Revisionist Literature Research Articles

Letting the Lark Ascend: Vaughan Williams's ‘Most Popular Work’ and the Limits of Revisionism

Ralph Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending is a perennial favourite in the British classical music radio station Classic FM's ‘Hall of Fame’ poll. In spite of its apparent popularity, however, the work sits uncomfortably with the way revisionist critics and scholars have wanted to portray the composer. As an escapist piece of English musical pastoralism, The Lark undermines their preferred view of Vaughan Williams as a progressive or even ‘modernist’ participant in his artistic milieu. To combat this image, some critics and musicologists have argued for complex, harder-edged interpretations of the work that have little to no basis in the music's primary source materials or the composer's stated priorities in his own writings. Such emphases reflect a problem in recent revisionist literature, wherein traditionalist, nationalist, or Romantic aspects of Vaughan Williams's music are excessively downplayed (or re-situated) in favour of arguments that better support elite sensibilities. As a work consisting of accessible, melody-centric music, and following from a poem excerpt suggesting an idyllic scene, The Lark serves as a bulwark against revisionist overreach and a check against over-emphasis on trendy priorities.

Examining Caste Consciousness in Kavita Kane’s Karna’s Wife and Fisher Queen’s Dynasty

Use of mythological tales for creating revisionist literature is contemporary approach of the modern Indian writers. Some famous works of literature, based on mythology are written by writers like Devdutt Pattanaik, Amish Tripathi, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Volga, Kevin Missal, SarathKomarraju and Krishna Udayashankar. These writers try to reinterpret mythological characters like Shiva, Rama, Draupadi, Amba, Krishna etc. Kavita Kane is one of the popular woman writers of India who renders Indian mythological texts and writes novels. Her ficitons are known for portrayals of the mythical characters who are less discussed. She picks up marginalized women characters from the mythical literature of India and retells their stories. She raises isssues of identity, individuality, gender, caste, femininity and patriarchy in her fictional works. In her novels, Karna’s Wife and Fisher Queen’s Dynasty, Kane has woven issues of gender and caste. Both of them are based on the Mahabharata. She retells the stories of Uruvi, Karna’s wife and Satyavati, Shantanu’s wife from their perspectives and explore their struggles against discriminations based on gender and caste. The novelist depicts these women characters with their courage, confidence, individuality and power to resist the class or caste-based violence. As modern literary works, their intersectionality is evident and they can be examined keeping in mind multidisciplinary approach. The present article examines caste consciousness as expressed by Kane in her Karna’s Wife and Fisher Queen’s Dynasty.

Réévaluer la participation des femmes aux activités entrepreneuriales au dix-neuvième siècle : une revue de la littérature

Nineteenth-century businesswomen were almost entirely neglected, the historiography having adopted the hypothesis of the withdrawal of women from the business sphere after the eighteenth century. A growing body of literature is challenging this view, claiming that women did in fact actively contribute to the industrialization process and occupied key positions as investors and entrepreneurs, and revealing the constant and non-negligible presence of women at the head of businesses. This article reviews recent literature on women entrepreneurship in the nineteenth century. On the one hand, we analyze the reasons invoked by recent studies in order to explain why female entrepreneurship has so long remained ignored. The separate spheres ideology, the rise of industrialization, legal systems, the narrow definition of entrepreneurship and the issue of the sources might have contributed to maintain the idea that women would have withdrawn from business. On the other hand, we review the methods used in the recent revisionist literature in order to identify women entrepreneurs in the historical records and to assess the importance of their participation in entrepreneurial activities. Whereas some sources (tax rolls, censuses, directories, articles of association, etc.) help drawing general conclusions about female entrepreneurship supporting quantitative research, others (private family papers and objects, newspapers and advertisements, public and legal records) are particularly helpful for qualitative investigations permitting to draw in-depth portraits of these women.

Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and the Reconceptualization of Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

Abstract One of the most powerful themes in the contemporary revisionist literature on the Scottish Enlightenment is the desire to understand the disciplinary context within which political economy began to develop. Central to this is the observation that Adam Smith was a professor of moral philosophy and conceived of his writing as a branch of that discipline. This article suggests that we can better come to understand some important elements of Smith's thinking if we appreciate and read The Theory of Moral Sentiments in the context of a philosophical debate between Smith and his contemporary Adam Ferguson, a debate that is driven by the pedagogical dimensions of moral philosophy in the eighteenth-century Scottish universities.

After the Deportation: Memory Battles in Postwar France by Philip Nord

The historical literature about the memory of the Occupation in France is immense. Since Rousso’s pioneering study, the accepted narrative was that for twenty-five years after 1945, the French lived a consoling Gaullist myth that France had been a nation of resisters.1 This myth not only underplayed the role of collaboration, but its focus on the heroes of the resistance marginalized the experiences of the Holocaust victims: Jews who tried to tell their story were ignored. This heroic narrative, so the argument goes, shattered at the end of the 1960s in the wake of the upheavals of May 1968 and the Six Day War. Increasingly the Holocaust, and Vichy’s role in it, has come to dominate French collective memory.This interpretation has been much contested in recent years, especially, as Azouvi has dubbed it, the “myth of silence” regarding the Holocaust.2 Nord’s new book is a distinguished contribution to this revisionist literature. As he says at the outset, “This will not be a history of the silence-to-voice narrative” (7). He shows that the shadow of deportation, and of the concentration camps, was pervasive in France after 1945. But he distinguishes that deportation memory from the memory of the Holocaust; it focused primarily on resistance deportees who “emblematized the wartime tribulation of the nation as a whole” (230). This does not mean that no Jewish voices were heard: “There was a distinctive Jewish voice in the post-war remembrance of the Deportation” (162). This voice, however, had to find its place in the wider deportation narrative. To the extent that there was ever a “Gaullist myth,” Nord sees it as most prevalent not immediately after the war but in the 1960s during Charles de Gaulle’s presidency. The result was that the post-1968 generation believed that it was discovering for the first time a story that had already been told in different ways during the two decades after the Liberation.The importance of Nord’s subtle book is less his re-writing of a narrative that has already been challenged than his careful attention to the complexity of the debates around the memory of deportation. Three themes stand out. First, he shows that the memory of deportation was never homogeneous. He carefully distinguishes between, for example, the Communist reading of deportation from that of the camp survivor David Rousset, who invented the term “concentrationary universe” in his L’Univers concentrationnaire (Paris, 1946). Nord’s second originality is to pay careful attention to the dialogues between Catholic and Jewish intellectuals in the decades after the war. His analysis of the anguished debates between Catholics like Jacques Maritain, François Mauriac, and Michel Riquet and Jewish writers like Elie Wiesel and Jules Isaac is one of the most illuminating features of this book. Although Maritain’s attempt to incorporate the Holocaust into a Christian salvific framework—a sacrifice that was also part of humanity’s struggle to redemption—was unacceptable to Jewish spokesmen, it did at least help to open a debate about the meaning of the Holocaust.Thirdly, Nord examines the debates about how to represent the deportation experience in literature, film, and painting, and how to memorialize it in monuments. Nord offers subtle analyses of the gestation, conception, and symbolic meanings of several key monuments, such as the Struthof Monument in Alsace and the Deportation Memorial on the Ile de la Cité in Paris. In regard to the Mémorial du Marty Juif inconnu (now the Mémorial de la Shoah), he shows that even though the monument had universalizing aspirations—part of French Jews’ desire to show that they belonged to the national community—this perspective must not blind us to the “affirmative Jewishness of the tomb” (185).This rich, nuanced, and often moving book uses a wide range of sources and methods—literary criticism, art history, and an analysis of philosophical debates—to make a major contribution to our understanding of how the French have remembered one of the most painful periods in their history.

Linnaeus, the essentialism story, and the question of types

AbstractAccording to an influential twentieth‐century narrative, Linnaeus's taxonomic endeavors rested on a suspect metaphysical basis of “typological thinking” or “essentialism”. Since the beginning of this century, historians and philosophers have shown that this narrative is deeply problematic and fails to be supported by the close study of Linnaeus's actual taxonomic principles and practices. Magnus Lidén has recently argued in Taxon that this revisionist literature on Linnaeus nevertheless preserves a residue of unwarranted attributions of typological thinking aimed at Linnaeus. I argue that this is incorrect and contend that Lidén misinterprets the recent literature on the history of “type concepts” in taxonomy, which has nothing to do with typological thinking. With this article, I hope to show that the historiography of taxonomy is helped, not hindered, by enquiring into Linnaeus's use of certain type concepts and his unfamiliarity with others.

Class Legislation, Fundamental Rights, and the Origins of Lochner and Liberty of Contract

While legal scholars and historians have criticized many judicial doctrines from the pre-New Deal period, critics have been especially scathing in their attacks on the “liberty of contract” doctrine enforced most famously in Lochner v. New York. Until recently, academics routinely asserted that the Lochner Court’s Justices simply made up the doctrine based on a combination of belief in laissez-faire economics and hostility to workers’ rights. Contemporary scholars, by contrast, have reconstructed the period’s due-process jurisprudence, finding in it a principled commitment to a conception of justice with philosophical and jurisprudential roots dating back to the Founding and beyond. There are two primary lines of this revisionist literature. One emphasizes traditional Anglo-American hostility to “class legislation” — legislation that arbitrarily favors or disfavors particular factions. The other emphasizes the influence of the natural rights tradition, tempered by precedent and historicism, on the Court’s due-process decisions. Part I of this Article reviews the debate that emerged in the 1990s and early 2000s between partisans of these interpretations. Part II of this Article discusses subsequent developments in the class legislation vs. fundamental rights debate through the present time, noting an increasing convergence between the two sides; both sides acknowledge that both class legislaton and fundamental rights played significant roles in the development of the Supreme Court’s due process jurisprudence, with the remaining debate primarily over which doctrine deserves more emphasis in histortical recountings. This Article concludes by noting that as this debate has progressed, certain areas of historical consensus have emerged. First, both sides agree that the Court did not attempt to enforce anything approaching a night watchman-type laissez-faire policy on government. Second, both sides agree that the Supreme Court’s fundamental-rights jurisprudence, often traced to the 1930s, in fact began to emerge in the pre–New Deal period. Finally, they agree that the Supreme Court Justices who adopted and applied the liberty of contract doctrine did not have the cartoonish reactionary motives attributed to them by Progressive and New Deal critics. Rather, the Justices, faced with constitutional challenges to novel assertions of government power, sincerely tried to protect liberty as they understood it, consistent with longstanding constitutional doctrines that reflected the notion that governmental authority had limits enforceable via the Due Process Clause.

History of Science During the Cold War Under the Microscope

The general post-communist perspective of historiography on the Cold War era is that the world was divided into two blocs, so different and isolated from one another that there was no interaction between them whatsoever. As revisionist literature is expanding, the uncovered data indicates a far more complex reality, with a dynamic East-West exchange of goods, money, information, human resources, and technology, be it formal or informal, official or underground, institutional or personal. The current volume History of Communism in Europe: Breaking the Wall: National and Transnational Perspectives on East-European Science tries to confer more detail to this perspec­tive, by bringing together research papers that focus on the history of science during the Cold War. The articles cover a wide range of subjects, from biology to philosophy and from espionage to medical practices, all sharing an ideological context that continuously impacted and molded the professional relations among scholars from both sides of the Iron Curtain.

An Exceptional Law: Section 98 and the Emergency State, 1919–1936 by Dennis G. Molinaro

Reviewed by: An Exceptional Law: Section 98 and the Emergency State, 1919–1936 by Dennis G. Molinaro Tom Mitchell Dennis G. Molinaro, An Exceptional Law: Section 98 and the Emergency State, 1919–1936 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2017) Writing of a history of Section 98 of Canada's Criminal Code – a statute that made it a criminal offence to be a member of any organization prepared to use force or violence to bring about governmental change – invites a number of narrative possibilities. Dennis Molinaro has rooted his account of Section 98 in the story of the liberal state's penchant to betray liberty – for Molinaro, its fundamental raison d'être. His book is also an intervention in the current debate about emergency legislation in Canada. Molinaro argues that, beginning with Section 98, emergency legislation up to and including the Anti-terrorism Act of 2015, has been deployed in peacetime to legitimize, sanction, and normalize deliberately targeted repression as an instrument of state formation. Such emergency legislation, he argues, is inconsistent with a liberal state based on "Locke's inalienable rights, which include the right to freedom." (11) Section 98 (Revised Code 1928), approved in July 1919, began life as Section 97a and b of Canada's criminal law. This addition to the Criminal Code [End Page 277] was modeled after PC 2384 approved in 1918 under the War Measures Act. Conceptually, Molinaro observes, Section 98 was designed to "normalize" emergency powers forged by the executive branch in a time of crisis. Notwithstanding repeated Liberal government attempts to repeal Section 98, Molinaro sees more evidence of the normalization of emergency powers when, in 1927, Mackenzie King amended the War Measures Act to expand its potential use and to rename it "An Act to Confer Certain Powers upon the Governor General in Council in the Event of War, Invasion, or Insurrection." By the early 1920s, the Communist Party of Canada (cpc) had replaced British-born labour militants of 1919 as the most likely focus of Section 98 prosecutions. A detailed account of the history and evolution of the Canadian Communist Party, justified in part as a contribution to the "revisionist literature of the cpc," (58) serves as a backdrop to Molinaro's account of Section 98 repression. No surprise then that the first use of the law came against a Communist party organizer in 1929: the charges were thrown out by a judge who ruled that pamphlets submitted as evidence by the Crown were not "revolutionary." (77) Aside from the successful prosecution of the leadership of the Communist Party in 1931, and labour organizer "Slim" Evans in British Columbia in 1933 (Evans got one year for advocating the use of force), most prosecutions under Section 98 went nowhere. Still, evidence suggests that the threat of such a prosecution proved a powerful weapon of reaction. The jurisdictional complexity associated with the use of Section 98 is implicated throughout Molinaro's narrative. Provincial premiers lobbied Ottawa to deport Communists, and Ottawa wanted the names of Communists convicted under Section 98 prosecutions for deportation proceedings. An Exceptional Law contains no account of the actual mechanics of criminal prosecutions under Section 98 to illustrate how federalism complicated the actual operation of this and other emergency laws. Molinaro's conflation of federal and provincial jurisdictions as simply "the state" implies quite incorrectly that the federal nature of the Canadian constitution was of little relevance to the operation of repression. The most important Section 98 prosecution had a complicated provenance. R.B. Bennett, in the 1930s the most interested party in the deployment of Section 98, wanted prosecutions, but had no constitutional authority to initiate them. He put pressure on provincial attorneys-general. The 1931 prosecution of the Communist Party leadership in Ontario came about at Ottawa's behest. Ontario Attorney-General William H. Price told a colleague that he was "under pressure from Ottawa to take action." (79) During the trial before a jury composed of "trade workers and farmers" the prosecution presented evidence that the accused were members of a revolutionary organization intent on the use of violence to bring about change. The prosecution's task was simplified by the fact that "the propaganda...

Hobson's Theory of Imperialism and its Indebtedness to Socialism: A Challenge to Conventional Narratives of early International Relations

Traditionally, the origins of International Relations as a stand‐alone academic discipline have been traced to the inspiration of a generation of so‐called liberal idealist thinkers. Since the late 1990s, however, a growing revisionist literature has challenged this assumption. Important studies have been conducted to show that prominent early IR scholars, such as Leonard Woolf and David Mitrany, hardly share the characteristics of so‐named IR's idealism. The case of J.A. Hobson has also been part of revisionist efforts. Paradoxically, however, he has been at times placed in alignment with “idealist” values. This article aims to employ Hobson to challenge IR orthodox narratives. Through an analysis of Hobson's writings on imperialism, the article aims to reveal a little acknowledged and yet significant underlying theoretical socialist influence on his international theory.

The Hybridization of Journalistic Cultures: A Comparative Study of Journalistic Role Performance

Influential research on comparative media systems identifies distinctive models according to which certain countries—particularly advanced democracies—share key features in their journalistic cultures. Revisionist literature has not only emphasized the limitations of such models, but also highlighted the hybridization of journalistic cultures elsewhere. This article tests the hybridization thesis, analyzing the presence of six journalistic roles in print news from 19 countries (N = 34,514). Our findings show patterns of multilayered hybridization in the performance of professional roles across and within advanced, transitional, and nondemocratic countries, with journalistic cultures displaying different types of hybridity that do not resemble either existing ideal media system typologies or conventional assumptions about political or regional clusters. The implications of these findings for future studies are discussed.

「ホロコースト否定文献」の図書館での扱いについての考察 : 「真実の使節団」事件へのカリフォルニア州図書館協会の対応をめぐって

「ホロコースト否定文献」の図書館での扱いについての考察 : 「真実の使節団」事件へのカリフォルニア州図書館協会の対応をめぐって

Rewolucja 1956 w literaturze węgierskiej. Na marginesie literackiego kanonu

The article is an attempt at an outline of the situation in Hungarian literature confronted with the revolution of 1956. The events of the Hungarian October are some of the more frequent themes in revisionist literature. Selected examples of literary works show the most important features of that literature, writing strategies, patterns of artistic message. From the wide selection of the literature, a poem, fragments of a diary, a novel, and an authobiographical essay by Sandor Marai, Gyorgy Moldova, Istvan Orkeny and Imre Kertesz were selected.

The realism that did not speak its name: E. H. Carr’s diplomatic histories of the twenty years’ crisis

AbstractE. H. Carr was one of Europe’s pre-eminent thinkers in the field of international affairs. Yet his contribution to International Relations theory is continually questioned. Realists depict Carr as a quintessential realist; revisionists draw from his wider corpus to qualify his contribution. Although not inaccurate, the revisionist literature is incomplete as it neglects a number of Carr’s diplomatic histories. Refocusing on these, especially the manner in which traces of Ranke’s ‘the primacy of foreign affairs’ tradition is evident, this article points to a more conservative and less critical Carr. Utilising an interpretivist framework, this shift in traditions of thought is explained by the dilemmas Carr faced. Although works of history rather than theory, the article contends that Carr’s diplomatic histories remain relevant, particularly with regard to the embedded criticism ofrealpolitikthey contain. This realisation is made evident through a reading of Carr in parallel with the concept of tragedy.

A reassessment of E.H. Carr and the realist tradition: Britain, German–Soviet Relations and neoclassical realism

E.H. Carr’s connection to realism has increasingly been called into question. Revisionist literature has pointed to realism’s narrow understanding of Carr and drawn from his wider body of work in order to problematise Carr’s association with realism. Given that it overlooks two key texts produced by Carr, the revisionist literature is incomplete. Refocusing on Britain and German–Soviet Relations, especially the way in which they reflect ideas associated with the realist tradition, this paper demonstrates the continued traditional link between Carr and realism. Having done so, it considers the contemporary relevance of Carr’s lesser known realist work. Drawing parallels between Britain and German–Soviet Relations and neoclassical realism, the paper contends that Carr’s forgotten texts can serve as the foundation for a more classically orientated, European mode of neoclassical realism.

DisORIENT

An extensive and important literature has shown that the Rise of the West occurred considerably later than often thought, only in the 19th century, and that the main advantages of the West prior to that period were essentially military. However, this revisionist literature fails to incorporate the insights of radical political economics, both regarding money and the role of demand in technological progress, in ways that distort their conclusions. This paper suggests that both revisionists and radical political economists would benefit from each other’s insights.

American Exceptionalism and the Welfare State: The Revisionist Literature

Recent research has argued that the American welfare state is not necessarily smaller than the welfare state in other advanced industrial countries. Rather, it is organized on principles that make it seem smaller: Because it functions through tax expenditures and public–private partnerships, it is less visible than welfare states that operate on the principle of direct spending. This review summarizes the most important messages of this revisionist scholarship, particularly in how this form of welfare provision undermines support for the welfare state, increases the complexity and decreases the efficiency of the system, and hides regressive policies from public scrutiny. I then argue that although this work has taught us much about American politics, several gaps need to be addressed. First, the explanation of the origins of this state of affairs is incomplete and unconvincing. Second, while private welfare is an important part of the American experience, the scholarship on private welfare provision has not yet grappled with the fact that private welfare was also historically found in many other advanced industrial countries, but did not crowd out the public welfare state there as it has in the United States. Finally, although the scholarship has usefully called attention to the invisibility of tax expenditures, we should not consider tax expenditures part of the “welfare state,” because they only rarely accomplish the functions of redistribution and risk pooling of public welfare programs. Rather, in most cases, tax expenditures should be seen as tax cuts, that is, diminishment of state capacity. These observations suggest that the scholarship would benefit from broader engagement with the comparative literature on political economy and from a more precise and conceptually grounded definition of the “welfare state.”

Learning to Pull the Strings after Suez: Macmillan’s Management of the Eisenhower Administration during the Intervention in Jordan, 1958

ABSTRACTThis analysis re-instates the importance of the 1958 British intervention in Jordan within the study of Anglo–American relations and the revisionist literature on Suez. It does so by challenging the idea of British subservience to American foreign policy after the 1956 crisis, and it reveals two key lessons learnt by London: that Britain’s economy, power, and influence were in decline and that Britain could no longer intervene in the Middle East without American support. Having learnt these lessons, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan proved to be a shrewd political actor who used the opportunity of the Jordan intervention to turn the policy of the Dwight Eisenhower Administration to British ends, regaining Britain’s maximum power and prestige for the minimum loss of resources.

‘The people need civil liberties’: trade unions and contested decolonisation in Singapore

The history of Singapore has been dominated by a narrow range of issues: the process of constitutional development during the era of decolonisation, the alleged threat posed by the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) and the island’s rapid social and economic transformation following separation from Malaysia in 1965. More recently, however, historians have sought to move away from this linear narrative of ‘progress’ associated with the ‘Singapore Story’ to focus on ‘ordinary’ Singaporeans and the role of often marginalised civil society groups. This article contributes to this growing body of revisionist literature by challenging conventional accounts that portray the organised labour movement as a stooge of the MCP. Instead, the article argues the trade unions’ leaders associated with the opposition party Barisan Sosialis had their own distinct national liberation agenda, where the aim was not Marxist revolution but social and economic development, the promotion of multiracialism and the protection of civil liberties.

Singapore. The 1963 Operation Coldstore in Singapore: Commemorating 50 years Edited by Poo Soo Kai, Tan Kok Fang and Hong Lysa Petaling Jaya: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre, 2013. Pp. 542. Photographs, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

The 1963 Operation Coldstore in Singapore: Commemorating 50 years Edited by POO SOO KAI, TAN KOK FANG and HONG LYSA Petaling Jaya: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre, 2013. Pp. 542. Photographs, Notes, Bibliography, Index. The historiography of post-1945 Singapore is changing. For a long time the history of this tumultuous period has been dominated by narratives that have focused almost exclusively on the role of the People's Action Party (PAP) in leading Singapore's anti-colonial struggle and the perceived threat posed by the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). However, more recently the foundational myths of what has become known as the 'Singapore Story' have been subject to greater historical scrutiny. Historians such as Loh Kah Seng, Thum PJ, and Hong Lysa have highlighted the way in which historical myths have been created and maintained by the PAP, while also rehabilitating the image of former leftist activists, arguing that leaders such as Lim Chin Siong were not proxies for the MCP but were anti-colonial nationalists, committed to building a democratic and socialist Singapore, where respect for civil liberties and racial diversity were paramount objectives. These historians have been joined in this endeavour by former activists, most notably Poh Soo Kai and the late Tan Jing Quee, who have set out to refute the charge that they were nothing more than communist radicals. The publication of The 1963 Operation Coldstore in Singapore represents the culmination of these efforts. Combining chapters by historians, as well as accounts by former activists, the book was published to mark the 50th anniversary of Operation Coldstore, when 133 men and women were detained on 2 February 1963. The arrests, which were a precondition for Singapore's merger with Malaysia and were sanctioned by the British, Singaporean, and Malaysian governments, helped to consolidate the PAP's position, as well as decimate the strength of the political opposition. Since the arrests, with the left neutralised and with the threat of further persecution ever present, public debate concerning Coldstore has been limited. It is for this reason then, that this book is such a welcome addition to the growing body of revisionist literature on post-war Singapore. The first part of the book includes chapters by Geoff Wade, Thum PJ, and Hong Lysa. Wade's chapter provides a useful overview of the events leading up to Coldstore. Focusing on the 'high politics' of the operation, Wade demonstrates that Coldstore was a plot of convenience, which the governments of Britain, Malaysia, and Singapore agreed to in order to secure their own strategic interests. In this respect Wade's chapter is broadly similar to the work of Simon Ball, Tim Harper and Matthew Jones. Where the chapter is more revelatory is in terms of its consideration of the effects of Coldstore, documenting how the operation and the subsequent treatment of the detainees attracted criticism from both within and outside of Singapore. This is important as most historians have treated Coldstore as an end in itself or as simply a staging post on the road to the creation of Malaysia. What Wade's chapter suggests is that there is more detailed work to be done on the left's struggles within Singapore in the immediate aftermath of the detentions. The chapter by Thum examines the divisions within the PAP, explaining the reasons for the split within the party and the subsequent establishment of Barisan Sosialis. Making good use of Chinese language sources, Thum also investigates the Chinese population's attitude towards contemporary issues, such as the PAP's performance in government and the merger issue. This is a particularly useful approach for historians. In the wake of Coldstore and the subsequent curtailment of civil liberties, it is often forgotten that the post-war period was a time of relative political freedom--in spite of the restrictions imposed by the British authorities as a result of the Malayan Emergency. …