Evening Mail Research Articles

Provincial architect with a competitive edge: Arthur Griffin, the early years

Arthur Reynolds Griffin was born in Nelson in 1883, and began architectural practice on his own account in that city in 1906. He quickly earned two important commissions by winning competitions for the design of the new Carnegie Library in Hokitika in 1906 and the relocated Nelson Girls' School the following year, kickstarting his career. The latter project led to his appointment as architect to the Nelson Education Board and further school jobs. By 1910, he had completed several prominent commissions in Nelson, including the replacement Trafalgar Hotel in the central city, the new Home for Old People in Waimea Road, and the imposing new premises for the Nelson Evening Mail. He went on to design numerous notable Nelson landmarks, such as: the Cawthron Steps in front of the cathedral (1913); Nelson Hospital (1925), since demolished; and the Trathen's Building in Trafalgar Street (1922), demolished in 2016. This paper will, however, focus on his early works, from the first decade of the twentieth century.

Medical misinformation in the era of Google: Computational approaches to a pervasive problem

On December 28, 1917, a fascinating article appeared in the pages of the New York Evening Mail. The article, titled “A Neglected History,” written by H.L. Mencken, laments the fact that the 75th anniversary of the introduction of the bathtub to the United States had passed without the slightest public notice. “Not a plumber fired a salute or hung out a flag. Not a governor proclaimed a day of prayer. Not a newspaper called attention to the day” (1). Mencken goes on to detail the history of the bathtub, describing the introduction of the English bathtub by Lord John Russell in 1828, “then, as now … a puny and inconvenient contrivance—little more, in fact, than a glorified dishpan.” Mencken wrote that installation of the bathtub in Millard Fillmore's White House in 1851 led to more widespread acceptance in the United States. Quoting from the purported April 23, 1843, issue of Western Medical Repository , he goes on to record the opposition of physicians to the bathtub as dangerous to health, inviting “phthisic, rheumatic fevers, inflammation of the lungs, and the whole category of zygomatic diseases.” And he states that by 1859 the majority of the medical community had finally accepted the bathtub as harmless to health—evidenced by a poll taken at the 1859 meeting of American Medical Association in Boston, in which nearly 55% of physicians regarded the bathtub as harmless and more than 20% advocated its use as beneficial to health (1). The spread of misinformation in science and medicine is a real problem, not only in spite of technology but often because of it. To sort through the cavalcade of journal articles, legitimate and otherwise, the scientific community should devote more resources to technological approaches that identify false and retracted findings. Image courtesy of Dave Cutler (artist). … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: dpapke{at}partners.org. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

Schoolchildren or Citizen Shareholders?: Provincial Repertory Audiences, Letters to the Editor, and Public Subscription

When the Abbey Theatre installed a nightly police cordon to silence protesting playgoers during the 1907 run of Synge'sThe Playboy of the Western World, spectators voiced their objections in newsprint. Under pseudonyms like “A Western Girl,” “A Commonplace Person,” “A Much Interested Foreigner,” and “A Lover of Liberty,” correspondents sent letters to theDublin Evening Telegraph, Freeman's Journal, andDublin Evening Mail. “Vox Populi” wrote that the arrested protesters “showed an admirable public spirit, which in any other country would be highly honoured.” “Oryza” reported a conversation overheard from the stalls in which Synge had said that the audience's hissing was “quite legitimate.” After journalist and Galway MP Stephen Gwynn penned a letter supporting the Abbey, biographer D. J. O'Donoghue responded that “the vindictiveness which has been shown night after night in expelling and prosecuting people who ahve [sic], in their excitement, called out ‘It's a libel’ or ‘shame,’ or otherwise mildly protested, is a serious menace to the freedom of an audience.” He referred to the furor as a “newspaper controversy”; others called it a “newspaper war.” In a public discussion at the Abbey after the play's run, Yeats quoted from the correspondence when defending his decision to call in the police. According to playwright William Boyle, the controversy boiled down to political representation. In a letter to theFreeman's Journal, he argued that protesters had not reacted “by staying away,” as some supporters had suggested they should, “because the ‘Abbey’ is a subsidised theatre, independent of the money taken at the door. Therefore … the public had no remedy, but the one resorted to.” Private subsidy had muffled the democratic shuffling of playgoers’ pocketbooks; forced to shut their mouths inside the theatre, playgoers opened up to the newspapers that circulated around it.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson's Published Works: A Bibliography in Progress

Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Published WorksA Bibliography in Progress Katherine Adams, Sandra A. Zagarell, and Caroline Gebhard We offer here a comprehensive bibliography of Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s primary works known to have appeared in print. Our listing begins with the four collections of her personal, belletristic, and non-belletristic writing produced by Akasha (Gloria) Hull, R. Ora Williams, and Eugene Metcalf in the 1970s and 1980s. It then presents, by genre, additional pieces published by Dunbar-Nelson in her lifetime. Some of this latter work is still accessible through libraries and digital archives. However, several of the newspapers and journals in which she published were never archived, and copies of certain works will only be available in the Alice Dunbar-Nelson Papers at University of Delaware’s Special Collections Library.1 To compile this listing we drew upon information provided in Williams’s 1976 bibliography and the Special Collections catalog at University of Delaware, as well as our own research. However, Dunbar-Nelson’s personal records, and especially the “itineraries” she kept— documentation of pieces accepted, rejected, and under review for publication2— indicate that more of her writing appeared in print than was previously believed. The hunt for such works is complicated by the fact that the writer published under several different versions of her name over the course of her career (we have provided the variants [End Page 254] she used for individual items wherever possible). Dunbar-Nelson may have also published pseudonymously. Her archive reveals that she submitted work under at least three aliases: Adele Morris, Monroe Wright, and Al Dane. But whether she ever published using one of these pseudonyms, or a different one, has yet to be determined. More discoveries may well lie ahead. Katherine Adams Tulane University Sandra A. Zagarell Oberlin College Caroline Gebhard Tuskegee University edited collections of dunbar-nelson’s writing An Alice Dunbar-Nelson Reader. Ed. R. Ora Williams. Washington, dc: UP of America, 1979. Google Scholar Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Ed. [Akasha] Gloria T. Hull. New York: Norton, 1984. Google Scholar [Metcalf, Eugene Wesley, Jr.] “The Letters of Paul and Alice Dunbar: A Private History.” Diss. U of California, Irvine, 1973. Ann Arbor: umi, 1973. Google Scholar The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Ed. [Akasha] Gloria T. Hull. 3 vols. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. Google Scholar poems “Delta Sigma Theta, National Hymn.” The Official Ritual of Delta Sigma Theta Grand Chapter. Washington, dc: Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, 1950. 192. [Alice Dunbar Nelson] Google Scholar “Let Me Live.” A. M. E. Church Review 35.1 (July 1918): 7. [Alice Dunbar-Nelson] Google Scholar stories “Edouard.” Southern Workman 29.6 (June 1900): 358–64. [Alice Dunbar] Google Scholar “Esteve, the Soldier Boy.” Southern Workman 29.11 (Nov. 1900): 631–37. [Alice Dunbar] Google Scholar “George Brenton, Artist.” Smart Set 6.1 (Jan. 1902): 129–34. [Alice Dunbar (Mrs. Paul Laurence Dunbar)] Google Scholar “The Heathen: A Christmas Story.” Tuskegee Student 32 (Christmas 1922): 6–7. [Alice Dunbar-Nelson] Google Scholar “Lesie, the Choir Boy.” Southern Workman 30.11 (Nov. 1901): 615–19. [Alice Dunbar] Google Scholar “The Little Mother.” Standard Union (Brooklyn) 19 Mar. 1900: 8. [Mrs. Paul Laurence Dunbar] Google Scholar “Science in Frenchtown— A Short Story.” Saturday Evening Mail 7 Dec. 1912: 8–9, 26, 27. Google Scholar “Tom.–An Incident.”Woman’s Era 3.5 (Jan. 1897): 11–13. [Alice Ruth Moore] [End Page 255] Google Scholar articles and essays “A Creole Anomaly.” Leslie’s Weekly 15 July 1897: 43. [Alice Ruth Moore] Google Scholar “Appointed, Some Points of View.” Daily Crusader (New Orleans) 2 July 1894. Google Scholar “The Big Stick.” A. M. E. Church Review 30.2 (Oct. 1913). 117–21. [Alice M. Dunbar] Google Scholar “The Black Farmers After Their Conference at Tuskegee.” Boston Evening Transcript 18 Mar. 1899: 18. [Alice Dunbar] Google Scholar “Hysteria: The Old Time Mass Meeting Is Dead.” Competitor 1.2 (Feb. 1920): 32–34*3 [Alice Dunbar Nelson] Google Scholar “Independent Opinions.” The Independent: Devoted to the Consideration of Politics, Social and Economic Tendencies, History, Literature, and the Arts 86.3522 (5 June...

Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian gothic stage

Catherine Wynne, Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)A book which considers Bram Stoker's immersion in late nineteenth-century theatre both on the Dublin and London stages, and how this may have contributed to his gothic fiction, is long overdue. Catherine Wynne is ideally placed to write such a study. Born and raised in Ireland, where she took a BA and MA in English at University College Dublin, she moved to England to pursue a PhD at Oxford with Irish poet-academic Bernard O'Donoghue. Currently, she is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Hull. Her career, in other words, follows the same Anglo-Irish trajectory as that of Stoker himself, and her study is particularly nuanced with regard to that cultural background. Wynne has previously researched Stoker's theatre reviews, and published in 2012 Bram Stoker and the Stage: Reviews, Reminiscences, Essays, and Fiction, all of which provides a rich seed-bed for this current study. She cites Irish novelist Colm Toibin who, on the eve of Stoker's centenary in 2012, suggested that the gothic novelist occupies a space 'in between' Dublin and London and, like Oscar Wilde, that he found his 'space' in the theatre (p. 3).Born in Dublin in 1847 (during the Irish Famine), Bram Stoker attended Trinity College Dublin, and became a civil servant. In his twenties, his nights were spent at the theatre, reviewing plays for the Dublin Evening Mail. In November 1876, Sir Henry Irving, the most celebrated stage actor of the late Victorian period, came to Dublin with his production of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The event was to prove transformative in Stoker's life and career. Not only did he see and review Irving's Hamlet, but attended and reviewed separately all three performances. Interestingly, the first two, though extremely positive, also contained some criticisms. Irving was attracted by the second review in particular and asked to meet the author. The outcome was an offer for Stoker to relocate to London and to become the manager of Irving's Lyceum Theatre. He did so later that year and as manager, was intimately bound up in the staging of the melodramas that were the lifeblood of Irving's theatre and that were to feed directly into Stoker's imaginative writings.Wynne's book provides a close intertextual reading of Stoker's gothic fiction and the blood-boltered, spectacular melodramas he saw performed on the Lyceum stage. Her book is an invaluable and revealing index of just how often stage plays are explicitly invoked in Stoker's novels. In Dracula, for instance, Jonathan Harker reaches for a quotation from Shakespeare's Hamlet (the play Irving performed in Dublin) when deciding to write down what he has just seen - the Count climbing lizard-like up the walls of the castle:Up to now I never quite knew what Shakespeare meant when he had Hamlet say: 'My tablets! Quick, my tablets!/'Tis meet that I put it down, etc.' for now, feeling as though my own brain were unhinged or as if the shock had come which must end its undoing, I turn to my diary for repose. The habit of entering accurately must help to soothe me.1Hamlet, when he speaks these lines, has just had his own encounter with the supernatural in the shape of his father's ghost. The submitting and hence subduing of a supernatural encounter to the rational act of recording is an obsessive concern throughout Dracula.Given the explicit invocation of Shakespeare's Hamlet by Jonathan Harker and hence by Bram Stoker, it might be expected that a study such as Wynne's would explore in more detail the connections that have been made between the mesmeric onstage presence of Henry Irving and the uncanny figure of Count Dracula. The author, however, resolutely sets her face against following this line, declaring early on her opposition to 'the biographical over-reliance on the notion that Irving is the model for the vampire' (p. 3). In her closing pages, she reiterates even more emphatically that her study 'contests the prevailing reading that sees Irving as the model for the vampire' (p. …

The Dublin Evening Mail and pro-landlord conservatism in the age of Gladstone and Parnell

The historiography of nineteenth-century Irish newspapers centres on the development of a nationalist press nationally and locally, with expansion of readership and titles connected to the great waves of politicisation under O’Connell and Parnell. Studies of unionist newspapers tend to focus on Ulster or the Irish Times, whose institutional continuity maintains interest in its earlier incarnations, and whose relatively liberal nineteenth-century unionism was directed at the Dublin Protestant middle classes. There was, however, another type of nineteenth-century Southern unionist newspaper addressing a conservative audience of landlords, professionals and Church of Ireland clerics. Such diehard newspapers often clung to older business models involving limited readership, and underpinned their activities by second jobs and patronage from local elites, though the Dublin Tory press developed a somewhat wider audience.

Franklin P. Adams's "Trio of Bear Cubs"

Evers again played second base without an error, accepting seven chances, and in addition secured a clean hit to center. The youngster is remarkably fast in relaying plays. Chicago Daily Tribune, September 16, 1902, 6. For the record, the September 15 game at Chicago's West Side Grounds marked Johnny Evers's second play with his infield colleagues. Just 260 spectators--a mere sprinkling of fans, according to the Chicago Daily Tribune's press account--were on hand to see Evers's dexterity as Frank Selee's Colts beat the Cincinnati Reds by the score of 6-3. Perhaps attendance was down that afternoon due to the double drubbing the Reds gave the Colts the before. Although the two losses on September 14, 1902, (2-1 and 8-6) dampened the spirits of the hometown crowd of some 8,500, the second game did quietly produce one historical statistic: the first 6-4-3 play recorded by shortstop Joe Tinker, second baseman Johnny Evers, and first baseman Frank Chance. (1) There would be more plays, of course, though in the deadball era that particular fielding statistic meant little to record keepers. And besides, as Hall of Fame historian Lee Allen often observed, care very little for statistics as such. My concern is the players. Who are these men? What are they? (2) For Allen, the stories behind the baseball players mattered, and during the early part of the twentieth century, many of these tales centered on the scrappy, steely-eyed Chicago Cubs. Led by Chance, the team's peerless leader, this true baseball dynasty captured four National League (NL) pennants (1906-1908, 1910) and two World Series titles (1907-1908). Chance and his players would be the first to acknowledge that tenacity and old-fashioned grit had much to do with the team's good fortune, and even their opponents admired Chicago's aggressive play. After the Cubs' archrivals, the New York Giants, beat them 5-4 during a hard-fought game in September 1908, the Giants sportswriter covering the game conceded that they're wild and woolly and full of tease, are the Cubs. Hard to handle, and apt to scratch all opposition out of their way. But we like to play with them at that. They keep us trying all the time. (3) The Cubs similarly relished their own confrontations with their New York nemesis. When a Chicago Daily News reporter asked Tinker to recall his greatest day in baseball, the shortstop immediately replied that might know it was against the I think that goes for every Cub who played for 'Husk' Chance in those years on Chicago's West Side. Warming to his subject, he added, If you didn't honestly and furiously hate the Giants, you weren't a real Cub. (4) You weren't much of a Cub fan, either, as New York newspaper columnist and pundit Franklin P. Adams knew. The Chicago-born journalist began his career in 1903 on the pages of the Chicago Journal, but he moved to New York and the New York Evening Mail a year later. Filled with jokes, poems, witty observations about the city, and puns (cotton is the root of boll weevil), his Always in Good Humor column soon became a staple among New York readers and a fixture on the editorial page of the New York Evening Mail. (5) When he wasn't pouring over his writing, F. P. A.--as Adams signed his columns--would often go to the ball games at the Polo Grounds, occasionally with his friends and fellow journalists Grantland Rice, Damon Runyon, and Ring Lardner. Baseball was a passion with Frank, according to biographer Sally Ashley, and he possessed a sincere enthusiasm for the sport. He would usually on the results of the games, and in a city where it was not unusual for three-inch headlines to trumpet GIANTS THROTTLE CUBS, he preferred to root for his hometown team and bet gleefully against the Giants. (6) As Adams recalled decades later in a letter to Hall of Fame historian Ernest Lanigan, one in July 1910 the foreman of the newspaper's composing room told him that eight more lines were needed for his column. …

Knock: The Virgin's Apparition in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (review)

Reviewed by: Knock: The Virgin's Apparition in Nineteenth-Century Ireland Patrick Maume Knock: The Virgin's Apparition in Nineteenth-Century Ireland. By Eugene Hynes. (Cork: Cork University Press/Attic Press. 2008. Pp. xx, 368. $62.52. ISBN 978-1-859-18440-0.) This work by a social anthropologist born in the 1940s close to the Marian shrine at Knock argues that the 1879 Marian vision should be seen as the conjunction of traditional oral folk and vision beliefs represented by the seers and a more clericalized and print-centered form of Catholicism through which the witnesses' accounts were reconstructed by promoters of the vision (so their original experience is ultimately unrecoverable). Hynes reconstructs the beliefs and social structures of Knock before the Potato Famine (assisted by a valuable "insider" memoir by a famine-era migrant to England, who recorded his memories in response to the apparition and whose accuracy is often confirmed by other records), then argues these persisted into the 1870s (the famine had relatively limited impact on Knock, fostering a sense of providential deliverance) but broke down as partible inheritance among extended families (sustained by seasonal migrants' earnings) was replaced by stem-inheritance of indivisible holdings. At the same time, the community faced local and national crises of authority. The relatively [End Page 863]lenient local landlord and his paternalistic agent were elderly; their successors might not maintain their tacit understandings with the tenantry. The authority of many priests (including Father Bartholomew Cavanagh of Knock) was challenged by the lay-led Land League, which despite predominantly Catholic leadership was opposed even by the aged Archbishop John MacHale, whose stature as folk hero rested on his image as champion of the poor. (Hynes's recovery of the full extent, significance, and popular construction of MacHale's image, as against more archive-centered accounts that highlight criticisms by clerical rivals, is a highpoint.) The Beirne family, who provided the majority of the Knock seers, were closely allied to the priest, experiencing generational difficulties, and as graziers potentially threatened by the land agitation. Hynes suggests the apparition could be read as rebuking or upholding Cavanagh and MacHale, depending on the recipient's sympathies; this ambiguity underlay its appeal. Hynes argues convincingly that the picture of top-down "devotional revolution" or "Tridentine evolution" rolled out from east to west conceals a complex pattern of adaptation where older practices were remodeled. Some of his evidence is almost painfully convincing. (Gallogly's history of the Diocese of Kilmore echoes the widespread view that the Stations of the Cross devotion appeared only in the 1850s while reprinting an 1820s picture of a church with the Stations. In this case, Hynes shows, a longstanding popular devotion was revamped in the mid-nineteenth century.) Hynes's reconstruction of nineteenth-century Knock is exemplary in its intellectual daring and the depth of evidence deployed, and his discussion of how the seers' accounts were reshaped when recorded by clerical investigators who assumed the authenticity of the vision they were supposed to be investigating is very challenging. The depth and coherence of Hynes's interpretation may, however, give a misleading impression that he provides the last word on the subject. In fact, he employs many speculations, some inherently unprovable while others require further research. For example, Hynes suggests the early dying away of the Knock devotion reflects the absence of rationalist critics of Catholicism in Ireland (unlike France), so there was no felt need to assert it against them. In fact, Conservative/Protestant papers such as the Dublin Evening Mail(still denouncing the shrine in 1882) subjected Knock to sustained ridicule, associating it and the Land League as evidence of popular barbarism and unfitness for self-government; why, then, did this not revive popular devotion? Hynes shows limited knowledge of "ultramontane" and "elite" devotions and procedures. (He presents the image of a crowned Virgin as unique to Knock because it was not found at Lourdes; the 1846 La Salette apparition—unmentioned in Hynes's index, although he notes references in contemporary accounts of Knock—featured a crowned Virgin.) Devotional use of clay, mortar, and rainwater is described as "animistic," but could be presented as [End Page 864]Catholic sacramentalism...

Deems Taylor: Selected Writings (review)

Deems Taylor: Selected Writings. Selected and annotated by James A. Pegolotti. York: Routledge, 2007. [xv, 227 p. ISBN-13 978-0-415-97957-3. $95.] Bibliographic references, index. Deems Taylor (1885-1966) was one of the most visible figures in American art music during the first half of the twentieth Known to millions as composer, critic, author, and radio personality, his appeal during this period of has been well explained by James Pegolotti who, in the epilogue to his biography, observed that Taylor had the character to succeed in all the areas of his multiple talents, and circumstances allowed them to fit the cultural needs of the early twentieth century. (Deems Taylor: A Biography [Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003], 340). Of all his talents, I believe that Taylor's greatest gift was his ability to communicate to broad spectrum of people through the written and spoken word. In Deems Taylor: Selected Writings, Pegolotti has assembled what he considers to be some of the composer-critic's literary offerings, with the intent to provide opportunity for the to rediscover an American writer with an engaging view of (p. xv). Deems Taylor: Selected Writings indeed affords those readers unfamiliar with Taylor's work in print, an opportunity to obtain sampling of what he was about musically and critically. Further, it reinforces Pegolotti's contention that Taylor's success was consequence of his ability to incorporate into his reviews a broad band of wit, musical knowledge, and experience as composer (p. 340). The book is divided into seven sections- six chapters plus an intermission-and is organized chronologically. Each chapter begins with brief introduction and each individual within the chapter contains brief note as well, with the intent to provide the reader with better sense of Taylor himself, as well as his place and time (p. xv). Chapter 1, Poems 1911-1919, offers selection of five poems. In his introduction, Pegolotti looks at the arrival of Franklin Pierce Adams (F. P. A.) in York City and his promotion of such writers as George F. Kaufmann, Dorothy Parker, and Edna Saint Vincent Millay. He observes that Taylor's poems were his first published works and were helped into print by Adams (p. 1). The fifth, and final poem of the chapter, Haec Olim Meminisse Iuvat, is humorous account of Taylor's college years at York University, replete with Taylor's own explanatory footnotes. The title of the poem, line from Virgil's Aeneid, means Perhaps one day it will be useful to remember even these things (p. 5). The following lines, recounting Taylor's final year at NYU, offer soupcon of the composer-critic's true gift of wit: As Senior now, I was bald and gray with the studious life I'd led, But proud of the knowledge stowed away in my small but well-formed head. I killed International (so-called) Law, Took Spanish and Chaucer (the latter's raw), Wound up with thesis on Bernard Shaw -How much of that stuff still sticks Well, here is the dope I recollect from nineteen-five and -six: Bill and I wrote the Senior show (his book was mere detail), And Loup played Elsie, the Cannibal Queen, and looked lie half-dressed whale: The senior ball was dream devine, The senior banquet was mostly wine, And F.P.A. ran piece of mine in the York Evening Mail. (p. 7) According to Pegolotti, the poem was judged by Franklin Pierce Adams as the best submission for his column during 1919 (p. 5). It is also demonstrative of why Taylor was to become friend of the Algonquin Round Table. Chapter 2, New York Sunday Tribune Articles and Some Others, 1914-1919, offers eight pieces written for the Sunday Tribune, the Republic, and Century Magazine. Of the articles appearing in this chapter, Pegolotti notes that they were selected because they illustrate Taylor's many interests and give insights to the world of his time (p. …

Dissonant Discourses: HIV-Positive Refugees and the Media in New Zealand

Will the authorities ever pluck up the courage to invoke the powers that surely already exist in our health regulations and take these time bombs out of circulation? ( Nelson Evening Mail , June 29, 1994) I didn't have any test in Sudan. I never expected I would have any kind of illness; I am very healthy and strong. I was shocked. My life was very dark and I wasn't expecting to have HIV. How did I get it? What way did I get it? I was very happy when I got to NZ, I was going to have a bright future helping my family, I was going to change my life, I didn't expect it was going to be like this [crying]. (Samuel)

Freedom Under Lincoln (review)

book reviews181 thizers from those who merely wanted to end the war with a negotiated peace, but his satire was an effective bludgeon for the Union cause. It was widely credited with helping to win the war. The Union more or less restored, Locke moved to Toledo to edit the Blade. As "a man who could do anything around a newspaper", he was in general charge of the operation, but made the Weekly his special care. Under his editorship it became nationally known, counting 200,000 readers. By culling skillfully from the Blade's editorials, Harrison has made his chapters on Reconstruction a case study of shifting opinion in the late 1860's. Originally a supporter of President Johnson and a foe of the Republican Radicals, Locke ended by supporting the Radicals and calling for Johnson's ouster. He agreed that the basic structure of the government should not be "distorted" merely to punish the Confederates, but he was not prepared—as he came to realize Johnson was^to withdraw protection from the freed slaves and leave their fate to the southern states. We thus find him praising the Congress as heartily for passing the Civil Rights Act of 1866 over Johnson's veto as he had previously praised the President for vetoing it. With war and Reconstruction receding, the author focuses on Locke's career with the Bhde and the New York Evening Mail. Here the keen interest of the first half of the book is not quite sustained. This is not because of any fault in style, which is pleasantly readable throughout, but rather that Locke's activities become less absorbing. His editorial campaigns were perhaps just as good as those of the Nasby period, but they do not move us as much and they were certainly less successful. It is good to know that he was a more complex personality than we had supposed and that he was a "persistent and often eloquent advocate of the rights of man", but it is likely that he will continue to be remembered , if at all, for Nasby. Factual errors, not numerous in the aggregate, are concentrated in the opening pages, obliging the author to bridge a quite unnecessary credibility gap in the remainder of the book. James B. Gidney Kent State University Freedom Under Lincoln. By Dean Sprague. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965. Pp. viii, 340. $5.95.) Freedom Under Lincoln sails under false colors. Its publisher claims that the problem of "Federal Power and Personal Liberty Under the Strain of Civil War" constitutes "a little-known chapter of history," that Freedom Under Lincoln is "a lively, authoritative and important book," and that Dr. Sprague's treatment of the centralization of power and resistance thereto during the American Civil War "implies much about contemporary political problems." In fact, Sprague, who received his 182CIVIL WAR history doctorate in Political Science from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University and serves as a civilian with the Department of Defense, has written a pedestrian narrative of the first year of the Civil War which sheds precious little light on important issues of that conflict, let alone "contemporary political problems." Sprague's account is episodic. He devotes four chapters to events in Baltimore and Maryland; four to St. Louis and Missouri; two to Kentucky; and five to Washington, D.C. and the North. He then returns to the same scenes for three, four, two and three chapters, respectively . His disjointed narrative begins with the clash between Massachusetts troops and a local mob in Baltimore, in April, 1861, and concludes with the release of political prisoners and transfer of the power to make "extraordinary arrests" from the State Department to the War Department in February, 1862. Sprague writes at length on minor, as well as major incidents during these ten months. He scarcely attempts to analyze the changing political and military situation in which these episodes occurred and offers no insights into the political and constitutional questions raised by the Lincoln administration's course of action during 1861-1862. By narrowly defining the chronological scope of his study, Sprague simply neglects the troubled history of the last three years of the Civil War. Inadequate research...