Standard Historical Narrative Research Articles

Herrman S. Saroni: Paths to Success as a Composer in New York, 1844–52

Herrman S. Saroni: Paths to Success as a Composer in New York, 1844–52

Looking beyond history: tracing the dispersal of the Malaysian complex of crops to Africa.

In his 1959 book, Africa: Its Peoples and Their Culture History, George P. Murdock suggested that a Malaysian complex of crops dispersed to Africa in ancient times across the Indian Ocean along the Sabaean Lane. The Malaysian complex comprised bananas, sugarcane, taro, three yam species, rice, Polynesian arrowroot, breadfruit, coconut, areca palm, and betel leaf. Except for rice, arrowroot, and potentially taro, most of these crops were domesticated in the Island Southeast Asia-New Guinea region, from where they dispersed to Africa. Our reassessment of agronomic, archaeological, classical, genetic, and historical sources shows that we need to go beneath standard historical narratives to recover a much more ancient and complex history of crop introductions to Africa. Despite considerable uncertainty and fragmented research, we were able to conclude that the Malaysian complex of crops did not arrive in Africa as a complete assemblage at one time or along one route. Multiple lines of evidence suggest that these crops arrived in Africa at different times and followed different pathways of introduction to the continent.

The Truman Show: The Fraudulent Origins of the Former Presidents Act

When President Donald Trump was impeached for a second time, many commenters pointed out that, if Trump were to be convicted by the Senate, he would likely lose millions of dollars in future taxpayer-funded benefits. These benefits are provided to ex-presidents by the Former Presidents Act, a 1958 statute of considerable political significance and ongoing controversy, that nevertheless has to this point been ignored completely by the legal academic literature. This Article represents the first sustained discussion of the FPA in that literature. It concludes that the statute should be revoked — and it centers its critique on the law’s until-now unrevealed fraudulent origins. Essentially the only argument ever put forward in either scholarly or popular discourse to justify the existence of the FPA is that it was passed as a response to former President Harry Truman’s financial struggles, and in particular because he refused to exploit his status as a former president to ameliorate them. Using recently released and until now unexamined archival evidence, this Article demonstrates that, in a complete contravention of the existing standard historical record, Harry Truman was, as a direct result of being president, a very wealthy man on the day he left the White House, with an estimated net worth, in relative economic terms, of approximately $58 million in 2021 dollars. The Article reveals that this wealth was a result of both Truman’s enormous presidential salary — several times larger, in real terms, than the current salary for the office — and, more problematically, of the evident fact that Truman misappropriated essentially all of the multi-million dollar — in 2021 terms — presidential expense account that was set up for him by Congress at the beginning of his second term. The Article also reveals that, again contrary to the current historical understanding, Truman made another fortune after he left the presidency, by doing precisely what he claimed he was not doing, that is, exploiting his status as a former president to maximum economic advantage. Indeed, by the time Congress passed the FPA in response to Truman’s various claims that he was at least teetering on the brink of potential financial distress, Truman’s net worth was, in relative economic terms, approximately $72 million in 2021 dollars. In a precise inversion of the meaning ascribed to it by the standard historical narrative, Harry Truman’s actual financial biography illustrates exactly why the Former Presidents Act has always been a bad law, that has never had any reasonable justification in public policy.

Mathematical formalization and diagrammatic reasoning: the case study of the braid group between 1925 and 1950

The standard historical narrative regarding formalism during the twentieth century indicates the 1920s as a highpoint in the mathematical formalization project. This was marked by Hilbert’s statement that the sign stood at the beginning of pure mathematics [‘Neubegründung der Mathematik. Erste Mitteilung’, Abhandlungen aus dem Mathematischen Seminar der Universität Hamburg, 1 (1922), 157–177]. If one takes the braid group as a case study of research whose official goal was to symbolically formalize braids and weaving patterns, a reconsideration of this strict definition of formalism is nevertheless required. For example, does it reflect what actually occurred in practice in the mathematical research of this period? As this article shows, the research on the braid group between 1926 and 1950, led among others by Artin, Burau, Fröhlich and Bohnenblust, was characterized by a variety of practices and reasoning techniques. These were not only symbolic and deductive, but also diagrammatic and visual. Against the historical narrative of formalism as based on a well-defined chain of graphic signs that has freedom of interpretation, this article presents how these different ways of reasoning—which were not only sign based—functioned together within the research of the braid group; it will be shown how they are simultaneously necessary and complementary for each other.

Gifts from Our Elders: African Artsand Visionary Art History

Gifts from Our Elders: African Arts<i>and Visionary Art History</i>

Plump or Corpulent? Lean or Gaunt? Historical Categories of Bodily Health in Nineteenth-Century Thought

Although “excess” weight today is usually associated with poor health, nineteenth-century classifications present an interesting historical puzzle: Physician concern with “corpulence,” on the one hand, was balanced by praise for “plumpness,” on the other. This is quite different from contemporary understandings of weight, where the focus is overwhelmingly on overweight and obesity. Through an analysis of nineteenth-century medical, health reform, and popular journals, I find that there was concern with weight on both ends of the spectrum—thin bodies and fat bodies were potential states of health, as well as illness, through the categories of plumpness, corpulence, leanness, and gauntness. In this way, body weight held multiple symbolic positions up until the early twentieth century when plumpness receded as a category of health. Such findings problematize the standard historical narrative of valued-to-stigmatized fatness, and suggest that the symbolic position held by body weight constitutes a more complicated phenomenon than previously believed.

Staging Migrations toward an American West: From Ida B. Wells to Rhodessa Jones

Staging Migrations toward an American West by Marta Effinger-Crichlow is a historical exploration of black women's migrations westward. Effinger-Crichlow describes the theatrical and everyday lived experiences of black female migrants to “expose the complexities of their struggles for sociopolitical emancipation” (p. 2). In the introduction Effinger-Crichlow defines the term migration by stressing the significance of the east-to-west movement of black women (as opposed to the standard historical narrative of the south-to-north migration) and how this migration helped establish the identity of the American West. For example, chapter 1 follows the travels of the journalist Ida B. Wells, who penned an editorial in 1892 about the lynching in Memphis of Thomas Moss. Witnesses claimed that in his final moments, Moss exclaimed, “Tell my people to go West—there is no justice for them here” (p. 19). Effinger-Crichlow quotes Moss's last words in relation to Wells's ironic west-to-east migration (since Wells had returned to the South from California by the time this lynching occurred). Using archival material, such as Wells's diary, Effinger-Crichlow uses Wells's travel patterns to support the argument that Wells “staged” her movements—thereby challenging the mythos of the American West (p. 40).

A Distinctive Quaker Theory of Knowledge: An Expanded Experiential Empiricism

While few Quakers have been academic philosophers, Quaker thought provides a distinctive way of understanding knowledge that does not fit easily within the standard historical narrative of Western epistemology. The standard historical narrative tells the story of the rationalism–empiricism debates in early modern philosophy, emphasising the triumph of empiricism, the rise of modern science and the establishment of the scientific method as the highest form of Western knowledge by the early twentieth century. From a scientific point of view, religion could no longer be properly regarded as a kind of knowledge, but ‘merely’ a matter of faith whose claims are seen as often coming into conflict with scientific understandings. The Quakers, however, have generally not regarded science and religion as being in conflict, and the reason is that they have generally grounded both their scientific and religious understandings in experience. The distinctive epistemology that emerges from Quaker thought can thus be desc...

Using the Educational Histories of Individuals to Complicate Standard Historical Narratives about Expanding Citizenship Rights and Opportunity

My History of Southern African American Education, 1865–Present class, a mid-level survey course, examines the history of education for African Americans in the South from Reconstruction to the twenty-first century. It draws a variety of undergraduate students, as it is cross-listed with the College of Education, Department of History, African American Studies Program, and the Institute of Southern Studies. We examine issues of power and privilege, and the ways that race, ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status interact with educational opportunities and achievement. A major objective is to help students understand the ways in which public education in the United States was shaped by competing economic, political, and ideological interests; this focus includes learning the ways in which schools reinforced and reshaped the larger society. Another objective is to use local, state, and regional educational issues to provide a background for understanding the history of education as well as patterns, trends, and changes in the larger historical narrative.

Richard II and the Unforgetting Messiah

Critics have long agreed that Shakespeare’s Richard II is deeply related to the Christian messiah, but they rarely think beyond a simple acknowledgment of the fact that Richard is a “Christ figure.” This essay argues that critics have failed to acknowledge fully Richard’s messianic character because they have operated without a fully informed theory of the messianic — a theory that questions the trustworthiness of standard historical narratives and narrative arcs. Richard’s analogical self-forgetting issues from a traditional theology handed down from Aquinas. A diverse set of writers — from Vida to Agamben — have described these modes of self-forgetting and analogy as the work of the messiah. This essay argues that Shakespeare deserves inclusion in this group.

The Christ-like Antichrists: Messianism in Sex Pistols Historiography

Typical accounts of punk locate “Year Zero” in 1976. Implying the death of an old order and the beginning of an entirely new epoch, punk discourses contain no shortage of grandiose claims about how punk permanently altered the course of not only popular music, but also the entire world. The standard historical narrative has come to resemble a mythology, with the Sex Pistols as the central figures responsible for instigating this transformation. Drawing upon the primary propagators of this narrative (Malcolm McLaren, Greil Marcus, and Jon Savage), and a contemporary portrayal of the Sex Pistols mythology in the film 24 Hour Party People, this article argues that a distinct strand of messianism marks the common historical narrative of punk. Walter Benjamin and Alain Badiou provide theoretical models for how scholars might recognize the intellectual consequences of this historiography.

Curious Intersections, Uncommon Magic: Steve Reich's It's Gonna Rain

1965 was a watershed year in the life of Steve Reich. Following numerous experiments with magnetic tape, he had, while creating his tape piece It's Gonna Rain, identified a fascinating process that would serve as the basic compositional tool of his output until about 1971, and as a foundational component of his output thereafter. l Reich's preoccupation with processoriented music in turn helped define a musical trend that shifted the standard historical narrative of twentieth -century concert music away from the reigning high modernist serialism of the 1950s toward minimalism. Defenders of the new style emphasize the cultural triumph of minimalism. For Susan McClary, minimalism is "perhaps the single most viable extant strand of the Western art-music tradition;" for K. Robert Schwarz, a specialist in this style, minimalism is "a potent force ... its influence is pervasive and enduring;" and for the composer John Adams, minimalism is "the only really interesting, important stylistic development in the past 30 years" (McClary 2004:289-98; Schwarz 1997:1-17; Adams quoted in Schwarz 1996a:177). These writers often attend to minimalism's programmatic reaction to the perceived structural complexities of high modernism with its ametric rhythms and pervasive intervallic dissonances. In contrast to high modernism, minimalism offered musical structures dearly audible to the listener; its rhythms were pulse-based, often elaborated in the context of extended repetition of short musical figures, and its pitch structures were simple, usually associated with, though not identical to, traditional diatonic constellations. Commentators may differ on the relationship minimalism takes to modernism-McClary argues in terms of a qualified Oedipal "reaction formation" to modernism; Wim Mertens argues in terms of a negative dialectical "final stage" of high modernism-but few commentators fail to situate high modernism as the central referent in describing the emergence of minimalism in music (McClary 2004:292; Mertens 2004:308). Whether the argument hinges on a theory of history beholden to Freud or one beholden to Hegel, modernism under these readings remains minimalism's basic condition of possibility. Most minimalist composers have themselves been outspoken about their aversion to certain forms of modernism, especially institutionalized

Hyperlinking History and Illegitimate Imagination: The Historiographic Metafictional E-novel

‘Historiographic Metafiction’ (HM) is a literary term first coined by creative writing academic Linda Hutcheon in 1988, and which refers to the postmodern practice of a fiction author inserting imagined--or illegitimate--characters into narratives that are intended to be received as authentic and historically accurate, that is, ostensibly legitimate. Such adventurous and bold authorial strategies frequently result in “novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” (Hutcheon, A Poetics 5). They can be so entertaining and engaging that the overtly intertextual, explicitly inventive work of biographical HM can even change the “hegemonic discourse of history” (Nunning 353) for, as Philippa Gregory, the author of HM novel The Other Boleyn Girl (2001), has said regarding this genre of creative writing: “Fiction is about imagined feelings and thoughts. History depends on the outer life. The novel is always about the inner life. Fiction can sometimes do more than history. It can fill the gaps” (University of Sussex). In a way, this article will be filling one of the gaps regarding HM...

Cultural Crossings in Prague, 1900: Scenes from Late Imperial Austria

Scenes of deep national division, competition, and conflictdominate standard historical narratives about the Austro-Hungarian monarchy during the late nineteenth century and most of its successor states in the 1920s and 1930s. Nationalist political movements flourished in this multicultural environment as capitalist agricultural and industrial development encouraged popular social ambitions and resentments over inequalities, while the advance of modern civil society and constitutional government provided public space for political movements. After the 1860s, political parties committed to nationalist interests increasingly dominated middle-class politics, and by 1900 national loyalties created growing fissures even in the ostensibly international Social Democratic movement. Some of the most intense nationalist social and political competition developed in the Crownlands of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia between Czech and German national interests. The Bohemian capital, Prague, became the stage for repeated mass nationalist demonstrations and rioting in the 1890s and after 1900 (see Figure 1).

The Forgotten Jurisprudential Debate: Catholic Legal Thought's Response to Legal Realism

Although countless journal articles and numerous books have described Legal Realism, The Forgotten Jurisprudential Debate: Catholic Legal Thought’s Response to Legal Realism, is the first to describe the widespread and thoughtful critique of Realism by an organized jurisprudential movement of Catholic legal scholars during the 1930s-1940s.In this Article, we accomplish three goals. First, we describe the standard historical narrative in which the contributions by Catholic legal scholars are ignored or marginalized. This gap is surprising because the critique offered by Catholic legal scholars constituted the single largest body of criticism aimed at Realists. This gap is doubly surprising because the arguments offered by Catholic legal scholars were generally thoughtful and nuanced, in large measure because they built on the world-wide Neo-Scholastic revival then taking place. Second, we detail the neglected Catholic legal scholars’ critique of Legal Realism. We describe the major Catholic legal scholars and how their movement drew upon, reflected, and facilitated the world-wide revival of Thomistic philosophy. Like other intellectual movements, Catholic legal scholars sought to institutionalize their movement in various ways. Third, we explore the oddness of historians’ neglect and marginalization of Catholic legal scholar contributions. We end by suggesting causes for the poverty of extant historical accounts.

The Origins of the Market for Corporate Control

This paper, which was prepared for a University of Illinois College of Law symposium honoring Prof. Larry Ribstein, examines the origins of the market for corporate control in the United States. The standard historical narrative is that the market for corporate control took on its modern form in the mid-1950s with the emergence of the cash tender offer. Using hand-collected data from newspaper reports, we show that there in fact were numerous instances during the opening decade of the 20th century where a bidder sought to obtain voting control by purchasing shares on the stock market. Moreover, share-for-share exchange tender offers were used to make takeover bids as early as 1901, and cash tender offers can be traced back to at least the mid-1940s. We argue that the way in which cash tender offers came to dominate the market for control after World War II can be explained primarily by changes in the pattern of share ownership and of the opportunities bidders had for managing the stock price of intended targets.

The Ghosts of Radicalisms Past: Allen Ginsberg's Old Left Nightmares

The Ghosts of Radicalisms Past:Allen Ginsberg's Old Left Nightmares J. Jesse Ramírez (bio) The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names . . . . Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte So it would be necessary to learn spirits . . . to learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts. . . . And this being-with specters would also be, not only but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx The Time is Out of Joint On a night in 1954, peyote-entranced allen Ginsberg gazed out the window of his apartment in San Francisco's Nob Hill district and beheld "a ferocious building . . . looming in the cloudy wisp fog" (Ginsberg, Journals 61). The building was the Sir Francis Drake, a luxury hotel at 450 Powell Street. A year later, during another peyote experience on the streets of San Francisco with his lover Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg saw the "smoking building in red glare downtown . . . again" (qtd. in Raskin 138). Spellbound, Ginsberg rushed inside the hotel where, in a cafeteria on the ground floor, he furiously wrote the opening stanzas of a new poem. The hotel appeared before the young, still unpublished poet in the form of a monster, a "Moloch" [End Page 47] that he shouted at, condemned, and even implicated in the death of a friend in the New York City subway: "Moloch! Molock! Whose hand ripped out their brains / and scattered their minds on the wheels of the subways?" (Howl 58). Ginsberg scribbled the lines at the foot of a draft of "Howl," establishing the visual and rhythmic base of what would become the second of its four parts. When Ginsberg read the first part of "Howl" just a month later, minus the still underdeveloped Moloch section, at San Francisco's Six Gallery, he launched his career as the most influential Anglophone poet since T.S. Eliot. But Ginsberg began backwards. For all the fame of its opening line—"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness . . ."—the historical and thematic core of "Howl" is not Part I, composed in August 1955, but the Moloch vision of 1954. On those surreal San Francisco nights, as fog descended and skyscrapers towered in the misty darkness, out of what historical alleyway did Moloch emerge? In this essay, I historicize Moloch and other apparitions for the sake of rethinking Ginsberg's mid-century poetry and the American cultural and social histories it has helped define. Despite a recent surge in secondary and primary source materials, from biographies to comic books to full-length films, Ginsberg and Beat Generation scholars are only just beginning to correct several common oversights that have hindered a full appreciation of the politics of "Howl" and several other major Ginsberg poems of the 1950s. Scholars have generally overlooked residual political and aesthetic forms in Ginsberg's early verse partly because their readings of the Beat Generation emphasize the Beats' irreverence toward the past, their eastern religiosity, and what Jack Kerouac called their "wild selfbelieving individuality" (32). According to the standard historical narrative, the Beats challenged the postwar Age of Consensus by dodging and denouncing all traditions in the name of personal liberty. The historian Christopher Lasch crystallized this widely held view when he wrote that "pastlessness" is the Beats' "very essence" (70). Accordingly, many commentators have portrayed Ginsberg's standpoint in the 1950s as fundamentally private, personal, and influenced not by the leftist movements of the 1930s and 1940s, but instead by jazz, black hipster subcultures, and idiosyncratic writers like Walt Whitman, William Blake, William Carlos Williams, and fellow Beat Jack Kerouac, among others.1 As Ben Lee notes, Ginsberg's and the Beats' hip, mystical individualism has been considered [End Page 48] political only in a futural sense (if at all): a rebellious structure of...

Collective memory in law and policy: the problem of the sovereign debt crisis

The idea of ‘collective memory’ features prominently in several disciplines but rarely in legal scholarship. Drawing on the work of Henri Bergson, Maurice Halbwachs and GWF Hegel, this paper seeks to present an account of collective memory that is relevant to discourse on law and policy. The paper uses the example of the policy response to the European sovereign debt crisis as a means of illustrating how collective memory of events in the distant past can shape individual behaviour and thinking. It argues that the current policy response can be explained, at least in part, by the influence on policy makers of the standard historical narrative of the Great Inflation of Weimar Germany. When, however, collective memory takes the form of Bergsonian ‘habit memory’, it can inhibit our efforts to resolve hard cases and the German government's opposition to the European Central Bank acting as a lender of last resort in the government bond markets neatly illustrates this point. If the debt crisis is to be managed effectively, policy makers must draw on Bergsonian ‘pure memory’ to explore the bounds of political and economic possibility.

Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty (review)

Reviewed by: Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty Lars Helgert Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty. By Gunther Schuller. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011. [xvi, 664 p. ISBN 9781580463423. $49.95.] Music examples, photographs, notes, index. Gunther Schuller's professional life has featured intimate involvement in a number of musical fields. As a performer (on horn) he has played with major orchestras and with important jazz artists. As a composer he is well known for writing works that combine aspects of classical music and jazz, although such works are only a part of his output. As an educator he has served as president of the New England Conservatory. He has also been active as a conductor, arranger, writer, editor, record producer, and advocate. This first volume of Schuller's memoirs covers the period from his birth in 1925 until approximately 1960. It begins with an introductory essay by Joan Shelley Rubin, "The Musician as Mediator," and a brief preface by the author. In the first two chapters, entitled "Childhood" and "Boyhood," Schuller discusses his early years before the beginning of his professional performing career as a teenager. The main focus of chapter 3, "Youth," is his time performing with the Cincinnati Symphony from 1943-45. An "Interlude" is followed by Chapter 4, "Encountering Jazz," which covers his early interest in jazz in terms of recordings and attendance at live performances. Chapter 5, "First Years at the Metropolitan Opera," highlights the initial portion of his fifteen-year tenure (1945-59) with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. Chapters 6 and 7 are concerned with "Plumbing the Depths of New York's Cultural Scene" and "Collecting Friends and Mentors" respectively. Chapter 8, "Great Years at the Met," describes Schuller's career as a classical musician, in both live and recorded performance, in the 1950s. Chapter 9, "The Third Stream," focuses on Schuller's professional interaction with several important jazz musicians. Chapter 10, "Re-encountering Europe," features discussion of selected Schuller compositions and accounts of his trips to Europe in the 1950s, including his presence at the Darmstadt and Donaueschingen festivals and his impressions of the music scene in Europe. The book concludes with fifty-seven pages of endnotes and an index. The endnotes are nearly always extensions of the narrative proper and only rarely involve secondary citations. Schuller's main source for this book is his memory, with some references to his diary. He does assume musical literacy on the part of his readers, but this will not overwhelm general readers. Since the volume ends around 1960, there is very little material on Schuller as a conductor, writer, or educator. There are numerous strengths to Schuller's autobiography. His description of his career as a professional classical performer in the upper echelons of New York's music scene gives the reader an interesting look at the life of a professional musician during the mid-century decades, providing valuable primary source material for scholars of twentieth-century American music. Also of importance to historians of classical music are Schuller's first-hand experiences of the concert culture in New York during the period in question. The descriptions of these experiences dispel myths in the standard historical narrative, add color to the biographies of other musical figures (including major conductors, composers, and performers), and enrich the reader's general knowledge of music history. Of significance to jazz scholars and jazz fans are Schuller's accounts of his interaction and professional collaboration with Miles Davis, John Lewis, Gil Evans, and other major jazz figures. These accounts are a contribution to the musical and social history of jazz. There is less material on Schuller as a composer than many readers would expect, but he nonetheless provides valuable insights into his work. Finally, Schuller is clearly an enthusiastic music fan in addition to being a professional musician, and this perspective will appeal to many different types of readers. Volume 1 of Schuller's autobiography is thus a fascinating look at the mid-twentieth-century American music scene from several different perspectives. I found the book's main weaknesses to be its excessive length and the frequent inclusion of details...

Hollywood Independents: The Postwar Talent Takeover , and: Hidden Talents: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents (review)

Reviewed by: Hollywood Independents: The Postwar Talent Takeover, and: Hidden Talents: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents Kathryn Fuller-Seeley (bio) Hollywood Independents: The Postwar Talent Takeover by Denise Mann. University of Minnesota Press 2008. $75.00 cloth; $25.00 paper. 334 pages Hidden Talents: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents by Tom Kemper. University of California Press 2010. $55.00 hardcover; $21.95 paper. 312 pages Two recent books revise standard historical narratives of the everyday workings and postwar dissolution of the Classical Hollywood studio system, reimagining how "the talent"—actors, directors, and writers, working with talent agents—carved out spaces for creativity, career advancement, and political commentary in the contested realm of the studio factory floor. Hollywood Independents: The Postwar Talent Takeover and Hidden Talents: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents show the cracks in the studio edifice that allowed such small maneuvers and how the turbulent breakup of that system created the conditions for a new independent cinema. Both books strive to create continuities between the old studio system and economic, creative, and ideological realities of today's [End Page 173] Hollywood. Mann reframes the collapse of the old Hollywood as the beginning of the bifurcation of studio-dominated production into protoblockbusters and art cinema in the 1950s. Kemper recovers the behind-the-scenes labor of talent agents in the 1930s as a vital component of the studio system that secured more creative input and control for actors, directors, and writers, and that significantly helped the Hollywood system function more efficiently. Agents gained in potential importance as producers and economic and creative power-wielders as industrial changes started to snowball in the 1940s. Both studies create a historical context for their stories that combines economic, institutional, ideological, and aesthetic analysis. Mann examines the climate of independence of Hollywood's post–World War II period, and how the changed industrial structure impacted films produced outside the direct creative control of the studios. She focuses on entrepreneurial new producers (who had been directors and actors) who made art-influenced films that "still relied on studio financing and distribution and which played in mainstream theaters."1 She analyzes a group of big-business-themed films to provide "a tangible means of exhuming evidence of the types of internal debates and subtle negotiations about the state of the industry" that later filmmakers of the 1970s New Hollywood would take for granted.2 Some historians recount the Hollywood studio period after 1946 as a tumultuous but dreary affair of panic and decline; they are clearly anxious to move on to the Holly wood renaissance of the 1970s. The first third of Mann's narrative, on the other hand, revels in the battles facing Hollywood on a rapidly changing industrial playing field. She lays out a spirited, cogent account of how the changes caused by the 1948 Paramount decree sundering the studios' control of exhibition, combined with postwar demographic changes, the rise of the feared rival television, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities political trauma, collectively delivered knockout punches to the studio status quo. Mann brings together industrial analysis, cultural history, ideological battles, and movie industry trade paper tirades in order to frame the reorganization of studio management by the new generation of corporate talent agencies as a liberating but destructive force. Lew Wasserman of the Music Corporation of America is no entrepreneurial hero here but, rather, chief exemplar of the greedy, grasping invaders who only sought profit and control, not artistic creativity. The balance of Hollywood Independents takes a more traditional Film Studies approach to the topic by undertaking close readings of films about big business and mass media—from The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (Nunnally Johnson, 1956) and The Hucksters (Jack Conway, 1947) to Executive Suite (Robert Wise, 1954)—that were produced by a small group of actors and directors who fought to become their own producers in the evolving industry. These films, which comment on the struggles between business and artistic needs that filmmakers found themselves in, are cynical exposés of the abuse of media power and the hypocrisies abundant in the changing media marketplace where film, television, public relations, talent, magazines, and gossip collided. [End Page 174...