a useful resource and a highly enjoyable read.
Goodwood House James Peill

Water in the City: The Aqueducts and Underground Passages of Exeter. By Mark
Stoyle. (Exeter, United Kingdom: University of Exeter Press, 2014. Pp. xx, 299.
$85.00.)

The author of this book has produced an exceptional piece of local history
about a fascinating case study. Water in the City is a detailed investigation of
the processes by which an extensive series of cathedral and civic aqueducts,
fountains, and underground conduits were established, maintained, and trans-
formed in Exeter (Devon, UK) from 1180 to 1700. Exeter’s medieval and early
modern water systems included, notably, extensive and expensive underground
passages that protected the conduits. They show a remarkable degree of source
continuity and structures; a steady and engaged process of repair, renovation,
and improvement; and a depth of both civic and private investment in the pro-
vision of water to the city. The systems are extensively documented and exca-
vated, allowing Mark Stoyle to tell a rich story.
Water in the City is arranged into three sections. The first, and most sub-
stantive, “The History of Exeter’s Underground Passages and Aqueduct Sys-
tems,” is arranged chronologically in five chapters that address the hydraulic
infrastructure and the social, economic, and political forces that required first
its construction and then its continued maintenance. The second section, con-
siderably shorter than the first, is a single chapter devoted to the uses of the
water, both practical and social. Finally, the book is rounded out by a section
that provides translations of a series of primary sources relating to the Exeter
aqueducts. The sources date from 1420 to 1603 and are administrative
accounts of the expenses of construction and maintenance of the aqueducts.
This is an engaging work that is deeply researched, richly illustrated, and
expansive in both its time frame and the range of broader scholarly conversations
(both within and without England) with which it interacts. The author’s empha-
sis throughout this work is on the evolution of the conduit systems, their interde-
pendence, and the connections between the conduits and the broader urban
828 THE HISTORIAN

concerns facing Exeter and its inhabitants. His work pushes past some of the
limits of such infrastructural local histories, including thoughtful discussions of
construction methods, urban topography, social structures, and the individual
actors and decision makers that shaped the water systems. The aspect of Stoyle’s
history that may be most important is the attention that he gives to the contin-
ued maintenance of the increasingly complex underground conduit systems that
ran throughout the city. It is the story of the resources, labor, and political and
economic capital expended to ensure that the water system met the changing
needs of the city that reveals the most about the capabilities and talents of pre-
modern people. For this element alone, this book would merit attention.
In sum, this is one of the best medieval water case studies this reviewer has
encountered. It is clear, vibrant, and provides a depth of visual and textual evi-
dence that one rarely sees deployed as effectively as this in such studies. It is
also a beautifully produced book and worth the time and attention of medieval
and modern historians who are interested in civic water issues, urban infra-
structure, the history of technology, and the complex ways that historical
actors have shaped and manipulated waterscapes.
Ohio Wesleyan University Ellen F. Arnold

London Calling: Britain, the BBC World Service and the Cold War. By Alban
Webb. (London, United Kingdom: Bloomsbury, 2014. Pp. x, 253. $120.00.)

This book is a pioneering account of the British national security context of the
BBC’s external broadcasting from World War II to 1957. It provides detailed
analysis of the World Service’s relationship to the Foreign Office and other gov-
ernment departments based on extensive research in declassified government
documents at the National Archives of the United Kingdom and BBC corporate
records and broadcast texts at the BBC Written Archive Centre. It includes
details of BBC’s partnership with the US Foreign Broadcast Information Service
in monitoring and translating foreign media and concludes with careful case
studies of BBC’s performance during the 1956 Hungarian and Suez crises.
Unfortunately lacking is an afterword, which would sketch how the BBC man-
aged that challenge from 1957 to the present day. A work for the specialist, it
offers a valuable comparative perspective to readers familiar with the history of
US international broadcasting and public diplomacy during the Cold War.
All publicly funded international broadcasters in democracies face the chal-
lenge of serving the national interest while providing their audiences with
BOOK REVIEWS 829

balanced and credible information that at times includes criticisms of current

government policies. The BBC’s Royal Charter, renewed in 1947, stipulated that
it would “remain independent in its preparation of programmes for overseas
audiences, although it should obtain from government departments” informa-
tion on local conditions and government policies “as will permit it to plan its
programmes in the national interest” (20). Alban Webb traces the BBC’s record
over the ensuing ten years in maintaining editorial independence in the face of
Foreign Office efforts to shape programming and cuts in its budget by the Trea-
sury. The BBC did this not by walling itself off from government (which its
Charter precluded) but by engaging in a two-way exchange of information and
views. BBC managers participated in government councils, broadcast service
chiefs were in regular contact with their Foreign Office counterparts, and broad-
casters benefited from reporting from British diplomatic posts abroad. During
the Hungarian Revolution, reports from the British legation in Budapest were a
major source of information for BBC Hungarian broadcasters.
The simultaneous Suez Crisis threatened that cooperative relationship, as the
BBC was challenged to convey the government’s rationale for military interven-
tion in Egypt (along with France and Israel) while also reporting on widespread
opposition to the intervention among the British public. Inclusion of an Egyp-
tian perspective in a roundup of world reactions led Prime Minister Anthony
Eden to complain, “Are [BBC managers] enemies, or just Socialists?” (169).
Determined to impose its editorial line, the government posted a Foreign Office
official to the BBC as “liaison.” Webb documents the ensuing compromise: The
BBC concentrated its broadcasts on the Soviet orbit and the Middle East,
viewed as highest priority by the government, while retaining its prerogative to
serve the national interest with programs on government policy but also signifi-
cant dissent to those policies within Britain.
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars A. Ross Johnson

Queen Anne: Patroness of Arts. By James Anderson Winn. (Oxford, England:

Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xxi, 792. $39.95.)

Queen Anne was the last Stuart ruler. For a certain generation, she is perhaps
best known as played by Margaret Tyzack in the BBC’s late 1960s The First
Churchills. For history buffs, too often she has been overwritten by the dramas
that preceded her (the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution), the highly
partisan Whig-Tory politics at home and endless war abroad that characterized
830 THE HISTORIAN

her own twelve-year reign, and the Hanoverian transition following her death
in 1714. Although recognizing Anne’s era as one colored by notable music,
prose, poetry, theater, and occasional architectural heights (think Handel,
Addison, Swift, Lee, and Blenheim), scholars have largely overlooked her role
in promoting the arts, until now. James Anderson Winn’s more than 800-page
tome concurrently immerses us in the minutiae of Anne’s world and demon-
strates the challenging task involved in extrapolating the patron’s contributory
role.
Winn, both a Restoration literature scholar and a concert-level flutist, brings
six years of research to bear (including support by the ACLS, Guggenheim
Foundation, and NEH). In Anne he has revealed a woman skilled from an early
age on guitar and harpsichord as well as in dance. Structuring each of eleven
chapters around a key event in Anne’s life (from a childhood theatrical perfor-
mance in Calisto: or, The Chaste Nymph to her funereal rites), Winn skillfully
paints the court, its players, and its culture—from thanksgiving services to
birthday celebrations—in vivid detail.
Finding respite from politics and traumas (not least her heirless state, despite
eighteen pregnancies and tiresome relations with father James II, sister Mary,
and brother-in-law William), Anne took obvious pleasure in theater, music,
and poetry, if less expansively in the visual arts. But she also recognized the
arts as tools of state, and we may indeed be left pondering whether patroness
Anne is ever independent of political Anne. Further, Winn reminds us that the
artists themselves were far from motive free, as in the theater’s attention to
Anne as the “only hope for the ‘Sight of Princes’” or Vanbrugh’s various cam-
paigns (212, 391). Winn tantalizes—be it in hypothesizing ten-year-old Anne’s
reading of the sexual messaging in Calisto, the variant political readings of a
Purcell “welcome song,” or the possible credit due Anne for the Deborah-based
allusions to the queen in the thanksgiving services following the victory at Blen-
heim. Yet, if much is left to speculation, the reader is only the more engaged.
Further plaudits are due to Oxford University Press and the author for the
accompanying website offering scores and performances of the twenty-eight
musical pieces discussed in the volume, hinting in a small way at the potential
for future hybrid and fully digitalized publications. One can easily envision
how such companion sites might expand to include, for instance, architectural
panoramas and theatrical readings, and, in so doing, both advance humanities
scholarship and a fuller appreciation of eras past.
St. Edward’s University Mary K. Brantl
BOOK REVIEWS 831

GENERAL, COMPARATIVE, HISTORIOGRAPHICAL

Informal Ambassadors: American Women, Transatlantic Marriages, and Anglo-

American Relations, 1865–1945. By Dana Cooper. (Kent, OH: Kent State Uni-
versity Press, 2014. Pp. xiv, 259. $65.00.)

This book promises much but provides little. The author sets out to demon-
strate that the selected women had a significant influence on Anglo-American
relations, that this influence has not been recognized by historians, and that
this is a field which deserves further research. She cites several distinguished
historians who rightly call for a wider range of approaches, concepts, theories,
and evidence to open up a neglected cross-fertilization of diplomatic history.
The question is, is this book a satisfactory example of how to go about it?
The difficulties begin early on. Dana Cooper lists the ranks of the peerage
and then moves to baronets and knights, saying that their children received no
titles, and furthermore, “while a great gap existed between a duke and a knight,
all of these people were members of the British nobility” (36). On the contrary,
baronets and knights were members of the gentry, not the nobility; neither could
sit in the House of Lords. Secondly, the title of baronet did pass to the eldest
son. Again, the younger son of a duke was afforded a courtesy title as in the
case of Lord Randolph Churchill and his wife Lady Randolph Churchill, but
the author calls her Lady Churchill, signifying that her husband was a baron.
This may seem unimportant, but what it shows is that the author does not
understand the context of her argument and did not immerse herself in her sub-
ject. There are dozens of books of memoirs and multivolume life-and-letters
about Victorian upper-class social life, but there are only ten such references.
Indeed, the sources cited hardly support the author’s case. For her five case
studies, there are two major classes: popular biographies, which naturally
emphasize their subjects’ importance, and American newspapers. She writes
that Mary Chamberlain’s savoir faire and self-possession “has had the effect of
considerably altering the ideas of Her Majesty with regard to the etiquette and
social ethics that prevail at the White House” (84). The source given is the
Salem News of 23 August 1895. Why not consult the volumes of Queen Victo-
ria’s letters? As for the appendices, why list presidents and secretaries of state,
which can easily be looked up, rather than the marriages, which cannot?
A major problem with the study is that Cooper sees everything through the
same lens. The attendance of the president, his cabinet, and Supreme Court justi-
ces at the Endicott-Chamberlain marriage was not because they sought improved
Anglo-American relations; they were there because the bride’s father was secretary
832 THE HISTORIAN

of war. The dinner parties of Lady Randolph, Mary Chamberlain, and Lady Cur-
zon certainly facilitated informal discussions between British and American politi-
cians during the Venezuela Crisis of 1895–1896, but President Grover Cleveland
still threatened war. Furthermore, the British agreed to arbitration because they
were facing threats from France, Russia, and Germany and wanted benign neu-
trality from the United States. In this context, Venezuela was unimportant; social
discussions were irrelevant, as the cabinet papers demonstrate.
Fundamentally, the book claims too much, but the evidence to support the
claims is not given. It is thinly researched and thinly analyzed.
University College London Kathleen Burk

The Yellow Peril: Dr. Fu Manchu and the Rise of Chinaphobia. By Christopher
Frayling. (New York, NY: Thames & Hudson, 2014. Pp. 360. $35.00.)

Sir Christopher Frayling—arts professor, television critic of popular culture,

and acclaimed creator of books and films about spaghetti Westerns, horror sto-
ries, Clint Eastwood, etc.—here deploys his narrative talents and social connec-
tions in a chatty but learned historical discourse on the Fu Manchu syndrome
and “Chinaphobia.” Many of us may recall “Fu Manchu” as the name of a fic-
tional criminal mastermind but not the particularities of his fiendishness,
though the implicit ethnic slur is apparent in his faux Chinese name and clari-
fied by academe’s now numerous studies of Western racism and “Orientalism.”
Fu Manchu’s signature mustache was a generic villainous touch added by film-
makers to embellish the original fictional character invented in 1912 by Sax
Rohmer—pen name of the prolific Irish-English novelist and comic song lyricist
Arthur Henry Ward [1883–1959]. Frayling’s mission (the reviewer cannot find
a real thesis in this book) is to place Fu Manchu—in particular, Rohmer and
British Sinophobic popular culture—at the center of all our past and even cur-
rent latent fears of things Chinese.
The book’s chapters read like stand-alone essays. The introduction and
chapter 1 examine Rohmer’s life and times, featuring the Victorian and Edwar-
dian fascination with London’s Chinatown (“Limehouse”). Frayling has done
his research and even interviewed Rohmer’s widow and relevant actors and
filmmakers. Such contributions get the book on track after a benediction from
Edward Said and a scene of Hong Kong’s last colonial governor, Chris Patten,
officiating at the 1997 sunset over the British Empire. Chapter 2 then provides
more on Limehouse and opium themes, notably from Charles Dickens. Then
BOOK REVIEWS 833

come racist caricatures of Asians in Edwardian-era music hall lyrics in chapter

3 and popular press accounts in chapter 4. From those subliterary and sub-
journalistic milieus sprang Rohmer’s imaginings of Fu Manchu. Rohmer and
fellow creators of British popular culture, unlike Christian missionaries who
actually saw China and disdained it for other reasons, insouciantly mixed
incompatible, often imaginary aspects of eastern and western Asian cultures.
This is treated in chapter 5. Finally, in the last chapter, Fu Manchu’s physical
and intellectual peculiarities in fiction and film are examined, and Frayling
expertly seeks out their textual predecessors in a commentary on the late films.
The book’s prose is lucid and jargon-free. Copious summaries and excerpts
of comedians’ patter, music hall lyrics, and sensational anti-Asian press tidbits
slow the narrative, but Frayling is a connoisseur of these materials, and they
steal the show. American readers may have difficulty understanding some of
the Edwardian humor, but these historical materials serve as a reminder that
America was not exceptional in its “Chinaphobia.”
This book is not really about anything specifically Chinese, however, nor does
it systematically explicate Yellow Peril fears. For that, one should consult Ruth
Mayer’s Serial Fu Manchu. Frayling gives us a big picture window on times when
the West, still believing in evil and in race, sought and found horrible fascination
in its own (long-lived) cultural self-doubt and scary fantasies about other peoples.
St. John’s University, New York Jeffrey C. Kinkley

Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World. By
Michael Guasco. (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp.
328. $45.00.)

Historians who study slavery in the early modern British Atlantic face a problem.
How does one define slavery, especially before slavery became a major part of
colonial endeavors (5)? From Aristotle’s “natural slavery” to the more recent
transatlantic practices, slavery has existed through much of human history.
Although well aware of the long historical precedent for slavery, those who sought
to define slavery in the legal and philosophical sense found that it was not always
a straightforward process. Michael Guasco’s magnificent and well-researched new
book describes how the development of slavery in the British Atlantic left those
who held Africans in bondage striving to “explain their actions” (5).
Where other works have focused on the development of the plantation com-
plex and religious justifications for slavery, Guasco focuses on the development
834 THE HISTORIAN

of slavery as a legal entity in the British Atlantic. Most historians accept 1661
as the starting date for legalized slavery under English law. Paul Finkelman,
Don Fehrenbacher, and others have discussed the development of slavery and
the law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but there has been much
less sustained analysis of the origins of transatlantic slavery under English law.
Guasco demonstrates convincingly that the groundwork began centuries before
the English were dominant players in the transatlantic slave trade and that slav-
ery was a major economic force in the Anglo-American economy.
What Guasco finds is that “the meaning of slavery was connected to what it
meant to be English” (5). He begins by unpacking English patriotism and the
myth of English freedom, using a diverse range of sources from Chaucer, Hak-
luyt, and antiquarians like Lambarde (21–33). Unsurprisingly, this myth plays
a central role in how, starting from the sixteenth century, the English began to
define themselves. Although the context is different, his findings are entirely
consistent with recent studies that have analyzed religious and philosophical
efforts to define slavery.
Readers will appreciate Guasco’s sustained treatment of his topic from the
fifteenth century onward as well as the global scope of his study, which is
impressive. He also maintains some comparative elements of transatlantic slav-
ery, demonstrating how the English envisioned themselves as benevolent mas-
ters compared to their European rivals like Spain.
Guasco has produced a very satisfying explanation for how law, patriotism,
and race merged to define the legal parameters of the transatlantic trade. It
should be noted, however, that his focus is primarily on racial ideology and the
development of the African slave trade. Although it does receive some mention,
the slavery of native America does not receive much attention. Some readers
might see this as a shortcoming. Given the complexity of the topic and its
depth, this may be asking too much of a single volume.
University of New Hampshire at Manchester Jessica M. Parr

Exposed: A History of Lingerie. By Colleen Hill. (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press in association with the Fashion Institute of Technology, 2014. Pp. 180.
$40.00.)

This book is a companion catalogue to the 2014 exhibition at The Museum at

Fashion Institute of Technology. It follows the traditional exhibition format
with an introductory essay by Director and Chief Curator Valerie Steele and
BOOK REVIEWS 835

short essays about individual objects by Associate Curator Colleen Hill.

Exposed serves as an illustrated survey of the history of lingerie and features
garments dating from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. It articulates
the difference between sensual lingerie and practical underwear and argues that
the study of lingerie provides insight into the larger subject of fashion and its
relation to propriety and technology.
This book is notable for what it is not. It is illustrated with photographs of
lingerie dressed on fiberglass mannequins and puts the focus squarely on the
garments and not the body of the woman wearing them. This is a welcome
change from the existing books on lingerie that tend to focus on titillating
images and fall short on scholarship. The volume is well researched and bal-
anced with an engaging mix of primary and secondary sources used throughout
its pages. The format of the book reflects the museum experience of strolling
from object to object and reading the didactics (or not) as you go. The essays
for each garment are informative and intriguing. The design of the book also
follows this exhibition model with full-page images of lingerie dressed on man-
nequins as well as period photographs, fashion plates, and illustrations. There
is an aesthetically pleasing sparseness throughout the volume, which is marred
by the occasional odd mannequin choice.
However, this sparseness is also one of the few flaws of this book. Though
each garment is accompanied by a short (approximately 600 word) essay, the
2D artwork—fashion plates, illustrations, and photographs—is presented with
minimal captions. Without the short essay to provide context, the reader is left
to infer meaning. Similarly, the object essays are engaging, but leave the reader
wanting more context as the book presumes the reader already has a rudimen-
tary knowledge of fashion history. In Steele’s introduction there is a passionate
discussion of the rise of lingerie in the late nineteenth century, but the essay
rapidly devolves into a cursory overview of changing styles. Additionally,
Steele’s essay indicates that the modern concept of lingerie developed in the
late nineteenth century, but the first ten illustrations in the book are of objects
dating prior to this period.
How do these garments and images fit into the larger context of the history
of lingerie? Hill attempts to reconcile this discrepancy, but there remains a dis-
connect between the contributors. Despite this, Exposed is a welcome addition
to the field. It is an enjoyable and interesting read, especially for those who
already have some knowledge of fashion history.
Drexel University Clare M. Sauro
836 THE HISTORIAN

The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself. By Andrew
Pettegree. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Pp. v, 445. $35.00.)

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates relates how Theuth, the Egyptian god of inven-
tion, tells King Thamus that writing will enhance the memory and wisdom of
its users. The king replies with a caution: “The discoverer of an art is not the
best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it.”
This wisdom of Thamus applies to this excellent study of how modern news
came into existence between 1400 and 1800 in Europe, emanating from Guten-
berg’s moveable-type printing press in the 1450s. News, as a marketable com-
modity for popular consumption, began with private newsletters for mercantile
and political elites, evolved into early newspapers in the 1600s, and reached
revolutionary impacts as “a major agent of opinion forming” by the end of the
eighteenth century. In tracing this evolution/revolution, Andrew Pettegree
stresses how the nexus of capitalism, expanding communication, and transpor-
tation technologies formed the foundations for modern mass media.
In three parts—separated into seventeen chapters and a conclusion, with six-
ty contemporary illustrations and three helpful maps—Pettegree provides a
learned, guided tour across a wide range of historic milestones that include
how news became a business, a force for popular democracy, a player in wars
and revolutions, a threat to privacy and secrecy, and a forger of national lan-
guages and nation-states. His organizing theme is that “the four prime consid-
erations that governed the business of news—its speed, reliability, the control
of content and entertainment value—were remarkably unchanging in these cen-
turies” (13).
In support of his analyses, Pettegree provides thirty-four pages of notes and
twenty pages of primary and secondary sources in Dutch, English, French, Ger-
man, and Italian that scholars across a wide range of disciplines will find use-
ful. A few omissions stand out: Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an
Agent of Change, Harvey J. Graff’s Legacies of Literacy, Daniel Headrick’s
When Information Came of Age, and S. H. Steinberg’s Five Hundred Years of
Printing.
Although he does not cite Phaedrus, the author continues that tradition of
caution when examining new technologies that claim to improve communica-
tion, memory, understanding, and wisdom. In the conclusion, he identifies three
critical developments in European society that changed how people thought,
communicated, and behaved: “The movement from an emphasis on divine to
human agency in the explanation of events, . . . the increasing emphasis on
BOOK REVIEWS 837

timelines in the reporting and reception of news, . . . [and] the sheer volume of
the news in circulation” (369–370). In helping us to understand the changes
that shaped the invention of news from 1400 to 1800, Pettegree reminds us
that we now live in communication environments that are being challenged
and changed by new media techniques and technologies.
New York University Terence P. Moran