History Commons^™

Home Front: Daily Life In The Civil War North (Book Review), Mary Niall Mitchell

History Faculty Publications

The article reviews the book "Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North," by Daniel Greene, Scott Manning Stevens, Diane Dillon, Peter John Brownlee, and Sarah Burns.

The Impact Of Kenya African Soldiers On The Creation And Evolution Of The Pioneer Corps During The Second World War, Meshack Owino

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Idle Woman In Therapy And Fiction: S. Weir Mitchell’S Literary Career And The Gilded Age Fear Of Malingering, Brent Ruswick

History Faculty Publications

As one of America’s most prominent physicians in the Gilded Age and a successful novelist, S. Weir Mitchell sought to secure the professional reputation and authority of scientific, clinical medicine. Historians have given great attention to the ways that his treatment of women suffering from exhaustion or nervousness reinforced and created highly restrictive, gendered norms; more recently, historians have explored how Mitchell’s literary career augmented and echoed his approach to medicine. This article extends the historical analysis of Mitchell’s literary career by examining one of his lesser novels, Circumstance. Through the novel’s protagonist, an archetypically virtuous physician, and the antagonist, …

The Disappearing Mestizo, Book Review, Andrew Rosa

History Faculty Publications

The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Grenada. Joanne Rappaport. Duke University Press, 2014, 368 pp., $25.99, paper. By probing “when and how” an individual was considered a mestizo (a person of mixed heritage) in the early colonial New Kingdom of Grenada (modern-day Columbia), Joanne Rappaport’s Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada (Duke University Press, 2014) adds to the growing scholarship on racial difference in colonial Spanish America.

Slander, Buzz And Spin: Telegrams, Politics And Global Communications In The Uganda Protectorate, 1945-55, Carol Summers

History Faculty Publications

Ugandans, from the earliest days of empire, did not simply receive information and messages from a distant Britain. Instead, with methods rooted in pre-colonial understandings of communications as establishing personal, affective, social closeness and reciprocities, they invested in education, travel and correspondence and built wide-ranging information and communications networks. Networked, they understood imperial institutions and pushed their own priorities via both official and unofficial channels. By the 1940s, political activists combined these information networks with the modern technologies of newspapers, telegrams and global press campaigns to destabilize colonial hierarchies. Generating slanderous allegations, repeating them to generate popular buzz, interpreting and …

Ugandan Politics World War Ii (1939-1949), Carol Summers

History Faculty Publications

World War II shaped Uganda's postwar politics through local understandings of global war.¹ Individually and collectively Ugandans saw the war as an opportunity rather than simply a crisis. During the War, the acquired wealth and demonstrated loyalty to a stressed British empire, inverting paternalistic imperial relations and investing loyalty and money in ways they expected would be reciprocated with political and economic rewards. For the 77,000 Ugandan enlisted soldiers and for the civilians who grew coffee and cotton, contributed money and organizational skills, and followed the war news, the war was not a desperate struggle for survival. Ideological aspects …

Remembering Appomattox, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Appomattox became ever more elevated in our national imagination not because it resolved what would follow but because everyone could see in it what they wanted. The white South envisioned nothing like the Reconstruction that would follow and thought that their quiet and peaceful surrender here meant that nothing more would happen. They saw Appomattox as the end, as resolution, not as the beginning of a more profound revolution in American life, a revolution in which formerly enslaved men would vote as well as fight, a revolution in which the North would call the shots in American politics and public …

Review: 'Common Threads: A Cultural History Of Clothing In American Catholicism', Una M. Cadegan

History Faculty Publications

Sally Dwyer-McNulty's Common Threads is a readable, useful study. The work's scope is narrower than the title suggests, but it is evocative nonetheless. The book focuses primarily on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (more on the latter), the clothing of priests and female religious (sisters or nuns), and the uniforms of Catholic schoolgirls.

In The 'Lógos' Of Love: Promise And Predicament In Catholic Intellectual Life, Una M. Cadegan, James Heft

History Faculty Publications

In the 'Lógos' of Love: Promise and Predicament in Catholic Intellectual Life, the title of the September 2013 conference cosponsored by the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California and by the University of Dayton, was inspired by a somewhat unlikely pair: Walker Percy and Pope Benedict XVI. The lógos of love, according to Benedict in his 2009 encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, is where “[t]ruth opens and unites our minds ... the Christian proclamation and testimony of caritas”—that Latin word inadequately translated into English as “charity” but which refers to the fullness of love made possible …

Review : 'Rural Unrest During The First Russian Revolution: Kursk Province', David W. Darrow

History Faculty Publications

The provincial, particularly the rural and agrarian, aspects of Russian history have received renewed attention of late. In many ways, the book under review fits well with two other recent publications by Catherine Evtuhov and Tracy Dennison (Tracy Dennison, The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom [Cambridge, 2011]; Catherine Evtuhov, Portrait of a Province: Economy, Society and Civilization in Nizhnii Novgorod [Pittsburgh, 2011]), contributing greatly to our understanding of provincial life and peasant economy in imperial Russia. Miller’s thorough study puts Kursk province under a microscope in search of an explanation of the socio-economic causal factors that contributed to violent peasant …

Review: 'States Of Obligation: Taxes And Citizenship In The Russian Empire And Early Soviet Republic', David W. Darrow

History Faculty Publications

Many have portrayed death and taxes as life’s only certainties. Yanni Kotsonis’ book masterfully disrupts many of our certainties about Russian history by examining taxation as a nexus of key categories (state, economy, and people), and the role taxation played in the mutually constitutive processes whereby the modern state, the modern economy, and the modern population came into existence. In Russia, perhaps even more than in other states, ‘new kinds of taxes helped define [create] these categories, introduced a fundamental duality to each of them, and put each in tension with the others’ (8). The modern imperial state thrived on …

Partition, Haimanti Roy

History Faculty Publications

The Partition of India in 1947 is one of the most significant events in South Asian history. It refers to the political division of the Indian subcontinent that marked the end of British colonial rule in the region. There were three partitions in 1947—of British India and of the provinces of Bengal and Punjab—that created the new nation-states of India and a spatially fragmented West and East Pakistan. While the end of the Second World War, political outcomes of the provincial elections in 1946 and contingency were factors, long-term organizing efforts of communal organizations, both Hindu and Muslim, were also …

Review: 'The Material Life Of Roman Slaves', Dorian Borbonus

History Faculty Publications

The Material Life of Roman Slaves complements and enriches a growing body of scholarship on the physical conditions and material remains of Roman slavery, but it also represents a logical continuation of the research agenda of both authors. It is clearly informed by Joshel’s book about occupational titles in funerary inscriptions (Work, Identity, and Legal Status at Rome: A Study of the Occupational Inscriptions [1992]) and Petersen’s study on the visual culture of freedmen and its perception (The Freedman in Roman Art and Art History [2006]).

Their collaboration on the present book represents a model of scholarly teamwork that …

How The Goodman Read His Bible, Bobbi Sutherland

History Faculty Publications

Though best known for its “cookbook” portion, the Menagier de Paris contains a wide miscellany of information. Written by a man for his fifteen-year-old wife, it teaches her to be a good wife in every sense of the word. It includes a treatise on the seven deadly sins and stories of good and bad women, many of which are drawn from the Bible. Recent scholarship has shown that contrary to long-standing assumptions, the Bible was widely known and read by the laity of the Middle Ages, especially in France and the Low Countries. The Menagier provides further support for these …

African Immersion: American College Students In Cameroon, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

Based on previously unused primary sources including extensive interviews in Cameroon, personal journals, diaries, responses to questionnaires, and a variety of secondary sources, this study is a critical analysis of US study abroad programs in Africa. Using the University of Dayton Cameroon Immersion program as a case study, the work examines different aspects of experiential learning including selection, orientation, activities of US college students in Cameroon, post-immersion meetings, and impact of program. The nation of Cameroon and University of Dayton are uniquely ideal for the study as Cameroon is considered “Africa in miniature” and serves as a window to understanding …

The Birth Of The U.S. Federal Reserve, Richard A. Naclerio

History Faculty Publications

On November 16, 2014 the United States Federal Reserve celebrated the centennial of its organization. Its one hundred year legacy has left no doubt of its vast monetary control, its far-reaching geopolitical power, and its enigmatic secrecy. These defining features of the Fed remain a mirror of the men who created it. Wall Street barons and ambitious politicians vied for control over shaping the U.S. Federal Reserve to the specifications that suited the needs of both their country and themselves.

This paper covers men like Senator Nelson Aldrich, J.P. Morgan, Jacob Schiff, and Paul M. Warburg, who were the undeniable …

Talking Less But Saying More: Teaching Us History Online, Carolyn J. Lawes

History Faculty Publications

After years of teaching in person at a large public university in Virginia, I decided to move my undergraduate U.S. history courses for that school online. I did so for one reason: the online format allows me to off er a better history class.

The Louvain Library And U.S. Ambition In Interwar Belgium, Tammy M. Proctor

History Faculty Publications

This article analyzes the ordeal that became the ‘Louvain Library Controversy' in order to demonstrate competing visions of postwar memory and reconstruction that emerged in the 1920s. As a country trying to mediate between the claims of its larger neighbors (Germany, France, and Britain), Belgium provides an excellent window into the climate of postwar Europe and US intervention. I argue that the controversies that surrounded the Louvain Library reconstruction reflect three main themes that plagued European–US relations in the 1920s: first, US pretensions as Europe’s cultural protector; second, US economic power over debt and reparation questions; and last, the question …