Usable Past Research Articles

Finding a History for Software Engineering

Historians and software engineers are both looking for a history for software engineering. For historians, it is a matter of finding a point of perspective from which to view an enterprise that is still in the process of defining itself. For software engineers, it is the question of finding a usable past, as they have sought to ground their vision of the enterprise on historical models taken from science, engineering, industry, and the professions. The article examines some of those models and their application to software engineering.

Siberia as Chronotope: Valentin Rasputin’s Creation of a Usable Past in Sibir’, Sibir’…

SUMMARY: Статья предлагает анализ нарратива русской истории, представленного в книге Валентина Распутина “Сибирь, Сибирь” (1991). А. Огден определяет его как альтернативный исторический нарратив, в рамках которого Сибирь предстает как отрицание всего, ассоциируемого с Москвой, модерностью и централизованной властью. Автор предлагает интересные размышления о природе конструируемой Распутиным региональной сибирской идентичности (подчеркивая заимствования из идеологии сибирских областников ) и о “материале”, из которого она создается. В качестве “материала” Распутин использует легенды, мифы, традицию – то, что, по его мнению, составляет настоящую “народную” коллективную память, противопоставленную государственному рациональному историческому нарративу. А. Огден интерпретирует распутинскую Сибирь через бахтинское понятие хронотопа – это позволяет создать реальное основание региональной идентичности с присущим только ей ощущением времени и пространства. Распутин, с точки зрения А. Огдена, пишет свою альтернативную историю Сибири не просто как “практическое прошлое” ( usable past ) для страны с проблемным национальным нарративом, но как прошлое, реально воплощенное в опыте конкретных людей, в их образе жизни, в их мировосприятии и памяти их малого сообщества.

Keeper of Histories: The State Historical Society of Wisconsin Library and Its Cultural Work, 1860-1910

Historical society libraries have remained a largely neglected area of library history. In this article, I examine the particular story of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin through the first two generations of its leadership to illuminate broader issues about the role and function of historical society libraries, both in their contribution to the story of the development of American libraries in the period 1860-1910 and their role in shaping historical consciousness and identity. Historical society libraries sought to create a usable past in the form of the material texts of state history that could inform and instruct. Alongside the emerging historical profession, with which they established a vital and symbiotic relationship, historical society libraries played an essential part in shaping the American nation's historical sensibilities.

In Search of a Usable Past: The Question of National Identity in Romanian Studies, 1990-2000

This article offers an overview of the scholarly debates on Romanian nation building and national ideology during the first post-communist decade. It argues that the globalization of history writing and the increasing access of local intellectual discourses to the international “market of ideas” had a powerful impact on both Eastern European history writing and on the Western scholarly literature dealing with the region. In regard to Romanian historiography, the article identifies a conflict between an emerging reformist school that has gained significant terrain in the last decade and a traditionalist canon, based on the national-communist heritage of the Ceauşescu regime, preserving a considerable influence at the institutional level. In analyzing their clash, the article proposes an analytical framework that relativizes the traditional dichotomy between “Westernizers” and “autochthonists,” accounting for a multitude of ideological combinations in the post-1989 Romanian cultural space. In view of the Western history writing on Romania, the article identifies a methodological shift from social-political narratives to historical anthropology and intellectual history. On this basis, it evaluates the complex interplay of local and external historiographic discourses in setting new research agendas, experimenting with new methodologies, and reconsidering key analytical concepts of the historical research on Eastern Europe.

A Usable Past: Church Historians as Engaged Scholars Who Serve the Common Good

In her October 2002 Killam lecture, “Building a Civil Society: A New Role for the Human Sciences,” Dr. Martha Piper, President of the University of British Columbia, cited a study put out by the Brookings Institution that shows that “in order to have an innovative economy, you must first have a civil society, one that is tolerant, culturally diverse and humane, that in turn provides the stimulus for creativity and innovation.” We cannot produce a truly civil society, argued Piper, without “the deep, extensive knowledge” that comes from research in the humanities and social sciences, scholarship that enables us to better understand ourselves, that helps define our Canadian identity, that guides public policy:

Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland by Jan T. s> Gross (review)

REVIEWS 58I Gross, Jan T. Neighbors.TheDestruction of theJewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland.Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 200I. XX + 26I pp. Map. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $19.95: 712.95. A QUICK visitto the internetwill reveal that thousandsof articles,printed and electronic, have been generated by this smallbook, which was publishedin a Polish edition in 2000. To be sure, its revelations are shocking: on i0 July 1941, part of the Catholic Polish population of Jedwabne, a small town of approximately3,000 personsin Lomza county in the Podlasieregion of northeastern Poland, attacked, tortured and murdered most of the town's Polish Jewish population, perhaps i,6oo in all. The culmination of the day-long killingspreecame when all the survivingJews were driveninto a barn, locked in, and burned to death. There is a lingering dispute about German involvement in the instigation of the atrocity, but there can be no question that the murdererswere Poles. The book has strucka nerve among Poles andJews because Grossdoes not shy away fromthe implicationsof thisevent. His researchaddsto the growing literature about the 'ordinary men,' to use Christopher Browning's phrase, who servedas the foot-soldierswho enabled the ideological fanaticsof Nazism to carryout the massmurderof EuropeanJewry. In thiscase, thevictimswere neighbours who had lived for decades side by side with their murderers in apparentpeace and amity. Even more unsettling although Grossdoes not dwell on this point the Jedwabne massacrewas not an isolated event, but partof a seriesof massmurdersin the region. Some of thevictimsinJedwabne wereJewish refugeesfleeingsimilarattacksin nearbytownslikeRadzilow and W,sosz. Although he does not comment in detail on this phenomenon, Gross includes a map of the '"Bermuda Triangle" of July I94I massacresof Jews by theirneighbors'(p. 203). Self-justifyingeffortshave been made in the past to explain both occasional acts of Polish collaboration with Nazi anti-Semitism, and the more common phenomenon of popular apathy toward the Final Solution. In particular, alleged Jewish collaboration with the Soviet occupation and sovietization of eastern Poland in the period I939-4I iS often used to explain, if not excuse, such actions and attitudes. Gross demonstrates that, despite retrospective claims, Jedwabne Jews could not in any way be linked to the stereotypical 'zydokommuna'.Grosslocated the impetusin the basestof human motives:it was 'thedesireand unexpected opportunityto robtheJews once and for all ratherthan, or alongsidewith, atavisticAntisemitism'(p. I Io). The heated response to Gross'sbook in Poland has served to demonstrate another point made by the author, the extreme difficultyfor Poles to cede the role of 'victim' to others. As Gross provocatively asks in one chapter, 'Is it Possible to Be Simultaneously a Victim and a Victimizer'. The answer is, of course, 'yes'. This has made the realities of Polish-Jewishrelations before, during and after the Second World War so difficult even for conscientious scholarsto address,to saynothing of the broaderpublic. Grossarguesthat the construction of a usable past that can serve as a foundation for a modern Polish identity must include a recognition of the 'dark past' as well as the episodes of martyrdom and glory. At least some segments of contemporary Polishsociety have ralliedto Gross'scall. 582 SEER, 8i, 3, 2003 Lost in the heat of theJedwabne controversyis a hypothesisthat arisesout of Gross' research, dealing not with the Holocaust, but with the subsequent Communist takeover in post-war Poland. Besides the dedicated ideologues who moved this process forward,he notes, was manpower of a differentsort. 'Amongtheir most valuable operativesand confidantsthere were also people devoid of all principles'. These were precisely the types of people who had been compromised during the German occupation. In other words, those willing to kill their neighbours for their cows or clothing, were also willing to benefit from serving the Stalinist system. His contention that 'communities whereJews had been murderedbylocal inhabitantswereespeciallyvulnerable to sovietization'(p. i66) is a hypothesisworthtestingby scholars. Gross's book is significantnot just for the light it sheds on Poland's 'dark past',but forthe many unansweredquestionsthat it raises. Department ofHebrew andJewishStudies J.D. KLIER University College London Jones, Derek (ed.). Censorship. A WorldEncyclopedia. Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers , London and Chicago, IL, 200I. lXii + 289 I pp. (in four volumes). Illustrations.Bibliographicalreferences.Index. ?265.oo. THEfirstand most importantpoint to make about thisencyclopaedia is that it is a magnificentachievement. Covering...

War Stories: The Search for a Useable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany, by Robert G. Moeller

"War Stories: The Search for a Useable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany, by Robert G. Moeller." Canadian Journal of History, 38(1), pp. 128–129

War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany. By Robert G. Moeller. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Pp. xiii+329. $45.00.

<i>War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany</i>. By Robert G. Moeller. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Pp. xiii+329. $45.00.

The Greening of Literary Scholarship: Literature, Theory, and the Environment (review)

REVIEWS Rosendale, Steven, ed. The Greening of Literary Scholarship: Literature, Theory, and the Environment. Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 2002. xxix + 275 pp. Paper: $19.95. This collection represents a much-needed effort to expand the boundaries ofecocriticism. Rosendale successfully collects thirteen essays that are not only well-written and informative, but that also deal with critical areas relatively unexplored by most works of ecocritical theory. Though several of the essays deal in part with the traditional ecocritical issues concerning the representation of nature and the human impact on the environment, they also examine a number of less studied areas. Collectively, these essays enrich scholarly discussion ofthe relationship between the natural world and literature, often in surprising ways. Beginning the call for an enrichment of ecocritical study, the essays of the first section highlight the need to rethink both the boundaries ofecocriticism and the texts that fall within those boundaries . The first section reexamines the relationship between literary history and nature writing, arguing that attention should be devoted to neglected critical theories and to texts that fall outside of traditional nature writing. As most nature-writing is non-fiction , several of these essays advocate ecocritical study of fictional texts. The first essay in the collection, Michael P. Branch's "Saving all the Pieces: The Place of Textual Editing in Ecocriticism," argues that "a full understanding of the American land and its various literary representations will require that scholars of environmental literature dedicate themselves to the preservation and restoration of the many rare, corrupted, or otherwise 'endangered' texts" (3). Branch's essay opens a new area of ecocritical scholarship that justifiably groups "endangered" manuscripts with the other natural resources that occupy so much traditional ecocritical research. In another essay largely representative of those that form the first section of the book, "In Search of Left Ecology's Usable Past: The Jungle, Social Change, and the Class Character of Environmental Impairment," Rosendale contends that many important texts, especially those from the Left literary tradition, are ignored by ecocritics because of "a mistaken tendency among ecocritics to confuse the complex and necessary project of developing eco-conscious critical values with a simplistic rejection of 'interhuman' concerns like urban social life and class politics" (61). The second section, entitled "Expanding the Subject in 122Reviews Ecocriticism," promotes a more open definition of ecocriticism that incorporates conventional literary theories dealing with race, gender , and ethnicity. These essays advocate an ecocritical approach sensitive to both place and human identity. James Tarter's "Locating the Uranium Mine: Place, Multiethnicity, and Environmental Justice in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony" opens this section by calling for a dual critical approach to both self-identification and the natural world. Tartar argues "that Ceremony provides a model of a sophisticated, simultaneous attention to environmental and multiethnic issues that needs to come to the fore in contemporary ecocriticism" (98). Essays by Andrea Blair and Eleanor Hersey expand this ecocritical concept in terms of gender, while James D. Lilley and Louis H. Palmer, III explore what they argue is a permeable boundary between human identity and the environment. Lilley asks, "What is the nature of the body's interaction with the environment ? Do we reach out from our bodies and fashion our surroundings , or do they encroach upon, penetrate, and mold us? Are we shapers of, or shaped like, clay?" (149). Further expanding the relationship between ecocriticism and traditional theory, the essays of the final section address the sublime , arguing collectively that the philosophical concept ofthe sublime is capable of clarifying problems associated with natural representation. Rick Van Noy's essay, "Surveying the Sublime: Literary Cartographers and the Spirit of Place," meaningfully connects the human experience of place with scientific cartographic representation. Aaron Dunckel's '"Mount Blanc': Shelley's Sublime Allegory of the Real" also calls into question the relationship between sublimity and representation, arguing that literary representation is not simply an exercise in mimesis but also works to create that which is not present in nature. The last essay of the collection, James Kirwan's "Vicarious Edification : Radcliffe and the Sublime," argues that "the barrier that separates us from nature is one that cannot be crossed quite simply because there is nothing...

Dying is Easy, Comedy is Hard

Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History. By James Livingston. New York and London: Routledge, 2001. 232 pages. $85.00 (cloth). $22.95 (paper). James Livingston's Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy mounts apowerful and polymathic challenge to the narrative vision that has dominated academic historiography for the past century. Animating that vision is the tragic decline of the modern subject, more specifically, the small producer steamrolled under by corporate capitalism and the "trust movement" around the turn of the century. According to this influential, even hegemonic, narrative, the heroic and class-based populism that was this figure's political idiom has, barring the progressive paroxysms of the 1930s, withered in the national imagination. The legacy of this enervation (and cooptation) of populism is a political economy of bureaucratic liberalism and corporate caprice to which there increasingly appears no alternative. Corporatization and proletarianization laid waste to the "commercial vernacular" of nineteenth-century production, and in so doing took away the means for constructing a nonalienating system of work and a sustaining communal politics. Moreover, these developments displaced the steadfast "moral personality" of an earlier entrepreneurial capitalism and constituted in its stead a more mercurial, tractable self—the desiring subject of consumer culture. Drawing on an unconventional reading of the often-maligned "consensus" or "counter-progressive" historians of the mid-twentieth century, Livingston opens by expressing the conviction "that the area inhabited by the American Left is larger than Populism, and therefore [End Page 121] that the twentieth century represents something more than the non-heroic residue of the tragedy staged in the 1890s" (2). With these acknowledgments begins the difficult task of "coming to terms with the third American republic, the one that resides in the emergence of corporate capitalism" (1). Such a rapprochement will require, for those Left historians who remain committed to a usable past of artisanal values and class-based politics, no little amount of sympathy for the Devil, as Livingston asks us to see in corporatization "the condition of a passage beyond parochial renditions of political obligation, exclusionary principles of social organization, and limited notions of genuine selfhood" (2). Some of his audience will find in his assertion that we "treat the historical fact of corporate capitalism as the source rather than the solvent of a social-democratic promise" (2) vital inspiration for new work; others will find evidence of his affliction with a neoliberal variant of Stockholm Syndrome. While Livingston salutes the critical energy that scholars in U.S. history, American studies, literature, women's studies, sociology, philosophy, cultural studies, and related disciplines have expended in what he sees as "an attempt to retrieve the modern subject from the wreckage of nineteenth-century proprietary capitalism" (17), he would rather that we adjourn the conversation about the loss of the autonomous individual. It's time, he argues, that we get on with the pressing business of constructing our own engine of social democracy, one that will employ but also transcend the Enlightenment ideal of autonomous or "natural" selfhood and the political vectors it was built to fly. Scholars' desire to resuscitate this figure "blocks the search for alternatives to the 'man of reason' who served as the paradigm of self-determination in the modern epoch, and thus blinds us to the political, intellectual, and cultural possibilities of our own postmodern moment" (17). Livingston's search for alternatives involves a certain ideological risk, as the figure of the possessive individualist has provided a crucial ethical pivot around which various modern emancipatory projects have coalesced and mobilized. American publics generally respond with outrage when sufficiently and officially convinced that some oppressive force or institution—racism, say, or sexism or big business—attenuates the potentials and freedoms of the monadic modern subject. Nineteenth-century factory workers, farmers, and their political allies instrumentalized this figure to resist the decline of agency in shaping the experience of Taylorized work and guiding the byzantine credit [End Page 122] economy, both of which were requisites of large-scale...

Living Music in Schools 1923-1999: Studies in the History of Music Education in England

Music in schools 1923-1999 - an educational debate: 1923-1924 1947-1948 1973-1974 1998-1999. 'Changing the face of school music' - Walford Davies and the development of BBC school music broadcasts 1924-1947: Walford Davies The Gramophone Company and Walford Davies The BBC Conclusion. Musical education of the under-twelves 1949-1983: Music in Primary Schools 1949-1972 Musical education of the under-twelves (MEUT) The progressive ideal and musical creativity Traditional concerns Conclusion. 'A house divided' - music education during the schools council era of the 1970S: The Schools Council and its Music Projects 'Music education of young children' 1970-1976 'Music in the Secondary School Curriculum' 1973-1980 Discussion Conclusion. Talking about music teaching - recollections and realities: Student music teachers talking Secondary music teachers talking Conclusion. Conclusion - Rhetorical discourse about the place of music in the curriculum Stages of curriculum change in music Living music in schools in the future. Afterword - towards a usable past for music educators: Issues in the history of education Bernarr Rainbow and 'The land without music' Broadening horizons Towards a usable past for music educators.

War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany

1St. Mary's College of Maryland War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany Robert G.Moeller BerkeleyUniversity of California Press 2001xiii + 329$29.95

Reviews of Books:War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany Robert G. Moeller

Reviews of Books:War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany Robert G. Moeller

Austria in the First Cold War, 1945-55: The Leverage of the Weak by Günter s&gt; Bischof (review)

REVIEWS 573 This may be so. But given that a rival Polish historian has recently claimed that the period in question should be completely rewritten in the wake of I989, Borodziej'sassertionsoundsa touch optimistic. Beyond that, Terror undPolitikis an excellent book, which deserves a place, alongside those of Jan Gross, Czeslaw Madajczykand Martin Broszat, as an important addition to the still slim corpus of non-Polish language work on German occupation policy in Poland. University ofStrathclyde ROGER MOORHOUSE Bischof, Gunter.Austria intheFirstColdWar,I945-55: TheLeverage oftheWeak. Macmillan,Basingstoke,2000. XVii + 237pp. Notes. Bibliography.Index. [45.00. AUSTRIA has neverfiguredveryprominentlyin accountsof the Cold War.The abiding internationalimage of its firstpostwar decade is encapsulated in the atmosphericthriller 7he Third Man(I 949).Gunter Bischof seeksto show that the country was involved in more important matters than the themes of criminalactivityunder occupation developed in GrahamGreene's story. His book contains six neatly sub-divided chapters. It is the product of considerable research in the government and private archives of the four occupying powers the United States, Britain, Austria, Germany and France.He displaysa familiaritywith scholarshipin Englishand German and also some French work. It is written in a clear, easy style and contains few errors.The referencingseems over-extensive:there are I56 pages of text and 59 pages of footnotes. The opening chapter considersAustriafrom the Anschluss in 1938 to the end of the Second WorldWar. Its treatment of the I 930S is necessarilybrief. Bischof charts the growing Austrian 'collective disaffection' with life in the Reich but Austrians grumbled rather than actively opposed (p. I8). The chaptercloseswith an outline of Allied planning forpostwarAustria. Bischof then examines Soviet brutalityand rapacity in Austriaafter I945 This hinderedco-operationwith Britainand the United States.Disputesarose over currencyconversion and the boundariesof the Austriancapitalthat they wouldjointly occupy. The inclusionof a map would have helped to clarifythis issue. Although there is a map showing the division of Austriainto four zones of occupation, Bischof could have been fullerabout how thiswas decided and about the natureof the occupation regime. The Austrian government, accepted by the Allies as responsible for the whole country, made effortsto create what Bischof calls a usable past: they invented a version of history that treated them as Hitler's firstvictims, who were utterly helpless during the war. The Foreign Minister, Karl Gruber, cultivated the USA, seeking its support in the face of tough Soviet action (pp. 73-76). Soviet economic depredations made Austria economically weak. This worsened Soviet-American tensions in Austria whose contribution to the emerging East-Westconfrontation, Bischof convincingly maintains,has been largely ignored by cold war historiography(p. 94). Financial assistancewas 574 SEER, 8o, 3, 2002 partof a tougherAmericanstance.Austriareceived$909. I millioninMarshall Aid. This constituted 14per cent of the country'snational income, the highest proportion of any recipient. The Soviet zone in Austriawas the only territory under communist controlto obtain such assistance(pp. 102-03). Chapters 5 and 6 consider the search for a treaty to restore sovereigntyto Austria. It was Karl Renner's 'keen legal mind' that devised the notion of a State Treaty,forcallingit a peace treatywould involve treatingthe countryas Germany'sco-belligerent (p. I05). Growing cold war tensions made progress difficult.Yet I949 saw 'amajorbreakthrough'.The Deputies agreedon allbut five of the forty-nine treaty articles. However, the 'American military establishment increasingly came to dominate foreign policy and rebelled againstsigningan Austriantreatybefore the buildingof an adequateAustrian security force' (pp. ii o-I i). This is to simplifythe situation. Anxiety about securitywas not exclusive to, or even primarilyfelt by, the military.Fearsof indirect communist subversion or direct Soviet action had led politicians to negotiate NATO. Bischof, nevertheless, makes an excellent point: 'Western Cold War scholarship has largely glossed over the fact that the covert rearmament of the Western occupation zones was initiated in 1948, at least two years before West Germany's' (p. I I6). Moreover, the outbreak of the Korean War in June and the strikesin Austriain October I 950 'appeared to be part of an ominous world-wide Communist offensive' (p. 120). 'Austrian treaty diplomacy deteriorated into psychological warfare and propaganda posturing'(pp. 123-24). In the final chapter Bischof emphasizes the importance of the March I953 election ofJulius Raab as Chancellor. I953 also...

Thinking about Self in a Family Way

I never had to worry about my identity as a middle school music teacher. Or as an off-hours videotape editor. Or as a paper boy, retail clerk, or warehouse worker. As an academic, though, I think about it all the time—perhaps not identity so often as subjectivity, and perhaps not my own so much as others'. Yet the connections between self and subject are seemingly obvious. My first book, Playing Indian, tried to take seriously people with pale faces who would be “Indian.”1 “That,” said some acquaintances, “has got to be personal!” My next project turns to my own family, asking how mixed blood and culture bounded and created my grandparents and great-aunt. In effect, it stands as a matched bookend to the first project: one concerned with whiteness, the other with a family way of thinking about race, culture, and Indianness. While I continue to insist that these projects are not about me, per se, I can hardly deny that they are informed by my own curious position. It feels as if a recent self, apparent for perhaps fifteen years, asks most of my questions. That self is taken with dualisms, both as structuring devices and as things to worry at, contemplate, and complicate. It quests for a usable past, not necessarily to explain itself to others but to make its questions visible through narrative and metaphor. Explanation and visibility, though, go hand in hand. My recent self has two stories to tell, and they necessarily implicate both self and subject. The first tends to function as history; the second as parable.

War Stories: The Search for a Usable past in the Federal Republic of Germany

War Stories: The Search for a Usable past in the Federal Republic of Germany

War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany

War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany

Usable Pasts: Traditions and Group Expressions in North America (review)

Reviewed by: Usable Pasts: Traditions and Group Expressions in North America Deanna M. Kingston Usable Pasts: Traditions and Group Expressions in North America. Ed. Tad Tuleja. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1997. Pp. x + 335 , acknowledgments, illustrations.) The stated purpose of the collection Usable Pasts: Traditions and Group Expressions in North America is to modify Hobsbawm and Ranger's thesis in the Invention of Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Whereas the latter demonstrated that tradition invention was used by those in power to create homogeneity and continuity in a disparate nation, the intent of the authors of this collection is to show that the "politically powerless may also have the power to invent, to apply the creative impulse to their own private heritages" (p. 3). The essays show that groups of people, no matter their size or constitution (whether ethnic, occupational, organizational, or regional), creatively utilize past practices as manipulatable markers of a common identity (p. 3). In other words, the authors turn our attention from a macrolevel, national view of tradition manipulation and identity creation to a microlevel, subnational perspective. In addition, according to Tad Tuleja, the authors also draw theoretically on Frederick Barth in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (Little, Brown, 1969) and contemporary folklore approaches that highlight context and performance. First, following Barth, they see ethnogenesis as a social and political dynamic. Second, they see folklore "not as a thing but as a practice," as a "malleable mobile expression of social identity" (p. 6). Thus, the authors base much of their work upon these theoretical underpinnings in order to show that small groups manipulate and use folkloric expressions to present themselves to themselves and to others. All of the examples, as the title implies, are from groups of people living in North America. Groups include the Navajo, Texans, Mexican Americans, Polish Americans, Canadians, Newfoundlanders, African American women, Jewish Americans, Boy Scouts, Mormons, martial artists, Appalachians, New Englanders in Maine, and American supporters of American victims and servicemen overseas. It is this eclectic mix of groups that gives the volume its strength. First, it focuses our attention on groups at home, within the larger nation-states of the United States and Canada. Thus, the collection is timely in that, recently (1998-99), the Anthropology News, the newsletter of the American Anthropological Association, reminded scholars that they did not have to go abroad to find interesting research sites. Second, the collection demonstrates the broad range and variability of peoples who live in North America. In doing so, it shows that no matter how a large nation-state might exert a homogenizing influence, its people resist by finding ways to create smaller, community-level interactions with one another. As Tuleja states, actual communities are "moved to rechannel the streams of their peculiar expressivities by the very forces that threaten to stop their flow" (p. 15). The other strength of this collection is the range and variability of the group expressions that are employed by collectives to differentiate themselves from others. Thus, arts and crafts, myths, legends and narratives, uniforms, license plates, food, calendrical rites, skits, drinking customs, and yellow ribbons are among the many creative responses that groups use to express themselves. This list, of course, is not exhaustive; instead, the variety of expressions in this collection suggests that there are endless possibilities of creative traditions that can be manipulated by groups as identity markers. Thus, the largest contributions that this collection gives to the study of folklore, cultural studies, and anthropology are to demonstrate both the diversity of groups in North America and the diversity of group expressions that are the bases of their identities. In this regard, it does fulfill its stated goal of demonstrating that [End Page 95] the politically powerless do creatively manipulate their pasts. However, the idea that people are social agents, actively engaging and responding to outside perspectives and pressures, is not new. In other words, after reading the essays, I did not learn much in the way of theoretical understandings of identity creation and maintenance. Perhaps I was expecting too much. Nonetheless, it was an enjoyable read because of the diversity of examples. It made me think of...

We Are All New Western Historians Now

It is now almost fifteen years since the Western announced itself to the world with the publication of Patricia Nelson Limerick's Legacy of Conquest: Unbroken Past of the American West (1987) and the Trails: Toward a New Western symposium in Santa Fe. By attacking many of the assumptions underlying the United States's best-known work of history-Frederick Jackson Turner's The Significance of the Frontier in American History-the New Western Historians helped return the American West, which only a generation before had carried more than a vague hint of antiquarianism about it, to the mainstream of historical scholarship. This dramatic shift in fortunes received a boost not only from the press attention that Legacy of Conquest and the Trails conference garnered and from the powerful prose of Limerick and her fellow members of New Western History's so-called Gang of Four-William Cronon, Richard White, and Donald Worster-but from larger national trends as well. To a United States grappling with a sense of ecological limits and with a multicultural future in which Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans would play increasingly prominent parts, the American West suddenly seemed to offer a potent new version of that age-old historical objective: the usable past. As Western history successfully re-asserted its place in the academy in the 1990s, however, the central debates sparked by the New Western History began to die down. Once-heated discussions as to whether the west was best understood as a process (read: frontier) or a place (read: region) burned themselves out, the participants apparently having concluded that their exchanges had reached the point of diminishing returns. In place of writing manifestos, historians of the American West returned to producing mono-

Book Reviews

Books reviewed:Lunde, Ingunn, (ed.), Kirill of Turov: Bishop, Preacher, HymnographerHasty, Olga Peters, Pushkin’s TatianaFrench, Bruce A., Dostoevsky’s Idiot: Dialogue and the Spiritually Good LifeKelly, Aileen M., Views from the Other Shore: Essays on Herzen, Chekhov, and BakhtinAdelman, Gary, Retelling Dostoyevsky: Literary Responses and Other ObservationsGottlieb, Vera and Allain, Paul (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to ChekhovGrenier, Svetlana Slavskaya, Representing the Marginal Woman in Nineteenth‐Century Russian Literature: Personalism, Feminism, and PolyphonyHenry, Peter, Porudominsky, Vladimir and Girshman, Mikhail (eds.), Vsevelod Garshin at the Turn of the Century: An International Symposium in Three VolumesBorenstein, Eliot, Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917–1929Brintlinger, Angela, Writing a Usable Past: Russian Literary Culture, 1917–1937. Studies in Russian Literature and TheoryTihanov, Galin, The Master and the Slave: Lukács, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of Their TimeKellman, Steven G., and Malin, Irving (eds.), Torpid Smoke: The Stories of Vladimir NabokovGreenfield, Douglas M. (ed.), Depictions: Slavic Studies in the Narrative and Visual Arts in Honor of William E. HarkinsGeraci, Robert P. and Khodarkovsky, Michael (eds.), Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion and Tolerance in Tsarist RussiaUli’anova, G. N., Blagotvoritel’nost’moskovskikh predprinimatelei, 1860–1914Remy, Johannes, Higher Education and National Identity: Polish Student Activism in Russia, 1832–1863Dowler, Wayne, Classroom and Empire: The Politics of Schooling Russia’s Eastern Nationalities, 1860–1917Carrère d’Encausse, Hélène, Nicholas II: The Interrupted TransitionBukharaev, Ravil, Islam in Russia: The Four SeasonsMally, Lynn, Revolutionary Acts: Amateur Theater and the Soviet State, 1917–1938Yedlin, Tovah, Maxim Gorky: A Political BiographyWade, Rex A, The Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil WarOsokina, Elena, Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in Stalin’s Russia, 1927–1941Ivanova, Galina Mikhailovna, Labor Camp Socialism: The Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian SystemLovell, Stephen, The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post‐Soviet Eras. Studies in Russian and East Europe SeriesVan der Leeuw, Charles, Azerbaijan: A Quest for Identity—A Short HistoryLo, Bobo, Soviet Labour Ideology and the Collapse of the StateSzporluk, Roman, Russia, Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet UnionIvanov, Vladimir R. and Smith, Karla S. (eds.), Japan and Russia in Northeast Asia: Partners in the 21st CenturyDarst, Robert G, Smokestack Diplomacy: Cooperation and Conflict in East‐West Environmental PoliticsWebber, Mark (ed.), Russia and Europe: Conflict or Cooperation?Desai, Padma and Idson, Todd, Work without Wages: Russia’s Nonpayment CrisisSperling, Valerie (ed.) Building the Russian State: Institutional Crisis and the Quest for Democratic GovernanceIsham, Heyward (ed.), with Shkylar, Nathan M., Russia’s Fate through Russian Eyes: Voices of the New Generation