Biography Of Great Men Research Articles

On Charles V

Biographies of great men are often undertaken by amateurs. Professional historians prefer to focus on collective institutions that are thought to be the theater of history properly understood. Geoffrey Parker has been a key figure in developing the “military revolution” hypothesis that has guided a good deal of recent work in early modern military history; he understands the perils of a biography better than most. But, having spent years amid the stacks of paperwork left by Spanish-Habsburg rulers, he also knows that the personal decisions of a Charles V (1500–58) made a difference. Charles signed more than 100,000 state documents, many of them with annotations in a distinctive hand that (one might say) only a mother could love.

PEIRCE ON THE USES OF HISTORY BY TULLIO VIOLA

Reviewed by: Peirce on the Uses of History by Tullio Viola Giovanni Maddalena Tullio Viola Peirce on the Uses of History Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2020. 261 pp. (incl. name and subject index) It is difficult to devise a new approach to any topic in Peirce scholarship, and it is also difficult to convincingly bring one to life. Tullio Viola's book, Peirce on the Uses of History, elegantly accomplishes this second trick, making it well worth reading. Viola is one of the many representatives of a new generation of Italian Peirce scholars (wherever based) who are connecting a solid philological and historical work about Peirce's writings with a vivid theoretical depth. Similar works by Chiara Ambrosio, Francesco Bellucci, Maria Regina Brioschi, Claudia Cristalli, Gabriele Gava, Maria Luisi, and Marco Stango on various aspects of Peirce's thought testify to the vitality of studies inspired by this profound connection. Peirce on the Uses of History deepens the various paths that relate the American philosopher's ideas to history, paths that discuss (a) Peirce's own studies of history, (b) his philosophical conception of history, and (c) his methodology for treating history. One of the few problems of the book is that Viola does not discuss each of these themes separately in its three parts, but rather, these topics are inextricably bound together due to the characteristic entanglement of Peirce's writings. However, Viola's reasoning and writing are absolutely clear, making it easy to follow these themes in the course of reading the seven chapters of the book. As for the first theme, Peirce's studies of history (a), the book's discussion in the two first chapters is splendid and worth reading for any Peirce scholar. Viola underlines the debt of Peirce to Whewell's metaphysical and logical views, which considered any observation as necessarily entailing conceptual elements, making history more the unfolding of vague, initial and real ideas than a sum of particular [End Page 288] accidents. As is well known, this approach would lead Peirce to a devotion to Duns Scotus's realism and then, at the beginning of the 1880s, in the Baltimore period, to research in a number of different fields of the history of science: the work on the Epistula de Magnete by Petrus Peregrinus, the biographies of great men, and the lexicography created in the long collaboration with the Century Dictionary. This growing interest would eventually lead to his two attempts to sketch a complete history of science in the Lowell Lectures of 1892—93 (that will be published in volume 9 of the Writings, cited by Viola) and the so-called "Putnam History" (never published) of the years 1896—98, in which Peirce's interests as a historian became intertwined with, and sometimes came into conflict with, Peirce's inquiry in both the philosophy and logic of history. The gist of this first part of Viola's book (chapter 1 and part of chapter 2), that has a short follow up in chapter 6, involves his description of the chronology of Peirce's studies of history and his argument that portions of these studies that have traditionally been seen as disjointed actually fit together seamlessly if one understands Peirce's attitude towards history. The reader will understand better the connections between Peirce's studies of Egyptian pyramids, the pronunciation of Shakespeare, and Mach's mechanics. If there is any quibble with this section of the book, it is that it does not satisfy the reader wanting to know more about some of the topics discussed, including the results of some of Peirce's research that apparently fell short of a proper conclusion and the historical studies that Peirce carried out in the later part of his life, after 1908. Viola treats the second theme, Peirce's philosophy of history (b), at the end of chapter 2, focusing on his classification of sciences. Here, Viola engages in his most effective philology, both in his comparison of the different versions of the classification and by putting to work the crucial notion of teleology and final causation that informs the process by which Peirce generated his classification. This notion is also at...

Psycho-Historical Perceptions of Gandhi

The literature on leadership has its roots in the “Great Man” Theory of Thomas Carlyle, who declared that “The history of the world is but the biography of great men”. These works which emphasised only political, economic, and social motivations for events, gave way to Erikson‟s, “Gandhi‟s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence”, is an attempt at understanding Gandhi through a Psycho-biographical study. Psycho-history analyses the incidents that left a deep impression on Gandhi and examines these experiences that Gandhi used on his techniques such as fasting, Ahimsa and Satyagraha later on. The present paper is a historiographical account of the psycho-historical writings on Gandhi. Erikson‟s seminal work which actually gained for Psychohistory its recognition, forms the major source of this paper and also includes some more recently published works such as Wolpert, Richards and Lelyveld. These narratives have explored the varied facets of his personality and his identity which had blurred between myth and history. Gandhi in most writings is raised to the stature of the Mahatma, but psycho-history has done justice to his character as it brings out the human side of the leader with all his frailties.

Economics and Ethics in the Victorian Novel

BLUMBERG, ILANA M. Victorian Sacrifice: Ethics and Economics in Mid-Century Novels. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2013. 260 pp. $69.95 hardcover. KREISEL, DEANNA K. Economic Woman: Demand, Gender, and Narrative Closure in Eliot and Hardy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. 309 pp. $65.00 hardcover. SIEGEL, DANIEL. Charity and Condescension: Victorian Literature and the Dilemmas of Philanthropy. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2012. 209 pp. $49.95 hardcover. Despite the significant body of dedicated to economics and the history of the novel, there is still much work to be done exploring the dense interconnections between emerging capitalism and Victorian literature. Each of the three monographs that are the subject of this review offers original and important contributions to this critical terrain. All three explore how literary texts negotiate and narrativize complex ideas about economic structures and relationships. Although their theoretical commitments vary--theological and historicist for Blumberg, structuralist for Siegel, psychoanalytic and narratological for Kreisel--each is committed to practices of historicized interpretation, predicated on the assumption that literature contains, as Kreisel puts it, textual symptoms of its cultural and discursive context (15). Thus close textual readings illuminate how self-sacrifice shifts in the nineteenth century from a dominant cultural value to an ambivalent, morally ambiguous one (Blumberg); how condescension begins to take on its modern connotations as a patronizing power play that asserts rather than relinquishes superiority (Siegel); and how fears about the new capitalist system are embodied in novelistic images of feminized sexuality (Kreisel). In Victorian Sacrifice: Ethics and Economics in Mid-Century Novels, liana Blumberg argues that mid-century Victorians were faced with two competing ideologies--the of self-sacrifice enshrined through Christian theology and the ideal of self-interest promoted by the new capitalist order. The novelistic response, Blumberg argues, was a new ethical realism that incorporated self-interest and sacrifice, a negotiated truce between what Herbert Spencer would call a proper altruism and a reasonable (2). In wide-ranging readings of Charlotte Mary Yonge, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, and Mary Augusta Ward, Blumberg explores how mid-century novelists developed various iterations of an ethic of mutual benefit (18), a practicable ethics that allowed authors to navigate the new economic realities of capitalism without eschewing the basic value of social generosity. For example, Adam Bede rejects unreasonable guilt and suggests that measured personal benefit is justifiable, in a world where others will continue to suffer (28). Looking back towards the first half of the century, Blumberg argues that the sensibility was dominant, promoted not only by Christian sermons and tracts but also bestselling novels and poetry, published eulogies and biographies of great men and women, accounts of war and empire, self-help manuals and housekeeping guides, treatises of political economy, the history of art, and literary criticism (3). Victorian Sacrifice does a particularly admirable job surveying the religious context of the mid-nineteenth century. The ethics of sacrifice were evident both in the dominance of Atonement theology--the emphasis on Christ's sacrifice to save humanity from their sins--and the pervasive, even ubiquitous, emphasis on personal sacrifice in imitation of Christ. As Blumberg makes a point of noting, even nonbelievers of the period were immersed in Christian ideology and often accepted the Christian value of sacrifice. She reads the Victorian ideology of duty, both Christian and secularized, as an extension of the sacrificial ideal, and describes how many of the new humanists adopted a renunciatory imperative (9) that read any taint of egoism as fundamentally incompatible with the social of altruism. …

Let's get dangerous – A review of current scholarship in public relation history

IntroductionThe mottoofthiscommentarycomesfromthelateSovietpresidentNikitaKhrushchev,whosaidin1956:“Historiansaredangerous and capable of upsetting everything”. It is applied in an ironic manner, as I wish that public relations historianswere more challenging than they are. In this paper the “state of play” in the history of public relations field is considered.It reflects upon papers and keynote addresses delivered at the International History of Public Relations Conference (IHPRC),which was first held in 2010, and journal articles published since 2008. Using these data, recent historiography and schol-arship are reviewed. The field, it will be shown, is trending from an initial eclectic, often descriptive, approach towards themore analytical and sometimes critical.ReconsiderationI argue for reconsideration of the “Great Men” focus and the Anglo-American primacy (e.g. content of many texts andarticles. Increatingahistoryofpublicrelations,somescholarsandmanyintroductorytextshavereliedtoomuchonThomasCarlyle’s dictum that, “the history of the world is but the biography of great men”. It is greatly concerning that manydeveloping countryscholarsapplyGrunigandHunt’sfourmodels(Grunig&Hunt,1984)andExcellenceTheoryasframestorecord andbenchmarkthegrowthoftheirnationalPRsectorusingtheseconvenientbutculturallyinappropriatestandards.There is,however,anemerginghistoriographicdebate,exemplifiedbyMegLammeandKarenMillerRussell’smonograph– RemovingtheSpin:TowardsaNewTheoryofPublicRelationsHistory(2010).Otherimportantcontributionsarerecentbooks,articles andpresentationsfromJacquieL’Etang,GunterBentele,DavidMcKie,DebashishMunshi,andJordiXifra.Theimpetusis growing for a genuine revision of the history of public relations in many countries which will show a less corporatist andmore authentic foundation.There is also a case for a distinction between public relations-like strategies and actions that occurred before publicityand public relations became discussed entities in the late 19th century, which I call ‘proto-PR’, and ‘public relations’ itself.The exact time boundary may never be defined but publicity, press agentry and institutionalised communication activitieswere widely evident in some countries from around 1875 onwards.

A bridge too far [bridge design

The history of engineering, as that of civilisation itself, is clearly one of both successes and failures, and paradoxically the failures are really the more useful component of the mix. Although examples of good engineering practice and grand technical successes can certainly serve as paradigms of good judgement and things to emulate, great engineers and great people generally do not become so merely by reading biographies of great men and women. And great new engineering achievements do not come to be so merely by inference from an extrapolation of successful precedents.

Russia's Oil Barons and Metal Magnates: Oligarchs and the State in Transition by Stephen Fortescue (review)

774 SEER, 86, 4, OCTOBER 2008 of the economic and political structure,but a weakness in that itdetracts from themajor theme of the book. Reforms under Brezhnev and Khrushchev, for example, were more about centralization and decentralization, departmental ization and administrative hierarchies ? the reader might have been pointed more explicidy to how such topicswere linked to the ownership of assets. The book has appeal to those in political studies: ithas detailed consider ation of recent developments under Putin and his conflicts with Gusinskii, Berezovskii, Abramovich; and there is a in depth discussion of the Yukos controversy. Here the author shifts attention to relations between interests in the state system and challenges by those in the economy, and to industrial organization and reorganization. The book's conclusion does not analyse the role of property ownership in the transformation process, but discusses the multiple actors involved and the implications forpolicy makers. The book can be recommended for specialists in politics concerned with the transformation of property relations inRussia and ithas a good literature review of mainly American sources on economic and political transition. Emmanuel College,Cambridge David Lane Fortescue, Stephen. Russia's Oil Barons and Metal Magnates: Oligarchs and the State inTransition. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2006. xv + 233 pp. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?50.00. Modern Russia appears inmany ways to have turned the clock back to the days when itmight have seemed, inThomas Carlyle's words, that the 'his tory of the world is but the biography of great men'. Gorbachev, El'tsin, Putin, siloviki, oligarchs ? the great engines of economic and social evolution seem just to provide the backdrop to these colossi as they reshape their country. Of course, the reality is that the human agents are empowered, constrained, elevated and becalmed by thewider and deeper forces affecting Russia but, for thepresent, personalities and their interactions do seem toplay a remarkable role in the country's progress. In this context, while there is a solid body of biographical literature on successive leaders and also a growing body of research on the new elite of the siloviki whom Putin has raised from thepolice, securityapparatus and military, it is strikinghow fragmentary the research on themajor business-people has been. There are studies of particular individuals and events, but surprisingly littleon these 'oligarchs' as a whole. What literature there is tends to come from journalists and concentrates on the horror stories of privatization ? of which there are admittedly many ? rather than subsequent economic management and consolidation. This book thus fills an important and relatively underpopulated niche. Stephen Fortescue, associate professor in politics and international relations at the University of New South Wales, has had a career spanning both the academic and business worlds. He has certainly done his homework, as this is a detailed, intricate and thoroughly referenced work. He has also set out to answer a range of interesting and important questions. From the reviews 775 very first,he challenges the accuracy and utility of the term 'oligarchs' as the businesspeople in question have made no efforts to gain formal political power. At the same time, he has to accept that ithas become impossible to avoid, however much itneeds to be treatedwith caution. Beyond this, he explores whether they are canny entrepreneurs or corrupt asset-strippers, how they firstgot theirmoney, what they have done with it, and whether they are as much of a malign force inpolitics and the economy as their detractors suggest. His overall conclusions are that while their origins are varied (and certainly in some cases shadowy) they are 'clever, adaptable people who have at the very least restored to health and atmost transformed the sectors they are involved in' (p. 174). Although he clearly tries to be even-handed, Fortescue ultimately sees the oligarchs in a positive light.To him, the greater danger is that Putin or his successor swings either towards effective renationalization or the Latin American-style populist politics of dispossession. Instead, he argues that the government and people must 'recognize the rightof the oligarchs to exist and evolve' (p. 179) and wait for these personalized business empires to become 'normal' corporations over time and generations. This sounds perhaps a little optimistic, and...

Media and Celebrity Culture—Subjectivist, Structuralist and Post-structuralist Approaches to Mother Teresa's Celebrity Status

There has never been a society without famous people and, as Thomas Carlyle once put it, ‘[t]he history of the world is but the biography of great men’ (1966, p. 29). In pre-industrialized societie...

Introduction

Introduction Linda Leavell (bio) The critical climate of recent decades has favored most forms of life writing. Open the latest edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, American Literature, or World Literature, for example, and you will find letters, diaries, slave narratives, travel narratives, memoirs, and autobiographies that would not have appeared there before the 1980s. But biography? Norton's earliest selections of world literature show biography not yet distinct from heroic epics and the sacred writings of the Old Testament. In the first two of six volumes of English literature, biography is well, but not newly, represented, from Bede's story of Caedmon to Izaak Walton's Life of Dr. John Donne. Near the end of the third volume appear excerpts from James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson. And after that (1791), the point at which biography assumed its modern form, the anthologies include no biography whatsoever. No Elizabeth Gaskell (no biography, that is). No Lytton Strachey. Certainly no Richard Ellmann.1 Why the shunning of this venerable and popular form? Many would trace the disdain for literary biography—in both senses of "literary"—back through Roland Barthes's "death of the author" to the New Critics' division of text from context all the way to T. S. Eliot's theory of impersonality.2 Critical theory of the past century has generally deemed an author's life, personality, and intentions irrelevant to the text. If biography draws suspicion both as literature and as literary criticism, what about as history? Despite the regular appearance of historical biographies at the top of bestseller lists, biography has sunk even lower in history departments than it has in literature departments. It is associated there with the Great Man theory: the view that, in Thomas Carlyle's words, "The History of the world is but the Biography of great men."3 No longer a sequence of kings, generals, battles, and treaties, history has become a confluence of social, economic, and political forces, in which masses of unnamed women and men, the marginalized and oppressed, play as important a role as that of the powerful elite. As biography was sinking into irrelevance and political incorrectness among postmodern academics, it has ironically proved itself fertile ground for postmodern novelists. One of the best places to find [End Page 1] postmodern analyses of biography—through deconstruction, paradox, and parody—is the contemporary fiction section of the local bookstore. Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot and A. S. Byatt's The Biographer's Tale both overtly engage questions of biography, and many other novels have flirted with the genre.4 The question of whether biography is "a form of fiction," as these novels imply, or "a form of history," as many readers assume, "points to the unresolvable conflict within the practice—and consumption—of biography," says Hermione Lee.5 Lee observed five years ago that the status of biography may at last be rising within the academy. Conferences are being organized. Courses are being offered. Single and multi-author books analyzing the genre appear with regularity. This issue of South Central Review results directly from such activity. Last October, Yale University hosted a symposium on literary biography and modernism. There I met Diane Middlebrook and Brenda Wineapple, both of whom agreed to let their presentations be included here. In the 1990s the National Endowment for the Humanities offered two Summer Seminars on Literary Biography. N. John Hall, who proposed and led these seminars, and Allen Hibbard, my fellow participant in the 1998 one, both contributed essays. Through the South Central Modern Language Association I have come to know, or know better, several scholars interested in biography, among them Janis P. Stout, another contributor, and Melanie Hawthorne, who kindly invited me to serve as guest editor. The six essays here address both the practice and consumption of biography. The first three focus on elements of artistry that biography shares with other literary narratives. Diane Middlebrook argues for the importance of the narrative voice—the creation of a reliable but engaging storyteller—in making biography literary. The narrator's transparency in most biographies does not preclude the necessity for artfully constructing this voice. She analyzes the narrators...

Iraj Afshar. « Book Translations as a Cultural Activity in Iran 1806-1896 ». Iran, 41 (2003), pp. 279-289.

This pioneering article provides intriguing insight into the energy with which Iranian intellectuals and bureaucrats set out to translate key works of European science, history-writing, philosophy, geography, and literature in the 19th century. The author suggests that the first translations, mostly involving books on military history and biographies of great men, were produced in the first decade of the century, and notes how much of the activity was court-sponsored, with especially Nasir al...

Entre la France et le Japon : Foujta et Légendes japonaises (1923)

Born in Tokyo during the Meiji Era, the artist Foujita Tsuguharu (1886-1968) lived in Paris for almost forty years and at the end of his life became a naturalized French citizen. Foujita's first stay in France, from 1913 to 1929, is the period most deserving of intense research. During the 1920s, the so-called années folles, there were many lively diplomatic and cultural exchanges between France and Japan. Foujita played an important role in these events since he came to represent Japan in the minds of the French. In 1923, he was the driving force behind the publication of an illustrated book, Légendes japonaises {Japanese Legends). Not just a translation of a previously published work, Légendes japonaises was a completely new edition created for French readers. Foujita drew the illustrations for this book in his role as an artist and also contributed greatly, in his role as a Japanese, to the compilation of the text and its translation from Japanese. This article discusses the context of this book's publication, as well as tne process of creating Légendes japonaises. As the « representative » of Japan in France, Foujita relied upon those texts and images from his homeland that he was able to locate in Paris. Zenken Kojitsu {Portraits and Biographies of Great Men from the Past), a ten-volume series of drawings by the Japanese artist Kikuchi Yosai (1788-1878) published at the end of the Edo period, was the most obvious source of images for Foujita. The relationship between Foujita's work and the Zenken Kojitsu is analyzed here through reference to several concrete examples, and the influence of Légendes japonaises on his future illustrations and paintings is also discussed.

The History of Surgery in Massachusetts

Thomas Carlyle noted that “The history of the world is but the biography of great men.” 1 The history of surgery in Massachusetts is full of great men who have made enormous contributions to the art and the science of surgery. I will concentrate for the most part on the century just past, and on the surgeons, mostly from Massachusetts but some from the other New England states, who have made those contributions and provided leadership and vision to the New England Surgical Society (NESS).

A SHORT HISTORY OF NEUROLOGY.

In some instances certainly it is true that those who ignore the lessons of history are likely to repeat the mistakes of earlier generations. Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) thought a little differently, feeling that no great man lives in vain, that history is the essence of innumerable biographies and that the history of the world is but the biography of great men. Interest in the history of medicine has mushroomed in the last decade or two and individual biographies, hospital histories, specialist journals such as the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences and sections in general journals such as Archives of Neurology , Neurology (Minneapolis) , The Lancet , the Journal of The Royal Society of Medicine and others have conveyed the lessons of history to a wider readership. Dr Frank Clifford Rose, Director of the London Neurological Centre and Chairman of the World Federation of Neurology Research Group on the History of the Neurosciences, is the Editor of this superb yet concise volume, the first of a pair that describes some of the important British contributions to neurology. This volume covers the years 1660–1910 in a series of 20 articles within 282 pages, including a good index. The references in the 20 chapters are legion—over 700 references, a few duplicated but a mine of information from which to chase primary sources. Rose himself writes on John Fothergill (1712–1780), James Parkinson (1755–1824) and on three writers of early nineteenth-century British neurological texts, namely John Cooke (1756–1838), Charles Bell (1774–1841) and Marshall Hall (1790–1857), advancing still further Rose's prolific contributions to the history of the neurosciences. In fact, this volume forms part of the proceedings of the Mansell Bequest Symposium which was held at the Medical Society of London (founded in 1773) and uses the term Neurohistory—a new word now to …

Abba Hillel Silver and American Zionism (review)

148 SHOFAR Summer 1999 Vol. 17, No.4 Abba Hillel Silver and American Zionism, edited by Mark A. Raider, Jonathan D. Sarna, and Ronald W. Zweig. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass Publishers, 1997. 127 pp. $37.50. In reading Abba Hillel Silver and American Zionism, the reviewer recalls Thomas Carlyles' statement: "The history of the world is but the biography of great men." As the Jewish world marks the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, this book is avery timely reminder that in reflecting upon the history of the Zionist movement and the creation of the Jewish state, one cannot overlook the significant accomplishments of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver. These collected essays offer the reader a careful and reasoned analysis of such pertinent questions as, "How did Silver's rabbinic career influence his actions as a Zionist leader?" "What was the source of his political strength and skill as a Zionist leader?" and "What impact did Silver have in the struggle to achieve Jewish statehood?" Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver (1893-1963) was not only a forceful and commanding presence in the American rabbinate, but also a dynamic and inspiring orator, a master of the Hebrew language, an intellectual luminary, and an uncommonly eloquent and persuasive voice for Zionism in the halls, not only ofJewish forums, but in Washington, D.C. and the United Nations. In a time when Refonn Judaism was primarily opposed to the aspirations and the principles of Zionism, Silver, as a leading Refonn congregational rabbi, first in Wheeling, West Virginia and then in Cleveland, Ohio, became an ardent champion of Zionism. For Silver, as these essays convincingly posit, there was no incompatibility between being a Refonn Jew and an ardent espouser of Zionism. This is borne out in Mark Raider's essay, "Where American Zionism Differed," in which he quotes Silver, "Zionism is the national effort to restore the lost hannony of Jewish life. It aims at a reconstituted totality of Jewish existence" (p. 93). There is much in Silver's writings and pronouncements that is not dated, even today. Thus, as Hasia Diner's essay, "Zion and America: The Fonnative Visions of Abba Hillel Silver," demonstrates, Silver was greatly concerned by the lack of unity among American Jews. He saw it not only as a political problem, but also as one which indicated the presence ofspiritual torpor in American Jewish life. Silver was profoundly disturbed by the low level of spirituality among American Jews and the absence of a strong interest in Jewish education. One wonders if Silver would have thus been heartened by recent trends in American Judaism indicating a desire on the part of more Jews to fmd increased spirituality and meaning in life and by Refonn Judaism's call for a stronger commitment to Torah study and Jewish learning in general. This reviewer was also struck by the parallel between Silver's call for a "vital Liberal Judaism" in Israel in order to keep alive Israel's spiritual strength and the contemporary struggles within Israel for the equal rights and recognition of nonOrthodox fonns ofJudaism. It was Rabbi Silver who insisted on an indigenous Israeli Book Reviews 149 form ofReform Judaism, when he said, "We cannot import our special brand ofReform Judaism into Israel. Our spiritual apparel may not be suitable raiment for them" (p. 30). However, Michael Meyer, in his essay, "Abba Hillel Silver as Zionist within the Camp of Reform Judaism," correctly points out that Silver was still a classical Reform Jew whose Reform Jewish ideology was very much patterned after prophetic Judaism rather than, as now evidenced within Reform Judaism, increased ritual and tradition. One of the major strengths of this book is its emphasis on the strong connection between American liberalism and Zionism in Silver's life. The influence of the ancient prophets with their clarion call for justice and righteousness was manifested in Silver's assertion, made again and again, that Zionism and liberal democracy are co-partners in giving meaning to people's lives. Thus his impassioned efforts to promote effective prolabor legislation and to further the cause of women suffrage, as well as his espousal of other liberal causes, emanated from...

Carlyle and The Economics of Terror: A Study of Revisionary Gothicism in The French Revolution by Mary Desaulniers

of this emergent domestic direction; and is able to see little pedagogic utility in some more recent developments (such as feminist literary theory). But — with its respect for individual, reflective student response, as exemplified in the detailed teaching unit provided by Ian Underhill — neo-Diltzianism has merit as a form of resistance to the circulars and directives currently being produced by the provincial Ministry of Education, where “English” is principally conceived as an element of workplace training. Lambert’s and Gutteridge’s studies, like most work on the discipline of English studies in Canada to date, are confined to Ontario. While they have a broader applicability and relevance — both as examples of detailed and analytical institutional histories, and because of the influence of Ontario in setting curricular directions for English Canada— one hopes for similar studies for other provinces and areas in the near future, and at various levels of analysis (schools, figures, publics, and policies). Only then will the true diversity — and possible future directions — of the discipline become fully apparent. h e a t h e r Mu r r a y / University of Toronto Mary Desaulniers, Carlyle and The Economics of Terror: A Study of Re­ visionary Gothicism in The French Revolution (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995). x, 140. $44.95 cloth. Thomas Carlyle in his first great history The French Revolution (1837) dealt with an historical period in which the velocity of change overwhelmed the participants, in which the event was greater than the men. Influenced by the theories of Saint-Simon, Carlyle believed history advances through al­ ternating periods of expansion and concentration. In a period of expansion, the intuitions of a heroic leader attract the loyalties of disciples who give the Social Idea institutional forms in the state, church, and judiciary. Each new era so begins. But success and consolidation may lead to inertia and a loss of the organic inner spirit. In a period of concentration, the inherited institutional fabric is found wanting and is destroyed. Such a critical period is marked by turbulence and loss of control: “it is the black desperate bat­ tle of Men against their whole Condition and Environment — a battle, alas, withal, against the Sin and Darkness that was in themselves as in others: this is the Reign of Terror” (Carlyle 2: 294). Carlyle quotes the Girondist Vergniaud for an emblem of such a period: “the Revolution, like Saturn, is devouring its own children” (2: 291). It is the antithesis of history as the biography of great men. As Carlyle saw the revolution as a negative phenomenon, it is driven by “Transcendental despair ... though not consciously so” (2: 294). 471 It is as if the Revolution were anthropomorphized, a great feverish body passing through what Carlyle in Sartor Resartus called “the Everlasting No.” The three parts, “The Bastille,” “The Constitution,” “The Terror,” chart the move from immobility to frenzy. The first part covers twenty-five years, from the death of Louis xv at Versailles to the forcible removal of his son Louis xvi and family from Versailles to Paris. “The Constitution” describes the attempt to establish a constitutional monarchy, which ended with the storming of the Tuileries on August 10, 1792. The final part, “The Terror,” opens with the September massacres. Fearful that the numerous royalist prisoners would rise in support of the Duke of Brunswick’s army march­ ing on Paris, a Parisian mob executed many of them. The panic killings ceased when the French patriot army stopped the invasion at Valmy and the Legislative Assembly reestablished its authority. In the new National Convention, power had shifted, however, toward the men of the mountain, the Jacobins, best represented by the incorruptible lawyer from Arras, Max­ imilien Robespierre. In the face of domestic insurrections in the Vendée, Lyons, and Toulon, and with the entry of Britain into the war as part of the coalition against France, “the goaded land waxed mad” (Wordsworth [1850 version] 10.336). Louis Capet and his queen, the Girondist deputies, Hébert, Danton, and Desmoulins — all were beheaded as the guillotine cut at an ever more frenzied pace, until July 1794 when the Convention turned on its Committee of...

Tibetan Opera Music and Dance from Lhasa: An Interview with Dacidan Duoji and Xiaozhaxi Ciren

Ache Lhamo, the Tibetan Opera tradition, is said to have evolved from a Buddhist storytelling genre in which a lama manis, a ballad singer, presented tales by unrolling picture scrolls that depicted popular narratives. Pointing with an iron rod, the singer would highlight characters in turn. Stories were based onjataka tales about the Buddha in his previous lives or on indigenous Tibetan stories relating to Buddhist holypersons. These stories were written down and eventually presented in more dramatic form by several actors who sang individual roles while retaining narrative sections to link the scenes. This innovation is attributed to Thantog Gyalpo, a Buddhist monk who lived circa I385, and the introduction to one traditional Tibetan opera text claims that the monk spread marvelous songs and dances like a canopy over the people of all tribes and influenced their minds with holy religious teachings and the biographies of great men (Yao 1986:7). Contemporary performances are dedicated to Thantog Gyalpo, and are presented as popular entertainments and as offerings to the spirits to ensure a full harvest. Lhamo literally means goddess and, although the genre was traditionally performed by all-male troupes, Wang Yao links it to pantomimic dances performed by female masked dancers (1986:8). Many of the Mahayana Buddhist stories that form the Lhamo repertoire correspond to tales told in Manora theatre, the oldest dance-drama genre of Thailand. As in the Manora tale in which a bird-woman is captured by a clown-hunter but later flies back to her spirit home, many Lhamo stories involve a female escaping by flight to the heavens and include clowning by characters called hunters or fishermen. Flying scenes are traditionally portrayed by an actor jumping off of a chair while waving a white cloth; such images may be considered metaphors for trance experiences. This pattern-female spirit-medium-dancer who flies off to spirit realms and male shaman-clown who guides her trance while simultaneously entertaining the gathered viewers-is frequently found in neighboring

The Ethnography of Everyday Life: Theories and Methods for American Culture Studies

OTHERWISE DIVERSE STUDIES OF EVERYDAY LIFE TYPICALLY SHARE THE assumption that ordinary human life is not, as it seems, an obvious, natural, or simple phenomenon, but rather a problematic, complex process in need of exploration and explanation. Those of us who do such studies also like to assume that it is not through investigations of national politics, or biographies of great men, or telephone attitude surveys, or laboratory experiments, but through in-context investigations of everyday life that we can best frame an adequate understanding, not only of particular human groups, but of human thought and behavior generally. This essay will focus on literature dealing with fieldwork approaches to everyday life. There are other methods, but it can be argued that participant-observation-interview research provides the most direct access to the phenomenon. These ethnographic methods, and studies based upon them, provide an important base line for considering less direct forms of everyday life study. Furthermore, in American Studies, the fieldwork approach is gaining increasing acceptance as an important supplement to traditional historical and literary methods. This trend is exemplified by the current research of American Studies scholars and by the presence of

The History of Coronary Heart Disease

Medical history has many facets —narrative accounts of discoveries and inventions; biographies of great men; relationships of medicine to the scientific, cultural, and philosophical background of different eras; socioeconomic features; and many others. One of the newer aspects to engage the attention of scholars is the history of particular diseases. Professor Leibowitz has given us a fascinating book on coronary heart disease, perhaps the most important disease of modern life. After a brief introductory survey, a sort of epitome of the book, he makes a detailed exposition of the various texts that can be construed as having to do with coronary heart disease. The periods of antiquity and the Middle Ages give greater difficulty, for the original descriptions were not oriented to 20th-century concepts. Leibowitz, however, indicates passages from Egyptian and biblical sources as well as the classical Greek physicians, the Talmudic and various medieval authors that he interprets as

Some Foundations of the Dairy Industry

Summary Difficulty was encountered in trying to evaluate the generous responses to the questionnaire. The percentage distribution method was used throughout to rank the responses made in the six categories of subject matter. For the most part, only the ten highest ranking items under each question were listed herein. One must remember that ten is an arbitrary number which does not reveal the whole picture but often renders injustice to some of the important, yet unlisted factors. Each of the named and unnamed introductions, contributions, or leaders might well be studied further. The field for future studies is unlimited. No sooner had the present task been undertaken when responses indicated that several dairy scientists were already steeped in dairy history and that this phase of history was more or less a hobby of theirs. The positive and negative responses from distinguished scientists were challenging. For the most part, they were encouraging. Several seemed to welcome the opportunity to furnish in detail the information sought. To them evaluating the dairy scientists and their contributions was a game. The Historian is amazed at the wealth of historical data embedded in the minds of many dairy scientists. Failing to tap this current source of information would have been a lost opportunity. Asking a busy person to fill out the questionnaire was little short of an imposition. This is fully appreciated and the Historian is ever grateful for the generous release of this information summarized herein. One noted teacher and investigator returned the questionnaire blank, penning a note to the effect that he no longer had access to the J ournal and an agricultural library and thus could not be of much help with these milestones. He concluded by saying, “Anyway, the proper ones to evaluate history are the young people— not the old timers.” Perhaps he was right. Nonetheless, the task has been interesting, though tedious, and enlightening. May the older dairymen review the summaries critically and the younger scientists be inspired by the accomplishments of the workers of yesterday. In conclusion, the Historian of the American Dairy Science Association would point out that this survey confines itself quite largely to the growth and development of the dairy industry in the United States. Likely, surveys in other countries would reveal much of the same information. Several of the leaders are of international scope and would appear on any foreign list of outstanding dairy scientists. But many of the leaders would be from specific countries making a similar survey. One is reminded that two approaches exist to any historical study—the events themselves or the lives of the men contributing to those events. Carlyle stated, “The history of the world is but the biography of great men.” Emerson put it another way, “There is properly no History; only Biography.” So it had to be in surveying the history of dairying in the United States. The events stood out, but were not complete without the leaders who made them possible. At this point, the final statement of one responding scientist lends encouragement. After having exhausted himself in a monumental reply to the questionnaire, he wrote, “Good luck to the Historian, for no matter what decisions are made, others will have different viewpoints. It is fortunate so, for if everyone agreed always, there would be no thought stirred up and no progress made.”

Buckland Abbey and Sir Francis Drake

The mariners of the sixteenth century are no exception to the rule that the biography of great men illustrates the period in which they lived. Francesco Pizarro might have been a cowherd at Seville for ever, instead of a viceroy at Lima, for any value attaching to his biography to the student of European politics; but he and Cortez, Cartier, Hawkins, Drake, and many another, marked an epoch in the history of maritime adventure, namely, the period which witnessed the union of science and enterprise—a union enabling the sailor to navigate his bark into the wide and unknown seas, where no landmark points the course—a union which gave to civilisation another world. The Phoenician groping his way, hugging the land along the shores of Africa and Spain, and shooting across the channel, with the sun and stars alone to steer by, until he touched the lonely but rich shores of the Cassiterides, was a mariner of equal daring with those who, westward ho! set sail for the Spanish Main; but, with an increase of knowledge, there had been discovered a new world—a world that, without the sensitive needle, and the discovery of the fact that it was ever true to its magnetic principle, true as the star to which the sailor from Tyre had in his day attached his faith —and for the subduing of that world it was necessary there should be a new departure, not in enterprise, for that was conspicuous in the earth's central sea, but a union of scientific knowledge with the enterprise and energy common to all young nations—at least to all nations which have made their mark in the world, and left the impress of their life upon time's honourable records.