Senior Historians Research Articles

Ferenc Andai. In the Hour of Fate and Danger.

Ferenc Andai. <i>In the Hour of Fate and Danger</i>.

No Ordinary American Girl

Research Article| February 01 2021 No Ordinary American Girl: A Peek into the Creation of Civil Rights Girl, Melody Ellison Mark Speltz Mark Speltz Mark Speltz is a Senior Historian with Wells Fargo’s Family and Business History Center in San Francisco, California. He worked as a historian at Pleasant Company/American Girl from 2000–2017 and is the author of North of Dixie: Civil Rights Photography Beyond the South (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2016).The author would like to express his deep gratitude to the journal editors, Sarah Case and James Brooks, and special issue guest editor, Lisa Jacobson, for their interest in this piece and support along the way. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (2021) 43 (1): 123–137. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2021.43.1.123 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mark Speltz; No Ordinary American Girl: A Peek into the Creation of Civil Rights Girl, Melody Ellison. The Public Historian 1 February 2021; 43 (1): 123–137. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2021.43.1.123 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe Public Historian Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The Regents of the University of California and the National Council on Public History2021 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Introduction: The Ocean and the Historian

I feel singularly privileged to write the introduction for the first of two special JIOWS festschrift editions honouring Michael Pearson’s contributions in the field of Indian Ocean studies. My association with Mike goes back to 1979/80 when I met him at the University of Viswabharati, where my mentor Ashin Dasgupta was working with him on an edited volume devoted to the history of India and the Indian Ocean. This was a time when as a young graduate student, I was being exposed to the hotly debated and discussed sub-field of maritime history. Several senior historians questioned the need to study maritime history outside the general frame of Indian economic history, by then an established field of enquiry, driven primarily by the agrarian question, poverty and the drain of wealth paradigm. I recall how, in course of my apprenticeship, I read a range of writings that looked at Asian trade and commercial exchanges that, although written largely out of European archives, dared to tell a very different story to the dominant one of European commercial and military hegemony. This was long before the heady debates of globalization, of Asia before Europe or indeed of the world system thesis that had entered the field; instead, we were chewing over the critiques of the peddler thesis put forward by Van Leur, and of the uncritical endorsement of colonial perspectives on Asian trade embodied in the writings of scholar administrator W.H. Moreland. It was here that Pearson and Dasgupta gave us the vital tools of our trade, to look beyond the official voices in the archive, to search for private adjustments and compromises that had so much more to say about the messy world of commercial and social transactions where to look for Weberian rationality or pure economic determinism was chasing a mirage.

The Legacy of Dawn Mabalon: Preserving Little Manila in the Heart of California

Research Article| May 01 2019 The Legacy of Dawn Mabalon: Preserving Little Manila in the Heart of California Stacey Anne Baterina Salinas, Stacey Anne Baterina Salinas stacey anne baterina salinas is Senior Historian for the Bulosan Center of Filipinx Studies and a PhD history student at UC Davis. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Allan Jason Sarmiento Allan Jason Sarmiento allan jason sarmiento is the archivist for the Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies and is a public historian with an emphasis in archival management, historic preservation, and oral history. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2019) 96 (2): 121–126. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2019.96.2.121 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Stacey Anne Baterina Salinas, Allan Jason Sarmiento; The Legacy of Dawn Mabalon: Preserving Little Manila in the Heart of California. California History 1 May 2019; 96 (2): 121–126. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2019.96.2.121 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCalifornia History Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2019 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Los Últimos Años de Fernando el Católico, 1505–1517, by Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada

Both within Spain and internationally, the years between the death of Queen Isabella of Castile, in November 1504, and that of her husband Ferdinand, in January 1516, has tended to be glossed over by historians. Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, who may be regarded as Spain’s most distinguished senior historian of the period, here sets out, with his usual meticulous scholarship, to give a much more complete picture than has been available hitherto of those turbulent years in Iberian, and general European, politics and society. Ladero’s scholarship has always been firmly based on a wide range of original sources, and this book is no exception. Political history is combined with a detailed treatment of Spain’s economic system and political structures in the period. While the author modestly states that this is not the place to look for a full account of the religious and cultural history of this time of political upheaval and transition, in fact he does effectively cover the crisis caused by the activities of the Spanish Inquisition, as well as the working out, mainly in the case of Ferdinand, of the concept and reality of Renaissance monarchy.

African American Civil War Veterans: Historical Documentation and Preservation In Cemeteries

BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 80, NO. 2 | 27 80 No.2 AFRICAN AMERICAN CIVIL WAR VETERANS: HISTORICAL DOCUMENTATION AND PRESERVATION IN CEMETERIES By Sarah Lane Within eyesight of my grandfather’s US Navy plaque was a large field with a few dilapidated headstones. This was the historical “colored section” of Washington Cemetery.TherewerenobrightUSflags.Thisdidnotconvey messages of honor or thankfulness from the community for the service of African American veterans. African American veterans in cemeteries across the nation have lacked deserved recognition. Not only is this disparaging to the African American community and families of veterans, but also, without correction, it passes on division among future generations. In the Civil War, over 200,000 African American soldiers and sailors served in the US Army and Navy.1 They served in 163 units that mainly fell under the moniker United States Colored Troops (USCT). Units of African American soldiers began forming as early as 1862. African American Civil War soldiers were given inferior equipment and low pay, and the highest achievable rank was sergeant major.2 However, African American soldiers and sailors held to their determination to fight the chains of oppression; twenty-one-year-old private Samuel Cabble wrote, “I am a soldier now and i shall use my utmost endeavor to strike at the rebellion and the heart of this system that so long has kept us in chains.”3 Despite their bravery and determination, historically, African American Civil War veterans were not fully recognized, and many of their histories have gone untold. Over 150 years after the Civil War, this discrepancy has begun to be addressed through local and national efforts. I had the privilege of being a part of Paul LaRue’s Research History course at Washington High School in Washington Court House, Ohio. The goal of the course was to bring to light little-known history, with a focus on African American history. Some of the most meaningful work I engaged in was researching and documenting the histories of African American veterans buried in local cemeteries. Prior to my arrival in the course, a 2002–2003 class installed a new row of headstones, called Soldier’s Row, for most of the African American Civil War veterans in Washington Cemetery. This was the unattended area I described earlier; now the headstones for African Americans who served in the Civil War stand upright, with flags and proper honors. There is an Ohio historical marker located there (with text written by students) that includes a quotation by USCT veteran Albert Bird, “We have suffered to save the Country; we ought to be remembered.”4 We engaged in similar work in Beech Grove Cemetery near Cincinnati, Ohio. We did not need to take a trip to Gettysburg; there was untold history in our local community cemeteries. In Beech Grove Cemetery, we were actively conserving the history of African American veterans. I was part of a group who documented as many headstones as possible via photograph, leading to the creation of a digital map of the cemetery. My peers and I hoped to spark even greater change and recognition for these soldiers. Carl Westmoreland, senior historian at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and a representative from the Ohio Department of Veterans Services, visited our class. Imagine the difference that can be made if more teachers took the initiative to engage students in documenting and recognizing the contributions of African American veterans. Nationally, similar history documentation and recognition work is being done, including efforts by the National Park Service (NPS). Overall, African American heritage and history continues to be recognized, documented, and honored throughout NPS sites and programs. In 1991, an African burial ground (used in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries) was discovered in New York City. An African Burial Ground National Monument was erected, and in 1993 it became a National Historical Landmark.5 The National Park Service’s efforts have also focused on the documentation and recognition of African American Civil War veterans. In 1997, the Spirit of Freedom statue, also known as the African American Civil War Memorial, was created. It has a wall of soldiers’names and is located in Washington, DC.6 The NPS provides a Civil...

Crime, Truth, and Justice in Modern Mexico: Notes for a National History

With this lecture by Pablo Piccato, The Americas continues its collaboration with the New School for Social Research to publish its annual Lecture in Latin American History. The series features lectures by senior historians in the field of Latin American history across an array of topics. This is the fifth in the series.

The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age

Cybernetics - the science of communication and as it applies to machines and to humans - originates from efforts during World War II to build automatic anti-aircraft systems. Following the war, this science extended beyond military needs to examine all systems that rely on information and from the level of the cell to that of society. In The Cybernetics Moment, Ronald R. Kline, a senior historian of technology, examines the intellectual and cultural history of cybernetics and information theory, whose language of information, feedback, and control transformed the idiom of the sciences, hastened the development of information technologies, and laid the conceptual foundation for what we now call the Information Age. Kline argues that, for about twenty years after 1950, the growth of cybernetics and information theory and ever-more-powerful computers produced a utopian information narrative-an enthusiasm for information science that influenced natural scientists, social scientists, engineers, humanists, policymakers, public intellectuals, and journalists, all of whom struggled to come to grips with new relationships between humans and intelligent machines. Kline traces the relationship between the invention of computers and communication systems and the rise, decline, and transformation of cybernetics by analyzing the lives and work of such notables as Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Warren McCulloch, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Herbert Simon. Ultimately, he reveals the crucial role played by the cybernetics moment-when cybernetics and information theory were seen as universal sciences-in setting the stage for our current preoccupation with information technologies.

More than hot: a short history of fever

Christopher Hamlin's magisterial work engages a common experience-fever-in all its varieties and meanings. Reviewing the representations of that condition from ancient times to the present, More Than Hot is a history of the world through the lens of fever. The book deals with the expression of fever, with the efforts of medical scientists to classify it, and with fever's changing social, cultural, and political significance. Long before there were thermometers to measure it, people recognized as a dangerous, if transitory, state of being. It was the most familiar form of alienation from the normal self, a concern to communities and states as well as to patients, families, and healers. The earliest medical writers struggled for a conceptual vocabulary to explain fever. During the Enlightenment, the idea of became a means to acknowledge the biological experiences that united humans. A century later, in the age of imperialism, it would become a key element of conquest, both an important way of differentiating places and races, and of imposing global expectations of health. Ultimately the concept would split: were dangerous and often exotic epidemic diseases, while fever remained a curious physiological state, certainly distressing but usually benign. By the end of the twentieth century, that divergence divided the world between a global South profoundly affected by fevers - chiefly malaria - and a North where fever, now merely a symptom, was so medically trivial as to be transformed into a familiar motif of popular culture. A senior historian of science and medicine, Hamlin shares stories from individuals - some eminent, many forgotten - who exemplify aspects of fever: reflections of the fevered, for whom fevers, and especially the vivid hallucinations of delirium, were sometimes transformative; of those who cared for them (nurses and, often, mothers); and of those who sought to explain deadly epidemic outbreaks. Significant also are the arguments of the reformers, for whom stood as a proxy for manifold forms of injustice. Broad in scope and sweep, Hamlin's study is a reflection of how the meanings of diseases continue to shift, affecting not only the identities we create but often also our ability to survive.

History and Gender

History and Gender Joyce Antler (bio) Gerda Lerner had a remarkable career as a public intellectual. No historian is more identified with the field of women’s history, which Gerda wrote about prolifically in a series of books that have had extraordinary influence in conceptualizing the field. Even a cursory glance at the titles of her works indicates that Gerda’s work as a historian has been broad and deep, not only focusing [End Page 16] on her primary subject, the history of American women, but branching out in time and place to include bold new syntheses of ideas using sources from antiquity, Western Europe, and other societies. In the Origins of Patriarchy she charts the emergence and development of patriarchy over more than two millennia of Western civilization. “I write to find out what I know,” Gerda wrote in the introduction to her autobiography, Fireweed. “I write to give form to chaos.”11 Those instincts communicated the deepest layers of her thinking to an engaged audience. Another trait that marked Gerda’s contributions as public intellectual is her abiding concern with the world around her. The title of her last book says it succinctly—Living with History/Making Social Change. In her introduction Gerda explains why she wrote the book: I want to show how thought and action have been connected in my life; how the life I had led before I became an academic affected the questions I asked as a historian; how the social struggles in which I engaged as an academic woman informed my thinking. … I want to trace how feminist teaching led to the development of “outreach” projects that influenced a large number of people, far beyond the reach of the academy.12 For Lerner activism and history came together. “I think whatever contributions as a feminist theoretician and thinker I have been able to make,” she wrote in Fireweed, “derive from my life experience, including my life as a Communist, my experience of persecution, and above all, my life as a grass roots organizer.”13 In the late 1940s and early 1950s, before she came to the study of history, Gerda was active in the Congress of American Women, a Marxist group interested in economic and consumer issues. She also participated in several events with the Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women, clubs that were composed of radical Jewish women, many of them avowed Communists, who worked on behalf of civil rights, peace, and a myriad of political issues. Throughout the 1950s Gerda worked in support of the United Nations and peace; in the early 1960s she successfully blocked the construction of the Ravenswood nuclear power plant in Long Island City. During these years she actively supported civil rights for African Americans. One of the opportunities to probe the connections between Gerda’s activism and scholarship and her distinctive background as Jewish refugee came for me in the early 1990s, when as director of Brandeis’s Women’s Studies Program, I invited Gerda to speak at a conference on the subject of US Jewish women’s history, the first of its kind. The intention of the conference was to explore questions concerning the narrative of American Jewish women’s history. [End Page 17] Did Jewish women have a significant history distinct from that of the Protestant majority? (At this point in time some senior historians posited that they did not.) To what extent did it meld with mainstream or minority narratives? How was this history influenced by diverse aspects of region, education, class, religion, race, sexuality, culture? Gerda was the first person I called as I began to plan the conference. I asked if she would give the keynote talk, perhaps focusing on the connections between her identity as a Jew and her work as a historian, specifically as a historian of women. Gerda was not happy with the question, and quite unceremoniously, she hung up. But fifteen minutes later she called back. She said, first, that she had “never given it a moment’s thought,” but second, that this was one of the most profound questions she ever had been asked. The question prompted her to reflect on a connection she had hidden...

Jejak-jejak Imperial dalam Beragam Nasionalisme Asia Tenggara

Anthony Reid, Imperial Alchemy: Nationalism and Political Identity in Southeast Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2010), xiii + 248 pages.Reid has long been widely known as a senior historian with a specialty in the history of Aceh, Sumatra, and the Indonesian revolution. Recently, he has begun to write about the history of Southeast Asia. Inspired by French historian Fernand Braudel, this work presents what Reid calls a “total history” of this region. In this approach wars, royal dynasties, and foreign traders are not prioritized over the diets, health, and pastimes of ordinary people. Through this work, Reid has begun to strengthen the study of Southeast Asia. As one of the pioneers and masters of the study of Asia and the Pacific, particularly Southeast Asia, Reid is uniquely positioned to offer new insights about this region’s history. In this book, Reid offers a new understanding of the historical data collected on the link between ethnic identity, nationalism, and history of Southeast Asia.DOI: 10.15408/sdi.v20i3.516

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Remembering Michael S. Mahoney

Michael S. Mahoney, professor of the history of science at Princeton University, died in 2008. Born in 1939, Mahoney was already a seasoned historian of mathematics when he became one of the arst senior historians to take an interest in the history of computing. He was by no means the arst: for example, individuals such as I. B. Cohen at Harvard University and Derek de Solla Price at Yale University had been interested since the 1960s. Moreover, several institutions were already actively engaged: the Smithsonian Institution, the Charles Babbage Institute (founded 1979), the Computer Museum in Boston, and similar organizations in Europe. A journal, the Annals of the History of Computing, was established in 1979. However, Mahoney’s unique mission was not so much to do the history of computing, as to see it done well. The collection of papers on the history of computing, admirably edited by Thomas Haigh, stands as a memorial to Mahoney. It is arranged in three categories which effectively deane Mahoney’s contributions to the discipline: the shaping of the history of computing; constructing a history of software; and the structures of computation. Haigh has provided an excellent, and by no means uncritical, commentary on the collection. In this essay, I will follow Haigh’s organization.

Reply to Westman:

The question of the Copernican Question is whether, in arguing its thesis, Professor Westman met the standards of argument and evidence expected of a senior historian. In my review I pointed to problems in reasoning and translation pertinent to an answer.In response, Professor Westman gives further specimens of his reasoning and describes his botched translations as “peccadilloes.” Had I known that he was writing in Peccadillo, I would willingly have expressed the admiration his performance deserves. When judged on the permissive Peccadillian principle, Tant pis tant mieux (in ordinary English, “never mind, so much the better,” in high Peccadillo, “Aunt feels better since she’s been to the toilet”), much of Professor Westman’s reasoning and most of his translations are faultless.

"Those Who Labor for My Happiness": Slavery at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello by Lucia Stanton (review)

Those Who Labor for My Happiness: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. By Lucia Stanton. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Pp xiv + 369. Paper $24.95.)Reviewed by Frank CogitanoIn January 2012 the Smithsonian Museum of American History mounted an exhibition, Slavery at Jefferson's Monticello: Paradox of Liberty. The exhibition was jointly sponsored by the Smithsonian's nascent National Museum of African American History as well as the Thomas Foundation, which owns and operates Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home, as a museum. The exhibit focused not only on what thought and wrote about slavery but, more importantly, on the experiences of Jefferson's slaves - he owned approximately six hundred persons over the course of his long life.The exhibition received rave reviews and attracted large crowds. When I went to see it on a Sunday in February, it was crowded and the visitors moved slowly through the galleries, examining each artifact and carefully reading the descriptions and commentary. There was a great deal of hushed conversation as families and friends sought to address the questions raised by the exhibition. As Edward Rothstein wrote in his review in The New York Times, Jefferson didn't just embrace the new nation's ideals; he gave voice to our conception of 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.' What does it mean that such a man not only held slaves but also devoted considerable attention to their status, their mode of life and, yes, their profitability? What was the connection between his ideals and the blunt reality? These are not just biographical questions; they are national ones.1It is no exaggeration to say that we would not be able to address such questions and the exhibition would not have been possible without the scholarship of Lucia Stanton, the recently retired Shannon Senior Historian at Monticello. Her major publications on slavery at Monticello are gathered in this important collection. Cinder Stanton worked at Monticello for nearly three decades. During that time she acquired an unparalleled knowledge of Jefferson's life and times, particularly the operation of Monticello as a working plantation. Together with James A. Bear she edited Jefferson's Memorandum Books, the daily record of Jefferson's financial transactions that he kept for more than six decades.2The Memorandum Books are replete with information about Jefferson's day-to-day life including his management of the enslaved persons that he owned, hired, and sold. Building on her intimate knowledge of Jefferson, Stanton led the way as Monticello began to confront the reality of slavery in Jefferson's life in the 1980s. It has been a long road, culminating in the exhibition at the Smithsonian and the recent dedication of a permanent exhibit on slavery at Monticello's Mulberry Row. These developments reflect the path-breaking scholarship published in this collection.Stanton's first major publication on the subject was 'Those Who Labor for My Happiness': Thomas and His Slaves, an essay that she wrote for a collection marking the 250th anniversary of Jefferson's birth in 1993. While a generation of scholars had taken to task for the hypocrisy of holding slaves while extolling human equality, this essay was (and remains) a revelation for its focus on the people held as slaves rather than on Jefferson's dilemma as a slaveholder. …

The Pace of Manumission among Quakers in Revolutionary-Era North Carolina

*Michael J. Crawford holds the doctorate in history from Boston University and is the author or editor of fourteen books, including The Having of Negroes Is Become a Burden: The Quaker Struggle to Free Slaves in Revolutionary North Carolina, and Seasons of Grace: Colonial New England’s Revival Tradition in Its British Context. He is the senior historian of the U.S. Navy’s Naval History and Heritage Command in Washington, D.C. The Pace of Manumission among Quakers in Revolutionary-Era North Carolina

The politics of China studies in South Korea: A critical examination of South Korean historiography of modern China since 1945

This paper argues that the South Korean scholarship on modern Chinese history since 1945 can be characterized as apolitical with its objectivism, positivism, liberalism, and anti-communist nationalism. This characteristic is a product of not only the Cold War and the military regimes of South Korea but also the political orientation and stance of the senior historians who played an initial and decisive role in determining the goal, direction, and research methods of South Korean studies concerning modern China. The South Korean perspective they promoted usually meant the study of liberal, apolitical topics in Chinese history from a nationalist perspective without any political/ideological influences. The utility of modern Chinese history has mainly lain in helping to construct an anti-socialist, modern Korean nation–state through modernization. South Korean historians of modern China, the paper argues, have not been able to induce a meaningful, broad discussion of critical historical issues in modern China as they might pertain to South Korean society, thus failing to utilize them to help challenge and transform the undemocratic South Korean society and regimes. Hence, the future success of new academic undertakings since the 1990s by South Korean historians will be determined by whether or not they are able to make a radical break from the previous scholarship, in particular, from its objectivism and nationalism.

Victors in Blue: How Union Generals Fought the Confederates, Battled Each Other, and Won the Civil War (review)

Reviewed by: Victors in Blue: How Union Generals Fought the Confederates, Battled Each Other, and Won the Civil War Wesley Moody (bio) Victors in Blue: How Union Generals Fought the Confederates, Battled Each Other, and Won the Civil War. By Albert Castel. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011. Pp. 374. $34.95 cloth) Albert Castel, best known for his seminal work Decision in the West (1992), has once again made a positive contribution to Civil War historiography. Victors in Blue tells the story of the generals who won the Civil War. Each man he discusses has had at least one biography, the majority wrote postwar memoirs, and the battles he details have all had numerous pages written about them. What makes Castel's work unique is that he examines how the generals who reached the highest ranks of the Union command made it there. It is a story of politics, rivalries, and, of course, war. What Castel shows is that to understand how Ulysses S. Grant became the top Union general at the end of the war or how a man who won great victories like George Thomas gets left behind, you have to look at the whole picture. The sometimes overly simplistic narrative of Grant's rise to the top, that he simply kept winning, does not stand under the close scrutiny that Castel gives it. There are numerous factors that Castel examines. Grant had to overcome a commanding officer who did not like or trust him. His victories at Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Fort Donelson could have been career enders had there not been other events over which he had no control. Castel demonstrates the common-sense argument that one cannot understand the career of a man like Grant or any other Civil War [End Page 593] general without putting him in the context of his allies and rivals. Castel uses published sources almost exclusively. He uses the generals' memoirs, published collections of letters, and what other historians have written. That, however, is to be expected in this kind of work. Castel is offering a new way to look at oft-examined events and that does not necessarily involve finding long-forgotten sources in dusty archives. What Castel has done is to take well-researched puzzle pieces and fit them together into an interesting picture. Castel might be criticized for concentrating purely on the generals of the North when he could have been writing about the common man and social movements. That is, after all, out of fashion. His arguments successfully counter such criticisms. He shows that the decisions of a handful of men, sometimes based on purely personal or political reasons, had a profound effect on millions of people and the future of this nation. Victors in Blue is the work of a senior historian who not only tries to give the reader a new way of looking at a well-trodden subject but also offers us his opinions accrued from decades of writing and research. In those opinions, there is plenty of material to spark debates and controversy. His argument that Rosecrans was one of the great generals of the war and that only bad luck and poor relations with his superiors kept him from being the senior general at the end of the war is sure to spark debate. He is also rather harsh on Sherman and Grant, showing that so much of their success had little to do with their military skill but with good luck and events outside of their control. He also offers an interesting evaluation of Halleck, arguing that Halleck's career stalled simply because Lincoln did not understand the role of a chief of staff. Lincoln expected him to take personal command of the Army of the Potomac in addition to his responsibilities to all Union forces. Castel's work is extremely well written and entertaining. It is one of those rare books that can be enjoyed by the novice and yet still offer a great deal to the professional. [End Page 594] Wesley Moody Wesley Moody teaches history at Florida State College at Jacksonville, Florida. He is the author of Demon of the Lost Cause: Sherman and Civil War History...

The having of Negroes is become a burden: the Quaker struggle to free slaves in revolutionary North Carolina

Adds an important sharpness to a cloudily understood aspect of American history. Crawford helps bring Quaker history into the mainstream of a larger context, providing a compelling narrative of a region, a community, and a fascinating individual.--Emma J. Lapansky-Werner, Haverford College. A thorough and often extraordinarily eloquent collection of documents from the struggle over emancipation and African-American freedom in the age of revolution.--Jon F. Sensbach, author of Rebecca's Revival. Michael Crawford presents the compelling story of colonial manumission movements among North Carolina Quakers in this illuminating volume. Embedding complete primary documents within the context of his own interpretive analysis, Crawford effectively shows how the consequences of this group's antislavery activism radiated out from a few individuals to the region, the state, and, eventually, the nation. Students and scholars will be able to draw their own insights from the important documents presented in The Having of Negroes Is Become a Burden, many of them obscure or recently discovered. Through diaries, petitions, legislative debates, and letters, well-known as well as unknown players in the struggle for manumission are allowed to tell their own stories in their own words. This approach has the effect of highlighting the personal motivation of figures both prominent and obscure in the movement. Michael Crawford is senior historian of the Naval History and Heritage Command. He is the author of thirteen books, including Seasons of Grace: Colonial New England's Revival Tradition in Its British Context.

The Impact of the Holocaust in America: The Jewish Role in American Life: An Annual Review, Volume 6 (review)

The Impact of the in America: The Jewish Role in American Life: An Annual Review, Volume 6, edited by Zev Garber. W. Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press for the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life, University of Southern California, 2008. 230 pp. $25.00. Not long ago I was present at a meeting of scholars at Yad Vashem discussing contemporary research among graduate students and young lecturers. Almost none of them are actually dealing with the these days, sighed one of the senior historians, himself a survivor. they study history, they write about the impact of the after the war. If they study memory, then they usually choose something about representation in the arts. And if they deal with comprehension then they end up writing about post-Holocaust philosophy, theology or education. No one deals any more with the actual event which brought about the impact, the memory, the philosophy or the education! he moaned. Although all of us present understood and empathized with what he was saying a few reminded him that it wasn't only the lack of knowledge of European languages or the difficulty of traveling for long periods to archives throughout Europe that was drawing scholars towards topics of post-war impact and aftermath. And it wasn't only young scholars who were drawn towards these topics. Every Man is close to Himself, states the author of Ecclesiastes, and so, many scholars were drawn to writing about their present, the impact of the on the world in which they lived in the recent past and in which they live today. This choice in no way diminishes the importance of the or detracts from its horror; instead it provides an additional perspective to the tremendous depth and scope of its impact, showing how it continues to affect various aspects of our lives today in countries far away from the killing grounds or even those who had been under Nazi domination. The most recent volume of the Casden Annual Review, The Impact of the in America, is an excellent example of this phenomenon. Ten articles, most of which were based on papers delivered at the Association of Jewish Studies conference held in San Diego in 2006, provide the reader with a broad vista of topics, all related to how the major Jewish cataclysm of the twentieth century affected various areas of thought, action, education, media, economy, theology, sociology, and history in the United States. Although all the articles are worthy of note, I will focus on three which were of particular interest to me and I think are especially deserving of further discussion. The first is Beth Cohen's excellent analysis of the survivor's first years in America. Based on the research for her book on the subject, Case Closed, Cohen paints a vivid picture of what life was really like for some of the 140,000 European Jewish who resettled in the United States between 1946 and 1954. Citing poignant case studies of families who were brought from Europe to the United States during the immediate post-war years, Cohen depicts the complex and often multifaceted process through which refugees became new Americans. It would still take years before they could be identified publicly as Holocaust survivors, she shows us, and meanwhile, to their American-Jewish relatives, to the organizations that cared for them, and to the Jewish community in general they were often just poor refugees, some with severe emotional difficulties which they were unable to overcome in the war's aftermath. Cohen paints a very different picture than that described in most existing studies regarding the life of survivors in America, primarily because she concentrates on the immediate post-war years, those in which various survivors who came to America were still quite far from being success stories. …