Political Pamphlets Research Articles

American Sectionalism in the British Mind, 1832–1863 by Peter O'Connor

Reviewed by: American Sectionalism in the British Mind, 1832–1863 by Peter O'Connor Thomas Blake Earle (bio) American Sectionalism in the British Mind, 1832–1863. By Peter O'Connor. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. 280. Cloth, $47.95.) In the winter of 1860–61, Americans had a choice to make. Would the Union continue to survive intact as it had, or would the election of Abraham Lincoln prove momentous enough to finally rend the union of the states? The choice they made inaugurated the bloodiest conflict in the nation's history. But Americans were not alone in making a choice. Nations, primarily in Europe, decided between Union and Confederacy just as Americans did at home. Nowhere else was this decision as important as it was in Great Britain. Peter O'Connor's American Sectionalism in the British Mind, 1832–1862 examines the dilemma British elites faced in deciding whether to support the North or the South. O'Connor's study follows from the simple question of why Great Britain did not offer its full-throated support of the Union cause until fully two years into the war. The answer, O'Connor contends, is rooted in an underappreciated degree of nuance some in Britain had in how they understood sectionalism in the United States, an understanding that was decades in the making. The British mind O'Connor claims to study is not nearly as capacious as the title would suggest. O'Connor's source base—primarily works of fiction, travel narratives, and published political pamphlets—has an unmistakably elite bias, as he narrows his focus to "public intellectual[s]" writing for "the literate public" (4). The author's decision to limit his focus follows from his characterization of the existing literature as overly reliant on the analysis of class to understand the fissures the Civil War engendered in Great Britain. While O'Connor does an expert job in detailing how "a minority of the population" engaged with the Civil War and American sectionalism, his analysis does not provide an understanding of anything approximating the "British mind" (4). As O'Connor shows, even the limited group under study was hardly ever of one mind about the events that transpired in North America during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. As Americans lined up under the Stars and Stripes and the Stars and Bars, most Britons were hard pressed to distinguish between the two in any meaningful way. Not even the Confederacy's unambiguous embrace of slavery, O'Connor confidently asserts, swayed many in Britain. Even though many Britons saw American slavery as an odious institution, they were quick to characterize slavery in the American South as a gentler, more benign iteration based on paternalism. Combined with a focus on the poor state of race relations in the North, their understanding of American slavery did not allow for a stark moral dichotomy between North and South. [End Page 154] That distinction was only made in 1863 as the Emancipation Proclamation made liberation an unambiguous Union war aim. Throughout the antebellum period, O'Connor contends, Britons "did not see slavery as a purely southern problem" (13), thus allowing observers to "level the moral playing field when North and South were contrasted" (15–16). Just as with issues pertaining to race and slavery, British perceptions of ethnocultural regions in the United States were complex. In the British mind, the United States was divided into three cultural regions. Farthest north was New England, dominated by a Puritan tradition that was unmistakably English in origin. The South was dominated by the Cavalier culture, which likewise had strong ties to England. In between, however, was a region that was distinctly anti-English and dominated by recent migrants from Ireland and central Europe. While elites in Britain harbored a close cultural connection to the English-derived communities they imagined in New England and in the South, they recoiled from the anti-English attitudes they perceived in the mid-Atlantic. Again, O'Connor pushes back against a simple divide between the North and the South in the British perception of the United States. In considering the workings of American politics, British observers displayed a nuanced...

Barrack Yard Politics

Taken together, C. L. R. James’s 1933 political pamphlet The Case for West-Indian Self Government and 1936 novel Minty Alley reveal the author’s competing visions of relations between Africans and Indians in the British West Indies. In The Case for West-Indian Self Government, James proclaims that West Indian societies are fit to govern their own affairs because they are modern and harmonious. However, James’s argument contradicts his literary sketches of the barrack yard in Minty Alley. The novel features a fractious relationship between Benoit and Mrs. Rouse, the owners of the yard. Mrs. Rouse responds to Benoit’s infidelity by remarking, “My blood and coolie blood don’t take.” They fight over ownership of No. 2 Minty Alley, but when Benoit dies, Mrs. Rouse buries him at the yard. Minty Alley portrays a barrack yard politics made through the combined—if tense—efforts of African and Indian descendants.

“Patria” and “Respublica” in French Political Publicism of the Fourteenth Century

In the Conceptual History Latin notion respublica is one of the most complex and disputable issues of research and translation. In spite of its fundamental significance for political thinking and political philosophy of Antiquity and Middle Ages, the evolution of the meaning of respublica stays underinvestigated for the most of its stages. The present paper is devoted to the Latin respublica in French political thinking of 14th century. Political vocabulary of this time was beginning to be controlled by laic courtly intellectuals instead of clerics and universities. In that way, both spiritual and laic aspects, Aristotelian philosophy and Ciceronian rhetorics constitute the context for all the dominant political notions of the time, and so it is for the Latin respublica. The research is based on the political pamphlet A Dispute between a Priest and a Knight, its reception and French translation at Charles V’s court. The mutual comparison of respublica’s semantical function in different versions of the treatise in the context of other key political notions like people (populus) or common good (bonum commune) allows us to trace the evolution of its interpretation from the principle of political life to a material object. Thus, the concept of Latin respublica is being objectified and earthed within the framework of gallicanist project on the base of late medieval Aristotelianism.

A Polish Parody of “Our Father” from the Middle of the 17th Century and its Russian Translation: in Search of an Unknown Polish Source

The purpose of this study is a textual analysis of a Russian translation of a Polish pamphlet, a parody of the prayer “Our Father”, which was found among documents from 1671–1673 in the archive of the Ambassadorial Chancery (Posol’skii prikaz). The actual source of the translation was not found, but since any study of a translated text must include an analysis of its connection with the original, it was first of all necessary to pay attention to the known copies of the Polish pamphlet “Ojcze nasz krolu polski Janie Kazimierzu” (“Pacierz dworski”), since one of its now most probably lost copies was translated into Russian. “Ojcze nasz krolu polski Janie Kazimierzu” is a Polish political parody from the middle of the 17th century (probably 1665), directed against King John II Casimir Vasa. The article investigates the history of its creation, describes its form, content, and genre, discusses its literary value, the Polish tradition of parodying religious texts, and analyzes the versions of the pamphlet. As a result, it was possible to reveal some new details about the anonymous author and the time when the work was written, the number and character of the preserved copies, the correlation between manuscript variants and their later editions. A comparative analysis of seven different textual variants of the Polish pamphlet made it possible to find a version which is textually — and perhaps even genetically — close to the Russian translation (a copy of the family saga “Sylva rerum Szyrmów”). Particular attention is paid to the interpretation of Polish translation parody in mid-17th century Russian culture, the possible reasons why this Polish political pamphlet caught the attention of the Russian translator (reader), and the functional transformation of the occasional political pamphlet into a parody with a political theme and a more explicit humoristic component. The appendix provides a parallel publication of the Polish pamphlet from the family saga “Sylva rerum Szyrmów” and the Russian translation from the archive of the Ambassadorial Chancery.

Plagiarism, Parody, and Pastiche: Eliza Haywood writes back to Daniel Defoe and J. M. Coetzee

Through an examination of the politics of print culture that contributed to the 1740 continuation of Daniel Defoe’s 1724 Roxana, this essay brings the historical 18th- century playwright, novelist, and political pamphleteer Eliza Haywood into conversation with South African novelist J.M. Coetzee’s metafictional reworking of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Roxana, Foe (1986). This essay places Haywood – whose novel The British Recluse (1722) is one of at least seven pre- existing texts that make up the “pastiche” (Seager, 2009, p. 370) that constitutes the 1740 Roxana – alongside Foe’s narrator Susan Barton, a character who constitutes “a pastiche of 18th-century heroines” (Maher 39), a woman who is “doubt itself” (Coetzee 133), uncertain of who controls the truth of her narrative, yet a woman who writes back to and against the narrative established for her by her male counterparts. Susan’s story of her life as a castaway on Cruso’s island is taken from her by Foe, Coetzee’s fictionalization of Daniel Defoe, who, instead of writing her requested The Female Castaway, writes her out of the narrative that becomes Robinson Crusoe, turning her instead into the narrator of Roxana. Spivak asks, “who is the female narrator of Robinson Crusoe?” And I answer: in a somewhat playful feminist act of resurrection, Eliza Haywood.

Two Allusions in Samuel Johnson’s The False Alarm

IN ‘ “Defying Our Master”: The Appropriation of Milton in Johnson’s Political Tracts’, Bruce Redford demonstrates the use of allusions to Paradise Lost in all four of Samuel Johnson’s late political pamphlets to demonize opponents of George III’s ministers, directed primarily against John Wilkes and his party.1 For example, in the 1770 The False Alarm, Johnson writes: The great engine has recoiled upon them. They thought that ‘the terms they sent were terms of weight’, which would have ‘amazed all and stumbled many’; but the consternation is now over, and their foes ‘stand upright’, as before.2

Parkinson's disease - 200 years: the outstanding contribution of "Old Hubert".

Two hundred years after the publication, of "An Essay on the Shaking Palsy", this indisputable landmark in our understanding of the nature of Parkinson's disease still remains. What is frequently overlooked, however, is the originality of James Parkinson's ideas about how clinical observations could be segregated into diagnostic entities. Parkinson was a surgeon apothecary with wide ranging interests outside medicine including geology and paleontology. He was also a strong campaigner for social change and a political pamphleteer, writing under the nom de plume of "Old Hubert".

PART I: Pierre Bayle’s Reply of a New Convert (1689)

ABSTRACTThis is the first English translation of Pierre Bayle’s political pamphlet, Réponse d’un nouveau converti à la Lettre d’un refugié of 1689. It may be one of the most critical attacks on a writer’s own side in the history of political ideas. It is a stinging rebuke of Bayle’s own party, the Protestants, for their incoherence, hypocrisy, and violence. It came three years after his similarly savage refutation of the Catholics in The Condition of Wholly Catholic France, also recently published in its first English translation in this journal. A substantial introduction explains some of the context, explores the political theology of this pamphlet, and reviews scholarly interpretations.

Image and illusion in Francis Quarles’s emblems and pamphlets: duplication, duality, duplicity

In the seventeenth-century dictionary The Gate of Languages Unlocked, Johann Comenius describes “Gravers cutting most curious little images in brass, and imprinting them on paper,” under a section called “The Delights of the Eyes.” These curious shapes, engraved on brass or copper plates, formed a new illustration technique in seventeenth-century prints. Engravings were reproduced in print through the duplication and reversal of their visual forms. In Francis Quarles’s Emblemes (1633) and political pamphlets, a pattern of replication and inversion appears throughout their poetic texts, engraved illustrations, and philosophical concerns. This pattern portrays the visual reading process as unsettled. In a culture where visual species, or replicas of images and objects, were thought potentially to mediate and transform what was seen, where diabolical influences interfered with the human senses, and where new visual marvels in astronomy and aesthetics were displayed and contested, visual observation was an ambivalent sensation that could alternately divine truths and deceive observers. This article will explore Quarles’s and his collaborator William Marshall’s use of rhetorical tropes, such as chiasmus, paradox, and mimesis, and references to visual technologies, such as glass prisms, “fool’s paradises,” optical glasses, and telescopes, as well as engraving itself, to interrogate vision in the context of the popular illustrated print. In the works of Quarles, these crises and marvels of visual culture create a sense of duplicity, as readers become lured by sensual visions and optical illusions.

СРЕДСТВА ВЫРАЖЕНИЯ СУБЪЕКТИВНОЙ МОДАЛЬНОСТИ ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННОГО ТЕКСТА

The present article deals with the means of expressing subjective modality of any literary text in the process of studying a foreign language. The method of text analyzing and interpreting in order to evaluate and to mark the idea of the author is the main purpose of the scientific paper. The original versionof the antiwar pamphlet “The Conduct of the Allies and of the Late Ministry in Beginning and Carrying on the Present War” written by Jonathan Swift, an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist and political pamphleteer, is the major source that the research has been conducted on.

Mary Robinson and the Genesis of Romanticism: Literary Dialogues and Debts, 1784–1821 by Ashley Cross

288 BOOK REVIEWS real and literary remains” (201), and considers “the joint nature ofthe com­ position ... of the posthumous Shelley” (208). The chapter culminates with reference to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s edition of the Posthumous Poems ofPercy Bysshe Shelley (1824), of which Gamer observes: “Selectively chosen, strategically ordered, and carefully hierarchized, the poems and fragments that make up Posthumous Poems deserve close reading” (201). With this in mind, Gamer could perhaps have devoted more space to that task. His discussion of Mary Shelley’s “active and interpretive choice[sj” (225) when managing material for the volume is revealing: as, for example, in the selection of prefaces included (yes for “Julian and Maddalo,” no for “The Witch of Atlas”). He explains that Mary Shelley sought to depohticize Shelley: “part of the method of the Posthumous Poems is to make Shelley’s political reputation seem groundless and to portray his political enemies as vicious and gratuitous in their persecution of him” (225). Gamer opts to devote significant space to discussing how Leigh Hunt came to view Shelley, synecdochically, as “the all-but-unattainable ‘heart of the heart’” (212). Indeed, in one sense, this chapter is less about Shelley’s self­ canonization than it is about how others manipulated his legacy—both those he knew well (Hunt and Mary), and those hostile to him (his Tory critics)—although Gamer does describe, perceptively, how Adonais “pro­ vided Shelley’s mourners with a kind ofguide for dealing with the business of his death and burial” (217). The book is the first to examine poetic “re-collections” of previously published material, and how their authors specifically made these transfor­ mations with commercial ends in mind. Gamer’s study convincingly dem­ onstrates that the commonly-accepted assumption that Romantic poets were unworldly, naive, and indifferent to practical considerations of liter­ ary production is well wide of the mark, and leaves us in no doubt that subsequent readers have tended to accept, too uncritically, their self­ proclamations of unconcern for the business of poetry. Octavia Cox University of Oxford Ashley Cross. Mary Robinson and the Genesis of Romanticism: Literary Dia­ logues and Debts, 1784-1821. New York: Routledge, 2017. Pp. 288. $140. Who can say what it is to have a poetic, intellectual conversation without already being entangled in one, acknowledged or not. True exchange oc­ curs like lyrical hotstepping, with only some of its finer points captured in SiR, 56 (Summer 2017) BOOK REVIEWS 289 the publication and subsequent reading of writers rhyming and stealing each other’s tropes. These effable snippets of table talk stir literary and political discourse in concrete ways we can track and, in some sense, re­ experience. As Ashley Cross remarks in only the second monograph exclu­ sively focused on Mary Robinson, Romantic scholars have been collec­ tively rewriting the myth of the “genius in a garret starving” with a more vibrant sense of coteries, schools, multiple-authorship, interactions, or co­ horts of writers jointly refashioning both the literary marketplace and Brit­ ish aesthetics. Within such a contextual frame, Robinson—the infamous thespian, mistress, and later literary celebrity—becomes an arch conversa­ tionalist when she talks her way into—and shapes—a series ofthe most im­ portant poetic dialogues of the 1790s. Cross’s account of Robinson moves her a step beyond notoriety for garrulous ton-jumping, and characterizes her as even more intently intellec­ tual and literary than Daniel Robinson does in his path-breaking study of Robinson as a poet who creates multiple public personas. Robinson’s pub­ lic performativity aids her in becoming a literary community organizer whose intellectual work, however crafted for posthumous fame, consists of her initiating career-shifting dialogues among writers. She was, as Cross writes, “a key player in multiple circles,” that generated almost every liter­ ary innovation in the 1790s: Della Cruscan erotic and political verse, the poetry of sensibility (and its demise), the sonnet craze, the ruminative ode, the Jacobin novel, newspaper verse, literary annuals, political pamphlets, and finally the Romantic lyric (3). Tracing these movements as dialogues between Robinson and Romantic writers, Cross’s work provides us nei­ ther simply with an author-based monograph touting Robinson’s impor­ tance to 1790s...

The Old Peace of Absalom, Absalom!: Interwar Faulkner and the Tradition of Nonviolence

The Old Peace of Absalom, Absalom!:Interwar Faulkner and the Tradition of Nonviolence Caitlin Cawley (bio) Introduction William Faulkner's life was shaped by war. He lived through World War I and World War II, and despite being born thirty years after President Andrew Johnson signed Proclamation 157, "Declaring that Peace, Order, Tranquility and Civil Authority Now Exists in and Throughout the Whole of the United States of America," the Southerner wrote about the wrote about the uniquely American Civil War throughout his work. In 1950, Faulkner used his Nobel Prize acceptance speech to address the question that had come to define humankind in the wake of atomic warfare: "When will I be blown up?" Twelve years later, as he lay dying in Byhalia, Mississippi, the United States was once again preparing for war, this time in Vietnam, a conflict which would lack the Manichean frames of reference shaping America's collective memory of the First and Second World Wars. That war would come to epitomize Jason Compson Sr.'s advice to his son Quentin in The Sound and the Fury: "[N]o battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools" (76). Faulkner created a body of work that, among many things, labors to subvert the conditions and illusions that support war and, in turn, underwrite the modern individual's terrorised state. And while scholars have attended to this labor for decades, there is little critical consensus over Faulkner's views on war and its antinomy, pacifism. Like many of his fellow modernists, Faulkner had a complicated relationship with pacifism that reflects the socio-political climate in the United States and Europe between WWI and WWII as well as the writer's personal history. [End Page 127] In 1918, the Mississippi native made a rather ignominious attempt to join the fight against the Central Powers. Inspired partly by the legacy of his great grandfather who served as an officer in the Civil War and partly by by his heartbreak over a beloved high-school sweetheart marrying another man, the twenty-year-old joined the Royal Air Force in Canada. He never saw combat, but Faulkner made a mountain out of his five months as a RAF cadet, posing for years as a combat veteran and fabricating an elaborate mythology around this posture. Donald Kartiganer sums up the paradoxes that characterize this layer of the Southerner's biography as Faulkner "honoring the combatants of that war through the flattery of imitation and yet also [importantly,] mocking the mythology that had attached itself to them … Faulkner's war consists of zany theatrics, gallant pratfalls: gestures so empty of serious military content that they become at once farcical and heroic" (632). Faulkner's ironic and critical bellicosity found its way into his interwar fiction as well. His writings from the period are replete with naive Southern characters who enthusiastically participate in the Civil War and First World War. And while Kartiganer insists that Faulkner's "doubleedged performance becomes the key to the wars he described in his fiction, wars that reflect, with increasing complexity, the characteristic Southern conflict of 'looking two ways'" (632), Faulkner's life and interwar fiction also register a broader transatlantic intellectual and political movement. By the 1930s, pacifism had gained significant ground on the left. However, Hitler's programme of remilitarization led many of the American writer's British contemporaries to question their campaigns for peace and disarmament. At the Labour Party Conference in 1935, the party leader, George Lansbury, decided to support rearmament despite his self-professed commitment to Christian pacifism (Briggs 314–5). Virginia and Leonard Woolf were in attendance at the conference, and like England's pacifist-leaning literati, the couple was divided on the decision. Virginia reflected on the conference in her diary, writing that her "sympathies" were with "non-resistance," and through figures like Antigone and mediums like her political pamphlets, she worked to advance a precedent for resisting perpetual warfare, culminating in her pacifist manifesto Three Guineas (1938) (Woolf 315). Leonard, on the other hand, who was closely involved in...

From History of Serbian-Russian Historical and Cultural Relations: Dušan I. Semiz (1884–1955) and His Family. Commentaries to Archival Materials from St. Petersburg and Moscow

The fate of a Serbian political emigrant in Russia, the journalist, politician, and historian Dušan Ivanović Semiz (1884–1955) and his family, is studied for the first time on the basis of archival materials from St. Petersburg: the Institute of Russian Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Pushkin House) and the Russian State Historical Archive. Dušan Semiz was a journalist and press correspondent at the frontlines of WWI and the author of historical and political pamphlets and books, and translations of Serbian epics into Russian. He was first arrested in Leningrad in 1929 for being a former active participant in the Serbian nationalist revolutionary organisation Crna ruka (The Black Hand) and sentenced to five years in the GULAG. His first spell in the labor camps was followed by several others. Semiz did hard labor as a lumberjack in the Archangel region and at the construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal; he was exiled to Kazakhstan in Berlik, where Alexander Solzhenitsyn was also later exiled. Semiz was not released from the GULAG until 1953, not long before his death. Here I present some fragments of the works by Semiz on historical and current relationships between Serbia and Russia, the causes of WWII, and also a short story he wrote in 1933, as well as his letters from the GULAG and exile to his family and letters from his family to him. These documents show hist strong personality, which was maintained even through his period in the GULAG. The archive materials presented in the paper are another historical document of Stalinist terror and are of interest for the study of Serbo-Russian historical and cultural links in the mid 20th century.

The Irish Stage: A Legal History by W. N. Osborough

Reviewed by: The Irish Stage: A Legal History by W. N. Osborough Deirdre Oleary THE IRISH STAGE: A LEGAL HISTORY. By W. N. Osborough. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2015; pp. 352. As he opens his The Irish Stage: A Legal History, W. N. Osborough is quick to concede that the study of the history of the Irish theatre is itself a rich and varied genre, and the justification for another work on the subject might not be immediately obvious. But his ambitious and extensively detailed survey and analysis of the legal applications, patents, transfers of ownership, laws, and codicils surrounding Irish theatre from the seventeenth to the late twentieth century are distinctive in their focus. While other Irish theatre scholars, notably Christopher Morasch, John Harrington, and Eamonn Jordan, have examined Irish theatrical history primarily chronologically and through the lens of dramaturgical analysis, Osborough largely omits a consideration of dramatic literature from his study. Instead, he provides exhaustive documentation on changes in theatre patents, reviews of privy councils, newspaper accounts, political pamphlets, acts of Parliament, and so on to further contextualize the evolution of theatre in Ireland as inextricably tied to Irish law. While other Irish theatre texts may focus on the entertainments and dramatic offerings as reflecting the evolving Irish national character and cultural interests of the people, Osborough examines the legal maneuvers and political acts that exercised limitations on the types of performances allowed at various theatres, and considers how these limitations influenced the development of particular genres and entertainments. The book is largely geared to Irish theatre scholars and legal scholars and provides valuable contributions to the extensive body of Irish theatre scholarship. The Irish Stage is organized chronologically across fifteen chapters, beginning with the creation in 1638 of the office of the Master of the Revels in Ireland. The original Master of the Revels, James Ogilby, and his successors are the focus of much of chapter 1, as they individually navigate the nascent Irish theatre landscape (exclusively concentrated in Dublin) against the changing political climate of Britain. Osborough notes the changes in theatrical patents, the theatrical threat posed by an emboldened Sir William Davenant and Sir Thomas Killigrew in London in 1660, and the ever-changing occupiers and owners of Ireland's original theatre, Smock Alley. This chapter is followed by an examination of the theatrical regulation in Britain from the early eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth. Some theatre scholars might rightly contest the choice of relying heavily (as Osborough does) upon British theatre historical practice (which was far larger, catered to a more diverse audience, and had significant legal and organizational differences) to document the Irish theatre. To that point, Osborough argues that Ireland's patents, theatrical structure, and legal oversight are informed and shaped by British theatrical practice, and that the Irish law surrounding theatre is best understood with sufficient description of British theatrical precedent. Where there are differences—for example, the lack of a Lord Chamberlain for Ireland—they are extensively documented. The next three chapters focus on the Dublin Stage Regulation Act, first introduced in 1779 by Thomas Sheridan as a thinly veiled attempt to preserve his theatrical monopoly in Dublin, passed by Parliament in 1785, and vigorously challenged by the Dublin Corporation the same year. Osborough details the debates in the House of Commons and the petitions filed in opposition to the act, which focused on the discrepancy in fees for putting on a play in an unlicensed theatre (£300 in Ireland, compared with £100 in Britain). Chapters 6-7 consider performances in Britain that were regulated under the Act of 1737 and the often creative means by which producers and managers sought to skirt the definitions of what constituted a regulated performance, in accordance with the act. These include the various attempts by managers to have their performances categorized as other forms of entertainment, as well as oftentimes ingenious staging methods employed to escape classification as a "stage play." Osborough notes as example the court case of Day v. Simpson, about an 1865 production of Pepper's Ghost by James Day that was performed "from a chamber below the stage—a complicated pattern of lenses and mirrors being...

Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America by James Alexander Dun

Reviewed by: Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America by James Alexander Dun Jeffery L. Stanley (bio) Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America. By James Alexander Dun. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. viii, 342. $45.00 cloth; $45.00 ebook) James Alexander Dun's Dangerous Neighbors is a well-researched and creative study of how early Americans contextualized the Haitian Revolution within political discourse about their own revolution and used the drama in Saint Domingue as a sounding board for partisan political rhetoric in America's early party system. Dun's work makes a valuable contribution to a growing field of scholarship that explores the Haitian Revolution's reverberations throughout the Atlantic world, specifically building on the work of historians such as Ashli White and François Furstenberg who have recently analyzed the impact of refugees from Saint Domingue on American politics during the early republic period. As a study of public discourse, Dangerous Neighbors relies mainly on newspapers and political pamphlets published in Philadelphia from 1789 to 1804. Dun demonstrates convincingly that the Philadelphia press commentary on Haiti changed over time, reverberated across the young republic, and influenced national political discourses. The author's command of the histories of both the Haitian Revolution and the early republic is a strength of Dangerous Neighbors. The book consists of an introduction and seven chapters arranged chronologically according to different phases of the Haitian Revolution. Chapter one discusses the initial phase of "Philadelphia's Haitian Revolution" from the outset of the French Revolution in 1789 to the French Legislative Assembly's May 15, 1791, law that granted political equality to free people of color in Saint Domingue born to free parents. This development led to a public debate that broadened the implications of the universal declarations at the heart of the American Revolution as the proto-Republican (Dun's term to identify those who would later join Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party) defenders of the French Revolution argued for the positive effects of the May 15 law. Chapters two, three, and four discuss the [End Page 666] next phase of the Haitian Revolution in Philadelphia, which began in August 1791 as slaves rose up on Saint Domingue's North Plain, setting fire to the cane fields and launching the first successful slave uprising in the Western Hemisphere. Although American observers condemned the violence and bloodshed emanating from Saint Domingue, proto-Republican commentators in Philadelphia used the event as an avenue to discuss the potential danger of slavery in the United States, leading to "a high tide of Revolutionary-era antislavery sentiment and activity" (p. 21). Chapters five and six discuss the impact of Toussaint Louverture's rise to power on discussions about the meaning of the Haitian Revolution for the United States. Louverture's rise occurred in the context of an increasingly bitter partisan divide between Federalists and Republicans amid the Quasi-War with France. As Louverture increasingly steered Saint Domingue toward independence, Federalists championed cooperation with his government as a way to strike against France while Republicans "married a simmering effort to expose the Federalists as betrayers of American honor and independence to a portrait of Louverture as a despot" (p. 147). Chapter seven discusses the final phase of the Haitian Revolution, marked by former slave Jean-Jacques Dessalines's declaration of Haitian independence in 1804. As the first black republic, Haiti became "an alien and dangerous place" in the minds of white Americans, and commentators increasingly dismissed events there as "irrelevant to their discussions about race, slavery, and revolution" (p. 23). Dun suggests that "in reducing the intricate and nuanced revolutionary agendas at work in Saint Domingue over the period to a simple portrait of black violence, Americans pieced together a basic agreement about their own nation's Revolution, one that marked it as complete" (p. 23). Dun's most important contribution is to show that Haiti's legacy in the United States was an historical construction that developed during extended public discourse about the revolution in the early republic. Initially, events in Saint Domingue sparked genuine debate about the meaning of the American Revolution for slavery and racial [End Page 667...

The Most Influential Scientists in the Development of Medical Informatics (18): Isaacs Sedick.

Isaacs Sedick, PhD (1940-2012) was born and grew up in the Bo-Kaap, Cape Town, Western Cape. From an early age, Isaacs was fascinated with science and was engaged in performing science experiments at home. At the age of 13, he was involved in distributing political pamphlets and attending meetings of the Teachers League of South Africa (TLSA) and the Non European Unity Movement (NEUM). After completing his education, Isaacs worked as teacher at Trafalgar High School in Cape Town. It was while teaching at the school that he met Achmad Cassiem. Isaacs with his knowledge of explosives tried to train some of his friends in the use of this. This attracted the attention of the security police who monitored their activities. Consequently,

The Early Twentieth-Century Countryside of Bernard Samuel Gilbert: Lincolnshire Poet, Novelist, Playwright, Pamphleteer and Correspondent, 1911–14

The writings of Bernard Samuel Gilbert (1882–1927) form a rich body of primary source material. However, they lie little known and neglected. Gilbert’s life and output have yet to attract a literary biography. Gilbert’s writing includes poetry in dialect verse, historical novels, stage plays, political pamphlets and newspaper correspondence. This investigation focuses on the early, formative work published by Gilbert between 1911 and 1914, while he was still living in Lincolnshire. The research identifies a number of interconnecting themes in his writing that are prominent among the interests of early twentieth-century rural historians: landscape, culture and the formation of regional identities; the nature of the rural, the character of country class and labour relations, and perceptions of the town and countryside; and, in addition, the interrelationships existing between party politics, agriculture, improvement and the state of the countryside in this period. This article, as well as bringing the work of Gilbert to wider attention, is an interdisciplinary exercise in the use of literary sources in regional, rural and agrarian historical study.

To “Alarm the Publick Mind”: A Reexamination of Pamphlets and Newspapers in Philadelphia and the Early Republic

ABSTRACT This article compares the role of political pamphlets and newspapers in the early US republic, especially whether pamphlets were intended to appeal to a closed circle of political insiders while the target audience of newspapers was average citizens, a topic seldom discussed by journalism historians for the federal period. Pamphlets, lower priced compared to newspapers (whose publishers generally required a year's subscription in advance), were more within the income range of average citizens. As a case study, pamphleteering activities of US senator John Taylor of Caroline, a Philadelphia resident during early the 1790s, are discussed, as well as those of Benjamin Franklin Bache, Thomas Paine, William L. Smith, William Cobbett, Benjamin Russell, and others involved in the period's print culture. Emphasizing Philadelphia-based publications, and after comparing prices of pamphlets and books with the cost of a one-year subscription to newspapers during the 1790s, the author concludes that political writers viewed pamphlets as a way to reach a wide audience, not merely a restricted cohort of the wealthy or those in positions of political power.

TATAR INVASION TO GAZI-KUMUKH IN 1239-1240

The article is devoted to Mongolian-Tatar invasion in 1239-1240, in Gazi-Kumukh. Gazi-Kumukh is located in the heart of mountainous Dagestan, in Lakia. Dating back to the XII century, he was the center of the Islam-ization of Dagestan and Chechnya. At the initial stage ally Gazi-Kumukh was Kaitag. But then began the rivalry. Kaitag yielded Gazi-Kumukh and lost the struggle for leadership. Then Kaitag entered into an Alliance with the rulers of Hunzaq that have not accepted Islam. However, the allies are unable to achieve success. During this period, Derbent was captured by the Mongol-Tatars, who were sent for the conquest of Ba-tu-Khan. Avar rulers turned to their leader for help. Between them was entered into political Alliance, sealed by dynastic marriage. So the war between the feudal rulers of Dagestan became the Gazi-Kumukh in the war for the Fatherland. From the East the Mongol-Tatars, and from the West, the Avars and their allies are kajtags moved to Gazi-Kumukh. Heroically resisted Gazi-Kumukh. But unequal struggle ended with the destruction of Gazi-Kumukh. So exactly described these events in Dagestan historical chronicle Tarikh Dagistan. However, some authors, including T.M. Aytberov and A.E. Krishtopa do not accept set out in this essay facts, giving them a different interpretation, and, in fact, shuffle them around, throwing hundreds of years, thereby refuting the presentation of the work itself and transforming it from the historic monument to political pamphlet. This article advocates that works and gives the correct interpretation as set out in her events.

Rehabilitating Machiavelli: Kaspar Schoppe with and against Rome

SUMMARYThis paper presents the unusual story of the efforts of the political agent and pamphleteer Kaspar Schoppe to rehabilitate Machiavelli. Unlike the few earlier attempts by Machiavelli's Florentine descendants, Schoppe's campaign was motivated by complex factors, which were in a great part related to his vision of Catholic renewal. Through the story of Schoppe's campaign for Machiavelli (which at a certain moment became related to Galileo's similar fight for Copernicanism), this paper offers not only a novel interpretation of this fascinating figure of the Counter-Reformation but also insight into the problems of science and political philosophy in the Catholic world.