Historical Reputation Research Articles

Light and Liberty: Thomas Jefferson and the Power of Knowledge ed. by Robert M. S. McDonald, and: Thomas Jefferson, Time, and History by Hannah Spahn (review)

Light and Liberty: Thomas Jefferson and the Power of Knowledge. Edited by Robert M. S. McDonald. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Pp. 256. Cloth, $40.00.)Thomas Jefferson, Time, and History. By Hannah Spahn. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Pp. 304. Cloth, $45.00.)Reviewed by Sean P. HarveyThomas Jefferson believed generations should be sovereign, but he intended to shape the instruction of younger Americans so they could preserve the revolutionary inheritance that his own generation had bequeathed. Robert McDonald's essay collection successfully illuminates the projects through which Jefferson optimistically hoped to educate the citizenry. Hannah Spahn's compelling intellectual history elaborates the views of time and history that led a more pessimistic Jefferson to suspect that history writing was unreliable, believe that historical precedent did not apply to the country, and ultimately distrust the succeeding generation. Jefferson's notions of nationhood and difference, and the actions that proceeded from them, are central to reconciling these contrasting interpretations.Light and Liberty exposes the multifaceted shape of Jefferson's educational ambition. Formal institutions were central to this vision. Focusing on the Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge (1778), Johann Neem examines Jefferson's advocacy of an active state (47) that would have created the conditions for meritocratic equality of opportunity by obliging citizens to relinquish the fruits of their labor to support locally governed public schools. That effort failed, but Jefferson successfully garnered public support for two institutions of higher education. He pushed for a U.S. Military Academy, Christine Coalwell McDonald and Robert M. S. McDonald convincingly argue, as a means to advance the exploration and development of the West. The academy would train the engineers necessary to advance American agriculture and extractive industries, and teach French skills useful for communicating with Louisiana inhabitants and participants in the fur trade. Cameron Addis provides a provocative sketch of the early history of the University of Virginia, which Jefferson established in the hopes of creating a secular ethical education. His contextualization of this effort in the growing strength of revivalism on college campuses and in the wider culture is especially useful, though he mistakenly asserts that New York University existed in 1822, whereas the Jeffersonian Albert Gallatin and other New Yorkers did not begin organizing the institution until 1830-1831.Other efforts existed outside academic walls. Frank Shuffle ton describes Jefferson's use of a bibliographic and epistolary network to import useful ideas from Europe and export accurate information about America. Craig A. Reynolds sketches Jefferson's hopes to use architecture to cultivate U.S. citizens' aesthetics. While this essay never explains how some of his preferred architectural models, which dated from imperial Rome, would have inculcated republican principles, Reynolds traces how craftsmen who had worked for Jefferson most likely transmitted Jeffersonian designs for public buildings that influenced several Virginia county courthouses (172, 175, 179). Gaye Wilson provides an insightful reading of Thomas Sully's portrait of the retired president, which West Point commissioned in 1821, as an effort to teach citizens republican simplicity and to shore up his own historical reputation amid a wave of pro-Federalist historiography. Cumulatively, according to Robert McDonald's introduction, these essays reveal Jefferson's vision for a fairer, freer, more democratic America populated by citizens more capable of individual self-government (15). Joyce Appleby's provocatively critical Afterword, however, expresses surprise at the authors' unstinting admiration of Jefferson's ideas and practices, especially in light of his commitment to slavery, and argues for greater attention to the interplay of culture and politics (215). …

Countess Hodierna of Tripoli: From Crusader Politician to ‘Princesse Lointaine’

<span>This case study of Hodierna (c. 1115 to c. 1161), princess of Jerusalem and countess of Jerusalem, highlights how any given woman’s historical reputation is subject to unpredictable forces, often beyond her control and rarely reflective of her actions in life. Hodierna has been ignored or dismissed by most historians of the crusades, except insofar as they define her by her male relatives and her more famous sisters, Melisende of Jerusalem and Alice of Antioch. Hodierna is perhaps best known today as one possible model for the ‘Distant Princess’, with whom the troubadour Jaufré Rudel supposedly fell in love without ever seeing. This article aims to outline earlier historians’ attitudes towards Hodierna and to explain how these have been shaped by the various exigencies of poor source survival, a singularly unfortunate scribal error and the arguably misogynist legend of the ‘Distant Princess’. In doing so, the article hopes to demonstrate how such obstacles – familiar to all historians of medieval women – can be overcome, allowing a reassessment of Hodierna’s agency and contemporary significance. Like her sisters, she was able to use her social status as derived from kinship bonds to transcend the gendered norms and constraints of the Latin East. A devoted mother and sister, but also an active politician in the two ‘crusaders states’ of the kingdom of Jerusalem and the county of Tripoli, she ought not to be neglected as has hitherto been the case. This article thus encourages a closer investigation of other obscure figures of crusading history, especially women.</span>

Genetic investigation of grapevine varieties ‘Ribolla Gialla’ (Italy), ‘Rebula’ (Slovenia) and ‘Robola’ (Ionian Islands)

‘Ribolla Gialla’ is a very old grape variety cultivated today in the Friuli Venezia Giulia region in north-eastern Italy. The historical reputation of this variety in central Eastern Europe was strongly related to the vast distribution of the Venetian Republic markets. In the 1960s, the interest of Italian winegrowers in ‘Ribolla Gialla’ decreased and it was replaced by international varieties. Despite historical documents reporting the longstanding tradition of ‘Ribolla Gialla’ cultivation and winemaking in Friuli Venezia Giulia, the origin of this variety is still questionable. The aims of this work were to study the genetic identity of ‘Ribolla Gialla’ and to investigate the possible genetic relationships with ‘Rebula’ and ‘Robola’ that have been traditionally cultivated in other European Countries (Goriška brda in Slovenia and Kefalonia Island in Greece). For this purpose, 35 SSR loci were analyzed to fingerprint 19 accessions with denominations or morphologies that are similar to ‘Ribolla Gialla’. The Italian ‘Ribolla Gialla’ accessions (#5) and the Slovenian ‘Rebula’ accessions (#2) revealed identical genotypes in all 35 analyzed SSR markers, and can therefore be confirmed as synonyms. The group of Greek ‘Robola’ accessions resulted as the most heterogeneous, showing several distinct allelic profiles. By phylogenetic analysis, two ‘Robola’ accessions were clustered with ‘Ribolla Gialla’ (or ‘Rebula’), and parentage analysis strongly suggested a full-siblings relationship between ‘Ribolla Gialla’ and ‘Robola’.

Legitimacy and Interventionism: Northern Republicans, the “Terrible Carpetbagger,” and the Retreat from Reconstruction

Legitimacy and InterventionismNorthern Republicans, the “Terrible Carpetbagger,” and the Retreat from Reconstruction K. Stephen Prince (bio) After the Civil War, an Ohio native and Union army veteran named Albion Tourgée headed South, intending to do his part in the region’s political and social rebirth. Settling with his family in Greensboro, North Carolina, he bought a home, started a law practice, and involved himself in Republican Party politics. His fondest hope, he told his wife, was to “do good” in his adopted region. Events soon robbed Tourgée of much of his optimism. He watched a tide of white supremacist conservatism overtake North Carolina. The Ku Klux Klan killed two of his political associates and repeatedly threatened his family. The North Carolina Democratic press unmercifully pilloried him as a dangerous outsider, a corrupt interloper, and an incorrigible nuisance. Sitting in his Greensboro home at the close of Reconstruction, Albion Tourgée was left to survey the wreckage, capturing the failed promise and tragic betrayal of the period in a novel whose very title—A Fool’s Errand—spoke volumes as to its tone and its contents.1 Though copious in its criticism of murderous and anti-democratic white southerners, A Fool’s Errand reserved some of its most stinging rebukes for the North. Tourgée had little trouble understanding white southern distrust of the northern strangers that came into their midst after the war—known then, and ever since, as “carpetbaggers.”2 What he failed to comprehend was the maddening ease with which the northern public had sold out its own. “Perhaps there is no other instance in history,” Tourgée fumed, “in which the conquering power has discredited its own agents, denounced those of its own blood and faith, espoused the prejudices of its conquered foes, and poured the vials of its wrath and contempt upon the only class in the conquered territory who defended its acts, supported its policy, promoted its aim, or desired its preservation and continuance.”3 The North, Tourgée insisted, had betrayed the carpetbaggers. [End Page 538] The carpetbagger remains one of the most enduring symbols of the Reconstruction era. Technically, a carpetbagger was simply a northerner who went South in the wake of the Civil War and took part in Republican Party politics.4 For most of its lifespan, however, the term has been an epithet, denoting a lowly, immoral northern opportunist, a demagogue who preyed on the defeated South, perverted sectional peace, and rose to power by deceiving African American voters. As late as 1988, historian Richard N. Current’s classic Those Terrible Carpetbaggers could be labeled “a reinterpretation” precisely because it insisted upon the humanity of these historical villains. Current concluded that the carpetbaggers were, in reality, no better and no worse than most other Americans. The average carpetbagger was an educated, moneyed Union veteran who hoped to make his home in the South and entered politics largely as an afterthought. Some were undoubtedly corrupt, but many others were honest and deeply committed to the ideals of Reconstruction, to African American civil rights, and to the rebuilding of the South.5 If Current successfully debunked the terrible carpetbagger stereotype, the more recent work of historian Ted Tunnell has shed important light on its provenance. “Carpetbagger” was never a value-neutral term, Tunnell argues. From the first, it was an ingenious piece of political propaganda, a highly self-conscious “rhetorical weapon” that white southerners coined to discredit Radical Reconstruction and African American suffrage.6 The carpetbagger’s less-than-sterling historical reputation, Tunnell concludes, had less to do with graft and corruption than it did with the politics of white supremacy. If we accept, with Current and Tunnell, that the carpetbaggers were not actually that terrible, we are still left to account for the phenomenon that Tourgée described—the widespread, nearly universal, northern acceptance of the “terrible carpetbagger” stereotype during the latter years of Reconstruction. A study of the northern Republican repudiation of the carpetbagger promises to shed new light on the manner in which Americans conceptualized and experienced the nation’s retreat from Reconstruction. As it traces the fate of the carpetbagger in the northern Republican print media...

Memorializing its Hero: Liberal Manchesters Statue of Oliver Cromwell

Oliver Cromwells historical reputation underwent significant change during the nineteenth century. Writers such as Thomas Carlyle were prominent in this reassessment, creating a Cromwell that found particular support among Nonconformists in the north of England. Projects to memorialize Cromwell included the raising of public statues. This article traces the history of the Manchester statue, the first major outdoor statue of Cromwell to be unveiled in the country. The project originated among Manchester radical Liberal Nonconformists in the early 1860s but was not realized until 1875. It was the gift of Elizabeth Heywood; the sculptor was Matthew Noble. The project, including its intended site in Manchesters new Town Hall, was contentious, exposing political and religious divisions within the community, reinforcing the view that the reassessment of Cromwells place in the making of modern Britain was far from settled.

The Political Air: Birmingham and the Struggle for Statewide Air Quality Legislation, 1967-1971

The Political Air:Birmingham and the Struggle for Statewide Air Quality Legislation, 1967-1971 Jonathan Foster (bio) By the late 1960s, Birmingham's historical reputation as an industrial center was perhaps overshadowed only by its more recent and heavily publicized role as a center of protest and violence during the civil rights demonstrations of 1963. Although the "Magic City" had given way to the "Tragic City" in many circles, the public identification of the city as a center of steel and iron production remained strong. Alongside this industrial identity, Birmingham had also built a reputation for poor air quality. A 1968 letter from Oregon teen Don George to city air pollution control engineer Charles B. Robinson is evidence of how this perception extended well beyond the state's borders. Having recently developed an interest in air quality and environmental activism, George revealed his anxiety over local air quality control and felt certain that the city continued to suffer from "a bad air pollution problem."1 While the young environmentalist's assumption was correct, he was likely unaware of his letter's timely arrival. As George put pen to paper, local environmental activists, who included members of the city's public health and medical community, were locked in a heated conflict with industrialists and an industry-friendly state government over the issue of air quality regulation. Embedded within this political battle over clean air and the state's environmental quality of life was the influence of Alabama's historical deep-rooted resistance to federal intervention. [End Page 40] The battle for air quality legislation that young George's letter had become part of was not the first time Birmingham reformers had sought to limit local airborne pollutants. A similar struggle had occurred in the city some fifty-four years earlier. Then, as in 1967, proponents of clean air ran up against backers of the local industrial economy. During this early episode the outcome was never in doubt. In 1913, booming industrial Birmingham briefly emerged as a state leader in air pollution regulation thanks to the efforts of a few progressive-minded local officials. That year city commissioner James Weatherly introduced an ordinance aimed at abating high levels of coal smoke. At that time the city often suffered under a choking blanket of emissions from the centrally located Sloss-Sheffield plant's blast furnaces. While many locals often associated smoke with progress and industrial growth, atmospheric pollution could also be economically damaging. One 1907 estimate listed smoke as being responsible for $3 million in annual damages to local merchants' inventory. With this in mind, during routine deliberations the three-member Birmingham Board of Commissioners adopted Weatherly's ordinance without regard to the reaction of local industry. They soon realized this was a major oversight, as the ordinance inflamed local industrialists. At issue was the ordinance's restriction on the firing of iron and steel furnaces to only three minutes per hour within the city limits. Industrialists also resisted the ordinance's creation of a smoke inspection agency ordained with the power to arrest violators.2 Industrialists' fears proved warranted as the pollution inspectors quickly exercised their authority. Mere days after the ordinance's passage the inspectors arrested the vice-president of Sloss-Sheffield Furnaces after his company blatantly ignored the smoke ordinance. Industrial reaction proved swift and overwhelming. With the support of local newspapers, city industrialists embarked on a press campaign aimed at repealing the law. Birmingham residents found themselves constantly bombarded with a stream of newspaper headlines equating [End Page 41] smoke with progress and payrolls. Articles abounded detailing the plans of local industry to flee the city in light of oppressive air regulation. Newspapers made it evident that when they left the companies would take jobs and the future growth of the city with them. Additional articles quoted various "experts" on the impracticality of outlawing smoke and promoted the idea that local dust, not coal smoke, represented the truly damaging pollutant.3 Faced with this onslaught and public outcry, the commission quickly amended the smoke abatement ordinance. Weatherly conceded that this initial attempt had been too strict and introduced an amendment that increased the hourly time limit on coal burning...

It Happened Here: Turfing over Irish and English History

ABSTRACTTaking as an exemplar a work by artist duo, Cornford & Cross, commissioned by Meadow Arts for the newly refurbished Commandery Museum in Worcester, the article examines questions raised by such ‘intervention’ works in the context of site responsive history, national consciousness and Anglo Irish History. It explores questions of historical reputation, cultural memory, cultural trauma and historiography. It makes a case to distinguish such critical interventions by artists from the tropes and mechanisms used in heritage display and museology. It proposes shifting the often- perceived gulf between art-practice and the writing of academic history in favour of a more complex notion of ‘historiographical practice.’

Safety of spinal angiography

Spinal digital subtraction angiography (SpDSA) continues to be the imaging gold standard for the evaluation of spinal cord vascular disorders. The safety of this procedure has a poor historical reputation and there are few current reports on complication rates. We hypothesized that modern SpDSA can be performed with an acceptably low risk of iatrogenic complications. In this retrospective series, we reviewed 302 consecutive spinal angiograms performed during a 10-year period at our institution for the frequency of intraprocedural and postprocedural neurologic, non-neurologic, and local complications. Indications for SpDSA, prior noninvasive imaging findings, and angiographic diagnoses for each case were assessed to evaluate the diagnostic contribution of the procedure. There were no intraprocedural or postprocedural neurologic complications in the studied cohort. Systemic complications occurred in 2 cases (0.7%), in the form of back spasms in one patient and pulmonary edema in the other. Both recovered promptly and were discharged at baseline status. Access-site complications included 3 groin hematomas (1.0%), all managed conservatively. MRI findings showed 51% sensitivity and 83% specificity for spinal vascular malformations. A total of 31% of patients with the preangiographic diagnosis of transverse myelitis were found to have a vascular malformation. SpDSA carries very low risks of neurologic and systemic complications, while offering a gold-standard level of diagnostic confidence for the evaluation of the normal and pathologic vasculature of the spinal cord.

The Real Herbert Hoover

����� ��� hen the economy sank into the Great Recession in 2008, memories of the Great Depression were resurrected and the name “Herbert Hoover” was dusted off for a new round of scolding. He was repeatedly reprimanded as a champion of laissez faire, a term and philosophy he had specifically rejected as early as 1922 in his philosophical treatise American Individualism. 1 Virtually every Democratic presidential candidate since Franklin D. Roosevelt has equated Hoover with hard times. When people think “Depression” they think “Hoover.” They might as well be listed as synonyms in Roget’s Thesarus. Meanwhile, Amity Schlaes, author of The Forgotten Man, has impaled Hoover from the libertarian end of the spectrum. According to Schlaes, Hoover was a co-conspirator with Franklin D. Roosevelt. The duo prolonged the Great Depression by meddling with the economy. 2 George H. Nash has described Hoover as a political orphan, “too progressive for the conservatives and too conservative for the liberals.” 3 During his tenure in the White House, Hoover’s once enviable reputation plummeted so precipitously that Will Rogers quipped that a man bit into an apple, found a worm, and exclaimed, “Damn Hoover.” 4 Presidential polls of historians as late as 2008 rank him among the worst presidents, and the stereotype cemented in the mind of the general public resembles a cross between Ebeneezer Scrooge and the Grinch who stole Christmas. 5 His historical reputation is ensnarled in exag

Essay Review: Piero's Flagellation of Christ Elucidated?

PIERO'S FLAGELLATION OF CHRIST ELUCIDATED? Astrolabes and Angels, Epigrams and Enigmas: From Regiomontanus' Acrostic for Cardinal Bessarion to Piero della Francesca' s of Christ. David King (Boethius: Texte und Abhandlungen zur Geschichte der Mathematik und der Naturwissenschaften, Ivi; Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart, 2007). Pp. xii + 348 + CD-ROM. euro78. ISBN 978-3-515-09061-2.Readers of this journal will recognize with respect name of David King, who has earned an international reputation in history of Islamic astronomy. King is arguably leading historian of astrolabe, for he probably has seen, catalogued, and studied more astrolabes than anyone else, and not only those of Islamic civilization. In main part of this book King returns to an instrument about which he and Gerard Turner published a fundamental article. It is famous astrolabe that Johannes Regiomontanus (1436-76) in 1462 gave to his patron, Greek emigre Cardinal Bessarion (1408-72), a leading intellectual and astronomical enthusiast.1 King's primary focus now is Regiomontanus's four-line dedication to Bessarion, which he believes to be an acrostic that not only identifies figures in of Christ by Piero della Francesca (d. 1492), but also explains structure of this famous, mysterious and controversial painting.King's title aptly warns us not to expect standard fare; indeed, book is unusual from beginning to end. Substituting for author's name on title page is phrase An essay by David A. King inspired by two remarkable discoveries by Berthold Holzschuh. Curious already. As a member of King's 2005 Frankfurt seminar, Holzschuh first proposed key ideas that King takes up. We soon learn that he disagrees with many of King's extensions of his own hypotheses in present book.2 In Notes to Reader, King acknowledges layout problems and missing footnotes that resulted from his rushing book into print. Next, he summarizes book, significance of which he links with extravagant claim (repeated) that his is the first hypothesis [about Piero 's Flagellation of Christ] to be based on a contemporaneous document (p. viii). By this, he means four-line dedication on Regiomontanus's astrolabe. The table of contents includes one prelude and one conclusion, two tributes to Holzschuh, and three interludes interspersed among four parts. Nine appendices (almost half book) discuss various aspects of history of astrolabe, including valuable - and controversial - material on sole surviving astrolabe with a Greek inscription (1062) and on several dozen fifteenthcentury astrolabes that King convincingly links to a Viennese workshop. After useful bibliographical and biographical material, King's acknowledgments broach candidly scepticism with which his critics, many of them sympathetic, from members of his 2005 seminar outward, have greeted his claims. Finally, after index, a CD-ROM inside back cover contains King's claims in form of a 238-slide show (the illustrations, both here and in book, are generally excellent).What is King arguing? This question is not always easy to answer. He took in such an impressive amount of history and art history in a short time that book is not fully digested. On expository grounds alone, it was published prematurely. Its pages offer a profusion of details and correlations - geometrical, numerical, alphabetical, symbolic, and biographical - that lead to sometimes competing claims. The reader is left to figure out when a specific point counts as a thesis, a suggestion, a probability, a coincidence, or a passing thought, and whether a new claim replaces, or should be added to, previous ones. Since King's Summary (pp. vii-viii) and Prelude (pp. 1-12) contain some concise declarative statements of core ideas, I will treat them as canonical, even though they are sometimes inconsistent with later ones:I maintain first that epigram on [1462] astrolabe provided ideas for composition and basic geometrical structure for painting, and second that each of eight images across painting represents at least two persons whose identities are deliberately partially concealed (p. …

Why there is (almost) no Christian Democracy in post-communist Europe

Compared to its West European counterparts, post-communist Christian Democracy is notable for its lack of success. Even in the most religious of post-communist democracies, no Christian Democratic (CD) party has claimed a plurality of the electorate. At the same time, there is a considerable range in average electoral support from 1990 to 2010, i.e. from 0.7 percent in Estonia to as high as 18.4 percent in Slovakia. The most successful CD parties have arisen in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Lithuania, and (with qualifications) in Macedonia. The reasons for this success lie not in popular religiosity, state–church conflict or alliances between CD parties and churches. Instead, where parties can point to a history of nation and state-building in the inter-war period, they receive an initial electoral boost from this historical legacy. Yet even these favourable historical reputations have transitory effects: by the second or third elections, the impact of inter-war support rapidly faded.

Irish public histories as an historiographical problem

It is now almost impossible to reflect upon the historical reputations of Eamon de Valera and Michael Collins without considering the recent war in Northern Ireland (c. 1969–97) and the challenges to Irish identities it has induced. In the Republic this is evident in the movement away from irredentist nationalism toward official recognition of partition, following a constitutional referendum in 1998. Against a similarly barometric historiography, de Valera and Collins's historical representations have transformed. De Valera, it is clear, long since fell from favour among mainstream nationalists.

Policing Indigenous Peoples on Two Colonial Frontiers: Australia's Mounted Police and Canada's North-West Mounted Police

This article examines the ways in which colonial policing and punishment of Indigenous peoples evolved as an inherent part of the colonial state-building process on the connected 19th century frontiers of south-central Australia and western Canada. Although there has been some excellent historical scholarship on the relationship between Indigenous people, police and the law in colonial settings, there has been little comparative analysis of the broader, cross-national patterns by which Indigenous peoples were made subject to British law, most especially through colonial policing practices. This article compares the roles, as well as the historical reputations, of Australia's mounted police and Canada's North-West Mounted Police (NWMP) in order to argue that these British colonies, being within the ambit of the law as British subjects did not accord Indigenous peoples the rights of protection that status was intended to impart.

Celebrating diversity in early care and education settings: moving beyond the margins

As the USA continues to live up to its historical reputation as a nation of immigrants, early childhood professionals are increasingly faced with the challenge of supporting children and families from diverse cultural milieu. However, to truly celebrate diversity in early childhood settings, early childhood teachers and caregivers must engage in a careful examination of their own cultural biases and assumptions, and be willing to consider differences not as deficient but as potential sources of strength. In short, providing care and education in which all children can thrive requires moving diversity out of the margins of the curriculum, and infusing principles of diversity, equity and social justice into our teaching and our interactions with children and families.

The Not-So-Grand Review: Abraham Lincoln in the Journal of American History

Perhaps it is accidental that the premier journal of American history has had so little to say about the premier figure in American history, Abraham Lincoln. Or perhaps it was Lincoln's misfortune that the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (mvha, the forerunner of the Organization of American Historians, or oah) was not formed until 1907 and that the Mississippi Valley Historical Review (MVHR, the forerunner of the Journal of American History, or JAH) did not begin quarterly publication until 1914, when the sun of Lincoln's historical reputation had already reached its apogee and had nowhere to go but downward. For five decades after his assassination, Lincoln's position as the second greatest American (after George Washington) had arched upward, until by 1909, the centennial of his birth, Lincoln had eclipsed even Washington as the central icon of American democracy. In just one decade, 1910–1919, seventeen new Lincoln statues were dedicated, one more than all the Lincoln statues installed in the half century after the attack in Ford's Theatre. And in that heyday of Progressivism, the most important Lincoln biography, Ida M. Tarbell's The Life of Abraham Lincoln (1900), was not only the product of one of Progressive journalism's most famous voices, but unveiled a Lincoln whom Progressives could embrace as their own. Which they did: “The Progressive platform of to-day is but an amplication … of Lincoln's,” announced Theodore Roosevelt.1

The Curse of Cromwell: Warrington's Statue of Oliver Cromwell

The revision of the historical reputation of Oliver Cromwell in the Victorian period associated with writers such as Thomas Carlyle was expressed in many forms, in histories and biographies, novels, public lectures, magazine articles, and also in the erection of outdoor public statues. Two Cromwell statues were erected in the North of England, Manchester in 1875 and Warrington in 1899. This article traces the history and responses to the installation of the statue of Cromwell, sculpted by John Bell, in Warrington. The gift of a prominent local Liberal businessman, the statue exposed divisions within the community, reinforcing the view that the reassessment of Cromwell's status and place in the making of modern Britain was far from settled. Opposition to the scheme was especially evident within the town's substantial Irish community.

The cultural politics of Dido and Aeneas

AbstractControversial efforts to find political allegory in Dido and Aeneas (c.1689), the great chamber opera by Nahum Tate and Henry Purcell, have obscured the opera's broader concern with the politics of culture. As rival political factions claimed ownership of the nation's cultural heritage, Tate and other dramatists in Restoration England asked searching questions about the relationship between the artist and political authority. Grappling with Virgil's Aeneid, a central text of Stuart absolutism, Dido and Aeneas explores the workings and the costs of partisan myth-making. The opera joins many other Restoration voices in taking up an ancient ‘chaste Dido’ tradition, which accused Virgil of mangling Dido's historical reputation in the service of imperial propaganda. Yet Dido does not set forth a topical allegory or a coherent critique of Stuart misrule, but takes an unstable, irresolute attitude towards the cultural legacy of Virgil, the aesthetics of female suffering, and the politics of royal praise.

Tom Wharton and the Whig Junto: Party Leadership in Late Stuart England*

This previously unpublished lecture by Geoffrey Holmes looks at the parliamentary career of Thomas, 6th Baron Wharton, 1st earl and 1st marquess of Wharton, a leading member of the whig junto in the reigns of William III and Queen Anne. It examines his ‘unsavoury’ character and how his reputation as a libertine and swordsman may have helped his role as a party leader. It also examines his historical reputation, partly through the works of Jonathan Swift, Richard Steele and Lord Macauly and attempts to restore his position as a much‐maligned major figure in Augustan parliamentary and electoral politics.

Genome-scale reconstruction of the metabolic network in Yersinia pestis, strain 91001

The gram-negative bacterium Yersinia pestis, the aetiological agent of bubonic plague, is one of the deadliest pathogens known to man. Despite its historical reputation, plague is a modern disease which annually afflicts thousands of people. Public safety considerations greatly limit clinical experimentation on this organism and thus development of theoretical tools to analyze the capabilities of this pathogen is of utmost importance. Here, we report the first genome-scale metabolic model of Yersinia pestis biovar Mediaevalis based both on its recently annotated genome, and physiological and biochemical data from the literature. Our model demonstrates excellent agreement with Y. pestis' known metabolic needs and capabilities. Since Y. pestis is a meiotrophic organism, we have developed CryptFind, a systematic approach to identify all candidate cryptic genes responsible for known and theoretical meiotrophic phenomena. In addition to uncovering every known cryptic gene for Y. pestis, our analysis of the rhamnose fermentation pathway suggests that betB is the responsible cryptic gene. Despite all of our medical advances, we still do not have a vaccine for bubonic plague. Recent discoveries of antibiotic resistant strains of Yersinia pestis coupled with the threat of plague being used as a bioterrorism weapon compel us to develop new tools for studying the physiology of this deadly pathogen. Using our theoretical model, we can study the cell's phenotypic behavior under different circumstances and identify metabolic weaknesses that may be harnessed for the development of therapeutics. Additionally, the automatic identification of cryptic genes expands the usage of genomic data for pharmaceutical purposes.

Liberty Tree: Ordinary People and the American Revolution , and: Revolution in America: Considerations and Comparisons , and: Stories of Independence: Identity, Ideology, and History in Eighteenth-Century America (review)

Liberty Tree: Ordinary People and the American Revolution. By Alfred F. Young. (New York: New York University Press, 2006. Pp. 417. Cloth, $75.00; Paper, $22.00.)Revolution in America: Considerations and Comparisons. By Don Higginbotham. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Pp. 230. Cloth: $49.50; Paper, $19.50.)Stories of Independence: Identity, Ideology, and History in Eighteenth-Century America. By Peter C. Messer. (DeKaIb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005. Pp. 258. Cloth, $39.00.)Reviewed by James S. KabalaTwo of these books are collections of articles written by two of the most distinguished historians of the Revolutionary period, published over the course of several decades, and now collected for the first time. The third is a single volume and the first book of a younger historian. Two common themes, however, link all three books. First, the three deal with the complicated issues surrounding historical memory. Second, to different degrees, the books raise questions about the role of ordinary people in the revolutionary era. This focus is greatest in Alfred Young's book, while the other two seem at first to focus on the elite.Young's essays look at the issue of historical memory from two points of view. First, he takes the perspective of the present day, writing out- standing essays on ways to improve Boston's Freedom Trail and on the memory (or lack thereof) of the liberty trees and liberty poles that were focal points for popular resistance in Boston and several other Revolutionary cities and towns. Second, he looks at some of the ways that Revolutionary-era Americans themselves evaluated the past, devoting a large section of one essay to the image of Oliver Cromwell among the Revolutionary generation and another to the question of how and why Thomas Paine's popularity decreased dramatically within his own lifetime. He also looks at the historical origins of many of the forms of popular protest engaged in by the ordinary people of the Revolutionary era, although in some cases, such as tarring and feathering and the liberty tree itself, Young shows that the methods of popular protest were as much novel as time-tested. Don Higginbotham devotes less space to the subject of memory, but in some essays he examines issues of historical reputation, including how historians' accounts have affected the posthumous reputations of three women in Washington's life (his mother Mary, his friend Sally Fairfax, and his wife Martha). In perhaps his most interesting essay, Higginbotham questions the common belief that the antebellum South had an especially strong martial tradition, provocatively arguing that in fact the militia of many southern states was in shambles and there was an equally strong, perhaps even stronger, martial tradition in the New England states.Peter Messer confronts the subject of historical memory most directly and pervasively, since the very subject of his book is how historians of the Revolutionary era shaped their attitudes toward the past. He postulates that the historians of the colonial era can be divided into two groups, which he calls the provincial and imperial schools. The former gave credit for the prosperity of the American colonies to those who had actually settled the colonies, while the latter deprecated the colonists, often criticizing their mistreatment of the Indians and sometimes even their owning of slaves, while giving credit to the British imperial framework for imposing order on the colonists and saving them from the mess they would have created had they been left to their own devices. The later portion of the book traces the fate of these provincial ideas during and after the Revolution in the hands of writers and historians such as Thomas Paine, Jeremy Belknap, David Ramsay, Hannah Adams, and Mercy Otis Warren.Messer himself makes a notable contribution to present-day historical debate through his analysis of the intellectual roots of these two schools of historians, which naturally leads him to the question of who were the primary intellectual influences on the founding generation. …