Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Murderous Nation: A Review Of Randolph Roth's 'American Homicide', William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

In 1863, a cooper in Chillicothe, Ohio, named Schyler Courier angrily responded to a group of boys throwing snowballs at him by firing his shotgun, killing one of the boys. In 1866, in Petersburg, New York, Hiram Coon warned his employer's wife, Mary Laker, to quit taunting him for his criminal past; when she would not stop, he split her head open with an ax. In 1873, an enraged Waiden, Vermont, farmer named James Snow shot peddler John Stanton in the face for the latter's snarky comment to Snow's wife — "I guess you have money, as farmers generally have …

Bede And The Rewriting Of Sanctity, Sally Shockro

History Faculty Publications

Bede's use and revision of the anonymous Life of St Cuthbert and the redeployment of patristic texts in later continental and Anglo-Saxon ascetic and hagiographical texts.

Clear-Eyed: African Immersion, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

Recent events including the World Cup in South Africa have done much to redeem Africa’s global image. Early European visitors wrote about the beauty of the landscape, vegetation, rivers, lakes and mountains, but labeled the inhabitants “natives” and “sub-human.” For too long, the continent was dismissed as an “exotic” place inhabited by “primitive” people considered misfits in the modern world, and as a result, some of the most vicious racial epitaphs have been detonated against them. UD’s immersion experience educates our students and reverses these stereotypes by charging them to discover for themselves firsthand the African people.

Girls' Secondary Education In The Western World: From The 18th To The 20th Century (Book Review), Christopher Bischof

History Faculty Publications

This edited collection traces the development of girls’ secondary education over three centuries in a way that highlights national peculiarities without losing sight of ideas and debates that cut across borders. Contributors follow very similar formats, exploring historiography and key themes: religion, coeducation, the ideal of domestic motherhood, and politics. The greatest single overarching theme is what the editors describe as “the dialectic between education as a conservative force and as a force for change as expressed in both democratic and authoritarian political agendas across Europe” (p. 2). Political battleground that it was, however, there emerges from the essays as …

American Revolution: New Directions For A New Century, Andrew M. Schocket

History Faculty Publications

This essay maps out the directions I believe we are going, gives examples of recent trailblazing work, and offers suggestions about how we might move forward as we enter another century of scholarship.

Review: Mark Noll's 'The New Shape Of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith', William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

It has become commonplace to observe that the center of Christianity has moved from Euroamerica to the global South and East. Still, it is a bit jarring to realize, as Mark Noll notes at the beginning of this compelling book, that "this past Sunday" more "Anglicans attended church in each of Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda than did Anglicans in Britain and Canada and Episcopalians in the United States combined"; more "members of Brazil's Pentecostal Assemblies of God [were] at church than the combined total in the two largest U.S. Pentecostal denominations"; and more people attended the Yoido Full …

Review: The Overflowing Of Friendship: Love Between Men And The Creation Of The American Republic, Jen Manion

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Educating Women: Schooling And Identity In England And France, 1800-1867 (Book Review), Christopher Bischof

History Faculty Publications

Christina de Bellaigue’s Educating Women: Schooling and Identity in England and France, 1800-1867 explores stereotypes about women’s boarding schools on both sides of the English-French Channel. In the process de Bellaigue identifies the basis in reality which many of the most widespread stereotypes had, including: the socially grasping schoolmistress; the schoolmistress as a gentlewoman fallen on hard times; the short-lived nature of many schools; the stress laid on the teaching of “accomplishments”; and the idea that preparing women for their domestic role was the ultimate goal of an education. However, she also simultaneously undermines these stereotypes by supplying nuance and …

Rebirth Of A Strategic Continent?: Problematizing Africa As A Geostrategic Zone, Abou B. Bamba

History Faculty Publications

At a time when the U.S. Department of Defense is putting the finishing touches to the establishment of a military command for Africa (known as AFRICOM) and the People’s Republic of China’s influence on the continent seems to be on the rise, a detour through the history of America’s past geographical imaginations of Africa appears as a necessity. This is especially crucial since the current constructions of the African continent as a strategic place in both policy and military circles seems to echo the geodiscursive representations of Africa during the Second World War. In fact, it was in the early …

Book Review: Authentic New Orleans: Tourism, Culture, And Race In The Big Easy, J. Mark Souther

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

(Review) Ladder Of Shadows: Reflecting On Medieval Vestige In Provence And Languedoc, Frederick S. Paxton

History Faculty Publications

The article reviews the book "Ladder of Shadows: Reflecting on Medieval Vestige in Provence and Languedoc," by Gustav Sobin, 236 p., Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, 2009. Series: An Ahmanson Foundation Book in the Humanities.

Review Of The Rule Of Women In Early Modern Europe, Edited By A.J. Cruz And M. Suzuki, Elizabeth Lehfeldt

History Faculty Publications

Review of the Rule of Women in Early Modern Europe, edited by A.J. Cruz and M. Suzuki

Review: 'Storied Independent Automakers: Nash, Hudson, And American Motors', John Alfred Heitmann

History Faculty Publications

Nash, Hudson, and now even American Motors are automobile brands that have largely disappeared from the American memory. Yet, despite riding the twentieth-century economic roller coaster and operating in the shadow of the Big Three, these firms made sustained, significant technological and economic contributions. Charles K. Hyde’s Storied Independent Automakers is the author’s latest foray into the area of automotive business history, following work on the Chrysler Corporation and the Dodge brothers. A professor of History at Wayne State University, Hyde has written a needed critical business history on an important topic that complements the vast amount of “buff” and …

Evelyn Aschenbrenner. A History Of Wayne State University In Photographs (Book Review), Julie Mujic

History Faculty Publications

Wayne State University (WSU) alumna and freelance writer Evelyn Aschenbrenner compiled this book to fulfill her own curiosity about the evolution of Wayne State University's campus in Detroit, Michigan.

Book review by Julie A. Mujic: Aschenbrenner, Evelyn. A History of Wayne State University in Photographs. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009. ISBN 9780814332825

Triangulating A Modernization Experiment: The United States, France And The Making Of The Kossou Project In Central Ivory Coast, Abou B. Bamba

History Faculty Publications

Toward the end of the 1960s, authorities in the Ivory Coast decided to build the Kossou Dam, a hydro-electric dam on the Bandama River near the geographic center of the Francophone country. Initially conceived as a technopolitical measure to meet the growing energy demand of the most economically successful country of France's former colonies, the damming experiment soon emerged as a multipurpose regional development project aimed at correcting the regional disparities that tarnished the Ivory Coast's phenomenal economic growth.

This article focuses on the Kossou modernization experience and the sociopolitical transformations that it caused. I argue that the nationalist enthusiasm …

Comrade Father Thomas Mcgrady: A Socialist Priest's Quest For Equality Through Socialism, Jacob H. Dorn

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

(Review) Witchcraft And The Papacy: An Account Drawing On The Formerly Secret Records Of The Roman Inquisition, Marc R. Forster

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Prescient Pacifists, William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

Reviews of two books:

• Patricia Applebaum, Kingdom to Commune: Protestant Pacifist Culture between World War I and the Vietnam Era.
• Joseph Kosek, Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy.

The Enlightenment has bequeathed us — Americans more than anyone else — the conviction that history is a story of progress. Such a notion seems ludicrous when one considers the violence of the contemporary world. As the British historian Eric Hobsbawm observes in his brilliant work The Age of Extremes, the 20th century "was without doubt the most murderous century of which we have record, both by the scale, …

Ethno-Nationalism, Islam And The State In The Caucasus: Post-Soviet Disorder (Review), Sean Pollock

History Faculty Publications

Review of the book Ethno-Nationalism, Islam and the State in the Caucasus: Post-Soviet Disorder (edited by Moshe Gammer).

Review Of Convent Times: A Social History In The Foundations Of Modern Spain, By A. Atienza, Elizabeth Lehfeldt

History Faculty Publications

Review of Convent Times: A Social History in the Foundations of Modern Spain, by A. Atienza

Sculpted Landscapes: Art & Place In Cleveland's Cultural Gardens, 1916-2006, Mark T. Tebeau

History Faculty Publications

Perhaps the world's first peace garden, the Cleveland Cultural Gardens embody the history of twentieth-century America and reveal the complex interrelations between art and place. This essay uses the Cleveland Cultural Gardens as a lens through which to explore how art and place have intersected over time. It explores how communities have negotiated questions of national, ethnic, and American identity and embedded those identities into the vernacular landscape. It considers how the particulars of place were embedded into a public garden and asks whether it is possible for public art to transcend its place both in terms of geography and …

Male Same-Sex Relations In Modern China: Language, Media Representation, And Law, 1900–1949, Wenqing Kang

History Faculty Publications

The article discusses the tension in the Chinese indigenous terminology for male same-sex relations which was similar to Eve Sedgwich's description of the Western modern homosexual/heterosexual definition. It argues that the Western sexological concept of homosexuality was accepted in the early 20th century China and notes that its legal apparatus had no clear stipulations on sex between men. It indicates how writers during the first half of the 20th century were more concerned with the proper gender behavior and the image of the nation than sex itself.

Rescripting Stalinist Masculinity: Contesting The Male Ideal In Soviet Film And Society, 1953-1968, Marko Dumančić

History Faculty Publications

This dissertation traces the evolution of a new type of cinematic masculinity in the fifteen years following Joseph Stalin’s death and examines how controversial post-Stalinist movie heroes became a battleground for the country’s postwar values and ideals. During the 1950s and 1960s, postwar Soviet leadership faced the kinds of sociopolitical ruptures that were also evident on the other side of the Iron Curtain; the Communist Party leadership struggled to moderate the combined destabilizing effect of consumerism, a recalcitrant youth (sub)culture, and Cold War anxieties. Nowhere was the angst of the postwar period more obvious than in the way Soviet filmmakers …

"The Urban Praetor's Tribunal" In Spaces Of Justice In The Roman World, Eric Kondratieff

History Faculty Publications

"Book abstract: Despite the crucial role played by both law and architecture in Roman culture, the Romans never developed a type of building that was specifically and exclusively reserved for the administration of justice: courthouses did not exist in Roman antiquity. The present volume addresses this paradox by investigating the spatial settings of Roman judicial practices from a variety of perspectives. Scholars of law, topography, architecture, political history, and literature concur in putting Roman judicature back into its concrete physical context, exploring how the exercise of law interacted with the environment in which it took place, and how the spaces …

‘Broken Brotherhood: The Rise And Fall Of The National Afro-American Council,’ By Benjamin R. Justesen, Eric S. Yellin

History Faculty Publications

The dominance of Booker T. Washington and the loyalty of most African Americans to the Republican Party are often mistaken as markers of black political unanimity at the turn of the twentieth century. Even worse, they are assumed to stand for the whole of African American political life. Benjamin R. Justesen’s story of the struggles to establish and sustain the National Afro-American Council should serve as an important reminder of the tensions, diversity, and energy within black politics in this period. The reminder is so important, and so potential productive, that one wishes that Broken Brotherhood: The Rise and Fall …

Turning Toward Place, Space, And Time, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

A critical geography and a new historicism have reoriented many humanists and social science disciplines. Like the spatial turn, the temporal turn now grounds the analysis of everything from literature to sociology in new kinds of contexts. The exciting challenge before us now is integrating those new perspectives, taking advantage of what they have to teach us.

The Tide Is Setting Strongly Against Us, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Lincoln's bid for reelection in 1864 faced serious challenges from a popular opponent and a nation weary of war. For a good part of 1864 -- the year he faced reelection -- Abraham Lincoln had little faith that he would win or even be renominated.

Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery (Foreword), Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

A foreword to the book, Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery by John O. Peters. Petersbury: The Dietz Press, 2010.

What Lincoln Was Up Against: The Context Of Leadership, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Abraham Lincoln faced desperate challenges from the moment he took office until the day he was killed. While Union armies in the field struggled for four years against dismayingly effective Confederate forces, Lincoln fought to keep the North from breaking apart. The task proved unrelenting.

Domesticating The Diaspora: Memory And The Life Of Sister Katie, Caroline Waldron Merithew

History Faculty Publications

Three shrines in Illinois honor heroes of the working class: one for the legendary Mother Jones; one for the Virden martyrs, who died for coal mining unionism, and whose memory is kept alive by labor organizers around the world; and one for Catherine (Katie) Bianco DeRorre. Katie's monument, unlike the others, draws few visitors today. But when it was dedicated in 1961, men and women — on the floor of the U.S. Congress, in the neighborhood where Katie grew up, at American universities, in union halls, on the streets of New York City, and in Milan — took notice and …