post-Civil War Years Research Articles

Las Hermanas De Manolete by Alicia Montesquiu, and: Entre Sevilla y Triana (review)

Reviewed by: Las Hermanas De Manolete by Alicia Montesquiu, and: Entre Sevilla y Triana Duncan Wheeler LAS HERMANAS DE MANOLETE. By Alicia Montesquiu. Directed by Gabriel Olivares. Teatro Fernán Gómez, Centro Cultural de la Villa, Madrid. January 23, 2022. ENTRE SEVILLA Y TRIANA. Music by Pablo Sorozábal. Libretto by Luis Fernández de Se-villa and Luis Tejedor. Teatro de la Zarzuela, Madrid. January 28, 2022. Historical memory is a hot topic in Spanish theatre and society more generally. The long Franco regime (1939–1975) came to an end only when the dictator died in his bed in November 1975. A relatively peaceful transition was predicated on a tacit agreement by the major players not to weaponize the past, moving forward with the consensus politics enshrined in the 1978 constitution. In the twenty-first century, there is a growing divide between citizens who believe it best to let sleeping dogs lie and those who contend that the existence of mass graves and a denial of the country’s traumatic past is an obstacle to the consolidation of a mature political democracy and broader social wellbeing. Madrid’s “Teatro del barrio” [Neighborhood Theatre], which was established in 2013, has, for example, provided a vibrant forum for practitioners, activists and audiences emotionally and politically invested in disinterring the original sins of the dictatorship and the so-called “regime of 78.” While there is a loyal clientele for such initiatives, attending sold-out productions at this hipster hangout in a multicultural neighborhood is not necessarily representative of where the conversation is heading more broadly. Merely referencing censorship alongside the use of non-traditional framing devices—the zarzuela (light Spanish opera) Doña Francisquita was adapted for television during the dictatorship—prompted catcalls from an older and generally more conservative clientele at Madrid’s Zarzuela Theatre in 2019. In this publically funded space, a 2021–2022 staging of Entre Sevilla y Triana was far less polemical. Understanding how and why a production of this zarzuela did not offend conservative sensibilities—in spite of touching on a number of the same unsettling themes that a recently premiered new play, Las hermanas de Manolete, also did—offers new sociological and theatrical insight into the cultural politics of contemporary Spain. Manuel Laureano Rodríguez Sánchez, known professionally as “Manolete,” was the most important matador of Spain’s post-Civil War years. Beyond his prowess with the sword, he was a national hero because audiences during the so-called “years of hunger,” identified with an idol who had a melancholy countenance and emaciated frame. After Manolete died in 1947, gored in the ring, his mother, Angustias Sánchez, and his inner professional circle ostracized his lover, the actress Lupe Sino. In a previous life, she had been married to a Republican army soldier during the Civil War (1936–1939) and was rumored to have made a living as a sex worker after he was jailed. Much of the cultural production surrounding Manolete—see, for example, the film A Matador’s Mistress (Menno Meyjes, 2008) starring Adrien Brody and Penélope Cruz—hinges on the melodrama of a mythical icon caught between a passionate love affair and an over-protective Bernarda Alba-style mother. The underlying conceit of Las hermanas de Manolete is the making of a documentary film about Lupe Sino, but the play itself is set almost entirely in the home of Manolete’s sisters, the more sympathetic of whom has learning difficulties. They reminisce about the past and dissect their brother’s relationship, which began in the infamous Chicote cocktail bar, the place to score a plethora of drugs from cocaine to penicillin (a game-changer for the life expectancy of matadors). Click for larger view View full resolution Alicia Cabrera and Alicia Montesquiu in a rehearsal for Las hermanas de Manolete, Photo by Kike Parra. The first husband of Manolete’s mother was a bullfighter who died of tuberculosis. She remarried another bullfighter who also died young. Manolete, her only son, was born of this second marriage. The future matador left school at twelve to help provide for his mother and five (half-)sisters. To a large extent, the Spanish Civil...

Commonwealth of Compromise: Civil War Commemoration in Missouri

Over 155 years after the end of the Civil War, Americans are still struggling with the legacy of the conflict and how it should be commemorated. Different factions continue to see the war through sectional and racial lenses that distort the reality of the country's shared collective memory. But this phenomenon is neither new nor soon to be settled. In Amy Laurel Fluker's Commonwealth of Compromise, she explores the development of competing memories through the experiences of Missouri. She skillfully demonstrates the importance of this border state from the several different perspectives that its geography played. Missouri not only divided North from South, but as a gateway to the Pacific Ocean, it divided East from West. She also explores other internal divisions throughout her work, including those between Blacks and whites, urban and rural, and males and females, creating an in-depth, well-researched view that focuses strictly on primary sources. Missouri's sectional division during the war, which manifests itself in the post-bellum period, becomes the ideal microcosm from which to study the country.Fluker taps into the growing historiography of Civil War memory by demonstrating that Missouri was deeply steeped in all four narrative traditions that historians recognize today: Unionist, emancipationist, Confederate, and reconciliationist. After a summarization chapter of Missouri during the war, she devotes a chapter to each of these narratives and chronologically explores each of them independent from one another. She finally ends with an investigation of the state's need to be at the forefront of reconciliation as Missourians felt it was their obligation to be an example for the country. She examines the unified veteran's monument at Vicksburg Military Park and the eventual state's control over both the Union and Confederate Soldiers’ Homes. In doing so, she demonstrates how the state's white population desired to move forward from the war purely for the political and economic gain of the state and how this made Black Union veterans’ push for racial uplift yet another long-term causality of the war. She argues, “Missourians never arrived at a complete consensus over the legacy of the Civil War in their state and . . . the ways [they] remembered the war largely reflected the ways they experienced it” (p. 10). Missouri experienced the war as a pro-Union, slave state divided over its role within the Union; therefore, that experience translated directly into how Missourians chose to remember their legacy. Those experiences and that legacy were both debated, reconciled, and even legislated by whites, leaving Blacks to once again fight for their rights alone and against an unsympathetic majority. The legacy established in the immediate post–Civil War years still lingers today. Fluker shows that, despite the challenges set before Missouri's Black population, they never stopped fighting and continually made progress when and where they could, thereby unquestionably displaying their character as true American citizens.With her focus predominately on sources from within the state, one might argue that the addition of Missourians effect on non-Missourians’ memory could have been looked at closer, but she identifies early on that this was not her intent and it remains as work to still be investigated. That issue aside, the depth of her research and clarity of her writing makes this monograph accessible to a wide audience. Additionally, the combination of relevancy, historiographical integration, and highly detailed research makes it an important read to historians and lay readers with a broad spectrum of historical interests. Illinois historians should easily recognize the importance of her research as some southern counties also suffered from similar divisions during the era. Her examination of Missouri, where majority consensus on legacy was troubled from the start, gives it a higher place in Civil War memory than cases discussed in other states that were decidedly North or South during the war.

Spain on show. Nationalism and internationalism in the presentation of the 12 October holiday under post-war Francoism

ABSTRACT Since the early twentieth century the celebration of the 12 October, the anniversary of Columbus’ first landing, has served as a reminder of the importance of Spain’s links with the Americas as a part of Spanish national identity. Nostalgia for empire and the resulting image of international importance, enriched with diverse narratives, have helped build a myth of a Spanish identity with universal ambitions, one useful for political regeneration, social cohesion, and diplomacy. This article analyzes the versatility of this symbol under the Franco dictatorship in the post-Civil War years, centering upon its public presentations in 1940 and 1947. Open to contradictory interpretations, these celebrations reflected the different Falangist and National-Catholic political cultures, and the distribution of areas of power. We will examine their contexts, their international impact, their representation in public space, the actors involved, and the exhibitions that complemented public rituals in Madrid and, given the event’s transnational significance, in Buenos Aires. We will also indicate the ways in which cultural symbols of Spanish nationalism associated with the day, such as the Conquest of the Americas or the language of Cervantes, were updated and given new meanings as part of the invention of identity, depending on political circumstance and international objectives.

Football at Historically Black Colleges and Universities in Texas by Robert C. Fink

Reviewed by: Football at Historically Black Colleges and Universities in Texas by Robert C. Fink Alan C. Atchison Football at Historically Black Colleges and Universities in Texas. By Robert C. Fink. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2019. Pp. 282. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Since the 1950s, football has dominated American sports pages year round. In addition to reports of trades, drafts, game summaries, etc., current articles address themes as diverse as social protest (e.g., kneeling during the National Anthem), the lifelong effects of injuries, and dwindling youth participation. These issues reflect the game’s broad influence on American culture. Football is also a major part of black culture; most National Football League players are African American, a strong indication of minority interest and participation in football from youth leagues to university elevens. Football at Historically Black Colleges and Universities in Texas examines the historical impact of America’s game on black Americans’ culture. Concentrating on the eight historically black colleges in Texas (Bishop College, Jarvis Christian College, Paul Quinn College, Samuel Huston College, Prairie View A&M College, Texas College, Texas Southern University, and Wiley College) that consistently fielded teams in the twentieth century, Robert C. Fink divides football history into eight eras. Beginning with the post-Civil War years and continuing through World War I, the first chapter briefly chronicles the overall expansion of football at both white and black colleges. This was a time of minimal sway, especially in Texas, as the first black college in Texas did not field a team until 1901, and all college teams played abbreviated schedules (far fewer than ten games). With so few games, how and when did the game become a major cultural factor in the black community? Fink’s information, using sources such as the major twentieth-century African American newspapers Dallas Express and Houston Informer, provides some answers. These dailies contain vivid accounts of major contests, descriptions of players and coaches, as well as discussions of tactics and strategies, which Fink ably incorporates into his narrative. More importantly, in these chapters readers will discover, through stories highlighting band performances, homecoming traditions, and various festivities that surrounded the annual State Fair Classic played in the Cotton Bowl on Negro Day at the State Fair of Texas, the connection between the college game and the African American community. The author implies that football was a driving force in black life. However, after many pages lauding the cultural effects of the game, Fink notes, “for many African Americans in Texas, the State Fair game ranked second in importance” to Negro Day at the State Fair (132). Elsewhere, Fink comments on newspaper accounts of other games that contain more coverage of pre-game and half-time activities than the football teams’ performance. [End Page 479] Similarly, one other claim lacks satisfactory support. For example, Fink emphasizes that segregation allowed black college football to develop “away from the control of whites” (22). Yet the growth of black collegiate football and associated groups and events mirrored the development of the white game: bands, cheerleaders, homecoming festivities, and post-season bowl games. Football at Historically Black Colleges and Universities in Texas provides valuable insights into the connection between football and black culture. Fans will find it an interesting and entertaining read. But Fink’s well-documented monograph raises a number of important questions that beg for further research. Anyone endeavoring to answer those questions will find the book’s bibliography valuable and extensive. While Fink’s work does not totally “fill the void in the historiography” (2) of football at predominately black colleges, it does add a valuable portion. Alan C. Atchison San Marcos, Texas Copyright © 2020 The Texas State Historical Association

The Commanders: Civil War Generals Who Shaped the American West by Robert M. Utley

Reviewed by: The Commanders: Civil War Generals Who Shaped the American West by Robert M. Utley William A. Dobak The Commanders: Civil War Generals Who Shaped the American West. By Robert M. Utley. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. Pp. 256. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) The years after the Civil War saw ever-increasing organization, both private and corporate, in the American West. As civilian entities of the federal government multiplied, so did those of the military branch, often assuming strange shapes that were ill-adapted to the army’s post-war tasks in the West. Robert M. Utley, one of the foremost historians of the nineteenth-century western military, has undertaken a sketch of the army’s activities during the two decades that followed the Civil War. His approach is biographical. Among the generals Utley discusses are: Philip Sheridan, commander of the Military Division of the Missouri (the central part of the United States during most of these years); Alfred Terry, commander of the Department of Dakota (the Territories of Dakota and Montana, headquarters at St. Paul); Christopher C. Augur and Edward O. C. Ord, commanders (consecutively) of the Department of the Platte (Nebraska, Wyoming, and Utah, headquarters at Omaha) and the Department of Texas (Texas and sometimes the Indian Territory, with headquarters at San Antonio). One of the longest serving generals was John Pope, whose spectacular failure at the Second Battle of Manassas in 1862 sent him to the Plains for twenty-one years, mostly in the Department of the Missouri (Kansas, Colorado, [End Page 467] New Mexico, and sometimes the Indian Territory, with headquarters at Fort Leavenworth). Other high-ranking officers, each the subject of a chapter, are George Crook, Oliver O. Howard, and Nelson A. Miles. These latter officers’ experience was largely with indigenous tribes in the Military Division of the Pacific (Arizona, California, and the Pacific Northwest, including part of Idaho). The army’s chief duty, before and after the Civil War, was to guard transportation routes, wagon roads before 1865, and railroads after that. This duty led to the awkward shapes of military departments, which were often dictated by the availability of water for draft animals and later for steam engines. Water was likewise a requisite for Indian tribes—for people, horses, and game animals. Competition for water and grass was a frequent source of conflict between ethnic groups in the West. These conflicts form the focus of The Commanders. The exploits of lower ranking officers, Mackenzie and Custer among them, take backstage to the performance of lesser known but higher ranking men who helped to orchestrate the series of conflicts known as the Indian Wars. The episodic violence Utley records, though, was only one facet of Indian-white relations during the post-Civil War years. For instance, the army fed Indians in addition to fighting them. When Indian agencies ran out of rations to issue, the commissary at a nearby army post would often make up the deficit, with higher headquarters in Washington, D.C., reconciling the accounts. General Pope believed that to hold Indians on a reservation without food was a crime against humanity. During the last three years of his tenure in the Department of the Missouri, Pope also devoted about half his cavalry force to driving the “Boomer” invaders from the Oklahoma District (roughly, today’s greater Oklahoma City), where white settlement was forbidden under the terms of a treaty. This might have been a better book if Utley had concentrated on the lesser known incidents of peaceful interaction between Indians and the army, with which the history of the postbellum West abounds, instead of persisting in detailing the record of hostilities that the post-Civil War generation took part in as junior officers. William A. Dobak Hyattsville, Maryland Copyright © 2019 The Texas State Historical Association

Historic Alabama Courthouses: A Century of Their Images and Stories by Delos Hughes

Reviewed by: Historic Alabama Courthouses: A Century of Their Images and Stories by Delos Hughes Pamela Sterne King Historic Alabama Courthouses: A Century of Their Images and Stories. By Delos Hughes. Montgomery: New South Books, 2017. 162 pp. $25.95. ISBN 978-1-58838-334-1. Professor Delos Hughes has turned a trove of photographs and historical documentation into a neat, compact, readable book. It is about an important topic---Alabama's historic courthouses---and it offers a multi-faceted way of learning about each county's "tastes," how they stamped aesthetic preferences onto the public space, and, [End Page 167] sometimes, the fate of these buildings. Hughes organized Historic Alabama Courthouses: A Century of Their Images and Stories alphabetically, county by county, and included every structure at least one hundred years old that he could document. Those built later, such as the architecturally rich 1929 Jefferson County Courthouse, did not make the cut. Maybe a later edition will incorporate some of the more recently constructed courthouses. Roman architect Vitruvius's "strong opinions about the qualities of fine architecture" provide Hughes with a reference point for analyzing the tastes of Alabama's courthouse designers. He uses the ancient scholar's "standards for judging architecture," namely commodity, firmness and delight, and applies them to this state (3). Readers will get a quick, succinct romp through Alabama's public architectural mores. They will not, Hughes makes clear, get an exhaustive, academic tome requiring advanced degrees to finish. Readers should pay attention to Hughes's two "observations of special interest." One is the extent to which Alabama courthouses did not reflect necessarily a county's unique personality as, he asserts, readers might presume. Rather, they often mimicked or in some cases "literally copied" other courthouses (6). Second, he asks the reader to notice the influence of South Carolina's "courthouse tradition," especially in Alabama's Black Belt, where many Palmetto State residents moved. However, although the older state revered the separation of powers evident in the "literal independence of administrative and judicial spaces," the author contends that "no such history nor any such actual separation of powers existed to be expressed at the county level in Alabama" (7). Such a conclusion seems premature without more proof. Hughes, emeritus professor of politics at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, is a graduate of Lee County High School in Auburn and, since retirement, has spent time researching and writing about architectural history. This combination of expertise and interests lures both the academic and the lay scholar who may be interested in economic, social, or political history along [End Page 168] with those seduced more by builders, architects, and practitioners. As it happens, these disciplines always are interfaced with individual personalities and money, but also, uniquely to public buildings, with taxpayers' demands. The author captures these realities with facile writing, archival mastery, and precision. In his "A Last Word" the author acknowledges that he hopes this volume challenges earlier American historians' declarations that Alabama was a backwater, lacking "taste and resources," especially in the postbellum period (153). He achieves this counter narrative and much more. Where possible he reveals each courthouse's style, architect, builder, and cost of construction. He also points out those that are singularly notable such as Washington County's bare-bones 1854 courthouse still (barely) standing in St. Stephens; Pickens County's second courthouse, reportedly etched by lightning with the first courthouse arsonist's face on his way to the executioner; or Cherokee County's courthouse, in Centre, built after the state legislature stipulated its location precisely at the county's center point. Hughes also treats us to a compendium of Alabama courthouse designs which may surprise many. Classically-inspired style, he points out, was "de rigueur in antebellum Alabama" (Madison County and Montgomery County) and "survived with some vigor in post-Civil War years" (Greene County). But, he explains, "an entrepreneurial class in the Reconstruction era embraced the emergent New South philosophy and looked for more appropriate, nay, modern architectural styles," as exemplified in the courthouses of Bibb, Butler and Chambers Counties (6). These boosters, he notes, often were more interested in dollars than design, equating modern style with "evidence...

STRANGE FRUIT, Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard in the Deep South

This article will attempt to analyse the creative and technical process of the site-specific production of the play Strange Fruit at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance in April 2015, and how the student company found that transposing Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard from rural Russia to the cotton fields of Dixie heightened their awareness of just how much civil unrest and human bondage dictate the characters’ relationships with each other, the family estate and the land itself. What follows is an analysis of how the transplanting of the location from Russia to America; the adaptation of the text for a site-specific, multi-audience promenade production; and a strict adherence to Chekhov’s insistence that the comedic and farcical elements of the play be given their full due, all contributed to fulfilling the project’s educational brief of training student performers, designers and technicians in the conventions of “ensemble” theatre. The particular focus lies in the portrayal of African-American characters and their Russian counterparts, drawing on biographical sources highlighting Chekhov’s personal experience of the legacy of serfdom and historical accounts by former slaves of the Deep South in the immediate post-Civil War years. To download the e-pub text of Strange Fruit and to view a photographic record of the production go to http://www.stevendykesplaywright.com/showcase/strange-fruit/.

The Women’s National Indian Association: A History ed. by Valerie Sherer Mathes

Reviewed by: The Women’s National Indian Association: A History ed. by Valerie Sherer Mathes Mikaëla M. Adams The Women’s National Indian Association: A History. Edited by Valerie Sherer Mathes. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015. vii + 340 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index. $45.00 cloth. The post–Civil War years marked a turning point in federal Indian policy. Whereas some Americans called for the annihilation of the country’s indigenous people, others wanted “to replace policies of removal, confinement, and extermination with homes, Christianity, and even citizenship” (2). Leading this reform impulse was a group of Protestant middle-class white women who created the Women’s National Indian Association (wnia). In Valerie Sherer Mathes’s edited volume, nine historians evaluate the mixed legacy of this organization. Although it provided certain women with an outlet for political participation, the wnia promoted a strident policy of assimilation—one that had devastating consequences for Native communities. Founded by Mary Lucinda Bonney and Amelia Stone Quinton in Philadelphia in 1879, the wnia started as a petition drive to pressure Congress to uphold Indian treaties. Auxiliary branches sprung up in the 1880s, although regional understandings of race and power (particularly in the South) limited the wnia’s work in certain areas. In 1882 the male-dominated Indian Rights Association took over the lobbying function of the wnia. To remain relevant, the women refocused on missionary work. Taking a “maternalist” approach, wnia members endeavored to spread “the values of white Christian society” by transforming Indian homes, families, and economies through projects such as the Home-Building and Loan Department and the field matron program (68). wnia members also participated in the annual Lake Mohonk conference on Indian reform and began publication of The Indian’s Friend in 1888. Although funding cuts and policy shifts eventually undercut the organization (it disbanded in 1951), in its heyday the wnia included ninety branch organizations in twenty-eight states and supported fifty-six mission stations on reservations. Through appealing to Victorian “domestic ideology that made women into the moral caretakers of the nation,” the wnia claimed authority to enact social change at a time when women lacked full rights in the United States (72). Yet even as these women enhanced their own political life, they treated Indians as “children” who needed to be taught to become “civilized” adults. Ultimately, the wnia [End Page 154] supported destructive legislation such as the 1887 Dawes Act and federal Indian boarding schools. According to contributor Lori Jacobson, wnia members “remained largely untouched by a sense of responsibility for their role in the violent cultural genocide enforced by an assimilationist agenda” (281). Instead, through what Jacobson calls the “erotics of reform,” they imagined Indians as willing participants and counted as a moral victory every conversion from “savage” to “civilized,” no matter “the personal and cultural traumas such conversions could enact” (281). As this volume shows, historians can no longer ignore the wnia since it offers one of the strongest examples of “women’s associational and maternalist political power in the nineteenth century” (212). Yet the volume also acknowledges its limitations. As Mathes points out, “one finds little Indian voice in the wnia literature, making it impossible to measure individual Indian’s responses to the efforts of these women reformers” (40). Future researchers, one hopes, will build upon this work to include indigenous perspectives. Mikaëla M. Adams Department of History University of Mississippi Copyright © 2016 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Militant around the Clock? Left-wing Youth Politics, Leisure, and Sexuality in Post-Dictatorship Greece, 1974–1981 by Nikolaos Papadogiannis

Reviewed by: Militant around the Clock? Left-wing Youth Politics, Leisure, and Sexuality in Post-Dictatorship Greece, 1974–1981 by Nikolaos Papadogiannis Katerina Rozakou (bio) Nikolaos Papadogiannis, Militant around the Clock? Left-wing Youth Politics, Leisure, and Sexuality in Post-Dictatorship Greece, 1974–1981. New York: Berghahn Books. 2015. Pp. xi + 329. 9 illustrations, 4 tables. Cloth $100. The study of leisure brings to the fore the political dimensions of social relatedness; it also provides an alternative lens through which to analyze social and cultural transformations. Historical approaches to youth, on the other hand, question it as a reified and bounded notion and investigate the historical processes by which it emerged as a distinct category. Moreover, such studies stress that youth as a unified entity tends to conceal internal differences and variations stemming from cultural or social stratifications such as class. Nikolaos Papadogiannis’s Militant around the Clock? Left-wing Youth Politics, Leisure, and Sexuality in Post-Dictatorship Greece, 1974–1981 is embedded [End Page 435] within the rich matrix of historical works that engage with the concepts of youth and leisure. Grounded on a broad definition of the political, the book explores the politicization of leisure and sexuality by diverse left-wing youth groups. Through interviews, written records, and published materials, as well as numerous cultural products that range from music to films, Papadogiannis examines the main Socialist and Communist youth groups’ leisure and sexuality patterns in post-authoritarian Greece. The book seeks to go beyond the simplified reification of the youth by meticulously highlighting the internal diversity of left-wing youth groups. With one exception (the case of Rigas Feraios), however, it fails to link these variations with broader social differences. At the same time, the analysis could benefit from a more in-depth engagement with relevant discussions in other disciplines. One of the strengths of the book is precisely its interdisciplinary perspective and the incorporation of discussions from anthropology to political science, and sociology. Nevertheless, sometimes references to these debates and analytical concepts remain fragmented and their potential unexploited. The book is divided into three parts. The first part refers to the youth leisure patterns during the post-World War II era and the dictatorship years. The 1950s and 1960s was a period of social and cultural transformations in Greece: urbanization and migration shifted the social landscape, whereas economic prosperity fueled the diffusion of mass consumption and led to the emergence of new venues for the youth. These transformations affected the realm of leisure and sexuality, although, as the author claims, these were still dominated by the “conjugal model” (30). As far as the Left is concerned, the post-Civil War years were a time of exclusion and lack of freedom of expression. At the university protests of the late 1950s, and particularly in the 1960s, the Left was significantly strengthened, and the United Democratic Left (EDA) came to represent “itself as the genuine expression of the Greek nation” (33). Patriotism and anti-Americanism dominated left-wing cultural politics and also informed the leisure activities of the left-wing youth in subsequent years. Tradition was invented and incorporated in leisure patterns, such as in music and in publishing activities. The Left elaborated on the concept of tradition, which, during the dictatorship, was invoked as a counterweight to the “monopolizing of patriotism by the regime” (43). The late 1960s and the dictatorship years signaled the identification of Greek left-wing youth with other movements in Western Europe and the United States. The youth in Greece became familiar with these trends through films and popular culture. These years were also marked by shifts in sexuality patterns, and sexual emancipation was a claim of particular political groups, such as Rigas Feraios. The legalization of communist organizations after the fall of the dictatorship contributed to their flourishing in universities and in major Greek cities, such as Athens and Thessaloniki. The second part of the book revolves around the mid-1970s and presents this boom of participation and the emergence of new spaces and activities. Magazines, films, and music hosted “a deep collective reflection of Greek society and its history” (86), both as “suffering and militant” (89). At the same time, new...

Painters and Paintings in the Early American South by Carolyn J. Weekley (review)

Reviewed by: Painters and Paintings in the Early American South by Carolyn J. Weekley Eleanor Jones Harvey (bio) Painters and Paintings in the Early American South Carolyn J. Weekley New Haven: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in Association with Yale University Press, 2013 438 pp. Painters and Paintings in the Early American South is the culmination of forty years’ work, painstakingly assembled and presented by Carolyn J. Weekley. Her acknowledgments alone make clear the magnitude of this endeavor, providing a road map of the archives, museums, colleagues, and collectors with whom she has worked in pursuit of information crucial to an understanding of the fine arts in the southern colonies between 1564 and the 1790s. The result is a massive and thorough enumeration of the contributions painters made to early southern culture, a significant and lasting research resource relying heavily on primary archival material to ground our understanding of the network of patrons and artists active during this period. Weekley begins with the laudable premise that there is no “southern” style endemic to the works produced by early generations of American artists, and rightly concludes that the tendency toward ascribing specifically and uniquely southern characteristics to American art is in large part a legacy of the Civil War. I would further note that even more recently—during the Bicentennial of 1976—the promotion of civic and by extension regional pride prevailed over commemorating a more balanced view of our history. That bias is only now being seen for what it is—making clear the need for a corrective approach to understanding the complexity of American art from its inception to the present day. This is not to underestimate [End Page 576] the power of local preference and custom, or insist on a generic American style—but to point out that many of the artists discussed in this volume plied their trade up and down the thirteen colonies, and as Weekley notes, did not appreciably change their styles in so doing. But the Civil War did leave one daunting legacy with which Weekley grapples throughout her work: the often frustrating lack of records before the war, exacerbated by the lamentable destruction of records during and after it. The ragged economy in the post–Civil War years plays a supporting role here, as careful research on artwork and records across the South lagged well behind the scholarship devoted to art made in the northern colonies. As a result, Weekely’s career has been spent sleuthing everything she could find, each piece of information contributing to a better understanding of the cultural and aesthetic drivers during this period. Much of the information she has found takes the form of genealogical networks of southern families and the artists they patronized. There is, as a result, a steady flow of detailed and interconnected family histories, and at times the volume reads like a conversation about various extended family trees rather than an analysis of the artworks produced. There is a pragmatic reason for this close attention to family ties: whereas research on the key paintings and sitters in the northern colonies is vast, this volume represents the most comprehensive effort to date to account for a southern history of artistic practice. To readers steeped in and fascinated by genealogy, this book provides an impressive web of connections; for a lay reader seeking to understand the various roles the fine arts played in colonial life and in the transition to nationhood, it can be tough going. The text favors this genealogical approach; the extended captions on the paintings themselves provide only a modicum of art historical analysis of the artworks. Not surprisingly, then, the vast majority of paintings included as illustrations and described are portraits. Weekley has made every effort to include landscapes and coastal views wherever possible, but very few examples either survive or can be ascribed to an artist working in the South. A set of charming coastal marine views she includes as illustrations are made by an observing British artist—a reminder that landscape painting did not begin to flourish as a separate and significant genre until after the Revolution. (A parallel may be drawn between this and seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting, which flourished...

Whither Kentucky Civil War and Reconstruction Scholarship?

Whither Kentucky Civil War and Reconstruction Scholarship? John David Smith (bio) For all its salience, the broad and symbolic importance of Kentucky in the Civil War has received surprisingly little attention from professional historians, whether traditional academics or those who engage directly with the public. Fortunately, this lacuna is being filled by a wealth of recent studies, a trend that began in the mid-1970s. To a certain degree, we are on the cusp of a “new” Kentucky Civil War and Reconstruction historiography. These works increasingly treat the Kentucky Civil War experience comparatively and through the lens of politics, economics, law, gender, and the military. This article suggests where scholarship on Civil War-era Kentucky stands today and notes possible avenues for future investigation. I hope that [End Page 223] it will stimulate even more dynamic research by those interested in Kentucky in the Civil War era. Serious historical writing on Kentucky during the Civil War period has seen a renaissance in the last thirty-five years. Before that, E. Merton Coulter’s oft-maligned but still incredibly important The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky (1926) dominated the field. In 1988, I traced the publishing history and importance of that book in the Register.1 The big question has always been: Why has Coulter held sway for so long? As graduate students in the 1970s, we recognized the serious flaws and limitations of Coulter’s work, which was inspired by William A. Dunning of Columbia University, but none of us did anything to come close to replacing it. Coulter described—but failed to explain—the early neutrality of Kentucky as civil war dissolved the Union, and he overstated its alleged pro-southern sympathies. Coulter largely ignored military campaigns in the state and accepted and perpetuated Jim Crow-era stereotypes of African Americans and their white supporters, especially Freedmen’s Bureau agents. White historians of Coulter’s generation generally considered emancipation an unfortunate by-product of Confederate defeat, a deleterious step that unleashed black assertiveness and the so-called “horrors” of Reconstruction. Coulter sympathized openly with the Democrats’ ascendancy during and after what he termed the state’s “readjustment.” For decades, American historiography has rejected much of the ideological and methodological assumptions that undergirded Coulter’s work; nevertheless his book has dominated the field largely because no revisionist or revisionist school of Kentucky historians challenged his Dunningite interpretations head-on. Have conditions changed so that someone can write a book that thoroughly revises and replaces Coulter? Unquestionably yes. To be sure, scholars have made great strides in supplementing, if not replacing, Coulter. A great deal of scholarship, providing fresh consideration of Kentucky’s [End Page 224] multifaceted experiences in the secession crisis, the Civil War, and the post–Civil War years, has appeared, or soon will appear. The modern study of Kentucky in the Civil War period began with the publication of three important books—Lowell H. Harrison, The Civil War in Kentucky (1975); Ross A. Webb, Kentucky in the Reconstruction Era (1979); and Victor B. Howard, Black Liberation in Kentucky: Emancipation and Freedom, 1862-1884 (1983).2 Soon after, a number of works, including Richard D. Sears, “A Practical Recognition of the Brotherhood of Man”: John G. Fee and the Camp Nelson Experience (1986); Ira Berlin, ed., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, Series II: The Black Military Experience (1982); Berlin, ed., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, Series I, Volume I: The Destruction of Slavery (1985); and Berlin, ed., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, Series I, Volume II: The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Upper South (1993), extended the reach of Howard’s monograph. As the new century unfolded, several valuable books appeared, including Lowell H. Harrison, Lincoln of Kentucky (2000); Earl J. Hess, Banners to the Breeze: The Kentucky Campaign, Corinth, and Stones River (2000); and Kent Masterson Brown, ed., The Civil War in Kentucky: Battle for the Bluegrass State (2000). Richard D. Sears, Camp Nelson, Kentucky: A Civil War History (2002) and Darrel E. Bigham, On Jordan’s Banks: Emancipation and Its Aftermath in the Ohio River Valley (2006) provided new research on the emancipation process in Kentucky...

Standing their ground: small farmers in North Carolina since the Civil War

Standing Their Ground: Small Farmers in North Carolina since the Civil War. By Adrienne Monteith Petty. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. [xiv], 281. $74.00, ISBN 978-0-19-993852-0.) In this bold and ambitious book Adrienne Monteith Petty seeks to clarify the history of agriculture in the South since the Civil War by making room for the high ideals and remarkable persistence of small-scale landholders. While Pete Daniel, Gilbert C. Fite, Jack Temple Kirby, and other historians have focused primarily on sharecroppers and tenant farmers, the two most exploited groups in southern agriculture, and other scholars have recently turned attention to either white or African American small-farm owners, Petty the novel approach of studying small farm owners--white, black, and Indian--as a single class (p. 4). The economic disruptions of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries notwithstanding, small farm owners, Petty argues, maintained their own discrete social group with its own ideology and aspirations--a subsistence-oriented, cooperative mode of living (p. 10). Over time, however, market forces, technological developments, federal farm programs, and the often violent race relations that precluded solidarity between white and black farm owners undermined aspirations as well as hold on the land. Petty takes a case study approach, focusing on the seven counties--Bladen, Brunswick, Columbus, Duplin, Pender, Robeson, and Sampson--that cover the Cape Fear River watershed of southeastern North Carolina. In the immediate post-Civil War years, small landowning families were more likely to harvest turpentine from the region's dense pine forests than plant crops, but with the rising dominance of commercial agriculture between 1880 and 1920, they turned first to truck farming and then to tobacco and cotton. While some longed for the self-sufficiency of the antebellum yeomanry and others exhibited unabashedly capitalist values, both groups continued to reassert an ideology of individualism and self-reliance by devoting valuable acreage to food and feed crops. During the New Deal era, white small farmers, unlike tenants and sharecroppers, at first benefited from the payments they received under the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), but by not embracing the black farmers who shared economic class, they weakened position in pushing for an equitable distribution of government benefits (p. …

From Quarantine to Mainstream: The Literary and Historical Journey of American Mixed-Race Heroines

From Quarantine to Mainstream: The Literary and Historical Journey of American Mixed-Race Heroines THE STRANGE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN QUADROON: Free Women of Color in the Revolution- ary Atlantic World. By Emily Clark. Chapel Hill: Uni- versity of North Carolina Press. 2013.THE ROMANCE OF RACE: Incest, Miscegenation, and Multiculturalism in the United States, 1880-1930. By Jolie A. Sheffer. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Uni- versity Press. 2013.Racial color in the United States and the plight of those who have dared to cross them have long fascinated historians, sociologists, psychologists, novel- ists, and playwrights alike. In the nation's early years, especially from the period of the Haitian Revolution to the American Civil War, the specter of threatened the social and political structures in a nation built upon race-based slavery. As abolitionists cried out against slavery, they were met with a fierce resistance. They were accused of supporting amalgamation, a term that was used as a rallying cry against emancipa- tion. For anti-abolitionists, black freedom would too likely lead to a nation of racial hybrids. Abolitionists responded by pointing out that most of the racial mixing in the nation resulted from the power white men held over enslaved black women on southern plantations, but even many white opponents of slavery admitted to discomfort with the notion of too much intimate contact with African Americans.During the Civil War, those who opposed black freedom coined the term miscegenation and used it to play on existing fears and stir others, in both the North and the South, to resist any new social order based on social equal- ity, claiming that in such conditions blacks and whites would mix freely. This message was loud and clear, and so was the response. The post-Civil War years saw the emergence of Jim Crow segregation and the use of brutal tactics such as lynching to ensure the maintenance of white racial purity. Legal and extra- legal means sought to prevent people from crossing the carefully constructed and rigidly maintained racial divide in the U.S. well into the twentieth century. Whether amalgamation or miscegenation, mixing would not be tolerated in mainstream culture. At the same time, however, Americans remained in many ways fascinated with this taboo subject. What of those who dared to cross the lines, or of those born of such unions?1In recent years, scholars of American Studies have begun to examine in depth the history of, and reaction to, love across racial and ethnic lines in the U.S.2 Two new works in this field, Emily Clark's The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World and Jolie A. Sheffer's The Romance of Race: Incest, Miscegenation, and Mul- ticulturalism in the United States, 1880-1930, collectively illustrate the unique and challenging position of those born of such unions. Focused primarily on history but also incorporating literature, Clark creates a case study to explain the historical origins of New Orleans' reputation as the exotic home of the al- most mythical American quadroon, often portrayed as the mulatto. Clark's work highlights the otherness of the legendary quadroon and the pro- cess that left her colonized in that city to show how the tragic mulatto became a prominent but very much misunderstood figure in the cultural imagination. Sheffer employs history but relies primarily on literary technique to examine works in the literary genre of romance as she brings the topic into a later period and shows how mixed-race writers at the turn of the twentieth cen- tury built on tales such as that of the tragic mulatto to call for a more inclusive multicultural American society. She explains how writers with firsthand famil- iarity of that special space between races appropriated the image for their own ends as they tried to open the door for acceptance and equality. …

Another face of ‘mass tourism’: San Sebastián and Spanish beach resorts under Franco, 1936–1975

ABSTRACT:Histories of the ‘mass tourism’ of sunshine and beaches, and of the ‘package holiday’, in post-war Europe have tended to focus on the activities of big international companies and the role of governments. This has certainly been the case in Spain. This article recovers an earlier version of the urban history of coastal tourism in southern Europe, focusing on the resort of San Sebastián in the Spanish Basque Country, and thereby drawing attention to the neglected Atlantic dimension of Spanish coastal tourism. It then examines the responses of an established resort and summer capital to the new developments of the post-Civil War years, and shows how the decline of an older model of aristocratic tourism was counterbalanced by the development of new holiday markets and practices, many of which arose spontaneously beyond the regulatory and promotional gaze of the local authorities.

Brothers to the Buffalo Soldiers: Perspectives on the African American Militia and Volunteers, 1865–1917 ed. by Bruce A. Glasrud (review)

Reviewed by: Brothers to the Buffalo Soldiers: Perspectives on the African American Militia and Volunteers, 1865–1917 ed. by Bruce A. Glasrud Marc Dluger Brothers to the Buffalo Soldiers: Perspectives on the African American Militia and Volunteers, 1865–1917. Ed. Bruce A. Glasrud. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8262-1904-6, 256 pp., cloth, $39.95. Military service has always been an outlet for Americans to gain respect from their fellow citizens and provide career opportunities. In the decades after the Civil War, African Americans looked to build on the successes they achieved while serving in the Union army. Typically, historians have examined the military, social, and cultural exploits of the Buffalo Soldiers, African American men who served in the regular army and were deployed out West. Bruce A. Glasrud, however, has focused historical attention on those African American citizen-soldiers who participated in state militias or enlisted in the Spanish-American War. In doing so, Glasrud collected what he believes are the most influential articles written in the past fifty years examining these soldiers. From Otis A. Singletary’s “The African American Militia during Radical Reconstruction,” and Eleanor L. Hannah’s “A Place in the Parade: Citizenship, Manhood and African American Men in the Illinois National Guard,” to Willard B. Gatewood Jr.’s “North Carolina’s Negro Regiment and the Spanish-American War,” and Roger D. Cunningham’s “‘A Lot of Fine, Sturdy Black Warriors’: Texas’s African American ‘Immunes’ in the Spanish-American War,” Glasrud has brought together nearly a dozen historical treatments of African American military experiences in the post–Civil War years. As with any edited collection of articles and essays that spans the decades and incorporates differing styles, the occasional disconnect and unevenness occur. This becomes obvious when one compares the various arguments located within each of the two well-defined sections of Glasrud’s collection. The first half of the book explores the extent of African American participation in the state militia movement from Reconstruction to the turn of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, the structure of the book creates a sense of redundancy, as each essay develops similar themes in setting the historical understanding of a particular state’s militia. The rise, sustainability, and eventual collapse of African American militia units in Illinois, Virginia, Alabama, and Texas present similar and parallel paths, with the men experiencing shared difficulties and only occasional successes. What is missing between these individual essays, and what Glasrud dutifully attempts to bridge in his opening narrative, is the relationship between the rise of Jim Crow at the turn of the twentieth century and its impact on the continuation of these African American militia units. The influence of Jim Crow made it impossible for white politicians, even those partial to the African American community, to maintain the militias, especially when African American political power was curtailed. Each article’s conclusion briefly touches upon this theme, but a greater, in-depth analysis is needed on the local, state, and even national levels, especially with the 1903 passage of the Dick Act, the creation of the National Guard, and the federalization of the state militias. In many ways, this nationalization of the state militias transformed Jim Crow from a regional issue into a federal policy with regard to African American citizen-soldiers. A closer examination of Jim Crow [End Page 509] through the militia movement could provide further insight into the lack of respect and heightened racial animosity experienced by African American soldiers who served during the Spanish-American War and help bring the two sections of the book together with a common narrative. Perhaps it was Glasrud’s aim to pose these unwritten historical questions to readers in an attempt to push the historiography further and jumpstart future narratives. The second half focuses on the role of southern African American volunteers serving during the Spanish-American War and the difficulties they experienced during training and deployment. Similar in structure to the initial examination of African American militia units, every essay concentrates on a particular military group or region of volunteer soldiers. The historical arguments each author presents contain similar narratives, as exemplified by the common theme that their...

Out of Africa

Out of Africa Eric Arnesen (bio) Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott. Fly Away: The Great African American Cultural Migrations. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. xviii + 408 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $45.00. In early 2011, a New York Times reporter posed several crucial questions concerning the newest addition to the Smithsonian Institution, currently under construction in Washington D.C. "What story will it tell?" she asked of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. "Will its tale be primarily one of pain, focused on America's history of slavery and racial oppression, and memorializing black suffering? Or will it emphasize the uplifting part of the story, highlighting the richness of African-American culture, celebrating the bravery of civil rights heroes and documenting black 'firsts' in fields like music, art, science and sports?"1 Important questions indeed. But the challenges confronting curators—with their multiple audiences of Capital Hill legislators, donors, scholars, and the broader public—are not usually ones that weigh too heavily on the minds of academics, at least not explicitly. Because academics operate largely out of the limelight (save for brief reviews in specialized journals), few external constituencies weigh in to constrain their scope of operation. And yet, when it comes to race in America, the tension between competing impulses to highlight racial oppression, resistance, or examples of transcendence is often all-too-visible in scholarly analyses. Over the past century, these impulses have defined the literature on black migration in the United States. The first studies, carried out by government officials as the first Great Migration of the World War I era unfolded, were sober and unromantic attempts to make sense of the unprecedented movement of black people from the agricultural South to the industrial North. Focusing on black objections to Southern conditions and on new opportunities created by the reduction in European immigration, these writers showcased the mechanics of migration, the life conditions of migrants in their new homes, and black motivations for moving; they were, after all, trying to explain to white America just why the migration was happening.2 Decades later, in the 1960s and 1970s, migration figured prominently in the "making of a ghetto" genre which, while acknowledging the achievements and institution-building of black [End Page 270] professionals, stressed persistent discrimination in housing and employment, high disease and death rates, social disorganization, and human suffering. At the conclusion of his study of Harlem, Gilbert Osofsky invoked Alain Locke's depressing reminder that the ghetto, by the 1930s, was a "nasty, sordid corner into which black folk are herded."3 From the 1980s onward, the impact of the new social history was evident in migration studies. Migrants—sharecroppers, domestic servants, and industrial workers, among others—came into much clearer focus, their aspirations no longer inaudible, their activities no longer invisible, their politics no longer reduced simply to following black elites' guidance.4 Occasionally a celebratory quality marked the new scholarship: black migrants didn't just get herded into nasty, sordid corners, the ubiquity of discrimination and oppression notwithstanding. Rather, they built effective institutions informed by the rich cultural traditions carried with them from the South and resisted oppression in ways large (politics) or small (infrapolitics).5 Ultimately, they forged lives of their own and established vibrant and sustaining communities. In their geographically sweeping and thematically focused study, Fly Away: The Great African American Cultural Migrations, Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott continue this tradition. There is, by way of backdrop, attention to oppression. The authors certainly make clear the brutalities of slavery and the incomplete freedom of the post-Civil War years. They describe the conditions of life that prompted black migration and resulted in disappointment in their new homes—poverty and the denial of economic mobility for sharecroppers, persistent employment and housing discrimination, lynching, police brutality, and other forms of racial violence. At the same time, they demonstrate that, no matter what white America threw at them, the descendants of slaves continued to strive, drew on a collective heritage, and forged new cultural, religious, and political institutions. They transformed not only the black communities they entered; they changed the nation as well. Unlike many...

Early Black Migration and the Post-emancipation Black Community in Cabell County, West Virginia, 1865–1871

West Virginia's formation divided many groups within the new state. Grievances born of secession inflamed questions of taxation, political repre - sentation, and constitutional change, and greatly complicated black aspira- tions during the state's formative years. It must be remembered that in 1860 the black population in the Virginia counties comprising the current state of West Virginia totaled only 5.9 percent of the general population, with most found in the western Virginia mountain region. 1 Moreover, long-standing attitudes on race and slavery held great sway throughout Appalachia. As historian John C. Inscoe notes, mountaineers were first and foremost southerners and they viewed slavery and race not unlike those of their yeoman or even slaveholding counterparts elsewhere in the South. 2 Thus, the quest by the state's black residents to achieve the full measure of freedom in the immediate post-Civil War years faced formidable challenges. This essay builds upon the voluminous works studying the historic movement of black people in immediate post-emancipation America, and focuses on southern West Virginia where the state's largest contingent of black residents resided among the state's largest contingent of former slave owners and southern sympathizers. 3 To meet the mandates for statehood recognition established by President Lincoln, the state's legislators were forced to rectify a particularly troublesome conundrum: how to grant citi- zenship to the state's black residents as well as to its former Confederates. While both populations eventually garnered the rights of citizenship, the fact that a significant number of southern West Virginia's black residents departed the region suggests that the political gains granted to them were not enough to stem the tide of out-migration during the state's formative years, from 1863 to 1870. In the mid-1860s, Collis P. Huntington's decision to construct the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad from Richmond, Virginia, through the

Describiendo el neurolatirismo. Los clínicos ante la epidemia de latirismo en la España de la posguerra

Lathyrism is a chronic disease involving spastic paralysis of the lower limbs caused by the prolonged consumption of large amounts of flour made from grass pea, or almorta as it is known in Spain. In Spain it became an epidemic in the early post-civil war years, and this gave rise to a series of studies and clinical descriptions of unquestionable medical and historical interest.This paper analyses the clinical reports of patients with lathyrism during the above-mentioned epidemic in order to stress the importance of the symptoms and the neurological examination in identifying new cases and in controlling them. One interesting feature that stands out is how uniform these descriptions are, except in the initial phase of the disease, where certain differences have been reported depending on the epidemic area. Likewise, the (typical and atypical) prodromal symptoms, the classic symptoms of the disease and the so-called residual symptoms are all described.The lathyrism epidemic that occurred in Spain in the years 1941-1943 resulted in a series of clinical descriptions with very detailed accounts of the signs and symptoms written by the Spanish physicians who treated those patients. These reports constitute a valuable historical and clinical contribution on the subject of a disease that has been eradicated in west but is still endemic in other parts of the world.

Open Wound: The Long View of Race in America (review)

Reviewed by: Open Wound: The Long View of Race in America David Roediger Open Wound: The Long View of Race in America. By William McKee Evans. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 2009. William McKee Evans, professor emeritus of history at California State University Polytechnic, here follows his earlier monographs on race and Reconstruction with an impressive synthesis on race in American history. Evans tells an engaging story accessible to undergraduate students even as he distills insights in a way that will edify experts in the field. Though similar in its organization to Michael Goldfield's The Color of Politics and to my How Race Survived U.S. History, Open Wound is a unique and adventuresome study. Evans portrays both enduring patterns of white supremacy and also lingers over three periods—the American Revolution, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the Cold War-inflected civil rights movement—during which significant openings for change occurred. He regards those periods of change as ones during which divisions among elites, and/or pressures from the wider world, made it possible for a durable protest tradition to achieve real changes though not full equality. The approach is basically a materialist one, at times a polemicizing against psychological interpretations which could be read as making racism a timeless human flaw. However, the emphasis on class is folded into Gramscian theories of hegemony. The result is a study able to account for social structure and cultural expressions convincingly. Indeed a crucial section on race and the origins of the Civil War uses the varied roles of blackface minstrelsy to focus its analysis. The early sections of the book are particularly successful in making sense of the turn from a religiously-based slavery to a racially-based plantation society comprehensible but also highly contingent. Evans roots plantation slavery's history in the Mediterranean world, the British political economy, and the interracial rebellions of early Virginia, setting the stage for a book often astonishing in its transnational scope. The section on the Revolution provides an especially fine example of the author's ability to cut to the heart of matters in clear and vivid language. Describing the on-and-off British strategy of encouraging slaves to desert from revolutionary owners, he writes, [End Page 271] that the strategy failed because Britain "never made a clear choice between two mutually exclusive alternatives: promoting a slave revolt or promoting the Loyalist Party, which included important slave owners" (56). Similarly, and with wickedly effective force, he later writes of the 1930s that "Stalin gave Communism an uglier face at a time when Roosevelt was giving capitalism a kindlier one" (203). Not surprisingly, the sections on the Civil War and Reconstruction, Evans' areas of specialization, are especially strong. The sense in which the Democratic Party, and not only the Whigs, collapsed is beautifully captured as is the role of John Brown. The material on the post-Civil War years captures the coexistence of terror and political economy in shaping results and rightly emphasizes that in much of the South struggles persisted far past the 1877 date generally taken as ending Reconstruction. At certain junctures, my own preference would be for more emphasis on the centrality of Black self-activity, and less on exogenous factors shaping what was politically possible. In particular, telling so much of its twentieth century story via the activities of the Communist Party and of anti-Communists seems to lose as much as it yields. But Open Wound on the whole is an excellent study, well-suited to the classroom and beyond. David Roediger University of Illinois Copyright © 2010 Mid-America American Studies Association

Opportunism or Business Strategy: Perspectives on Igbo Commercial Dynamism in Kano in The Post Civil War Years

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the unparalleled rapidity of Igbo success in post-Civil War years in Kano. Several questions arise - Why did Igbo businesses recover in such a short time? What factors were involved? What was the Role of the Igbo Community Association? Was the success of the Igbo the outcome of the new opportunities that arose in Kano after the Civil War? Were the Igbo successful because of their business strategies? These and other questions are answered in this study. (Humanities Review Journal: 2003 3(1): 58-66)