Wide Variety Of Primary Sources Research Articles

The Union League and Biracial Politics in Reconstruction Texas by Carl H. Moneyhon

Reviewed by: The Union League and Biracial Politics in Reconstruction Texas by Carl H. Moneyhon Derrick D. McKisick The Union League and Biracial Politics in Reconstruction Texas. By Carl H. Moneyhon. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2021. Pp. xii, 401. $45.00, ISBN 978-1-62349-956-3.) Carl H. Moneyhon returns to his usual scholarly territory—Texas after the Civil War—in The Union League and Biracial Politics in Reconstruction Texas. This critical study concentrates on the twin developments of the [End Page 162] Republican Party and the Union League in Texas. Moneyhon relays a transformative story that details the first steps African Americans took toward developing a distinctive political voice in Texas and describes how Black Texans used the Union League as the base of their political activity during Reconstruction. Although the rise and fall of the Union League is not a new area of historical inquiry, Moneyhon’s focus on the interconnected development of the Texas Republican Party, the Union League, and African American political agency constitutes a break from earlier Reconstruction studies that have been more concerned with the national narrative. In Texas, unlike other southern states, the Union League and the Republican Party were formed through an uneasy alliance between native white Unionists and Black Texans, rather than by northern “carpetbaggers” and educated free people of color who moved south after the Civil War. According to Moneyhon, Texas presents an interesting lens through which to view the state Republican Party apparatus, the Union League, and African American political engagement. The Union League in Texas indicated the growth of a dynamic biracial coalition despite limited federal protection, Klan opposition, and a lack of support from various Republican factions. In this account, Moneyhon highlights the differences between Texas and other southern states. In Texas, the small antebellum free Black population, Union military policies requiring soldiers to muster out of service in the same state where they enlisted, and the late establishment of the Freedmen’s Bureau combined to limit the number of possible Black political leaders. In other southern states, educated free Black populations and former soldiers collaborated to provide a significant portion of political leadership. These constraints created an entirely different context for Black political leadership in Texas. Moneyhon merges this narrative with a narrowly focused inquiry into the political machinations surrounding the “ab initio controversy,” a period of political infighting centered on “the legality of the constitutions of 1861 and 1866 and any legislation or government action taken following secession” (p. 97). His examination of this debate shows how this thorny political issue ripped away at the underpinnings of Republican solidarity in Reconstruction Texas. Moneyhon uses a wide variety of primary sources and provides two appendixes listing the charter members of the Union League in 1870 and 1871. These sources bolster his argument about how the league developed in Texas and why Republicans viewed it as a critical component in their plans for Texas Unionists to gain political power after Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts of 1867. After the election of 1869, the Union League faced increasing political pressure within the state Republican Party to broaden its membership and create public clubs, outside resistance from a resurgent Democratic Party, and increased Klan violence. Moneyhon has created a significant volume in the study of Reconstruction that will give both scholars and history enthusiasts a clearer understanding of Reconstruction Texas. In this study, Moneyhon captures the developing tensions between native white Unionists in Texas, who supported the Republican Party and organized the Union League, and the increasing assertiveness of African American political leaders, who sought to use the Union League to further their political goals. His focus on this troubled relationship forms the basis of a balanced [End Page 163] historical narrative that offers a compelling analysis of Reconstruction politics in Texas. Derrick D. McKisick Texas A&M University–Commerce Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association

A Single Star and Bloody Knuckles: A History of Politics and Race in Texas by Bill Minutaglio

Reviewed by: A Single Star and Bloody Knuckles: A History of Politics and Race in Texas by Bill Minutaglio Mark Stanley A Single Star and Bloody Knuckles: A History of Politics and Race in Texas. By Bill Minutaglio. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. Pp. 456. Illustrations, notes, index.) In A Single Star and Bloody Knuckles: A History of Politics and Race in Texas author Bill Minutaglio takes on the daunting task of exploring the interrelationship of politics and race in Texas history from Reconstruction to the present. The book’s title alludes to a quote from John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner, the first Texan to serve on a winning presidential ticket, which he did as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice-president in 1932. A salty yet well-seasoned Texas politician, Garner first noted the need to “bloody your knuckles” when “playing the political game” in Texas (210) because Texas politicians played hard and played to win. Always in the background, however, and even in broad daylight, ran the issue of race. As the author notes, the issue was whitewashed by generations of Texas leaders. The existence of slavery was “an inconvenient truth” (8). The two issues are so intertwined in Texas history and political life that the challenge of untangling them is like separating berries from the bramble. Minutaglio approaches this methodically with concise chapters covering each decade from the 1870s to the 2010s, all written in an accessible, easy-to-read style one would expect from a professor of journalism. He does a good job of picking out the key actors—politicians, progressive activists, and innocent bystanders—as well as key events in the story. The author has written the chapters as a series of vignettes rather than as a traditional narrative. This approach allows Minutaglio to tie various narrative elements together without bogging them down in the bramble, as might happen in a more traditional approach. The author’s decade-by-decade approach begins in the 1870s and gathers pace as Texas politics becomes more competitive and vocal. The book hits its stride in the 1890s in the chapter entitled “Elites and Aliens: the 1890s.” The middle chapters covering the 1940s through the 1980s are the strongest, as Texas and Texans were becoming more prominent in national politics. This rise is also true of race and civil rights, because [End Page 332] some of the most important court cases decided during the period originated in Texas. The latter chapters of the book, 13 through 15, are good but may be too recent for deep examination. The book is generally well researched, using a wide variety of primary sources, strong secondary sources, and archives. A Single Star and Bloody Knuckles was an ambitious undertaking that could have been much longer. While not comprehensive, the book offers a well-rounded look at the complexities of race and politics, as well as the various characters involved. Minutaglio is to be commended for adding to the underrepresented topics of race and politics in post-civil war Texas historiography. Mark Stanley University of North Texas at Dallas Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

Shipbuilding and repair in eighteenth-century Suriname

Suriname’s pre-modern economy was entirely dependent on water transport. While shipbuilding in the colony itself was not encouraged by the directors of the Suriname Company (1683–1795) in Amsterdam there was a need to support the colony’s transoceanic, regional and local transport. This article finds that Suriname certainly had an infrastructure for shipbuilding and repair, but its existence has been neglected in the historiography. Since there is no literature on shipbuilding in colonial Suriname this article explores a wide variety of primary sources to piece together the various types of shipbuilding and repair conducted in the colony. We have found that there was a modest-sized barge wharf, as well as the production of small vessels on the plantations, and among the maroons and indigenous people in the interior. The colony furthermore procured ships on an ad hoc basis from the regional North American shipping connections with Suriname.

Tangled: Organizing the Southern Textile Industry, 1930–1934 by Travis Sutton Byrd

Reviewed by: Tangled: Organizing the Southern Textile Industry, 1930–1934 by Travis Sutton Byrd Matthew Hild Tangled: Organizing the Southern Textile Industry, 1930–1934. By Travis Sutton Byrd. ( Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2018. Pp. xii, 356. $50.00, ISBN 978-1-62190-407-6.) Historians of the southern textile industry during the Great Depression associate two years from that era with strikes: 1929, when labor unrest engulfed mill towns such as Gastonia and Marion, North Carolina, and Elizabethton, Tennessee, and 1934, when a massive textile strike spread from Alabama to Maine. Travis Sutton Byrd has written about the 1929 strikes in Unraveled: Labor Strife and Carolina Folk during the Marion Textile Strikes of 1929 (Knoxville, 2015). Janet Irons and John A. Salmond each have also written histories of the general textile strike of 1934; Salmond has also written a book on the 1929 Loray Mill strike in Gastonia. Now, in Tangled: Organizing the Southern Textile Industry, 1930–1934, Byrd looks at the period between the textile strikes of 1929 and 1934, although he also devotes the last of the book's three parts to the 1934 strike. Part 1 of Tangled covers the "Organize the South" campaign, which was launched by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in late 1929 after the failure of the textile strikes. Byrd examines how "national union leaders … tried to convert [the] bloodshed" of those strikes "into a wedge issue that would crack the factories of the piedmont open" (p. 4). In explaining the failure of this campaign, Byrd focuses heavily on the strike that occurred at the Riverside and Dan River Mills in Danville, Virginia, in 1930, which ended in failure in four months, after strikers were evicted from company-owned houses and became destitute. With the end of that strike came the end of the AFL's southern campaign, "killed on the banks of the Dan River" (p. 146). Part 2 examines the strike in High Point, North Carolina, waged by hosiery boarders during the summer of 1932. The "Boarders' Revolt" came on the heels of wage cuts by several mills. The strike spread to include as many as 20,000 operatives in three counties, and it proved that workers could represent themselves without the United Textile Workers or the communist organizers who were in the area. The operatives won the strike in less than two weeks, in part due to the intervention of Governor O. Max Gardner, to whom Byrd ascribes "a milquetoast [End Page 730] progressivism" (p. 15). Part 2 makes the book's most original contribution with its detailed account and analysis of the Boarders' Revolt. Part 3, in contrast, deals with the far more well-trodden ground of the general textile strike of 1934. Byrd covers this strike in about fifty pages, and he suggests that "strikers agitating for reform under NIRA [National Industrial Recovery Act] Section 7(a) could be seen as a first wave of the civil rights movements that would rework sectional identity" (p. 265). He further asserts that "'right-to-work' doctrine would go hand in hand with 'massive resistance' in the 1950s and 1960s, and many supporters of the latter crossed picket lines in the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s under the banner of the former" (p. 265). Finally, Byrd argues that the birth of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1935 "was the upshot and outcome of everything that had transpired in the textile belt since the autumn of 1929" (p. 286). This book makes a significant contribution to the existing literature on southern labor during the Great Depression. This review only scratches the surface of what Tangled has to offer. The book makes use of a wide variety of primary sources, including the deep level of newspaper research that the digital era affords. The lack of a bibliography is disappointing and, in a way, does the author an injustice, as it would catalog an impressive amount of research. With Unraveled and Tangled, Byrd—a Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, according to the back cover—has established himself as a leading scholar in the field. Matthew Hild Georgia Institute of Technology Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical...

Coleman, Heather J. (ed.) Orthodox Christianity in Imperial Russia: A Source Book on Lived Religion (review)

REVIEWS 369 Baltic History is not only an exciting read, but an inspiring contribution to Baltic studies, pointing out new directions and novel attempts for historians of the Baltic States. UCL SSEES and Johan Skytte Institute of Paris Pin-Yu Chen Political Science, University of Tartu Coleman, Heather J. (ed.). Orthodox Christianity in Imperial Russia: A Source Book on Lived Religion. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 2014. xi + 333 pp. Maps. Notes. Glossary. Further reading. Index. $35.00 £22.99 (paperback). Heather Coleman has done a great service to the fields of Slavonic and East European Studies, history and religious studies by publishing Orthodox ChristianityinImperialRussia:ASourceBookonLivedReligion.Acollaborative effort, Coleman’s edited volume features translations of a wide variety of primary sources (whole and excerpted). Each is accompanied by an informative introduction from a scholar of imperial Russian lived religion who has worked with the type of source being showcased, along with footnotes, including the explanatory kind that may benefit those less familiar with the historiography or the type of source, and a list of suggested works for further reading. I can imagine no more convenient gateway into the history and historiography of imperial Russian lived Christianity, a subfield that has attracted some of the best contemporary minds in Slavonic and East European Studies and that has blossomed in recent decades, since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the worldwide resurgence of religion have captured scholars’ attention. How to approach Orthodox Christianity itself presents certain challenges for Western readers more familiar with Protestantism and Catholicism, but Coleman argues in her introduction that, ‘With its incarnational and experiential spirituality, Orthodoxy by its nature lends itself to the material culture and “lived religion” approaches that have emerged in the study of western Christianity in the 1980s’ (p. 11), and her assertion that ‘Everyday life in imperial Russia comes alive’ (p. 1) in the primary sources selected for the volume strikes this reader as entirely justified. For those who prefer history with people in it (as opposed to only institutions or social forces), there is a particular pleasure in reading the kinds of sources that bring us very close to individuals with whom we might in some respects identify — sources such as the letters to Russian monastic elders (startsy) introduced by Irina Paert, the sometimes very intimate written confessions to Father John of Kronstadt introduced by Nadieszda Kizenko, or the letters and diocesan reports SEER, 95, 2, APRIL 2017 370 showing concern among Vladimir Diocese clergy over secularizing tendencies introduced by Gregory Freeze, whose pioneering and ongoing scholarly efforts continue to exert enormous influence on the field. The volume helps to shore up one of Professor Freeze’s key insights — one that among others his student Scott Kenworthy, who introduces selections from the diary of Archimandrite Toviia (Tsymbal) of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra for the volume in question, has continued to emphasize — namely that despite the imperial Russian Orthodox church’s challenges and limitations, the church was not a moribund institution. These serious challenges ranged from state bureaucratic oversight, to a lack of sufficient infrastructure for the space to be overseen (on which the missionary reports from Siberia introduced by Aileen Friesen are particularly striking), to the dependence of priests on fees from their parishioners. Despite this, not only were clergy active in a wide variety of ways, but the laity, too, found meaning in active religious life, even if their interpretation of Orthodoxy might at times put them at loggerheads with official church structures, as shown, for example, in the petitions to the Holy Synod regarding miracle-working icons introduced by Vera Shevzov. The volume also highlights the importance of healing miracles and pilgrimage to ordinary believers, for example in the documents related to the case of the mute peasant Sergei Ivanov who reportedly miraculously recovered the ability to speak in the presence of the relics of St Sergius, introduced by Christine Worobec. The sources selected for the book help to illustrate other broad nineteenthand early twentieth-century developments in Russian history as well, giving us a window onto Russia’s uneasy modernization. For instance, Coleman includes sources that touch on attitudes toward Ukraine among Russians and Ukrainians. She also highlights late...

“Forward My Brave Boys!”: A History of the 11th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, C.S.A., 1861–1865 by M. Todd Cathey and Gary W. Waddey

Reviewed by: “Forward My Brave Boys!”: A History of the 11th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, C.S.A., 1861–1865 by M. Todd Cathey and Gary W. Waddey John D. Fowler “Forward My Brave Boys!”: A History of the 11th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, C.S.A., 1861–1865. By M. Todd Cathey and Gary W. Waddey. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2016. Pp. [xx], 503. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-88146-544-0.) Since the Civil War ended, countless regimental studies have been published. The earliest were often sentimental reminiscences written by the members of a particular regiment. Later regimental studies were written by the descendants of those in the regiment or by antiquarians from the communities that produced the regiments. Finally, in the late twentieth century, professional historians began to research and write the stories of regiments. Using a wide variety of primary sources, especially census records and compiled service records, these scholars have been able to draw accurate conclusions about the individual soldiers who made up Civil War armies. By using quantitative analysis, they could use their data to compare units across states and regions. While regimental histories have something to offer students of the Civil War, it is these modern studies that have the most to offer. “Forward My Brave Boys!”: A History of the 11th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, C.S.A., 1861-1865 by M. Todd Cathey and Gary W. Waddey is a mixture of the old and the new. Cathey and Waddey are descendants of men from the regiment. Their work contains a wealth of primary resources and recounts the wartime story of the Eleventh Tennessee Volunteer Infantry Regiment, composed of men from five counties in Middle Tennessee. The unit had an interesting combat history, participating in the major campaigns and battles of the western theater. As it stands, “Forward My Brave Boys!” is a well-researched wartime account of the regiment. The authors have written a fine history for those who want to know what the Eleventh Tennessee did during the Civil War. Yet the authors have produced a rather old-fashioned account in that it fails to place the regiment into any proper perspective. Absent is a meticulous search of the records that could have told us more about these men in the pre– and post–Civil War worlds. The men of the Eleventh Tennessee, [End Page 184] like all Civil War soldiers, were products of their communities, and the Civil War was only one part, albeit perhaps the defining part, of their lives. Focusing merely on the war years turns these soldiers into one-dimensional individuals. By examining community records, census records, newspapers, letters, diaries, and pension records for the soldiers and their families, the authors could have made the men themselves and not just their wartime service the focus. Moreover, through an exploration of their medical histories, prisoner of war experiences, and desertion incidents, a clear picture of the “real war” would emerge. The statistics that could be generated would allow the men to be placed in their proper context and would allow comparison with the men of other regiments. An examination of the records mentioned could also answer a number of questions useful to modern scholars. Did the men come from basically the same districts in their respective counties? How wealthy were the officers compared with the enlisted men? How old were the men on average? How large were their farms? What crops did they grow? How many came from urban areas? How did the men do economically after the war? How many were slaveholders? The answers to these questions and others would allow for patterns to be detected, and these patterns could be used to understand the world from which these men came. Cathey and Waddey’s work is well written and contains a wealth of primary sources, but not enough. Moreover, they did not extract enough information from the sources they did use. If one is interested in the wartime exploits of the Eleventh Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, this is an excellent book. Indeed, it is better than most regimental accounts. However, the work falls far short of the type of regimental history that modern scholars produce. The extra effort...

LBJ’s Neglected Legacy: How Lyndon Johnson Reshaped Domestic Policy and Government ed. by Robert H. Wilson, Norman J. Glickman, Laurence E. Lynn (review)

Reviewed by: LBJ’s Neglected Legacy: How Lyndon Johnson Reshaped Domestic Policy and Government ed. by Robert H. Wilson, Norman J. Glickman, Laurence E. Lynn Karen Wisely LBJ’s Neglected Legacy: How Lyndon Johnson Reshaped Domestic Policy and Government. Edited by Robert H. Wilson, Norman J. Glickman, and Laurence E. Lynn Jr. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. Pp. 464. Tables, references, list of contributors, index.) Published in celebration of the centennial of Lyndon B. Johnson’s birth, LBJ’s Neglected Legacy is a collection of essays contributed by professionals in various fields such as history, sociology, engineering, and economics. Together they propose a new method of evaluating the impact of LBJ’s Great Society domestic policy. With each chapter focusing on [End Page 332] a different policy area, the authors examine both the short-term results of LBJ’s programs, during his administration, and their long-term effectiveness through subsequent administrations, mostly dominated by the opposition party. Even though the lack of support, and often absence of funding, provided by Republican-led governance often muted the long-term influence of LBJ’s initiatives, his policies did expand the reach of the federal government and permanently altered the way the different levels of government interacted. As president, LBJ proved to be a master of the legislative process. He used skills honed during several decades spent representing Texas as both a congressman and senator to coax bills through Congress in the face of increasing opposition. He believed that getting a bill passed was the most important step, even if it meant compromising away some of its potency. A law “on the books” could always be modified later under more favorable legislative conditions, while it was more difficult to repeal a law entirely. An example of this mind-set was the Head Start Program. Intended to be only a small piece of a much larger effort to improve conditions for poor families that was never fully realized, Head Start was hindered from the beginning. Yet, even after repeated cuts and continual questions about its effectiveness, the program perseveres today. LBJ’s Texas roots, particularly his years spent teaching poor, Mexican American children in Cotulla, were evident in his work on civil rights issues, education, and his War on Poverty. In the chapter “Lyndon Johnson and American Education,” Gary Orfield repeatedly mentions how Johnson’s personal experiences working with children and in schools informed his education policies, which sought to improve opportunities for everyone but especially for poor and minority children. Orfield noted that LBJ’s education reforms enjoyed much greater success than those of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The authors use a wide variety of primary sources, including oral history interviews, White House recordings, and government reports to analyze the topics mentioned above, as well as such subjects as urban planning, water quality policies, science and technology, and public management. While it may be a bit too dense for the casual reader, LBJ’s Neglected Legacy provides a unique approach to evaluating the Johnson administration’s work. Other scholars who have examined his impact have often become distracted by the negative effect of his escalation of the Vietnam War on his domestic policies. They fail to recognize the lasting change in the way the government works fostered by his programs and policies, and the strength of this work lies in the authors’ insistence on following a different path. [End Page 333] Karen Wisely University of North Texas Copyright © 2015 The Texas State Historical Association

Manufacturing Mennonites: Work and Religion in Post-War Manitoba by Janis Thiessen (review)

Reviewed by: Manufacturing Mennonites: Work and Religion in Post-War Manitoba by Janis Thiessen Patricia F. Harms Manufacturing Mennonites: Work and Religion in Post-War Manitoba. By Janis Thiessen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. x + 249 pp. Tables, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $65.00 cloth, $27.95 paper. In a community that has historically valued a simple lifestyle, identified by its emphasis on rural agriculture communal equality, what is the role of big business and successful entrepreneurs? Within a social context that values working for oneself over working for someone, how does the identity of Mennonite workers and employers influence the work environment? These are the kinds of questions Janis Thiessen’s new book addresses in her exploration of religion’s role within three influential Mennonite-owned family businesses, namely Friesen Printers, located in Altona, Loewen Windows, founded in Steinbach, and Palliser Furniture, built by the DeFehr family in Winnipeg. Focused primarily on the 1960s and 1970s, the author explores relationships between employers and employees ultimately searching for a rationale as to why Mennonite workers by and large rejected unionism during a time it was highly influential through Manitoba. According to Thiessen, the ethno-religious identity of Mennonites played a significant role in both employers’ and employees’ experiences. Tracking working conditions, salary, and employment benefits, she identifies an environment she refers to as “a Mennonite corporate mythology.” Within this milieu, employers actively cultivated “a strong work ethic, an emphasis on quality craftwork, and a combination of religious humility and yieldedness” (64). So although class and hierarchy remained intact within these Mennonite workplaces, the Mennonite ideals held by both employee and employer mitigated such a perception. Furthermore, within a relatively homogenous workplace, the personal management style practiced allowed workers to express concerns and discuss issues with the owner or manager directly, thus making the employees feel integrated and important. This combination of religious obligation for quality work without complaint and a superficial sense of belonging explains, in part, why many workers rejected unionization. However, Thiessen’s analysis also presents a more complex historical perspective. Here, the scholar reminds us that immigrants bring their personal histories and political experiences with them. Mennonites in Manitoba, whose backgrounds in the Soviet Union had been primarily negative, left them suspicious of socialism and unionism, despite the various similarities within their socioeconomic and religious ideologies. Although Mennonite attitudes towards socialism and communism by the early 1970s had shifted significantly, concerns about unionism remained high due to this particular history along with the perception that strikes and work stoppages represented acts of violence (123). By focusing on this immigrant community, which has been ignored by labor historians, Manufacturing Mennonites sheds new light on a hidden aspect of Manitoba’s labor history. As a first monograph on Mennonite labor, Thiessen structures her argument chronologically through six chapters. Drawing on a wide variety of primary sources, including oral interviews of both employees and employers, corporate records, government records, and labor union sources, Thiessen seeks to track the expansion of successful family-owned businesses and their relationship with the workers. Using employee oral testimonies, the study pays particular attention to the transition during the early 1970s. The author’s argument, while convincing, would have been reinforced by a more thorough discussion on the social and business structures of class and hierarchy. While such is an unpopular topic amongst a religious group that values ideals of equality, this reader wishes [End Page 83] Thiessen had highlighted this very critical conclusion. In keeping with structural elements of the Mennonite milieu, another structural component the author leaves dangling is the absence of women, both as subjects within the work and within gender analysis. Thiessen makes several passing references to the fact that women received lower wages than men (103) or that it was an employer’s wife who introduced the idea of profit sharing with the employees (148). While based only on anecdotal evidence, Thiessen’s preliminary conclusions that gender played a critical role within broader structural elements beg further evaluation, which would have also strengthened her central argument. Thiessen’s work raises several critical aspects of Mennonite communal identity that warrant further investigation. This book addresses class, a fact often dismissed...

A 26-year-old female with metastatic primary gastrointestinal malignancy presenting as menorrhagia.

Krukenberg tumor is a metastatic malignant tumor of the ovary arising from a wide variety of primary sources, with the stomach being the most common. The presenting symptoms are non-specific and the primary source is often un-identified. Here, we describe a case of a 26-year-old Hispanic gravida 4, para 3 female who presented to our hospital with dysuria, pelvic pain and irregular, heavy menstrual cycles for three months duration. An endometrial biopsy was suggestive of carcinosarcoma. The patient underwent debulking surgery with partial cystectomy and bladder repair. A week later, she presented with hematemesis and an endoscopic biopsy revealed a diagnosis of poorly differentiated gastric adenocarcinoma. The tissue specimen obtained during the initial surgery was identified as Krukenberg tumor. The patient underwent adjuvant chemotherapy with FOLFOX along with gastrectomy with intraperitoneal chemotherapy.

The First World War: Propaganda and Recruitment

The second collection in our 'First World War Portal' (see Personal Experiences) First World War: Propaganda and Recruitment offers a wide variety of primary sources on recruitment, training, morale, public opinion, censorship and the development of different forms of propaganda during the First World War. The material has been collated from the Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University, the Bibliothek fur Zeitgeschichte and the Hauptstaatsarchiv in Stuttgart, Cambridge University Library, The National Archives at Kew, Mirrorpix, the Opie collection, the British Library, McMaster University and various local record offices and museums. web address = http://www.amdigital.co.uk/m-collections/collection/the-first-world-war-propaganda-and-recruitment/ Click on Organisation below to go to website

Dreaming of a Better Life: Utopia as a Focus for Thematic, Interdisciplinary Instruction

Throughout history humans have dreamed of a better life. This concept of utopia can be used as a central focus for thematic and interdisciplinary instruction. This approach has three key advantages. First, students recognize that certain themes are consistent across time and place and that realization can lead students to explore their own dreams and how those dreams reflect the realities of their own cultures. Second, this thematic approach encourages interdisciplinary connections among economic and social history, literature, geography, and culture. Finally, students critically analyze a wide variety of primary sources, including songs, prose, poetry, and images. This article outlines utopian dreams of everyday working people from the Middle Ages to the present and presents a variety of student activities related to the utopia theme.

Yes, Minister: Reassessing South Africa's Intervention in the Angolan Civil War, 1975–1976

In 1975–1976, South Africa's apartheid regime took the momentous step of intervening in the Angolan civil war to counter the Marxist Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola and its backers in Havana and Moscow. The failure of this intervention and the subsequent ignominious withdrawal had major repercussions for the evolution of the regime and the history of the Cold War in southern Africa. This article is the first comprehensive study of how and why Pretoria became involved. Drawing on a wide variety of primary sources from South African archives as well as interviews with key protagonists, the article shows that the South African Defence Force and Defence Minister P. W. Botha pushed vigorously and successfully for deeper engagement to cope with security threats perceived through the prism of the emerging doctrine of “total onslaught.” South Africa's intervention in Angola was first and foremost the product of strategic calculations derived from a sense of threat perception expressed and experienced in Cold War terms, but applied and developed in a localized southern African context.

The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation: African Americans and the Fight for Freedom by Glenn David Brasher (review)

Reviewed by: The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation: African Americans and the Fight for Freedom by Glenn David Brasher Andrew L. Slap (bio) The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation: African Americans and the Fight for Freedom. By Glenn David Brasher. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Pp. 296. Cloth, $39.95.) Glenn David Brasher begins The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation by recounting a tour he gave as a National Park Service ranger of the site of one of the Peninsula campaign’s key battles. Conducted after Congress had required Civil War battlefield sites to educate visitors about slavery’s role in the conflict and its impact on individual battles, Brasher for the first time added slavery to the standard military history tale of battles and leaders of the Peninsula campaign. After explaining different northern attitudes toward slavery in the spring of 1862, Brasher argued that General George McClellan’s failure to capture Richmond during the campaign exasperated northerners and prolonged the war, both of which led President Abraham Lincoln to issue the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation later that year. Brasher was not satisfied, however, having brought slavery but not the slaves themselves into the discussion. Over a decade later, the result is this insightful study that brings together military, social, and political history to analyze the agency of Virginia blacks in the Peninsula campaign and emancipation. Brasher’s extensive research in a wide variety of primary sources allows him to make two major and interrelated arguments. First, African Americans influenced the strategy and outcome of Union and Confederate army actions during the campaign. Brasher deftly shows the myriad choices Virginia blacks faced early in the war and demonstrates that they were important actors in the campaign, building fortifications, serving [End Page 265] as laborers, running away to Union lines, and providing military intelligence. African American participation in the campaign—in particular the Confederate army’s use of their labor—helped northerners accept emancipation as a military necessity. Union soldiers complained that Confederate soldiers benefited from having African Americans perform much of the fatigue duty in the Confederate army, such as digging fortifications. More explosively, Republican and abolitionist newspapers reported the existence of black Confederate regiments, and such assertions became “a mainstay in speeches by congressmen who favored the confiscation and liberation of southern slaves” (154). Brasher nicely demonstrates how some northerners used accounts of black Confederate soldiers as propaganda to argue for the Union to enlist black soldiers. Brasher briefly discusses the “black confederate legend” (5) and how neo-Confederates now use it to insist that slavery had nothing to do with the war. He “emphatically rejects claims of widespread slave support for the Confederacy” (6) and quickly dismisses every one of the numerous accounts of black Confederate regiments. For instance, he writes that “a Hoosier soldier made the outrageous claim that the New Yorkers came upon ‘a body of 700 negro infantry’” (77) and asserts that a Pennsylvania soldier who wrote about fighting against two black Confederate regiments “obviously greatly embellished the number of blacks he may have observed” (132). Brasher also warns that Civil War–era newspapers “frequently provided inaccurate information about events” (5). He argues that blacks serving as body servants to Confederate soldiers or the fog of war may have confused witnesses, and that these accounts were then circulated for propaganda. This analysis makes sense and fits with Bruce Levine’s findings in Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War (2006). Unfortunately, Brasher’s examination of smaller numbers of blacks fighting for the Confederate army is a significant weakness in this otherwise fine volume. He thinks “many professional historians have too quickly dismissed any claims that blacks fought with the Confederates,” insisting that “when contemporaries maintained that Southerners were using blacks in combat roles, they were not manufacturing it out of the whole cloth” (5–6). Brasher repeatedly states as fact that African Americans served as snipers with the Confederate army and regularly argues that the evidence suggests that African Americans served as combatants for the Confederacy. The evidence Brasher uses, however, is the same he labels unreliable about the existence of...

The dynamics of electoral politics in Abkhazia

Presidential and parliamentary elections in Abkhazia are pluralistic and competitive. They have led to the transfer of power from government to opposition forces. This in itself is a remarkable fact in the post-Soviet context, where the outcome of elections very often is determined in advance by the ruling elite. The article explains how and why this form of electoral democracy could occur in Abkhazia, arguably the most ethnically heterogeneous of all post-Soviet de facto states. Drawing on a wide variety of primary sources and data from within Abkhazia, particularly interviews with key players, the author describes the remarkable willingness of the main political actors to compromise and assesses to what extent Abkhazia's democratic credentials are sustainable

The Roman Dominate from the Perspective of Demographic-Structural Theory

The Dominate Cycle is an application of demographic-structural theory in a historical work. It seeks to interpret demographic and economic trends seen in a wide variety of primary sources from Late Antiquity in the context of secular cycles. It attempts to shed light on why the Roman Empire declined and fell in the West and survived in the East, to help resolve one of the longest standing debates in modern historiography.

China in the World: A History since 1644 by The Curriculum Specialists at Primary Source, Inc., editors (review)

Reviewed by: China in the World: A History since 1644by The Curriculum Specialists at Primary Source, Inc., editors Jeremiah Jenne (bio) The Curriculum Specialists at Primary Source, Inc., editors. China in the World: A History since 1644. Boston: Cheng and Tsui, 2009. xvii, 391 pp. Includes CD-ROM. Paperback $53.99, isbn978-0-88727-621-7. While few educators deny that understanding China is important for today’s students, until now most materials on Chinese history and society have primarily for the postsecondary classroom. China and the World: A History since 1644seeks to fill this gap and for the most part does an admirable job. Twenty chapters divided into five units cover the period from the Manchu conquest in 1644 down to the present day. The narrative and pacing of the curriculum are neat and efficient. Each unit and chapter is well structured with separate headings for chapter contents, an organizing idea, key questions, and a list of terms. While written for secondary students, the compilers and chapter authors have done a commendable job in not dumbing down important concepts. Most international China scholars will be satisfied with the tone and content of the narrative. I qualify “international” China scholars because while the text [End Page 502]does a fine job of incorporating recent historiography and scholarship on China, there is little mention about how the narrative presented here departs substantially from how the same topics are taught in China or are understood by many Chinese. It is important to learn China’s history, but it is equally necessary to understand how Chinese see their own past and how it relates to their present and the future. This is not to say that a textbook written for English-speaking secondary school students ought pass muster with the PRC Ministry education, but a note or sidebar explaining alternative interpretations would be useful. For example, most foreign accounts of the Boxer movement mention that the anti-foreign Boxers also killed thousands of their own countrymen and women, a decidedly more complicated tale than that taught in PRC schools where it is taught the Boxers were heroic Chinese patriots protecting their country from foreign imperialists. It is not always necessary to “teach the controversy,” but considering this interpretation of the Boxers, as well as other events during China’s “Century of Humiliation,” is necessary to understanding Chinese nationalism in the present day. A set of related discussion questions asks students to think about how this event could be used by the government to promote nationalism. Without some background about how the Boxers as narrative is constructed and deployed in Chinese schools, students not from China may not be able to fully appreciate the extent to which events like the Boxers inform the way many Chinese view the world today. A later chapter includes excerpts from a speech given in 1952 by Mao Zedong on the “liberation” of the Tibetans that does give some insight into the internal logic of the CCP regarding the status of Tibet. But this is presented as an artifact of history. Given the ability to include video via the supplementary CD-ROM, the authors might have considered the inclusion of more recent government statements on the Dalai Lama or clips from the 2008 patriotic viral video “China Stand Up!” This video serves as a chilling reminder that Tibet is not just a matter of history or international politics but remains an emotionally charged issue for many young Chinese. The accompanying CD-ROM and the structure of each chapter and section make this an excellent teaching tool for secondary teachers. Each chapter comes with an array of activities, all of which develop core analytical skills while utilizing a wide variety of primary sources including texts, maps, photographs, posters, and video. The lesson plans are thoughtful and engaging and foster a high level of student interaction with the sources. Introductory essays provide a contextual framework for students’ exploration of the primary materials. Suggested activities include mapping exercises, mock negotiations, creative writing assignments, debates, discussions, and role-playing. All of the activities seem designed to help students read and appreciate primary sources and to gently wean secondary students away...

The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The Ottoman Empire and the First World War (review)

Reviewed by: The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The Ottoman Empire and the First World War Alexander M. Shelby The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The Ottoman Empire and the First World War. By Mustafa Aksakal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-52188060-2. List of abbreviations. Glossary. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xv, 216. $99.00. In this short, well researched volume, Mustafa Aksakal, assistant professor at the American University, explores why the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War in 1914. Aksakal asserts that literature dealing with the Ottoman participation in the Great War exclusively blames the Ottoman war minister, Ismail Enver Pasha, depicting him as the hawkish omnipotent leader who single-hand-edly [End Page 1355] guided the empire into the war. Other historians claim that the Young Turk leadership was seduced by German overtures to join the war. Aksakal, however, takes a new perspective by attributing the misfortune of the Ottoman commitment towards belligerence to the political and military environment surrounding the Ottoman Empire. Aksakal’s book is divided into six chapters with an introduction and conclusion. Each chapter focuses on the period between 1913 and 1914 and the events that led the Ottoman leadership to seek to revive the “Sick Man of Europe.” Aksakal explains that this was a period when the Ottomans found themselves politically isolated and increasingly under European financial and economic domination. This pressure persuaded the Ottoman leadership under the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) that the only way to save the empire was to align it with one of the Great Powers. The general consensus among the Turkish elite also focused on the notion that war was the only option to forge a new global order in which the empire would achieve economic and political independence (p. 191). Aksakal challenges the notion that Enver sought a Great Power alliance in order to expand the empire to include the Turks of Central Asia. He argues that Enver and the other leaders of the CUP viewed war not as a way to build a new empire, but as a “war of independence” from European domination (p. 17). This attitude among the CUP leadership stemmed from a series of incidents that plagued the empire from 1878 to 1914. Aksakal’s narrative of the Ottoman crisis begins in 1913 after the First Balkan War when the empire found itself succumbing to British, French, and Russian demands. Aksakal contends that the emotional drain of the Balkan Wars on the Ottomans and the fear of losing territory in eastern Anatolia to the Russians forced the CUP leadership to seek German aid in 1914 in order to save the empire. Aksakal observes that when Germany, in anticipation of the Ottomans joining the war effort, agreed to give them aid, the CUP leadership, guided by Enver, hesitated and attempted to delay the Ottoman pledge towards war by citing a Bulgarian-Ottoman alliance as a condition to war. It was not until Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II refused to allow any more assistance to reach Istanbul and the “alliance became strained to the point of rupture” that the CUP leadership, facing the prospect of being politically isolated once again, reluctantly agreed to German demands (p. 154). This well organized and well written volume is extensively researched with a wide variety of primary sources that include those of the Turkish General Staff, the Ottoman Archives of the Prime Minister, and the German Foreign Office as well as the German Federal Military Archives. The book’s strongest asset is the scope of the second half of the volume, which deals with the Ottoman attempts to avoid war. Aksakal’s argument that Enver Pasha was not the all-powerful tyrant who drove the empire to its demise is solidly based in primary sources. [End Page 1356] Alexander M. Shelby Florida State University Tallahassee, Florida Copyright © 2009 The Society for Military History

Verkleidungen der Aufklärung: Narrenspiele und Weltanschauung in der Goethezeit (review)

Galil Shahar, Verkleidungen der Aufklarung: Narrenspiele und Weltanschauung in der Goethezeit. Trans, from the Hebrew by Stefan Siebers. Gottingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2006. 229pp. Galil Shahar 's well-researched study Verkleidungen der Aufklarung: Narrenspiele und Weltanschauung in der Goethezeit investigates the interrelation between the trope of foolishness, the figure of the Narr, and Enlightenment thought. Delineating her own version of the dialectic of enlightenment, Shahar seeks to demonstrate that reason and the carnivalesque do not contradict but rather complement and complete each other. Tracing a tine from Goethe's Hanswursts Hochzeit oder der Lauf der Welt via Gottsched 's banishment of the fool from the theater to his reappearance as lustige Person in the prologue to Faust, Shahar claims that the fool never really disappeared from the German stage. Rather, the bourgeois theater integrated elements of the carnivalesque, which, as Shahar argues, did not detract from but rather facilitated its emerging function as a matrix of enlightenment thought. Shahar's study draws on a wide variety of primary sources. Her analysis of cultural and social history is interlaced with interpretations of literary texts, ranging from Goethe's Faust, Wilhelm Meister, Schiller's Uber die asthetische Erziehung des Menschen, Kant's concept of the sublime, and Kleist 's Uber das Marionettentheater to various actors' memoirs, including those of Karoline Schulze-Kummerfeld and Carotine Neuber. The first section of Shahar's study summarizes the historical developments that account for the transition from traveling theater companies to the professionalized and institutionalized bourgeois theater, from the actor as outcast to the upwardly mobile thespian. In this process, the theater, although it retained elements of the carnivalesque, was civilized and re-defined as the arena of homo ludens, in which the bourgeois subject is free to confront the internal contradictions of Enlightenment thought in a safe environment. In the theater, the dangers and problem zones of enlightened thought assume innocuous shapes. Theatrical illusion does not countermand truth, but gives rise to a higher truth. Similarly, the actor's ability to let go of his own identity does not signal alienation from the self but rather allows for processes of self-discovery and identificationThus, the theater emerges as an institution that mediates between the anarchy of the carnivalesque, its investment in pleasure, spontaneity, and the body, and the rigidity and homogeneity of enlightenment thinking. …

The Tupac Amaru and Catarista rebellions: an anthology of sources

Through a wide variety of primary sources--including letters, eyewitness accounts, and governmental documents--this collection portrays in vivid detail the three indigenous rebellions that threatened Spanish control of its South American colonies more than a quarter century before the Wars of Independence (1808-1825). Headnotes introduce each selection, and a general introduction provides historical, cultural, and political context. Maps, a chronology of the rebellions, and a glossary of terms are included.

Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945, and: Plen: Sovetskie voennoplennye v Germanii, 1941-1945 (review)

Reviewed by Mark Edele Catherine Merridale, Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945. 462 pp. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006. ISBN 0805074554, $30.00 (cloth); 0312426526, $15.00 (paper). Aron Shneer, Plen: Sovetskie voennoplennye v Germanii, 1941–1945 [Captivity: Soviet Prisoners of War in Germany, 1941–45]. 620 pp. Moscow: Mosty kul´tury; Jerusalem: Gesharim, 2005. ISBN 5932731958. The Great Patriotic War, or to put it in Western language—the Soviet experience of World War II in Europe—is having a renaissance among historians. After the long hiatus that followed such classics as Alexander Werth's Russia at War, and after the wave of research on late Stalinism looked at the war years largely from the perspective of their impact on postwar society, more and more historians are now starting to explore the war itself.1 Recently, two new and important additions have been made to this emerging literature on the Soviet experience of World War II: Catherine Merridale's Ivan's War and Aron Shneer's Plen: Sovetskie voennoplennye v Germanii, 1941–1945.2 These are two very different books. Merridale attempts the delicate balancing act of targeting an educated audience beyond academe without losing sight of the latter. Her book is beautifully written, illustrated with [End Page 209] interesting photographs, and minimally footnoted. Following the lead of Elena Seniavskaia, it tells the story of frontline experience from below as well as from the East—a long overdue counterpoint to Omer Bartov's work on the Wehrmacht.3 Shneer's book is at the other end of the spectrum. It is a classical monograph with long, careful, and detailed footnotes, drawing on primary and secondary sources in an impressive range of languages (Russian, German, English, French, Latvian, and Polish). It is targeted to a specialist audience and part of an already established research field: the history of Soviet prisoners of war (POWs).4 In terms of source base and conceptual problems, however, the two volumes have a lot in common. Both combine as wide a range of sources as they can muster—memoirs, letters, diaries (in the case of Merridale), archival evidence, and interviews with survivors. Merridale worked in Russian and German archives and talked to Russian survivors. Shneer worked in Israel, contacting Jewish survivors and exploring the holdings of the Yad Vashem archive—clearly a rich archival repository that more historians of Russia should note. Aside from geographical differences, the two source bases contain similar types of documentation, and both historians attempt to compensate for the problems of one genre by supplementing it with documentation of a different type. The two volumes also share a similar conceptual problem, a problem well known to any historian dealing with group experience: on the one hand, one needs to tell a story common to all; on the other hand, knowledge of a wide variety of primary sources alerts the historian to the many differences cutting across the group. Red Army soldiers were far from undifferentiated. Men of three generations served alongside a significant minority of (mainly young) women; Russians served alongside Ukrainians, Belorussians, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Moldavians, Armenians, or Jews (to list just a few); peasants served together with urban dwellers, intelligenty alongside those barely literate; party members served together with non-party people, internationalists alongside antisemites; those who had profited from the Stalin revolution and the Great Terror served alongside those who had been victimized by one or the other or even both of these upheavals. To tell the story of such a diverse group of people, to find a common denominator, to distill a typical experience out of this diversity is a serious challenge to any historian. [End Page 210] The two books deal with this problem in fundamentally different ways. Merridale starts with the assumption that there is a collective singular—"the true Ivan"—which the historian can set out...