Missouri Press Research Articles

US Secretary of State George C. Marshall's Losing Battles against President Harry S. Truman's Palestine Policy, January–June 1948

US Secretary of State George C. Marshall's Losing Battles against President Harry S. Truman's Palestine Policy, January–June 1948

James J. Cooke . Chewing Gum, Candy Bars, and Beer: The Army PX in World War II . Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 2009. Pp. 186. $39.95.

James J. Cooke . Chewing Gum, Candy Bars, and Beer: The Army PX in World War II . Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 2009. Pp. 186. $39.95.

Essays of Futures Past

Essays of Futures Past Robert Root (bio) The American Essay in the American Century. Ned Stuckey-French. University of Missouri Press. http://press.umsystem.edu. 272 pages; cloth, $60.00. Although essays on the death of the essay abounded in the early twentieth century, Ned Stuckey-French demonstrates in The American Essay in the American Century that what was dying was "a particular kind of essay and the America of which it had been a part." One thread of his book recounts the transition from the fireside musings and ambling meditations of essayists in the "Genteel Tradition" through the jaunty, vigorous, and largely urban reflections of popular newspaper "colyumnists" and magazine essayists to the emergence of E. B. White as "arguably the greatest American essayist of the first half of the twentieth century." Stuckey-French argues that White's 1940s columns for Harper's, subsequently collected in One Man's Meat, "signaled a breakthrough for the American personal essay." White's essays combined the "warmth, self-deprecation, and irony" of his writing for The New Yorker with "more serious" thinking "possessed of a greater sense of citizenship." Reviewing that book, Irving Edman declared, "Mr. White is our finest essayist, perhaps our only one." Tracing the arc of the American essay from Washington Irving to E. B. White, Stuckey-French provides a thorough and enlightening overview of largely forgotten figures: Genteel essayists Nathaniel Parker Willis, Fanny Fern, Donald Grant Mitchell (who wrote as "Ik Marvel"), and George William Curtis; influential colyumnists Christopher Morley, Don Marquis, Franklin Pierce Adams (F. P. A.), and Heywood Broun. These writers are relevant in their own right and significant as White's precursors: when he began writing from his saltwater farm in Maine, he was well aware of Ik Marvel's farm book Wet Days at Edgewood (1865) and the equally bucolic Adventures in Contentment by "David Grayson" (another pseudonymous essayist), and he gave due homage to Morley and Adams, who had published his poetry in their columns, and especially Marquis, whom he expressly imitated in some very powerful political essays. Stuckey-French's perceptive and wide-ranging review of the American essay's evolution encourages tracking down and perusing a number of these writers. The second thread of the book, masterfully interwoven with the essay's history, traces the transformation in American culture in the same period. "The American Century," according to Stuckey-French, "encompassed roughly the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first four of the twentieth," a sixty-year span in which American culture changed radically. The decline of the agricultural economy and rural life style, the rise of the middle class, the faster pace of urban life, "evolving text technologies"—all these created a different audience for the essay and required a different kind of essayist. Stuckey-French is astute in his assessment of this transformation and its influence on the essay, as well as of the essay's contribution to the transformation. By chronicling the parallel shifts in American society and intellectual thought and in the American essay over six decades, Stuckey-French suggests ways that social, political, and commercial shifts impact the literature created in a culture. He offers a corrective to the narrower perspectives of ideology and class that arise, often unacknowledged, in literary criticism. In the case of the essay, a continuous debate about the death of the essay tended to be energized by the aesthetic or sociological politics of the critics taking sides. Cultural conservatives defined the essay largely in terms of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century stereotypes, continuing a kind of critical life support to a form of the essay practiced by earlier masters, most notably Charles Lamb. Cultural progressives argued for either a more journalistic emphasis on reportage and research or for a more polemical emphasis on opinion and advocacy, preferring articles and editorials over essays. The rise of the middle class altered perspectives. Where the division between an elite culture of the educated and wealthy and the "folk" culture of the working class had once been more pronounced, the advent of radio, film, and popular newspapers and magazines generated a demand for commercially viable literature and the creation of what has...

The Improbable First Century of Cosmopolitan Magazine (review)

Reviewed by: The Improbable First Century of Cosmopolitan Magazine Martin Green The Improbable First Century of Cosmopolitan Magazine. By James Landers. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2010. 368 pp. $34.95. Cosmopolitan is one of a handful of American periodicals that have had a continuous existence for more than one hundred years—at least the name has been around that long. Over that period, the magazine has undergone many incarnations, from a general family magazine to a crusading progressive voice to a sensationalist outlet for muckraking to a quality popular fiction magazine before its last metamorphosis appealing to young, often single women making their way in the world of careers and sexual experimentation. James Landers's history covers the magazine's first hundred years thoroughly, using much archival material. There is some justification for his labeling the magazine's continued existence as "improbable," although he attributes its survival (it is 126 years old as of this writing) more to the "primacy of individuals who create something new, something worthwhile" (298). The individuals in question are John Brisben Walker, the magazine's second owner; [End Page 113] William Randolph Hearst, who purchased the magazine from Walker; Ray Long, its editor from 1918-32; and Helen Gurley Brown, who took over the moribund title in 1965, completely transforming it from what it had been for most of its lifespan. Some of the early history is well known to scholars of late-nineteenth-century magazines. Landers traces Walker's taking a failing magazine and making it into a leader in its category, transforming it into a vehicle for his progressive and pro-business views. New rivalry (especially from McClure's) in the turbulent period of magazine competition in the mid-1890s dropped it to second place. By the early 1900s, the ever-restless Walker had new interests (automobiles) and the magazine, as Landers says, "lost vitality." Walker sold the magazine to newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst in 1905. Under Hearst, Cosmopolitan became more overtly political, its often-sensational campaigns against child labor and political corruption defining muckraking more than the more scholarly articles of McClure's (and later Collier's and the American) in this unprecedented period in magazine journalism. After the end of the muckraking era, Cosmopolitan was transformed again, especially after Hearst hired Ray Long in 1918 to become its editor (and the overseer of Hearst's other magazines). Long was a workaholic editor with a keen eye for what was popular, and under his editorship, the magazine became a premier outlet for popular fiction. Drawing on Hearst's papers at the University of California, Berkeley, Landers's narrative moves into new territory in recounting the next phases of the magazine's existence, which have never been told in such detail. Through the early 1920s, its circulation was over one million, composed mostly of affluent middle class readers, and consequently it was attractive to advertisers, generating healthy profits for Hearst, both the company and its leader, personally. The only bump in the magazine's successful journey under Long was competition from its corporate sibling, Hearst's International, which "The Chief" founded in 1911 as an eponymous vehicle for his political ideas and interests. Over the years, Hearst's International and Cosmopolitan came to resemble each other in content and design. In 1925, Hearst merged the two periodicals under the ungainly title of Hearst's International Combined with Cosmopolitan. Although Long tried to keep the quality of the new magazine up to his previous standards, the publication occasionally veered toward the inconsequential formulas of some of its rivals. By the end of the decade, Long was at odds with his corporate bosses, and as the Depression affected the magazine business along with all other businesses, he was forced out. The magazine limped along through the Depression, the war years, and the 1950s, a shadow of its former self. In the post-war period, when magazines, now in competition with television for advertising dollars, thrived or died on specialization, Cosmopolitan had no clear identity. The venerable magazine was on the verge of extinction in the mid-1960s when it found an unlikely savior in the person of Helen Gurley Brown, [End Page 114...

Brothers to Buffalo Soldiers: Perspectives on the African American Militia and Volunteers, 1865–1917 (review)

Reviewed by: Brothers to Buffalo Soldiers: Perspectives on the African American Militia and Volunteers, 1865–1917 Garna Christian Brothers to Buffalo Soldiers: Perspectives on the African American Militia and Volunteers, 1865–1917. Edited by Bruce A. Glasrud. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011. Pp. 256. Notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780826219046, $39.95 cloth.) Only within the past generation have military historians brought the study [End Page 312] of African American regulars to center stage. The signs of success are the proliferation of titles and the division of scholarship into competing schools. Bruce A. Glasrud, retired Dean of Arts and Sciences at Sul Ross State University, hopes to move the black militia forward as editor of this collection of readings. Judging from his selection of journal articles and astute editorial comments, his chances appear good. Glasrud has chosen leaders in the field of the black experience: Otis Singletary, Roger Cunningham, Alwyn Barr, Marvin Fletcher, and William Gatewood, among other gifted writers. He has also made the wise decision to draw from multiple sources. The locales are primarily in the South—Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, Georgia—though, notably, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio also receive examination. No essay focuses altogether on one state; each story melds with the larger background. The time span of the collection is 1865–1917, but there is some material that ties together loose ends after the latter date. The Spanish-American War (1898) divides the accounts, with five articles before that splendid little war and six after. In the composite treatment, Glasrud illuminates the motivations for enlistment, the service of the volunteers, and their treatment and reaction. Financial reward, patriotism, and anticipation of recognition of their contributions persuaded many blacks to enlist in the militia in both time periods. Anticipation of recognition dwindled to a desperate hope by 1898, after the failure of the Reconstruction Acts. The rising tide of racism around the turn of the twentieth century dashed the hopes of the war veterans. Certainly, white treatment of the blacks varied from place to place: Illinois and even Virginia and North Carolina rated above Georgia and Texas. Nevertheless, African Americans experienced racial prejudice everywhere, and it often took the form of violence from white militiamen, police, and streetcar conductors in the former states of the Confederacy, where beatings and shootings often awaited the defiant. Bitterness over the refusal of the white establishment to respect constitutional and human rights emboldened African American regulars to forcefully retaliate in Texas garrison towns and elsewhere, but the militiamen had fewer options. They lived among their antagonists, who also worked and paid them. There was no federal employer, though the War Department supplied only nominal security for the regulars, no united separate community, and, when off duty, no symbols of authority. Although there were pushbacks against exclusion from the commissioned ranks and the most egregious acts of humiliation, the blacks usually persevered. The patience of the militiamen notwithstanding, bigots considered even their limited status a threat to the social system, a prejudice reinforced by the condescending attitude of some white officers and the reluctance of the War Department to send them into combat. The Dick Act of 1903, which ended the racial separation of National Guard units, enabled southern states to abolish the black militia. The general reader will find some surprises: the continuation of black militia after Redemption, the occasional tolerance of some southern states toward the militia, and the long-standing limited scholarship on the subject. Mostly, though, the reader will experience frustration at another example of white America’s historical difficulty in accepting an equitable multiracial society. [End Page 313] Garna Christian University of Houston-Downtown Copyright © 2012 The Texas State Historical Association

Southern Frontier Humor: An Anthology (review)

Reviewed by: Southern Frontier Humor: An Anthology John Mayfield (bio) Southern Frontier Humor: An Anthology. Edited by M. Thomas Inge and Ed Piacentino. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2010. Pp. 360. Paper, $26.95.) Between 1830 and 1860, a diverse group of southern humorists produced a catalog of tall tales, satires, spoofs, and reminiscences that still ranks as the Old South's major literary contribution. "Serious" writers such as William Gilmore Simms always labored in the shadow of Cooper or Hawthorne, but the amateur humorists had no equal. The tradition began with Augustus B. Longstreet's Georgia Scenes in 1834 and persisted in George Washington Harris's wildly anarchic Sut Lovingood. Clustered around these classics were many more, some well known and some not. The writers drew their characters from all strata of southern society, put them in uncomfortable and often ludicrous situations, and let them speak in their own words. Twain picked up the tradition in Huckleberry Finn, Faulkner developed it in Spotted Horses, and Andy Griffith brought it to television in Mayberry RFD. There have been anthologies of this humor from its beginnings. William T. Porter of the New York sporting journal Spirit of the Times encouraged the craft, and in 1964, Hennig Cohen and William B. Dillingham issued Humor of the Old Southwest, which has served as the standard for two generations. Now Thomas Inge and Ed Piacentino have produced a handsome new anthology that will carry us through for years to come. The differences between this volume and Cohen and Dillingham's are subtle. The new one has more emphasis on lesser-known wits such as Christopher Mason Haile ("Pardon Jones") or Hardin Taliaferro, and more stories feature blacks and women (although all the tales were written by white men). The editing is superb, the introductory biographies are to the point, and the core is there: Longstreet and his descendants live on. So does a core question: Why should we take such tales seriously? At one level the answer is simple: They are fun. Who can resist Sut Lovingood's moment of conquest when he slips two wriggly lizards up a revivalist's pant leg and watches the old windbag strip naked before a throng of pious females, hollering "the Hell-sarpents hes got me!" Or when Henry Clay [End Page 551] Lewis's Widow Rugby impulsively decides to horse-race a preacher to church and beats him by stripping to the buff to lighten her load? In this sesquicentennial "celebration" of the Civil War—with all its nostalgia for crinoline ladies and chivalrous gentlemen—it is good to remember that in 1860 the South was an unformed, fluid place where social status was insecure and life was anything but serene and elegant. The tales also remind us of what literary historian Richard Gray has called the patrician/populist divide in southern identity. Humor is by definition subversive of propriety and social conventions, and we have here what James Justus has called a "riot" of those very conventions. Given the fact that the stories came from literate, well-read gentlemen writing often about the antics of an underclass of plain folk and con men, who exactly was poking fun at whom, and why? An anthologist's selections and the ways in which they are framed are important issues. Early collections tend to be fondly nostalgic. The humorist is a yarn spinner and cracker-barrel philosopher telling whoppers about a time gone by. The lovable folk bring up visions of Jefferson's virtuous agrarians, and the fact that they whoop and holler and fight is a sign of democratic enthusiasm. Seen from this perspective, southern humor was populist to the core, and the humorist was a fond chronicler of its spirit. That changed during the 1960s as historians rediscovered the dark and bloody ground of antebellum social relations. There was nothing inherently funny about social stratification, poverty, cruelty, or illiteracy, unless one was using comedy as a shield. Kenneth Lynn's highly influential Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (1960) regards the storytellers as self-controlled gentlemen using satire to draw a cordon sanitaire between themselves and the bumpkins by mocking them. Lynn's analysis emphasizes class antagonism...

Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page . Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement . Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 2011. Pp. x, 164. $34.95.

This short book attempts to say something new or at least uncommon about Abraham Lincoln. Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page's thesis is clear: that Lincoln remained more interested in colonizing African Americans outside the United States than modern historians have wanted to see. The authors contend that Lincoln pursued efforts to export black laborers to the British or Dutch Caribbean for some months after his administration issued the Emancipation Proclamation and began arming black soldiers. The historiographic rationale for this work is strongly stated. Magness and Page suggest that Lincoln's progression toward enlightened racial views is one of the most politically freighted themes of modern Civil War scholarship, the sort of moral redemption narrative that has energized a host of academics. While historians have noted Lincoln's long antebellum support for colonization, and his ill‐fated experiments early in the war with resettlement efforts in Haiti and modern Panama, they have been less attentive to his interest after he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. As the authors observe, “The postemancipation colonization literature remains noticeably underdeveloped, and indeed a topic that many scholars decline to pursue for simple doubt of its existence” (p. 7).

Donald E. Davis and Eugene P. Trani, Distorted Mirrors: Americans and Their Relations with Russia and China in the Twentieth Century. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009. 461 pp.

Donald E. Davis and Eugene P. Trani, <i>Distorted Mirrors: Americans and Their Relations with Russia and China in the Twentieth Century</i>. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009. 461 pp.

Reading Emily Dickinson's Letters: Critical Essays. Edited by Jane Donahue Eberwein and Cindy MacKenzie. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. Pp. xvi, 294. $39.95.) The Creative Crone: Aging and the Poetry of May Sarton and Adrienne Rich. By Sylvia Henneberg. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2010. Pp. xvi, 204. $44.95.)

<i>Reading Emily Dickinson's Letters: Critical Essays</i>. Edited by Jane Donahue Eberwein and Cindy MacKenzie. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. Pp. xvi, 294. $39.95.) <i>The Creative Crone: Aging and the Poetry of May Sarton and Adrienne Rich</i>. By Sylvia Henneberg. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2010. Pp. xvi, 204. $44.95.)

The Present State of Scholarship in the History of Rhetoric: A Twenty-First Century Guide (review)

Reviewed by: The Present State of Scholarship in the History of Rhetoric: A Twenty-First Century Guide Antonio de Velasco The Present State of Scholarship in the History of Rhetoric: A Twenty-First Century Guide. Edited by Lynée Lewis Gaillet with Winifred Bryan Horner. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2010; pp vii + 258. $24.95 paper. The topoi of scholarly invention dwell largely in the arguments of our colleagues. As rhetoric study expands into new venues, and new arguments and counterarguments arise, research must respond adequately to changes in the field's topical map. Which is why good bibliographies in rhetoric are not mere lists; they distinguish themselves as artifacts of careful intellectual judgment amidst a changing terrain in which the term "rhetoric" itself remains slippery and contested. [End Page 182] The evaluative dimension of bibliography announces itself clearly in the third edition of The Present State of Scholarship in the History of Rhetoric, edited by Lynée Lewis Gaillet with Winifred Bryan Horner. (Horner was the sole editor of the first two editions, also published by Missouri, in 1983 and 1990.) Gaillet promises a book that will not simply amend earlier editions, but will "recast the condition of study in the history of rhetoric" (vii). Along these lines, the six contributors focus greater attention than had their predecessors (only Don Paul Abbott returns as a contributor from the second edition) on women in rhetoric, on "rhetorical practices outside the academy, and on discussions of nonwhite and non-Western rhetorical practices" (ix). Present State easily delivers on its promise to overhaul earlier editions. It advances the field into new territory, and effectively challenges common lore associated with the history of rhetoric. Chapters on classical rhetoric and the eighteenth century stand out as particularly useful in this regard. As it extends the range of scholarly invention in certain directions, however, the book limits this range as well, and does so in ways that reveal a distinctly negative consequence for the place of public address research. Since these limits are most pronounced in the volume's final two chapters, and since they seem to emerge as a result of broader forces tied to rhetoric study's split between disciplinary communities in English (composition) and Communication (speech), I review the earlier chapters before turning to my chief concerns. In "The Classical Period," Lois Agnew catalogs both longstanding and new translations of primary works in Greco-Roman rhetoric, before dividing secondary scholarship into categories that nicely cover the diversity of current research—she discusses work focused on areas such as gender ("women and rhetoric"), cultural geography ("ancient rhetoric beyond the West"), tradition ("revisiting the canon"), and teaching ("classical rhetoric and pedagogy"). Turning to chapter 2, "The Middle Ages," Denise Stodola makes an often-overlooked period of rhetoric seem not only interesting, but inviting and ripe for greater investigation. Her section on "definition and redefinition of the discipline" and her attempt to name (and suggest ways to address) seven specific areas for further research proves especially helpful. Abbott has significantly revised his entry, "The Renaissance," from the previous edition and included new sections on "women and rhetoric" and "rhetoric and new worlds." Alongside these additions, Abbott does an excellent job (as do most of the contributors) in pointing readers to a host of electronic databases newly available for research. In chapter 4, "The Eighteenth Century," [End Page 183] Linda Ferreira-Buckley delivers the book's most eloquent and informative contribution. With a sure grasp of the primary texts, she deepens our sense of the social and philosophical context of eighteenth-century rhetoric. At the same time, she folds her contextual account of the period's rhetoric into a detailed narrative of recent scholarship, including a look at fascinating research into the nonlinguistic materials of rhetorical activity at the time. For chapter 5, "The Nineteenth Century," Gaillet presents sections surveying areas, such as "Asian rhetoric" and "American Indian rhetoric," that have only recently started to gain recognition. The chapter also excels in highlighting how feminist scholarship commands a growing influence on understandings of this period. Nevertheless, Present State begins to show limits at this same juncture. These limits become apparent when one notes how Gaillet...

Disturbing Proximity

Disturbing Proximity William H. F. Altman John J. Ranieri. Disturbing Revelation: Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Bible. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009. Pp. ix + 272. Benjamin Lazier. God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008. Pp. xiv + 254. John J. Ranieri. Disturbing Revelation: Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Bible. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009. Pp. ix + 272. Benjamin Lazier. God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008. Pp. xiv + 254. It is certainly not the thematic proximity of these two well-researched and thought-provoking books that disturbs: they complement each other in many useful ways, creating in the process a whole greater than its parts.1 One aspect of this overlap is methodological: Lazier is an intellectual historian while Ranieri's field is philosophy. But the more important factor is that while both books are in large measure devoted to Leo Strauss, Ranieri never mentions either Hans Jonas or Gershom Scholem—the other two members of Lazier's triad of interwar German Jewish intellectuals—while Lazier never discusses Eric Voegelin, with whom Ranieri links Strauss.2 Given the primary importance of Gnosticism in Lazier's book—along with Pantheism it is one of two modern heresies under consideration there3—his decision not to consider Voegelin becomes less jarring in the context of Ranieri. In the meantime, Ranieri's [End Page 292] failure to discuss key figures like Jonas, Scholem, and Karl Barth makes Lazier an indispensable historical corrective along the way. It is rather the pervasive proximity of an uninvited guest to this rich intellectual banquet that is disturbing. As long as anti-Semitism is considered an adventitious or merely expedient element of National Socialism, itself understood as little more than collective stupidity,4 it can, of course, be safely excluded from serious discussion both of contemporaneous thinkers who regarded Old Testament Revelation as "disturbing" and interwar German heresies whereby God was "interrupted." But if, as Strauss famously claimed, National Socialism "had no other clear principle except murderous hatred of the Jews,"5 it must be considered in an intellectual context as well as a Jewish one. Strauss's friend Jacob Klein pointed in this direction when he called National Socialism "Judaism without God."6 It turns out that there is a disturbing proximity between Klein's astute analysis of National Socialism and the four German-born thinkers considered in these two books.7 The only serious flaw in Ranieri's treatment of Strauss is his claim that "the Second Cave" is an attempt to outflank Christianity but not Judaism (pp. 23–24).8 But Ranieri is miles ahead of Strauss's apologists who read the Second Cave as a critique of historicism rather than Revelation.9 [End Page 293] Despite his repeated and perfectly appropriate insistence on the illegitimacy of Strauss's "silence with regard to the New Testament" (p. 173, also 11–13), Ranieri overlooks the anti-Jewish implications of Strauss's post-Platonic image of the recovery of "natural ignorance" (p. 24)10 through a Nietzsche-inspired (p. 24)11 emancipation from the tradition of Revelation.12 It is interesting to ponder exactly why an anti-Christian Strauss should be so much more palatable than an anti-Jewish version.13 But for someone who once accepted14—and never subsequently repudiated—the truth of Nietzsche's claims about the Jewish origins of Christianity,15 Strauss's obvious anti-Christianity doesn't ipso facto disprove the hypothesis of his covert anti-Judaism. The most important contribution Ranieri makes to the understanding of Strauss is likewise connected to this Christian orientation. Ranieri's readings of "Jerusalem and Athens," "Progress or Return?," and "On the Interpretation of Genesis" (pp. 115–24) are competent and often insightful, but his treatment of On Tyranny (and related documents)16 is magisterial. Ranieri begins by revealing that charity is the unlikely villain in Strauss's intellectual universe.17 By replacing the self-affirming and autonomous "admiration" of the classics with an other-dependent "love,"18 "the triumph of the biblical orientation"19 undermines all that is [End Page...

Reviews: Tilo Schabert, How World Politics is Made: France and the Reunification of Germany, Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2009 [Translated by John Tyler Tuttle, edited and abridged by Barry Cooper] xx + 401 pp.; £49.95 hbk; ISBN 9780826218483

Reviews: Tilo Schabert, How World Politics is Made: France and the Reunification of Germany, Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2009 [Translated by John Tyler Tuttle, edited and abridged by Barry Cooper] xx + 401 pp.; £49.95 hbk; ISBN 9780826218483

Friends in Warm Places

Friends in Warm Places Michael J. Jarvis (bio) Larry Gragg . The Quaker Community on Barbados: Challenging the Culture of the Planter Class. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009. x + 192 pp. Map, bibliography, and index. $39.95. In the second half of the seventeenth century, Barbados was the richest, most populous, and economically most productive colony in the Anglo-Atlantic world. Its planters were the first to embrace a slave plantation system, providing a model that English settlers copied elsewhere in the Caribbean and North America. Successful Barbadian planters displayed their wealth to all through their clothes, lavish entertainments, and fine mansions. The island was among the closest to England and Africa in terms of maritime distances: it was the first port of call for many western-bound English vessels, as well as for the rising tide of English slavers operating on the West African coast. Virginia and Massachusetts are the darlings of many colonial historians, but Barbados was the single most dynamic, trend-setting colony in the half-century before 1700. Considering the vanity, rampant materialism, and brutal slave-based labor regime that characterized seventeenth-century Barbados, one would not expect George Fox's radical Quaker faith to flourish there. And yet Barbados was home to the largest Quaker population in the Americas prior to Pennsylvania's founding. Larry Gragg has followed up his recent general history of early Barbados with a slim but meticulously researched investigation of Barbadian Quakers that is both a community study of island Friends and a recovery of their transatlantic and intercolonial networks and connections. As he charts the rise and decline of Quakers in Barbados from the 1650s through the early eighteenth century, Gragg profiles who became "convinced" and how Quakers dealt with slavery, the ultimate source of the island's prosperity. He argues that Barbadian Quakers formed a counterculture that aggressively challenged the island's dominant planter class, directly and through their example of leading lives of peace, simplicity, and equality within a rigidly hierarchical society.1 Gragg starts with an appraisal of the turbulent times in England from which George Fox and his Society of Friends emerged. Fox grew up in a comfortable "middling" Midlands household and wanted for little until, at [End Page 595] the age of nineteen, he experienced a crisis of faith. Over the next four years, he wandered spiritually through an England wracked with religious and civil discord. Even as Calvinist, Arminian, and Episcopal clergymen debated theology, attacked one another, and sought adherents, a large segment of the English populace remained unchurched and ignorant of basic Christian doctrine. Fox floundered within "this confusing milieu of conflicting beliefs and apathy" until he experienced "a mystic union with the divine" and discovered a guiding inner light (p. 14). Further revelations led him to embrace the egalitarian worldview that shaped the central tenets of Quaker belief: rejection of vanity and hierarchy, a commitment to peace, belief in direct divine revelation, and social and gender equality. Rejecting predestination, Fox promised widespread salvation to a nation in spiritual disarray. Established clergymen condemned Fox's "blasphemy," but his message was highly appealing and spread quickly during the 1650s, especially among the families of yeomen and craftsmen in rural northern counties. Despite civil and clerical authorities' vigorous efforts to suppress Fox and his followers, the ranks of England's Quakers swelled to an estimated 50,000 by 1660—and Quaker missionaries and pamphlets were fanning out to Ireland, Continental Europe, and the colonies to spread Fox's radical message even farther afield. The first Quaker itinerants arrived in Barbados in the mid-1650s and found a colony in the midst of dynamic change. As sugar supplanted tobacco and great planters bought out their poor and middling neighbors, settlement patterns established during the island's first decades were radically altered. English political, ecclesiastical, and legal institutions transplanted in Barbados survived the sugar revolution intact, but the island's society and landscape became markedly different from that of England. The growing number of enslaved Africans working under a coercive and oppressive labor regime stoked racism and white fears of violent revolt. As the gulf in wealth between great planters, middling landowners, and the many English and...

Rethinking Rights: Historical, Political, and Philosophical Perspectives. Edited with an Introduction by Bruce P. Frohnen and Kenneth L. Grasso. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009. 288p. $44.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Rethinking Rights: Historical, Political, and Philosophical Perspectives. Edited with an Introduction by Bruce P. Frohnen and Kenneth L. Grasso. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009. 288p. 24.95 paper. - Volume 8 Issue 4

Advent

Advent Lee Oser (bio) What led a saint in a coracle to cross the western sea?No hollow faith but a bell-like heart, never to be broken,Though blood dry dark as coal and scrolls of saints' lives burn to ash.But tell me, teacher or disciple, where Christ Jesus went,Ascending after forty days? I mean, where did he land?Dead planets and red-shifting stars and vacant spaces echoWhat we really think: there never was a miracle,No voyage bridging earth and heaven. Advent heralds absence,A comet cribbed in ice, a nova traced on fissured walls.The saints are in their shoreless tombs and we forget their names. Whether it's that reason, like winter's sun, is sharp and cold,Or that faith, like spring, strikes the spark inside the cobalt wave,Stokes the sun, and stores the empty calendar with years,I scarcely know. Nor can I direct the credulous stranger,Who drives the well-mapped streets of our town, which way is leastIncredible: our being here and there at home, or not.We have followed no star, with no map, squalling and bickeringIn the desert, as seasons tore away or dimmed with time—Suffering through youth and age, in dreams of both, come to sheaveThe ghostly fields, or weave interpretations of the void. A funny touch, those simple shepherds being sore afraid.Good news so rarely happens, or gravitates toward bad,While pain and anguish always can appear out of thin air.Anaesthetizing terror, you will never have to fearA miracle: transitory shadow taking substance,Lifeless air become winged, bright hair grazing the moon's halo,The hills ringing, the pulse of music rising to a chord,Minor first, then major, rapt in aetherial overtones,As if the light sang upward as it fell from sky to ground,And angels joined to hear an instrument of clay resound. [End Page 304] Lee Oser Lee Oser teaches religion and literature at the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, MA. His books include T. S. Eliot and American Poetry (University of Missouri, 1998) and The Return of Christian Humanism: Chesterton, Eliot, Tolkien and the Romance of History (University of Missouri Press, 2007). His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including Commonweal, Southwest Review, National Review, and Literary Imagination. "Advent" is the twelfth poem in a sequence entitled "Once Around the Sun." leeoser@holycross.edu Copyright © 2010 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Mark Twain and Human Nature (review)

Reviewed by: Mark Twain and Human Nature Henry B. Wonham Mark Twain and Human Nature. By Tom Quirk. Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2007. 304 pp. Cloth, $39.95. It must be inevitable that as scholarship on a major author accumulates over time, the canvas on which critics depict their subject becomes smaller, the focus of each new contribution more constricted. The number of pixels also increases as scholars zoom their critical lenses, refining the image the way Google Earth draws us in from a view of the planet to a miraculously legible snapshot of the backyard. Thus after the first wave of Twain scholars took a planetary view of such indistinct landmarks as Mark Twain's America, a new generation sharpened its focus on Twain's art and technique—though the horizon must still have seemed a long way off to the critics who gave their books such expansive subtitles as The Fate of Humor and The Development of a Writer. Twain scholarship continues to thrive, but recent contributions understandably tend to be more modest in scope, often signaling their use [End Page 86] of the zoom lens by adopting the fashionable titular formulation "Mark Twain and X," where X equals an ever smaller appendage of the author's art and identity. Lest I be misunderstood as disparaging this tendency, I offer my own Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale as a prime example of the shrinking critical gaze; other recent examples, all of them important contributions to scholarship, might include Mark Twain and Modern Authorship, Mark Twain and the American West, Mark Twain and West Point, Mark Twain and Metaphor, Mark Twain and Shakespeare, Mark Twain and William James, and Mark Twain and Orion Clemens. With its modestly formulaic title, Tom Quirk's Mark Twain and Human Nature might seem like the latest micro-critical addition to the scholarly oeuvre, and yet this book is really a throwback to a more ambitious era in Twain scholarship, an era of long views and large canvases. W. D. Howells put his finger on a special, not quite definable, quality that he believed set Mark Twain apart from the other funny men of his generation when he said of The Innocents Abroad: "There is an amount of pure human nature in the book that rarely gets into literature." At the other end of his epic career, Twain's obituaries returned to the same point: "How keen he was in his knowledge of human nature"; he had "a deep knowledge of human nature"; his writings "go to the very heart of human nature." While most scholars today cringe at the ideologically suspect notion of a "pure human nature," Quirk is bold enough—and philosophically astute enough—to resurrect this relic of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century literary-critical vocabulary in order to test its theoretical and interpretive possibilities. And the results are striking. As his contemporaries were convinced, and as Quirk helps us understand in our own terms, Mark Twain's books are full of human nature. This is most plainly true of the late writings, in which Twain sought to systematize his increasingly deterministic view of human beings, but it is equally true of his earliest efforts to make readers laugh, in which an implied concept of shared humanity operates as a benchmark against which to measure idiosyncrasy, deviancy, and pretentiousness. In mapping Twain's various deployments of the elusive and problematic concept of human nature throughout his career, Quirk has given us the most ambitious and illuminating study of Mark Twain to be published in years. Part of the freshness of Mark Twain and Human Nature is methodological. The story of Twain's intellectual development is usually narrated as a series of watershed moments that transformed him from the "vagabondizing" bachelor of his western years into an upstanding Victorian gentleman and finally into the misanthropic author of What Is Man? and other late pronouncements on the "damned human race." Twain's engagement with the concept of human nature has traditionally been treated this way, [End Page 87] as fallout from a series of seismic events (migration west, sudden fame, migration east, travel abroad, marriage, exposure to...

Mark Twain: Unsanctified Newspaper Reporter (review)

Reviewed by: Mark Twain: Unsanctified Newspaper Reporter Janice McIntyre-Strasburg Mark Twain: Unsanctified Newspaper Reporter. By James E. Caron. Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2008. 448 pp. Cloth, $49.95. For years the debate over how much of Mark Twain was Samuel Clemens and how much of Clemens was Mark Twain has generated oceans of scholarly ink. James Caron's new book shifts this debate to a new level, one that ultimately will generate much more productive scholarship in years to come. Caron views the Mark Twain persona as a performance mode, and from this stance, analyzes the early influences and experiences that contribute to the creation of this most famous pseudonym. In keeping with the discussion of "Mark Twain" as a dramatic narrative performance, the text is divided into acts and scenes rather than the usual chapters. The prologue and first act trace the influence of the Southwestern humorists on the young Clemens as he begins his career as a newspaper reporter. Those familiar with Walter Blair's early texts will get a few surprises here, as Caron carefully makes the case for a Gentleman Roarer and reinterprets early humorists like William Tappan Thompson and George Washington Harris and their influence on the "Mark Twain" narrative persona. He proposes that the Gentleman Roarer interpretation as opposed to the Backwoods Roarer "insists that the common man, though rustic, was not maliciously rude; though simple and unpretentious, was not simple-minded; and though undereducated and practically unlettered, was nevertheless possessed of common sense and mother wit." He establishes the lineage of the comic tradition that Clemens inherits, acknowledging his debts to earlier scholars Constance Rourke, Blair, and David Sloane. Act two (Washoe Mark Twain) traces Clemens' life on the Comstock writing for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise and his submissions and reprints in San Francisco and Eastern papers during those years, carefully tracing the influences of William Wright (Dan DeQuille) and "Washoe" reporting as these influences contribute to the development of "Mark Twain" long before the byline appears in print. Act three (Mark Twain in San Francisco) moves with Clemens to San Francisco, where Caron discusses the more subtle satire the persona acquires through the Bohemian and flaneurs influences of Charles Webb and Bret Harte, which contribute to more comic possibilities for the Twain narrator. Act four (Correspondent on Assignment) deals with Clemens' [End Page 83] time in the Sandwich Islands, the creation of Mr. Brown, and the ways in which a more sophisticated Clemens expands the performance possibilities of "Mark Twain." Act five (Correspondent at Large) delineates the ways in which Clemens uses the narrative persona of "Mark Twain"—by this time quite versatile in its creative possibilities—into a lecture persona. What this book offers us as scholars is nothing less than a new and more complicated way to look at "Mark Twain"—as a pseudonym, a narrative character, and an actor. Through careful and detailed scholarship, Caron demonstrates the consciously constructed nature of the persona as Clemens became more experienced in determining various audiences, their expectations, and the ways in which he could appeal to them through dramatic performance. The text also includes a detailed account of Clemens' early work out West, challenging and marvelously complicating a segment of the author's life that has been ignored for some time in favor of the later years. It contains an excellent index and a detailed works cited section for those interested in further reading. After reading Caron's book, it will be much more difficult for scholars to interchange the pseudonym "Mark Twain" with the name Samuel Clemens—the two have come to mean very different things through the course of this book. Janice McIntyre-Strasburg St. Louis University Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

ReviewLaura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: Authorship, Place, Time, and Culture. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008. x + 263 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95.) John E. Miller

Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: Authorship, Place, Time, and Culture Get access Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: Authorship, Place, Time, and Culture. By Miller John E.. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008. x + 263 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95.) Amy S. Fatzinger Amy S. Fatzinger University of Arizona Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 41, Issue 2, Summer 2010, Page 244, https://doi.org/10.2307/westhistquar.41.2.0244 Published: 01 May 2010

Man of Douglas, Man of Lincoln: The Political Odyssey of James Henry Lane (review)

Reviewed by: Man of Douglas, Man of Lincoln: The Political Odyssey of James Henry Lane Cathy Rodabaugh (bio) Man of Douglas, Man of Lincoln: The Political Odyssey of James Henry Lane. By Ian Michael Spurgeon. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008. Pp. 291. Cloth, $42.50.) In 1879, the Kansas state legislature considered a bill to fill the state's two spots in Statuary Hall at the United States Capitol with likenesses of [End Page 347] John Brown and James Lane. Neither man was eventually so honored. The choice of Brown was overwhelmingly popular among Kansans, but ultimately he inspired too many polarizing passions for touchy politicos of the period.1 If Ian Spurgeon's Man of Douglas, Man of Lincoln is correct, despite Lane's indisputable impact on events in Bleeding Kansas, Lane's personality and powerful political enemies probably contributed to his rapid fall from grace in the national memory. Spurgeon admits up front that James Henry Lane was a "notorious" antebellum politician and "tragic figure of territorial and Civil War Kansas" (1). As the free-state movement's military commander, he often itched restlessly for action, but was also given to grandiose gestures and theatrical speeches, the latter aiding his rise to become Kansas' first U. S. senator. The book's title alludes to the main controversy surrounding Lane—what Nicole Etcheson calls his apparent "chameleon-like" willingness to change political views.2 Raised an ardent Democrat, in 1854 Lane was a U.S. senator from Indiana, Stephen Douglas ally, and supporter of the Kansas–Nebraska Act. Arriving in Kansas Territory in 1855, he quickly promoted himself as a leader in the developing free-state movement, which Spurgeon ably demonstrates did not require Kansas men to alter alliances to national political parties. The movement grew in national importance the more it resisted Kansas' new pro-slavery government and legislature, installed as the result of Missourians crossing the border to vote. Examined on the face, Lane's fairly typical Northern Democrat free-soilism appears to have morphed into aggressive free-statism, and then pro-Lincoln and later radical Republicanism, eventually shifting yet again to support for conservative Andrew Johnson. Without the benefit of a Lane memoir, some biographers accuse Lane of operating primarily out of opportunism and self-promotion. Correcting this miscalculation of [End Page 348] Lane is Spurgeon's main goal. While acknowledging Lane's sometimes shocking behavior and savvy political maneuvering in service of his own ambitions, Spurgeon insists scholars have largely missed the explanation for Lane's shifting political alignments—an unwavering loyalty to "old-line Democratic principles, including popular sovereignty" (17). Man of Douglas joins a rash of recent books on Lane, perhaps an indication that antebellum actors on the Kansas stage long overshadowed by Brown now benefit from a resurgence of interest. Spurgeon's book promises to be the most useful, given its sound scholarship and portentous chronological range—from Lane's 1854 migration from Indiana to his 1866 suicide. By comparison, Robert Collins's Jim Lane lacks Spurgeon's deep reading of political events in Kansas and Washington D.C., while Bryce Benedict's Jayhawkers is primarily a military history of the Civil War regiments from Kansas under Lane's command, the so-called "Lane Brigade."3 Ironically, the strength of Spurgeon's book—its close political analysis and tight chronology—is also its primary weakness. In Minerva-like fashion, Spurgeon's Lane almost leaps to life fully formed and armored in Democratic Party ideology, poised to march onto the contentious stage of antebellum partisan politics. The influences of Lane's background, family, or earlier experiences receive scant attention, when remedying this flaw would not have rendered this 291-page book overly long. For example, Spurgeon does not tell readers that the year of Lane's birth, father Amos moved the family back to Indiana after a self-imposed exile to Kentucky, purportedly the result of political persecution for his fervent support of Democratic Party politics.4 While Spurgeon briefly acknowledges the "deep passion" (20) for the party Amos Lane instilled in his son, he misses an opportunity to analyze Lane's later struggles over party loyalty in the context of early...

Review Reginald HorsmanFeast or Famine: Food and Drink in American Westward Expansion. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008. viii + 356 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $39.95.)

Review Reginald Horsman<b><i>Feast or Famine: Food and Drink in American Westward Expansion</i></b>. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008. viii + 356 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $39.95.)