End Page Research Articles

Proceedings of the Japan Academy - History, database, and trend.

A catalog of 13,591 papers published by the Japan Academy in three phases over a century in the Proceedings of the Imperial Academy (1913-1945), the Proceedings of the Japan Academy (1945-1977), and Proceedings of the Japan Academy, divided in Series A and B (1977-2022), is made available for public access. The catalog contains information about the authors, the title of the paper, published year, volume, issue, start page, end page, the field of sciences, and the academy member who introduced the paper in the monthly academy meeting. This article reports some analyses of the catalog and discusses the trends and background of the academies' publications during the past century.

The Renaissance Scholar of Library and Information Science: Professor Linda C. Smith

The Renaissance Scholar of Library and Information Science:Professor Linda C. Smith Anita S. Coleman (bio) and Martha Kyrillidou (bio) This collection of essays is to honor Linda C. Smith, widely recognized as a well-established and dedicated teacher and scholar at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the soul of the iSchool. Smith's contributions to library and information science (LIS) research, teaching, and higher education administration, as an award-winning professor of LIS for the past forty-five years, have been characterized by attention to interdisciplinarity, people, and information technology. From the very beginning of her graduate studies, Smith targeted key aspects of the information revolution that would come to shape our technological world. Her impact on education for the information professions as well as on generations of graduate students has been a richly complex and multithreaded story. It is thus fitting that an issue in her honor recognize and laud Professor Smith as the renaissance scholar of LIS, trace the arc of a relevant past, and reflect on a future that Smith so presciently studied. Smith's oeuvre includes her movement from pretenure basic research in a new area to the integration and transformation of that knowledge through research, teaching, and service as a distinguished and tenured professor. In her early work, Smith focused on how artificial intelligence techniques could be used to improve computerized information retrieval systems. Captured initially by the proliferation of databases and the impact they had on reference work and information behavior in libraries, she co-edited five editions of the key textbook in this area, Reference and Information Services: An Introduction. She has written one of the most highly cited articles on citation analysis (1981), which is also one of the most highly cited articles ever published in Library Trends. Among her many articles and contributions to the research and professional literature, she coedited a Festschrift in honor of her colleague Kathryn Luther Henderson, a book on technical services management (Smith and Carter 1996). Finally, she [End Page 1] has supported numerous students, both domestic and international, in pursuing their passions and achieving their goals. It was Smith's support for her PhD students that brought together the two co-editors of this special issue. Those who know Linda Smith, especially her doctoral students, are cognizant that her editorial skills are unparalleled. As coeditors, we are thankful for her willingness to read and review the contributed articles as they came in. Such meticulous, and often invisible, editorial expertise is the kind of added support that Linda has generously and diligently provided her collaborators, colleagues, students, the iSchool and the University of Illinois over the many years of her work as a researcher. This Festschrift is a testament to Linda Smith. It is done for her and with her. The articles in Linda's Festschrift represent the countless ways she has contributed to the discipline of LIS and helped to structure its evolution and growth as a field of knowledge and practice. "Library and Information Science, Interdisciplinary Perspectives" is a collection of essays based on three central themes of Smith's prodigious work: library systems, intelligent and interdisciplinary services, and information sciences education. Smith's themes were selected from her writings, such as her very first research paper, "Systematic Searching of Abstracts and Indexes in Interdisciplinary Areas," which won the 1974 ASIS Student Paper Award and was published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science. While emerging trends were her motivation, Smith's goal for her research was to build capable computer systems and save the time of researchers and information users. That goal never changed, and it led her to study the different applications of computers beyond the sciences to humanities, engineering, and medicine. In the process she also became an astute administrator and a key influencer of LIS education. The topics covered in this issue include LIS education, accreditation, teaching reference and bibliographic searching, navigating copyright, and serials modeling, concluding with admonitions for new roles in LIS in relation to data stewardship and interdisciplinarity and in relation to artificial intelligence and the responsibilities of LIS roles. Linda's Design Lynne C. Howarth and Eileen G...

Dungan Folktales and Legends transed. by Kenneth J. Yin (review)

Reviewed by: Dungan Folktales and Legends transed. by Kenneth J. Yin Rostislav Berezkin Dungan Folktales and Legends. Translated and edited by Kenneth J. Yin. New York: Peter Lang, 2021. xviii + 426 pp. Cloth $113.25. Electronic $111.60. Dungan Folktales and Legends is an anthology, translated by Kenneth J. Yin from the Russian edition of 1977. The Dungans have a very complex cultural background, as they are Chinese-speaking Muslims (speaking northwestern dialects, close to Mandarin) who originally lived in Gansu and Shaanxi provinces and fled to Russian Central Asia after the failure of the Dungan Revolt (1862–1877) against the Qing Dynasty. Recognized as a separate ethnic group of Central Asia, the exact history of the Dungan's formation in the premodern period still remains not completely clear. There are several theories of their origins (including the origins of the "Dungan" name [Donggan in Pinyin], commonly used in Russian and several other languages).1 Now the Dungans live in Kyrgyzstan, southern Kazakhstan, and the northeastern area of Uzbekistan (formerly republics of the Soviet Union). This volume is the most comprehensive anthology of Dungan folk narratives, available now in English for the first time, and features masterly translations of the most outstanding and characteristic oral narratives collected in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan in the mid-twentieth century. The original Russian collection was compiled by the famous Russian sinologist Boris L. Riftin (1932–2012) and two Dungan scholars: Makhmud A. Khasanov and Ilʹias I. Iusupov.2 Riftin started to collect Dungan tales in the 1950s, when he traveled to Kyrgyzstan and worked there at the Dungan collective farm in Milyanfan to study the language and folklore of this people, related to his interest in spoken Chinese and Chinese folk literature in general. It was not the first folkloric expedition of Russian sinologists to the Dungans. The work on collection and studies of Dungan folklore by Russian scholars started around the turn of the twentieth century, during the imperial period, as noted in the preface to this collection of tales.3 The present collection contains seventy-eight folk stories divided into three parts: (1) wonder tales and animal tales; (2) novel-type tales, folk anecdotes, and adventure stories; and (3) legends, historical tales, and narratives. The preface introduces the major special features and cultural status of the Dungan tales. The volume also has several appendixes, a glossary, an index, the original notes to the texts in the Russian translation, and translator's notes aimed at an English-reading audience. [End Page 95] In the past, folk narratives played an extremely important role in Dungan culture, as most Dungans were illiterate: They usually did not study Chinese characters, but did speak a variety of Chinese. Stories were transmitted primarily in the oral mode, though some of them had written antecedents in Chinese literature.4 While living in Central Asia, the Dungans were exposed to the rich folklore of their neighbors and that resulted in their borrowing of numerous tale motifs. The influence of the historical reality of the Russian Empire is also discernible in several tales, for example, the common mention of contemporary Russian currency. The reader of the Dungan tales will be impressed by the fascinating amalgamation of Central Asian and Muslim elements with a variety of subjects and figures derived from Chinese folklore and vernacular narratives. Peri and devs, originating in Iranian and other Middle Eastern tales, appear in these texts along with dragons, magic foxes, diviners, and immortal-magicians typical of Chinese folklore and the vernacular narrative literature of the late imperial period. Many of these subjects also are present in Chinese folklore collected in the modern period. Several subjects of the tales included in this volume were obviously derived from Chinese dramas and novels, such as "Zhon Yu Boils the Sea" (based on the drama of the thirteenth century "Young Zhang Boils the Sea" 張生煮海; Li Haogu's 李好古 version is extant) and "Snake Girl" (similar to the story of the White Snake in Feng Menglong's 馮夢龍 [1571–1646] early seventeenth-century vernacular short story "Madam White Forever Confined under Thunder Peak Pagoda" [Bai niangzi yong zhen Leifeng ta 白娘子永鎮雷峰塔]). These, of course, underwent significant transformation through oral transmission. At the same...

Editor’s Note: Special Issue: Gender and Social Change in Myanmar

Editor’s NoteSpecial Issue: Gender and Social Change in Myanmar Jane M. Ferguson The Myanmar military’s 1 February 2021 coup d’etat of the elected government quickly provoked widespread protests, namely the Civil Disobedience Movement and the Spring Revolution. During the earliest days of these manifestations, people of various gender identities were at the forefront of the demands for political change. They made use of numerous creative tactics to fight the military’s political imposition and to bring their grievances to the public sphere. Following the government’s brutal suppression of the nonviolent protests emerged the organization of People’s Defense Forces. In the years since, fighting, repression, and resistance continue. Now, as ever, it is imperative to interrogate how gender—as produced, experienced, and mobilized—operates across cultural fields, and relates to social transformation in Myanmar. Using nuanced, dynamic methodologies, the four research articles in this special issue of The Journal of Burma Studies take up that challenge. They reconsider gender in varied contexts of social activism, everyday practices, identity politics, and religious histories. Gender discourses in Myanmar are reforged through the work of many different agents, from renunciants to punks, to revolutionaries, and to keyboard warriors. Powerful ideologies are confirmed, [End Page 1] reinvented, and modified in complex and often contradictory ways. Superstitious Fabrications? The Revolution’s Secret Weapon Two articles in this special issue foreground a seemingly anomalous protest strategy: using some pieces of cloth to fight an armed-to-the-hilt military. Through their creative use of women’s htamein (sarong-like skirts), protesters have drawn attention to—even weaponized—a specific gender taboo, a taboo which is sometimes considered particular to the region. In their article for this special issue, “Our Htamein, Our Flag, Our Victory: The Role of Young Women in Myanmar’s Spring Revolution,” Marlar, Justine Chambers, and Elena use an intersectional approach to explore how status is interrogated by other types of difference, namely those of gender, age, and class. They argue that during past decade, Myanmar has witnessed important shifts in gender roles, and these present new vistas for solidarity and ways to imagine a more democratic political future. As they argue, the movement’s use of htamein and menstrual pads were part of a public rallying strategy. Through these methods, protesters stand in defiance of the patriarchal and misogynist ideologies of the military. On a related vein, Aye Lei Tun’s article in this issue, “Deconstructing and Reinforcing Gender Norms and Cultural Taboos in Myanmar’s Spring Revolution,” offers experiential accounts from the movement and explores the use of htamein in the Spring Revolution. The article also pivots to analyze how some of the activists’ symbolic attacks mobilized a repertoire that included sexist ideologies as part of their strategies to shame high-status members of the government, as well [End Page 2] as their families and associates. In sum, social transformations are inextricably gendered, and these times of tremendous upheaval demand further questioning. Let’s not skirt the issue raised by both articles: what is special about these items of women’s clothing and absorbent plastic pads in Myanmar, and what makes them so powerful? The general explanation is as follows: mainstream culture in Myanmar, as with that of other societies in the region, treats women’s genitalia and menstrual blood as dirty and polluting. They are therefore considered disgusting, off-limits, and treated with disdain. By contact or even mere association, women’s skirts, nether garments, and menstrual pads carry this taboo as well. In Buddhist temple compounds’ stupa enclosures, posted signs explicitly prohibit women from entering; their bodies are deemed to have the nefarious power to harm sacred relics. Menstrual blood has a contemporary enemy vivant: men. Any contact with a man is perceived to obliterate his hpon, or his special masculine energy. According to anthropologist Melford Spiro (1991), Burmese society locates presence of hpon specifically on a combination of the “sexual anatomy” and a “psycho-spiritual entity”; in short, as argued, the penis is a noble golden flower whereas the vagina is an ignoble polluting organ (Spiro 1991:534). Floral stigma notwithstanding, ideas about hpon and its threats have a profound impact on everyday life...

Henry VIII and Martin Luther: The Second Controversy, 1525–1527 ed. by Richard Rex

Reviewed by: Henry VIII and Martin Luther: The Second Controversy, 1525–1527 ed. by Richard Rex Korey D. Maas Henry VIII and Martin Luther: The Second Controversy, 1525–1527. Edited by Richard Rex. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2021. xvi + 306 pp. The bad blood between Henry VIII and Martin Luther has long held a prominent place in narratives and interpretations of the early English Reformation. The King's 1521 salvo against Luther's Babylonian Captivity, rewarded with the ultimately ironic "Defender of the Faith" title, never goes without mention. Nor do the hard feelings resulting a decade later from Luther's refusal to endorse the dissolution of Henry's first marriage, and from the intransigence attending England's bid to enter the Schmalkaldic League. Less well-known is the subject of Richard Rex's latest volume, what he dubs the "second controversy" between Henry and Luther. That this conflict has received less sustained attention is largely understandable, as it revolved around only two relatively brief letters. Luther wrote privately to Henry, expressing his belief that the King was becoming favorable to the Wittenberg theology and hoping that the imprudence of his earlier invective might be forgiven. Henry then replied publicly, saying, in effect, "You're badly [End Page 246] misinformed about my inclinations toward your still damnably heretical doctrines—but I'm glad we now agree about the foolishness of your earlier writings." Although the brevity and straightforwardness of the exchange itself might not demand extended scholarly analysis, Rex emphasizes that it quickly (if briefly) became an international affair, with more than a dozen editions of the two letters being published almost immediately across continental Europe. He highlights especially "the level of attention it attracted from leading Catholic scholars in Europe" (40), who "gave it all the publicity they could" (x), and who leveraged the opportunity to heap "praise on the king and scorn on Luther" (23). In addition to the texts of the original letters, the bulk of the volume is given over to transcriptions, translations, and annotations of the various pamphlets, letters, and prefaces produced in the months after the initial correspondence was made public. As such, it makes readily accessible to scholars a valuable cache of primary source material. The author's own 54-page introductory essay sheds further light on some important contextual questions. Perhaps the most obvious and baffling of these: What possible reason could Luther have had for suspecting a royal change of heart? Rex rightly notes that all objective indicators militated against that supposition, and that the most frequent explanation—that Luther had been misled by the exiled Christian II of Denmark—is unsupported by any extant evidence. Intriguingly, though, especially in light of long-running debates about who might have helped draft the King's contribution to the "first controversy" of 1521 (which the introduction illuminates), the author points to evidence indicative of Thomas More having a hand in Henry's 1526 reply to Luther. Similarly relevant to the earlier controversy, Rex deftly demolishes the "abiding myth" (2) that Henry was already at work on anti-Lutheran polemic as early as 1518. One significant question is unfortunately left unaddressed. While emphasizing that the attention given the correspondence by Catholic polemicists is one of the "remarkable features" (40) of the exchange, the author nowhere indicates—aside from the inclusion of one further contribution by Luther himself—whether the exchange [End Page 247] provoked any similarly polemical reactions from European Protestants. If it elicited only silence that is surely worth highlighting, if only because it further bolsters the implicit thesis that Luther's original missive constituted an unforced error and handed his detractors an embarrassingly lopsided rhetorical triumph. If, on the other hand, Protestants did weigh in against the King's letter, those interventions, too, surely deserve some attention. [End Page 248] Korey D. Maas Hillsdale College Hillsdale, Michigan Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc.

Introduction: Empire and (Post-)Colonialism in Austrian Studies

IntroductionEmpire and (Post-)Colonialism in Austrian Studies Tim Corbett (bio) Globalization, migration, transnationalism, empire/imperialism, (post-)colonialism/decolonization, heterogeneity, diversity, interculturality, cosmopolitanism: These are some of the most influential concepts that have shaped not only academic research but also public and political discourses across the globe in recent years. The field of Austrian studies has already been engaging innovatively and productively with these issues for quite some time now. With a number of pioneering research institutions and corresponding journals on both sides of the Atlantic,1 the field of Austrian studies has since its inception in the postwar period been rooted in a transnational, intercultural, and multilingual context (see most recently Lorenz). Unlike many comparable fields, Austrian studies has therefore from the outset been largely unfettered by the artificial boundaries imposed by language, by the often linguistically imagined "nation-state," or by "culture" however defined in the past century or more (see for example Arens; "Forum: Austrian Studies"). Indeed, it is the very polysemy of the concept "Austria" in multiple geographical, political, cultural, and historical contexts that makes the field of Austrian studies—and its practitioners—so diverse and dynamic. It has been a decade since, in 2012, one of the flagship organizations in the field of Austrian studies, the Association of Modern Austrian Literature, was renamed the Austrian Studies Association, with the association's journal being renamed accordingly, in order to reflect the growing interdisciplinarity of the field. When the journal's former editors, Hillary Hope Herzog and Todd Herzog, handed the baton over to the current editors during the course of [End Page 1] 2021, I saw this as a momentous opportunity to take stock of this vibrant and expanding field and the range of exciting research being conducted therein. Hence the idea for a special volume of the Journal of Austrian Studies dedicated to "New Directions in Austrian Studies" arose, with a call for articles going out in November 2021. The aim of this special volume was to solicit short pieces of no more than about 3,500 words in length, with a twofold reasoning: First, this would allow for a greater number of contributions to the volume, thus offering a more diverse overview of current research being conducted in the field of Austrian studies. Second, this would allow the authors to offer ludic overviews of broad yet incisive concepts, methods, or themes rather than in-depth research articles including expansive references to source materials, which might only have appealed to specialists in their particular areas. This editorial concept was inspired by the 2016 volume Habsburg neu denken (Feichtinger and Uhl), which comprises thirty snapshot articles from the field of Habsburg studies and managed to total only 250 pages. This struck me as an innovative approach to making large research fields accessible to a broad readership. We—the journal editors and I—were astounded by the response we received to our call. As a stocktaking of the current state of the field, the disciplinary and thematic range of the proposals in itself made for interesting reading. We received altogether 42 submissions from 48 authors based in ten different countries, reflecting research projects of an exceptionally high quality across the board. About half the proposals came from scholars based in Austria itself, the rest spread across (East-)Central and Western Europe and the United States, including all career levels, from PhD candidates to professors as well as a number of independent scholars. There was a conspicuous disciplinary concentration on history (albeit with a great diversity of thematic and geographical foci therein), but we also received numerous submissions from the fields of literature studies, film studies, ethnology, musicology, educational studies, political science, and sociology. Given the overarching theme of "Austrian" studies, the geographic scope of the proposed topics was also astounding, covering not only the territory of the modern Austrian Republic and the many disparate lands connected to the former Habsburg Empire but also extending to Eastern, Southern/Southeastern, and Western Europe as well as to North and South America and even further afield to Africa and Asia. The pool of submissions also revealed certain glaring absences. For example, [End Page 2] while we received several contributions focusing...

Lutherische "Orthodoxie" als historisches Problem. Leitidee, Konstruktion und Gegenbegriff von Gottfried Arnold bis Ernst Troeltsch by Christian Volkmar Witt

Reviewed by: Lutherische "Orthodoxie" als historisches Problem. Leitidee, Konstruktion und Gegenbegriff von Gottfried Arnold bis Ernst Troeltsch by Christian Volkmar Witt Joar Haga Lutherische "Orthodoxie" als historisches Problem. Leitidee, Konstruktion und Gegenbegriff von Gottfried Arnold bis Ernst Troeltsch. By Christian Volkmar Witt. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021. 300 pp. Most books present familiar material in new ways, fewer break new territory. Rarer still are those which change the way we think about a given period. This is such a rare book. The German church historian Christian Witt has written a book about the framing of the period that many until recently have referred to as Lutheran Orthodoxy. After this, it will be difficult or impossible to use the term "Orthodoxy" as a neutral category, suited to designate a period of church history. Packed with analytical tools from the theory of [End Page 230] institutional symbolic orders by sociologist Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, Witt deconstructs the function of a central term in history. A term that postulates a correct faith, ortho-doxa, "orthodoxy" does not merely function as a formula of identification of certain concrete features, it is also an instrument of demarcation and marginalisation (18). Witt uses the three concepts in the title (Leitidee, Konstruktion, Gegenbegriff) as perspectives on his material, stretching from Arnold to Troeltsch. Witt traces how the idea of truth is at work among central European church historians not merely in how they treat historical facts; he also uncovers how it is built into the very theories the interpretations rely on. These theories are in some ways connected through their truth-claims, or their resistance to making truth claims. To highlight this aspect of the conceptual framework, Witt draws on the historian Reinhard Koselleck, a scholar close to Carl Schmitt, who viewed politics through the categories of friend and foe. Indeed, one could read the whole German Begriffsgeschichte as an attempt to utilise Schmitt´s understanding of the political as a battle ground. Witt's twelve pages about "Gegenbegriff" (oppositional concept) could serve as a fruitful theoretical reflection on a wider range of materials, due to its unpacking of an almost silent pejorative potential in the analytical tools. In the conclusion, Witt in a more direct manner comes to the fore and fleshes out his understanding of heterodoxy, the opposite of orthodoxy. Witt underlines that the so-called heterodox theologian does not become heterodox by framing himself in the image of a different doctrinal conception. It is much more likely that the heterodox would construe his own identity as orthodox (40). Witt's deconstruction of the (in)famous Gottfried Arnold´s (1666–1714) supposedly Impartial History of the Church and of Heresy (1699)—the most unwillingly ironic title of all time—is perhaps the most fruitful part of this work. One could claim that Witt's presentation of Arnold offers nothing new. Arnold´s revisionist claims and radical pietist assumptions have been previously noted. For Arnold, to be orthodox meant to be a hard-headed persecutor of true believers. The strength of Witt´s text lies in showing how far the implications [End Page 231] and consequences of Arnold's fundamental distinction reverberated among church historians. By Witt's thorough step-by-step analysis of how Arnold unleashed his pejorative power, Arnold's method and its results become clear. In one sense, Witt's book is a portrayal of the rhetorical power of historians. Witt's nuanced tracing of how the normative choices of a man at the close of the seventeenth century dominated successive research is simply mindboggling. Witt traces the categories of interpretation influenced by Arnold through several church historians from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. For example, the analysis of the normative positions of supposedly neutral Enlightenment theologians such as Johann Semler (1725–1791) is rewarding. The search for an "inner attitude" (102) corresponded to Semler's lamenting how the Catholic church attempted to create a monopoly of the truth by allegedly suppressing an original plurality (109). The chapter on August Tholuck (1799–1877) and his book Der Geist der lutherischen Theologen Wittenbergs (1852) is a gem. Witt shows how Tholuck fought on two fronts, against the rationalism of yore and the confessionalism of...

The Fateful Lightning: Civil War Stories and the Magazine Marketplace, 1861–1876 by Kathleen Diffley

Reviewed by: The Fateful Lightning: Civil War Stories and the Magazine Marketplace, 1861–1876 by Kathleen Diffley Catherine V. Bateson (bio) The Fateful Lightning: Civil War Stories and the Magazine Marketplace, 1861–1876. By Kathleen Diffley. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021. Pp. 268. Paper, $36.95.) Second-book syndrome is a mountain to overcome and doubly hard when the second book in question comes in the middle of a proposed trilogy assessing American Civil War and Reconstruction magazine fiction. That is the task Kathleen Diffley sets with The Fateful Lightning, a follow-up to Where My Heart Is Turning Ever: Civil War Stories and Constitutional Reform, 1861–1876 (1992). Previously, Diffley focused on [End Page 263] how northeastern periodicals expanded expressions about citizenship and liberty. The Fateful Lightning covers the same comparable period, following on from its predecessor while standing alone (you can read this book without reading the first). By marrying national context with divergent country-wide perspectives, the fictional Civil War stories examined in The Fateful Lightning “helped engineer a master narrative that was nonetheless open to regional challenges” (3–4). While maintaining an urban focus, Diffley notes how distinctive cultures “magazine by magazine” emerged around the country; the “four periodicals and the cities in which they arose” covered in this book offer “varying gauges of continued political unrest, emerging social opportunity, and dickering regional agendas as Reconstruction first unfolded” (6). “A latticework of intersecting print culture concerns materializes,” Diffley argues, that highlights how postwar memory making and emancipation reflections were prominent in areas beyond Washington, D.C., and the South (19). The Fateful Lightning’s four central chapters tour the print culture of midcentury periodicals, from Baltimore’s Southern Magazine (1886–75) and Charlotte’s The Land We Love (1866–69) to Chicago’s Lakeside Monthly and San Francisco’s Overland Monthly. Each of the four main chapters is divided into three sections. The first is an opening contextual discussion that lays the groundwork for the periodical being examined, its editorial focus, city (and region) of publication, and central wartime and Reconstruction story themes. This section includes snippets of article outlines and comparisons to the other magazines. The second section is a full short story complete with contemporary two-column-style periodical presentation. The brief third section critically analyses the short story’s meaning. The railroad runs like a literal and imagined metaphor across the whole book. “In magazine after magazine, story after story . . . the fictional platforms from which local heroes depart . . . were almost always cast as hurried and heterogeneous, crammed . . . with a hodgepodge of strangers” (103), who would meet in carriages, waiting rooms, and depots and share their stories of the civil conflict with messages for the Reconstruction present. The four main terminus/starting points reveal examples of how the lines between public and private blurred in mid-nineteenth-century cultural outputs. National changes and encroaching modernity come to the fore: “the medium was the message, and, thanks to federally funded postal routes [and ever-growing railways], the message spread” beyond the parlor into the zeitgeist (65). Yet the message was not necessarily about progress. Diffley develops a theme in chapter 4 that regards photography and the advent of thinking [End Page 264] stereoscopically in terms of wartime images and memory. This interesting framing works well for the entire study. By taking an enhanced look into the wider realm of Civil War–and Reconstruction-era historical scholarship, Diffley delves into how the nation’s competing immediate wartime memories evolved before Reconstruction ended. Take The Land We Love covered in chapter 2; its very name is revealing. The “land” stresses the moonshine and magnolia image of the Old South; unsurprisingly, Diffley notes that “in the immediate aftermath of defeat, [the periodical] would also become the magazine forum of choice for chronicling Confederate military action and kindling a fleeting nation’s Lost Cause” (63). This study shows that “during the 1860s and 1870s, the fraught terrain of postmemory coalesced almost immediately” to sanitize a vanished southern (and national) image before the Lost Cause became embedded (80). Drawing on David Blight’s Civil War memory and Marianne Hirsch’s postmemory scholarship, Diffley makes this point well. Indeed, she...

Open Wounds: Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George Tabori ed. by Martin Kagel and David Z. Saltz

Reviewed by: Open Wounds: Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George Tabori ed. by Martin Kagel and David Z. Saltz Inge Arteel Martin Kagel and David Z. Saltz, eds., Open Wounds: Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George Tabori. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2022. 200 pp. Scholarship on the Hungarian-born Jewish playwright and director George Tabori (1914–2007) is gaining new momentum, especially under the impulse of Martin Kagel, professor of German literature and culture at the University [End Page 135] of Georgia. After the 2018 publication of a substantial special section on Tabori in Nexus, the essay series in German Jewish Studies, Kagel has now co-edited with David Z. Saltz the book Open Wounds: Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George Tabori. So far, Tabori scholarship has predominantly addressed the generic and ethical specificities of Tabori's interaction with Holocaust remembrance culture, focusing on his provocative grotesque humor and his radically intertextual rewriting of dramatic and theatrical conventions. In her opening essay, eminent Tabori scholar Anat Feinberg stresses the need to look at other aspects of Tabori's work as well. Feinberg herself gives the example of Tabori's often overlooked experimental directorial practice in the 1970s and 1980s in Bremen and Vienna. Tracing Tabori's legacy means asking how the dramaturgical specificities of Tabori's work relate to theater and performance of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. At stake is first of all the embodied form of the survivor-witness so central to Tabori's dramaturgy. Several contributions tackle this question in a comparative approach. Alice Le Trionnaire-Bolterauer convincingly shows Tabori's connection with the newer avantgarde in confronting the physicality of Tabori's ritual dramaturgy with two theater performances by Israeli artists, Arbeit Macht Frei vom Toitland Europa (1991) by the Israeli Akko Theatre and Yael Ronen's Third Generation: Work in Progress (2008). Rebecca Rovit reads the drama of Tabori's contemporary Charlotte Delbo and two playwrights of the succeeding generation, Yehoshua Sobol and Peter Barnes, through the lens of Tabori's work. Rovit carefully outlines the quite diverse dramaturgical means with which these authors address the question of theater as a space to bear witness. Johanna Öttl, in her comparative reading of Tabori's The Cannibals with Robert Schindel's drama Dunkelstein (2010), shows how we can read Tabori's embodied theater as a way to present victims as singular self-determined subjects, whereas Schindel shows how this self-determination has been reduced to a mere convention in melodramatic cinema. Tabori's nonrealistic aesthetics, including his disturbing and grotesque humor, present a second and maybe even bigger challenge, especially when transposing his work to the formats of popular culture. Peter Höyng's contribution on Urs Odermatt's film adaptation (2009) of Tabori's Mein Kampf shows, though Höyng is careful not to voice too strong a judgment, how the film nullifies every aspect of Tabori's aesthetics. Ironically, it is the failed adaptation [End Page 136] that retrospectively makes Tabori's dramatic "palimpsest" (157) stand out as the highly complex and provocatively grotesque work it is. Barbara Wallace Grossman's chapter on so-called Holocaust musicals asks whether they can provide an equivalent for Tabori's disturbing laughter. The answer is nuanced: melodramatic Broadway productions do not pass the test at all, whereas some more stylized productions do explore musical theater "as an appropriate genre for presenting Holocaust narratives" (182). The challenges of a transcultural transposition in performance practice are touched upon by the director Laura Forti, who discusses the difficulties she faced when staging The Cannibals in Italy in 2002. Her contribution indirectly indicates how rewarding a more encompassing transnational investigation into Tabori's work could be, an approach that would reflect on how Tabori addresses the legacy of the Holocaust as a European one. Other contributions adopt a more historiographical and genealogical perspective. Klaus van den Berg compares two quite diverse stagings by Tabori of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice in 1966 and 1978. Van den Berg reads them in relation with Walter Benjamin's thoughts on "image-space" and "performing space," an approach very well suited to trace the shift from...

Ministers of a New Medium: Broadcasting Theology in the Radio Ministries of Fulton J. Sheen and Walter A. Maier by Kirk D. Farney

Reviewed by: Ministers of a New Medium: Broadcasting Theology in the Radio Ministries of Fulton J. Sheen and Walter A. Maier by Kirk D. Farney Kathryn M. Galchutt Ministers of a New Medium: Broadcasting Theology in the Radio Ministries of Fulton J. Sheen and Walter A. Maier. By Kirk D. Farney. Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2022. 345 pp. In our multi-media saturated times, it is difficult to imagine the singular importance of radio during its golden age, from the 1920s to the 1950s. During that era before television, the essayist E. B. White described radio as having a "godlike presence" in homes across America. In his book Kirk Farney notes that radio had a range of qualities, from intimate to communal, from democratic to authoritative. Yet Farney's study is less concerned with the medium of radio and more concerned with the impact of two men and the messages they spoke to millions during the 1930s and 1940s. The Lutheran pastor Walter A. Maier (1893–1950) and the Roman Catholic priest Fulton J. Sheen (1895–1979) were two of the most popular and prominent broadcasters during radio's golden age. Both men came from religious backgrounds that were considered on the periphery of mainstream American Protestant religion. Maier came from a German-American Lutheran background and was a member of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, a synod which some saw as an ethnic and theological enclave. Sheen came from a primarily Irish-American Catholic background and sought to counter the historic anti-Catholicism in American society. Farney explains how Maier and Sheen preached messages rooted in their own religious traditions, yet succeeded in appealing to wider audiences. Both men "combined a traditional theological conservatism with an equally traditional American idealism" (133). Maier and Sheen took to the airwaves after the Modernist and Fundamentalist debates of the 1920s. Both men were vocal critics of modernist [End Page 191] theology. They preached messages of traditional Christian theology, putting a strong emphasis on the doctrines of the atonement, sin, and grace. Given the well-known antagonism between Protestants and Catholics, it is remarkable that the Protestant Maier and the Catholic Sheen asserted such similar teachings about the foundations for faith and life (160). Maier and Sheen also made connections with the difficult times in which they were living, commenting on the economic challenges of the Great Depression, the conflicts and controversies of World War II, and the threat of communism. Both were careful to avoid partisan politics. But they reflected a spirit of American patriotism while also calling on Americans to repent and to avoid a stance of national self-righteousness. Farney notes that Maier and Sheen were critical of racial and ethnic discrimination in America and urged the church to recognize the equality of all people before God (257). Farney could have done more to explain the significance of their stances in the context of American race relations in the 1930s and 1940s. Both men reached out to many beyond their respective religious communities. Farney describes how Sheen received considerable attention for the prominent converts to Catholicism whom he reached, including Henry Ford II and the American Communist Party leader Louis Budenz. Besides the famous, Sheen also reached "the obscure … of all races and incomes" (297). Farney describes Maier's contacts with political, military, and cultural leaders, but did not mention specific converts. More could be done to examine those who made a commitment to Lutheranism because of Maier's "The Lutheran Hour." Among these are Mary Banta, who contributed to the development of True Light Lutheran Church, a Chinese-American congregation in Manhattan and Chris McNair, who lost his daughter Denise in the Klan bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963. Exploring the international impact of the "Catholic Hour" and "The Lutheran Hour" is another potential area of future research. Farney has written a very significant study of two of the most important radio preachers in American history, examining the similar ministries of a Lutheran pastor and Catholic priest. The parallels ended when Maier died relatively early of a massive heart attack [End Page 192] in 1950 and Sheen transitioned to even greater fame with a...

Nenilava, Prophetess of Madagascar: Her Life and the Ongoing Revival She Inspired by James B. Vigen and Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Reviewed by: Nenilava, Prophetess of Madagascar: Her Life and the Ongoing Revival She Inspired by James B. Vigen and Sarah Hinlicky Wilson Mark Nygard Nenilava, Prophetess of Madagascar: Her Life and the Ongoing Revival She Inspired. By James B. Vigen and Sarah Hinlicky Wilson. Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2021. 137 pp. From my mother Martha, I learned a respect, even a kind of reverence, for the lives of contemporary saints. "A washer of dishes in the church kitchen is as noble in God's sight as the pastor of the church," she would tell us, and I remember paying attention to see who these wonderful people working in the kitchen were. Two elderly, specially-gifted sisters who dusted our pews at First Lutheran in Minot were often discussed and appreciated at the Sunday dinner table. I have since marked where they are buried, and to this day I look for their tombstones as I drive by. This is a book of that kind of respect and even reverence for a contemporary saint. She is not a saint from North Dakota, so her [End Page 224] sainthood requires some interpretation for those who find Madagascar an exotic place. But she was a saint deeply loved by literally millions of Malagasy, and her humble story and its effects are still reverberating in the Malagasy Lutheran Church (MLC) and beyond, twenty-five years after her passing. Hagiography this book may be, but it is an academic hagiography. It reflects an orderly approach to the life and work of Germaine Volahavana (1920–1998), affectionately known as Nenilava, with presentation of data and thoughtful reflection. The first chapter—a history of the revival that she inspired until 1970—is an English translation of an oral account that she provided Zakaria Tsivoery, a MLC pastor, during her lifetime. Unquestionably the centerpiece of the work, it takes up the first half and furnishes the basic raw material for an insider's understanding of Nenilava and her work—preaching, casting out of demons, strengthening through laying on of hands, and assignment of personal hymn or scripture passages (45). Reading this chapter is an unvarnished, cross-cultural experience for the Western reader, from the merely peculiar, like an unusual consciousness of direction ("a photo of the baby was taken on the east side of the church," 42), to spiritual matters affecting the shape of faith, like awareness of divine presence ("Then Jesus took her by the hand and led her into the pulpit," 10) or of evil ("It isn't me who makes them vomit, but the devil who does it!" 32). It is with some relief, then, that the Western reader finds mediating voices in the second half of the book. In chapter two James Vigen finishes the story of Nenilava's life after 1970, including her travel abroad and the establishment of a healing center in France. In chapter three he proceeds to assess Nenilava and her ministry from his own perspective, including remembrances from the Madagascar missionary community and pertinent insights by theologian Paul Tillich, psychologist M. Scott Peck, and British missionary John V. Taylor. In a conclusion that might better be called a discussion opener, Sarah Wilson offers a series of brief, open-ended theological perspectives on noteworthy elements of Nenilava's story—evil spirits, healing and miracles, healing and sin, and "emergent offices of ministry" that focus outward towards the unbaptized rather than on the inward care of the established flock (127–28). This thoughtful [End Page 225] mediation by two sensitive American pastors/teachers with long international experience will make the Nenileva story coherent for many American readers. This is not a book for the unadventurous. Mild-thinking American Lutherans, accustomed to their favorite paradigms and narratives, may leave the book troubled and even angry. On the other hand, this may be just the book for the unadventurous, as one generation of saints calls out to another to stretch and grow and imagine fresh ministry for fresh situations. The work is accessible. Its pages should be able to ruffle seminarian and parishioner alike. Given all the Malagasy place names in the text and the pitiful knowledge of Malagasy geography of, at least, this...

Resistance Comes First: Pirate TV as Postmedia Activism

Resistance Comes First:Pirate TV as Postmedia Activism Joseph Sannicandro (bio) HACKED TRANSMISSIONS: TECHNOLOGY AND CONNECTIVE ACTIVISM IN ITALY BY ALESSANDRA RENZI University of Minnesota Press, 2020 HACKED TRANSMISSIONS: TECHNOLOGY AND CONNECTIVE ACTIVISM IN ITALY BY ALESSANDRA RENZI University of Minnesota Press, 2020 A brash "self-made" billionaire with no previous political experience is elected to the nation's highest office, buoyed by a rising tide of populism. Sophisticated manipulation of the media stokes xenophobia and resentment toward elites. The chattering classes decry declining press freedom and the hyperpolarization of society, while supporters seem happy to toss a monkey wrench into national politics as usual. While this farce may now be familiar to American readers, the tragedy began for Italians in 1994, when Silvio Berlusconi first took office as prime minister. Berlusconi continued to dominate Italian politics through 2011 and whose specter still hangs over Italy even now, always seemingly one clever joke and a smile away from the news cycle. More important than Forza Italia, the center-right political party he founded prior to his first election, is Berlusconi's control of Mediaset, Italy's largest mass media company. The Economist calculated that, while in office, Berlusconi had "wielded influence over some 90% of Italy's broadcast media," the primary source of news for a majority of Italians.1 Berlusconi took advantage of the media liberalization that followed the widespread popularity of pirate radio during the 1970s, epitomizing the appropriation of resistance that would characterize his political career. But the politicization of the media in Italy certainly [End Page 194] did not begin with Berlusconi's conflicts of interest. Already in 1967, Umberto Eco recognized that "a country belongs to the person who controls communications,"2 and Italian activists have never ceased to make media production a prime terrain of contestation.3 In Hacked Transmissions, Alessandra Renzi provides a timely reflection on how activists challenged Berlusconi's media dominance. Through an immersive and historically thorough (auto)ethnography, Renzi explores the case of Telestreet, a decentralized network of pirate micro-TV stations that turned television into a collaborative epistemological practice with those marginalized by the media—not "representing" everyday life but incubating and organizing resistance through connective practices of coproduction. Renzi's genealogy of Telestreet finds its roots in the pirate radio movement of the 1970s, stretching through twenty-first-century digital television and social media. Telestreet intentionally describes its practice as connective rather than collective, making for a clever means of continuity that downplays what could otherwise become a technologically deterministic narrative. Renzi's intervention is not guided by the novelty of new media, but she instead carefully emphasizes "how people come together, work together, and change with technology" (4). The interrogation of connectivity extends to the study's method, as well as to its form. Hacked Transmissions "lays out a collaborative research methodology that puts processes of subjectivation at the center and attends to an ethics of connection and care" (2). One might not be surprised to find such language in an ethnography drawing upon fifteen years of participation, yet the conditions of activist research present unique challenges that necessitate such deep imbrication. Hacked Transmissions consists of an introduction, eight article-length chapters, and a short epilogue, a perhaps unconventional structure linked by what Renzi terms a "social movement energetics" (14). Coursing through multiple terrains of struggle, this focus on energy offers Renzi a way into the narrative that centers on neither specific individuals nor technologies. Renzi makes significant theoretical and methodological contributions to the study of activist media, while those not already predisposed to Continental philosophy will still find much of interest in her qualitative research. Her method of co-research benefits from the use of anecdote, personal stories, and a plethora of heterogeneous voices. The history of Telestreet's transformation from [End Page 195] "Indymedia-style to social-media-based production" has many commonalities to the experiences of other transnational media activists, while bringing to bear the unique contributions of Italian theory to the study of media, which Renzi articulates as connective activism, composition, and hacking (4). Many have argued that Italy is a political laboratory whose developments often anticipate those elsewhere in Europe and beyond...

The Story of Jesus: A Mosaic by Roy A. Harrisville

Reviewed by: The Story of Jesus: A Mosaic by Roy A. Harrisville Troy M. Troftgruben The Story of Jesus: A Mosaic. By Roy A. Harrisville. Foreword by Mark C. Mattes. Eugene, Oregon: Resource, 2020. xx + 229 pp. To Lutheran scholars, Roy A. Harrisville needs no introduction. Professor Emeritus at Luther Seminary and author of many books, Harrisville's scholarly career has been devoted not only to New Testament interpretation in general, but also to the significance of Jesus more specifically. He has particularly reflected on the advantages and limitations of scientific methods such as the historical-critical method for arriving at clearer understandings of Jesus of Nazareth. He culminates a lifetime of work in a concise portrait of Jesus—a "mosaic"—in a book that is at once biographical, theological, confessional, and poetic. Harrisville writes this book because "despite the decline … of mainline Christian denominations, the fascination with Jesus of Nazareth is still existent, particularly among the youth" (xvii). The book takes its cues from the four New Testament Gospels, since Harrisville finds their witness credible, despite the challenges of skeptics. After the Introduction, the book has five parts, four of which progress chronologically through Jesus' life: Beginnings, Beginnings of Jesus' Ministry, Schooling the Disciples, The Passion, and Summary. In each section, Harrisville discusses the significance of Jesus' ministry as it is collectively portrayed in the New Testament Gospels. In these discussions, Harrisville routinely begins with traditions deemed [End Page 193] the earliest, making Mark's Gospel the most consistent starting point. But the book considers traditions from other Evangelists no less, and without diminishing their contributions. Throughout, Harrisville demonstrates broad awareness of parallels from Jewish and Greco-Roman literature, enriching the discussion. Although he surveys the gamut of Jesus material in the Gospels, the areas most substantively discussed are miracles (35–52), parables (53–73), conflict with religious leaders and others (79–110), discipleship matters (117–39), and the Passion narrative (149–89). The book reads like a hybrid that is part New Testament commentary, part historical-critical reconstruction, and part theological assessment or confession of faith. A regular dialogue partner, it seems, are historical-critical assessments that are more confident in scientific reconstruction and skeptical of the miraculous. An example is the section on miracles (35–52), which concludes: "We are left with the alternative that the exorcisms are to be set down to the legendary or mythical, or are to be believed as having actually occurred" (34). The book is more positivist regarding what may be known about the "inner life" or "psychic states" of Jesus, for which Harrisville finds Mark's Gospel the richest in material (143–48). The book ends with "A Final Reflection on the Resurrection of Jesus" (200–03), in which Harrisville incorporates insights from authors as varied as Martin Luther, William Blake, and C.S. Lewis. Regarding the resurrection, Harrisville confesses: "Human thought is a mendicant, a beggar. Its object does not need me to be, to be there; it is a given, a gift, an act of grace" (202). This book envisions an audience of college or seminary readers (xiii). Certainly, the more familiar readers are with New Testament scholarship from the last century, the richer the book will be. Even so, invested novices will find this book enlightening and thought-provoking, as well as enjoyable due to the turns of phrases playfully inserted throughout (for example, "The narrative of Jesus' stilling the storm… may appear to some as absurd as a purple cow" 45). Although minor misspellings occur, they do not diminish the clarity and profundity of the book's substance. The Story of Jesus is a concise compendium of Harrisville's teaching, historical-critical reflection, and theological discernment about the significance of Jesus [End Page 194] for today. It is at once enjoyable and profoundly instructive, from someone who has greatly influenced the conversations of New Testament theology to this day. Troy M. Troftgruben Wartburg Theological Seminary Dubuque, Iowa Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc.

Theology, History, and the Modern German University ed. by Kevin M. Vander Schel and Michael P. DeJonge

Reviewed by: Theology, History, and the Modern German University ed. by Kevin M. Vander Schel and Michael P. DeJonge Walter Sundberg Theology, History, and the Modern German University. Edited by Kevin M. Vander Schel and Michael P. DeJonge. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021. 358 pp. When I was asked to review this volume, I was intrigued immediately by the title. Few subjects are more important in contemporary Christian theology than the nexus of theology and the discipline of history in the context of German university culture. It is important wherever Christian intellectual life is carried on in the global church. When the volume arrived, I discovered it was a collection of fifteen essays. Reviewing a bunch of essays is like herding cats. The introduction by the editors was helpful and accurate, but not sharply focused. If I had been asked to introduce the volume, I would have said something direct and simple like this: In the Early Church, theological reflection was often led by bishops (e.g., Irenaeus, Augustine). In the Middle Ages, monks took the lead (e.g., Anselm, Aquinas). With the coming of the Reformation, and into the Modern World, theology has become largely the province of the academic professorate. (Think of Luther as the last monk and the first professor.) The professorate [End Page 226] is beholden as much to university culture, with its secular canons of criticism, as it is to the church and its articles of faith. In the emergence of the professorate, Protestant faculties in German universities have dominated. A chief reason for this dominance is the role that the discipline of history has played in the development of modern Christian theology. Church history is the youngest branch of theological study, having been first added to the curriculum at the University of Helmstedt in 1750. The editors call this "the historical turn" whose implications "are reflected in the shifting compositions of university faculties and curricula … as universities themselves grew beyond the medieval organizational structures to become centers of historical scholarship" (1). What does one do when faced with the challenge of historical criticism? One possibility is for history to go on the attack. Historical method assumes explanation by mundane causes. Claims about divine incursion and miracle have no place. Seas do not part; the dead do not return to life. Lessing famously spoke of the "ugly broad ditch" separating "accidental truths of history" from "eternal truths." A possible defense is to concede the public record of events and instead assert the interior life as the locus of religion. "Dogmas and doctrines," said Schleiermacher, are "nothing but general expressions for definite feelings." Troeltsch labeled Schleiermacher's strategy an "'agnostic theology of mediation' which recognized the inexact and symbolic character of religious language" (65). To put it another way, "theology springs from … personal conviction and … without it theology is a mere dead letter" (45). Roman Catholics of the "Tübingen School" (for example, Johann Sebastian Drey) sought to harness history. Yes, history teaches that Christian life in the church, and thus truth, are subject to constant change. But this is the work of the Holy Spirit who leads us to the discovery of further revelation beyond scripture (John 16:13). Eternal truth of revelation is not only "being," it is "becoming." History, Bible, and doctrine join together in harmony because the (Roman) church is nothing less than the continuation of the incarnation. As Drey put it, "the primitive history and the subsequent course [End Page 227] of Christianity are in fact one history … Christianity is itself only one reality" (122). This idea helped to make popular the historical/theological discipline known as "the development of doctrine." For Barth, the public record of Christian teaching in the Bible and the history of doctrine produced a rigorous discipline (Wissenschaft) with definite rules determined by the historic Christian community: "church dogmatics." Writing explicitly against Lessing's ugly ditch, "Barth stressed … that knowing God depends on God's own action; we do not reach this goal through a historical inquiry, even if such inquiry may help us understand that God alone is the source of any human knowledge" (307). These are but three examples. In all the essays, we see...

Rethinking Freedom: Slavery, Time, and Affect in the Global Novel

Rethinking Freedom:Slavery, Time, and Affect in the Global Novel Rita Barnard (bio) RUNAWAY GENRES: THE GLOBAL AFTERLIVES OF SLAVERY BY YOGITA GOYAL NYU Press, 2019 RUNAWAY GENRES: THE GLOBAL AFTERLIVES OF SLAVERY BY YOGITA GOYAL NYU Press, 2019 Even before the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests that followed George Floyd's murder in 2020, Yogita Goyal's erudite and nuanced study of "the global afterlives of slavery" would have been acclaimed as an important academic book. But in the months (and now years) that have followed, the work has come to seem even more important and urgent. It opens, after all, with a consideration of memorialization and monuments, which have become such an important point of contestation in the U.S. Specifically, Goyal cites Toni Morrison, whose enormously influential Beloved was shaped by the novelist's deep regret that there was "no suitable memorial" to the slave experience: not a "plaque or wreath or three-hundred-foot tower," not even a "small bench by the road" (1). Goyal uses this poignant starting point to comment on the massive body of literature about the slave experience that has arisen since the publication of Beloved in 1987. Whether in forms that replicate those of the nineteenth-century slave narrative or those that break with its tropes and structures of feeling, the remembrance of slavery has radically shaped contemporary writing in the U.S. and beyond over the past three decades. And yet, Morrison's lament over inadequate public memorialization still seemed completely apt and timely in the last years of the Trump presidency, [End Page 179] when monuments to the Confederacy became a divisive and burning issue—vividly affirming Saidiya Hartman's observation that "if the ghost of slavery still haunts our present, it because we are still looking for an exit from the prison" (7). For evidence of this entrapment, we need look no further than Caroline Randall Williams's reflections on her "rape-colored skin" in a devastating New York Times essay from July 2020 entitled "My Body is a Confederate Monument," or, by way of heartless contrast, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton's contemporaneous remark that slavery was "a necessary evil." The events of that year certainly reawakened and intensified an awareness of what Faulkner once described as America's "debt that cannot be amortized"; and the struggle between remembering and misremembering the past is clearly ongoing. Goyal's understanding of the stakes of her project can be grasped along these lines. Absent a "politics of recognition and restitution," she declares, we will remain haunted by slavery's often uncanny afterlives (233). But as the title, Runaway Genres, suggests, this study is as much literary and formal as political. One of its animating observations is the contrast between the wildly inventive and irreverent ways in which American slavery has recently been treated by African American novelists (we might think of Paul Beatty's The Sellout, Mat Johnson's Pym, and Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad) and the formally conventional ways in which others have narrated the new forms of "slavery," such as human trafficking, debt peonage, mass incarceration, and involuntary migration. Indeed, as Goyal's first chapter demonstrates, these new global works not only replicate the formulaic narrative structures and affective modalities of the nineteenth-century slave narrative, but they do so in ways that replicate two problems associated with the form. Packaged by abolitionists and marketed to a Northern audience, the earlier slave narratives often operated as "a black message in a white envelope," thereby diminishing the narrator's authorial agency (60). They offered, moreover, certain self-congratulatory satisfactions through what Goyal grasps as a kind of sentimental substitution, whereby the narrative serves to prove not only the humanity of the suffering subject but also that of the empathetic reader as well. Though the form still clearly works, as evidenced by the excellent sales of books like Francis Bok's Escape from Slavery or [End Page 180] Dave Eggers's What Is the What?, those two ethically problematic narrative strategies abide. Indeed, the application of formulae born in a very particular historical context to contemporary forms of global oppression tend to exacerbate these problems of authorship, affect...

Editors’ Note

Editors’ Note Kate Masur and Gregory P. Downs Our June issue reinforces our sense that the field of the Civil War Era remains a wide-ranging, creative site of engaged scholarship. The pieces in this issue span from slavery to the present day, delving into concrete historical details and the persistent narratives that shape our encounters with the past. In his Tom Watson Brown Book Prize address, Sebastian Page explains the origins of his book, Black Resettlement and the American Civil War, relating his discomfort with many aspects of the historical profession. He concludes with a discussion of how received narratives of Lincoln’s presidency and of abolition itself continue to shape the questions historians ask and, by extension, the scholarship they produce. The participants in a roundtable on studying slavery on campus are likewise engaged in challenging received narratives. Historians Hilary Green and Adam Domby assembled a group of scholars who are researching and publicizing their campuses’ relationships to slavery, bringing forward histories of people and events that have been either covered up or forgotten entirely. Contributors offer reports from the field and a call to press forward with work that should, Green and Domby write, include not just research and writing but also “working with constituent communities (descendants of enslaved people, local black and other marginalized communities affected by the campus, alumni, students, faculty, et cetera) to ensure equity in admissions, scholarships, hiring, and future campus planning.” In a research article, John Quist analyzes the career of Michigan editor Theodore Foster, a Liberty Party supporter who became a Republican in the late 1850s. Quist contributes to an ongoing conversation about how to characterize the politics of white antislavery Northerners, particularly as their views changed over time. He argues that Foster shifted during wartime and its aftermath from abolitionism to an accommodation with political antislavery and racism, concluding that Foster’s evolution should lead us “to reexamine white abolitionists’ long-term commitments to racial equality, to reevaluate the distinctions between abolitionism and the Republican Party’s antislavery message, and to recognize that abolitionists could be more easily transformed than the society they hoped to change.” Frank Towers rounds out this eclectic issue with a wide-ranging historiographical essay on cities and Reconstruction. Adopting an expansive chronological frame, Towers reminds readers of interdisciplinary [End Page 145] scholarship in urban history that developed from the 1960s to the 1980s and suggests that historians of the Civil War Era could fruitfully return to that body of work for insights and ideas. That scholarship suggests, in particular, that cities can be viewed as agents in their own rights. They are not simply places where things happened but also a particular kind of human formation that, itself, produces novel dynamics, solidarities, and structures of power and inequality. We are as always indebted to associate editors Hilary Green, Luke Harlow, and Katy Shively, who are constantly soliciting essays and reviews, editing writing, and helping produce this journal, as well as to Matt Isham and Heather Carlquist Walser, who keep the wheels turning under challenging circumstances. [End Page 146] Copyright © 2023 The University of North Carolina Press

Open Hearts, Closed Doors: Immigration Reform and the Waning of American Protestantism by Nicholas T. Pruitt

Reviewed by: Open Hearts, Closed Doors: Immigration Reform and the Waning of American Protestantism by Nicholas T. Pruitt Mark Granquist Open Hearts, Closed Doors: Immigration Reform and the Waning of American Protestantism. By Nicholas T. Pruitt. New York: New York University Press, 2021. ix + 279 pages. The politics and religious controversies over immigration in the United States are older than the country itself, and, though the specifics keep changing, the controversies seem to have much the same tone across the centuries. Nicholas Pruitt (Eastern Nazarene College) examines the role that mainline American Protestant denominations played in discussions over immigration legislation and policy during the twentieth century, especially between the major immigration laws of 1924 and 1965. Seeing themselves as leading entities of American society, these mainline groups sought to use their power and influence to oppose some of the harsher elements of the 1924 legislation, and to advocate for a more open immigration system. Initially these Protestants came at this issue through the mindset of their overseas missionary activities, and were especially worried about the exclusion of Asian immigrants. But as they advocated in the realm of immigration, they also sought transformations in American society, as well as within their own denominational cultures. The irony is that as they successfully lobbied for the immigration reform of 1965, which allowed in many immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa, they were diluting their own control over American religious life, through the increased religious diversity brought by these same immigrants. Pruitt spells out other ironies in the relationship between the old-stock mainline Protestants (Congregationalist, Presbyterian, Methodist, Northern Baptist, and Episcopalian) and the new immigrants. During the nineteenth century these Protestants fought against immigrant Roman Catholics and Jews, sponsoring laws that hindered them in education and language maintenance. Even Protestant immigrants, mainly German and Scandinavian Lutherans, were valued only for their labor, and for the possibility that their Protestant roots might lead them to bolster sagging mainline memberships. This delusional hope was as much a chimera then as it is now. Mainline Protestants wanted the immigrants to become assimilated in American culture, as they, the mainline, defined it. [End Page 233] In the twentieth century mainline denominations developed programs of home missions work and settlement assistance, but again, with the same overtones of assimilation, cultural conversion, and an increasingly desperate recognition that they were losing their hold on the American religious majority (something they had already numerically lost). These mainline groups criticized the restrictive immigration laws of 1924, and advocated for their relaxation during the 1920s and 1930s, but still with the idea that they could convert the immigrants, socially as well as religiously. During the Second World War, they pushed for the admission of refugees, and afterwards led the way with the resettlement of displaced persons from Europe. They held that this could be accomplished while still maintaining a common American religious culture, which, of course, they would lead. The whole ideal of a "Judeo-Christian America," of a common religious morality, was their mantra, even though it was as much a fiction then as it is now. Finally, though the 1960s proved that religious pluralism was here to stay, mainline Protestants were the leading political and cultural voices in the efforts to relax immigration restrictions. Pruitt recognizes and highlights the ironies inherent in the attitudes of the mainline, who believed that they could and should continue to determine the religious and cultural worlds of the United States. Mainline Protestant leaders argued for immigration policies that kept pushing them further into a numerical minority, while assuming that they could manage this religious tide. In his conclusion, Pruitt writes: Many mainline Protestant leaders turned to a more liberal immigration policy that welcomed cultural differences, with the understanding that America's religious identity would remain largely intact. What they did not realize was that they unwittingly helped pave the way for a broader religious pluralism in the future (184). Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services (LIRS) is not mentioned; the book's focus is on efforts to influence policy rather than on refugee resettlement. In fact, Pruitt rarely mentions American [End Page 234] Lutherans. During this time Lutherans were rapidly moving out from their...

Martin Luther and Women: Theology and Lived Experience by Laura Jurgens

Reviewed by: Martin Luther and Women: Theology and Lived Experience by Laura Jurgens Mary Elizabeth Anderson Martin Luther and Women: Theology and Lived Experience. By Laura Jurgens. New York: Peter Lang, 2020. 161 pp. This is a thoroughly researched account of Martin Luther's views on women, arguing convincingly that the complexity of his understanding is revealed only when one considers his interactions with women alongside his writings. To provide context, the book begins with an overview of the common beliefs on the place and standing of women in early modern Europe, as well the influences of classical and medieval thought on these convictions. As the author summarizes, "They believed that women were physically weak, less intellectually capable, and less competent at controlling their emotions" (7). The author then explores Luther's commentaries referencing biblical women, particularly Eve, but also Tamar and Sarah. Mary was not considered because Jurgens questionably asserts Luther did not think Mary was "involved in this temporal life" (42). The author shows Luther's ideas were consistent with those of his time, save for some development in his discussion of Eve in the later lectures on Genesis. Even here, while the mature Luther acknowledged aspects of Eve's equality with Adam, he simultaneously maintained traditional claims of her inferiority (35). Jurgens next considers Luther's general understanding of women's nature. Again, he did not deviate from the thinking of his day, viewing women as weaker and intellectually inferior to men. Likewise, Luther's conception of the ideal woman as an obedient wife, mother, and homemaker was not unique. While these conclusions are not surprising, the author's quotations from Luther are taken from numerous writings but provide no context and no sense of a particular order, chronological, genre, or otherwise. One is left to wonder if context could have provided additional insights. Next the author investigates Luther's communication with actual women, and it is here that Jurgens finds a more complex picture. She first addresses Luther's relationships with his mother, Margarethe Luther, and his wife, Katharina von Bora. Jurgens then looks at his correspondence with two female reformers, Argula von Grumbach and Katharina Schütz Zell. In all these encounters, which we only [End Page 197] know of primarily through Luther's letters, Jurgens sees that Luther treated the women as intellectually capable and did not reprimand them for transgressing the ideal female roles. Similarly, a survey of Luther's pastoral letters reveals that his pastoral advice to women differed little from that offered to men. Jurgens concludes that Luther's actions, consequently, did not fit with his "strict theological convictions" about women (84, 110, 140). While there is no reason to argue with the author's thesis, there are some questionable assumptions within the analysis including noting that Martin Brecht's Martin Luther: His Road to Reformation, 1483–1521 does not even mention Katharina von Bora (83), whom Luther did not know until 1523. The author also asserts that Argula von Grumbach was the first to employ the printing press to support the Protestant message (92), although Luther and others clearly did this previously. The most striking, however, is the notion that if Luther's beliefs about women were consistent, his pastoral care to women would somehow be different than that to men because he considered women more emotional and less intelligent. Yet Luther's "strict theological convictions" ultimately are about the gospel and care of souls, not anthropology. A true theological evaluation must take the core of his theology under consideration. This work will prove valuable to researchers and experts with its numerous quotations from Luther's writings and frequent references to other scholarship. The price of the book and the literature review style of the writing in portions of the text, however, will make it inaccessible to others. Nonetheless, the author's conviction that Luther's actions as revealed in his correspondence should be considered alongside his treatises and biblical commentaries is significant for all. [End Page 198] Mary Elizabeth Anderson Loras College Dubuque, Iowa Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc.

Prison Elite: How Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg Survived Nazi Captivity by Erika Rummel

Reviewed by: Prison Elite: How Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg Survived Nazi Captivity by Erika Rummel Laura A. Detre Erika Rummel, Prison Elite: How Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg Survived Nazi Captivity. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2021. 215 pp. It is undeniably true that both academics and the general public have a thirst for stories of resistance to the Nazi machine and that consequently a tremendous amount of media on the topic is produced every year. Historians increasingly endeavor to look at the ways in which Nazism impacted Europe through diverse lenses, continuing to examine stories of Jewish victimization in death camps but also analyzing the lives of non-Jewish people who were oppressed [End Page 128] by German fascism. Erika Rummel's book Prison Elite does just that by looking at the writings of the Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg, who was imprisoned by the Nazis after the 1938 Anschluss. This book largely focuses on how Schuschnigg dealt with the conditions of his incarceration and the coping mechanisms he used to survive the experience. The author dives deep into the details of how he found comfort in religion, music, and books. She details how Schuschnigg was initially held in solitary confinement, although she also notes that he was allowed to marry and then receive visits from his new wife in this period. It is undeniable that Rummel has spent a great deal of time with Schuschnigg's writings, which form the core materials consulted for this text. The question this leaves us with is: what will we learn from this material? As she acknowledges, Kurt von Schuschnigg was not a typical prisoner and his treatment at the hands of his Nazi jailers was indeed exceptional. It does, in fact, make the reader wonder if his experiences were so unusual as to be unhelpful in understanding the functioning of the Nazi political machine. Most camp internees lived lives of terror and life-threatening deprivation, whereas Schuschnigg, by the time of his transfer to Sachsenhausen, lived in relative comfort with his family and many privileges. His experiences are somewhat comparable to those of French politician Leon Blum, who was also a VIP political prisoner of the Nazis, but Blum, as a Jewish Socialist, had the specter of the Holocaust hanging over his imprisonment. Is there value in a detailed examination of the imprisonment of a figure who had himself led a dictatorial, illiberal regime and who by all admissions fared well under Nazi incarceration? Additionally, because this text hangs so thoroughly on Schuschnigg's own writings we do not learn why his experiences were so singular. Why is it that the Nazis chose to imprison him rather than execute him? Why did they transfer him first from Vienna to Munich and then on to Sachsenhausen? Why was his family allowed to accompany him on that final move? These are just a few of the questions raised by this account but not answered in any meaningful way. One of the challenges inherent in any examination of this period in Central European history is that Nazism's singular fixation on genocide colors our view of all other contemporary political movements. It is tempting to look at Austrofascism, the clerico-fascism of Slovakia, the nominal regency under Hungarian dictator Miklós Horthy, or any of the other radical right-wing governments to be found in this region in the 1930s and see them as benign compared with the incomparable evil taking power in Germany. As historians [End Page 129] we must resist this urge, however. It is undeniably true that the genocide perpetrated against Europe's Jews by the Nazi regime was unique in its cruelty as well as its pervasiveness, but when we look at the Austrofascist government in isolation rather than in comparison, we see that it was a murderous movement it its own right. Anyone who is interested in the interwar history of Austria must acknowledge the 1934 Civil War as a violent turning point, after which the country was undoubtedly no longer a liberal democracy. Additionally, we need to increase our awareness of the state-sanctioned murders of political opponents, particularly Communists and Social Democrats, under the governments of both Engelbert...

A Religious History of the American GI in World War II by G. Kurt Piehler

Reviewed by: A Religious History of the American GI in World War II by G. Kurt Piehler John Hannah A Religious History of the American GI in World War II. By G. Kurt Piehler. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. xv + 393 pp. A military chaplain must be able to listen carefully to members of his uniformed congregation regardless of their particular faith, their level of piety, or even lack thereof. G. Kurt Piehler models that skill very ably as he chronicles hundreds of oral histories from World War II. This book will enlighten anyone interested in what real GIs and real chaplains were thinking as they served their nation around the world. GI stands for "Government Issue" and is any soldier, marine, sailor, or airman. Piehler conveniently organizes his collection of quotations and anecdotes. He begins with President Roosevelt's effort to mobilize the nation for war by reference to religion. Next is the unprecedented [End Page 228] raising of twenty thousand volunteer chaplains from civilian clergy of America and the building of multi-faith chapels. He then covers all circumstances and conditions that chaplains and GIs faced: basic training, foreign deployment, ethical challenges, fear, wounds, dying, imprisonment, and dealing with former enemies following surrender. One chapter discusses race relations and another chapter concerns uniformed women. Segregation and patriarchy were the order of the day. President Truman's order to integrate the services would not come until 1948. Piehler believes that the GIs of World War II provided the prelude to the religious revival of the 1950s. He also believes that the pluralism and tolerance exercised by the chaplains then formed a foundation for American civil religion. On many occasions a chaplain substituted for an absent chaplain of a different faith, reinforcing acceptance of pluralism and tolerance. The Navy chaplaincy developed the widely accepted motto: "Cooperation without compromise." Serious piety was not universal and unanimous. Nor was facile pluralism. Piehler adduces quotations disputing any illusion of unanimity. Atheists and agnostics were not afraid to dissent. The practice of pluralism and tolerance was not perfect. Tensions between some elements arose. For example, some Roman Catholics were afraid that Protestant chaplains were proselytizing their flock. Likewise, many Protestants believed that Roman Catholic chaplains were favored, especially in the army where the chief of chaplains was Roman Catholic. Orthodox Jews were suspicious of Reform Jewish chaplains who seemed to predominate in the military rabbinate. Fundamentalist church bodies felt that the accession system was rigged against them due to education requirements. The general Protestant services were not satisfying to all. Latter Day Saints (Mormons) frequently held separate services. Although not mentioned by Piehler, Lutheran and Episcopalian chaplains often held supplementary eucharistic services for their respective coreligionists. Only a few Lutherans are quoted by Piehler. No specifically Lutheran archive appears in the lengthy bibliography, although it includes the official account of Army chaplains, "Report of the Army Chaplain in the European Theater" compiled by a team led [End Page 229] by Lutheran chaplain, Arthur Carl Piepkorn. Had Piehler included more quotations from Lutheran chaplains, they would likely have differed little from the range of attitudes among other chaplains. However, Lutheran chaplains typically served dual roles. In addition to serving as unit chaplains for all GIs and presiding at general Protestant services, they conducted Lutheran eucharistic celebrations for Lutheran GIs, embracing pluralism while upholding the integrity of Lutheran pastoral practice. Piehler notes that General Marshall, President Roosevelt's Army Chief of Staff, and other high officials held Roman Catholic chaplains in higher respect than their Protestant counterparts (306–08). Further research would find that Lutheran chaplains of the era were regarded with respect equal to Roman Catholics. Many, like Piepkorn, Storaasli, Scharlemann, Reiss, and Dreith, were promoted and assigned to the staffs of very senior commanders. All in all, this book is an excellent treatment of the character and religiosity of the Americans who served in World War II (the "greatest generation"). Like Ernie Pyle's cartoons from the front, Piehler paints a portrait of GIs who were displaced and under duress. We remember them for their valor. John Hannah U.S. Army Chaplain (Retired) The Bronx, New York Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press...