Traditional Political History Research Articles

Big Bend National Park: Mexico, the United States, and a Borderland Ecosystem. By Michael Welsh

Formed by one river and an already humongous 800,000 acre park, part of the rugged ecosystem spread across two countries with their shifting priorities and fluctuating relationships in a remote and arid landscape, the greater Big Bend area, long dreamt for united recognition and management. We write this review as longtime NPS employees, one a historian, and the other a landscape architect who acquired park knowledge as he worked on Sierra Club service trips for eighteen years, removing fences and planting vegetation to counter overgrazing. Each chapter details different eras and the vacillating prospects for a truly binational park in Michael Welsh’s traditional political history based on his several administrative histories. We recommend this book for people interested in the complexities of park management who are already acquainted with this park and for people interested in the many-decade efforts to establish a binational park/protected area over the larger area bisected by the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo.

Nikolaus Leo Overtoom. “The Power-Transition Crisis of the 160s–130s BCE and the Formation of the Parthian Empire”

The article discusses the rise of the Parthians to power over large territories in the Middle East at the expense of their Seleucid rivals. The author borrows a framework from International Relations theory, namely (Offensive) Realism, to place the actions of the Parthian kings, in particular Mithridates I in their wider geo-political environment. While the resulting account is rather close to a traditional (positivist) political history, the explicit reference to political science theory all...

El oficio del historiador y las nuevas formas de hacer historia: De la teoría a las prácticas

El siguiente artículo intenta precisar algunos aspectos metodológicos, conceptuales y temáticos que delinearon el desarrollo de la investigación y la ciencia histórica a partir de la segunda mitad del siglo XX, época en la que se tomó conciencia de la necesidad de comprender desde las ciencias sociales todos los ámbitos de la actividad humana y de superar las barreras trazadas por la historia política de corte tradicional. Este movimiento de renovación se concretó en la corriente historiográfica conocida como la historial social, un enfoque que echó mano de las nuevas formas, objetos de estudio, teorías sociales y fuentes de información, replanteando el modo como se investiga el pasado, considerando el estudio de otros actores sociales y de los diferentes fenómenos que implican la vida en comunidad. En la parte final del artículo se reseñan tres investigaciones que ilustran el interés de los historiadores por los “otros” temas que, como la enfermedad o los estereotipos femeninos, llamaron la atención de la historia social.

Emancipación y guerra en el Río de la Plata, 1840-1865: hacia una historia social de las relaciones internacionales

Las causas de la guerra grande o guerra del Paraguay (1864-1870) han sido discutidas desde el final de ésta y continúan siendo objeto de polémica entre los historiadores. En este artículo analizo la relación entre la coyuntura política brasileña y el proceso de abolición de la esclavitud en Uruguay entre las décadas de 1840 y 1860. Pretendo argumentar que la presencia de individuos esclavizados y de terratenientes y dueños de esclavos brasileños en territorio uruguayo afectó las relaciones internacionales entre los países de la región de la Plata en el siglo XIX, contribuyendo fundamentalmente en el crecimiento de las tensiones que llevaron al inicio de la guerra. Más allá de este argumento, al utilizar documentos y métodos típicos de la historia política tradicional y de la historia social, también busco defender la pertinencia del análisis de las relaciones internacionales a partir de la perspectiva de la historia social. Así, pretendo demostrar que los fenómenos de tránsito de individuos por las fronteras, de la fuga de esclavos, de la violencia del reclutamiento de ejércitos y milicias uruguayos y brasileños y de los ataques a las comunidades de negros libres y libertos ocurridos en este periodo tienen una importante dimensión internacional, cuya comprensión es fundamental para el entendimiento de los orígenes de la guerra del Paraguay.

The American President: From Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, by William E. Leuchtenburg

Reviewed by: Stephen J. Randall, University of CalgaryThe American President is a striking example of the best of traditional political history, written by one of its leading practitioners. Leuchtenburg in his 95th year has provided readers of American history with a brilliantly argued, thoroughly researched, and elegantly written overview and penetrating analysis of the ways in which the American presidency has evolved since the end of the nineteenth century, and the contributions (or lack of same) which from Theodore Roosevelt to William Jefferson Clinton have made to the office. Other scholars have provided outstanding studies of individual presidents, but there is no equal to the detailed synthesis which Leuchtenburg has written of the 17 men who occupied the office between 1901 and the end of the Clinton presidency. It is particularly auspicious that the volume ends with Bill Clinton, since at the time of writing this review Hillary Rodham Clinton has just failed to be elected as the first woman to hold the presidential office.Leuchtenburg makes a compelling case that an analysis of is an effective way to understand American history. In his words: twentieth-century America was significantly shaped by its presidents (xiv). Many social and economic historians might dissent from the argument that themselves are such significant factors in shaping history, but such differences among historians do not detract from the excellence of the arguments presented in this volume.Leuchtenburg's treatment of the is balanced, judicious, and critical where criticism is warranted. His main focus is on the two Roosevelts, Harry Truman, Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton. Franklin Roosevelt's remarkable tenure in office warrants 100 pages of analysis, as do Reagan's and Clinton's. Leuchtenburg presents Theodore Roosevelt as the first of the modern presidents, a man who as president had a Hegelian conception of the primacy of the state (37), and used the office as a bully pulpit to advance his goals and vision. He had a patrician's disdain for the nouveaux riches of his generation, but it was his determination to ensure that the executive office had primacy that greatly determined his efforts to curtail the power of business. Roosevelt's vigorous use of presidential power further influenced Woodrow Wilson's evolving perception of the office. Wilson brought innovation to the office, including addressing joint sessions of Congress and, initially at least, holding press conferences. Although he preferred domestic to foreign affairs, he demonstrated a willingness to use American military power, and like Roosevelt before him, projected American power and prestige abroad. He anticipated the later interpretation of the Supreme Court in US v. Curtiss Wright: that in the area of foreign policy the power of the president was virtually unlimited. It has been in foreign policy and national security that presidential power came to be exercised most dramatically in the course of the century.Leuchtenburg passes lightly over the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover years, portraying their approach to the presidency and its powers as a regression to a pre-Theodore Roosevelt generation. The stock market crash and the deepening depression which brought Franklin Roosevelt to office in 1933, however, marked a dramatic advancement in the way in which the president used his office, from mobilizing public opinion through fireside chats, flooding Congress with legislative initiatives in the first hundred days, or--less nobly--trying unsuccessfully to pack the Supreme Court in order to advance his legislative agenda. …

Stéphane Durand, Arlette Jouanna, and Élie Pélaquier. Des États dans l’État: Les Etats de Languedoc, de la Fronde à la Révolution.

Dazzled by the brilliance of Alexis de Tocqueville’s L’ancien régime et la Révolution, scholars have been reluctant to challenge the traditional political and administrative history of France, which has long been dominated by the thesis of centralization, with the monarchy gradually tightening its grip over the provinces. Central to that interpretation was the role of the intendants, who acted as modernizing agents confronting the parochial and frequently self-interested opposition of their provincial subjects. That model continues to find adherents, but it has always possessed an Achilles’ heel in the form of the pays d’états, those provinces that had preserved functioning provincial estates where the administration remained firmly in local hands. To be fair to Tocqueville, he was well aware of the flaw in his argument, and to avoid disrupting his compelling narrative, he had the good sense to write what was, in effect, a separate essay in the form of an appendix discussing the administration of the largest pays d’état, Languedoc. In their enthusiasm for the alluring paradigm of centralization, generations of subsequent historians tended to ignore the warning contained in that appendix and to gloss over the continued existence of provincial estates, which they treated as little more than medieval relics. Thanks to the works of, among others, James B. Collins, Marie-Laure Legay, and Jérôme Loiseau, that interpretation has been substantially revised. Far from appearing moribund, the provincial estates in Artois, Brittany, and Burgundy, in particular, remained vibrant, often innovative, and highly acquisitive of new powers and responsibilities, especially in the eighteenth century, when they began to look more like the administrative future in the eyes of would-be reformers than the increasingly unpopular intendants.

Social history, (Neo-)revisionism and mapping the 1930s Spanish left

Revisionist historians and their Neo-Revisionist/conservative fellow travellers identify the Spanish left as the main cause of the civil war (1936–1939) that culminated in the establishment of the Franco dictatorship. Such claims are possible because these historians distort both the history of the left and the nature of social protest and mass mobilisation during these years. In part, the reliance of Neo-Revisionist/conservative historians on the methods of traditional political history – combined with their stubborn aversion to social history – makes it impossible for them to understand the left. This article argues that only through social history is it possible to comprehend the complex and shifting nature of protest dynamics in the 1930s. Indeed, many of the conflicts that played out in the political arena during these years were conditioned by structural economic problems and social tensions that resulted in diverse forms of radical contestation among the grassroots of leftist movements. Social, and indeed cultural history, are, therefore, central to any analysis of the myriad forms of these protest energies that flowed from the bottom up to shape the orientation of the leftist organisations.

Making Space: Sufis and Settlers in Early Modern India by Nile Green

Reviewed by: Making Space: Sufis and Settlers in Early Modern India by Nile Green Hunter Bandy Making Space: Sufis and Settlers in Early Modern India by Nile Green, 2012. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, xvii + 339 pp., photos, Rs.795, £27.50. isbn: 978-0-19807-796-1 (hbk). India’s many Sufi shrines produce a unique historical consciousness attuned simultaneously to local and distant Muslim states. Tracing influences and cross-pollinations between aesthetic, conceptual, and material institutions, Nile Green’s Making Space: Sufis and Settlers in Early Modern India deftly intertwines pre-colonial political history, Sufi hagiography, and the architectural development of shrines as sites of temporal and epistemic power. The Sufis he portrays from Iran, Central Asia, and the Middle East settled in various Indian geographies since the late-medieval era and imported unique visions of ethnic, linguistic, and devotional origins that became integral components of the dynamic matrix of Indian Muslim governance. Ignoring their internal historical consciousness, or impact on the political culture of the Bahmanid, Mughal, and Deccan imperium would mean to misunderstand the sources of Indo-Muslim power that rested in trans-regional and multiethnic polities bound to mystical brotherhoods. The rise of network studies has affected how we conceive of disciplinary and archival purity, and Green’s analysis of the Indian context draws together sources that may typically be pursued separately by social historians, scholars of religion, Persian, and Urdu literature. Instead, Green puts forth an analysis that is focused on the very marble walls of the shrines of Khuldabad, and simultaneously, imbricated within a mélange of metaphors for what, and for whom, that space mattered. This union of ‘text and territory’ in Green’s analysis works to locate histories and concepts in contested spaces, buildings, lands, and trade routes that reproduced the legends of Muslim presence across generations. His central argument holds that the tomb of the Sufi saint of early modern India acted as an ‘enduring spatial anchor’ that made the present Indian landscape replete with a material and narrative archive of distant [End Page 228] homelands and origin stories that animated religious and cultural life for emergent Muslim settler communities. For instance, Green describes how the Chishtī and Naqshbandī Sufis of the Deccan met to study the hagiographic texts of their pious ancestors from Sultanate Delhi and Timurid Khurasan and Transoxiana. Green considers this discursive remembrance a product of the texts themselves, which circulated and brought together the old communities with the new, not only through their unique historical contours, but also through the formalism of prose models that inspired commentaries among later generations. While traditional political history may envisage these territories erecting a sovereign’s flag after official military conquest, Green’s analysis demonstrates how the enduring hallmarks of piety, memory, and devotion ebb and flow despite the fissures of dynastic rise or fall. Emphasizing this point, Green expounds on the higher status, either real or symbolic, that many Sufi saints held above Muslim rulers. Mughal political theology articulated a conjunction of diverse religious practices, not the least of which incorporated shrine visitation. Bābur (d. 1530), like his Delhi Sultanate predecessors, continued the longstanding tradition of recognizing saints like Niẓām al-Dīn Awliyāʾ (d. 1325) as symbols capable of bolstering temporal power. Through importing these holy men from Iran and Central Asia, to performing circumambulation of their tombs, and establishing capital cities in the shadow of Sufi shrines, Mughal political theology flourished under pious blessings either offered or indirectly appropriated from these saints. Green astutely points out how the borrowing of insignia, titles, and investiture ceremonies between the royal court and Sufi tomb (dargāh) enabled the idiom of mystic brotherhoods to permeate the political sphere, which analogized Mughal emperors like Akbar to Sufi masters. Composed in eight chapters, all but Chapter 2 has appeared in an earlier published form. Making Space does not assume a linear progression through historical time. Rather, the chapters are organized thematically and point towards Green’s longstanding research into Sufi shrines with much emphasis on those in and around Aurangabad and Khuldabad in contemporary Maharashtra. Green’s prose tends to dis-locate a particular Sufi text or shrine in time...

Gender Matters

Gender Matters Lesley J. Gordon When I arrived at the University of Georgia to start graduate school in the fall of 1989, I consciously labeled myself a Civil War “military historian,” who would at all costs avoid courses in women’s history or gender. I earnestly believed that such classes (and the professors who taught them or students who took them) had little to teach me; I wanted to focus on generals, soldiers, campaigns, and grand strategies, and I assumed there was no connection to women or gender in any of these topics. I also supposed (although it took me a while to consciously recognize this fact), that prominent Civil War historians—mainly older, white men—would not take me seriously if I showed any interest in questions of gender. This charade seemed to work pretty well until I began my doctoral program. My narrow focus was unsustainable, and I began to realize that I needed to open my mind to the important and exciting approaches scholars of gender and women’s studies offered. Things really began to break as I became exposed to germinal works by Catherine Clinton, Joan Cashin, Carol Bleser, Nina Silber, Elizabeth Leonard, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, LeeAnn Whites, George Rable, Drew Gilpin Faust, and Jean Freidman, among others. Then one day, when I was already ABD, a new female professor, Miranda Pollard, at UGA took me aside and urged me to audit her course, “Gender Matters.” For the first time, I read Joan Scott, Judith Butler, bell hooks, as well as poststructural theorists, [End Page 441] and began to reassess many of my basic assumptions about history. I think it is safe to say that gender theory enabled me to grow as a scholar more than any other type of history—yet I steadfastly remained (and continue to call myself) a Civil War military historian. These scholars also forced me to think about my own identity as a Jewish, white woman in a field still predominantly perceived as masculine and white (and Protestant Christian). Although there are increasingly more women and more voices of diversity in our field, I think that image, and the public’s expectation of it, has endured: Civil War historians should be white (middle-aged) males. This simply has not changed. Over the past five years, as editor of Civil War History, I’ve been pleased to see the variety and breadth of scholarship in the hundreds of article submissions we have received and read. Although recently there has been alarm expressed over the perceived dearth of traditional military history, traditional political (especially antebellum) history seems to be thriving. However, at Civil War History, we have received very few submissions by women and even fewer on topics related to gender (by men or women). This concerns me on many levels. As the first and for now only female editor of this journal in its sixty-plus years of existence, I regret that during my tenure, I could not do more to attract and encourage female authors. As we reflect on the significance and place of Mary Elizabeth Massey in the historiography, it is clear that we need more; more scholarship that builds on her pioneering efforts; more scholarship that continues to explore the effects, implications, and consequences this conflict had on all women; and more scholarship that grapples with the broader societal concepts of gender. Copyright © 2015 The Kent State University Press

Introduction: Irish sports history

Sports history as a discipline in Irish academia has had a long gestation. Perhaps this was inevitable, considering that a substantial move away from the study of traditional political history and ...

Культура повседневности провинциального города: Казань и казанцы в ХIХ–ХХ веках by Е. А. Вишленкова, С. Ю. Малышева, А. А. Сальникова (review)

Reviewed by: Культура повседневности провинциального города: Казань и казанцы в ХIХ–ХХ веках by Е. А. Вишленкова, С. Ю. Малышева, А. А. Сальникова Serhy YEKELCHYK (bio) Е. А. Вишленкова, С. Ю. Малышева, А. А. Сальникова. Культура повседневности провинциального города: Казань и казанцы в ХIХ–ХХ веках. Казань: Издательство Казанского государственного университета, 2008. 452с., илл. ISBN: 978-5-98180-622-3. Well-illustrated books on local history occupy pride of place in the bookstores of most major Russian and Ukrainian cities. There is an interesting phenomenon at work here that deserves separate analysis: Is this new antiquarianism a sign of resistance to grand narratives or a consequence of their acceptance? Either way, modern urbanites’ interest in detailed accounts of their cities’ past coincides luckily with the history profession’s move into the history of everyday life (istoriia povsednevnosti), particularly in urban history. Why studying the history of everyday life has become such a prominent field in post-Soviet states is in itself an important research question. In the introduction to their excellent book on Kazan, the three authors speak in more general terms of the field’s transition from political history recording the deeds of “great men” and from social history that concentrates on societal processes to a cultural-historical focus on individual experiences. This statement, however, refers to trends in global historical scholarship rather than to the specific post-Soviet situation. One could argue that the Soviet historical profession did not practice social history as such and that mainstream post-Soviet historical scholarship reverted to traditional political history, if not to the “great men” theory of history. In such a context, scholars working on the history of everydayness go against the prevalent trends. They commit themselves to reconstructing the lived experiences of ordinary people, which may not fit well into any of the grand narratives and would be difficult both to access and analyze. The historians of Russian everydayness also need to play methodological catch-up: by taking a crash course in modern Western social history, cultural history, and microhistory before advancing to a meaningful study of everyday life. Otherwise, the everydayness they find may be simply descriptive and not tell us anything significant about the people and society in which they lived. Vishlenkova, Malysheva, and Salnikova are perfectly aware of the theoretical and methodological traps awaiting historians of Russian everydayness. Working closely with students also helped the authors to structure the book wisely. The authors did not simply test parts of [End Page 570] the manuscript in the classroom, but also incorporated the results of student class assignments in the form of interviews with family members – a perfect synergy between teaching and research. The book’s origins in a course also explain the authors’ decision to include in Chapter 1, which examines the theory and method of “provincial everydayness,” Alf Lüdtke’s essay on “What Is the History of Everyday Life?” almost in its entirety. The themes raised in this famous text are not really developed in the book, but reading it does provide a helpful reminder that Western history of everyday life was born out of neo-Marxist social history, a field that post-Soviet historians could find vaguely familiar. It is difficult to put this book down, both because the authors write exquisite prose and because Kazan is such a fascinating subject. A major university city described by many travelers and memoirists, it was nevertheless the epitome of “provinciality,” and the authors rightly interpret it as such, except that provinciality in this case does not imply deficiency, but difference. Unlike the two Russian capitals, Kazan preserved its multicultural character over the centuries without ethnic strife and was never a major center of the Bolshevik Revolution. Indeed, it preserved the old city layout well into the age of modernity, the distant suburbs finally coalescing into a contiguous city space only in the 1960s. In a book that is rich in fascinating detail and covers almost two centuries of a big city’s life, sustaining any consistent, general argument would have been difficult. The authors of this book spell out their general theoretical vision of Kazan’s everydayness. They believe that in the nineteenth century the everyday lives of different strata remained largely “segregated” (obosoblennye, P. 9) and thus are best studied one by one. In contrast, Soviet everydayness was considerably more homogeneous, if fast-changing, and therefore was best suited to a chronological study as a unified phenomenon. Such a distinction...

The characteristics and trends of historical writing in the People’s Republic of China since 1978

The December 1978 decision at the third plenary session of the eleventh central committee of the Chinese Communist Party to implement reform and opening-up marks an important watershed in historical studies in contemporary China. With this in mind, historical studies in contemporary China can be conveniently subdivided into three periods: the period from the founding of the People’s Republic of China to the start of the Cultural Revolution (1949–1966); the Cultural Revolution period (1966–1976); and the period starting with reform and opening-up, or the “new period” (1978 onwards). This paper gives a comprehensive survey on historical writing in the People’s Republic of China since 1978. The paper has three parts. The first is about how and why Chinese historians have turned away from traditional political history to cultural and social histories. The second part analyses four paradigms in contemporary historical research in China: the revolutionary history paradigm, modernisation paradigm, postmodern paradigm and global history paradigm. The third part reviews world history studies in China and lists four methods that have successively been employed, namely total/integral history, modernisation history, the history of civilisational exchange and global history. The paper concludes that it is incumbent on Chinese historians to be sensitive to all foreign historiographies while steadfastly adhering to the best Chinese traditions, for only in this way can a unique and worthy model of Chinese historiography emerge.

Roman History

This being my first attempt at writing the Roman History subject review, some kind of comment on the nature of the field as illustrated by this issue's crop of books seems appropriate. Firstly, the paucity of books focusing on the period of the Roman Republic is striking, especially if Cicero is taken out of the equation; the Imperial period clearly dominates, though the study of Late Antiquity (in which I must declare an interest) is still clearly on the rise. In terms of subject matter, traditional political history is obviously still largely out of fashion, religion is on a roll and the ‘cultural turn’ continues its rise (again I declare an interest), but the economy is making a late comeback (thanks to the formidable industry of the Oxford Roman Economy Project). This issue's collection offers a healthy mix of genres: biographies, student textbooks/sourcebooks, edited volumes, ‘companions’, and substantial monographs, including both revised PhDs and the reflections of more seasoned scholars, books for specialists and novices alike. I shall be interested to see how the balance of both subject matter and methodology appear in future issues.

Ghanaian Traditional Women Leaders and Sustainable Development: The Case of Nadowli Districts in Northern Part of Ghana

The unequal power relations between men and women in modern political administration have implications for sustainable development and specifically, under representation of women in traditional institution’s decision making process also have effects on traditional governance. Most traditional authorities in Africa and to be specific are made up of both male and female leaders, however a close examination of the traditional political history of the Dagabas of Northern Ghana reveals that women traditional leaders have played less significant roles as compared to their counterparts in the south. This is due to some endemic cultural perception of the position of women in public life. Consequently, sensitization and training programmes to empower these women leaders have been made by governments and civil society groups to include them in the governance system and structures of the country. In spite of these efforts the results are low. The extent to which culture plays a role in determining the effects of such efforts is the focus of this paper. It does so by examining the roles, achievements and challenges of contemporary traditional women leaders in Ghana using Nadowli district as a case study. Primary and secondary data were collected and data analysed qualitatively. The women play educational, political and economic roles using the training skills learnt. However, their challenges reflects on their level of achievements which is very low. This demonstrates that cultural belief systems play a role in the impacts of women traditional leaders’ contributions to nation building.

Late Slavery and Emancipation in the Greater Caribbean

The profession of academic history is going through one of its periodic reorientations, although it is doing so more gradually and with less blood on the floor than in the past. When the “new” social history displaced traditional political and economic history in the 1970s and when the cultural and linguistic turn of the 1980s became manifested in different kinds of history written in the 1990s, controversy over new ways of doing history was intense. The controversy is less now but the change in focus is just as significant as in more heralded redirections. The hegemony of cultural history—so prominent in the last twenty years—and the dominance of historical explorations of identity, be it racial, gendered or class-inflected, has been supplanted, if gently, by a renewed emphasis on institutions, especially those related to the making of empires and nations, and by an abiding concern with borders, boundaries and movement in, between and over such boundaries. To an extent that must seem surprising to people used to history written according to the tenets of cultural anthropology and literary criticism, as was fashionable until the last decade, historians are increasingly fascinated in this new century by how people in various periods of the past

Religión, Política E Identidad En La Independencia de MéxicoIndependencia Y Revolución: Pasado, Presente Y Futura

Religión, Política E Identidad En La Independencia de MéxicoIndependencia Y Revolución: Pasado, Presente Y Futura

Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (review)

Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic. By Rosemarie Zagarri. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Pp. 233. Cloth, $39.95; Paper, $22.50.)Reviewed by Simon P. NewmanFrom quite different vantage points, historians such as Susan Branson and Catherine Allgor have done a great deal to illuminate women's political activities in the early republic. Branson showed elite and some middling women participating in the cauldron of popular political activity in the excited revolutionary ferment of the 1790s, while Allgor demonstrated how leading women politicized the domestic sphere in early national Washington, creating a new and highly significant political arena.1 Their work has informed our understanding of women and politics by broadening our definitions and understanding of just what comprised political activity, from wearing pro-French Revolutionary bonnets and cockades to leading Washington women's salons. Perhaps because of this, what might be termed traditional political history continues to pay little attention to the work produced by Allgor, Branson, and others in the wake of the ground-breaking books published by Linda Kerber and Mary Beth Norton in 1980.2 Many historians chronicling the political history of revolutionary and early national America continue to regard women as wholly separate from the actual business of politics, and thus conclude that women can justly be excluded from their histories of political parties and the processes of local and national politics.Rosemarie Zagarri's Revolutionary Backlash furnishes a powerful and successful challenge to such conclusions, by reuniting the concerns of political and women's historians. Primarily concerned with exploring why the revolution changed so little for women, and why so many women were - by the late 1820s and the early 1830s - apparently willing to accept their exclusion from the public political sphere, Zagarri's answer provides the book's title and its compelling theme. It is her contention that men and their political parties orchestrated a severe, sustained, and successful counterrevolutionary backlash against women's political activities and identities, a backlash that succeeded in justifying women's exclusion from public political roles to such a degree that many women accepted without question private and domestic roles for themselves and their daughters. Perhaps what is most exciting in this book is Zagarri's strong sense of the revolutionary possibilities of the 1790s and early 1800s, and the ways that women were challenging the very assumptions and practices of politics. Progress ended only when political parties moved to restrict political activity to white men, slamming the door on women and effectively delegitimating a generation of female political activity.This argument places Zagarri at odds with Whiggish interpretations of American women's history that have assumed a revolutionary-inspired progression from women's public activities in support of resistance and independence through to Republican Motherhood, a feminized domestic sphere that supported the separate, male public political sphere, the advent of female moral reform, and women's eventual emergence into public politics embodied in the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. …

Uncivil War: Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction (review)

Reviewed by: Uncivil War: Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction Andrew L. Slap Uncivil War: Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction. By James K. Hogue. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Pp. 288. Cloth, $45.00.) James K. Hogue tackles an important and timely subject in his book on violence in New Orleans during Reconstruction. While concentrating on “reappraising the nature of violent politics of Reconstruction,” Hogue ambitiously has many other goals. For instance, he argues that “not coincidentally, this era of state government backed by federal military occupation preceded one of the longest periods of unbroken one-party dominance in American history” (8). Unfortunately, he offers no support for this hypothesis, with only a few pages on post-Reconstruction politics and nothing past 1900. This failure is unfortunately symptomatic of the entire work. Uncivil War is a traditional political history of Reconstruction in Louisiana that mostly uses government records and secondary sources to cover well-trod ground. Given the title, surprisingly less than 10 percent of the book deals directly with the street battles. This limited treatment makes it impossible for Hogue to meet his goals of beginning “to rethink the meaning and nature of ‘battle’ itself” and “to reconceptualize both the fighting and the roles that different types of military forces played in its [Reconstruction] origins, development, and outcome” (4, 11). While finding sources for street battles can be hard, [End Page 209] Hogue does not employ all of the primary and secondary sources available. For instance, he visited the U.S. Military Academy Library but did not use its James Fornance Papers, which include the letters of an army lieutenant writing home about his participation in one of the book’s street battles. Hogue also never mentions several articles on the street battles, such as Donald E. Reynolds’s “The New Orleans Riot of 1866 Reconsidered,” Louisiana History 5 (Winter 1964): 5–27. Most of Uncivil War covers the political events in between the street battles. A failure to engage the relevant historiography dooms Hogue’s efforts to reappraise Reconstruction politics. He regularly creates straw men, referring to the positions of “many historians” or “modern scholars” while offering few, and many times no, examples or citations (14, 45, 52, 59, 113, 125, 169). At one point he refers to the interpretations of “recent scholars” and cites two books published in 1967 and 1982 (183). Hogue’s major straw man is the New Political History (NPH), as he repeatedly argues that “historians have all too often mistakenly tried to make Reconstruction’s origins, development, and outcome fit a model of stable, competitive party politics, articulated by the study of political parties, interest groups, voter mobilization, and election returns” (7, 9, 186). First, Hogue only cites Michael Perman’s work to assert the NPH’s dominance, never mentioning scholars like Joel Silbey, Michael F. Holt, or Richard McCormick. Second, historians have been attacking the NPH for over a decade—in the late 1990s the Journal of American History sponsored two roundtables challenging its paradigms. Finally, Hogue ignores the work dealing with Reconstruction political history outside the NPH, such as Heather Cox Richardson’s The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post–Civil War North, 1865–1901 (2001). Hogue regularly fails to mention prominent works that bear directly on his study. While repeatedly discussing Ulysses S. Grant during Reconstruction, he never uses Brooks D. Simpson’s Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction, 1861–1868 (1991). Hogue spends several pages trying to place Louisiana’s Reconstruction political corruption in the broader context of nineteenth-century America without mentioning Mark W. Summer’s The Era of Good Stealings (1993). William L. Richter’s Army in Texas during Reconstruction, 1865–1870 (1987) would have provided a nice comparison with events in Louisiana. Lack of a firm historiographical grounding leads to significant interpretive errors. For example, Hogue asserts that “white militia officers of northern origin tended to have demonstrated an ideological devotion to the radical [End Page 210] wing of the Republican Party . . . by their service with black...

Many Identities, One Nation: The Revolution and Its Legacy in the Mid-Atlantic (review)

Many Identities, One Nation: The Revolution and Its Legacy in Mid-Atlantic. By Liam Riordan. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007, Pp. 353. Cloth, $49.95.)Reviewed by Patrick SperoWhat can three disparate towns of late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries tell us about multiculturalism today? Some may consider anachronistic to apply current debates about diversity, inclusion, and multiculturalism in globalizing world to earlier American experiences. Liam Riordan, associate professor of history at University of Maine and author of Many Identities, One Nation, contends, however, that it is imperative to move beyond superficial connotations of that term, one of most debilitating of which assumes that controversial public awareness about identity has primarily been recent phenomenon and that a historical perspective on multiculturalism is essential not only to properly locate cultural diversity as central theme of American history but also to demonstrate how politicization of identity has changed over (12-13). Riordan marshals this argument over seven chapters, and his end product should be considered contribution to growing field of nineteenth-century political and religious studies.Many Identities takes reader on journey that traverses space and time through Delaware Valley. New Castle, Delaware, southernmost and oldest town studied, was home to most diverse populace, including large numbers of Anglicans, Scots-Irish, and both free and enslaved African Americans. Further north, Burlington, New Jersey, which like New Castle was its colony's capital, had large population of Quakers and Anglicans. Many wealthy Quakers had chosen Burlington for their country retreat, making wealthiest town of three. Easton, Pennsylvania, sitting at confluence of Delaware and Lehigh Rivers, was youngest town. Laid out through proprietary initiative in 1750s, attracted Germans looking for farm land and waterway to carry goods to market.Riordan's approach to understanding history of these towns from their colonial origins to Jacksoman era is sound, and his research is impressive. He deploys methodologies of social history, cultural history, traditional political history, and religious history to give reader full understanding of each town's social milieu. Riordan arranges his chapters by chronology and theme rather than place. This allows readers to place each town's experience within broader historical moments and historiographical debates, thus illuminating each locale's history while also casting new light on national phenomena and historians' understandings of past.Although towns may appear different, for Riordan they shared one profound experience that shaped creation of identity and cultural transformations in early republic: In each place, War for Independence divided rather than unified society. Over course of four chapters, Riordan traces how group identity from Revolutionary War influenced political allegiances and fundamentally shaped early national consciousness in Delaware Valley (83). This argument, particularly as developed in chapters 5 through 7, is work's most provocative.By focusing on local history rather than national narratives, Riordan links foundation of second party system to local experiences of Revolutionary War rather than to broad national trends, thus upending standard narratives of Jacksoman America. For Riordan, the Revolutionary War remained alive and bitterly contested (212) through electoral on local level; in Easton, for instance, the powerful localism of Revolutionary mobilization found its institutionalization in partisan politics (244). The origins of second party system, he concludes, are best understood within context of transformed and ongoing Revolutionary values among ordinary people who increasingly relied on ethnic, racial, and class-based language to explain electoral politics (247). …

Beyond the Sonderweg

12 Historically Speaking ¦ November/December 2007 hensive inclusion. Thus would Abraham Lincoln take the necessary step thatJefferson found impossible to effect. Speaking prior to his presidency on the Dred Scott decision, Lincoln shone this light on the recurring dilemma: I think the audiors of that notable instrument [the Declaration of Independence] intended to include allmen, but tiiey did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects .... They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact, they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit .12 Continuous? Perhaps not. But certainly sustained, ever resurgent, recoverable. 1 Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason, and Religion (Routledge, 1992), 71,77-79. ;Joan Gadol, Leon BattistaAlberti: UniversalMan of the Early Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 1969), 70-71, 198-200. 1 See my article, "The Sixeteenth-Century Venetian Celebration of the Earth's Total Habitability: The Issue of the Fully Habitable World for Renaissance Europe,"Journalof World History 8 (1997): 1-27. * Anthony Pagden, Lords of allthe World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France c. 1500- c.1800 (Yale University Press, 1995), 11-63; esp. 21-24. 5 HaroldJoseph Berman, Law andRevolution: The Formation of the Western LegalTradition (Harvard University Press, 1983), 199-254. ' Brian Tierney, "Religious Rights: An Historical Perspective" in John Witte,Jr. andJohn D. van der Vyver, eds., Religious Human Rights in GlobalPerspective: Religious Perspectives (Marrinus Nijhoff, 1996), 17-45; esp. 28-29. ' Francisco de Vitoria, Political Writings, eds. Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrance (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 246. " Brian Tierney, The Idea of NaturalRights (William B. Eerdmans, 1997), 273, 286-87. * Hugo Grotius, Prolegomena to the Law of War and Peace (Liberal Arts Press, 1957), Sections 6, 16, and 11. 10Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1:13. 11PJ. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The GreatMap of Mankind: Perceptions of New Worlds in theAge of Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 1982), 1. u The Speeches ofAbrahamLincoln, eds. Maureen Harrison and Steve Gilbert (Excellent Books, 2005), 40. Beyond the Sonderweg Sanjay Subrahmanyam John Headley, a well-known specialist of die thought of Martin Luther, Tommaso Campanella, and the ideology of the Spanish Empire, has lately turned to more general reflections within the larger realm of the history of "Western" ideas. Here he poses what appears at first to be a bold challenge . He tells us in effect that we—and he means not the world at large but only those who teach in Anglo-American history departments —have all fallen victim to a form of political correctness over the past couple of decades. (He does not seem currentiy to care what the rest of the world thinks or does in its practice of history: this is quite typical in its own fashion of his Sonderweg). We have apparendy lazily jettisoned three notions that are dear to Headley and his own historical horizon as he has maintained it inviolate over a half century: "the dignity of Western civilization "; the central importance once given to traditional political history; and the key role in history—or at least in the good bits of history— of the Renaissance. Mounting the pulpit provided by this forum, he wishes all of us to repent forthwith and fully rehabilitate all of the above. But before we do that, we must at the very least clearly identify what the real disease is against which Headley wants to inoculate us. It is undesirable rhetorical practice I believe to summon up one's minions for a fight to the death against intellectual Weapons of Mass Destruction that may not even "Entrance of Cortez into Mexico," ca. late 19th century. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-DIG-pga-01902]. exist. So where is the enemy and can we be sure that he (or it) even exists? The enemy for Headley, I think, is the vague program called world history, which has been gaining slow but sure ground over Western civilization in U.S. colleges and universities for quite...