Steve Goddard's History Wire

Out in Paperback / Abraham in Arms

Abraham in Arms -- War and Gender in Colonial New England by Ann M. Little, 262 pages, ISBN #0-8122-1961-9. Index, source notes, no bibliography, b&w images sprinkled through text.

Conventional wisdom has it that armed conflict in colonial America was a man's enterprise, undertaken while women knitted by the hearth. Colorado State University historian Ann M. Little has a far different take. She argues that gender was at the heart of understanding of war in the colonial era.

Drawing on a 17th century Puritan sermon evoking Old Testament Abraham as a role model for the male listeners, Little paints this ideal as that of "the unquestioned leader of his family and his people in war and peace." But, she writes, "enemies challenged Abraham's authority in New England. Indians threatened the safety of his household, subordinates in his own family threatened his status, and wives and daughters taken into captivity became baptized Catholics, married French or Indian men, and refused to return to New England."

Little's study embodies the period from 1636 to 1763, including the Pequot War, King Philip's War, King William's War, Queen Anne's War, Dummer's War/Rale's War/Greylock's War, King George's War and the Seven Years War/French and Indian War.

Book Alert / That The World May Know

That The World May Know -- Bearing Witness to Atrocity by James Dawes, Harvard UP '07, $19.95, 289 pages, ISBN #0-674-02623-3. Index, source notes, no bibliography or illustrations.

Bearing witness to atrocity is a tremendously important duty, particularly for the benefit of future generations. But as Macalester College English Prof. James Dawes writes, it's only half the battle. For the logical follow-up to witness is to devise mechanisms to prevent the reoccurrence of atrocity and to stop others in their tracks.

Dawes's study focuses on the horror of Rwanda as depicted brilliantly in the film Hotel Rwanda. "Who," he asks, "has the right to speak for the survivors and the dead, and how far does that right go? How are these stories used, and what does this tell us about our collective moral future?" He divides his narrative into four sections: Genocide, Interrogation, Burnout and Storytelling (interviews with those who have been there).

Is 1968 Repeating Itself In 2008? "A Tidy Premise....It's Irresistible -- And Wrong"

The Washington Post:

"Forty years ago, this country entered what would turn out to be the most politically charged, disorienting, violent and tragic year in modern American history. The year we're now heading into has some surface similarities to 1968: a protracted and wrenching war in Asia, an unpopular president, a wide-open presidential campaign and raw-nerve controversies over civil rights (with gays and immigrants this time) and geopolitics (featuring jihadists instead of communists). The murder of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan is another awful reminder of 1968, when two American heroes, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, lost their lives to assassins.

"History repeating itself: It's a tidy premise. In fact, it's irresistible -- and wrong, but wrong in interesting ways that shed light on both years. Sure, elements of '68 persist in the world and in America today (because folly is durable), but the difference between 2008 and 1968 is the difference between needing psychotherapy and requiring a brain transplant.

In 1968, the country came close to political disintegration. Authority wasn't merely questioned; it literally lost control. The Tet Offensive in late January 1968 shocked those who had assumed we were winning the Vietnam War. President Lyndon B. Johnson essentially quit his job on live television. Days later, the apostle of nonviolent resistance was gunned down in Memphis. The cities burned.

                                                    (Click above link to read more)

Benazir Bhutto, Newly Arrived In America, Says People Don't Show Enough Respect To Their Parents

The New York Times:

"Benazir Bhutto always understood Washington more than Washington understood her. Ms. Bhutto, the Pakistani opposition leader and two-time prime minister, who was assassinated in Rawalpindi on Thursday as she campaigned for the office a third time, had a more extensive network of powerful friends in the capital’s political and media elite than almost any other foreign leader. Over the years, she scrupulously cultivated those friends, many from her days at Harvard and Oxford. She was rewarded when her connections — at the White House, in Congress and within the foreign policy establishment — helped propel her into power in Pakistan.

"But in the end, with yet another American administration behind her, Ms. Bhutto’s Washington network only underscored how little the United States fathomed the feudal politics of South Asia, and its own ability to control events in the cauldron of Pakistan. 'I always thought this was roughly how it would end for her, but I didn’t think it would happen today,' Peter W. Galbraith, a former United States ambassador and a longtime friend of Ms. Bhutto’s, said in an interview on Thursday.

"A descendant of a feudal landholding family in Sindh, a southern province, Ms. Bhutto was raised in a mansion in the Karachi seaside neighborhood of Clifton and educated at Christian convent schools. She arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1969 as a primly dressed 16-year-old, bewildered by American customs. 'I was amazed at how people talked to their parents — not enough respect,' she later told The Washington Post."

                                                  (Click above link to read more)

Book Alert / Italian Voices -- Making Minnesota Our Home

Italian Voices -- Making Minnesota Our Home, Foreward by Rudolph J. Vecoli by Mary Ellen Mancina-Batinich, Minnesota Historical Society Press '07, $29.95, 315 pages, ISBN #0-87351-581-1. Index, source notes, appendix, no bibliography, b&w images sprinkled through text.

The author, an oral historian, describes Minnesota's Italian colonia "in Duluth, Dilworth, the Twin Cities, and towns of the Iron Range between 1900 and 1960." Rather than offering our feeble attempt to deconstruct the lives of Italian emigres in their new world, it seems much more to the point to let members of that community speak for themselves:

"Christmas, we used to make stuffoli, a lot of dough with honey, and we made those rings like doughnuts. My mother had a machine and we used to make seppole, an Italian sweet, and then in the middle we put a chunk of crema and a cherry on top." -- Josephine Nigro, Virginia.

"If you went to a union-organizing meeting you got fired. We had to hide when we met. Somebody gave us a place to meet in a tavern basement, but one guy stooled on us. The next day at work the boss said, 'Hey, Patsy, when there gonna be a strike?'" -- Patsy Serrano, Buhl.

"The boarders paid me $3.00 a month. I washed their clothes full of iron ore. Tough to get clean. They brought the eats and I cooked for them. I always made a good lunch pail: break, some meat, fruit, sometimes a piece of cake. We made wine. There were lotta barrels in our cellar!"

Book Alert / The Squandering of America

The Squandering of America -- How the Failure of our Politics Undermines our Prosperity by Robert Kuttner, Knopf '07, $26.95, 337 pages, ISBN #1400040809. Index, source notes, no bibliography or illustrations.

It may be a comfort to liberals to know that Robert Kuttner can be always be found stationed at the left wall of the ship of the American republic, with his fingers in dikes labeled Medicare and Social Security while, with his other arm, he unleashes salvos against hedge funds and subprime lenders. He examined the nature of markets in his well-received Everything for Sale. Now the founder of the American Prospect magazine is back again, and no one will be surprised that he has found new conservative evils to rail against.

Kuttner ably sketches the evolution of American democracy into the 20th century, when "a more democratic American became a more balanced society," with public policy promoting broad prosperity and economic security, particularly after legislation of the FDR and LBJ eras and felicitous Supreme Court rulings. But lately, the formerly diffuse power has been consolidated by "a narrow elite, which blocks the ability of government to restore broad prosperity to the majority of citizens."

Ever the Cassandra, Kuttner posits that "The ultimate test of a democracy is whether it is possible for the people to throw out the governing party" and suggests that because of this unprecedented power grab, "we have come very close to losing our democracy, not just in rigged rules and stolen elections but in the domination of politics by big money, the decline in participation by ordinary people, and the assault on basic constitutional liberties."

Out in Paperback / An Intimate Affair

An Intimate Affair -- Women, Lingerie, and Sexuality by Jill Fields, UCal Press '07, $21.95, 375 pages, ISBN #0520252616. Index, source notes, no bibliography, b&w images sprinkled through text.

"Clothes," wrote Virginia Woolf in 1928, "are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath." In her new work, Cal State University historian Jill Fields interprets for her readers how the history of undergarments (or the lack thereof) is reflective of the changing zeitgeist of the times. But her findings are sometimes counter-intuitive. Would we expect, for example, that a popular undergarment during the Victorian Era was open-crotch drawers?

Fields's narrative divides into seven sections, examining: Drawers, Corsets and Girdles, Brassieres, The Meaning of Black Lingerie, advertising for intimate apparel, the garment industry and union culture, and the return of the repressed (waist). The book features more than 70 illustrations, some of them quite striking, to wit: Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus, Jean Harlow in Double Whoopee, and a plethora of brassiere and lingerie ads. And yes, such titillating anecdotes as Howard Hughes inventing a bra for actress Jane Russell to enhance her natural endowments are revisited.

Book Alert / Architect of Justice

Architect of Justice -- Felix S. Cohen and the Founding of American Legal Pluralism by Dalia Tsuk Mitchell, Cornell UP '07, $59.95, 384 pages, ISBN #0801439566. Index, bibliography, source notes, unillustrated.

Among the many misfortunes Native Americans have suffered during the life of the American republic is the fact that Felix Cohen, Esq. died of a ruptured blood vessel at the age of 46. During 15 years in the Solicitor's Office of the U.S. Department of the Interior, he drafted the Indian Claims Commission Act of 1934, the Indian Claims Commission Act of 1946, and authored The Handbook of Federal Indian Law as head of the Indian Law Survey. Imagine the additional contributions he could have made had he been allotted his full three score and ten.

According to George Washington University law professor Dalia Tsuk Mitchell, what most informed this young Jewish lawyer's mission was his ongoing dialogue with the Jewish community on cultural pluralism and assimilation against the backdrop of the persecution of European Jews during the Second World War. Prof. Mitchell's work is the first biography of her subject.

Book Alert / Path of Empire

Path of Empire -- Panama and the California Gold Rush by Aims McGuinness, Cornell UP '08, 249 pages, ISBN #0801445213. Index, bibliography, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

With the advent of the California Gold Rush in the late 1840s, hordes of intrepid fortune-seekers trekked westward. Conventional wisdom has it that they took the arduous and sometimes treacherous land route. But as University of Wisconsin historian Aims McGuinness relates, more than 200,000 came by ship to the east coast of Panama, crossed the Isthmus of Panama that would in three generations become the Panama Canal, and then embarked on the final leg of their trip by boat to California.

The author describes the commercial hub that Panama became in those days, as gold, silver and mail was transported over the land route, a task made easier in 1855 with the completion of a railroad route, built by an American company, across the Panamanian neck. He dramatizes the frenetic activity of those days against a backdrop of Panamanian society, the abolition of slavery, establishment of universal manhood suffrage, and the creation of an autonomous Panamanian state.

The stimulation of commerce caused by use of the transcontinental route, with passage made easier with the railroad, inspired entrepreneurs and nations to envision the wealth that would accrue to whoever succeeded in digging a canal in its place. As David McCullough famously relates in The Path Between The Seas, the French first ventured forth in the 1880s and 1890s only to fall prey to the tropical terrain and malaria. It was no easier for Americans, who battled the elements for decades before finally opening what we know as the Panama Canal in 1914.

                                                                            

Book Alert / Gods Behaving Badly -- A Novel

Gods Behaving Badly -- A Novel by Marie Phillips, Little, Brown '07, $23.99, 293 pages, ISBN #0316067628.

You may have thought those Greek gods you studied about in college -- the ones enshrined in marble, with blank, staring eyes -- are dead. Actually, they've just gone underground and are alive and ("well" is perhaps too strong a word) in a London townhouse that has seen better days. Aphrodite, Goddess of Love, works as a phone sex operator; Apollo, God of Prophecy, is a TV psychic; and Zeus, King of the Gods, is their landlord; so you see they haven't entirely abandoned their original skillsets.

At least this is the premise of Marie Phillips's debut novel, which has received the kind of enthusiastic reviews given by book reviewers starved for new premises. Since the gods are living in our time, not theirs, they "dabble in the lives of mortals." A for instance: "Aphrodite convinces her son, Eros, to shoot Apollo with an arrow that makes him fall in love with the first woman he sees -- a young mortal named Alice, a cleaning lady." Such set-ups yield frivolous and sometimes lusty hilarity.