Revolutionary Life Research Articles

About the Contributors

About the Contributors

Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life by Albert Louis Zambone

Reviewed by: Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life by Albert Louis Zambone Vaughn Scribner Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life. By Albert Louis Zambone. (Yardley, Pa.: Westholme Publishing, 2018. Pp. xx, 376. $30.00, ISBN 978-1-59416-315-9.) In Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life, Albert Louis Zambone takes a fast-moving, narrative-driven approach to Daniel Morgan, an often overlooked [End Page 893] Revolutionary Virginian “of humble origins who wished to be recognized as a gentleman” (p. xv). In Zambone’s telling, Morgan’s life “amounts to an outline for how to get ahead in colonial America” (p. xvi). Morgan’s life was indeed an “outline” for white men’s success in an America defined by unfreedoms and inequality: he killed and displaced Native Americans for his extensive land-holdings in the Ohio Valley region; exploited the labor and firepower of African Americans in his bid for military prowess and genteel status; and continuously negotiated mercurial lines of hierarchy, gender, and honor during his scrabble to the top of Virginia’s powerful gentry. Curiously, however, Zambone pays little attention to the diversity of the American experience, and he does not engage with the equally diverse historiographical discussions surrounding Revolutionary America’s various peoples. African Americans receive sparse consideration in the story of a man who prospered in a region that relied on enslaved people for its economic success. Zambone mentions Morgan’s “agricultural wealth” as well as the sixteen enslaved black people in Morgan’s will, but the author misses several opportunities to dive into the contradictions between slavery and freedom with which Morgan—a man so dedicated to defending “honor as well as liberty itself”—must have grappled (pp. 14, 235). For instance, the thousands of African Americans who served with Morgan in the American Revolution go unmentioned, while Morgan’s decision to take two free black men as his permanent slaves after the victory at Cowpens, South Carolina, is noted without further analysis. Native Americans, furthermore, serve as elusive, violent characters. In the description of Morgan’s experiences in the French and Indian War, Natives are only present insomuch as they might cause the Virginia ranger “to be killed, wounded, or scalped” (p. 31). They disappear during the American Revolution, only to reemerge as the final obstacle to America’s “settlement of the Ohio valley . . . [and] all of Washington’s hopes for the future” of the region (p. 281). Never mind that Native warriors like Little Turtle and Blue Jacket had spent the last fifty years warding off British, French, and now American invaders—when the Ohio Valley tribes defended their land from General Arthur St. Clair’s forces in 1791, “[t]he fighting was savage” as one thousand Americans were caught in a “killing zone” just after they “had stacked their guns and lined up to get their morning meal” (p. 280). Zambone explains how the Native Americans executed all who were left behind (including an old friend of poor Morgan), capping off the description of St. Clair’s defeat with President George Washington’s rage-filled exclamations of his army being “‘hacked, butchered, tomahawked, by a surprise’” (p. 281). Nevertheless, Zambone provides a riveting account of Daniel Morgan’s raucous exploits. Chapters that delve into the minutiae of battles will delight fans of military history (his chapter on Morgan’s defeat at the siege of Quebec is quite well written). Yet, in tackling “the history of Morgan’s place and his era, particularly as it influenced him and others around him,” Zambone’s work leaves unanswered questions, especially regarding nonwhite actors, women (Morgan’s wife and daughters receive only brief mention), and deeper historiographical developments (p. xix). Morgan—apt to self-aggrandize with false claims such as “Old Morgan was never beaten!”—would have probably [End Page 894] preferred to ignore more unflattering investigations (p. 107). But this was necessarily Morgan: a man whom George Washington described in 1792 as “No head. Health gone. Speculator” (p. 282). Vaughn Scribner University of Central Arkansas Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Chính sách an sinh xã hội - tầm nhìn nhân văn sâu sắc trong tư duy chính trị của Hồ Chí Minh

Believe people, respect people, promote people is the philosophy of action throughout Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary life. All his life, he has only one desire - the ultimate desire: the people are independent, free, enhanced living standards, living conditions and quality of life both physically and spiritually. This desire has become a concern in Ho Chi Minh’s mind and become the concrete actions, the real work and more profoundly to become the clearheaded guidelines and policies. Typically, it is the policy of nursing people which is actually a social security policy. This has created a great power and effect to bring the Vietnamese revolutionary career from one victory to others. This article initially finds out the unique characteristics that show Ho Chi Minh’s strategic vision through his thoughts on social security policies.

Прошлое и настоящее в революционной повседневности М. М. Богословского (по материалам дневника историка)

Прошлое и настоящее в революционной повседневности М. М. Богословского (по материалам дневника историка)

Leninist Legacies and Revolutionary Life Histories in the Chinese Communist Party: A Plutarchian Case Study of Cai Hesen and Zhao Shiyan

This article explores the political influence of V. I. Lenin and the Russian Revolution on the lives of two Chinese revolutionaries: Cai Hesen (1895–1931) and Zhao Shiyan (1901–1927), who were critical to the early ideological development of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the spread of mass politics. A Plutarchian comparative case study of Zhao Shiyan and Cai Hesen provides a more nuanced view of the commonalities and differences in their youth group experiences, politicization in France, travel to the Soviet Union, political-agitation activities, and martyrdom. One of the key unifiers of these two life histories is the role of Lenin—his ideas and revolutionary practice. In addition to collected writings, archival materials, and memoirs, the article utilizes oral interviews conducted in 1985 and 1990 with relatives and friends of Cai Hesen and Zhao Shiyan and with CCP scholars.

When I Met Kathy Acker

When I Met Kathy Acker

USING OF HO CHI MINH’S IDEOLOGY ABOUT GREAT UNITY IN BUILDING THE NATIONAL GREAT SOLIDARITY TODAY

Solidarity is an important issue that President Ho Chi Minh paid special attention during his revolutionary life. He refers to this issue right from the first revolutionary propaganda articles and until he prepared to go far, in the “Testament”, Ho Chi Minh still emphasizes solidarity and great solidarity. Immersing Ho Chi Minh’s ideology on the great solidarity, considering it a red thread, through to gather forces fighting for national independence and building the country. For the past 88 years, the Communist Party of Vietnam has always applied flexibly his ideology of solidarity. The great turning points of the nation’s history since the Party established up to now, especially the achievements of the renewal process of country, especially the achievements in socio-economic development, deep, remote, difficult areas which proved the great vitality, the great power and theoretical and practical value of Ho Chi Minh’s ideology on the national great solidarity.

Deng Xiaoping: A Revolutionary Life, by Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. viii+610 pp. £22.99 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsDeng Xiaoping: A Revolutionary Life, by Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. viii+610 pp. £22.99 (cloth).Yen-Lin ChungYen-Lin ChungNational Chengchi University, Taiwan Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The China Journal Volume 80July 2018 Published on behalf of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/697613 Views: 90Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

A Revolutionary Narrative of European History: Bonneville's History of Modern Europe (1789–1792)

A Revolutionary Narrative of European History: Bonneville's <i>History of Modern Europe</i> (1789–1792)

Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution in Permanence: Its Significance for Our Time

How can Marx’s ideas help us with the problem of how to make new revolutionary beginnings in a time when the counterrevolution is ascendant, without losing sight of the need to prepare for the equally crucial question of what happens after the revolution? Capitalism has taken various forms as it developed, with the latest shaped by its endemic crisis since the mid-1970s generated by its falling rate of profit. Throughout these stages, the humanism and dialectic of Capital remain prime determinants of allowing Marxist responses not to stop at economic analyses but to release, rather than inhibiting, new revolutionary subjects and directions. Critical for the present moment is to take up Marx’s humanism and dialectic as crucial dimensions of his philosophy of revolution in permanence. This encompasses not alone the famous March 1850 Address to the Communist League, but also the full trajectory of Marx's revolutionary life and thought from the 1844 Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts through Capital to the new moments of Marx's last decade as expressed in his writings on Russia and his Ethnological Notebooks. We trace Marx's theoretical/philosophical concept of permanent revolution in a number of his writings, to confront how various post-Marx Marxists addressed or ignored this dimension of Marx's thought, and explore whether this concept can be seen as central to Marx's body of thought, and can assist in the dual task of needed revolutionary transformation – the destruction of the old (negation) and the construction of the new (the negation of the negation).

Immediate healing for personality development

Abstract Purpose of the treatment: Achieving immediate non medicinal effortless painless healing without complications. For personality development, relief of neurotic disease, psychosomatic symptoms and diseases, treating emotional obesity and smoking. Method: After joint analysis with Client and definition of psychological and physical goals of treatment, the healer as a trained behavioral, cognitive and logo psychotherapist arrives with client to a new corrected understanding of the case and roots of conflicts in childhood, taking around 2 hours, then in less than an hour performs non-verbal interpersonal hypnosis with transfer of energy and telepathy to client till deep sleep when he implants the required personality, ideas, emotions, motives and attitudes into the subconscious embodying the required state. The subconscious and conscious mind will have same agreed upon analysis and targets for immediate results in that session of 3 hours. Results: The healer got patent in Egypt 2016 for his discovery of the immediate healing for personality development and for mentioned purposes. Up till now treating more than 700 cases aging between 12 and 80 years with relief of more than 80% of cases either totally or mostly. Conclusion: Immediate non medicinal revolutionary life transforming healing for a wide spectrum of cases achieving higher grades of maturity, insight, harmony and efficiency saving client time, effort, interests and complications. Also used to maturate community leaders to be a trouble shooter model efficient leaders with team spirit.

Immediate healing for personality development

Abstract Purpose of the treatment: Achieving immediate non medicinal effortless painless healing without complications. For personality development, relief of neurotic disease, psychosomatic symptoms and diseases, treating emotional obesity and smoking. Method: After joint analysis with Client and definition of psychological and physical goals of treatment, the healer as a trained behavioral, cognitive and logo psychotherapist arrives with client to a new corrected understanding of the case and roots of conflicts in childhood, taking around 2 hours, then in less than an hour performs non-verbal interpersonal hypnosis with transfer of energy and telepathy to client till deep sleep when he implants the required personality, ideas, emotions, motives and attitudes into the subconscious embodying the required state. The subconscious and conscious mind will have same agreed upon analysis and targets for immediate results in that session of 3 hours. Results: The healer got patent in Egypt 2016 for his discovery of the immediate healing for personality development and for mentioned purposes. Up till now treating more than 700 cases aging between 12 and 80 years with relief of more than 80% of cases either totally or mostly. Conclusion: Immediate non medicinal revolutionary life transforming healing for a wide spectrum of cases achieving higher grades of maturity, insight, harmony and efficiency saving client time, effort, interests and complications. Also used to maturate community leaders to be a trouble shooter model efficient leaders with team spirit.

Philippe Girard. Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life.

Toussaint Louverture was an extraordinary historical figure in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World. Contemporaries and historians have compared him to George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1791, when the military campaign of the Haitian Revolution began, Louverture was numbered among its early leadership. By 1797, he became the general-in-chief of French armed forces in Saint-Domingue and the leader of the Haitian Revolution. Four years later, similar to Washington and Bonaparte, Louverture became the head of a government he had helped to establish. Upon learning of his death in 1803, American diarist Elizabeth Drinker lamented, “the celebrated African Chief, is dead” (Elaine Forman Crane, ed., The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker [1991], 3:1659). The English poet William Wordsworth offered an elegy for the fallen hero: “Thou hast left behind / Powers that will work for thee … There’s not a breathing of the common wind / That will forget thee” (“To Toussaint L’Ouverture,” 1803). Over fifty years after his death, according to Matthew J. Clavin’s Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War (2010), the image of the Haitian Revolution’s leader served as a resonant, polarizing symbol on both sides of the war that determined the fate of American slavery. Louverture’s was a revolutionary life in the midst of Atlantic revolutions.

The Black Bonaparte

Philippe Girard’s exhaustively researched book, Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life, is a reminder that even the greatest among us reflect the constraints of our own times.

Freedom, Power and the Crisis of Politics in Revolutionary Yemen

In the study of revolutionary events, it is often assumed that ‘political crisis’ attests to the failure of revolutionary ideals. Accordingly, revolution is understood as the pursuit of political consensus and the institutionalization of freedom and equality at the level of the state. In contrast, this article describes how, during the recent revolution in Yemen, revolutionaries actively negated proposals for a ‘political solution.’ It explores how the desire to contain power within the imaginary of ‘the people’ and safeguard revolutionary freedom produced instead an ethical charter for perpetuating a crisis of politics. As such, it argues that revolution should be understood less in terms of a seamless teleology of political development and more according to the immediate ethics of living a revolutionary life.

A dance on contrasting platforms: African tradition and revolutionary aesthetics in Esiaba Irobi’s plays

Igbo African tradition, characterised mainly by rituals and myths, has often been regarded as too codified and therefore a dead end of sorts, as M.J.C. Echeruo observes in his article “The dramatic limits of Igbo ritual” (1981). But Esiaba Irobi, in his plays of revolutionary aesthetics, decodes this and has practically given it limbs, sinews and all, breathing into it a Marxist revolutionary life. The result of this miscegenation of forms is a dramaturgy that is rich both in the African tradition and culture of songs, dirges, anecdotes, and the age grade system-propelled communal festivals of ritual sacrifice, on one hand, and the Marxist Brechtian revolutionary aesthetics, characterised by a dramatisation of what Frantz Fanon (1963: 255) sees as “the blood-thirsty tension fed by classes”, dialectics, and the alienation techniques on the other. In Esiaba Irobi’s Hangmen Also Die (1989) and Nwokedi (1991), we see this “blood thirsty tension” fully and boisterously, if psychoanalytically, dramatised. For what he presents in these plays is a psycho-dramatic portraiture of characters, especially disenchanted characters, bitterly going against their oppressors. These model “victims of the system”, as Francois Maspero (1980: viii) would say, have been driven to the fringes of reason by vicious and blindfolding oppression and they fight back sporadically and blindly at whoever they stumble on especially in Hangmen. But in Nwokedi they have matured into a visionary vanguard force, having realized the collective nature of the struggle to dislodge their oppressors. In the end, Irobi has literarily responded to Fanon’s (1963: 255) clarion call that “we must invent”, that “we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man”, while recognizing (and creatively appropriating) “the sometimes prodigious thesis which Europe has put forward.”

Haydée Santamaría, Cuban Revolutionary: She Led by Transgression

Haydée Santamaría, Cuban Revolutionary: She Led by Transgression

Lev Trotskii as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution

Iurii Georgievich Fel'shtinskii and Georgii Iosifovich Cherniavskii, Lev Trotskii. 4 vols. Moscow: Tsentropoligraf, 2012-13. 1: Revoliutsioner, 1879-1917 gg., 448 pp. 2: Bol'shevik, 1917-1924gg., 512 pp. 3: Oppozitsioner, 1923-1929 gg., 464 pp. 4: Vrag No. 1, 1929-1940 gg., 541 pp. (Lev Trotskii: Revolutionary, 1879-1917; Bolshevik, 1917-24; Oppositionist, 1923-29; Enemy no. 1, 1929-40). ISBN-13 978-5227037831, 978-522703829, 978-5227040640, 978-5227041548. Oddvar K. Hoidal, Trotsky in Norway: Exile, 1935-1937- 414 pp. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013. ISBN-13 978-0875804743. $39.95. Bertrand M. Patenaude, Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary. 384 pp. New York: Harper Collins, 2009. ISBN-13 978-006082068. $27.99. Joshua Rubenstein, Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary's Life. 225 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. ISBN-13 978-0300198324. $16.00. Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography. 656 pp. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. ISBN-13 978-0674036154. $35.00. Research for this article was conducted with the financial support of the Russian Foundation for the Humanities, Project no. 15-33-12016, Revolution of 1917 in the Historical Memory of Russian Culture. I would like to thank the Department Development Partnership Program of the European University at St. Petersburg for supporting my research and educational projects, Boris Kolonitskii for the idea for my title, and, for valuable advice, Alissa Klots, Liudmila Novikova, Igal Halfin, and Elizaveta Zhdankova. According to Soviet school textbooks, the Russian writer Lev Tolstoi, in the light hand of Vladimir Lenin, was known as the of the Russian Revolution. This metaphor was not entirely accurate, as Lenin was equally convinced that Tolstoi did not correctly reflect the revolution. In the same sense one may consider Lev Davidovich Trotskii (1879-1940) as an inaccurate mirror of the revolution, both an opponent of Lenin and his close associate. Attempts to write a biography of Trotskii that reflect the full complexity of his personality and political career have been undertaken since the 1920s. (1) The beginning of Trotskyana occurred during the lifetime of the international Marxist revolutionary, when in 1925 the brilliant writer Max Eastman, who had sympathized for some time with the Bolsheviks, published the first serious biography of Trotskii's youth. (2) In his memoirs, Eastman left vivid characterizations of Trotskii. (3) Together with the memoirs of Trotskii's wife and other people close to him, Eastman's portraits became one of the main sources of Trotskyana. (4) The others are the multivolume publication of Trotskii's documents from 1917 to 1922 preserved in the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam and the 14-volume collection of his essays, published by Trotskyists. (5) Among research on Trotskii, the most influential work for many years was Isaac Deutscher's trilogy about Trotskii the prophet. A supporter in the 1930s of the Fourth International, the Trotskyist alternative to communist and socialist internationalism, Deutscher later moved away from the Trotskyist movement. However, his trilogy demonstrated an interest in Trotskyism among societal and scholarly circles. (6) Deutscher's book had a great resonance--to a large extent because the author was able to get access to documents in the closed section of Trotskii's archive in Houghton Library (Harvard College Library), known as the Exile Papers. (7) Among other biographers of Trotskii, it is worth mentioning the former Communist Bertram D. Wolfe, the French historian-Trotskyist Pierre Broue, and works representing the trend of psychological history. (8) For a long time, the interpretation of Trotskii put forward by Deutscher remained the most influential, especially given the rise of revisionist historians and proponents of the linguistic turn and new cultural history showing hardly any interest in Trotskii. …

Women, Work, and Revolution: A Do-It-Yourself Practice

Through a study of images of women engaged in work both in and outside the home found in the Cuban magazine Mujeres during its initial decade of production, this article examines the magazine’s representations of labor as a means of fostering collective participation and loyalty to the new regime in post-revolutionary Cuba. Mujeres aimed to propagate images of women participating in revolutionary life to engender collective support for the Fidel Castro regime, which simultaneously reinforced and subverted existing gender stereotypes and, in the process, defined the new Cuban woman. In fact, the editors of Mujeres encouraged a do-it-yourself approach to household maintenance and care that prompted readers to embrace self-directed, creative design strategies as a component of their revolutionary activism.

Tricking Time, Overthrowing a Regime: Reining in the Future in the Yemeni Youth Revolution

Based on research at the heart of the 2011 revolution in Yemen, this article explores how a capacity to inhabit the future culminated in a collective act of temporal deception on the part of the revolutionaries. Contrary to the prevalent assumption that the future is something that is worked towards, aspired to, emerging or lying in wait at the end of a distant telos, revolutionary life in Yemen asserts that the future can itself be a way of being, but in the present. Upholding the future involved dramatic acts of selflessness whose value lay not just in where they would lead, but in the acts themselves. This fusion of means and ends, presents and futures, ultimately bred a capacity for endurance that defied the temporal expectations of the regime.