Political Historiography Research Articles

Beijing's Crypto-Victorian: Traditionalist Influences on Hu Shi's Poetic Practice

Beijing's Crypto-Victorian:Traditionalist Influences on Hu Shi's Poetic Practice Daniel Fried (bio) Introduction: Hu Shi, Imagism, and The Needs of Modernist Historiography In both political and literary historiography of China, the first flowering of a modernist national consciousness has always been traced to a single canonical date: May 4, 1919. On that date, thousands of Peking University students marched out from Tiananmen Square in protest against Western confirmation of Japanese colonial interests in China at the Paris Peace Conference. The protest march drew nationwide media attention, both because of its size and its vehemence (the march culminated in torching the house of a Chinese delegate to the conference), and in the ensuing weeks sympathy marches and strikes were organized by university students across the country. The immediate political results of the protest were not great. The Chinese government was pressured into refusing to sign the treaty of Versailles, but this refusal did not affect the treaty's implementation, and Japan took control of German colonial possessions in Shandong province. The real fruits of the protest movement were intellectual: national university life was politicized, a raft of new journals were launched, and a vibrant general debate was begun on the sources of, and possible remedies for, the national weakness that had been demonstrated at Paris. Not only were specifically political solutions discussed; much of the debate was driven by a desire for a wholesale renovation of Chinese culture. Indeed, the literary aspects of this intellectual reform movement were so strong that political historiography of modern China almost unavoidably fuses into literary history during the 'May Fourth Era.' This is the main reason why so much weight has come to be placed upon a young Western-trained Peking University professor, Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962), who was at the forefront of this intellectual movement [End Page 371] through his advocacy of 'literary revolution'. In a series of essays written largely before May Fourth, but which became emblematic of the movement's modernizing Zeitgeist, Hu argued for the abandonment of classical styles and the reformation of Chinese literature as a thoroughly vernacular mode of expression – only then, he argued, could the national experience of literature be popularized and made to serve as a unifying cultural force. However, Hu, who had recently finished his doctorate at Columbia University under John Dewey, was a thorough devotee of pragmatism and was averse to the advocacy of theory without practice. Hence, in addition to his theoretical essays, he also published the Experimental Collection (Changshiji 嘗試集, 1920), the first book of vernacular Chinese poetry, as a public test of his theories regarding the creation of a truly vernacular and modernist Chinese literature. What Hu did not reveal, and what most readers have failed to notice, is that the verse in the Experimental Collection is 'modern' only through linguistic dislocation. In fact, and rather ironically, the primary models on which Hu bases his poetic style are clearly traditionalist English-language poems. Hu's primary poetic reading, both as an undergraduate at Cornell and then later at Columbia University, was the standard course of poetry popular with American university students of the period: the Elizabethans, the Romantics, and the Victorians, especially Browning and Tennyson. Insofar as Hu read contemporary English-language verse, he was reading stylistically conservative poems published in popular periodicals, not the more radical work of those now considered canonical English-language modernists. And this reading left its mark: in diction, imagery, theme, and prosody, Hu's own poetry is remarkably similar to those conservative English-language models. Scholarship on Hu Shi is plentiful – his signal importance as a conduit for Chinese modernism assures continuing attention. But this scholarship has generally focused more on Hu's theoretical statements rather than his own poetic practice. As a result, a very partial debate has arisen on whether or not, and to what extent, Hu received his primary influences from the Imagist school (including T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, and Amy Lowell, among others). Indeed, if one confines oneself to Hu's public and private statements of his poetic ideals, there are good reasons to suspect that he may have had Imagist sympathies. In his diary, Hu quotes extensively from...

BOOK REVIEW: Edited by Laurence M. Geary and Margaret Kelleher.NINETEENTH-CENTURY IRELAND: A GUIDE TO RECENT RESEARCH. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005.

Reviewed by: Nineteenth-Century Ireland: A Guide to Recent Research Timothy G. McMahon (bio) Nineteenth-Century Ireland: A Guide to Recent Research, edited by Laurence M. Geary and Margaret Kelleher; pp. xii + 340. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005, €25.00, $39.95. Specialist scholars and general readers alike will profit enormously from this ambitious collection, which covers aspects of the long nineteenth century in Ireland and the United Kingdom. As their subtitle implies, editors Laurence M. Geary and Margaret Kelleher have brought together "a" guide to research, rather than "the" definitive work on recent Irish scholarship—were such a creature even possible. They have, therefore, given their eleven contributors enormous leeway to prepare essays that are critical, thought-provoking, and entertaining. Much as J. J. Lee's Irish Historiography, 1970–1979 (1981) became a vital resource for students of Irish history a generation ago, Geary and Kelleher's volume promises to be a touchstone for all with an interest in the many fields of Irish studies, including history, literature in English, sociology and anthropology, historical geography, musicology, art history, and diaspora studies. That list of subjects could be extended, as the broad category of history warrants separate entries on political, social, women's, and religious history. Niall Ó Ciosáin's insightful essay on "Gaelic Culture and Language Shift" may give pause to readers who assume that the death of Gaelic, as a literary and as a spoken language, coincided with the Famine years of the late 1840s. To be sure, Ó Ciosáin emphasizes the rapidity of the shift away from the use of Irish in everyday intercourse, but he points out that few have even attempted to explain adequately the causes, the pace, or the sociocultural impacts of this dramatic transformation. Moreover, he notes that scholars prior to the 1990s largely failed to consider the ongoing production of manuscript literature in Irish because of lingering presumptions about what constituted high culture in Victorian Ireland, especially the primacy of English in the public sphere— commerce, literature, the press. In fact, Irish scribes produced more manuscripts in the nineteenth century than ever before. Similarly, because scholars have seen the Anglicization of Ireland as an essential component of the island's fitful push toward modernity, they long failed to appreciate the contested culture of "Gaelic" Ireland, where, as research in the 1990s has demonstrated, aspects of modernity competed with the pre-modern just as they did throughout the western world. Indeed, "undercutting comfortable assumptions" could be a further subtitle for this collection. Sean Ryder's discussion of literature in English, for instance, makes clear that the methodological insights gleaned from postcolonial and gender studies, along with attention to long-neglected novelists and poets, have allowed scholars to move [End Page 344] beyond the Yeatsian categories that dominated criticism for nearly a century (119). Similarly, Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh's overview of political historiography embraces what he calls "the fructifying influence of cultural critics" on old debates about pre-Famine politicization, as well as on parliamentary and agrarian mobilizations later in the century (13). As the previous comments might suggest, one element that unites these disparate contributions is the growing interdisciplinary nature of inquiry into nineteenth-century Ireland. Nowhere would this be more apparent to readers than in the potentially controversial decision of the editors not to include a separate chapter on Famine studies, which practically grew into a cottage industry in the 1990s. This was, I think, the correct choice here because it allows contributors—such as Gary Owens in his chapter on social history, Maria Luddy in her overview of women's history, Marilyn Cohen and Joan Vincent in their summary of key works in anthropology and sociology, and Matthew Stout in his account of historical geography—to discuss the variety of approaches to this watershed event from perspectives that inform and challenge one another. Thus, one finds Owens lauding the collaborative Mapping the Great Irish Famine: A Survey of the Famine Decades (1999) as "the first comprehensive single-volume social history of the event" and Stout denouncing the same project as filled with "missed opportunities" to chart meaningfully the impact of the calamity (31, 87). It should not be surprising, of...

NATIVE AMERICANS AND THE BURDEN OF HISTORY

Steven Conn, History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)Maureen Konkle, Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827–1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)New histories of indigenous and colonized peoples have revitalized some ancient questions. When and where does a properly historical discourse begin and why? The profession has traditionally given two different answers to the “when” and “where” queries. One venerable account holds that history proper begins with the Greeks and takes Herodotus (or Thucydides, depending on the political climate) for its founding patriarch. The second answer holds that historical consciousness only begins with modernity, and that real historical discourse—including the beginnings of professional, disciplined historiography—starts in Europe.

Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827-1863

Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827-1863

Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827-1863

Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827-1863

The politics of historiography—towards an ethics of representation

What is the relationship of writing to praxis, of historiography and critique to the human experiences and oppressions which are its subject matter? Is there a politics of context, as there is in practice: a duty of solidarity which requires that we bear responsibility for the reproduction of these narratives, for their use and reuse? What responsibility lies upon the historian as traumatic human experiences are reified, codified, and sent into the academic ether, to be picked up, quoted, referenced, theorised, and detached from their source in a specific political reality? Indeed, what politics inhere in the very notion of a single author, when understandings derive from collective work? Can academic critique be divorced from active commitment, from praxis: can we will the end, without committing ourselves to the means? And in the end, who are these histories for? Who is speaking from within them, and towards whom? These are the questions considered in this article. Drawing on the lessons of ethnography, anthropology and social research, the article critiques current practice, and offers some thoughts on how we might move towards a richer, more complex and ethical historiography. It calls for an approach based on ‘thick’ description, reflexivity, commitment, dialogue, collective authorship and transparency about the ideological interests and economic and power relations which mediate all practice and its history.

Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827-1863

Book Review| March 01 2005 Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827-1863 By Maureen Konkle. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press. 2004. ix,367 pp. Cloth, $49.95; paper, $19.95. Eric Gary Anderson Eric Gary Anderson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2005) 77 (1): 181–183. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-77-1-181 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Eric Gary Anderson; Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827-1863. American Literature 1 March 2005; 77 (1): 181–183. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-77-1-181 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. 2005 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Who You Callin' an Intellectual?

Maureen Konkle. Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827-1863. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 367 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). Twenty-five years ago Paul Conkin and the late John Higham organized a conference. Their purpose was to gather together a range of scholars young and old to examine the state of intellectual history. That there was a need for such a conference at all betrayed a worried sense by practitioners in the mid-1970s that their field was in crisis. Higham explained as much in the introduction to the resulting volume. In his very first sentence Higham announced: "In the 1930s and 1940s the study of American intellectual history enjoyed its heroic age." Heroic because, at least in Higham's view, intellectual history lay at the foundation of most of the significant historical scholarship, because its insights, concerns and conclusions shaped what we call the "consensus school" of mid-century historical thought and because it provided the basis of an emerging American Studies as well. In 1951, for example, John Caughey conducted a survey of historians asking what they thought was the most important work of American history to appear since 1920. Vernon L. Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought (1927) topped the list by a wide margin. As Higham put it: "The most exciting, as well as the most controversial, single achievement of intellectual historians in the 1950s was a fresh vision of the meaning of America—a vision that comprehended the whole of American history and thus illuminated the present also."1 That heroic age did not last. In the 1960s intellectual history got caught in the crossfire directed at consensus history by a new generation of historians. The New Social History, however, didn't merely dethrone intellectual history from its seat atop the profession and replace it as the field where fresh, exciting work was to be done (not to mention the field where grants and graduate students grew). More, it leveled the charge, implicitly or explicitly, that the grand generalizations that emerged about the "American mind" in the 1950s weren't so much synthetic as exclusionary and oppressive, that they [End Page 64] ignored the vast majority of Americans who left no poetry or painting for us to admire, that the whole endeavor of intellectual history was hopelessly . . . elitist. And so it came to pass that John Higham and Paul Conkin assembled a group of scholars who still called themselves intellectual historians to survey the state of their field. The crisis they found themselves in was simultaneously one about their disciplinary position and professional status, about their methodological approaches and assumptions, and about the politics of what they did. (In fairness, other scholars also saw their disciplines as facing some sort of crisis in the 1970s. Anthropologist Dell Hymes assembled a volume of essays by anthropologists aimed at, from the book's title, "Reinventing Anthropology.") In truth, however, this confusion of purpose within intellectual history also had roots inside the field. As it emerged in the mid-century, American intellectual history found itself exploring "culture" as much as ideas strictly speaking. And in so doing, in trying to examine the American "mentalite" these historians necessarily found themselves wrestling with theoretical ideas about the nature of culture. As Higham himself pointed out, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, rather than, say, Parrington, hovered over the conference like a "patron saint." But this embrace of "cultural history" by intellectual historians only begged the question of what, precisely, constituted American intellectual history. An Italian colleague of mine chuckles at the very notion that there is any American intellectual history. After all, as compared with Kant and Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger, not to mention Locke, Hobbes, Descartes and Rousseau, whom has America contributed to the Grand Tradition of Western Thought beyond a handful of Puritan theologians, a few Founders, a couple of New England Transcendentalists, and a Pragmatist or two? In the...

The Sixties as History: A Review of the Political Historiography

The Sixties as History:A Review of the Political Historiography M. J. Heale (bio) The concept of a historical decade seems first to have been invented for the 1890s, but for the American twentieth century the Sixties has excited more popular and academic attention than any other.1 Conferences, websites, and television and radio programs seem almost in permanent and argumentative session to debate the Sixties. University courses and textbooks have proliferated, yet no two look alike. They disagree over dates, content, and significance. They even disagree over case—is the Sixties singular or plural? Yet debate on the era seems strangely unstructured, even that on its political history.2 One sign of this is the scarcity of historiographical articles or review essays on the Sixties qua the Sixties. The student can be introduced to most recognized topics in American history, such as the American Revolution or the New Deal, via essays that survey the literature and lay out the scholarly battleground.3 Not so with the Sixties, for which few guides light the way.4 One reason for this absence has been the difficulty of writing synthetic history as a consequence of the 1960s, when the powerful currents of race, gender, class, and culture undermined the older notion of a consensual society. The pieces have never been put back together again. While these forces have fragmented the writing of American history in its entirety, for the Sixties an agreed narrative was never constructed in the first place. For an older topic like the New Deal, a reasonably coherent literature had come into existence within a generation. There were disagreements, of course, but the battle lines or the rules of engagement seemed to be fairly clearly understood. This could not be said of the Sixties, whose fate it was to be dissolved by the currents it spawned before a stable historiography could be written. Probably too the Sixties has seemed unfocused as a topic because scholars have been reluctant to impute too much significance to an arbitrary segment of time.5 Further, its very contents invite discrete treatment, ranging as they do through the New Frontier and the Great Society, Civil Rights and Black Power, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam, the New Left and the New Right, the Counterculture and Rock Music (several of which have commanded their own review essays).6 [End Page 133] Just why the era continues to excite such interest deserves a study of its own. Several factors have contributed. A measure of cultural polarization did occur in the Sixties, one that became—and has remained—entangled with party politics. During the conservative 1980s such figures as President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher helped to carry the culture wars forward to a new generation with their assaults on what the Sixties represented, and the subsequent controversies of the Clinton administration deepened the cultural divide. "If you look back on the Sixties and think there was more good than bad, you're probably a Democrat," mused Bill Clinton in June 2004. "If you think there was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican."7 The media and the associated technology too were important in perpetuating Sixties' preoccupations. Television and television archives, the general supplanting of black-and-white by color film, and electronically amplified rock music have meant that the images, sounds, and sound bites of the Sixties have cascaded down the decades in a way denied to earlier forms of culture. Demography has played a vital part, as the aging baby-boom generation that once imparted to the era its youthful ambience has continued to fight its battles (not to mention one another) and to provide a large market for its products. An emerging globalization helps to explain the era's continued fascination; the Beatles made history in 1967 when a live performance of "All You Need Is Love" was transmitted around the world by satellite technology. If the experiences of the Sixties fractured historical scholarship, this was not evident for most of the era in the United States, when historical writing seemed to be empowered by new intellectual currents. Among the books that occasioned debate were Stanley Elkins's study of Slavery...

Reviews of Books:Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827-1863 Maureen Konkle

Reviews of Books:Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827-1863 Maureen Konkle

The politics of historiography*

Historical narrative is a way of thinking about politics, and a species of political thought. Political societies develop narratives of their past actions, the institutions by which, and the contexts in which, these actions have been performed; and in these narratives, constantly rewritten, they view the many ways in which their histories are to be understood, criticized and contained. These are thick narratives, difficult for the members of each society to understand, and even more difficult for the members of other societies. This is probably as it should be.

The Idea of Thick Constitutional Patriotism and Its Implications for the Role and Structure of European Legal History

A sense of cohesion grounded in a common identity is widely believed to be a prerequisite for a functioning democratic European polity. If the European Union is to master successfully the tasks assigned to it in the Constitutional Treaty and, using a non-consensual procedure, decide on policies that concern the security of its citizens or have significant distributive effects, then a sufficiently thick common identity is believed to be necessary both to legitimate and to ensure the functioning of the polity in the long term. There is little doubt that such an identity is currently missing. The question is what such an identity should be and whether the prepolitical pre-requisites for the development of such an identity exist. Are there historical experiences and accomplishments that enable European citizens to understand themselves as having suffered a common past and which animate them to see themselves engaged in the construction of a common political future? What are the appropriate narratives around which a European identity could, over time, develop? What should the focus of a self-conscious politics of memory be? What are the implications for the role and structure of European historiography, in particular for the European legal and political historiography?

Les députès du centre aux origines de la Troisième République française

SUMMARY French political historiography has always been fascinated by the extreme parties and by the polarization between right and left. Nevertheless, there is an important tradition of centre groups and centrist projects, which have been very influential at some decisive moments of French history. The subject of this communication is a rehabilitation of the Left Centre group in the inception and installation of French parliamentary democracy, at the very beginning of the Third Republic.

Writing Indian nations: native intellectuals and the politics of historiography, 1827-1863

In the early years of the republic, the United States government negotiated with Indian nations because it could not afford protracted wars politically, militarily, or economically. Maureen Konkle argues that by depending on treaties, which rest on the equal standing of all signatories, Europeans in North America institutionalized a paradox: the very documents through which they sought to dispossess Native peoples in fact conceded Native autonomy. As the United States used coerced treaties to remove Native peoples from their lands, a group of Cherokee, Pequot, Ojibwe, Tuscarora, and Seneca writers spoke out. With history, polemic, and personal narrative these writers countered widespread misrepresentations about Native peoples' supposedly primitive nature, their inherent inability to form governments, and their impending disappearance. Furthermore, they contended that arguments about racial difference merely justified oppression and dispossession; deriding these arguments as willful attempts to evade the true meanings and implications of the treaties, the writers insisted on recognition of Native peoples' political autonomy and human equality. Konkle demonstrates that these struggles over the meaning of U.S.-Native treaties in the early nineteenth century led to the emergence of the first substantial body of Native writing in English and, as she shows, the effects of the struggle over the political status of Native peoples remain embedded in contemporary scholarship. |Konkle demonstrates that struggles over the meaning of U.S.-Native treaties in the early nineteenth century led to the emergence of the first substantial body of Native writing in English. These writers countered widespread misrepresentations about Native peoples' supposedly primitive nature, their inherent inability to form governments, and their impending disappearance with history, polemic, and personal narrative.

‘A Festering Sore on the Body of Society’: The wolfenden committee and Female Prostitution in Mid-Twentieth-Century Scotland

The proceedings and report of the Wolfenden Committee on Prostitution and Homosexual Offences (1954–7) figure prominently in the historiography of the sexual politics of late twentieth-century Britain. In terms of female prostitution, three broad but inter-related strands of interpretation may be detected within the literature. First, a largely narrative approach has located the Committee and subsequent legislation within the broader story of changing sexual mores and associated moral panic in 1950s Britain. Secondly, many social historians and sociologists have focused upon the coercive and regulatory implications of the report and the Street Offences Act of 1959,often within a Foucauldian framework of analysis. For commentators such as Jeffrey Weeks, the Wolfenden Report, by redefining the relationship of the law to the private moral terrain of the citizen, enabled a reaffirmation of the policing of public space in the interests of order and decency. Similarly, for Frank Mort, one of its most significant features was its codification of a ‘new geography of sexuality’ which both made the ‘troublesome and dangerous sexualities of prostitution’ more visible to the official mind and furnished a new ‘topography of regulation’. Meanwhile, other commentators have advanced a more specifically feminist interpretation of events. Thus, Carol Smart views the central thrust of the Wolfenden Committee’s deliberations on

Music in Early Virginia

Virginia's ideals, virtually synonymous with those of young American republic, dominated Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights. Four of first five presidents were Virginians. No other state has had as long a political and cultural history. And yet, even today, Old Dominion's precedence seems to be ignored, especially in history of American music. Leaving aside political historiography, and those earliest histories of music intentionally devoted to New England, most general texts dealing with American music have neglected musical activity in early Virginia.1 Curiously enough, tradition and myth rather than fact seem to be behind this position. Frideric Louis Ritter, our first scientific historian, who dedicated himself to accentuation of which is in accordance with a true art spirit, is seemingly confused by fact that while English cavaliers appeared in Virginia [1607] fourteen years before arrival of 'May Flower' [1620] .. . yet they exercised very little influence on American musical development. Of course, Ritter was puzzled. If Virginians were indeed fun-loving, sybaritic Englishmen, as implied by term cavalier, one should have expected them to foster music. According to him, they did not. The Puritans, on other hand, who lived to destroy pleasures of this world better to enjoy those of next, or so story goes, developed the crude form of barbarously sung simple psalmody from

Re-Democratizing the Progressive Era: The Politics of Progressive Era Political Historiography

When historians fight about Progressivism — and fight they do — they are not just arguing about events of a century ago. They are also struggling over the basic meanings of American democracy. If we could face this fact more directly, and begin to come to grips with the stakes involved, we would not only advance the study of the past but, even in some small and indirect ways, we might improve the practice of our current politics as well.Politicians standing at the center of our nation's democratic dramas recognize, even if often without nuance, the value of reclaiming the Progressive Era. Cheerfully blurring historical distinctions, Bill Clinton announced as he left office, “I always felt that the work we did the last eight years made us the heir of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.” In turn, Al Gore's communications director saw his candidate's “message more in the tradition of progressives such as Theodore Roosevelt, who confronted powerful trusts, rather than the populists who railed broadly against elites of all stripes.” Several years earlier the vice-president's main Democratic opponent, Bill Bradley, wrote, “I've always admired the progressives, such as Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, who enabled the private sector to flourish but in a way more responsive to national purpose.”

Books in Summary

Books reviewed:Sharon Anderson‐Gold, Unnecessary Evil: History and Moral Progress in the Philosophy of Immanuel KantMaghan Keita, Race and the Writing of HistoryGottfried Mader, Josephus & the Politics of Historiography: Apologetic and Impression Management in the Bellum JudaicumRobert Allen Rutland (ed.), Clio’s Favorites: Leading Historians of the United States,1945–2000Tamsin Spargo (ed.), Reading the Past: Literature and HistoryJean‐Claude Waquet, Odile Goerg, and Rebecca Rogers, Les espaces de l'historien: Tudes d'historiographie

Russia under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum by Martin s> Malia (review)

556 SEER, 79, 3, 2001 Malia, Martin. Russia underWestern Eyes. Fromthe BronzeHorsemanto the LeninMausoleum.Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, I999. xii + 514 pp. $35-00:?2I.95. WHATEVER MartinMalia writesis of unusualinterest,and here he writesof a capital ancient question, 'What is Russia?' One traditional answer, as an anonymous Lithuanianrecentlyput to TimQthyGartonAsh, is starklysimple: 'Russiais non-Europe.' In my opinion, most Russiansand most non-Russian Europeans or, synonymously, Westerners have historically agreed. Malia, everthe maverick,does not agree, and he hasgiven us anothertypically challenging piece of work. A related question is the one apparent in Malia's title,the Westernperception chieflymisperception, he maintains of Russia. If the issue of perception sometimes seems paramount here, it is naturally inseparablefromwhat remainsthe more basic question:the natureof Russia. Malia contraststhe views of Voltaireand his confreres,outdoing themselves in praise of Catherine II, who was, however, operating the most rapacious system of imperialism in Europe at the time, with their nineteenth-century successors,who condemned the despotism of Nicholas I, although he was a loyal and reliable member of the Concert of Europe. This is a perfectly appropriatejudgment too oftenforgotten:we have onlyto recallthe misplaced russophobia of Palmerston and StratfordCanning (paceJ. H. Gleason and Paul Schroeder, among others). Of course, Western misperceptions of the Soviet I 930s the rosy accounts of the fellow travellers,Sidney and Beatrice Webb and others are more familiar.It is worth remarkingthat Catherine also managed an effective public-relations operation as Stalin did, too, though with poorer results and Nicholas did not. If Russia is, however, a partof Europe, as Malia maintains,how to account for the difference between the traditions of liberal democracy of Western Europe and of heavy-handed authoritarianismin Russia? It is a matter of 'cultural gradient' running from west to east, Malia asserts. Here is a new terminology for an old idea: we might recall perhaps the classic statement of the case in the I898 Russian Social Democratic programme, 'the farthereast one goes in Europe'. Malia'streatmentof the concept deriveschieflyfrom the inspirationof PavelMiliukov (Ocherki) and Alexander Gerschenkron(Economic Backwardness), but it evidently owes something to the recent work of Terence Emmons as well (see in particular Emmons, 'On the Problem of Russia's "SeparatePath" in Late Imperial Historiography',in Thomas Sanders (ed.), Historiography ofImperial Russia(Armonk,NY, I999), where the term 'cultural gradient'also appears). Perhapsthe chief argumentof the book isthatWesternperceptionof Russia has almost invariablybeen a projection, often terriblyconfused, of the issues and viewpoints dominating Westernpolitics at any given time. This point is hardto dispute,and there is scarcelyany example of it more strikingthan our recent conflict between the conservative political historiography and the radical social historiographyof the Soviet experience as a reflection of partis prisin Anglo-Americanpolitics. One of the more striking features of the book is that Malia often takes positions at oddswith hisreputationasone of ourmostvenerableconservative REVIEWS 557 historians. His new work sometimes speaks the language and flirtswith the viewpoint of post-modernism. The Preface introduces the phrase 'the great Other'; there is frequent reliance on the terms 'construct'and 'invent'; and both 'Russia'and 'the West' often appear in quotation marks.Of course, in a book emphasizing perception in favour of reality, the language is consonant with the conception, but both will surprisereadersof the workof an eminent historian whom we are accustomed to regard as one of the champions of conservativehistoriography. Malia's use of the concept of culturalgradientprovides a similarexample. Not a mere matter of perception, it is tangible enough. It runs, however, not only west to east. In I9 I I, Max Weber'sstudyof the Protestantethic observed it running north to south. If that fault line has been obscured in Western Europe as the French and Italian economies have eclipsed the English, it remains as conspicuous as ever in the East, as any travellerproceeding from WarsawthroughPragueand Budapestto Bucharestand Sofiacan plainlysee. More fundamentally,however, the gradient is surelysustainedby something more than the mere distributionof space. It is also a function of the grip of cultures. Does Budapest owe nothing of its better fortune to Habsburg affiliation,and is the poorer condition of Bucharestnot in partindebted to the ancient Ottoman sick man? And does a similar cultural gap not distinguish the Orthodox...

Snatching Victory from the Jaws of Defeat: History and Imagination in Baroque Italy

That modern historiographical methods emerged from the depths of late seventeenth- century Pyrrhonism has long been well known. In his 1950 article on 'Ancient History and the Antiquarian', Arnaldo Momigliano showed how an avalanche of diatribes against the historians, culminating in those of La Mothe Le Vayer and Pierre Bayle, inspired Jean Mabillon and Bernard de Montfaucon to formulate more rigorous paleographical techniques and, following the Bollandists, to initiate some of the most ambitious projects in modern times for the editing and publishing of historical documents.1 Meanwhile, the likes of Ezechiel Spanheim and Jacob Spon turned away entirely from fallacious documentary sources and toward what they regarded as the much more certain traces of the past in non-literary evidence, joining the discipline of erudite antiquities to that of historiography for the first time. So far, this trend of scepticism has been treated as the byproduct of an intellectual tradition dating to the humanist recovery of the texts of Sextus Empiricus and Diogenes Laertius, reinforced by three half-centuries of religious disputation. In order to destroy the very foundations of the Protestant position, it is argued, Roman Catholic apologists put in doubt the accomplishments of all the arts and sciences, urging believers to repose their trust unquestioningly in the truths of faith. Learned writers of every persuasion, seeking a firmer footing in the shifting sands of religious doubt, agreed.2 And when Bayle complained that 'there is no mischief so great as what can be exercised upon the monuments of history', he was chiefly referring to bias and distortion due to religious enthusiasm.3What has not yet been examined in sufficient detail is the role played by sheer historical charlatanry in creating the climate of scepticism against which the critics railed. What is more, the charlatanry that exercised the most profound impact during the course of the century did not circulate in the realm of pure erudition, where it might more properly be incorporated into the history of forgery.4 It circulated in the realm of political commentary and contemporary history. And among the places in Europe where this charlatanry was to be found perhaps in the greatest abundance was Italy. This article is a preliminary attempt to restore the lost connection between hired political historiography and Pyrrhonism.Indeed, from the preliminary episodes of the Thirty Years' War to the conclusion of the War of Castro, from the revolt of Palermo to the revolt of Fermo, from the negotiations between the dukes of Savoy and the Spanish monarchy in 1617 to the negotiations between the Venetians and the Turks in 1699, seventeenth-century Italy afforded to the aspiring historian an extraordinary spectacle. However, what brought the attention of a new group of writers to the momentous events of the time was more than mere curiosity. The parties in the conflicts demanded interpretations calculated to shore up damaged loyalties, repair breaches of trust and impress foreign powers. Upon any writer who could provide the necessary material they were disposed to lavish money and favours, including preferment to the most exclusive court circles. Writers who were attracted to this high-stakes game included professional historians as well as charlatans; former diplomats as well as blackmailers. They based their work on eyewitness reports and diplomatic correspondence as well as on newsletters, news books, newspapers, and simple hearsay. By freely mixing historiography with adulation, deceit, sensationalism and pure fantasy, these writers turned hired historiography from an occasional strategy into a cultural industry and set the formation of public myths on an entirely new footing. In doing so, they provoked a reaction that was eventually to shake the emerging discipline to its foundations.Careful cultivation of a particularly edifying view of the recent or remote past, capable of inspiring patriotism and loyalty among the forty percent or so of urban dwellers who could read, and flattering the vanity of the exalted was, of course, nothing new in the mid-seventeenth century. …