Revisionist School Research Articles

The Possibility of Writing the History of the Qurʾān by Bypassing Islamic Narratives and Materials -Stephen Shoemaker Example

Research shows that Qurʾānic studies in the West have navigated away from the Nöldekean-Schwallian paradigm in recent years. By using this paradigm, Western thinkers attempt to write the history of the Qurʾān with the support of Islamic narrations. American orientalist Stephen Shoemaker claims that the revisionist school broke this paradigm and brought a new perspective to the field in 1977. Stating that the Nöldekean-Schwallian paradigm, which followed the standard Sunnī Qurʾānic history, blocked the field until the 1980s, Shoemaker criticizes Islamic narrations and does not take them as references. Shoemaker believes that the studies will not go beyond the Sunnī paradigm by using purely Islamic narrations. The author, who claims that the Qurʾān emerged and was written in a political environment, argues that historians should consider the works of the surrounding cultures. Shoemaker, who uses the historical criticism method used in holy book readings in the West, focuses on what happened to the Qurʾān rather than what the Qurʾān tells us. Is it possible to write the history of the Qurʾān by bypassing Islamic narrations? The main focus of this article is to reveal the answer to this question through Stephen Shoemaker's work Creating the Qur'an. The work, published in 2022, was seen by Fred Donner as a milestone for the field and stated that everyone working in this department should read it. Our study will ultimately discuss the impasses of Shoemaker's approach. In this context, the research will generally apply data collection, text, and discourse analysis methods.

Conflict on Mount Lebanon: The Druze, the Maronites, and Collective Memory

Conflict on Mount Lebanon: The Druze, the Maronites, and Collective Memory

Adaptation or Historical Anomaly?: Partition Narratives and Their Visual Counterparts

This research accentuates the presence of multi-layered histories within partition literature and its adaptations as a historiographic mise en abyme— an interpretive multiplicity of historical narratives. The aim is to highlight, probe and eventually determine the significance of addressing multivocality within sensitive historical accounts when told through the aesthetic mediums of fiction and film. In the context of this research, the traditional narrative of the partition of the Subcontinent includes political and nationalistic attitudes on both sides of the divide. The research sets out to explore the extent to which these overreaching accounts and wide-ranging versions of the partition empower the concerned entities to give subjective meanings to their partition experiences. Gurinder Chadha’s film Viceroy’s House (2017), which is partly based on the memoirs of Louis Mountbatten, documented in Freedom at Midnight by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre (1976) is taken as the case study, with reference to its source text. The primary trigger of this research is the debate between the Traditionalist and Revisionist school of Historiography, as it seeks to examine the inherent problematic nature of revisionist partition history on text and on screen. This research presents the textual and film narratives of partition as alternative archives, whose authenticity and validity is yet to be established, in comparison with the historical documents/texts. It advocates the necessity to constantly re-evaluate and reinterpret history in the light of new facts; however, all attempts to revise history in the name of aesthetics, without merit and evidence, should be recognized as subjective versions.

How Is a Man to Decide? Unjust Combatants, Duress and McMahan’s Killing in War

ABSTRACTJeff McMahan’s much-discussed work Killing in War is an important part of the revisionist school of just war studies. This paper avoids discussion of McMahan’s use of human rights and examines the practical consequences of his argument about duress on soldiers to fight an unjust war. These arguments are found to be wanting and to be impractical ones that do not fit battlefield realities. The importance of the Law of Armed Conflict and the legal equality of combatants that is part of it is emphasised and accepted as the most practical way of regulating battlefield behaviour and saving lives. It is concluded that attempts to tell soldiers what to do when they may be fighting an unjust war add to their burdens and are misplaced.

‘The trouble with treachery nowadays’: Revisiting the Age of Treason in Philby, Burgess and Maclean and Blunt

The Cambridge spy ring has been the subject of many dramatic representations on British television. While prior scholarship has largely focused on plays by Dennis Potter and Alan Bennett depicting the later lives of such figures, this article examines an alternative tradition: representations which re-enact events at the height of their careers in the early Cold War. I focus on two productions which centre specifically on events surrounding the 1951 defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, but from hugely contrasting perspectives. Firstly, Philby, Burgess and Maclean (ITV, 1977) by Ian Curteis covers a ten-year period from the 1945 ‘Volkov Incident’ to Kim Philby's exoneration in 1955. This production closely adheres to broadly accepted accounts of the case as known in the late 1970s, and I examine this is as a product of the public service-oriented drama-documentary culture of Granada Television. I then contrast this with the revised narrative presented in Robin Chapman's Blunt (BBC, 1987). Not only does this incorporate the newly revealed ‘fourth man’, Anthony Blunt, but it also offers a more humanised portrayal of Burgess and centres much of its drama on the marginal but implicated figure of Goronwy Rees. I explore how, in contrast to Curteis, Chapman takes greater artistic licence in examining the spies' personal lives, which resulted in a wave of controversy. I argue that this portrayal can be situated within a broader revisionist school of 1980s representation which mobilised these icons of an earlier generation's ideals in order to critique new political developments.

Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation by Peter Marshall

Reviewed by: Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation by Peter Marshall Korey D. Maas Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation. By Peter Marshall. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017. xix + 652 pp. + 22 plates. Over the past generation, those pressed to recommend a readable and reliable history of the English Reformation have faced a quandary. A.G. Dickens' venerable The English Reformation (1964) has not only grown long in the tooth; many of its conclusions have been subsequently and persuasively challenged by scholars such as J. J. Scarisbrick, Eamon Duffy, and Christopher Haigh. Despite the import of their findings, however, this revisionist school has not produced anything like a major overview for mainstream readers. Peter Marshall's book is advertised as just such an overview, the first in a generation—and rightly so. Organizing seventeen chapters into four chronological yet broadly thematic sections, Marshall skillfully and lucidly guides readers through the complex vicissitudes of the English church in the sixteenth century. The first section, "Reformations before Reformation," establishes the late medieval context in such a way as to emphasize that the changes of the sixteenth century were neither inevitable nor merely reactionary, but were in important respects "a flowering of late medieval developments" (xvii). Part two, "Separations," narrates the events still most familiar to a popular audience: the Luther affair and its reverberations across the channel, Tyndale's New Testament and the mediation of continental evangelicalism, Henry VIII's marital crisis and the ambiguous status of English religion following his break with Rome. Section three, "New Christianities," picks up in the final decade of Henry's reign, when that ambiguity allowed [End Page 484] proponents of various theological visions to vie for royal support— and when the same ambiguity made it just as likely that advocates of each would be silenced and suppressed. It proceeds through the brief reign of Edward VI and the tenuous evangelical establishment crowned by Cranmer's Prayer Book, and concludes with the equally tenuous but ostensibly successful reestablishment of Roman obedience under Mary I. The final section chronicles the first three decades of Elizabeth I's rule; its title, "Unattainable Prizes," illuminates the potentially counter-intuitive stopping point. By 1590 the old faith had been effectively reduced to the dissenting posture of a minority; but it had also become clear—not least because of still, and increasingly, divergent Protestant visions—that a realm united in a common faith would remain beyond reach. Marshall's outline, then, is hardly novel. But the synthesis of previous research, complemented by his own insights and interpretations, is masterful. Limpid prose and arresting anecdotes ensure that, even at 600 pages (with, as the preface forewarns, "a lot of names"), the mainstream reader will remain engaged. Other readers, including this one, will lament the lack of bibliography, and even the choice of endnotes rather than footnotes. Some will be put off by the occasionally jarring anachronism or too-clever colloquialism; the early Henrician supremacy as sports car test-drive comes immediately to mind (230). Minor quibbles aside, though, and despite the gestures to mainstream readers, Marshall's book is a monument of scholarship. Marshall consistently, if subtly, nods toward ongoing academic debates, while explicitly stating many of his own convictions up front. The "lot of names" mentioned above, for example, serves to emphasize the decisive role continually played by individual agency—and the impact of events on real human beings. Although by no means embracing an ideological history from below, Marshall is clearly dismissive of the still sometimes heard claim that England's Reformation was simply an "Act of State." He gives equally short shrift to the notion that religion itself was only a secondary, or even tertiary, concern of those involved, a mask behind which to hide political or economic motives. With an eye toward wider implications, he also notes with some regularity the manner in which the Tudor Reformation did not merely change the religion of the [End Page 485] realm; it also changed the way many, even into the present, would come to understand the nature of religion itself. Given what Marshall here accomplishes, and the flair with which he...

The Rabbinic God and Mediaeval Judaism

From the earliest stages of Wissenschaft des Judentums, scholars of Judaism typically read statements about God in the classical sources of Judaism with a mediaeval philosophical lens. By doing so, they sought to demonstrate the essential unity and continuity between rabbinic Judaism, later mediaeval Jewish philosophy and modern Judaism. In the late 1980s, the Maimonidean hold on rabbinic scholarship began to crack when the ‘revisionist school’ sought to drive a wedge between rabbinic Judaism, on the one hand, and Maimonidean Judaism, on the other hand, by highlighting the deep continuities and links between rabbinic Judaism and mediaeval Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah). The revisionist scholars regarded rabbinic Judaism as a pre-cursor to mediaeval Kabbalah rather than mediaeval Jewish philosophy. This article provides the history of scholarship on these two methods of reading rabbinic texts and then proposes that scholars adopt a third method. That is, building on the work of recent scholarship, we should confront theological rabbinic texts on their own terms, without the guiding hand of either mediaeval Jewish framework.

Should the dangers of deflation be dismissed?

Deflation has emerged as a concern for Asian policy makers. The traditional view is this concern is warranted – that deflation can lead to a vicious cycle of falling demand and prices, and is therefore a dangerous condition. However, another revisionist school of thought emphasizes the role of positive supply shocks in deflation and takes a more benign view of the phenomenon. In a recent paper, Borio et al. (2015) find some evidence which casts doubt on the traditional view. In this paper, we re-visit these findings using alternative measures of deflation. While we find some grounds for concern about the harmful effect of deflation on growth, our results also raise significant questions about the revisionist view.

Evaluating the Revisionist Critique of Just War Theory

Modern analytical just war theory starts with Michael Walzer's defense of key tenets of the laws of war in his Just and Unjust Wars. Walzer advocates noncombatant immunity, proportionality, and combatant equality: combatants in war must target only combatants; unintentional harms that they inflict on noncombatants must be proportionate to the military objective secured; and combatants who abide by these principles fight permissibly, regardless of their aims. In recent years, the revisionist school of just war theory, led by Jeff McMahan, has radically undermined Walzer's defense of these principles. This essay situates Walzer's and the revisionists’ arguments, before illustrating the disturbing vision of the morality of war that results from revisionist premises. It concludes by showing how broadly Walzerian conclusions can be defended using more reliable foundations.

Between Ideology and Reality: The Right Wing Organizations, the Jerusalem Question, and the Role of Menachem Begin 1948–1949

The article examines the attitude of Menachem Begin and the Revisionist organization towards Jerusalem during 1948–49. As a political right wing entity that believed in the “wholeness of the Land of Israel on both sides of the Jordan River”, it seemed that their approach could not be anything but opposing United Nations resolution 181. This approach was accompanied by the demand for a declaration of the new state of Israel that Jerusalem should be and must be the capital of Israel. This view of Jerusalem as the capital was also shared by the pre-state undergrounds, Etzel and Lehi. There were rumors of illicit activity, such as a plot to take over the city and declare its independence in 1948. Yet the Revisionist school does not seem to have employed all the legitimate political tools at its disposal to further its goals on this issue.

Stalinism as Traditional Political Culture

J. Arch Getty, Practicing Stalinism: Bolsheviks, Boyars, and the Persistence of Tradition. 359 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. ISBN-13 978-0300169294. $45.00. J. Arch Getty has played a major role in defining our understanding of Soviet history. His 1985 book on purges was an important study within the so-called revisionist school. (1) There he advanced a new understanding of political violence in the Soviet Union that was different from the then-dominant paradigm of a violence conceived, ordered, and carried out carefully from above through an efficient chain of command. His new book represents both continuity and rupture with his earlier works. Just as he did 30 years ago, Getty tries to understand the origins of the political violence that peaked in 1937-38. In this respect, Practicing Stalinism echoes his earlier book and in a certain sense represents a completion of 30-years' research, bringing in archival sources that were unavailable at the beginning of the 1980s. As in his earlier work, in his new book Getty is interested in conflicts, tensions, groups, and rivalry. But many of his interpretations are new: most noticeably, the role of Iosif Stalin is conceptualized in a different way, and the dictator occupies a far more central place in Getty's new book. Practicing Stalinism combines two layers of argumentation. core chapters of the book (chaps. 3-8) focus on political conflicts in Stalin's USSR that are mostly interpreted in terms of struggle between clans and groups, and as center-periphery tensions. In this part of the book, Getty studies the personal and political conflicts of the 1920s and 1930s, discussing the actors, development, and resolution. But in the first chapters of the book--and this is new--the author attempts to situate these struggles within the broader context of the modernization/tradition debate. (2) Arch Getty opens his book by drawing continuities among Ivan IV's Muscovy, Stalins USSR, and Vladimir Putin's Russia. He also underscores these continuities in the epilogue. It is through this persistence of Russian traditionalism that Getty seeks to explain many of the phenomena he is discussing. Getty follows in the footsteps of several other scholars of Soviet history by uncovering signs of archaism in interwar Soviet political practices. (3) In the first two chapters of the book, he discusses some of these archaic practices from a long-term perspective. For the pre-Soviet period of Russian history, Getty mostly relies on secondary sources; he reveals numerous practices the first appearances of which may be found as early as in 16th-century Russia but can be seen again in the Soviet Union. These practices include restricted access of foreigners to Russia, denunciatory letters written to the authorities, the existence of an aristocracy with a particular status, and collective responsibility. This assertion of the persistence of tradition, which features even in the subtitle of the book, is almost always pervasive. For example, Getty twice mentions, The famous 'anointing' photographs of Stalin alongside Lenin recall those of Nicholas II alongside his son Aleksei and preview those for sale today in Moscow of Putin skiing and chatting with Medvedev (4, 89). He also speaks on numerous occasions of boyars and king's men in the Stalin period. Getty's main point is that these practices represent something totally and specifically Russian. In his opinion, they were neither Soviet nor Stalinist but Russian. Getty explains: Because we find this understanding of politics and government from Riurik to Putin, at all levels of the hierarchies at all times and places, it was inescapable. This was the deep structure by which Russia had always been governed (95). Getty's interpretation of the persistence of archaic practices differs markedly from the neotraditional model earlier proposed by Terry Martin. (4) In his seminal article Martin claimed: Neo-traditional societies, rather, represent an alternative form of modernization, one that includes the most characteristic processes of market-driven modernization (industrialization, urbanization, secularization, universal education, and literacy), but one which likewise produces a variety of practices that bear a striking resemblance to characteristic features of traditional pre-modern societies. …

The Son by Philipp Meyer (review)

Reviewed by: The Son by Philipp Meyer Don Scheese Philipp Meyer, The Son. New York: HarperCollins, 2013. 561pp. Cloth, $27.99; paper, $16.99; e-book, $12.49. “No land was ever acquired honestly in the history of the earth” (164), says Peter McCullough, the conscience of this epic novel and the son of Colonel Eli McCullough, legendary Indian captive turned Indian fighter, Texas Ranger, and eventual patriarch of a 250,000-acre “proper acreocracy” (501) in southeastern Texas along the Nueces River. Dispossession and the legacies of conquest are the main themes here, in a family history (genealogical chart included) spanning the years 1836 to 2012. The author chronicles the displacement and near extermination of the Comanches by the first waves of pioneer settlers, the removal of the Mexicans by the Texans, then the gradual takeover of ranchers and cattlemen by the petroleum industry. The narrative is constructed from three different points of view: that of Eli McCullough, recounted through a wpa recording from the 1930s; that of his son Peter, chronicled through journal entries dating from the 1916–17 period, the time of the modern Mexican Revolution; and that of Eli’s great-great-granddaughter Jeanne Anne, a stalwart Republican feminist matron whose recollections take us up to the present. We see how the lives of these three individuals intersect and are affected by a grand sweep of historical events and forces: the conflicts with the Comanches, the US-Mexican War, the Civil War, the Mexican Revolution, World Wars I and II, the Great Depression, the oil boom and subsequent embargo of the post–World War II era, and the two Iraq wars. Some figures, like the Colonel, seem to make and transcend history; others, like his son Peter, the Comanches, and the Mexican Americans who live along the border in the early twentieth century, are victimized by it. Jeanne Anne, with more than a bit of the Colonel in her blood, comes into her own after the premature death of her oil-catter husband and learns to profit from the boom-and-bust cycles of the industry, eventually becoming a legend in her own right and twice gracing the cover of Time magazine. I found most riveting those early portions of the novel representing Eli’s captivity narrative. Part ethnographic study of the [End Page 414] Comanches, part potboiler narrative and coming-of-age story of a thirteen-year-old white boy slowly inducted into the culture of the most powerful tribe on the Southern Plains, this aspect of the tale represents a revision of the revisionist school of western American history. To some degree the long-dominant myth of rugged individualism is challenged in the novel: “The strong white man comes to an unpopulated wilderness and proves himself. Except there has never been any such thing” (311), says Maria, whose once-aristocratic family has been ousted from its rancheria along the border. However, the Comanches, through young Eli’s interactions with chiefs and medicine men and “squaws,” are depicted not as politically correct Dances with Wolves–type Noble Red Men but simply as people, human beings who love their land, families, and tribe and who will do anything, no matter how seemingly brutal, to save their homeland. Reflecting back on his life, Eli extols his time with the tribe as “the greatest summer I ever had” (207), and when he is forced to return to white society because of the tribe’s decimation by smallpox, he laments that the forty acres of his host’s property felt “like a postage stamp. I was used to having twenty million or so at my disposal” (333). But in the end even as powerful and legendary a figure as the Colonel is a victim of historical forces, in this case manifest destiny and progress. “There are many things I have wanted to save,” he says to Peter late in life: “the Indians, the buff alo, a prairie where you could look twenty miles and not see a fence post. But time has passed those things by” (352). As well as a historical novel, this work is also an environmental history describing one of the greatest transformations of a bioregion...

Stalin’s Rule of Terror

Stalin’s Rule of Terror Hiroaki Kuromiya Jörg Baberowski , Verbrannte Erde: Stalins Herrschaft der Gewalt ( Scorched Earth: Stalin’s Reign of Violence ). 606 pp. Munich : C. H. Beck , 2012 . ISBN-13 978-3406632549 . €29.95 . Nearly ten years ago, Jörg Baberowski, a distinguished German historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, published a concise, lucid, and readable account of Bolshevik terror.1 Preparing for an English edition of that book a few years later, he did additional research and ultimately came to doubt his own earlier account. As he writes in the introduction to the present volume, “My own book did not suit me any more … much of what I once thought to be right seemed to me to be nonsense seven years later … it quickly became clear to me that I would have to refute what I had written earlier” (10). So he decided to rewrite the book completely. The result, the present book, is an important and thought-provoking work. In his 2003 book, Baberowski stated that red terror should be attributed to the culture of violence that was particularly prevalent in the Caucasus, where Stalin grew up. It was almost innate to Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin and to the rest of his entourage, whether Caucasian or Russian, who grew up in a similar environment of brutality characteristic of the lower classes of the Russian Empire. Baberowski drew a distinction between this culture of violence and the “European culture” in which other Bolshevik leaders (Vladimir Il´ich Lenin, Lev Davidovich Trotskii, Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, Grigorii Evseevich Zinov´ev, and the like) were socialized. Stalin’s government was a clan and a mafia of fanatics who lived in a fantasy world of ubiquitous conspiracy and the intrigue surrounding it. The Stalinists used backward and [End Page 670] barbaric methods of terror to destroy their supposed enemies and to realize their goals of modernizing Soviet society. In his new book, Baberowski hardly discusses “culture.” Nor does he emphasize the role that Stalin’s associates (his “clan”) played in the extensive and brutal application of political terror. It is rather Stalin himself who is shown making all important decisions, including those on terror. Stalin was a dictator, despot, psychopath, sadist, and paranoiac, according to Baberowski, who unleashed his vicious and criminal energy on the communist experiment. What mattered was the power of Stalin, the master of life and death in the Soviet Union. With a passion for violence, Stalin made decisions and carried them out according to his will. It was Stalin the Despot who started and ended the Great Terror in 1937–38. Baberowski contends that ideas do not kill and that violence should be understood not in terms of its origin but in terms of its dynamic. He positions himself to see the world through Stalin’s eyes so as to explain this dynamic and to understand how his extraordinary terror became normality during his reign. Baberowski’s stress on Stalin thus differs from his earlier emphasis on “culture,” ideology, and the clan.2 The new turn he takes creates its own problems, however. Was Stalin’s terror possible without ideology? What conditioned the dynamic of his violence? It is not entirely clear from this account. By emphasizing Stalin the Dictator, Baberowski naturally downplays the significance of the system (“the totalitarian regime”) itself. By the same token, he is also critical of the “revisionist school,” which, he contends, shows power as diffused thoughout the country and depicts Stalinism “from below” (18–19, 217–18, 546).3 Moreover, he goes on to take to task the “subjectivist school,” which, according to him, wrongly assumes that individuals could have had free will under Stalin (20–21).4 Baberowski is quite right that without Stalin the kind of violence that took place in the Soviet Union would not have been possible. True, this does not preclude the culpability of others, including Lenin himself, whom he [End Page 671] characterizes as “a vicious mastermind” (ein bösartiger Schreibtischtäter) and to whom human tragedies, sorrow, and misery meant nothing (66). However, Baberowski immediately qualifies this by concluding that Lenin was not a “cynic.” By contrast, the author is unstinting in his colorful...

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...

Russian-Ottoman Borderlands: The Eastern Question Reconsidered ed. by Lucien J. Frary and Mara Kozelsky (review)

Reviewed by: Russian-Ottoman Borderlands: The Eastern Question Reconsidered ed. by Lucien J. Frary and Mara Kozelsky Sean Gillen (bio) Lucien J. Frary and Mara Kozelsky (Eds.), Russian-Ottoman Borderlands: The Eastern Question Reconsidered (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014). ix + 363 pp. Index. ISBN: 978-0-299-29804-3. The book under review is unexpectedly timely. As the book was going to press, the protests on Kyiv’s Independence Square culminated in a series of dramatic and still poorly understood events: Ukraine’s security services fired on and killed dozens of protesters under unknown orders; the Supreme Council impeached the sitting president, Viktor Yanukovych; and the Russian Federation invaded and annexed Crimea. In the months since, the varied aspirations and experiences of the vast majority of the population go underreported. The annexation of Crimea and the subsequent outbreak of violence in Eastern Ukraine understandably shocked the world. But the welter of sanctimonious government and media cant from Washington to Moscow – with precious few exceptions – is crude, uninformed, and baldly politicized. As the editors of Russian-Ottoman Borderlands, Lucien Frary and Mara Kozelsky, muse, “it is hard not to see the imprint of nineteenth-century diplomatic behaviors” on them (P. 341). Presentist considerations aside, this collection represents an impressive contribution to the literature on the imperial dimension of Russian history since Andreas Kappeler’s landmark 1992 synthesis, Russland als Vielvölkerreich. But the editors and contributors do not explicitly engage this work. Nor do they engage the literature of what Alfred Rieber calls “complex frontiers.” Complementing them, however, this volume shifts that literature’s geopolitical center of gravity from the metropole’s administration of ethnic and confessional minorities to the experience of peoples in the borderlands between the Ottoman and Russian empires themselves. Providing a coherent narrative to the history of this region presents the editors with an important historiographical problem laden with organizational, political, and moral concerns: how does one arrange a narrative of a region whose boundaries and peoples were often in flux and apparently dependent on great power whims. Answering this problem, the editors chose to organize their volume’s contributions around the so-called Eastern Question in order to demonstrate that it was “a much more complex phenomenon” than the old-fashioned diplomatic history would have it (P. 6). The primary historiographical target of the volume’s contributors is M. S. Anderson’s admirable 1966 synthesis on the Eastern [End Page 400] Question. That comprehensive but traditional diplomatic history of the Eastern Question related the story of great power negotiations over how to divide up the Ottoman “sick man of Europe” as codified in the treaties signed from Küçük Kainarca in 1774 to the treaty of Lausanne in 1923. In Anderson’s account – which V. A. Georgiev echoed in the standard Soviet version – the Ottoman Empire’s failure to enact effective social and political reforms justly provoked the great powers to intervene in Ottoman affairs to restore order and protect various ethnic and confessional groups. The volume’s contribution to the neglected field of diplomatic history is to be welcomed and complements Oleg Airapetov’s recent synthesis.1 Their principal aim is to complicate Anderson’s diplomatic history of the Eastern Question by looking at the social and cultural history of this fluid region. To do that, the contributors draw on a linguistically and geographically rich vein of government, voluntary association, and private materials from Russian, French, Turkish, Bulgarian, Crimean, Armenian, Austrian, Georgian, British, and Greek archival funds. These revelations alone are an impressive feat. To make sense of this wealth of material, the editors and contributors also draw inspiration from the Ottoman revisionist school of Kemal Karpat and Bernard Lewis, who recovered the vitality of Ottoman government and society. The thrust of that scholarship was directed against the standard assumption of diplomatic history that the Ottoman Empire was the main problem in great power relations because it was perceived to be decadent and degenerate by Soviet and non-Soviet historians alike. Their analytical decision is conceptually justified as an organizing principle in such a historiographically undefined region; organizing principles for collected volumes are also notoriously difficult to find. But the editors overstate the historiographical...

MATTHEW S. SELIGMANN. The Royal Navy and the German Threat, 1901-1914: Admiralty Plans to Protect British Trade in a War against Germany.

Matthew S. Seligmann has produced a fine reassessment of the British navy's strategic planning versus Germany in the years before World War I. The author focuses on measures taken by the Royal Navy to guard against a German war on British commerce. Seligmann asserts that scholars have paid scant attention to the fact that Britain took seriously such a threat, and he highlights the loss of the passenger liner Lusitania to submarine attack in World War I as evidence of the view held by many that Britain was unprepared for a war against shipping interests. In truth, Seligmann reveals that the threat was a perceived one, but that British efforts to guard against a commerce war centered on the threat posed by civilian ships, mostly passenger liners, converted into auxiliary cruisers. The author identifies two reasons for this oversight. Firstly, most scholarly studies focus on British offensive planning in the prewar years rather than on defensive preparations. The second has to do with the debate surrounding the origins and nature of the Anglo-German naval arms race in the years leading up to World War I. Seligmann identifies the two prevailing schools of thought in the debate concerning when Britain identified Germany as a potential enemy and why. The first of these, the traditionalist school, holds that Britain considered Germany a threat as early as 1902 given its warship construction program. The revisionist school of thought asserts that well after 1902 the British continued to look at France and Russia as the chief threats to British overseas interests, since the German construction program centered solely on capital ships designed to fight an engagement in the North Sea rather than cruisers. Only after 1905 did that focus begin to change in the context of the naval arms race. Both of these schools of thought hold in common that the growth of German sea power was based on the battleship rather than vessels capable of pursuing commercial warfare. As a result, there was little British impetus to plan measures to defend commerce against the German navy. Seligmann asserts that both of these schools are incorrect as he examines British measures to combat a German war against their trade through the use of auxiliary cruisers. Such measures occurred as early as 1901, which challenges existing arguments about when the British considered Germany a threat.

Rethinking the Utility of Nuclear Weapons

The parameters of the discussion about nuclear weapons are well known and appear to be relatively fixed. It seems as if there has been little on that front in forty years. Most civilian scholars have lost interest in nuclear weapons and moved on to other topics. But it is the habit of the military mind to learn from the past; even today there are lessons to be learned from Cannae, Waterloo, and Vicksburg. It will not surprise thoughtful military officers to find that the past has something important and interesting to tell us about nuclear weapons. The conventional wisdom is that nuclear weapons are horrible, probably immoral, but necessary. We keep them because they have a unique ability to coerce and deter. There are psychological characteristics to the weapons--as Secretary of War Henry Stimson pointed out in the first semiofficial discussion of them in 1947--that make them unlike other weapons. (1) Now evidence is throwing doubt on these decades-old conclusions. Actually not new evidence, but additional evidence culled from a careful study of the past. Hiroshimas The first and most important revision to history has to do with the efficacy of bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (2) This evidence, however, has nothing to do with the school of Hiroshima history. The revisionist school ascended in 1964 with the publication by Gar Alperovitz of a book arguing that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was unnecessary--the Japanese would have surrendered anyway. (3) This debate has caused controversy and aroused passions for almost fifty years. But it is not really about nuclear weapons. The revisionists argue that the bombings were horrible and, since they weren't necessary to win the war, they were immoral. The counterrevisionists argue that the bombings were required and were, therefore, moral. But this is a debate about whether the United States acted morally, not about whether nuclear weapons work. New evidence seems to suggest that while the bombs destroyed the cities, they didn't play much of a role (or perhaps any) in convincing Japan's leaders to surrender. Over the last twenty years, increasing access to records in Japan, Russia, and the United States has revealed that in the three days following the bombing of Hiroshima Japan's leaders had little idea that they had to surrender as a result of the bombings. (4) Meeting notes, diary entries, and the actions that various actors took during this period show that while Japan's leaders knew Hiroshima had been destroyed by a nuclear weapon, they saw this as another problem in an already difficult war, not a war-ending crisis. The Foreign Minister, Togo Shigenori, actually suggested convening the Supreme Council two days after the bombing of Hiroshima to discuss it and found he could not generate enough interest on the subject to get it on the agenda. When the Soviet Union, which had signed a five-year neutrality pact with Japan in 1941, broke that agreement and joined the war at midnight on 8-9 August, however, it touched off a crisis. Within hours of the news reaching Tokyo, the Supreme Council met to discuss unconditional surrender. It is clear from all the evidence now available that Japan's leaders surrendered because of the Soviet entry into the war and not because of the nuclear bombings. There are reasons to doubt the traditional story that the Emperor was horrified by the bombing of Hiroshima. The documentary evidence is thin, (5) and if the Emperor was so moved, it begs the question: why was he moved by secondhand reports of a city destroyed in August when he was not moved by driving through Tokyo and personally witnessing the devastation of that city in March? Would it not be sensible to expect that firsthand experience would have a stronger emotional impact than a secondhand report? (6) In some ways, this conclusion about Hiroshima makes sense. In order to believe that Hiroshima was the cause of Japan's surrender, it was necessary to believe that Japan's military men didn't know their business. …

Beyond the New Deal: The Postmaterialist Divide in Pennsylvania Presidential Elections

The values divide between materialists and postmaterialists, first identified by Ronald Inglehart, continues to define the evolution of partisan loyalties in the United States. Contemporary analysis of voting behavior within the White working-class incorporates the debate between a revisionist school that identifies a contemporary electoral battleground inverted from that of the New Deal era and a traditionalist school that maintains the class alignment established during the New Deal largely remains in effect. The following case study investigating voting behavior in Pennsylvania at the precinct level allows the application of empirical data to identify trends in partisan identity. The study concludes that there is significant evidence that the class loyalties as determinants of partisan attachment established by the New Deal have been superseded by values-driven imperatives. Accordingly, traditionally Democratic, materialist blue-collar constituencies in southwestern Pennsylvania have moved towards the Republican Party, while the opposite has occurred in the traditionally Republican postmaterialist white-collar constituencies of southeastern Pennsylvania. Given the underlying demographics, the Democratic Party has been the net winner from this transfer of allegiances.

Entre a natureza e o artifício: a concepção de nação nos tempos da independência

Como mostrou a literatura recente sobre a revolução da independência, a articulação de uma certa identidade nacional, contrariamente ao que afirmam as histórias nacionais tradicionais, não foi o ponto de partida senão o término final do processo de ruptura do vínculo colonial. E isso terá consequências historiográficas decisivas, posto que faz surgir a pergunta do que, então, o colocou em marcha. A chamada crítica "revisionista" abrirá as portas a esta pergunta só ao preço de declará-la insolúvel de antemão. A afirmação da persistência de imaginários tradicionais resulta em um ponto de vista da revolução como o resultado de uma série de acidentes, sem chegar a explicar porque os ditos acidentes tiveram as consequências que tiveram. Sem dúvida, alguma ideia de nação se encontrava operando então, posto que do contrário a vacância real não havia tido as consequências que teve. Definitivamente, pretender explicar tais sucessos sobre a base de um conceito de nação que, na realidade, só na segunda metade do século XIX receberia forma é um simples anacronismo; a negação da existência de toda ideia de nação (como se ela antes de mencionada fosse a única possível e verdadeira) também o é. À pergunta antes assinalada cabe então retraduzi-la do seguinte modo: que ideias de nação e autodeterminação puderam desenvolver-se no dito contexto político-intelectual e sem as quais não poderia haver se produzido o tipo de ruptura política que então se produziu; enfim, como pôde surgir a ideia de que os territórios americanos eram nações, e que puderam, portanto, reclamar direitos soberanos e autogovernar-se. O trabalho se propõe a reconstruir a série de deslocamentos político-conceituais que precederam a revolução da independência na América Latina e que, se bem que não a anteciparam, terminaram abrindo lugar para que esta se tornasse concebível.

Variations in Performances in Chinese Small and Medium Enterprises

Malaysia, like many developing countries, is encouraging local businesses to take greater role in the management of its economy. While incentives and deregulation measures are offered, variations in performances still persist. Researchers have long been interested in explaining the variance in firm performance, as even those firms operating in the same industry and in the same business environment show differences in performance outcomes. Numerous paradigms in the literature have been employed to explain the variance in business performance, including the Classical Industry Organisation, the Revisionist school, the New Industrial Organisation school, the PIMS paradigm, the Austrian school, and the Resource-based school. This paper investigates the combined effects of managerial characteristics of owners/managers and business strategy on the firm performance of Chinese small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Malaysia. Using multivariate relationship, the results of the study did not show any significant correlation between the managerial characteristics of the owners/managers and firm performance outcomes among the Chinese entrepreneurs. Nevertheless, a significant amount of variance in performance outcomes can be explained by firm strategy. Furthermore, several significant correlations were found between managerial characteristics and business strategy.