Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Consolidating Power: Technology, Ideology, And Philadelphia's Growth In The Early Republic, Andrew M. Schocket

History Faculty Publications

Considers how during the 1780's-1820's wealthy Philadelphians adopted the British institutional structure of the corporation for purposes of organizing Philadelphia's economic and political life and how the corporate form was used to reconstruct and consolidate economic and political power. The corporation was part of a variety of "nexus technologies" that included canals and markets. These new social technologies allowed the coordination of physical and financial activities across greater distances, without relying on older forms of face-to-face control and coordination, thus permitting new elites to gain power as older, local patrician elites were displaced. These new corporate forms needed the legal …

Census As A Techology Of Empire, David W. Darrow

History Faculty Publications

A census is an example of the social construction of knowledge and the politics of measurement. Measuring people assumes a political significance because it entails converting heterogeneous populations into numbers—stable pieces of knowledge that can be easily combined and manipulated. In constructing such numerical representations, census officials claim to be creating an objective portrait of the population. Censuses, however, also contribute to something less tangible by playing a key role in the creation of what Benedict Anderson has termed an “imagined community.” General censuses provide states with a unique opportunity to unify space and populations with a single instrument. Furthermore, …

(Review) Kaspar Von Greyerz, Religion Und Kultur, 1500–1800, Marc R. Forster

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Colonial Legacies: The Problem Of Persistence In Latin American History (Review), John Sherman

History Faculty Publications

Review of the book Colonial Legacies: The Problem of Persistence in Latin American History (edited by Jeremy Adelman).

"Rosebloom And Pure White," Or So It Seemed, Mary Niall Mitchell

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review: Stuart Banner's 'The Death Penalty: An American History', William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

In this dispassionate but chillingly detailed survey of capital punishment, Banner, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, documents and explains the dramatic "changes in the arguments pro and con, in the crimes punished with death, in execution methods and rituals ... [and] in the way Americans have understood and experienced the death penalty."

Review Of Rip Van Winkle's Neighbors: The Transformation Of Rural Society In The Hudson River Valley, 1720-1850, By T.J. Wermuth, Thomas J. Humphrey

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

(Reviews) Iotsald Von Saint-Claude, Vita Des Abtes Odilo Von Cluny/Studien Zu Iotsalds Vita Des Abtes Odilo Von Cluny, Frederick S. Paxton

History Faculty Publications

Reviews the books 'Iotsald von Saint-Claude, Vita des Abtes Odilovon Cluny,' edited by Iotsald von Saint-Claude and 'Studien zu Iotsalds Vita des Abtes Odilo von Cluny,' by Johannes Staub.

Is There A Center To American Religious History?, William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

Is there a center to American religious history? Of course, this question grows out of what David Wills has referred to as “the perennial debate that always seems to hold center stage as the Big Issue in the field ... [that is,] the ongoing quarrel between those who center their stories on the culturally formative role of a dominant Protestantism and those who emphasize the countervailing forces of religious pluralism and toleration.”

As I take the question, Is there some sort of center to American religion – dominant Protestantism or otherwise – that enables us to tell the story of …

Statistics And Sufficiency: Toward An Intellectual History Of Russia's Rural Crisis, David W. Darrow

History Faculty Publications

The article examines the impact of the ‘rise of statistical thinking’ and statistical measurement on elite perceptions of the condition of the Russian Empire's post-emancipation peasant economy. Using archival and published sources, it argues that the increased use of statistical measurement did much to concretize in numerical (‘objective’) terms the idea of rural crisis. In particular, the combination of traditional paternalistic concerns about the sufficiency of peasant resources and the use of cadastre measurement yielded an image of the peasant household economy in which the value (the income-producing capabilities) of post-emancipation peasant allotments nearly always fell short of subsistence requirements …

Book Review: General Crook And The Western Frontier By Charles M. Robinson Iii, Michael L. Tate

History Faculty Publications

Few frontier military officers could claim a more varied and significant combat career during the second half of the nineteenth century than George Crook. Beginning with service as a young lieutenant in the Rogue River War and the Yakima War of the 1850s, he learned quickly about the weaknesses of an army that suffered from underfunding, congressional neglect, low morale, and petty bickering among its officer corps. Despite his commanding troops during the next three decades in some of the most celebrated Indian wars of the Great Plains and Southwest, he also developed an empathy for his adversaries who suffered …

(Review) L’An Mil Et La Paix De Dieu, La France Chrétienne Et Féodale 980-1060, Frederick S. Paxton

History Faculty Publications

Reviews the book 'L'an mil et la paix de Dieu: La France chretienne et feodale 980-1060,' by Dominique Barthelemy.

The Dilemmas Of Enlightenment In The Eastern Borderlands: The Theater And Library In Tbilisi, Austin Jersild, Neli Melkadze

History Faculty Publications

The Russian field is quickly accumulating a wide variety of works on Russian imperialism. These works now rival the field of colonial studies on the Western empires, and include explorations of imperial ideology, the multiethnic service elite, educational policy, missionary activities, cultural borrowing and interaction among the diverse peoples of the empire, and native responses and challenges to Russian rule.¹ The new studies often venture out to the eastern borderlands of [End Page 27] the empire, such as the Volga-Urals and Turkestan, and complement and complicate a more developed historiography on the western borderlands and its peoples, such as …

Force And Colonial Development In Eastern Uganda, Carol Summers

History Faculty Publications

This article explores why and how administrators and missionaries in Eastern Uganda came to associate progress and development with the need to whip, coerce, and imprison women, developing new institutions for the violent control of wives that went far beyond more common patterns of informal patriarchal control. New Native Courts took over from husbands in arranging for troublesome wives to be whipped. New mission associations of church, teachers’ and evangelists’ groups, and church men’s groups worked to establish Christian patriarchal control over wives who rejected husbands and Christ. Both officials and missionaries understood clearly that the government and missions needed …

The Inevitable Future Of The South, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

In some ways, the Consolidation started all the way back in the big war they had in the middle of the twentieth century, when the South was still way behind the rest of the country--behind even the ridiculously cold parts up north and the ridiculously dry parts out west. They had to build big army bases and big ships for the war, so they moved some of that to the South and paid people more than southerners had ever earned before. Cities grew real fast, and people got new cars and houses and things when the war ended, but the …

Slavery, Economics And Constitutional Ideals, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

As we think about endings, however, it is also useful to think about beginnings. That is what President Abraham Lincoln did in his Second Inaugural Address, delivered just five weeks before the surrender at Appomattox and his own assassination soon thereafter. All knew, he said reflecting sadly and thoughtfully on how the Civil War came about, that slavery was, "somehow," the cause. In fact, "somehow," however, lay puzzles, contradictions, and questions. The connections between slavery and the Civil War have concerned Americans ever since the events at Appomattox.

Technological Revolutions I Have Known, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Historians are trained to see things in the context of change, but even a historian might find it hard to gain a sense of perspective on the technological changes sweeping over us these days. The machinery itself is evolving with astonishing speed, and the larger culture seems obsessed with the evolution. Articles on the latest high-tech stock miracle fill the business pages while advertisements for automobiles and sport leagues bear their World Wide Web addresses like badges of honor.

Why Were The Railroads The "Contested Terrain" Of Race Relations In The Postwar South?, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Most of the debates about race relations focused on the railroads of the New South. Travel was a different story, for members of both races had no choice but to use the same railroads. As the number of railroads proliferated in the 1880s, as the number of stations quickly mounted, as dozens of counties got on a line for the first time, as previously isolated areas found themselves connected to towns and cities with different kinds of black people and different kinds of race relations, segregation became a matter of statewide attention.

Review: 'Portraits In Steel: An Illustrated History Of Jones & Laughlin Corporation', John Alfred Heitmann

History Faculty Publications

Recent developments at the time of this review (2001) call for the addition of one final chapter to Portraits in Steel: An Illustrated History of Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation. Jones & Laughlin's (J&L's) successor firm, LTV Steel, is currently declaring bankruptcy. Consequently, numerous questions concerning the fate of its workers, the future of a once-vibrant industrial region, and the role of the federal government in industrial planning are subjects of intense private and public concern. This work, therefore, is most timely, as it places the controversial current event in historical context, and it does so in a most elegant …

Rereading The Conquest: Book Review, Charlotte M. Gradie

History Faculty Publications

Book review by Charlotte Gradie.

Krippner-Martinez, James. Rereading the Conquest: Power, Politics and the History of Early Colonial Michoacan, Mexico, 1521-1565. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001.

ISBN 0-271-02129-2

China's Trial By Fire [And] Chinese Collaboration With Japan, 1932-1945, Thomas D. Curran Ph.D.

History Faculty Publications

Book review by Thomas D. Curran.

Jordan, Donald A. China's trial by fire: the Shanghai War of 1932. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.

Barrett, David P. and Shyu, Lawrence N., eds. Chinese collaboration with Japan, 1932-1945: the limits of accommodation. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2001.

Historical Perspectives On Contemporary East Asia, Thomas D. Curran Ph.D.

History Faculty Publications

Book review by Thomas D. Curran.

Goldman, Merle and Andrew Gordon, eds. Historical Perspectives on Contemporary East Asia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Spain's Enterprise Of Evil, Charlotte M. Gradie

History Faculty Publications

Book review by Charlotte Gradie.

Rabasa, José . Writing violence on the northern frontier: the historiography of sixteenth century New Mexico and Florida and the legacy of conquest. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. ISBN 978-0-8223-2567-3.

Radical Religion From Shakespeare To Milton: Figures Of Nonconformity In Early Modern England By Kristen Poole (Review), Christopher Oldstone-Moore

History Faculty Publications

Review of the book Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England by Kristen Poole.

The German Free Professions After 1945, Charles E. Mcclelland

History Faculty Publications

A survey of the degree to which liberal professions have managed to recover from the damage done by the Hitler regime and World War II.

Landscape Of Ghosts, River Of Dreams; A History Of Big Bend National Park, Michael Welsh

History Faculty Publications

National parks join the system for a variety of reasons: great natural beauty, the need to preserve wilderness in the face of development, historic resources that the nation needs to remember, and the like. For Texas’s first unit of the NPS system, Big Bend National Park, all of the above features applied. In addition, the distinctive ecology of a mountain, desert, and riverine landscape compelled NPS officials and local sponsors alike in the 1930s and 1940s to plead with private donors and elected representatives to make Big Bend in 1944 the 28th unit of the NPS organization (at the time …

Good Friday In Omaha, Nebraska: A Mexican Celebration, Maria S. Arbelaez

History Faculty Publications

Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Nebraska commemorate Holy Week with a popular display of religious fervor. In semblance with the old religious traditions in Mexico, the Mexicanos, old and new residents, parade through the Omaha streets following the Way of the Cross on Good Friday. Processions, rituals, and plays are not only a yearly Catholic ritual in the streets of Omaha but an essential part of Mexican American and Latino cultural identity. Palm Sunday and the Way of the Cross are but a few of the constituent elements of the growing manifestations of Latino popular culture in the state. The …