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Reviews and Short Notices
The Americas
William Penn. By Mary K. Geiter. (Profiles in Power.) Longman. 2000. xiii +
186pp. £14.99.
Most previous biographers have portrayed the proprietor of Pennsylvania
as the emblem of the Quaker tenets of simplicity, equality and peace, a man famous for his fair dealing with Native Americans. Readers of prior Penn studies
will blanch at Mary K. Geiter’s portrait of an assiduous courtier whose personal
achievements and American province rewarded his status as ‘a member of the
ruling class’ in the empire of the later Stuart monarchs. To the most notorious
of these, James II, Penn was a sycophant. To King James’s supplanter, William
III, Penn was a traitor. William Penn was interested in his American province
not so much as ‘a holy experiment’ in moral community but as a series of stockjobbing corporate investments and land deals. They failed because Penn, the child
of privilege, was a terrible businessman. Jailed for debt, Penn tried to sell Pennsylvania back to the crown. Typically, his price was too high and his timing was
bad. So, Dr Geiter tells us, Penn left the government of Pennsylvania to the
Tories, in the persons of Robert Harley, earl of Oxford, and his chum, Lord
Paulet. Penn left the land in trust for his squabbling families. Penn’s second set
of sons destroyed whatever idealism had survived the colony’s quarrelsome,
factionalized and selfish first generation, the proprietorship of William Penn.
Not since Macaulay has there been such an unsparing assessment of Penn.
While this ‘Profile in Power’ is a brief work, and episodic, the resulting redundancy only reiterates Mary K. Geiter’s well-documented argument that Penn was
a man of his time, an authoritarian, whose religious tolerance was a condescending act of political and economic calculation, useful for promoting political
quietism and attracting Dissenters’ investment in Pennsylvania land and Penn’s
innumerable fly-by-night corporations. Penn abandoned toleration the moment
the Anglicans raised their political heads in Pennsylvania. Like the projectors
with whom he identified, Dr Geiter points out, Penn was an imperialist, given
to vast, sometimes prescient, schemes of American conquest and dominion – in
1693, Penn proposed a European union, including the Turks and surrounding
France. Penn’s reward was not a crown but a cross, and this trenchant indictment. Small wonder that Dr Geiter’s publications on Penn have not found
American presses, for her findings tarnish the image which still stands atop
the city hall of Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love. There, as one of the
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pacifist William Penn’s military deputy governors put it, the Friends ‘prayed for
each other on seventh days and preyed on each other the other six’.
Syracuse University
STEPHEN SAUNDERS WEBB
Blue Jacket: Warrior of the Shawnees. By John Sugden. University of Nebraska
Press. 2000. xvi + 350pp. £19.95.
The Shawnees, an American Indian tribe centred around the present state of
Ohio, are best known for their role in what Americans call the War of 1812 when
the Shawnee chief, Tecumseh, led an Indian confederacy against the United
States. John Sugden demonstrates that an Indian confederacy – inspired by the
Shawnees – had existed earlier and was led by another Shawnee war chief, Blue
Jacket (c.1743–1808). Sugden has produced an impressively researched book. His
bibliography has 105 different manuscript collections listed, along with a plethora
of other sources. Such extensive research was required to overcome the major
problem faced by biographers of Indians of this period – most Indians were
illiterate. Sugden carefully sifts through the legends about Blue Jacket and, with
usually convincing logic, determines what Blue Jacket did and did not do. Although Blue Jacket’s reputation is elevated, that of another warrior, Little Turtle
of the Miamis, neighbours of the Shawnees, is lessened.
The impulse behind Shawnee efforts to unite the Indians came from the
land hunger of Americans. Losing Kentucky to them because of the American
Revolution, the Shawnees battled to hold their territory west of the Ohio River.
Blue Jacket, who became the leading Shawnee about 1790, was not a stereotypical
Indian. His two wives were not full-blooded Indians and he became well-off
by trading in alcohol. His ties with French traders figured prominently in his
life. Encouraged by British agents to resist the Americans, Blue Jacket sought
to save Indian land in Ohio. Angered by the defective 1789 treaty of Fort Harmar,
Blue Jacket gained a great victory over an inept American force commanded by
Arthur St Clair in 1791, a defeat far more disastrous than that suffered by Custer
years later. Though the British on the scene dreamed of regaining control over
the ‘Old Northwest’, the home government did not want a war with the United
States. Slowly, Blue Jacket grew to distrust the British. When the able American
general Anthony Wayne defeated the Indian confederacy at Fallen Timbers
(1794), the British failure to act alienated Blue Jacket, who made peace with
Wayne at Fort Greenville the following year. During Blue Jacket’s last years, he
supported Tecumseh and his brother, the Prophet. Blue Jacket seems to have been
the inspiration for Tecumseh’s re-establishment of the confederacy. Those unfamiliar with Indian culture will profit from Sugden’s first chapter, ‘Blue Jacket’s
People’.
Hunter College
PHILIP RANLET
An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean. By
Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy. University of Pennsylvania Press. 2000. xvi +
357pp. £17.00 (pb).
The premiss of this book is that competing explanations of the American
Revolution can be refined and qualified through an analysis of events in the
British West Indies. O’Shaughnessy develops a question raised by T. R. Clayton in
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The Historical Journal (1986): why did Jamaica (and the other English-speaking
Caribbean colonies) not rebel? In answer to the retort that rebellion was impractical for planters dependent on British troops to police their slaves and on
the imperial preference market to sell sugar, O’Shaughnessy asks why the West
Indies failed to develop alternative strategies of opposition? In nine principal
chapters the book outlines the political economy of sugar production, reviews
responses to the Stamp Act and other imperial measures, discusses responses to
the decision for a coercive policy and the Declaration of Independence, and
analyses the impact of the war (1776–1783) on the sugar islands. O’Shaughnessy
observes that planters (even those resident in the Caribbean) had nothing to gain
and everything to lose from supporting the American rebels. He interprets West
Indian opposition to British colonial policy in terms of a struggle over prerogative that, unlike on the mainland, never produced a republican shift in ideology.
Rioting in the Leeward Islands is dismissed as a panic reaction to North American trade boycotts which planters feared would result in famine. O’Shaughnessy
concludes that, once rebellion broke out, it was natural that loyalism would
win the day in the Caribbean. And when France and Spain entered the war, he
argues, the conflict in the West Indies became a patriotic struggle waged against
traditional enemies. Profit, fear of invasion and a ‘garrison mentality’ generated
by a large black majority dictated that it would be so, though for good measure
O’Shaughnessy throws in some prospographical analysis to indicate the depth
of the planter elite’s English sympathies. In general terms, the thesis presented
is unassailable and the conclusions drawn are uncontroversial. How useful the
book is in understanding the causes of the American Revolution is, however,
less evident since O’Shaughnessy scarcely indicates which of the many interpretations of the revolution should be modified as a result of his work. Thirtyeight illustrations take up space that could have been devoted to this issue and
to a fuller discussion of the Guadeloupe question.
University of York
S. D. SMITH
The Creation of America: Through Revolution to Empire. By Francis Jennings.
Cambridge University Press. 2000. xii + 340pp. £12.95 ( pb).
Francis Jennings, the veteran author best known for his pioneering studies
of settler–Indian relations, here casts a critical eye over the trajectory of the
American Revolution. Drawing upon his earlier published work, he reiterates
his now-familiar premiss that the colonists, intent upon occupation and eradication, were rapacious invaders of Native American space. From this startingpoint their revolution emerges as a contest between elite settlers and British
imperial authorities over who was to exercise control in the wake of conquest.
In a challenge to the ideological interpretation pioneered by Bernard Bailyn and
others, Jennings sees the colonists’ rhetoric about virtue and liberty merely as a
weapon designed to win the underlying disputes that invariably arose over the
related issues of political power and territorial acquisition. Inclusiveness and
democracy, Jennings maintains, were never high on the revolutionary leaders’
agenda. Instead, their main aspiration was to create their own, hierarchically
organized empire – one independent of British control. In the process, he argues,
the ties between conquest and its invented justification, ‘race’, hardened still
further. Native Americans and blacks joined other peoples who ran foul of Whig
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theory in being definitively excluded from the new nation’s promise. The US
Constitution, far from representing the triumph of liberty, contained lacunae that
the author sees as the apotheosis of all the developments he has been describing. This analysis bears all the hallmarks of what we have come to expect from
Jennings. It is a characteristically lively, provocative, and even slightly mischievous work. He writes with considerable engagement and develops his case tenaciously. Although some might balk at his overarching thesis, there are insights
that merit close attention. Jennings is particularly good, for example, at depicting the east–west tensions within colonial society and shows how backsettler
communities as well as Indians became dependencies of the American empire,
albeit of a rather different kind. Also, he once again successfully highlights the
crucial role that the Mid-Atlantic region, especially Pennsylvania, played in
the revolution and the shaping of the resulting nation-state. At times, however, The
Creation of America is a frustrating read. The book’s structure is partly to blame.
The short chapters fragment the analysis, which doesn’t flow particularly
smoothly. More significantly, Jennings seems unwilling to engage either with
evidence or with rival interpretations that conflict with his own. Still, these
difficulties do not detract from the boldness of his vision. With its welcome
emphasis on the West and the notion of empire, The Creation of America complements other recent studies of the revolutionary era by, for example, Peter Onuf
and Edward Countryman.
University of Liverpool
KEITH MASON
The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920. By Andrew
C. Isenberg. Cambridge University Press. 2000. xii + 206pp. £24.95.
The near extermination of the bison is one of the most notorious sagas in
the Euro-American conquest of the American West, its high profile in the western world’s popular consciousness reinforced by Kevin Costner’s revisionist
Western, Dances with Wolves (1991). Though the bison’s fate has hardly eluded
scholarly attention, a wealth of fresh scholarship recently renders this book most
timely. The Destruction of the Bison follows in the footsteps of US environmental
historians Arthur McEvoy and Richard White, whose work on fisheries and
Indians demonstrates the subtle interplay of economy, ecology and culture. More
specifically, Isenberg heads down a trail blazed by Dan Flores and James Sherow,
whose seminal articles in 1991 and 1992 questioned the received wisdom that
the destruction of the bison was a straightforward matter of Euro-American
avarice and brutality and the pressures of an urban-industrial economy. Extending their insights regarding the role of dangerously dependent and unsustainable
Indian lifeways and hunting systems (large packs of dogs were maintained as
an emergency food supply) and a volatile semi-arid grassland environment,
Isenberg provides a comprehensive statement of the ‘new’ bison history. His
complex and inclusive narrative (more alert to considerations of gender than
the works of his predecessors) stretches back to the 1750s and spreads responsibility across a range of intertwined human and environmental factors, including disease, drought, predation by wolves, fire, grazing competition from the vast
herds of horses maintained by Plains tribes and (not least) reckless exploitation by Indians and whites. What emerges will no doubt astound the general
reader accustomed to the standard story of dynamic Euro-Americans imposing
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themselves onto a timeless environment and equally static aboriginals living in
harmonious balance with nature: a picture of flux and dynamism situating white
activity within a context also shaped by nature’s unpredictability and rapidly
changing Indian cultures capable of environmental degradation. Instead of the
venerable tradition that Costner presented, the horse-powered, bison-hunting
nomadic existence (the product of a bout of Indian westward expansion that
preceded the better-known Euro-American version) was barely a century old
when it became enmeshed in white commerce. Isenberg finishes with a reappraisal
of the crusade to preserve the relics of once vast herds, which examines the
cultural and economic impetus behind an apparently simple story of wildlife
conservation. This is a lucidly written and strongly argued book, based on a
variety of sources, that presents major conclusions clearly within each chapter.
And to his credit, Isenberg appears to belong to that handful of US historians
who are beginning to appreciate that the American frontier fits into a bigger story
of European imperialism.
University of Bristol
PETER COATES
A Year of Mud and Gold: San Francisco in Letters and Diaries, 1849–1850. Edited
by William Benemann. University of Nebraska Press. 1999. xxv + 241pp. £19.95.
Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush. By Susan Lee
Johnson. Norton. 2000. 464pp. £19.95.
A number of books have appeared recently in association with the 150th
anniversary of the California gold rush. In A Year of Mud and Gold editor William
Benemann, a former librarian at the Bancroft Library of the University of
California, has collected writings from journals and letters of forty-nine sources
drawn from the Bancroft’s holdings. These eye-witnesses resided in boomtown
San Francisco from the summer of 1849 to that of 1850. Benemann groups the
accounts into somewhat traditional categories covering first impressions of the
city; descriptions of homesickness, illnesses, the town’s crimes, vice and fires; and
the maleness and ethnic complexity of this early gold-rush society. Each section
is introduced by an explanatory essay. Benemann admits the limitations of these
sources – generally middle class and English-speaking – but believes they provide a better understanding of ordinary life in gold-rush San Francisco than can
be attained from other evidence. As Benemann also acknowledges, these accounts
are prone to repetition. Veteran readers of these types of sources will find much
that is familiar, but those seeking entrée to the gold-rush metropolis will find
this collection an effective introduction.
In Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush, Susan Lee
Johnson seeks to ‘dismantle’ the popular understanding of the California gold
rush as defined by ‘white Americans’, and to produce instead a culturally diverse
offering. To that end she concentrates on the ‘Southern Mines’ on the San
Joaquin river drainage, rather than the more frequently studied diggings of the
Sacramento river valley. She finds greater ethnic diversity in the Southern Mines,
and also that a continued reliance on small-scale placer mining created a ‘social
world of possibility and permeable boundaries [free of ] . . . more entrenched
forms of dominance rooted in Anglo American constructions of gender, of class
position, and of race, ethnicity, and nation’. Johnson’s effort to diversify the story
of the mining West, while laudable, is not new; it has been going on for the last
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generation. Nevertheless, she writes effectively and with authority when casting
the California gold rush as a world event. She also excels in an able and sensitive treatment of the society, roles and prospects of the Miwok Indians overrun
by the 49ers. By the late 1850s, ‘Anglo-Americans’ won cultural and economic
control over California. They quickly forgot the history of the Southern Mines,
Johnson believes, because that history was ‘global, complex, fragmented, multivocal’, hence unappealing to the ‘dominant cultural memory’ of white America. Johnson’s attempt to use gold-rush society to examine larger questions about
mid-nineteenth-century sex roles is less successful. Since she cannot credibly
use females to ‘gender’ an activity that was 97 per cent male, Johnson declares
the gold rush to be a ‘crisis of [sexual]representation’ and devotes much of her
effort to analysing the domestic activities of the miners. Her argument is that
men forced by circumstances to do their own laundry are also forced to
redefine their sex roles. The proof of such an assertion would be that men
continued to perform these new tasks when returned to a traditional domestic
environment, but Johnson’s own evidence suggests that most people resumed
previously defined sex roles almost as quickly as the region’s demographics
permitted.
Roaring Camp is atypical of mining history, but is an excellent example of
recent American scholarship on the American West. As with much ‘new Western history’, Roaring Camp sees historical meaning almost exclusively in racial,
ethnic and ‘gendered’ terms. This historical understanding is one of conflict, of
the ultimate conquest of various minorities by ‘Anglo-Americans’, especially
males. These ‘Anglo-Americans’ (Caucasians of north-western European, Protestant descent) can be, and are in this case, strawmen – almost invariably and
exclusively responsible for all misunderstandings and intolerance. To Johnson,
the utility of the Southern Mines as a case study is her perception of them as
‘a time and place of tremendous contest about maleness and femaleness,
about color and culture, and about wealth and power’. Johnson’s interpretations, in common with much ‘new Western history’, are heavily influenced by
deconstructionism. Events themselves are less important than how the author
or various groups, then or since, interpret their meanings. Once discovered, these
meanings should be used either for purposes of advocacy or, as perhaps in this
case, self-discovery and affirmation. Roaring Camp is deductively reasoned,
a-chronological, exceedingly self-conscious – frequently carried on in the first
person – and uses anecdotal sources almost exclusively. A reading of the anecdotal tea-leaves to reveal hidden meanings occurs on almost every page. In one
example, a dead-earnest analysis of the flippant correspondence of one 49er
establishes that waiting tables in a restaurant caused him a crisis of sexual
identity. In another case, the disposal of a murdered baby down a mine shaft
was, rather, ‘a grim commentary on a historical movement that has come to be
as celebrated as the California Gold Rush’. The numerous problems with such
Rorschach history, where events and sources have no meanings save those that
a historian chooses to assign to them, cannot be discussed in the space available. Suffice it to say that Roaring Camp, awash in jargon, cannot be recommended as literature or as mining history, but devotees of deconstructionist
histories or of advancing the fight against ‘the arrogance of Anglo-America’ will
find it useful and receive it enthusiastically.
Southeast Missouri State University
ERIC L. CLEMENTS
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Recalling the Wild: Naturalism and the Closing of the American West. By Mary
Lawlor. Rutgers University Press. 2000. xiv + 224pp. $22.00.
The official closing of the American frontier in 1890 was an historic moment
for Westerners, a time for celebrating the pioneering impulse, whilst tentatively
pondering the post-frontier future. US writers in the 1890s captured the mood
of nostalgia tinged with uncertainty in their own accounts of American life. In
Recalling the Wild, Mary Lawlor, associate professor of English and American
Studies at Muhlenberg College, explores how illustrious writers such as Jack
London and Frank Norris dealt with the closing of the American West, and how
competing ‘Westernist’ and ‘naturalist’ tendencies influenced their work. Whilst
‘Westernism’ situated the frontier as a romantic, open-ended Euro-American
adventure, ‘naturalism’, as popularized by French novelist Emile Zola in the
1880s, encouraged US writers to engage with the Western experience more
critically, and recognize issues of confinement appropriate to a time of frontier
closure. The first three chapters of Recalling the Wild elaborate on the Westernism inherent in early biographies of Daniel Boone, writings on the Lewis and
Clark expedition, and the Leatherstocking novels by James Fenimore Cooper.
As expected in any work concerning the end of the frontier, historian Frederick
Jackson Turner gains mention, Lawlor noting his legacy in terms of fuelling
nostalgia for a lost age (and place), and that, in a sense, ‘Turner invented the
West for the twentieth century by closing it’ (p. 46). Lawlor then turns her attention to writers who, by using naturalism in their work, delineated some of the
limitations and frustrations involved in settling the West. Successive chapters deal
with Frank Norris, Jack London, Stephen Crane and Willa Cather. Despite the
naturalism that shaped their work, Lawlor argues that such authors struggled
with ‘the elusiveness of the true West’ (p. 85), with Crane, for example, resorting to ironic use of Western romanticism to flesh out his characters and scenarios.
Recalling the Wild perfectly captures the intellectual self-searching that surrounds any fin-de-siècle moment. There are a number of strong sections, including an insightful commentary on the romantic Indian captured on celluloid by
Edward Curtis and how evolutionary theory filtered through Jack London
novels. How writers engaged with the ‘Wild’ itself, and the overarching significance of material landscape, might have been explored further, but the gripe is
a minor one. Above all, Lawlor treats the topic with the intellectual complexity
that it deserves, never simplifying the process of authorship or the creation of
Western identity. As such, the book is best suited to those already familiar with
nineteenth-century American literature and culture. For the uninitiated, start off
with London’s The Call of the Wild (along with other Westerly novels) before
moving on to Lawlor’s Recalling the Wild.
University of Bristol
JOHN WILLS
Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West. By Patricia
Nelson Limerick. Norton. 2000. 384pp. $27.95.
Patricia Limerick loves the American West and loves history. In Something
in the Soil, which reprints several essays, she clearly wishes to communicate both
to the general pubic at large and to her academic colleagues that Western history is alive and well. Her Western history, however, is neither the Turnerian
vision of a steadily evolving westward expansion of Euro-Americans, nor the
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romantic, picturesque and popular visions of Hollywood movies. She sees a continuous and complex regional picture in which there are conquests, but there
are also reorientations. Her picture is never static. It evolves as historians find
new data and re-evaluate their approaches. In following this track, Patricia Limerick demonstrates her ability to criticize herself and her pathbreaking volume
The Legacy of Conquest (1987). She confesses to sins of omission, both in terms
of neglecting important historians, like Josiah Royce, Carey McWilliams and
Angie Debo and characters, like Juan Bautista de Anza or John Sutter, who well
illustrate multiple meanings. She would now take some different stands, unlike
Frederick Jackson Turner who seemed to become trapped in his own early fame.
She advocates a checklist of neglected points, for example, to complicate the
discussion of the inevitable history of war in the West and she wants to write
the West back into mainstream history in a much more inclusive and interesting way. Much more attention needs to be given to environmentalism, to ethnic
diversity and to the stark differences in wealth and privilege in the New West.
And academics and popular readers alike need to watch Western trends more
carefully as the demographic, economic and political balance tilts to the Pacific
coast. There is much of value in this volume. As one of the ‘gang of four’ who
heralded the advent of ‘new Western history’, Patricia Limerick is always going
to be an attractive and challenging read. Yet there is more. As an author who
prides herself on her writing she, unlike many of her colleagues, is easy to read
and comes to the point without perambulating through academic thickets. She
is also amusing. Yet she may have mixed a strange brew here. Public talks given
on celebratory occasions, expressions of faith in the future of the West, critiques
of textbooks and wider-ranging observations about the rediscovery of the
landscape lead to a somewhat disjointed text and one that at times reads like
random thoughts. But that is what comes from being a famous and controversial figure!
University of Nottingham
MARGARET WALSH
Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. By Edwin G. Burrows and Mike
Wallace. Oxford University Press. 1999. xxiv + 1383pp. £30.00.
No doubt only serious lovers of New York City will be tempted to read such
a lengthy book from cover to cover. That would be a pity because this is a scholarly and highly readable work The first four hundred or so pages have been
written by Burrows, the rest by Wallace, although one would be hard pressed to
notice any seam in the work. It consists of a panoramic, three-hundred-year
survey of New York from the early story of scattered Indian settlements at the
mouth of the Hudson through to the era of borough consolidation which took
place in 1898. A second volume is projected to take the story into the twentieth
century. En route, this book covers in marvellous detail the Dutch and English
eras, the national capital phase and the various economic revolutions which made
New York the nation’s foremost financial and corporate centre by the late nineteenth century. The main sweeps of history are all here, political, economic, social, cultural and intellectual. The intricacies of politics, race, ethnicity, class struggle,
architecture, feminism and a host of other subjects are told in fascinating detail. The famous and the not-so-famous who lived and worked in the city also
feature, albeit the lengthier accounts involve men rather than women. Amongst
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the men, the sketches of Henry George, Horace Greeley, P. T. Barnum and Walt
Whitman provide fascinating reading.
Works aplenty have appeared on New York during the past five years, not
least those by Frederick Binder and David Reimers, Selma Berrol, Allen Schoener, Eric Homberger, George Lankevich, Kenneth Jackson and Ann Douglas
(on Manhattan). The only comparable work to the study under review here is
Jackson’s Encyclopaedia of New York City, itself some 1,289 pages long. The
synthetic approach of Gotham provides a much more satisfying read than
Jackson’s work, however. That is not to say that there are no errors; indeed, it
would be surprising if there were not in a volume so large. Some can be found
in the index where a rather loose interpretation of ‘late’ and ‘mid-century’
prevails. And although many references are cited by the authors to demonstrate
their command of the city’s history, there are occasional gaps as with the story
of black education where Carleton Mabee’s research seems to have been overlooked. This is all a bit nit-picking, however, for this is a splendid work which
deserves as wide an audience as possible.
University of Southampton New College
DEREK EDGELL
Water for Gotham: A History. By Gerard T. Koeppel. Princeton University Press.
2000. xiv + 355pp. £16.95.
New York City possesses the world’s oldest continuously running water supply. The city’s water system today supplies a city of seven million inhabitants.
An immense series of reservoirs, dams, tunnels and aqueducts reaches from the
west branch of the Delaware river to Manhattan, 125 miles away. The story of
the creation of that vast system remains largely untold. But Gerard T. Koeppel’s
lively, readable and handsomely illustrated volume takes the story to the successful completion of the Croton river supply in the 1840s. The deteriorating
quality of the city’s domestic water supply was first complained of in the Dutch
colonial period. Tanneries were blamed for the inadequacies of private wells, but
it was only after the English seized control of the city in 1666 that the first public
well was dug. The public water supply soon deteriorated and it was not until
the 1740s that a pure source of suburban spring water, known as ‘Tea Water,’
was provided from farm land to the north of the city. The first proposal to erect
a reservoir and supply water directly to the city’s inhabitants was made in 1774.
After the American Revolution, as the city’s population began once again to
expand rapidly, proposals were sent to the Common Council for a public water
supply drawn from rivers in nearby Westchester County. Without sufficient revenue to undertake such a project, the city embarked upon a fruitless search for
a solution to the intractable problem of manifest public need and constrained
public resources. Colonel Aaron Burr returned to the city after distinguished
military service in the revolutionary army and proposed that a private company
undertake to construct the system. Winning over the leading figures in public
life, including his great rival Alexander Hamilton, Burr played his hand with
immense skill and successfully piloted legislation chartering the Manhattan
Company through Albany. Written in the ninth paragraph of the charter was
language which enabled the Manhattan Company to engage in the purchase of
stock and ‘any monied transactions’. So long as the company held its charter, it
was free to conduct itself as a bank. Thus the origins of the city’s great financial
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behemoth, the Chase Manhattan Bank. The Manhattan Company was far more
interested in banking than water supply, and the city’s needs languished until
Governor DeWitt Clinton and the mayor of New York, the wealthy sailmaker
Stephen Allen, again took up the idea of drawing upon the water supply in
Westchester County. With the support of Myndert Van Schaick, alderman and
state senator, the project of building an aqueduct linking the city to the Croton
river above Tarrytown won support. It was not until the 1840s that the disputes
among politicians and rival schemes of surveyors and engineers came to an end
and the Croton reservoir, on the present site of the New York Public Library on
Fifth Avenue, began to fill.
Drawing upon the full range of public documents and a rich resource of
private letters and memoirs by the leading engineers, Koeppel successfully integrates the story of the city’s need for pure water into themes in the city’s social
history. He shows that in the colonial period city water was seldom a beverage
itself, but tea drinking and the city’s coffee houses enhanced city life. He also
shows, in a political culture marked by intense partisanship, that the epic battles between politicians in Albany and Manhattan for control of the building of
Central Park in the 1850s had been anticipated by the struggles over the Croton
project two decades earlier. Koeppel has made a valuable contribution to the
emerging understanding of the antebellum American city. That the cities did not
control their own destiny, or even their own finances, forced local politicians to
turn for support to the state legislatures, and even to the federal government.
Even the most parochial urban struggles could scarcely fail to escalate into
issues of national consequence.
University of East Anglia
ERIC HOMBERGER
Zion on the Hudson: Dutch New York and New Jersey in the Age of Revivals. By
Firth Haring Fabend. Rutgers University Press. 2000. xvi + 284pp. $50.00.
This study explores how the Dutch community of New York and New Jersey
responded to the accelerating pace of social change in nineteenth-century
America. Because Fabend sees ‘Dutchness’ as essentially a religious identity,
her emphasis is firmly on the tensions within the Reformed Dutch Church,
admittedly the community’s main focal point. Fabend’s principal contention is
that the church and its adherents were not simply blinkered defenders of Old
World traditions. Instead, the institution acted as a crucible in which the contending influences of ethnicity and Americanization vied for dominance. On the
one hand, certain ingredients contributed to the persistence of a Dutch identity.
Among the most significant were the community’s continuing devotion to Calvinism, the efforts made to cultivate an interest in Dutch history, the sense of a
distinctive peoplehood nurtured at institutions like Rutgers and the New Brunswick Seminary, the clergy’s tight family connections, and the social cohesion of
the Dutch settlements themselves. On the other hand, the church’s involvement
in nineteenth-century revivalism encouraged an ecumenical spirit that helped to
erode any lingering ethnic identity. Within the home, evangelical concepts of
family life and child-rearing disseminated through the religious press hastened
the decline of Dutch cultural separatism. In the wider world, as Reformed clergy
and their congregations joined with their fellow Protestants in social reform
campaigns, they came to develop a sense of themselves, not as foreign and
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different, but as American. Perhaps the most important influence of all, Fabend
argues, was the powerful common culture that grew up around death and
dying. In adopting the styles in which they were accoutred and in imparting
certain of their own ancient mortuary customs to the larger culture, the Dutch
finally erased the customary ties that bound them to the Old World. Fabend’s
story, then, pivots around an eventual and inevitable Americanization. Dutch
efforts to maintain their own and their church’s distinctive roots and cultural
identity eventually became futile. ‘Dutchness’ as a result became an, albeit-strong,
historical memory. Though more might have been made of the Dutch community’s own diverse origins and the degree of internal adaptation that was required
earlier in the seventeenth century, the book is generally persuasive. Also, Fabend
successfully relates the Dutch experience to wider themes in American social
history, such as evangelicalism, the changing role of women and the development of reform movements. Finally, in reaching her conclusions, she makes good
use of a rich array of previously untapped sources, including family papers,
the records of the Reformed Church, prescriptive literature aimed at parents,
teachers’ and students’ Sabbath school guides, and sermons. All told, this is a
solid contribution to the study of ethnicity in nineteenth-century America.
University of Liverpool
KEITH MASON
Race and Class Politics in New York City before the Civil War. By Anthony
Gronowicz. Northeastern University Press. 1998. xix + 277pp. £42.75 (hb), £15.95
(pb).
This book is not entirely without historical virtue. It has some good passages
on urban growth, popular culture and party organization in New York City in
the 1840s and 1850s. It usefully disagrees with Sean Wilentz’s argument that the
city’s working classes developed both a class consciousness independent of party
politics and an autonomous culture that was remarkably free of racial prejudice.
By contrast, Gronowicz believes that the city’s working people were always the
victims of the dominant economic elite’s drive for supremacy: the workers lacked
true self-awareness, remained attached to a proto-capitalist vision of a republic
of small producers and skilled artisans, expressed themselves by the 1840s
through a corrupt Democratic Party, and were prevented from developing
class unity by the racial and ethnic prejudices that the commercial tools of the
business class whipped up among them. While the author is right to stress the
conservatism of working-class aspirations, surely it is no great surprise to learn
that white workers in the years leading up to the Draft Riots of 1863 were marked
by a deep dislike of blacks and hostility towards alien ethnic and religious groups,
or that many Northern workers’ jobs depended on the prosperity of slavery?
Sadly, the author reveals a limited sense of historical situations and political
processes. Everything seems to happen through conspiracy, and the manipulative powers of the economic elite are wondrous to behold, though never proven.
As a result, he presents a view of American politics that has scarcely moved
beyond Charles Beard, an interpretation of the Bank War that depends entirely
on Bray Hammond, and a version of the sectional conflict that ignores all moral
considerations and political complexities. He makes no differentiation between
racists who wanted to abolish or restrict slavery, and racists who wanted to
preserve slavery and burn down African-American orphanages. He misinterprets
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political actions, assumes the priority of economic motivations, and makes generalizations so wild that he later tacitly contradicts himself when a faction behaves
differently from the stereotype. He ignores trivial details like the actual order of
events, and interprets developments before 1844 in terms of the rise of a factory
system that later turns out to be new after 1845. Worse still, the author is sloppy
in the presentation of his case, at times supporting a point with evidence that the
end-notes reveal refers to ten or twenty years later. Schematic assertion is not
the same as a reasoned argument supported by historically pertinent evidence.
University of Durham
DONALD J. RATCLIFFE
Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City. By Edward
L. Widmore. Oxford University Press. 1999. viii + 290pp. £28.50.
‘Young America’ is usually described as a meretricious nationalist movement
of the early 1850s, devoted to territorial expansion and morally blind about
slavery. In this constantly interesting and thoughtful book, Edward Widmore
distinguishes that ‘stupid farce’ from an earlier movement of the same name that
endeavoured to generate a genuinely American literature and culture. The origins
of ‘Young America I’ are found in the United States Magazine and Democratic
Review, established in Washington in 1837 to advance the cause of the Democratic Party by raising the intellectual standing of its ideas and policies. From
the start, the journal sought to promote the nation’s cultural independence and
challenged the authority of the established literary quarterlies emanating from
Anglophile Boston. In 1841 the Democratic Review relocated to New York City,
where its associates energetically helped to turn that teeming metropolis into a
dynamic centre of cultural creativity for the nation. Though the movement was
in ruins by 1848, Young America had helped to stimulate the incredible output
of American literary masterpieces that appeared during the next seven years.
The guiding light of this energetic politico-cultural movement was the Review’s
editor, John L. O’Sullivan – more usually remembered for coining the term
‘Manifest Destiny’ – whose biography dominates the book. The other key figure
was the publisher Evert Duyckinck, who worked to create a literary canon more
appropriate for the American people than that of conservative Whiggery. Defining cultural independence in terms of youth, nationalism and democracy,
they published promising authors of Democratic tendency, notably Hawthorne,
Melville and Whitman, while their associates encouraged genre painters like
William Sidney Mount and Francis Edmonds and made their works available
through the American Art-Union (1838–51). Importantly, Widmore also identifies David Dudley Field’s efforts to simplify and codify New York’s laws as a
conscious part of the programme to create appropriate structures and language
for a heterogeneous democratic republic. Aware of the extraordinary partisanship of the 1840s, Widmore argues that the political agenda always intertwined
with the cultural output, though, for a speech-writer in the Clinton White House,
he proves surprisingly uninterested in the realities of partisan conflict in New
York. The writers and painters had all formed early commitments to Jacksonism
and wanted to develop a familiar, democratic art in contrast to what Melville
called the ‘Boston leaven of literary flunkeyism to England’ (p. 115). This patriotic attitude naturally encouraged ideas of America’s great destiny, but when
nationalism became belligerent in 1845, focused on territorial aggrandisement
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and threatened the expansion of slavery, the movement disintegrated. The writers,
for their part, moved on beyond the rhetorical simplicities of ‘Young America’,
leaving Duyckinck puzzled by Moby-Dick (1851) and O’Sullivan vulnerable to
the reckless adventurism of filibustering slavery expansionists.
University of Durham
DONALD J. RATCLIFFE
Britain to America: Mid-nineteenth-century Immigrants to the United States.
By William E. Van Vugt. (Statue of Liberty – Ellis Island Centennial Series.)
University of Illinois Press. 1999. xi + 241pp. $49.95 (hb), £18.00 (pb).
William Van Vugt has made a welcome addition to the limited literature
available on British emigration in the nineteenth century. He is a former student
of Charlotte Erickson, and the discussion of the difficult sources available to the
historian of British emigration in this book makes the excellence of his training
apparent. Anyone who values Rowland Berthoff’s British Immigrants in Industrial America (1953) and Professor Erickson’s own Invisible Immigrants: The
Adaption of English and Scottish Immigrants in Nineteenth-century America (1972)
must acquire a copy of this book. Van Vugt takes as a starting-point for his study
the passenger lists, or ‘ship lists’, for 1851, recording immigrant arrivals in the
US. This allows comparison with the British census of 1851, building on work
Erickson has pioneered. He uses ‘a one-in-ten sample of all the lists of ships
carrying six or more British emigrants’ and takes into account ‘statistical tests
on four variables’ that indicated that ‘the sample accurately reflected the entire
body of ship lists’ (p. 205). The objective (p. 161) is to use a sample technique
that can ‘reduce the overabundant data without introducing biases’. The result
is an excellent appendix discussing the nature of the difficult sources available
and an additional appendix giving ‘details of British immigrants to the United
States, 1851’ on which the rest of the study is based. In the best tradition of
Erickson’s work, Van Vugt is then able to use qualitative evidence drawn from
the immigrant press, emigrant letters and neglected sources, such as US county
histories published in the nineteenth century, to provide the vital human element
in emigration history necessary to bring the quantitative work into focus. Van
Vugt is interested particularly in British immigrants in the ‘old northwest’ of
Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio during the last period in which
British emigration to America had a significant element of ‘pull’ towards cheap
and available farm land on the American frontier. A particular strength of the
book is its American perspective on immigration and assimilation during a period
more often studied from the perspective of emigration from Britain. British
emigration studies are often weak on analysing how emigrants assimilated into
host societies, or not – as a significant proportion of British emigrants after the
middle of the nineteenth century became return migrants. Van Vugt’s study is
at its best in considering the process whereby Britons became Americans whether
in agriculture, industry or the professions. His chapters on Welsh miners and
on women break new ground in this type of study, and his last chapter, by
focusing on the Civil War, demonstrates the particular power of war in the
integration of emigrant/immigrant communities. This is a study which will help
establish the significant British element in the ‘new’ immigration to the United
States of the nineteenth century. It is written by an historian who has worked
long and hard with sources in Britain as well as America, and represents a
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handsome tribute to the remarkable contribution Charlotte Erickson has made
to British emigration studies as both scholar and teacher.
University of Edinburgh
ALEX MURDOCH
Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn. By Alan Dawley. Harvard
University Press. 2000. xxviii + 301pp. £12.50.
This is a welcome re-issue of one of the first and best of the community studies
of industrial change in the nineteenth-century United States that emerged with
the ‘new social history’ of the 1970s. First published in 1976, Dawley’s book was
widely influential as a model case study, as an application of class analysis to
American social history, and as an example of social history with the politics
left in. Dawley’s account of the transformation of shoe-making and of shoemakers’ lives in New England was pathbreaking in several respects. It traced the
introduction of mercantile capital and the division of labour in shoe-making,
and their impact on artisans’ households. Shoe-making was transformed by these
processes before the introduction of new technology and the concentration of
production in large factories. Dawley was among the first of his generation
of social historians to discuss women’s work as well as men’s. Finally, Dawley
argued that workers’ sense of class and community was animated by their commitment to an ‘equal rights’ tradition that had developed out of revolutionary republicanism. He suggested that, in this ideological context, access to the
ballot box and events such as the Civil War profoundly shaped the character of
class consciousness among American workers. For this volume Dawley has left
his original text untouched, but uses a new preface to reflect back on it. The
three themes he addresses – gender, race and identity, and globalization – allow
him to comment on changes in historical interest and fashion. He notes the
inward focus of early community studies, observing that he would now give more
stress than he did to inter-regional and international patterns of supply, labour
and distribution. He acknowledges Mary H. Blewett’s 1988 study of New England shoe-makers, which showed that women employed as domestic outworkers
had different attitudes to labour organizations and strikes from those who worked
in shoe factories; ‘gender’ alone is inadequate to explain consciousness. Finally, Dawley notes recent debates on workers and ‘whiteness’, suggesting that
modern studies even of such homogeneous groups as Lynn’s antebellum shoeworkers should take Yankee ethnicity not as normative, but as problematic in
a society where questions of identity were culturally and politically charged. However, he argues, the current interest in culture and identity should not bypass a
concern with material issues and power. His original purpose in writing Class
and Community was to explore the character and development of social inequality.
The last quarter-century has broadened our understanding of this issue, but its
urgency and significance is just as great as it has ever been.
University of Warwick
CHRISTOPHER CLARK
Born in Bondage: Growing up Enslaved in the Antebellum South. By Marie Jenkins
Schwartz. Harvard University Press. 2000. ix + 263pp. £23.50.
Surprisingly, Born in Bondage is the first book devoted exclusively to what it
meant to grow up in slavery. Its purpose, claims Marie Jenkins Schwartz, is to
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‘understand how children – and a people – endured the conditions associated
with chattel bondage . . . to view paternalism from the slave quarter’ and ‘to
understand the slave child’s stages of development and the nature of a childhood
in bondage’ (p. 14). To do this, the author devotes a chapter to each stage
of development of slave children, including such topics as ‘Birth of a Slave’,
‘Education in the Middle Years’ and finally ‘Young Love and Marriage’. The
dominant model informing Schwartz’s well-researched, if at times archly written, account locates bargaining and negotiating between slave parents and slave
owners for control of young slaves at the heart of the peculiar institution. The
owner’s primary concern was profit maximization, while maintaining his reputation for humane, if paternalistic, treatment of his slaves. For slave parents, the
ultimate aim was to retain as much control as possible over their children’s
development, while recognizing where power ultimately resided. Thus, according
to Schwartz, there was a kind of conscious, rational calculus at work on both
sides of the slave/free divide. What is curious, however, is that Born in Bondage
offers no hint of a theoretical framework to explain how the experience of young
slaves was internalized, processed and then acted upon. There is no Freud
or Erikson, no Kohlberg or Gilligan. Or if these theorists of development are
inappropriate, Schwartz fails to supply an alternative theory for our consideration. All we really have, as suggested above, is a kind of folk psychology which
privileges bargaining. Nor, needless to say, do we have any discussion about a
possible plantation slave ‘personality’. There is no real sense that growing up a
slave meant a different way of being or acting in the world. How was a whole
way of life permeated and haunted by loss and separation handled psychologically? What effect on the development of ‘love and marriage’ did the presence
of two sets of parents – one biological and one institutional – have on the young
slave? What did it mean over a single life, and over generations, to know that
parents ultimately could not protect their children? In Schwartz’s study, oppression remains largely a matter of the body and not the mind. Until the study of
slavery can (again) take up the question of personality development in those
‘born in bondage’, we will not get much further in understanding slavery in North
America or anywhere else.
University of Nottingham
RICHARD H. KING
Southern Paternalism and the American Welfare State: Economics, Politics, and
Institutions in the South, 1865–1965. By Lee J. Alston and Joseph P. Ferrie.
Cambridge University Press. 1999. xii + 171pp. £35.00.
In this provocative study, economists Lee Alston and Joseph Ferrie attribute
the rise of the modern American welfare state to the political influence of
southern cotton planters. As the authors argue in the opening chapter, the
destruction of slavery during the American Civil War necessitated a new system
of labour relations in southern agriculture. Planters responded to this potential
crisis through the adoption of private welfare, an arrangement that worked to
the mutual advantage of employer and employee. In return for their ‘good and
faithful’ service, black labourers received a variety of benefits including medical
care, old-age assistance and, in an era of increasingly oppressive race relations,
protection from white intimidation and violence. By the 1930s this paternalistic
system faced an increasingly serious challenge from the federal government. In
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an effort to alleviate the suffering caused by the Great Depression, the Roosevelt
administration attempted to introduce a series of welfare programmes that would
have undermined the reliance of black agricultural workers upon their employers.
Southern planters, therefore, used their political representatives in Washington
to resist reform. The seniority system accorded southern politicians control of
key congressional committees, enabling them to exercise an effective veto of
federal initiatives. The success of southern opposition is effectively illustrated by
the authors in their detailed studies of such New Deal legislation as the Social
Security Act and the Farm Security Administration. According to Alston and
Ferrie, it was not until the advent of mechanization in the late 1950s that southern resistance to federal welfare programmes suddenly declined. Since plantations no longer needed large numbers of skilled hands, the paternalist ethic lost
its rationale. By the 1960s the erosion of southern opposition enabled Lyndon
Johnson to implement his ambitious agenda for welfare reform.
This is a fascinating book, but its central thesis is by no means conclusive. In
particular, the authors’ analysis of southern paternalism relies on a number of
untested assumptions. Paternalism may have been the standard mode of operation on southern plantations, but, without closer attention to variations across
time and region, Alston and Ferrie cannot be certain how systematically it was
enforced. In the absence of any testimony from black labourers, we must also
take the authors at their word that paternalism worked to the mutual benefit of
both races. This book will stimulate considerable debate among scholars. It
should, however, be regarded as the starting-point for discussion rather than
the definitive statement on the subject.
University of Sussex
CLIVE WEBB
The Making of Milwaukee. By John Gurda. Milwaukee County Historical
Society. 1999. ix + 458pp. $26.35.
American urban historiography is currently undergoing a significant change.
Most likely influenced by new themes in this postmodern age, new, more comprehensive city histories are being written, such as the large encyclopaedias on
Cleveland, New York, Chicago and perhaps others. They include not only the
traditional topics of politics and economics, but also the social histories of ordinary inhabitants, working classes and their cultures. John Gurda has written a
monumental, double-columned, richly illustrated contribution to this new genre,
with both authority and eloquence. Additionally noteworthy is Gurda’s successful
ability to write for both the general public and scholars; hence, he has proved
the value of single-author, urban biographies, making his work an eminently
readable city portrait. Gurda is exceptionally well equipped for the task. While
not an academic but rather a freelance writer, he has replaced the previous, halfcentury-old standard reference work of Bayrd Still, Milwaukee (1948) and in fact
improved on it. Gurda’s degrees in both literature and geography, his numerous
published works on local institutions, and his regular columns in The Milwaukee
Journal-Sentinel have all prepared him to produce a well-organized and articulate
study that appeals to any intelligent reader. Its enthusiastic reception, Gurda’s numerous awards for the work and its likely reprint are all proof of its wide appeal.
Gurda’s focus and periodization are both conventional. He concentrates
on the city’s economic and political past, stressing Milwaukee’s divisive and
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tumultuous birth in the 1830s; its ensuing German and immigrant composition contributing to its singularly heavy industrial character beginning in the
Gilded Age; its powerful and enduring socialist make-up in the early 1900s; its
metropolitan growth in mid-century, followed by a disastrous era of urban decay,
poverty, racial tensions and de-industrialization thereafter; and finally ending
with some recent inner-city reconstruction and renovation. While the work is
organized conventionally, Gurda’s lucid understanding and integration of urban
space, architecture and physical structures are distinctive. And while sympathetic
to his community, he maintains a balanced, even critical eye on the corruption and
errors caused by his leading political and financial figures. There are a few weaknesses, such as inadequate, though evident, comparisons with other Great
Lakes and Midwestern cities; insufficient coverage of Milwaukee’s early cultural
institutions, and, despite the inclusion of much labour history, there is a lack of
attention to the effects of urban change on individual families. These, however,
are matters of emphasis and taste, perhaps impossible to convey given the available sources. Clearly, though, The Making of Milwaukee should be required
reading for both the professional and lay reader, as it sets a new standard for
city histories.
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
VICTOR GREENE
Rude Republic: Americans and their Politics in the Nineteenth Century. By Glenn
C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin. Princeton University Press. 2000. xii + 316pp.
$35.00.
Were the years between 1840 and 1890 the high point of American participatory democracy? So historians impressed by the high levels of voter turn-out
in the spectacularly partisan elections of these decades have argued; according
to Jean Baker, nineteenth-century Americans ‘gave closer attention to politics’
and had ‘a broader, deeper understanding of issues’ than their modern-day descendants. This constantly interesting book begs to differ: high turn-outs did
not imply a widespread understanding of political issues, and the signs of popular
participation in party processes were illusory. Hence, notions of subsequent
democratic declension and of modern civic irresponsibility are, they argue, hugely
exaggerated. Examining what politics and voting meant for people in a number
of widely scattered communities – four in 1840, increasing to seven by 1880 –
the authors demonstrate that the processes of party organization and nomination attracted little public interest and were dominated by the few activists; the
only difference by 1880 was that politicians had ceased to pretend otherwise.
Throughout, political activists tended to be men of means and generally participated also in communal activities untouched by party politics, though they
were tending to become a separate profession by the 1880s. In the most fascinating sections of the book, the authors use fiction, illustration and a host of
personal diaries to reveal that politics scarcely touched the consciousness of
people who were not themselves politicians. The main exception came in the Civil
War when national crisis made people acutely aware of public affairs, and the
subsequent problems – and pensions – ensured that expanding government became central to American life as never before. Yet, even so, the traditional
suspicion of politicians and their deceits survived, and awareness of how they
manipulated simple voters underwrote the civic reforms that reduced popular
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participation after 1890. No doubt all of this is a valuable corrective to current
historical perspectives, and yet at times it reasserts the obvious. Didn’t Ostrogorski
point out the cynical manipulation of ostensibly democratic parties in this
period more than seventy years ago? Haven’t recent American historians been
so aware of cultural worlds beyond politics that they have tended to overlook
the political dimension even in these decades? For political historians, isn’t the
fact that men bothered to vote in such huge numbers and along party lines still
essential for understanding political developments, regardless of how engaged
the voters were? And if periods of crisis did stir the masses, as the authors
acknowledge for the 1850s and 1860s (and ought to for the formative moments
before 1840), wasn’t it such heightened popular engagement that generated the
patterns of voter allegiance which the politicians manipulated when politics
became more routine, and habit and retrospection again became the primary
influence on popular responses to political appeals?
University of Durham
DONALD J. RATCLIFFE
The Columbia Guide to American Women in the Nineteenth Century. By Catherine
Clinton and Christine Lunardini. Columbia University Press. 2000. xv + 331pp.
$40.00.
Catherine Clinton and Christine Lunardini have provided a guide to the history of American nineteenth-century women which will prove at once accessible
to students and stimulating to scholars in the field. The intention to appeal to
both is signalled by the positioning at the beginning of the book of a thematic,
historiographical overview. This demonstrates that while scholars have moved
beyond ‘contribution’ history and accounts of ‘women worthies’, and have
penetrated even ‘the Civil War, the great male bastion of nineteenth-century
scholarship’, there is no broad consensus about women’s lives, any more than
there is about those of men. There are, too, still areas of comparative neglect,
for example the stories of Native American, Asian-American and Hispanic
women. Moreover, because ‘the history of immigration is most frequently viewed
through the prism of the male immigrant experience, it remains difficult to construct a completely accurate picture of the ways in which immigration affected
women and the distinctive impact that women immigrants had on society and
social change’. None the less, there is a massive amount of material to be drawn
on as the authors range over post-revolutionary America, economic matters,
education, the church and the law, natives and immigrants, the Civil War and
Reconstruction, the growth of women’s culture, sexuality, reproduction and
gender roles, suffrage and reform, and end-of-century issues. To avoid crowding
the narrative, the names of influential women, events, institutions and organizations are highlighted and then pursued in more detail in a separate section of
the book. What emerges is a history that tackles the public and private dimensions of women’s lives, and pays attention to the famous and relatively obscure,
among the last named being the journalist, Nellie Bly; the Confederate spy and
author, Rose Greenhow; the evangelist and author, Jarena Lee; the educator,
Alice Freeman Palmer; the Indian leader and trader, Nancy Ward; and the
teacher, Civil War nurse and author, Susie Taylor. However, it is not always
possible to do justice in a small space to the individuals treated, and the later
lives of a number of them are consequently only touched upon. The annotated
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bibliography is excellent and there is a useful guide to electronic resources, a
section of the book that will require the most regular updating. Altogether, this
Columbia Guide is to be highly recommended.
University of Kent at Canterbury
CHRISTINE BOLT
Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era. By
Laura F. Edwards. University of Illinois Press. 2000. x + 271pp. $29.95.
In his recent best-selling study of America’s continuing relationship with the
Civil War, Confederates in the Attic, Tony Horowitz observed that Gone with the
Wind has ‘done more to keep the Civil War alive, and to mold its memory, than
any history book or event since Appomattox’ (p. 296). Laura Edwards has acknowledged the truth of this, and throughout Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
highlights those aspects of southern women’s lives that either conformed, or more
commonly bore absolutely no relation, to the experiences of Margaret Mitchell’s
fictitious heroine. The main aim of this volume is to draw southern women
towards centre-stage, and to show how their inclusion ‘changes our understanding of the Civil War and Reconstruction’, by providing an overview of recent
directions in the scholarship and making it ‘accessible to a wider audience’
(p. 2). Southern women, Edwards reminds us, ‘played key roles’ during the Civil
War, and it was specifically their households, their families and their lives that
were most affected by the conflict, taking place as it did mostly on southern soil.
The southern household was key, Edwards shows, not just to women’s lives but
to southern society as a whole: it ‘stood at the juncture between private and
public life. Men and women acquired specific rights through relationships within
households as husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and slaves’ (p.
3). The Civil War altered forever the structure of the southern household, the
structure of the South, and the lives of southern women. Southern women were
not, of course, a homogeneous group, and Edwards stresses the wide variety of
household structures that existed in the South, from the elite plantation homes
to the slave cabins and the homes of poor whites. She takes particular care to
emphasize that historians still lack a full sense of how poorer white women were
affected by the war, and attempts – where she has managed to find material
relating to them – to bring them more fully into the overall picture. She also
highlights the stories of certain individuals, some well known – such as Harriet
Jacobs – others less so, to show how southern women reacted to their circumstances, dealt with problematic husbands, tried to survive slavery, and aligned
themselves with the ideology of a region in which class and racial divisions
constricted everyone’s options. Divided into three sections – antebellum, Civil
War and Reconstruction – the book is most detailed on the Reconstruction
period, perhaps unsurprisingly, given Edwards’s own research interests.
Yet, despite Edwards’s attempts to provide a comprehensive view of women’s
world in the South, gaps remain. The impulse to restore southern women to their
rightful place in the historical narrative too readily lends itself to their being
brought in on very favourable terms. Although academics have produced studies which take a hard look at southern women, and at their general complicity
in a system that oppressed both the coloured and the poor, general books such
as Edwards’s do tend to present an overall picture of triumph against adversity
at all levels, which is misleading. At one point, for example, Edwards makes the
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rather chilling observation that, at the start of the war, southern women encouraged their men towards the conflict, and even ‘encouraged militarism in
children’. At that stage, she argues, women had little notion of war, and it did
not ‘register that colorful uniforms, temperamental thoroughbreds, and arrogant
self-assurance might be poor preparation for the bloodiest war in US history’
(p. 73). In this, southern women did not differ much from southern men, and
were equally incapable of foreseeing that this would turn out to be the bloodiest
war in American history. Yet, how these women reacted to the loss of their men,
to the loss of their sons, is not really explored beyond showing that, by the end,
many women were heartily sick of the war. Such gaps are, however, a reflection
of the trend of scholarship in this area, which, Edwards stresses, still has a way
to go. In this study, Edwards has achieved her aim. She has produced a wellwritten, basic narrative of the Civil War South from the female perspective, which
offers a stimulating and accessible introduction to a thriving area of historical
research and debate.
University of Newcastle upon Tyne
S-M. GRANT
Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994. By
Deborah Gray White. Norton. 1999. 320pp. £9.95.
Memoir of James Jackson, the Attentive and Obedient Scholar, Who Died in
Boston, October 31, 1833, Aged Six Years and Eleven Months, by His Teacher,
Miss Susan Paul. Edited by Lois Brown. Harvard University Press. 2000. ix +
169pp. £21.95 (hb), £8.50 (pb).
Deborah White’s excellent piece of scholarly research into black women’s
organizations in the United States is written in the same clear, direct and
honest style as her ground-breaking study of female slaves, Ar’n’t I a Woman?
Her work is accessible and eloquent, and this, her second book, deserves as much
recognition as her first. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, she provides a
chronological analysis of black women’s organizations until the mid-1990s. It is
not just the level of historical detail that makes this book impressive; it is also
the refreshing honesty of White’s writing. Seeking to qualify the view that black
women’s organizations were more concerned with race than with gender issues,
she argues that black women seldom divided their identity into separate spheres,
but instead dealt with all parts of their identity at once. She thus highlights the
divergent ways in which black women of different economic and social classes
brought their race, class and gender to bear on both their organizations and their
self-identification. Despite acknowledging how much black women have achieved
in the past hundred years or so in naming and defending themselves, the tone
of this book, however, is not overtly optimistic. White shows how, by the end of
the twentieth century, black women still had to fight against discrimination and
prejudice and to defend their name. Furthermore, the contentious issues of class,
religion, sexuality and ideology have proved to be major stumbling blocks when
it comes to uniting black women and their organizations. Black women have
never been a monolithic group. In highlighting black women’s differences in such
an open manner, this book represents a welcome addition to scholarship on
the history of black women in America. Likewise, Lois Brown’s edited Memoir
of James Jackson by his teacher, Susan Paul, also makes a contribution to a
sometimes neglected area of African-American history. Highly revealing in its
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descriptions of the life of a free black child in antebellum times, this book also
makes a contribution to social and religious history through the evangelical tone
of Jackson’s teacher, Susan Paul, and the broader racial and political ideas
she embodied. Paul combined two nineteenth-century literary forms in Jackson’s
biography: spiritual narrative and juvenile biography. Undoubtedly this was to
highlight the memoir’s overriding message about African-American humanity
and the fact that she was striving to present a new view of the black community
of Boston. As such, the memoir stands as a unique record of African-American
community life at this time.
University of Reading
EMILY WEST
Woman’s America: Refocusing the Past, 5th edn. Edited by Linda Kerber and Jane
Sherron De Hart. Oxford University Press. 2000. xii + 660pp. £16.99.
An excellent collection of original documents and historical essays, this fifth
edition of Kerber and De Hart’s work serves as a valuable introductory text
to American women’s history. Woman’s America has been updated to include
material more reflective of current issues and critiques of women’s history. In
particular, the text represents the diversity of women’s historical experience, with
challenging essays such as Peggy Pascoe’s ‘Ophelia Paquet, a Tillamook Indian
Wife: Miscegenation Laws and Privileges of Property’. More modern issues are
tackled in Linda Bird Francke’s essay on the Gulf War, and an excellent concluding essay on ‘The New Feminism’ by De Hart. This collection is a valuable teaching tool which will both interest students and challenge them to explore further.
University of Birmingham
HELEN LAVILLE
Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. By Daniel T. Rodgers.
Harvard University Press. 2000. 634pp. £12.50.
This is a big book in every sense. Teeming with individuals and ideas, it has
an enormous sweep, criss-crossing the Atlantic from the end of the nineteenth
century through to the Second World War in an examination of the links
between American and European social politics. As America was transformed
by the rise of the factory and the industrial city, the sense of exceptionalism was
replaced by a feeling that the United States, while forging ahead in economic
development, had fallen behind other nations in the social and political sphere.
Theodore Roosevelt, for example, found it humiliating that European congresses
pointed to America’s poor record of industrial accident compensation. Numerous Americans toured Europe, attended conferences, or even went on special
package tours to learn by example from their European cousins. Toynbee Hall,
the inspiration for the settlement houses, had forty-two visitors from the US in
one year alone. Other US students gained an education and a critique of laissezfaire from a stay in German universities, while yet more drew on the experiences
of Birmingham, Paris and Berlin to learn about public health provision and city
planning. That not all the ideas gleaned from European example were applied
in the US was due to a combination of factors, such as the power of the forces
of resistance, differences in property law or the role of the state, and the negative consequences of the First World War which meant that the label ‘made in
Germany’ – or later, in the aftermath of the Red Scare, ‘Bolshevik’ – became a
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hindrance to the acceptance of ‘foreign’ ideas. While post-war political conservatism and economic materialism countenanced against American reform movements generally, some none the less found inspiration in Irish and Danish farm
co-operatives or the folk schools that influenced the Highlander folk school in
Tennessee. Many of the ideas gathered in Europe surfaced again in the New Deal
when ‘the Atlantic progressive connection reached its culmination’, and America
now took the lead in reform. However, Rodgers argues that this connection
‘unraveled’ during the Second World War. Focusing on the Beveridge report, he
suggests that this was a product of the war that ‘had made Europeans desperately poor’ and the USA ‘uniquely rich’. European social policy became based
on ideas of support and subsidies, while increasingly in America it was based
on growth and affluence. Some readers might question this conclusion as more
recent history has pointed to a revival in the transatlantic connection with ideas
of health insurance crossing from Europe, and New Deal metaphors being used
in British politics. The flow back and forth of broader social and cultural influences is also perhaps worthy of consideration both in the post-war years and in
the period on which Professor Rodgers concentrates. However, scholars on both
sides of the Atlantic will find much to consider in this deeply researched and
wonderfully articulated study.
University of Glamorgan
NEIL A. WYNN
Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929 –1945. By
David M. Kennedy. (Oxford History of the United States.) Oxford University
Press. 1999. 936pp. £30.00.
This book impressively bestrides the period from the Wall Street crash to the
atomic bomb. David Kennedy, the author of Over Here (1980), still the best
holistic study of American society in the First World War, delves into the lives
of ordinary citizens in the 1930s and early 1940s and the anxieties that drove
American politicians and bureaucrats during the collapse of the economy after
1929, the New Deal years and the Second World War. Freedom from Fear is
essentially a chronological narrative, within which themes of insecurity, burgeoning government and progress recur. Only a third of the book is devoted to the
New Deal itself; more than half is devoted to the diplomacy of the late 1930s,
the neutrality issue, the conduct of the war and the home front. Engagingly
written, Freedom from Fear draws on a massive range of secondary scholarship,
diaries and contemporary observation, such as the reports of Harry Hopkins’s
scout, Lorena Hickok. One of the most appealing aspects of the book to a wider
readership is the vivid portrayal of key individuals, such as Franklin Roosevelt,
Hopkins, James Byrnes, Charles Coughlin, Wendell Willkie, Douglas MacArthur
and Isoroku Yamamoto.
After a virtuoso survey of American society in the 1920s and the economic
crisis which enveloped it, Kennedy presents Herbert Hoover as ‘a peculiarly
artless politician’, who recognized problems better than most and who cared
about the unemployed, but was unable to deal with Congress. The advisers who
cooked up the New Deal before FDR’s inauguration and tried to drive it forward thereafter are given due prominence. Kennedy is particularly sympathetic
towards economists like Lauchlin Currie, who argued for the maintenance of
high levels of government spending, but he concludes that the New Deal ‘was
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not a recovery program, at any rate not an effective one’. It did, however,
purchase a new sense of security for most Americans. Roosevelt himself emerges
as energetic, resourceful, deliberately provocative and, at bottom, still an old Progressive. In the management of the neutrality issue, the conduct of the war and
the negotiations with America’s allies, Roosevelt excelled. However, Kennedy’s
concern is primarily with the outlook of those who fought the war, in all ranks.
Throughout the narrative, moments are found to reflect on the impact of depression and war on American women, the farm population, immigrants and
their children (including Japanese immigrants), African-Americans and critics
of the administration. The long bibliographical essay is a useful, well-organized
guide, and two dozen maps illustrate the war in the Pacific and in Europe. Used
alongside works by authors such as Michael E. Parrish (Anxious Decades),
Anthony J. Badger (The New Deal ) and Ann Douglas (Terrible Honesty),
Kennedy’s big book will be of considerable value to both general readers and
students of twentieth-century US history.
University of Strathclyde, Glasgow
MARK ELLIS
Black Civil Rights in America. By Kevern Verney. Routledge. 2000. v + 135pp.
£9.99.
Race, Jobs and the War: The FEPC in the Midwest, 1941–46. By Andrew Edmund
Kersten. University of Illinois Press. 2000. x + 210pp. $35.00.
Civil rights history remains contentious and often mirrors contemporary
arguments between those on either side of the affirmative action question or
between those in favour of and against black separatism. It is possible to fight
battles on the battlefield of history that have some meaning today, making writing civil rights history an attractive option for historians. There are two ways of
adding to the already voluminous store of civil rights histories. First, the historian may produce an overview, perhaps with a reinterpretation, of civil rights
history. Secondly, the historian can choose to examine one of the very few areas
of civil rights history not already examined to death, inevitably a sub-sector, with
the hope of shedding light on important new evidence. Black Civil Rights is of
the former variety, presenting an extremely condensed history of civil rights
throughout the twentieth century, designed for undergraduate students. Though
it contains a useful bibliography, it contains no footnotes. In many ways, it does
exactly what it says on the tin, as the man on the TV would say, and would benefit
the non-expert as an introduction to civil rights history. Quarrels about what
should be included in such a brief history are inevitable. There are a few
mistakes that the editors should have picked up (for instance, they might have
caught the gaffe on p. 32 – the Wagner Act was passed in 1935, not 1937 – as
well as the one on p. 99 – Adarand v. Pena, not Adarond v. Pera). In general,
there are some quite sharp observations, particularly on the impact of the cold
war on civil rights. However, after a useful chapter on black power, the book
seems to break down. There is an abrupt jump from the 1960s to the 1980s. Yet
this is the time that the leadership of the civil rights movement passed to
defenders of affirmative action inside and just outside of the Democratic Party.
How did this happen? The book fails to address this vital question. Its general
theme is that conservatism, even during the Clinton administration, has pushed
black civil rights further off the agenda. But the real story that needs to be told
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is how affirmative action has become ‘institutionalized’, as Nathan Glazer put
it, surviving the assaults made on it by Proposition 209 and by a generally
conservative Supreme Court.
Andrew Edmund Kersten’s offer is the second variety of civil rights history.
The President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practice (FEPC) was established
by Franklin Delano Roosevelt after intense lobbying by black leaders who wished
to eliminate the pervasive racial discrimination in wartime defence industries.
The threat of a march on Washington forced Roosevelt to issue Executive Order
8802 banning employment discrimination because of race, creed, colour or national origin for employers with defence contracts, labour unions, and civilian
agencies of the federal government. The FEPC set up regional offices staffed by
a variety of civil rights activists, academics and bureaucrats. Kersten’s story is
about those set up in the Midwest. It is interesting and topical, given the relative
success of this agency compared to many later affirmative action programmes.
Poring over the FEPC papers, as Kersten did, uncovered many nuggets of
information that add to the picture of government involvement in racial discrimination in employment. An example is the early use, at the St Louis FEPC
hearings in 1944, of the term ‘affirmative action’ in regard to employment of
African-Americans (p. 123). Well written, meticulously footnoted and detailed,
this study will be valuable to both specialists and those with more casual interest in the subject. Kersten notes that the successes of the FEPC in the Midwest
depended upon the support of local labour and civil rights activists, liberal
businessmen and government officials. For an agency with less than twenty
workers in the Midwest, it tackled an enormous task. Certainly, opportunities
for minority workers expanded dramatically; the percentage of blacks in war
industries increased from 2.5 per cent in 1942 to 8.3 per cent in late 1944
(p. 135). However, as Kersten admits in the end, it is unclear how much of this
progress was the result of the efforts of the FEPC and how much was due to
economic necessity. This is a crucial question. If progress occurred because of
economic necessity, the role of the FEPC becomes minor at best, especially given
the fact that state FEPCs, modelled on the federal original, were, by all accounts,
dismal failures. A last caveat: Kersten’s view of FDR as the benevolent wartime
uncle to the FEPC is somewhat one-sided. Though Roosevelt was forced into
creating the agency by threats from civil rights leaders, Kersten credits Roosevelt
for the FEPC and calls it a ‘quintessential New Deal agency’ (p. 5). In general,
he feels that federal involvement in race relations is the most important legacy
of the FEPC. This sanguine view of Uncle Sam during the war must be
tempered by the fact that US federal government led the way in promoting antiJapanese prejudice. This contradiction should have at least been acknowledged,
if not discussed.
University of Sunderland
KEVIN YUILL
Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State during World War II. By Daniel
Kryder. Cambridge University Press. 2000. xv + 301pp. £19.95.
The impact of the Second World War on African-Americans and the civil
rights movement is now a well-worked area of research. However, less has been
written about the effect of the war government policy. Looking at three areas of
racial manpower policy – factory, farm and armed forces – and drawing upon
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an impressive array of federal archives, Kryder attempts to ‘peer over the shoulders’ of the statesmen managing the war. His basic premiss is to challenge
Gunnar Myrdal’s ‘ideational model’ of the war as a force encouraging wider
acceptance of principles of freedom and equality. He suggests that, despite
the expectations of African-Americans, the responses of white politicians were
determined more by electoral and practical considerations than by abstract principle. Thus the rate of progress may have been slowed precisely because statesmen hoped ‘that relatively minor adjustments would defuse claims for permanent
change’. The attempt to ‘assemble a model of the political and organizational
determinants’ of official policy, complete with the diagrams, models and reference
to systemic roles, detracts from what is in many ways a fascinating study. Kryder
often clearly illustrates the sectional nature of America’s war mobilization and
the problems it caused. He looks especially at the use of African-American
appointments within the ‘Black Cabinet’ as a means of defusing tension and at
the significance of the executive order establishing a Fair Employment Practices
Committee in 1941. This, Kryder argues, was a typical Roosevelt measure in that
it offered limited reform rather than anything more drastic. He also suggests that
a rising crime wave and fear of violence in Washington, DC, were major factors
influencing the administration’s decision, but he does not establish a direct link
between the two. Strangely, in this respect, he does not say much either about
official responses to the riots of 1943. However, Kryder looks in detail at some
of the problems in and around the military camps in the South where black
troops were concentrated. He analyses 209 incidents involving black soldiers, but
concentrates especially on events in 1943 at Camp Stewart, Georgia, where black
soldiers killed one and wounded four military policemen. He argues that politicians responded to such incidents with a mixture of coercion, limited concessions, increased surveillance, and a policy of shipping black servicemen
overseas. Increasingly significant were the demands of war for the efficient use
of manpower, such as during the Battle of the Bulge when black and white
platoons were integrated on an experimental basis. Although it may be the case
that ‘despite causing extensive innovation in race management techniques, and
bringing new economic opportunities to all Americans, the war contained rather
than facilitated movements of black liberation’, the factors behind this may be
more complicated than those presented in this book.
University of Glamorgan
NEIL A. WYNN
Celluloid Soldiers: The Warner Bros Campaign against Nazism. By Michael
E. Birdwell. New York University Press. 1999. xxi + 266pp. $35.00.
Neatly avoiding duplication with Rudy Behlmer’s earlier work on the same
studios, while building on both the Warner Bros Archives and Alvin C. York’s
personal papers, Birdwell fruitfully charts the film company’s laudable and outspoken stance against Nazism amid the politically charged yet divided loyalties
of 1930s’ Hollywood. Three films are scrupulously examined to good effect: Black
Legion (1936), Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) and Sergeant York (1941). In
addition, the reputations of neglected studio boss, Harry Warner, and First World
War hero, Sgt York, who reconciled his post-war Christian pacifist principles
with his country’s renewed call to arms in 1941, are considerably enhanced.
The Open University
TONY ALDGATE
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The American Presidency 1945–2000: Illusions of Grandeur. By G. H. Bennett.
Sutton. 2000. xiv + 274pp. £20.00.
This book is a very clearly written account of the development of presidential power since 1945 and the tensions that it thereby gives rise to within the
American system of government. The publishers have augmented the author’s
ease of exposition with a readable, attractive format. The book is clearly designed
for the general reader and here it will undoubtedly be successful. Catchy
chapter headings – for example, ‘Truman: Harry Gives ’em Hell’; ‘Gerry and
Jimmy: An Unlikely Double Act’, or ‘Ronnie: B Movie Presidency at its Best’ –
illustrate the popular touch. This is reinforced by the concluding journalistic
chapter, which includes the author’s own observations from a flying visit to
Chicago in February 2000, tape-recorder in hand, to question ordinary Americans. This is not to denigrate the overall interest of the book, though the author
seems too readily to assume that presidents conspired to expand their power
(pp. 14, 21, 25, 30, 36, 69, 213) when sometimes events required that they did
so (as rightly noted p. 212). Is it true that since Truman’s (of do-nothing-80th
Congress fame) surprise 1948 victory, ‘foreign policy issues would predominate
in future presidential elections’ (p. 34)? Moreover, presidents do not come from
nowhere and the role of political party as a presidential power base needed
examination. Serious readers will regret the incorporation of – sometimes long
– quotations in the text itself, which often seem randomly chosen (pp. 79, 174,
186), presumably to facilitate an absence of footnotes. There is also an imprecision of source identity ( pp. 156, 162, 163,); occasional confusion between
primary and secondary sources ( pp. 263–4); and notable absences from the bibliography, including the memoirs of Presidents Ford, Reagan (though curiously
not Nancy) and Bush (with Scowcroft). Among several slips it should be noted
that Truman actually learned at the White House that FDR had died ( p. 23);
LBJ was elected to Congress in 1937 (p. 100) and Humphrey became his
vice-president in January 1965 (p. 105). It was Betty Ford’s first marriage that
lasted five years; she and bachelor Gerry lived happily ever after ( p. 152). The
Iran–Iraq war ended in 1988 (p. 195), whilst Primary Colors was first a novel
(pp. 227, 267). The author surveys rather than analyses in depth but argues
persuasively. Unsurprisingly, the presidency has recently lost respect but the situation is not terminal (p. 262). However, any office Romeo, with an eye on the
typing pool, will welcome his ‘stress relief’ defence of Clinton over the Lewinsky
affair (p. 240).
University of Liverpool
JOHN KENTLETON
Liberalism and its Discontents. By Alan Brinkley. Harvard University Press. 2000.
xii + 372pp. £11.50.
All serious students of twentieth-century American history will agree that Alan
Brinkley is one of the leading exponents of the subject. This volume of essays
(a bargain at £11.50) lavishly displays all his virtues. It is impressively erudite
and piercingly intelligent; above all, in a book that is markedly controversial, it
is unfailingly civil. Professor Brinkley’s good manners and lucidity are a model
to all of us, from which I hope we will profit. And to call his work controversial does not mean that it is pointlessly argumentative. Rather, in his deep commitment to understanding his subject, Professor Brinkley has, inevitably, grown
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dissatisfied with the conventional interpretations that litter the ground, including
some of his own earlier assumptions. His own researches and those of dozens
of other scholars – all of whose work he seems to have read – and, even more,
the course of time, which inexorably alters our view of the past, have forced him
to ask searching questions. For instance, the whiggish view of national politics
since the New Deal, which tended to assume that the United States was getting
steadily more united, more liberal and more secular, has perforce had to be
challenged in view of events in the past thirty years, especially the rise of an
effective conservative movement and the greatly heightened visibility of evangelical Protestantism. Some of the most valuable and enjoyable of Professor
Brinkley’s essays are those in which he takes these phenomena on board and
begins to interpret them historically. No teacher of the period can afford to ignore
them. If the book has a weakness, it is the complete lack of any comparative
element. I would not like to accuse Professor Brinkley of blinkered nationalism,
but a British reader must be struck by his complete failure to look sideways at
Canada, Britain or Europe for light on his favourite themes, especially the history of the left since the Second World War. His definition of liberalism, for
example, is couched entirely in terms derived from American experience. This
corresponds exactly to how Americans debate themselves and their history, but
it is a serious flaw for all that. The crisis of liberalism (or social democracy, which
is what is really at stake) is general in the west, but it is not exactly the same
everywhere, and the complexity and vigour of the struggle does not suggest that
social democrats need resign themselves to political failure and intellectual nullity
– even in the United States.
University of Essex
HUGH BROGAN
America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s. By Maurice Isserman and Michael
Kazin. Oxford University Press. 2000. x + 358pp. £13.99.
Taking the Civil War of a century earlier as their central metaphor, Isserman
and Kazin, leading historians of the American left and right, respectively, skilfully interweave domestic and foreign events in a scholarly yet compelling
narrative of the ‘culture wars’ which beset America during the 1960s. Without
neglecting such well-known episodes as the rise of black power and the counterculture – indeed, their account of the latter is especially full and informative –
the authors also treat less familiar but historically consequential aspects of the
decade, such as the resurgence of conservatism and revival of religion. This
volume should quickly take its place as the standard history of America in the
1960s.
University of Sheffield
HUGH WILFORD
Sketches from a Life. By George F. Kennan. Norton. 2000 (first pub. 1989). xviii
+ 365pp. $14.99 (pb).
An American Family. The Kennans: The First Three Generations. By George
F. Kennan. Norton. 2000. 137pp. $22.95.
This re-issue of Sketches from a Life comes at a timely moment, now that the
so-called ‘American century’ is being reappraised from the vantage point of a new
one. George Kennan, born in 1904 and still alive as this review is written, was
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a noteworthy figure in the ‘American century’, the peak of his career and the
peak of America’s power coinciding. As a Russian expert in the US embassy
in Moscow in the 1930s and 1940s and later as director of the Policy Planning
Staff in the State Department in Washington, he had an important role in the
formulation of America’s foreign policy, and consequently in how America has
been seen by the rest of the world. In the Sketches, a collection of travel pieces
not initially intended for publication and consequently containing elements of
revealing self-examination as well as his ruminations on world affairs, Kennan
displays the complexity of thought that allowed him to avoid losing sight
of human and moral considerations at a time when ideological and political
partisanship were almost unavoidable. Indeed, a great deal can be found here
that demonstrates the extent to which his political and personal lives have overlapped and influenced each other. His hatred of Stalin’s Soviet regime, which
was behind his inspiration of some of the invective of the early cold war period
(invective he later felt was misused by the US government in its Soviet policy),
does not seem to have stemmed from any deep ideological bias, but rather from
a sadness over the loss of the romantic Tsarist era and an abhorrence of the
Soviet lack of aesthetic sensibilities. In an account of a 1936 visit to the remains
of a manor house where Chekhov had once lived, Kennan reports distress at
finding it neglected: ‘The one really cultured spot in the district had been essentially obliterated: the only spot where life had been lived in a dignified way, and
where there had been cleanliness and beauty and gaiety’ (p. 26). Overall, Kennan
reveals himself to be sensitive and melancholic, having deep misgivings about
human progress in the twentieth century – in the United States as much as
anywhere. As early as 1938 he observed Americans afraid of casual social contact in the ‘temporary moving prisons’ of their motorcars (p. 43). By 1977 he
found American society passively in the grip of mass-produced technology,
having ‘[n]ot a touch of community; not a touch of sociability. . . . All unnatural; all experience vicarious . . .’ (p. 289). One clearly gets a sense of Kennan as
a man who is very keen to establish in his own mind what is proper and what is
improper in any human or political thought or action – a quality (perhaps a
result of his Presbyterian background) that may not have been prevalent among
his political and diplomatic colleagues. It seems that the price Kennan has paid
for his complexity has been a struggle with a growing pessimism about both
America and its foreign policy, and no inconsiderable amount of self-doubt. And,
as with all of Kennan’s less formal writings, there are the human touches that
make the reader warm to the author, such as the moving account of a visit to
his parents’ graves in Milwaukee, where he ‘wept [his] heart out, like a child’
(p. 171); however, the entire book is a pleasure to read, for, unlike most political
figures, Kennan has an accomplished literary style.
In An American Family, Kennan turns his erudition to his own family history.
Here Kennan confirms his credentials as an historian in a well-argued, empathetic account of the first three generations of Kennans in America from the early
eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Covering such issues as education and
religion, this slim volume should prove a particularly useful case study for those
interested in the social history of the New England settlers.
Pennymoor, Devon
PAUL J. PROSSER
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Decade of Transition: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Origins of the American–
Israeli Alliance. By Abraham Ben-Zvi. Columbia University Press. 1998. 219pp.
$55.00 (hb), $20.50 (pb).
Abraham Ben-Zvi, professor of political science at the Jaffe Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, challenges the idea that the Eisenhower
administration was lukewarm towards Israel, and that the foundation for the
American–Israeli alliance did not begin until the election of John F. Kennedy.
Scholars, according to Ben-Zvi, have overlooked the Eisenhower years in favour
of the Six-Day War of 1967, the Egyptian–Israeli Peace Treaty of 1979, and other
events. In Decade of Transition, Ben-Zvi proposes that 1953–62 is the crucial
period for understanding the formation of the American–Israeli alliance. Indeed,
by the late 1950s, the ‘seeds of change in the very essence and intrinsic nature of
American–Israeli relations had not only been planted, but also had begun to
bear fruit’ (p. 3). Kennedy, according to Ben-Zvi, did not change American policy
towards Israel; he only continued the pattern already established by his predecessor. Using recently released material from the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library
in Abilene, Kansas, and the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton
University, Ben-Zvi examines the evolution of Eisenhower’s Israel policy, American reaction to crisis in the region, and how American preconceptions of Israel
and the middle east were replaced by so-called ‘immediate images’. He then shows
how this process produced a policy paradigm that made Israel a strategic partner
in the middle east by 1962. He concludes the book by giving a brief overview of
American–Israeli relations since 1962 within the context of the ‘special relationship’ framework. The end of the cold war, suggests Ben-Zvi, may perhaps bring
the relationship back to a similar point as it was during the Eisenhower years,
as the United States again questions its preconceptions about Israel’s role in
the middle east. Ben-Zvi’s framework is intriguing, and challenges historians to
rethink this early period in American–Israeli relations. Israel, as Ben-Zvi shows,
was not always a willing partner. His focus on crisis and cold war threats in the
middle east gives a very clear picture of how the United States came to see
Israel as a valuable ally in the region. This book is well researched, thorough
and organized in a manner that allows the non-specialist to follow the author’s
argument without becoming bogged down in minutiae. It is a good example of
how case studies in American foreign relations ought to be written. Ben-Zvi has
successfully re-examined an overlooked period in American–Israeli relations, and
thus gives diplomatic historians cause to look again at the history of American
foreign policy in the middle east.
Weber State University
WILLIAM ALLISON
Six Presidents and China: A Great Wall. An Investigative History. By Patrick Tyler.
Public Affairs. 1999. xvi + 476pp. $27.50.
Using an impressive array of sources, including the recollections of many of
the participants in the events he describes, Patrick Tyler has produced a highly
readable and authoritative insight into the development of policy towards China
by successive administrations from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton. Tyler identifies the cultural divide between American and Chinese leaders – the book’s
‘Great Wall’ – as the root cause of Washington’s failure to develop a realistic
policy towards China. Crucially, he argues, it is Washington’s persistent failure
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to understand Beijing’s attitude towards Taiwan that has hamstrung efforts to ‘find
a formula for coexistence’ (p. 16). So it was, Tyler argues, that Nixon’s triumphant visit to Beijing was ultimately undermined by American cold war policy
of support for Taiwan. Tyler also highlights the difficulties faced by all six presidents in reconciling their desire to be seen to manage a moral foreign policy with
the pragmatic reality of events, a problem which contributed to George Bush’s
downfall. The strength of this book lies in its detailed investigation of the foreign policy-making process, especially during the Nixon and Carter presidencies. Tyler brings alive the often mundane politicking involved in the formulation
of policy to such an extent that the reader could be forgiven for wondering whether national interest had not become confused with the personal interests of the protagonists. So, the bureaucratic battles between Henry Kissinger
and William Rogers and, later, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Cyrus Vance form the
central focus of the story. Also, Tyler sheds valuable light on the extent of SinoAmerican co-operation, particularly over the Angolan civil war, and Jimmy
Carter’s connivance at the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979. Tyler is not able,
however, to sustain his forensic style throughout the book. After dealing with
Carter’s normalization of relations with China, he provides only a general analysis of events during the Reagan, Bush and Clinton years. Six Presidents and China
does not pretend to be a theoretical work casting new light on cold war policy.
It does, however, provide an insight into the way in which foreign policy is made.
Patrick Tyler is not afraid to engage in controversial debate by, for example,
supporting Nixon’s primacy over Kissinger in the making of China policy. He
also analyses US foreign policy critically, focusing on its lack of historical perspective and tendency to be in thrall to domestic political pressures. Overall, this
book provides a valuable addition to our understanding of an important area
of academic interest.
University of Warwick
ANDREW ROADNIGHT
America’s Overseas Garrisons: The Leasehold Empire. By Christopher Sandars.
Oxford University Press. 2000. xii + 354pp. £40.00.
I must, regretfully, open with a personal gripe. As the author of the most
comprehensive study to date of the United States and the Panama Canal (Prize
Possession, 1993), I naturally expected a book entitled America’s Overseas Garrisons to have drawn on it. Mr Sandars, however, does not appear to have heard
of the existence of a work which Professor Michael Conniff (not ‘Coniff’) has
described as the last word on the subject. This is a relatively small but significant caveat which I feel bound to enter. Having got that off my chest, I can say
that the rest of the book is a clear, competent and readable survey of a remarkable topic. Mr Sandars’s work is based on a host of secondary material, well
pulled together, and while there is a wealth of information on the base network
developed during and after the Second World War, the treatment is broad enough
to relate it to overall American defence policy. From its entry into the war the
United States aspired to and achieved ‘global reach’, and the scope of America’s Overseas Garrisons is correspondingly extensive, ranging across the Americas, Europe and Asia. And though the emphasis is on the huge expansion of
the US military presence, the author sets it in historical context. The United
States did not leap overnight from isolation to worldwide power projection, and
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its national ambitions vis-à-vis the western hemisphere and the Pacific in the 150
years after the birth of the republic foreshadowed much of what was to come in
the ‘American Century’ proclaimed by Henry Luce in 1941. It is a story which
says a great deal both about the attitudes of a superpower convinced of its title
to reshape the world and the love–hate response of the local satraps in the farflung US dominion. There are some things, I thought, which could have been
elaborated, such as the dedication of the MacArthurs, father and son, to the
outpost of the Philippines, and the contrast between the strategic concept of
‘Fortress America’ and the urge to acquire strongpoints around the world.
Equally, more sociological detail would have been welcome on the intense cultural insularity to be found everywhere in the base areas. And the conclusion
could have examined more closely the implications for American globalism of
the nascent security apparatus of the European Union. All told, however, this is
a useful synthesis which graphically records the burgeoning of a force still far
from spent.
Beverley, East Yorkshire
JOHN MAJOR
Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the
Fifties. By Laura McEnaney. Princeton University Press. 2000. x + 213pp.
£18.95.
The cover of Laura McEnaney’s book shows four mannequins perched over
a table enjoying a dinner party. Minutes later this idyll of fifties’ suburban life is
cruelly blown apart, the elegant hostess surprised into impaling her nostril with
a fork. Operation Doorstep’s brochure warns, ‘This party group was caught
unprepared.’ As McEnaney notes, pictures of the atomic preparedness campaign
in the United States has been dominated by images such as these. Mannequins
caught unawares, staged domestic devastation, and families gamely throwing
picnic blankets over their heads in an attempt to fend of nuclear annihilation
have become embolic of fifties’ America. These images of nuclear Americana
illustrate both the fear of the consequences of nuclear attack and the inadequacy
of any defence, so pitifully hopeless as to be almost humorous. Yet as McEnaney
argues, civil defence was never really a practical exercise. Throughout the history of the Federal Civil Defense Agency (FCDA), experts offered contradictory guesstimates regarding the survivability of nuclear attack. Planning for
nuclear attack said less about the realities of post-atomic survival, and more
about the need to construct an ideology of civil defence that could not only
avert the panic and hysteria which could challenge nuclear policy, but also avoid
complacency in the face of the cold war threat. In other words, as McEnaney
argues, the FCDA’s campaign aimed to ‘simultaneously scare and reassure
people about the bomb’. McEnaney’s work shows how civil defence, lacking any
practical foundation, quickly became a symbolic focus for cold war complexities and contradictions. Control and direction of the programme illustrated
tensions within cold war America regarding the extent to which militarization
would be allowed to intrude into private lives. McEnaney argues convincingly
that the domestic language, which quickly surrounded civil defence, represented
the privatization of preparedness, symbolizing the unwillingness of either the
American people or the government to accept a more intrusive militarization of
family life. Women’s role in civil defence campaigns, encouraged and mediated
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through a network of women’s associations, may have drawn upon and reinforced images of women’s role within the domestic sphere, but also allowed
women to make a claim for greater representation within government agencies,
allowing them, in McEnaney’s words ‘to enhance their professional and political status’. McEnaney’s work offers a well-researched account of the symbolic
nature of civil defence in cold war America. Her work manages to combine a
careful account of the practical limitations on the FCDA – its lack of funds and
vulnerability in the face of political in-fighting – with an illuminating account
of the symbolic value of civil defence. The private home shelter, she concludes,
serves as ‘a case study of the incoherence, contradictions and limitations of Cold
War militarization’. An engaging account of an often-overlooked campaign,
McEnaney’s account of civil defence offers an important insight into the American cold war.
University of Birmingham
HELEN LAVILLE
Americanization and its Limits: Reworking US Technology and Management
in Post-war Europe and Japan, Edited by Jonathan Zeitlin and Gary Herrigel.
Oxford University Press. 2000. xvii + 410pp. £48.00.
There is no doubt that the United States had massive influence on the reconstruction and development of post-war Europe, but how far exactly did it modify
the strong European national cultures? In this era of globalization, this is an
important and interesting question. The ‘Americanization’ studied here is the
relatively narrow, but absolutely large, area of the transfer to Europe of the
American economic model of mass production by modern corporations in an
expanded market disciplined by anti-trust. Jonathan Zeitlin’s introductory
essay argues that the American model was a ‘locally effective ensemble of interdependent elements, which could be deconstructed, modified and recombined
to suit foreign circumstances by self-reflective actors’. The following essays then
provide the detailed evidence. Jacqueline McGlade and Steven Tolliday argue
respectively on policy formation, and on the American car companies, that there
was no single ‘American model’. Ford, for instance, operated in a very different
way from GM. Then Jonathan Zeitlin on British engineering, Kenneth Lipartito
on British telecommunications, characteristically lagging, Henrick Glimstedt on
Swedish cars (Volvo), Mathias Kipping on French steel, Ruggero Ranieri on
Italian steel, Duccio Bigazzi on Italian cars (Fiat and Alfa Romeo), and Paul
Erker on German tyres show how the transfer process was modified and limited by European conditions and actors. Kazuo Wada and Takao Shiba discuss
the American influence on Japan. Finally, Gary Herrigel demonstrates how
American anti-trust policy transformed German and Japanese industrial structures, and then how they were again adapted to even more effective hybrids once
the occupiers had left.
The detailed essays provide some fascinating examples of transatlantic interaction. For instance, Paul Erker’s essay shows how the leading German tyre
companies followed the American model, but were upstaged by Michelin’s steelbelted radials in the mid-1970s. Jonathan Zeitlin’s introductory essay effectively
raises the issues. At one end of the spectrum of Americanization is ‘naïve
convergence theory’, at the other the definition above, and in-between ‘halfAmericanization’ – derived from Michael Hogan. The essays show what a richly
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diverse experience Americanization was, but the extremes of the spectrum
are perhaps suspect. Few would claim that Europeans exactly copied American
technology and industrial organization because of different factor proportions,
markets and industrial traditions and so on. On the other hand, most of the
essays show that the situation was very fluid in 1945, and that frequently, with
American encouragement, the farthest sighted European manufacturers seized
the chance for greater production in a wider market. Their action, widely
diffused, drove Europe forward. Since American aid was a small proportion of
European GNP, this qualitative effect was important. The authors do seem to
demonstrate that, in a general sense, American methods, although not always
the exact organization and technology, were becoming widespread by 1970. There
was a reaction in the 1970s, but as of 2001 there is still far less divergence across
the Atlantic than in 1945. Nevertheless, this is an important book bringing
together for the first time a great deal of useful information.
University of Leeds
JOHN KILLICK
Jazz, Rock and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided
Germany. By Uta G. Poiger. University of California Press. 2000. xiv + 333pp.
$50.00.
This valuable addition to the growing literature about the cultural influence
of the United States on cold war Europe takes as its subject the response of the
authorities in West and East Germany to German youth’s increased consumption during the 1950s of American popular culture, in particular movies, jazz
and rock ‘n’ roll. According to Poiger, elites on both sides of the Iron Curtain
saw this trend as a threat to German identity, linking it with the danger of
fascist resurgence, lower-class immorality (which was implicitly equated with
racial decay) and – Poiger’s main concern – the undermining of gender norms:
US mass culture, it was feared, either feminized German men or made them
excessively aggressive, while at the same time over-sexualizing German women.
At first, official strategies for dealing with this menace were similar: both sets of
authorities simply attempted to exclude American cultural influence from their
territories. Gradually, however, as the cold war intensified, their responses
diverged. The west resorted to a form of repressive tolerance, containing and
domesticating cultural consumption, and then fashioning it into a weapon of
the cold war, luring teenage East Germans to cinemas showing American films
in West Berlin shopping centres. Meanwhile, the East, after some hesitation –
could jazz, as the folk expression of an oppressed American minority, be used
to counter US cultural imperialism? – resorted to ever cruder methods of
coercion, banning concerts, imprisoning jazz critics, and so on, thereby tacitly
acknowledging the politically oppositional character of the youth culture. West
German elites, in contrast, succeeded in depoliticizing youthful rebellion by
invoking an American-influenced social science explanation of it as an inevitable stage of adolescent development. It is a fascinating story and Poiger tells it
well, linking the themes of popular culture, cold war politics and gender identity in revealing and suggestive ways. The book is also an accomplished piece of
scholarship, grounded in a wide range of documentary sources, conceptually
sophisticated without being inaccessible, and extremely well organized. Some
readers may feel that they have not been given enough information about the
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patterns of cultural consumption the authorities were attempting to regulate.
There is little attention paid, for example, to regional variation: the emphasis is,
as the author admits, overwhelmingly on Berlin. The concentration on containment as opposed to consumption also means that, despite the catchy title, the
book is not as much fun to read as, say, Reinhold Wagnleitner’s work on US
culture in post-war Austria, with its talk of the ‘Marilyn Monroe doctrine’ and
‘rock ‘n’ roll-back’. However, these limitations are perhaps inevitable given that
the book’s focus is on elite responses and regulatory strategies. As an account
of these phenomena, it is very impressive.
University of Sheffield
HUGH WILFORD
Reconstructing Italian Fashion: America and the Development of the Italian
Fashion Industry. By Nicola White. Berg. 2000. xvii + 181pp. £15.99.
This book attempts to link American political, economic and cultural influence to the developments that occurred in Italy’s fashion industry in the 1950s
and 1960s. The project is ambitious and only partially successful. The author
describes the impact of Marshall aid on the modernization of the country’s
textile industry and the knock-on effect on the fashion industry. She also shows
how Italian fashion designers were able to understand and successfully exploit
the American market, succeeding where the French failed. The evidence presented in the book reveals how America, after the war, became Italy’s most
important market for the export of couture, boutique and high-quality readyto-wear fashion and that the American authorities encouraged these exports.
Through a process of technical adaptation and the cunning use of cultural stereotypes, Italian designers were able to enter this market and build an international reputation. Where the book falters, however, is where it tries to link the
development of Italian fashion design to American cultural influences. In fact,
the author shows that the success of Italian couture fashion relied on its difference from the ‘American look’. Boutique and ready-to-wear designers developed
a sporty, simple look both to appeal to the American market and also because
these styles were cheaper to produce, giving the industry an instant competitive
advantage. Moreover, fabrics and patterns bore a distinctive ‘Italian look’ and
that is why American women bought them. This book will appeal to fashion
historians, with its wealth of detail and photographs, but cultural historians
are bound to be disappointed by the book’s failure to explore in depth the link
between culture, national identity and fashion.
University of Birmingham
FRANCESCA CARNEVALI
Here, There and Everywhere: The Foreign Politics of American Popular Culture.
Edited by Reinhold Wagnleitner and Elaine Tyler May. University Press of New
England. 2000. xi + 356pp. £18.95.
Every so often there is a ‘breakthrough’ wave of scholarship for American
historians of US foreign policy. In the 1960s, it was the economic dimension,
with the big, bad revisionists raising the prospect that maybe the Americans
weren’t the guys in the white hats. A generation later, the buzzwords were
‘national security’, as most US academics scrambled for the centre ground that
all was done, wisely or unwisely, in the defence of the Free World. And now we
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have ‘culture’. All of a sudden, historians are trading in stories of presidents and
diplomats and generals for jazz, Coca-Cola and the silver screen. Whereas in
1982 Emily Rosenberg’s study of Spreading the American Dream made its mark
because its approach was so different from the repetitions of ‘post-revisionism’,
now established professors and PhD candidates alike are combing the files of
the US Information Agency and ‘private’ groups. Even the defenders of ‘national
security’ are making gestures towards a collective ideology through more leisurely
pastimes. In one sense, this is a much-needed corrective to diplomatic history’s
emphasis on high-level political, economic and military exchanges. A conflict
such as the cold war was a total battle involving all sectors of ‘our’ society against
‘theirs’. The cultural dimension not only reflected the values for which we were
supposedly fighting; it crafted and disseminated them. At the same time, there
are pitfalls to trap those who rush in. Too often ‘culture’ is separated from the
activities of the state or, for those who focus on ‘cultural diplomacy’, the economic structures that define both cultural and political practice. Most significantly, there is the risk that cultural historians become victims of the very values
they are supposedly critiquing. Many are caught up in the self-congratulatory
trumpeting of ‘liberal democracy’, with bandleaders like Tony Smith and Frank
Ninkovich, that rules out the cultural approaches of scholars such as Donald
Pease and Edward Said. Bugbears such as US ‘hegemony’ are chased away
with an invocation of ‘Americanization’ in which the peoples of the world apparently learned how to love the US cultural offensive. Catchy concepts such
as ‘globalization’, far from taking on economic critiques such as Thomas
McCormick’s world systems theory, are emptied of any meaning.
It is in this context that Reinhold Wagnleitner’s and Elaine Tyler May’s
edited volume should be read, fittingly given that the editors – May with her
study of 1950s’ American women, Wagnleitner with his consideration of ‘CocaColonization’ and US cultural intervention in Austria – helped define this new
cultural history. At its best, the book highlights contributions from emerging
scholars linking cultural practice to the ideology of freedom and concepts such
as race and frameworks such as the ‘media’. At its most mundane, the volume
falls into navel-gazing at cultural forms with little economic or political context
or repeats the platitudes of a triumphant American system. The positive aspects
should be celebrated. Penny Von Eschen has followed her 1997 book Race
Against Empire with a riveting study of ‘Jazz, Race, and Empire during the Cold
War’. Here are all the aspects of America’s cultural offensive: the complex state–
private networks that were developed for the mobilization of culture; the even
more complex participation of an artist like Louis Armstrong in that network
as he both worked with and resisted the State Department’s attempted projection of US race relations; the tension of a US cultural policy trying to promote
‘partnership’ with African nations even as American agencies were backing coups
and assassinations to maintain the ‘right’ political alignment. Von Eschen’s
article is complemented by two others, Elizabeth Vihlen’s challenging assessment
of ‘Jazz, France, and the 1950s’ and a lighter but intriguing human-interest story
by Michael May of ‘Swingin’ under Stalin: Russian Jazz during the Cold War
and Beyond’.
Other contributions deserving of special mention include Oliver Schmidt’s
concise study of the American intellectual offensive and the European reaction
in ‘No Innocents Abroad: The Salzburg Impetus and American Studies in
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Europe’ and the best of the pieces on the ‘reception’ of American culture. Rob
Kroes has added to his impressive scholarship with his consideration of ‘Advertising: The Commodification of American Icons of Freedom’; his conclusion that
‘the very forms of protest against America’s alleged cultural imperialism may
have become tinged by the very Americanization that protesters are busy trying
to exorcise’ should open up a more complex debate on Americanization. Thomas
Fuchs’s case study on ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll in the GDR, 1949–1961’ is intriguing, even
if the conclusions need development. Many articles, however, are undercut by
the lack of an analysis linking cultural production and the role of the American
state. The four articles on ‘The World of Hollywood’ are little more than narrative of American cinema and television in Europe and Africa. With the exception of Kroes’s essay, the articles on reception are mostly collections of
observations about Disney in Japan or Bill Bryson in England. The analysis
of J. Michael Jaffe and Gabriel Wiemann of ‘Media Domination in the Internet
Era’ exchanges its consideration that ‘the media lords will likely continue to
function as keepers of the archives of shared culture as well as agenda-setting
focal points of social surveillance’ for comforting visions of a ‘global city’ with
a mythical social organization which will be an alternative to media conglomerates. Even more disappointing, Wagnleitner’s ‘The Internet as the New American
Frontier’ is a broad glance lacking any focus and, ultimately, any conclusion. It
is now more than forty years since Raymond Williams began developing his
study of culture as the ‘organisation of all experience’. This collection, both in
its strengths and weaknesses, reminds me how much remains to be done with
Williams’s analysis.
University of Birmingham
SCOTT LUCAS
California and the Fictions of Capital. By George L. Henderson. Oxford University Press. 1999. xxvii + 265pp. £36.00.
The author tells us that this is a work of historical geography, political
economy and literary criticism. He is very aware of the perils of interdisciplinarity
and hopes that he has surmounted them. Readers may applaud the effort or feel,
at least, some artificiality in the results, but what must be said immediately is
that this work is by a Marxist and by one of those who believes that it is important to any theory of agricultural production in a capitalist society that the
production is centred in nature. He believes that the way in which the owner of
land has to wait on the natural, seasonal rhythms makes him a special case and
differentiates him from other owners of means of production, such as factory
owners making, for instance, ploughs. Those not interested in the arguments as
to whether the family farm is a capitalist enterprise may find the lengthy discussion of the pros and cons a little too extended for their taste, but the author
has to get the debate out of his system before turning to one of his major goals.
This is to attempt to interpret certain Californian literary documents in order
to see what they say about the agricultural development of California in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Those interested in the intellectual
ancestry of the basic argument are directed by the author to the 1978 article
by Susan Mann and James Dickinson, originally published in the Journal of Peasant Studies. The author does not provide a general interpretation of the sweep
of California-centred literary texts. Indeed, he uses only a handful and these are
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treated discretely, according to the purpose of successive chapters. A chapter on
the agricultural history of the San Joaquin Valley at the end of the nineteenth
and beginning of the twentieth centuries is based on readings of Frank Norris’s
The Octopus and William Chambers Morrow’s little-known Blood-Money. Southern California in the period fares better with analysis based on five works:
Frederick R. Sanford’s The Bursting of a Boom, Theodore S. Van Dyke’s Millionaires of a Day, Horace Annesley Vachell’s The Procession of Life, Frank
Lewis Nason’s, The Vision of Elijah Berl, and Stewart Edward White’s The Rose
Dawn. Analysis of the situation in the Imperial Valley rests on Harold Bell
Wright’s The Winning of Barbara Worth with some account of The River by
Ednah Aiken. The author then investigates the way in which both Los Angeles
and San Francisco secured their water supplies by examining Mary Austin’s
The Ford and J. Allan Dunn’s The Water-Bearer. Generally, he uses the texts to
criticize the economic developments and their social repercussions of the period.
Since many of these texts have been long forgotten and have been out of print
for almost as long, it is difficult to know how accurate the author is in his analyses, but what he does not do is establish their representativeness.
The author has read the standard histories and authorities and renders their
arguments faithfully enough. This not a work pushing back the frontiers of
factual knowledge, nor is it particularly well written. Its preoccupations have
already been mentioned but something further of its flavour may be gained by
listing a number of the author’s rhetorical questions which close the work. For
him, twentieth-century literature with Californian themes has been a matter of
silences. ‘Where are the big novels of dam building? The novels of the Bureau
of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers? Where is the novel of
agribusiness investment?’, and so forth. Where, it may be asked, in such a land
and such a literature would there be space for the Californian Shostakovich?
The Eccles Centre, The British Library
R. A. BURCHELL
Concise Historical Atlas of Canada. Edited by William G. Dean et al. University
of Toronto Press. 1998. 180pp. £60.00.
Two of the jewels of collective historical scholarship in Canada in the past
few decades are the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (fourteen volumes to
date) and the three-volume Historical Atlas of Canada. In the three volumes of
the Historical Atlas, the well-researched plates illustrate various aspects of the
historical geography of the country, ranging from the climatic history of the
northern half of the continent, through the millenniums of aboriginal occupation,
to the past five centuries of European exploration, immigration and economic
expansion. Plates combine maps, text, visual documents and statistical information, and they reflect meticulous scholarship and exemplary illustrative technique.
These are complex and complete presentations, and each warrants a great deal
of close attention. Bibliographical information is located at the end of the
volume, providing references and suggesting further reading. The plates convey
current historiographical emphases on social history, presenting the information
in a clear and coherent manner. The Historical Atlas has been distilled to a
concise edition. Of the almost two hundred original plates, sixty-seven are reproduced in this version, reorganized according to three themes: national perspectives, defining episodes and regional patterns. One is not sure what to conclude
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from the fact that, while the first section contains some thirty-three plates, and
twenty-five deal with the regions, only nine episodes define the country’s past.
In general, the thematic structure of this compilation seems somewhat less
useful, at least to historians, than the rough chronological and geographical structure of the three earlier volumes. None the less, the coverage in this selection is
wide-ranging and innovative. A defining feature of Canadian geography is unquestionably the massive size of the half-continent. For instance, the depictions
of travel time from Liverpool to eastern Canada in 1837 and 1852 demonstrate
the impact of the steamship on connections with Britain. Likewise, the importance of the railways in linking up southern Canada show how the country
‘shrunk’ massively in travel time between 1867 and 1891. The plates do not
contain information more recent than the 1961 census. Given the rapid changes
that have taken place in Canadian society over the past forty years, one can hope
for future volumes. The Concise Historical Atlas provides a model of historical
research and presentation. If the entire set is beyond budgetary reach, this
concise version is an excellent second choice.
University of Edinburgh
COLIN M. COATES
The History Atlas of South America. By Edwin Early et al. Macmillan. 1998.
159pp. $27.95.
History atlases are always a source both of fascination – with their visual
capacity and their conciseness – and of frustration – in their tendency to oversimplify for the sake of a convenient fit and in the decisions on inclusion and
exclusion. This volume, however, with forty-six separate entries, does not disappoint, although the title misleads, since ‘South America’ patently means ‘Latin
America’, given the overall neglect of non-Iberian cultures. The strengths are
many. First, there is the series of introductory, scene-setting essays to each of
the seven chronological sections, showing a depth of specialist expertise and a
willingness to acknowledge contentious debates. This is especially so of the
essays on pre-Columbian America (highlighting our overall ignorance), on the
‘discovery’ and conquest (compressing well the complexity of factors, and dispelling certain familiar myths, although ignoring the imperial system’s roots in
the Reconquista), and on the independence rebellions. The second strength lies
in the maps themselves, which are always clear, absorbing, helpful and informative, especially on pre-Columbian patterns, the conquest, the changing empire,
independence, railway developments and the drug trade. Finally, one must
welcome some of the inclusions: the extensive treatment of the pre-1492 periods
(normally relegated to the role of ‘prologue’) and the coverage of Brazil (as both
distinct and an integral part of the wider patterns). However, it is difficult to
understand the preoccupation with wars, and to see why so much space has been
devoted separately to different conflicts: there is even a complete entry on the
(somewhat marginal) First World War. Conversely, it is regrettable that the
Caribbean is largely neglected, with only six pages in all, and also that three
hundred years of the colonial period merit only six entries (compared to nine
on the discovery and conquest, and four on independence). Finally, the fundamental question of slavery is mostly absent and might usefully have been given
a separate entry and map, as could the critical nineteenth-century economic
developments. Yet such objections are inevitable: no compiler could get it right
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for all readers. Inevitable objections to specific judgements (such as Francia’s
supposed xenophobia, or the stereotyping of the FSLN and Cuba) are the cost
of the necessary précis exercise. Overall, the volume gets much more right than
wrong and is a much-welcomed addition to many a shelf on the history of Latin
America, and even to many a coffee-table.
University of Wolverhampton
ANTONI KAPCIA
Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru, 1780–1840. By
Charles F. Walker. Duke University Press. 1999. xiii + 330pp. £34.00 (hb), £11.95
(pb).
This is a very fine book. It charts the development of national identity in late
colonial and early republican Peru by examining the relationship between the
largely indigenous lower classes and the political and economic elites. The
author stresses throughout the book that state formation in Peru can be understood only in terms of that relationship, and he insists that we pay careful attention to its regional and local dimensions. For that reason the book focuses
on the area around Cuzco, the capital of the former Inca empire, and a site of
immense cultural importance to both Spaniards and Indians. After a brief
historiographical survey, Walker’s study opens with an extended examination of
the 1780 Túpac Amaru rebellion, an event that, together with the death of
Agustín Gamarra in 1840, form the parameters of the book. Walker argues that
the rebellion was fundamentally anti-colonial and ‘proto-nationalist’. This
interpretation will sound familiar to Latin Americanists; Walker does not propose any radically new reading of the revolt. None the less, the chapter provides
clear and readable coverage of a key episode in Cuzco’s history – one that is
vital for understanding subsequent relations between Indians and the state. That
relationship is examined more fully in the following chapter, which uses court
records to examine schisms within local communities. Walker argues, unsurprisingly, that these records reveal ‘enduring, behind-the-scenes struggle(s) over
local power’ (p. 74), and that indigenous use of the Spanish legal system both
justified and challenged colonial rule. Overall, the late colonial period emerges
as a time of crisis and ethnic conflict that sets the stage for the outbreak of the
wars of independence, or ‘the arrival of the Santa Patria’, as the delightful chapter
title has it. Walker is somewhat evasive about whether Peru’s Indians supported
independence; Indians in the southern Andes are variously described as ‘cautious’
but not ‘apathetic’ about the war (p. 102), and as giving it massive support
(p. 101). In my view this issue could have stood further probing. Instead, Walker
stresses the multi-layered nature of independence, which he views as far more
than a simple struggle between royalists and insurgents. The final chapters
examine the creation of the republican state in the years after 1824. Focusing
particularly on the figure of the caudillo, or local political boss, Walker argues
that political leaders in post-revolutionary Cuzco did not envision a homogeneous culture. On the contrary, racial distinctions were maintained, and indeed
formed an essential part of the discourse of Cuzco’s most successful caudillo,
Agustín Gamarra. Gamarra’s political rhetoric was ‘Cuzco-specific’, and
appealed to its former glory as the Inca capital. The inability of competing
liberals to develop a comparable regionalist rhetoric contributed, Walker argues,
to their political failure. Republican Peru thus retained not only the colonial
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division between different races, but also heightened regional divisions. Moreover, Walker argues, the indigenous population itself contributed to some extent
to the maintenance of these barriers. Walker’s image of the post-colonial state
is so gloomy that he includes a disclaimer reassuring readers that contemporary
Peruvians do not lack a sense of ‘Peruvian’ identity.
This broad overview of the book’s principal arguments does not do justice to
its richness. While the broad contours of Walker’s thesis are perhaps not surprising, the intelligence and insight that he brings to his analysis lift this book
into an entirely different category of reading experience. His text is full of small
detail and sub-arguments that are a pleasure to read. The study of court cases
is enlivened by a discussion of political rumours; the examination of caudillo
politics pays particular attention to the role of revolutionary festivals and the
political press. Most fascinating of all, he provides splendid information on the
use of the Inca empire as a counter-hegemonic symbol throughout the entire
picture. From the Túpac Amaru rebellion to the rise of Gamarra, the Incas were
invoked to justify a wide variety of political and social projects. Walker thus
develops Alberto Flores Galindo’s ideas of Inca utopianism in his exemplary
case study. I will certainly use my heavily annotated copy of Smoldering Ashes
in my own research, and I am sure that other readers interested in Spanish
America, subaltern studies, and the development of nationalism will find this
volume equally appealing.
University of Warwick
REBECCA EARLE
Europe and Latin America: Returning the Gaze. By Peter Beardsell. Manchester
University Press. 2000. xv + 233pp. £13.99.
This book takes up a post-colonial studies perspective to examine Latin
America’s cultural relationship with Europe and to explore the ways in which
Latin Americans have reshaped that relationship to construct their own identity. It opens with a concise and comprehensible introduction to the genesis and
implications of the post-colonial approach and thus sets the context for the
book’s main theme: Latin American responses to the Eurocentric view of the
world which was constructed during the colonial period and has continued to
influence understandings of Latin America’s character and identity until the
present day. Exposition of this theme begins with an outline of European representations of the New World and rehearses the familiar argument that the
images conjured up by Columbus and colonial chroniclers served primarily to
reinforce Europe’s own sense of identity and to assert its cultural superiority.
Then, in the main body of the book, Beardsell proceeds to analyse the ways in
which colonized peoples and their descendants have responded to this
objectifying and subordinating ‘European gaze’, and, by turning themselves from
objects to subjects, have built a distinctive, non-colonial identity. Indians, he
contends, initiated this tradition by interpreting the conquest in a way that was
their own. Whereas for Spaniards the conquest was victory and triumph; Indians saw it, in accord with their own beliefs and prophecies, as a ‘disaster and
sorrow’ visited upon them by a preordained providence. For the societies formed
under colonial rule, such conflicting representations of conquest have become
central to the quest for identity. This, Beardsell argues, is reflected in works of
literature and theatre which – from colonial times to the present – constantly
© The Historical Association 2001
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REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES
revisit the theme of conquest in an anxious quest to identify with conquerers or
conquered or, more recently, to integrate these two sides of Latin America’s split
personality.
The consequences of tension between the Indian, African and European
elements of Latin America’s past and present is further explored in successive
chapters that examine ways in which the disputes over the European discourse
of ‘civilization’ have been bound up in the construction of national identities
in post-independence Latin America. It is here that, as a specialist in Latin
American literature, the author comes into his own. His analysis draws widely
and eclectically on the productions of (mostly twentieth-century) Latin American novelists, poets and artists to show how, while absorbing developments
in European culture, they have rejected Europe’s pretensions to provide a key
to understanding and a path to progress, and have asserted Latin America’s
own distinctive identity. The identity discovered by Latin American writers and
artists who returned the ‘European gaze’ has, it is argued, been further revealed
and reinforced by differentiation from the North American ‘other’. Rather
than being overwhelmed by US material power and cultural influence, Latin
America has found means to emphasize its own identity more strongly, notably
through the same methods of ‘critical appropriation’ of external influences that
have characterized cultural relations with Europe. Indeed, the book concludes,
Latin America’s exposure to the political and cultural power of the economically more potent world of the developed North has not been a one-way process of acculturation. It has, instead, been a ‘transculturation’, or mutual
transformation, in which Latin Americans have selected aspects of imperialist
cultures in a conscious exploration and constructive assertion of their own
identity. This is, then, a book which reflects the wider shift in the academic world
from the disciplines of history and literature towards cultural studies. It is
perhaps vulnerable to the criticism that, like many other studies which adopt
the post-colonial or colonial discourse approach, it never defines the concept of
culture clearly, treats Europe as though it were a homogeneous whole, and
concentrates mainly on elites while having little to say about majorities. And,
on a more specialist note, historians interested in the construction of ‘colonial
discourse’ will be disappointed: there is relatively little here about the dissemination of European values and its conduits during the colonial period, even
during the eighteenth century when, according to Edward Said, the Enlightenment gave new impetus to making Europe dominant over other cultures. But
this, perhaps, is to go beyond the author’s intention in this book. His concern is
to shift our focus from the colonialists’ culture to the culture of the colonized,
and to argue that, despite the powerful influences of European culture, colonial
subjects did not simply become enmeshed in a web of beliefs and values that
validated European superiority. Latin Americans, it is argued, have found the
means to represent themselves and to find an identity which is richly reflected
in their literature and art. In shifting from the ‘European gaze’ to the ‘returned
gaze’, this book incorporates fresh perspectives on post-independence Latin
American culture from the author’s own and others’ work, and for the nonspecialist it offers an interesting and readable introduction to the ways in which
creative writers and artists have responded to the dilemmas of an identity born
in European dominance.
University of Warwick
ANTHONY MCFARLANE
© The Historical Association 2001