Reviewed: The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933-1945 by Robert Gellately

by Jeffrey N. Hurwitz

Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933-1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Pp. xiv, 297. $45.00.

Robert Gellately’s book asserts that the Geheime Staaatzpolizei (“Gestapo”) was a relatively small police force that was able to enforce Nazi racial laws and policy only with the willing cooperation of ordinary German citizens. In making these assertions, Gellately challenged the then-existing historiography of the mechanisms of control exerted by the Gestapo. That historiography rested on what is effectively a top-down theory of control in which the Nazi police state relied on a large, well-disciplined centralized police force which, in turn, operated in conjunction with an army of paid agents and spies in imposing a regime of terror and conformity. This analysis assumed an omnipotent and omniscient system of Gestapo-led state terror, where ordinary citizens had little or no role in the functioning or implementation of this regime.          

Gellately dissects this analysis, carefully examining how the Gestapo acquired and used its power. He reviews existing scholarship and examines the numbers of individuals in Gestapo employment and concludes that, contrary to the assumption that the Gestapo constituted an extraordinarily large police force, the number of those involved was actually small, certainly “far too few to have accomplished their tasks even with the collaboration of other elements in the police network.” (5) How then, in lieu of a system of domination, did the Gestapo so effectively enforce Nazi racial laws and conformity, particularly in such private spheres of conduct as sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews or between Polish forced laborers and the general German population?

Gellately answers this question by focusing on the day-to-day operations of the Gestapo and demonstrating that “the key relationship between the Gestapo, Germany society, and the enforcement of policy was constituted by . . . political denunciations,” which he defines as “the volunteered provision of information by the population at large about instances of disapproved behavior.” (130)  He does this, at least in part, by reviewing a statistical breakdown of the causes of the initiation of Gestapo proceedings based on extant casefiles principally from Dusseldorf and Wurzburg (the only Gestapo case files apparently not destroyed), finding that 26% of all cases began with an identifiable denunciation, the single largest category of initiating causes. Other categories, such as information from “other control organizations” or communal or state authorities or businesses, also encompass denunciations or denunciation-like “tips” from citizens. Consideration of all such categories “suggest[s] that denunciations from the population constituted the single most important cause of the initiation of proceedings of all kinds.” (135) By way of comparison, the number of initiating causes tied to the Gestapo’s own observations constituted only 15% of the total. “Denunciation represented an integral part of the social constitution of Nazi Germany and … played an important role in the terror-system.” (132) If the Gestapo was an instrument of domination, it “was one which was constructed within German society and whose functioning was structurally dependent on the continuing cooperation of German citizens.” (136) 

Similar to Sace Elder’s article, “Murder, Denunciation and Criminal Policing in Weimar Berlin,” Gellately convincingly argues that this practice of denunciation was part of a continuum that grew out of policing practices that pre-dated Nazi rule. The Gestapo itself emerged from a process of “modification and transformation” (29) of existing police forces and drew the bulk of its personnel from the police forces of the Weimar Republic. This included the Weimar-era Berlin Kriminalpolizei, which relied on a tradition of informing and further blurred the lines between criminal and political policing. Gellately describes, for example, that while Weimar Berlin technically abolished the political police, it established a department under a new name to track “enemies” of the new regime – Department 1A (in lieu of the older, more explicitly entitled, “Political Department V”). (27)  

In sum, members of the Gestapo were “not merely” fanatical Nazis (75), but were instead trained policemen, many of whom were carryovers from Weimer and who willingly self-integrated into the Nazi system (“individual Gleichschaltung).”  (11) “In a word, the police became Nazis or at least adjusted to Nazi conceptions of the police …” (253)  In effect, both the police forces and public at large carried forward practices and traditions that pre-dated the Nazi terror and that were then modified and transformed to reflect the exigencies of the new Nazi state, in a form of parallel continuity. No specific law was passed that required citizens to inform on one another – there was an existing German criminal code provision that made it a duty to report certain offenses that citizens suspected were about to be committed. The practice of denouncing fellow citizens after 1933, then, was not the abrupt departure that it might first seem. The degree to which this practice was crucial to the functioning of the police state was new (along with the brutal and murderous tactics of the Gestapo), but citizen denunciation and police exploitation of the resulting information were not. 

Denunciations could flow from a wide variety of motivations, as was true for criminal cases in Weimar Berlin, including personal rivalries and romantic jealousies. Even petty remarks made under duress could result in denunciation and draconian punishment. Gellately offers the example of a casual remark made by an individual during an air raid attack in 1943 in Kitzingen, during a presumably stressful and difficult circumstance. The individual at issue was overheard to remark that families should be supported “but with the truncheon” and that “anyone who had more than three children should be castrated.” (138) The individual was reported to the Gestapo and brought to trial as an exemplar to reinforce the regime’s population policy. Here, no specific law was violated and there was no legal obligation for the informer to denounce his neighbor. Rather, a self-imposed conformity and willing cooperation by ordinary citizens, combined with a ruthless police structure, served to effectuate and enforce Nazi racial and related laws and policies. The critical take-way from this book is that in the absence of cooperative denunciations and citizen accommodation, Nazi racial policy would have in all likelihood been impossible or difficult to enforce.

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Complicating Edward Said: British Imperial Identity Construction in the Eighteenth Century

by Kelsey Hibbard

As eighteenth-century empires expanded, the insular realm of British identity adapted to encompass their new place on the global stage. Britons’ local and regional identities developed into an imperial identity as they represented Britishness through encounters with empires across the world. The Anglo-Ottoman relationship, born by trade, significantly impacted the construction of British imperial identity. The Levant Company, sanctioned by the Crown to trade with the Ottoman Empire, opened the space for the British to hone their imperial identity against what they perceived as foreign “otherness.” Both individual merchants and the cities where trade was conducted provided an essential meeting ground between world powers. Through encounters with the Ottoman “other,” the British established their performed imperial identity and conceptualized not only how they wanted to be perceived, but also how they represented the “other” to establish a façade of imperial superiority.  

As encounters became more frequent throughout the eighteenth-century, Britons left a trail of detailed, albeit problematic, sources in the form of travel literature. Historians have used these accounts to explore the development of imperial identity through racial, class, and gendered lenses. The study of Orientalism, led by Edward Said through his monumental text Orientalism, played a significant role in the developing field. In Orientalism, Edward Said exposed the long tradition of assumed European superiority over the Middle and Far East in academia.  Said stated, “in short, Orientalism is a western style of dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”[1] He continued, “It also tries to show that European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.”[2] This understanding of orientalism explains the trope of Western superiority that plagues the understanding of East-West relationships. However, recent publications have complicated Said’s Orientalism and the determinism of the performed superiority by Britons. Scholars such as Gerald MacLean and Malgorzata Sokolowicz point to performed superiority as a progression beginning with imperial envy, and not assumed upon first encounters.  Both Sokolowicz and MacLean also point to the importance of gender as an analysis for understanding the East-West relations, and as key factor in the construction of imperial identity–a lens that Said did not explore.

Gerald MacLean diverges from Edward Said in his understanding of British encounters with the Ottoman Empire. While MacLean does not discard Orientalism, he argues for a more complicated understanding of the Anglo-Ottoman relationship in Looking East.[3] Rather than Eurocentric superiority as a foundational element to the Anglo-Ottoman relationship, MacLean dismantles the authority and confidence of the British imperial identity and instead points to a relationship centered on imperial envy and identity performance. Self-conceptualization of Britishness led to represented superiority over the Ottomans, however, this conceptualization of identity was learned, not inherent at the moment of contact. In his preface MacLean explains, “[…] I find that I am not alone in noticing how widespread the effects of encounter with the Ottoman world, its people and culture proved to be on the development of the English nation during the early period.”[4]

His contribution to the field rests on his introduced terminology, “imperial envy.” The notion of British imperial envy toward the Ottomans challenged Said’s notion of the trope of inherent Western superiority. MacLean further discusses, “I suggest that ‘imperial envy’ usefully describes the evolving dynamic of early modern English responses to encounters with the Ottoman Empire at a time when the English were seeking to find a place for themselves in the larger world beyond their insular realm.”[5] MacLean complicates Said by pointing to the dynamism of the evolving imperial identity. While Said explores the perpetuation of orientalism in scholarship-which allowed European empires to hide behind pre-determined superiority- MacLean exposes the complicated and dynamic power structures encountered during the construction of British imperial identity. Certainty of power and dominance that led to orientalism, MacLean argues, was learned and navigated as the British self-constructed their performed identity.

A criticism of MacLean’s work is his interchanging use of both imperial and national identity. His interchanging terminology presents a lack of fluidity in his discourse on identity in the eighteenth-century. However, the lack of fluidity alludes to the uncertainty of the changing nature of identity for the British both in the Metropole and in the expanding Empire. Identity was shaped in both an imperial and national sense and the British were navigating both simultaneously in the eighteenth-century.

MacLean’s research follows the trajectory of the field, noting the importance of contact by trade and diplomacy. He understands diplomacy as the first location of challenge to British imperial identity. Islam remained one of the most prominent barriers of “otherness” to the British, however, differences succumbed to the desire for trade. To maintain access to Ottoman goods through trade, the British found themselves using diplomacy, rather than territorial expansion.[6] Without territorial control, imperial superiority was not validated through borders such as in the Americas.  Rather, imperial status and superiority was gained through performance and self-representation. MacLean states, “[…] the English first became aware of the Ottomans from the arrival of imported goods, from direct encounters and how the experiences of earliest visitors to that Empire began to challenge English conceptions of themselves.”[7] The complexity found within the developing inter-imperial relationship does not diverge completely from traditional orientalist framing. Notions of Ottoman backwardness, eroticism, barbaric cruelty, and despotism represented and upheld orientalist tropes.[8] MacLean acknowledges that these tropes conflicted with “a series of contradictions:” Ottoman might, opulence, and wealth.[9] He states, “Instead of any simple desire for domination, we will find a restructuring of desire, knowledge and power: imperial envy.”[10]  Contrasting against perceived backwardness, the Ottomans held great imperial wealth and power that Britons discussed in their travel writings with envy. Despite fears, hostilities, and challenges presented during the eighteenth century in the Anglo-Ottoman relationship, “The Ottomans were not simply foreign “others” but models by which the English learned to frame their own self-representations while seeking and building and empire of their own.”[11]

The British, by their encounters with the Ottoman Empire, were “being English, but doing it somewhere else.”[12] Not only were they conceptualizing the Ottomans as an “other,” but understanding themselves as “others” living within a foreign realm. MacLean uses Judith Butler’s scholarship on gender and performance, drawing on her research to connect the performance of gender to the performance of imperial identity.[13] British masculinity was a source of concern for travel writers, as “questions of male virility and the successful performance of English masculinity abroad also seem[ed] to have been of particular interest to travel writers and their readers.”[14] In constructing their eighteenth-century imperial identity, masculinity was a key presentation of dominance for the British. As MacLean showed in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s writings, masculine construction of imperial superior authority did not go unchallenged, even if subtly. Encounters with the Ottoman Empire provided resistance to the normative gendered ideas of superiority juxtaposed with liberty. Each challenge to imperial identity was formative in the self-conceptualized imperial identity of the British abroad.[15]

One of the most successful ways that MacLean presents the complexity of imperial identity through the Anglo-Ottoman relationship is through his gendered analysis. In considering gender, he further diverges from Said’s masculine-dominated orientalism to show through travel literature written by women that femininity also challenged British imperial identity. Lady Montagu and other British travel writers presented a problematic picture of the Ottomans and their work can be read carefully to understand British perceptions of the Ottomans, even if they represented falsifications or partial truths. In reading these sources not for the accuracy of their account of Ottoman culture but as representations and perceptions of the “other,” scholars can piece together British understandings of their own identity abroad. Lady Montagu had access to aspects of Ottoman society that male travelers did not and wrote extensively of women’s experiences. In writing about women’s bathhouses, she “concluded that women’s baths, parallel in the gender segregation to some any male institution, indicated that Ottoman women, far from being oppressed by Turkish tyranny, had much more liberty than English women.”[16] Using the avenue of increasingly popular travel literature, critiques such as Lady Montagu’s reached the heart of British society. The juxtaposed conceptualization of the Ottoman realm as exotic and draconian, and women’s bathhouses as liberating, reveal the complications of gendered construction of imperial identity. Gendered norms and familial roles established themselves comfortably in the insular realm of British identity but encounters with the Ottoman Empire challenged ideas of gender and liberty. Eroticism and femininity were foundational representations of orientalist “otherness,” yet Lady Montagu’s writings not only subtly praised Ottoman women for their liberty but also subtly resisted the English gendered identity.

A recent study by Malgorzata Sokolowicz intersects with MacLean’s use of Lady Montagu’s writing and adds to the discourses of both “imperial envy” and gendered conceptions of identity. Sokolowicz uses travel writing on food and smell to explore women and mobility in the Ottoman empire through the eyes of travel writers. She explores two women travel writers, Lady Montagu of England and Salomée Halpir of Poland, who demonstrated imperial envy and challenged notions of masculinity in their writings. Sokolowicz points out that these two women, “as female travelers, they had access to the gender-segregated spaces in the Ottoman empire.”[17] Each woman used this access to write about aspects of Ottoman life that would spark great interest in their perspective homelands.[18] In writing about food, perfumes, and the limited mobility of elite women, and juxtaposing these elements with the freedom experienced in the bath houses, each woman expressed their sense of Ottoman “otherness” and their imperial “envies.” Sokolowicz showed that between Poland and the Ottoman Empire “economic and cultural exchanges flourished, and for the Polish people the [Ottoman] Empire symbolized wealth and luxury.”[19] Speaking of Lady Montagu, echoing MacLean, Sokolowicz states, “Similarly, when Lady Mary mentions such foods, she also notes the golden knives, tablecloths, napkins, china, and gold ‘soucoups’ as they are signs of the wealth, and thus the power, of the Ottomans.”[20]

The wealth and power described by these women brought imperial envy back to their homelands. Sokolowicz describes how “the Ottoman Empire [became] an exotic place, perhaps more beautiful and attractive than their native lands.”[21] The women writers also noted many things that contributed to “otherness” in perceptions of the Ottoman Empire, particularly the lack of mobility for elite women and the erotic nature of perfumes. By the comparative nature of their travel literature, both women used their experiences to better understand, or challenge, their own self-representation, identity, and gendered norms of their homelands.            

Gerald MacLean and Malgorzata Sokolowicz complicate Said’s notion of orientalism in the Anglo-Ottoman relationship. Rather than inherent Eurocentric dominance over the other, encounters with the Ottomans challenged British notions of imperial superiority, gender norms, and performed self-identity. Said’s understanding of orientalism, the Western perceptions of dominance over the East, would and did materialize in the later years of inter-imperial relations. Initially, however, the relationship did not begin with Western perceptions of superiority. Encounters with the Ottoman Empire provided fertile ground for English men and women to self-represent Britishness in a foreign land. As these encounters challenged and shaped British notions of superiority, wealth, gender, and imperial dominance, the British imperial identity developed in the eighteenth century. MacLean concludes by showing the progression toward Said’s understanding of orientalism by stating that “once the English had looked upon the Ottoman Empire with imperial envy, but by mid eighteenth-century ‘Britannia’s gen’rous sons’ began arriving with benevolent schemes of neo-colonial occupation in the service of promoting commerce.”[22] The traditional orientalist ideas of Eurocentric superiority certainly shaped the future years of inter-imperial encounters and would define the Anglo-Ottoman relationship in the nineteenth century. The formative beginnings, as MacLean argues, were fraught with imperial envy, uncertainty, and the performance of self-identity as the British constructed their perceptions of themselves against the “others” in the expanding imperial world.

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[1] Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 3.  

[2] Edward Said, Orientalism, 3.

[3] For a further discussion see the precursor to looking east: Gerald MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580-1720 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

[4] Gerald MacLean, Looking East: English Writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), x.

[5] Gerald MacLean, Looking East, xi.  

[6] Gerald MacLean, Looking East, 18.

[7] Gerald MacLean, Looking East, xi.

[8] For examples of gender used to dismantle orientalist tropes today see: See Leslie Pierce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (Oxford University Press). See Elyse Semerdjian, Off the Straight Path: Illicit Sex, Law, and Community in Ottoman Aleppo (Syracuse University Press, 2008).

[9] Gerald MacLean, Looking East, 19-20.

[10]Gerald MacLean, Looking East, 20.

[11]Gerald MacLean, Looking East, 55.  

[12] Gerald MacLean, Looking East, 97.  

[13] Gerald MacLean, Looking East, 99.

[14] Gerald MacLean, Looking East, 102.

[15] Gerald MacLean, Looking East, 117.

[16] Gerald MacLean, Looking East, 101.

[17] Malgorzata Sokolowicz, “A Taste of Empire: Eighteenth- Century Eastern and Western European Women’s Journeys into Ottoman Culinary Spaces,” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 14, no. 1 (2019): 154.

[18] Malgorzata Sokolowicz, “A Taste of Empire”, 155.

[19] Malgorzata Sokolowicz, “A Taste of Empire,” 154.

[20] Malgorzata Sokolowicz, “A Taste of Empire,” 156.

[21] Malgorzata Sokolowicz, “A Taste of Empire,” 161.

[22] Gerald MacLean, Looking East, 198.

Reviewed: The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West by Megan Kate Nelson

by Carly Beehler

Megan Kate Nelson, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West. New York, NY: Scribner. 2020. Pp. 1, 352. $28.00 (Hardcover).

Megan Kate Nelson explores the Civil War in the American West as she follows the stories of nine individuals drawn together by the conflict. These stories exhibit how the West was central to the Civil War. In doing so, Nelson complicates the narrative of the Civil War by highlighting the centrality of the West to the war and displaying how this landscape drove the Union, the Confederacy, and Native Americans into a “three-cornered war”.

Civil War histories have long bound themselves within the regional North-South binary. Deconstructing this binary, the history of the Civil War West brings various other elements of the war into reinterpretation.[1] Elliot West’s The Last Indian War brings the racial and cultural diversity of Western America into the narrative of the Civil War recasting the war as a continental conflict. Using the context of the West, West also argues for a new construction of the Civil War Era (“Greater Reconstruction”) that extends back to 1845, the Texas Revolution, and forward to 1877.[2] The Three-Cornered War picks up on the racial and cultural diversity that West kept central to his book. However, in focusing on the war years, Nelson crafts her own extended timeline, bringing the war forward to 1868. She argues that the continued conflict with Native Americans was not a new war but a prolongment of the Civil War.

Nelson’s work ties together various historiographical trends within the study of the Civil War West. Historians have brought traditional narratives of the Civil War as North versus South and freedom versus slavery into question by adding the West into its understanding. Nelson continually asserts the idea of U.S. Federal land conquest and Confederate imperialism, both of which are central themes within Western and Civil War scholarship.[3] Nelson heavily questions the Union war aims. Like historian Ari Kelman, she shows how Union violence towards Native Americans challenged the Union army’s racial agenda.[4] Extending this theme, Nelson pulls on the work of historians like James Brooks, who have explored how Native American peonage factored into the narrative of Emancipation.[5] Nelson’s narrative offers a glimpse into the arguments that are occurring more acutely elsewhere in the scholarship of this region while providing a narrative that has the Civil War West at its heart.

By exploring the Civil War in the West, Nelson expands the actors and war aims included in the narrative of the war. Within her argument, one theme surfaces continuously: access. Access to water, access to resources, but, more widely, access to the West drove the decisions made both in western armies and eastern seats of government. This attention to the land is not only one of Nelson’s core arguments but also offers a new contribution to the historiography. Nelson makes readers think about how the desert, distances, lack of water, mineral resources, and vast uncolonized lands impacted how the Civil War in the West functioned.[6]  The Union and Confederacy both fought over access to the West and believed its land would strengthen their nations. It was the Union’s desire for this land that continued the fighting with Native Americans three years after Appomattox.

The Three-Cornered War follows the war’s narrative through the lens of nine individuals and their microhistories. The chapters switch between Nelson’s cast of characters; however, they progress chronologically. This approach allows her to follow the war’s progression while crafting a vivid, down-to-earth description of events. For example, Nelson’s account of the Battle of Valverde uses the stories of soldiers to give a visceral account of the realities of warfare in the western Civil War.

The book’s organization affects how Nelson employs primary sources. Some chapters’ source bases are drawn directly from the personal accounts of the actor the chapter focuses on. Alonzo Ickis, John Clark, and John Robert Baylor stand out as examples of actors whose stories are told primarily through their own diaries or letters. Some of the narratives do not rely on such a straightforward source bases and, instead, Nelson employs large swathes of source materials and is widely researched. An extensive bibliography highlights the vast amounts and types of sources considered throughout each chapter. Nelson reaches far and wide to craft her narrative by using newspapers, government records, published personal accounts, and oral histories.

The Three-Cornered War places the people and the landscape of the West in the Civil War though Nelson focuses almost exclusively on the areas of New Mexico and Arizona. In this specific landscape, she successfully asserts her ideas of the West’s impact on the Civil War. She illuminates how Native Americans were brought into the Union-Confederate conflict as those governments fought for control of the West. However, this book claims to be about the “West”: a physically immense and diverse landscape. The Three-Cornered War leaves readers wondering how the ideas explored by Nelson translate into other regions of the West. Would new understandings emerge if one focused on a different state or territory? Nelson places heavy emphasis on the role of the landscape in the Civil War West, but how does this translate outside of the arid deserts of New Mexico? While successful in its argument, Nelson leaves readers with questions of how the geographic confines of her examination affect her understanding of the war in the West and what would be gained or lost from an analysis of another area of the vast American West.

Experiencing the Civil War through the eyes of individuals, readers are immersed in this historical period. Readers feel their lips crack as the soldiers struggle through the desert without water. Readers stomachs’ sink as the fourth corn crop begins to fail at Bosque Redondo. Nelson’s book brings the Civil War West to life. Her narrative style makes the book accessible to all readers, both historians and non-historians, opening this new narrative of the Civil War to a wide audience. 

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[1] For a full account of the historiography of the Civil War West, including more sources on each of the explored themes, see: Stacey L. Smith, “Beyond North and South: Putting the West in the Civil War and Reconstruction,” Journal of the Civil War Era 6, no. 4 (December, 2016): 566-591.

[2] Elliot West, The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

[3] This theme has its own rich historiography. For examples of works that keep conflict and/or the Civil War at the heart of their analysis see: Richard Maxell Brown, “Western Violence: Structure, Values, Myth,” Western Historical Quarterly 24, no. 1 (March 1993): 4-20; West, The Last Indian War; Kevin Waite, “Jefferson Davis and Proslavery Visions of the Far West,” Journal of the Civil War Era 6, no. 4 (December 2016): 536-565.

[4] Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

[5] James Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

[6] Nelson explores this environmental impact in: Megan Kate Nelson, “The Civil War form Apache Pass,” Journal of the Civil War Era 6, no. 4 (December, 2016): 510-535.

Reviewed: Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic by Rosemarie Zagarri

By Chris Del Santo

Rosemarie Zagarri. Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2007. Pp. 1, 233. $39.95.

Rosemarie Zagarri’s Revolutionary Backlash charts the rise and fall of women’s participation in partisan politics from the American Revolution through the 1820s. Though lacking formalized inclusion in the political institutions of the United States, women embraced the revolutionary moment as an opportunity to claim a role in the political life of the new nation. Zagarri notes that women played an important part in politics during the raucous First Party System of the 1790s and early 1800s by directly engaging with the party contest between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans. Women’s political participation came to an end by the 1820s as, Zagarri argues, a “backlash” against women’s participation coincided with the advent of exclusionary gender ideology (such as separate spheres and biological essentialism), universal male suffrage, and the development of a voter-centric political culture.

Revolutionary Backlash effectively stands, as Zagarri claims, “at the intersection of political history, women’s history, and gender history” (3). Zagarri’s most important historiographical intervention is to bring together the worlds of political history and gender history. Zagarri characterizes this as a problem of artificial separation—two fields kept at arm’s length by historians rather than by any real distinction. Building on the rich historiography of women in the Revolutionary era and early republic, Zagarri’s work expansively defines politics to examine women’s participation beyond elections and institutionalized partisan politics. Despite this capacious approach to politics, Zagarri recovers the role that women played in party politics after the American Revolution. Uncovering women’s role in the partisan strife of the early republic effectively reconceptualizes women’s involvement in the public life of the United States for political historians and women’s historians. Zagarri shows that the two fields are not tangentially related but that women’s history and early American political history are intrinsically linked.

Zagarri begins her description of women’s involvement in the politics of the early United States with Enlightenment discussions of women’s rights and the burgeoning ideas of women’s intellectual and moral equality circulated among the reading public in early America. These ideas created opportunities for women that culminated with their unprecedented politicization during the American Revolution. In the early national era, women’s visible engagement in politics further challenged patriarchal presumptions about women’s inability to bear political rights and participate in the American polity. White women asserted “more independent political identities,” earning the derogatory label “female politicians” for their outsized interest in public life (81). Zagarri contrasts female politicians with the earlier concept of republican motherhood to demonstrate how female politicians presented not only a possibility of women’s civic involvement but also a threat to the gender hierarchy of American society. By 1820, gender ideology such as separate spheres and ascriptive definitions of citizenship based on false biological premises declared women and black people unfit to participate in politics.

The volatile party politics of the early United States that had first opened the door to women’s participation ultimately ended the opportunity for women’s political rights. Zagarri shows that decades of party strife led Americans to question women’s engagement with politics. Critics of women in politics vehemently attacked female politicians and prescribed that women act within the home as “nonpartisan patriots” to quell party conflict (146). Attacks on women’s participation rooted in evolving concepts of gender roles, as Zagarri demonstrates, were only one part of the backlash against their role in politics. Universal white male suffrage and the rigid partisan politics of the nascent Second Party System put the nail in the coffin of women’s political engagement in the early republic, covering over women’s political role in historical memory.

To make her argument about the rise and fall of women’s political participation in the early United States—and to remedy the historiographical problem of women’s and political history being treated separately—Zagarri brings together sources that historians previously kept separate. In examining the letters and diaries of early republican women, Zagarri focuses on their political preoccupation to note that women not only took notice but formulated their own opinions on politics. Likewise, Zagarri analyzes partisan print culture, such as newspapers and broadsides, for both their appeals to women and their weaponization of gender. In bringing together the sources and methodologies of gender history and political history, Zagarri successfully demonstrates the efficacy of merging the fields of women’s history and political history in the early United States.

Zagarri’s argument that women capitalized on the moment of expanded rights and capacious politics during and immediately after the American Revolution to actively engage in early American public life only to experience a backlash against their involvement that eliminated women’s political role is convincing. Her engaging and accessible style, as well as the importance of her findings, make this appropriate not only for professional historians but also for students at the undergraduate level. She effectively demonstrates that women were an integral part of early American politics, so much so that men ultimately perceived their presence as a threat to the gendered hierarchy of early American society and effectively ended their participation by the 1820s. But while on the topic of reframing narratives, Zagarri states that women continued to work in the informal political realm once excluded from the formal institutions of partisan politics. To what degree, though, may the gendered aspects of the partisan politics of the Second Party System remain hidden by the forces that Zagarri claims erased them? Revolutionary Backlash is nonetheless a thought-provoking and invaluable contribution to the literature of both women’s history in the United States and the political history of the early republic.

Cover Image Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Press

Reviewed: Collecting Music in the Aran Islands: A Century of History and Practice by Deirdre Ní Chonghaile

By: Marissa Ivie

Deirdre Ní Chonghaile. Collecting Music in the Aran Islands: A Century of History and Practice. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2021. Pp. 1, 352. $79.95.

Collecting Music in the Aran Islands: A Century of History and Practice by Deirdre Ní Chonghaile is a case study on music documentation practices and their impact on archival memory in Ireland. Described by Ní Chonghaile as an historiography of music collecting, this book looks at four diverse collections of sheet music, lyric transcriptions, and recordings collected between 1850 and 1970. Ranging from state sponsored projects to personal hobbies, the music in these collections all originate from the Aran Islands. Located off the west coast of Ireland in Galway Bay, the Aran Islands are an archipelago of three populated islands and several islets that have long captured the fascination of folklorists, antiquarians, and historians due to its cultural isolation from the mainland. To understand each collection’s contribution to the archival memory of cultural practices, Ní Chonghaile challenges assumptions of value and analyzes how motivations and methods influence the creation of the archive (8-9). Ní Chonghaile argues that this contextualization reveals the power dynamics inherent in archive creation, highlighting the collector’s authority over canonization and marginalization and promoting the benefits of local history.

Ní Chonghaile’s research adds important new information to Irish traditional music history and the history of music collecting, while also contributing to conversations on music documentation processes and archival best practices. The Aran Islands have been written about extensively as the archipelago appealed to the Romantic and nationalist interests of the nineteenth century, and many studies have been completed on its history, language, and people. For similar reasons, many scholars have studied the history of traditional music in Ireland. Ní Chonghaile is the first to study the overlooked traditional musical collections of Aran. Her goal is to place traditional music in Aran into conversation with the broader tradition in Ireland, questioning “the integrity of the narratives that have dominated, and continue to dominate, discourses on Irish traditional music, on Aran, and on Ireland.” (26) Ní Chonghaile also contributes to discourse on the power of the archive and its role in perpetuating bias and determining the legitimacy of historical narratives.

Ní Chonghaile uses the collections to investigate how the archive creators hold authority over canonization and marginalization. Throughout the four collections, she shows that the motivations of the collectors strongly effected the types of music and songs that they recorded, thus influencing what is, and is not, considered authentic Irish music.  In her first chapter, Ní Chonghaile highlights George Petrie and Eugene O’Curry’s impressive collection and their influential contribution as the first documentation of music from the Aran Islands. Although their collection seems to give an accurate representation of the music culture of the islands during the late-nineteenth century, Ní Chonghaile challenges this assumption by investigating their motivations for collecting. Influenced by the Romanticism and antiquarianism that were popular during the mid-nineteenth century, the men sought to document a “true” Irish identity. This bias caused the men to exclude many important contributions, including any songs not in Irish or any deemed insufficiently antique. By analyzing their interest in Aran’s reputation as an idyllic “cultural sanctuary” and their focus on instrumental music rather than lyrics, she demonstrates how their motives influenced the music they accepted as authentic (42-3, 49). In chapter two, Ní Chonghaile shows that the Irish Folklore Commission’s prioritization of Irish language preservation influenced which songs were recorded by Séamus Ennis (57). Additionally, Ennis’ lack of success in Aran led him to conclude that the island was not as good as a source of traditional music as Connemara and discouraged other collectors from visiting the archipelago, thus marginalizing the group, and influencing what had been accepted as canon within traditional Irish music (86).

Ní Chonghaile additionally questions the typical standards of value applied to collections by scholars. She argues that by contextualizing an archive, by looking at the motivations, prejudices, and methodologies of collectors, one can better understand the faults and strengths of a collection. In chapter four, Ní Chonghaile analyzes the collection of Bairbre Quinn, an Aran local who recorded music as a hobby (and is also the author’s aunt). Quinn was not part of an institution, her recordings were never published, and the sound quality is often rough (141-2). Because of this, Quinn’s collection has been largely overlooked by historians and musicians as the important repository it is. Ní Chonghaile goes in depth into Quinn’s methodology and motivations, both as a collector and recordist, illustrating how Quinn’s motivation to participate in the music’s creation, rather than to find an Irish identity or to preserve a dying cultural phenomenon, meant that she did not limit what she recorded. She also demonstrates how Quinn’s local origin put musicians at ease, giving her access to musicians that otherwise would have resisted being recorded. Ní Chonghaile argues that only a local could traverse this barrier between collector and musician, removing the power imbalance of an outsider deciding what does and does not count as authentic (174). Quinn’s motivations and methods led her to record songs that were bypassed by previous collectors as unimportant, making her collection a more representative sample of music culture in Aran during the mid-twentieth century. Ní Chonghaile shows the importance of understanding the background of the collection to judge its value, and that using local sources often provides the most democratic, accurate cultural collection (10-11).

The four collections that Ní Chonghaile uses to understand what each collection contributes to Irish music history are from diverse people and situations. Of the four collections, there are two male and two female collectors, two transcriptions and two recordings, and two institutional and two independent collections. She additionally has two Irish collectors, one American collector, and one collector from the Aran Island. Ní Chonghaile uses this variety to compare each collection, assess its value to the Irish music record, and understand its contribution to archival memory. Her background as an Irish Studies scholar and musician from the Aran Islands, as well as her past research focused on documenting the experiences of marginalized communities, enables her to approach the materials in a new way. Ní Chonghaile limits her scope to only include collections from the Aran Islands, ignoring music from other regions transcribed or recorded as part of the same collecting trip. This focus supports her analysis due to Aran’s isolation from Ireland and its neglect in the history of traditional music in Ireland. Ní Chonghaile uses her background and this bias against Aran to understand the cause of this neglect and what this says about the dynamics of power in archive creation.

Ní Chonghaile’s goal of looking at the marginalization of certain groups in the archival creation process is well supported and convincing, however her evidence is often clouded by a lack of analysis and a seeming emotional investment in the subject. In her attempt to treat each collection equitably, she often adds qualifiers to her criticisms, causing her conclusions to come across as speculative rather than assertive and obscuring her argument for local histories. For example, after explaining how Petrie and O’Curry’s collection was biased in its creation, she concludes that ultimately their true motivations are unknowable, and therefore their contribution should still be considered vital (49). Additionally, while Ní Chonghaile keeps her investigation into each collection equal, her admiration for her aunt is clear. While this might simply be the initial impetus for her research, it is impossible to separate the researcher from the subject. For example, the last sentence of the chapter reads more like a loving family member than objective researcher, saying “As a young woman [Quinn] who lived and worked in rural areas all her life and who continued to record—albeit less frequently—as she reared four children, she showed remarkable ingenuity, resourcefulness, and skill in creating Bailiúchán Bhairbre” (177). Ultimately, Ní Chonghaile successfully deconstructs the power dynamics and questions of legitimacy in archive creation and highlights the benefit to including local histories in research. Her work paves the way for future research to “revise attitudes to histories, languages, cultural practices, and their artifacts, and so to disrupt dynamics of power… [which are] vital to efforts to protect and cultivate cultural equity” (11)

Ní Chonghaile’s research supports a new system of legitimization in archival memory construction and demonstrates the benefit of local, non-institutional documentation to historical study. While the study of music collecting in Ireland may be a niche topic, Ní Chonghaile’s inclusion of questions of archival memory creation and who has the authority to decide what gets legitimized makes this study valuable for any scholar with an interest in the power dynamics within the archive. Ultimately, the work is a call for the “democratization” of the archival process, where “previously marginalized sectors of society are enabled to create and disseminate their cultural artifacts—to share, transmit, and so perpetuate their “archival” knowledge” (11)

Cover Image Courtesy of the University of Wisconsin Press.

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Reviewed: The Great Chief Justice: John Marshall and the Rule of Law by Charles Hobson

by Brianne Branco

Charles Hobson. The Great Chief Justice: John Marshall and the Rule of Law. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1996. Pp. 1, 272. $21.95.

Political experimentation characterized the decades following the American Revolution. The Constitution of the United States put sovereignty into the hands of the American people, defining the era as revolutionary. The Constitution protected the power of the people by creating a system of government with checks and balances that confined the different branches of government within the boundaries of their allotted power. However, the experimental nature of this new form of government led to disagreement and controversy over how the Constitution should be interpreted. By the early nineteenth century, the responsibility to guard and interpret the constitution was designated to the judicial branch. As the nineteenth century progressed, the power of the judicial branch was strengthened and defined as a result of the jurisprudence of the fourth Chief Justice, John Marshall. In the monograph The Great Chief Justice: John Marshall and the Rule of Law, author Charles Hobson analyzes and carefully explains the jurisprudence of Chief Justice John Marshall through his constitutional nationalist perspective. Hobson argues that John Marshall’s success was due to his ability to generalize and apply the ideals of American republicanism in his rulings.

The Great Chief Justice: John Marshall and the Rule of Law makes an important contribution to the historiography of American constitutional and legal history. One of the main goals of the monograph was to challenge some historiographical trends that Hobson believed inaccurately portrays the Marshall Court. Hobson notes, “despite some excellent revisionist scholarship during the last thirty years, there is still a prevailing view of Marshall as a kind of country lawyer unencumbered with much learning, though he possessed a first-rate mind.”[1] This scholarship makes Marshall appear to be inexperienced and scornful of precedent and authority. Hobson is successful in challenging these notions. Through his thoughtful use of court cases, he makes a strong argument for the legal knowledge and mastery of John Marshall.

Charles Hobson states that, “Marshall’s importance in the history of American political thought rests on his master skill in articulating and applying the leading ideas that emerged from the founding period of the American Republic. He was a creative adaptor of ideas, not an original thinker who formulated new insights into the nature of government and law.”[2] It was this skill that enabled Marshall to establish the importance of the judicial branch. To support his thesis, Hobson relies almost exclusively on the body of formal opinions that Marshall produced as a practicing judge. Charles Hobson carefully chooses cases that represented different issues, from political cases like Marbury v. Madison that established judicial review, to economic cases such as McCulloch v. Maryland that established the national bank and prohibited states from taxing the federal government. His utilization of these sources is thorough and detailed, not only does he provide background context and the decision of the case, but he also interprets the thought process behind the rulings in a way that underscores Marshall’s unique understanding of early American law and republicanism.

The strength of Hobson’s monograph is rooted in his clarity of writing. Hobson successfully managed to explain Marshall’s dense and logically complex judicial decisions concisely. Charles Hobson avoids the use of extensive academic jargon, making his monograph accessible to most readers. His monograph is weakened by its organization. The repetitive references to several important court cases, such as Marbury v. Madison, in various chapters throughout the monograph makes the information appear scattered. While Hobson’s analysis of Marshall’s opinions is conscientious, he would benefit from the inclusion of some secondary literature. His argument would be stronger if he included some other scholarly opinions on Marshall’s judicial decisions and contrasted them to his own. This monograph is a defense of Marshall’s genius, but the lack of information given on critiques of his jurisprudence makes the monograph appear decidedly biased. Hobson’s contribution to the historiography would be stronger if he referenced the ideas he was trying to challenge.

Overall, The Great Chief Justice: John Marshall and the Rule of Law is a strongly written defense of John Marshall’s legacy and legal mastery. While the monograph could benefit from more sources and better organization, it is a valuable contribution to the historiography of American constitutional law and is an invaluable resource to scholars interested in the legal history of the early United States.

Cover Image Courtesy of Amazon.com

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[1] Hobson, Charles F. The Great Chief Justice: John Marshall and the Rule of Law. University Press of Kansas. Copyright 1996. xiii.

[2] Hobson, The Great Chief Justice, x.

Reviewed: Sensing the Past: Sensing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting and Touching in History by Mark Smith

by Tripp Wright

Mark M Smith. Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Pp. 1, 180. $19.95.

Human experience is an amalgam of internal and external events that occur both to and by human actors in their environments. Most experiences are understood through one or more of the five traditional senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. As most history is often human-centric, it is odd that so many historical approaches have left the experiences of human senses to the wayside. As Mark Smith rightly claims, there has been a surprising lack of complexity to historians’ approach to what he often calls “sensory history”. Smith’s book, Sensing the Past: Sensing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting and Touching in History works as a landmark piece of historiographic realignment in sensory history meant to introduce readers to the importance of sensory history and address a worrying trend in sensory history’s early years. With intentions of general introduction and historiographical intervention, Smith uses broad strokes to paint the picture of sensory history as it stood in the year 2007. Through his systematic introductory exploration of each of the five senses, Smith introduces readers to the importance of sensory history as a discipline and he argues for a change in sensory history’s trajectory by decentering visual history and arguing against the common assumption of the relationship between modernity and the visual.

A newer approach, sensory history grew out of the necessity to treat sensory experiences as vital to understanding history. With interdisciplinary roots, sensory history originated from aspects of microhistory and everyday history blended with anthropology, media studies, art history and more. Of the pioneering works of sensory history, Alain Corbin’s 1998 book Village Bells investigated the symbolic power and the sonar experiences of the bell in the nineteenth-century French countryside and was often seen as the first monograph length work devoted to sensory history. After Village Bells, a trend in sensory history developed and was solidified by Marshal McLuhan and Walter Ong’s introduction of the “Great Divide” theory.” Essentially, the Great Divide theory stated that the printing press signaled a divide in the importance of historical sensory experience and modernity by touting a higher emphasis on the visual. This created an implicit relationship between pre-modernity with oral and aural experiences and modern experiences with visuality.

Mark Smith works in Sensing the Past systematically, sense by sense, to disprove the validity of the Great Divide theory. Smith looks to decenter the supremacy of sight in the historian’s approach to understanding modernity, and he asserts the need to reassess pre-modern and modern distinctions as they create false separation between the fluid and complicated sensory history that is not constrained by ideas of modernity.  Although Smith argues that the pre-modern and modern categorical distinctions are detrimental to an understanding of sensory history, he uses these distinctions to provide visual historical importance in a pre-modern context and non-visual historical importance in modern history. It is a simple, yet effective way to validate his claims to the complexity of sensory history and the need to adjust the current approach some sensory historians have taken.

In both his introduction and conclusion, Smith claims that sensory history does not need to be contained within self-imposed sensory history works but instead could be applied to most any historical approach. Coming from his cultural history background, the interdisciplinary and bottom-up approach is clear throughout the work as Smith pulls from a variety of secondary source literature. Some of the disciplines he frequently cites as touching on sensory history include the history of medicine, women’s history, the history of identity, and urban history. He is conscious of the Eurocentricity of the field of sensory history as it stood in 2007 and is deliberate in his approach to find sources and sensory history that are non-Western. Smith’s choice to include non-Western work, but still point out this glaring omission in the sensory history field, strengthens his appeal to the future of sensory history work (14). There is opportunity for continued research and by addressing the issue and providing a framework for future sensory historians, Smith is preparing a new generation to push the boundaries farther and provide a more complex, diverse, and global understanding of how our senses interact with history, and how historians interact with human senses.

Both structurally and methodologically, Smith works to simultaneously introduce sensory history and explain the importance of shifting narratives away from Great Divide thinking and towards his more complicated and fluid approach to sensory history. With an approach meant specifically to complicate matters and work seamlessly between disciplines, Smith creates systematic structure and a somewhat formulaic approach to instill the awareness of complexity. Smith weaves together historical anthropologists’ work throughout his analysis. The work of pioneering anthropologists David Howes and Constance Classen are deeply embedded in both footnotes and in the main text throughout most every chapter. Smith does not constrain himself temporally or geographically, instead his emphasis is on each sense wherever it might have been distinguished in historical work. Despite the vast scope, Smith masterfully walks the reader through sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch, in that order. Each chapter deals with a specific sense and provides a myriad of examples of sensory history that supports Smith’s claim on the complexity of sensory history, specifically regarding the sense’s relationship to historian’s ideas of modernity. The chapters follow a strikingly similar pattern. For each chapter, there is the introduction of the sense in a broad historical context.  Next, Smith focuses on how the sense is understood in a pre-modern context, and then an emphasis on modern applications of the sense in history. Finally, Smith introduces some historical loose ends that are often connected to that sense, usually addressing omissions of non-Western sources or the colonizing aspect of some past sensory histories (56). Smith’s approach to vision deemphasizes its role in modernity and his search highlights sight in pre-modern history, whereas the rest of the senses, work in the inverse with an emphasis on modernity. Although formulaic through repetition with each sense, the simplicity of Smith’s approach is necessary, as sensory history can (and Smith argues should be) used to approach almost any history.

As his work is meant to be an introduction to the field, Smith is quite brief in secondary source analysis and spends just enough time to introduce any evidence and quickly move on to the next. His focus is on proving the necessity of decentering the Great Divide theory and relies more on quantity of sources demonstrating possible complications for this theory as opposed to in depth analysis of a few select counterpoints. There are moments where this pace can be difficult to keep up with, but the evidence and analysis flows to keep the reader engaged critically with each sense being addressed. For example, in one of the subsections concerning taste in relation to ideas of modernity, Smith looks to gustatory descriptions from important philosophical thinkers like David Hume and Alexander Pope as evidence of a shift in the rise of “gustatory discourse [that] increased at precisely the moment when a variety of social boundaries became blurred…Order and the proximate senses, then, were intimately related and this is clear through the history of taste” (81). This blurring of social boundaries is the early Modern period of transition that Smith often works in to prove his argument concerning the devaluing of modern and pre-modern distinctions for sensory history. Relying on the work of David Howes and Marc Lalonde, Smith connects the bland nature of English cuisine to nationalism and the economic circumstances of imperial Britain in the eighteenth century, which in turn supports his claims on the importance of non-visual history in a modern setting. (82)

By emphasizing the modern contexts that require gustatory analysis, Smith is directly responding to the Great Divide theory and decentering the supposedly necessary visual superiority in historical analysis of modern history. This breadth of material is wide and varied, but Smith uses this to his advantage as he argues for the complexity of sensory history and discourages more binary understandings of sensory history, like the Great Divide theory. With his broad strokes approach and an ability to quickly introduce complex ideas without losing purpose and clarity, Smith gives the reader an opportunity to engage critically and thoughtfully with sensory history but leaves the reader the opportunity to explore beyond the more cursory introduction given.

Up to his conclusion, Smith leads readers through a multitude of geographies and temporalities that help explain the state of sensory history as it stood at a pivotal turning point in 2007. With the Great Divide theory aggressively qualified and almost totally dismissed, he leaves the reader with a hope for the future of sensory history. Smith believes that the future of sensory history lies in the concept of intersensorality. Intersensorality concerns multiple or perhaps all the senses simultaneously and particularly the ways in which relationships between senses can be used and understood and then used for historical analysis. The interconnectedness of multiple senses and the subsequent analysis needs to be addressed further, which seems to be why Smith left this as his potential for the future and not something covered in depth. Smith was successful in providing a multitude of examples that discouraged Great Divide thinking when approaching sensory history. With such a diverse and varied source base, Smith’s quantity-based argument is effective, but leaves the complexities of the individual sensory histories he uses mostly absent. Smith provides a wide and stable base for the work of future sensory historians to build upon. Smith’s purpose was to adjust the trajectory of sensory history in its adolescent phase and inspire new historians to engage with sensory history through this introduction to the field. This work is meant for a historian interested in branching into sensory history or applying that lens to their own work. With a scattered approach and introductory analysis of secondary sources, the actual content of history is mostly absent and may not entice non-academics looking to learn about the history through the lens of the senses.

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Reviewed: The War for the Common Soldier by Peter S. Carmichael

Review by Kristin Bridges

Carmichael, Peter S. The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 392 pp. $34.95.

In The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies, Peter S. Carmichael explores how soldiers endured and survived the brutalities and uncertainties of the American Civil War. Focusing on how soldiers thought, Carmichael seeks to reconstruct “the totality of the military experience.” (11) In doing so, he attempts to answer what ideologies framed their worldviews, how they navigated societal and military expectations, and how they managed doubt created by the brutality of war. Carmichael takes a diverse approach utilizing microhistory to examine these questions because, as he posits, this illustrates that no one man can be fully representative and that “there was no common soldier in the Civil War.” (12) Ultimately, Peter S. Carmichael argues that Civil War soldiers continually remade themselves and learned to be flexible and pragmatic to cope in a war that blurred their well-established worldviews.

This book adds to and expands on the historiography of soldiers’ motivations, worldviews, and choices to remain in the Civil War even as it challenged their beliefs and specifically seeks to reconstruct the totality of the lived military experience of soldiers. Carmichael argues that previous scholarship relied too heavily on identity and ideology as explanatory powers, while failing to fully explore the lived experiences of soldiers. Building on the work of historians like James McPherson and Earl Hess, Carmichael expands on the historiography of why men fought. Carmichael does not shy away from his belief that historians have focused too significantly on ideology and identity as “all-encompassing explanatory powers.” (10) Within each chapter, Carmichael outlines where he builds on existing historiography. For example, in “Providence and Cheerfulness” he refers to the work on providence by Mark A. Noll.  Noll argued that clergymen did not believe in their ability to understand Providence, and that the result of battles was God’s will. However, Carmichael does not shy away from pointing to gaps in this argument and scholarship on Providence. For example, Carmichael critiques how historians have overlooked how simple answers from clergymen failed to resonate with soldiers when “providential frameworks collapsed,” such as when faced with failed battles. (67) Therefore, Carmichael argues that scholars who study providence, like Noll, have ignored the role of pragmatism in the religious lives of soldiers. Carmichael also points to where scholarship diverges, such as why soldiers continued to fight and cope with trauma. According to Carmichael, scholarship has tended to fall into two camps in which soldiers were either willing to fight and rejuvenated by battle or coerced into battle and unmade by the experience of war. While both have merit, this has created a “historiographical cul-de-sac where we circle endlessly around matters of representation.” (134) Instead, he reframes the question to focus on the men’s adaption to mechanisms of authority. Therefore, Carmichael is making an intervention in the historiography by focusing more strongly on soldiers’ experiences and the war from their perspectives. Rather than using multitudes of soldiers quotes to prove his broader themes, he is closely examining those themes in the lives of a few soldiers to experience the war through their eyes. Carmichael engages actively with a diverse array of scholarship to both expand on existing scholarship and expose gaps in the historiography.

Carmichael organizes his book topically around close readings of soldiers’ written works. Each chapter focuses on a specific topic which he explores systematically through individual soldiers’ experiences as described in their letters. The chapters primarily follow the experiences of three to six soldiers who found similar ways of coping with the horrors they saw and often shared similar worldviews to understand the diversity of men in the war. Carmichael utilizes several keywords, such as “pragmatism”, “providence”, and “sentimentalism” to frame the soldiers’ worldviews in several chapters. Other chapters focus on aspects of military life, such as “Writing Home” and “Desertion and Military Justice” which help show how day-to-day existences shaped their perspectives. The effect of this organization is that it brings to focus on the lived experiences of soldiers within the camps. Rather than focus solely on just large overarching concepts, Carmichael frames these chapters around the everyday experiences of soldiers to demonstrate the impact of pragmatism and sentimentalism on soldiers as practical and real forces in their lives.

This book utilizes a wide selection of primary sources, particularly focusing on soldier’s letters. While Civil War soldiers’ letters are hardly an underutilized source, Carmichael distinguishes his methodology by doing a deep reading of the sources. Rather than use snippets of letters to prove a larger point, he extensively reads into each soldiers’ correspondence. Consequently, while using a diverse array of soldiers’ experiences, he relies heavily on soldiers who left significant correspondence. Carmichael justifies this choice by arguing that it reduces the “cherry-picking” of quotes that results in a perception of soldiers as unchanging men of duty. (12) To Carmichael, deep reading, in which the writer of the letters remains the focus, produces a narrative of greater depth. Presenting history from the perspective of each individual soldier, according to Carmichael, recaptures historical spontaneity and the war at the ground level of soldiers’ experiences. Carmichael goes beyond well-written officers and particularly analyzes semi-literate soldiers’ correspondence for their often-blunt honesty. Other primary sources he utilizes are political cartoons. This often enables him to make assessments of the culture and expectations of society that prompted soldiers to emphasize certain beliefs, such as providence, to their families. Carmichaels frame soldiers’ personal experiences and his analysis of their beliefs within the larger context of the nation and expectations of soldiers. A methodological strength is that Carmichael does not take the letters’ words at face value and, in his attempt to understand both the how and why he reads the letters critically. Carmichael uses letters and personal writings to understand the mindsets and cultures of Civil War soldiers through both what they wrote and why they wrote it, while never forgetting the fact that these soldiers were writing to their families, and therefore should not be taken at face value. Carmichael’s use of deep reading individual’s writings is evident in some of his other works, such as The Last Generation: Young Virginians in Peace, War, and Reunion where he uses letters to understand young southerners leading up to the Civil War. These are primarily used to further his points and expand his argument beyond the individual soldier to the larger society. In The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies, Carmichael brings deeper focus to the soldiers during their experiences of war, rather than the more generational and long-term oriented approach in his previous book. This serves to intensify his deep reading of soldiers which focuses on a shorter period of their lives, the length of the war, and allows him to delve into their mindsets at that moment. Carmichael intensely examines each case study to reveal the impact of the war on men’s ideals and beliefs.

Carmichael ultimately succeeds in arguing that soldiers learned to become pragmatic in their beliefs to make sense of a war that defied their worldviews. Using soldiers with diverse backgrounds, Carmichael successfully draws out both the differences in their experiences and the similarities in how they learned to interpret the world around them. While making his points, Carmichael consciously chooses not to overgeneralize and acknowledges the limitations of microhistory. For example, the question of how representative a few soldiers’ experiences can be of the other soldiers in the army. This serves to emphasize his point that there was no such thing as a common soldier. One question remaining is whether these notions of providence, sentimentalism, and pragmatism affected black soldiers in a similar way to their white counterparts. While black soldiers are certainly not absent from Carmichael’s book, they are often viewed through the letters of white soldiers and descriptions of violence inflicted on black troops. Only one case study focused on a black soldier who was executed for mutiny. This is hardly representative of many black soldier’s experiences in the war. Therefore, further exploration of the topics addressed in the book could expand on the differences between how white and black soldiers dealt with the hardships of the war. Another question that Carmichael could further expound would be the experiences of noncombatant military personnel, such as medics and female nurses. Although they did not experience direct combat, they were present on the front lines. An exploration of military personnel’s relationship to the brutality of war would broaden the scope of the book beyond just soldiers. This would enable a more comprehensive understanding of those who experienced the war, rather than the narrow scope that Carmichael takes. Altogether, Carmichael writes a convincing account of the flexibility required of soldiers to survive the world without sacrificing their ideologies. This book is a valuable read for any student of history seeking to understand soldiers’ ability to survive and fight without losing their idealism and belief in providence. Students and scholars interested in social or cultural history will appreciate this book’s deep dive into the tension between pragmatism and sentimentalism through the personal lives of the common soldier.

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Reviewed: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander

(Image from The New Jim Crow)

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York, NY: The New Press, 2010. 290 pp. $27.95.

By Kristin Bridges

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander explores the rise of the mass incarceration of Black people in the United States. Alexander’s book was published in 2010, just two years after former-President Barack Obama’s first election and during an era in which people believed racism was lessening. It strips away this faulty presumption to expose the racialized justice system that she argues has become a new form of the Jim Crow South. She argues that racism has not vanished but simply changed its expression. As Alexander notes, “The arguments and rationalizations that have been trotted out in support of racial exclusion and discrimination in its various forms have changed and evolved, but the outcome has remained largely the same” (1). Consequently, the current justice system continues to heavily target Black people. Once labeled a felon, they have nearly the same rights as they would have had in the Jim Crow era. Therefore, while Jim Crow may not ostensibly still exist, a new form of oppression through the mass incarceration of Black people has taken its place. The justice system has denied people released from prison certain rights, such as the right to vote and serving on juries, thus relegating them to a segregated existence (4). Social stigma reinforces both formal and informal methods of control which forces felons to the margins of society where they are denied the rights and privileges of mainstream society. Alexander argues that the fact that more than half of the young Black men in cities are under the control of the justice system is not a result of poverty or personal circumstances but rather systematic inequality resulting from a new racial caste system.

Alexander utilizes a diverse interdisciplinary collection of sources to craft her argument. She draws heavily on works focusing on imprisonment in the United States, such as Katherine Beckett and Theodore Sasson’s The Politics of Injustice: Crime and Punishment in America and Marc Maurer’s Race to Incarcerate,both of which examine the criminal justice system in the United States. However, Alexander does not draw heavily on historians throughout the book. This is because Alexander frames her work as a call to action that she hopes “other scholars and advocates will pick up where the book leaves off and develop the critique more fully or apply the themes sketched here to other groups and contexts” (16). Therefore, she presents her book as a new argument in the field.

Beginning with a description of the origins of racialized social control in the United States, Alexander traces the rise of mass incarceration into the present day, as a modern human rights crisis. While Alexander chooses not to engage in the long debate over what classifies a racial caste, she defines it as a stigmatized racial group locked into an inferior social position. Consequently, she argues that the United States caste system has evolved from one “based entirely on exploitation (slavery), to one based largely on subordination (Jim Crow), to one defined by marginalization (mass incarceration)”(219). While marginalization may seem preferable in comparison, it is dangerous because, as Alexander claims, extreme marginalization risks extermination. She backs this startling claim by pointing to the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia as examples of exterminations rising from the extreme stigmatization of racial and ethnic groups. Therefore, Alexander’s book serves to be a call for attention to the decade’s long marginalization of African Americans by the government.

From the very first interaction with the police through release and reentrance into society, Alexander shows how African Americans are disadvantaged by their race and the systemic racism of the legal system. The primary goal of her book is to call attention to this issue in an era in which people prefer to pretend that racism no longer exists. The United States would rather engage in collective denial of the role mass incarceration plays in the marginalization of Black people. Moreover, Alexander criticizes not only the general public on their desire to ignore these issues but the collection of Black advocacy groups who remain comparatively silent on these matters because of the desire to present “respectable” Black people in their arguments. The fear to leave the well-worn path of drawing public attention to cases against more attractive plaintiffs will not end mass incarnation or help those who are most oppressed by this new form of Jim Crow (229).  In order to reform this system, the United States must grapple with The War on Drugs, which was utilized by the government to target communities of color. She is not arguing for the reformation of the criminal justice system alone because these efforts would be futile. The prison system is simply too massive and entrenched in the economy to tackle on its own. Rather, Alexander believes that ending the War on Drugs would decrease the prison population because it has been the primary tool for targeting Black people in poor communities in significant numbers.

Alexander’s book is a call to action and demands that people talk about the link between race and incarceration. Because people fear breaking racial etiquette and discussing uncomfortable topics, they may be tempted to ignore race and present prison reform as colorblind. However, ignoring race in the discussion ignores major issues within the system. They are tied together and presenting colorblindness as an option allows people to become indifferent to racism. Ultimately, Alexander concludes her book with the hope that, when young Black people who have been released from prison begin to speak out, changes will begin with new grassroots advocacy.

Alexander uses extensive primary sources, heavily relying on court documents and prison statistics, to illustrate the disparity in the legal treatment between Black and white Americans. She makes heavy use of relevant court cases such as California v. Acevedo, which upheld the warrantless search and seizure of motorists’ personal belongings (62).  Using cases like this Alexander illustrates the ways in which systematic racism is upheld in the justice system through rulings that undermine protections like the Fourth Amendment. Alexander also draws on studies conducted on police reports and records, such as percentages of people pulled over by police who are Black versus those who are white, despite similar rates of violating traffic laws (133). Using studies conducted on police departments and prisons, Alexander provides quantitative data to support her claims of unequal treatment by the justice system. While Alexander primarily utilizes legal documents in her research to paint a larger picture of the justice system and systemic inequality, she does incorporate personal accounts that detail how mass incarceration impacts communities. For example, in her chapter “The Cruel Hand” Alexander uses personal stories from families of incarcerated people to illustrate the social stigmatization that individuals and families face. In one example, she describes a woman named Ruth who says she would never discuss her brother, who is incarcerated, with coworkers because of her fear of judgement (168). These personal accounts help to humanize the people Alexander is talking about and provide specific examples of the injustices they face. In conjunction with her quantitative data, Alexander’s sources help to provide concrete evidence and examples of her argument throughout the book.

Alexander, ultimately, presents a compelling argument for the continuing and evolving forms of racism in the United States. This work made waves in both academic and public circles upon its initial publication in 2010 and continues to become increasingly important and relevant as the United States grapples with issues of racism and the rampant legal discrimination against Black people. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is an essential read for anyone who wishes to understand the significant impacts of the War on Drugs and the rise of mass incarnation in the United States since the 1970s. By tracing the evolving nature of racism in the Unites States from slavery into the present, Alexander shows that racism continues to not only exist but thrive in American society.

Reviewed: Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory, by Claudio Saunt

(Image from W.W. Norton & Company)

Saunt, Claudio. Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2020. Pp. xix, 396. $26.95.

By Samuel Tomblin

Claudio Saunt’s Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory is a bracing examination of the United States government’s role in forcing tens of thousands of Native Americans from their lands in the early years of the American Republic. Inspired by the experiences and correspondence of his Jewish Hungarian grandfather during World War II, Saunt casts the American government’s expulsion of Native Americans in the 1830s as the first state-administered mass deportation in the modern era. Saunt makes three distinct arguments as part of his broader thesis. Saunt argues that the expulsion of Native Americans from their homelands was unprecedented, pointing to the government’s involvement in overseeing the expulsion and its usage of the modern tools of statecraft such as national transportation networks and military supply chains. His second argument contends that the expulsion of Native Americans during the 1830s established a pattern of further mistreatment and forced deportations of Native Americans, which represented a devastating turn in the fortunes of native populations within the borders of the United States. Federal policy towards native populations in the nineteenth century, as Saunt shows, was largely informed by this initial deportation and provided a blueprint for the further destruction of native homelands. Saunt argues persuasively that expulsion was the result of conscious political choices made by those in power, contesting the supposed inevitability of native expulsion. Taken together, Saunt presents an unpleasant time in America’s history in a competent and incisive way.

Unworthy Republic is arranged chronologically with a specific focus on the 1820s and 1830s. Saunt concentrates on the tribulations of the Cherokee and the neighboring tribes of the Southeast United States, primarily their turbulent battles with the federal government over expulsion. Saunt charts the westward journeys of the forced migrants, detailing the brutality, starvation, and disease they experienced along the way, with the horror detailed in these passages being absolutely dizzying. Passages such as the one on page 301, where Saunt describes the summary execution and torture of several Seminole refugees, reveal the true human cost of Native American dispossession. In addition to the sheer cruelty inflicted upon Native Americans, the federal government’s drive to expel Native Americans from their land had broader consequences for the young Republic as well. “Indian removal” led to the spread of the American South’s slavocracy, further embedding slavery in the nation’s economy as a result. The cruelty of “Indian removal” ensured that slavery, which was yet another monstrous fixture of American life in the nineteenth century, found new purchase in the lands taken from indigenous peoples. According to Saunt, financial and governmental interests not only made Native American dispossession possible but also set the stage for the Civil War.

Saunt’s background as a scholar of Native American history informs his work. Saunt consults a wide array of primary sources, from government documents to Cherokee newspapers. His use of Cherokee newspapers, while conventional in the historiographic sense, captures the sense of dismay that many in the Cherokee nation felt at the prospect of their people being forced from their land. Some of the most moving passages of the book can be found when Saunt cites Native American poetry, which he uses to demonstrate the sheer desolation many Native Americans felt. A prime example of this can be found in the final chapter of the book, “The Price of Expulsion,” where he includes a Choctaw poem on page 322 lamenting their forced expulsion into the hostile lands west of the Mississippi. Saunt’s utilization of native poetry provides emotional depth and humanizes the subjects of his inquiry in ways that more traditional approaches sometimes do not. Overall, Saunt is sensitive in his treatment of native suffering and avoids being gratuitous in his narrative.

Unworthy Republic possesses an engaging structure and a well-argued thesis, one that is sure to upset accusations that other ethnic deportations had occurred prior to the 1830s. As an example, other nations, such as Great Britain, had engaged in similar population evictions well before the United States’ efforts in the 1830s. The Highland Clearances, though not always state-driven, featured the wholesale destruction of native Scottish culture and history in the Highlands as the Highland Scots were progressively forced from their traditional holdings due to economic pressures and political considerations. Certain parallels can obviously be drawn between the experience of the Highland Scots and Native Americans, though there are definite differences in terms of the scale of destruction and the doggedness which characterized government actions against the latter. Saunt successfully argues that the forced deportation of Native Americans from their homeland was made unique by the utilization of state-level planning.

Saunt’s argument that the expulsion of Native Americans in the 1830s was unprecedented within American history is well-substantiated, as there had not been concerted, large-scale deportations up until that point. His second and third arguments are similarly well-argued, with both possessing intriguing implications for the study of Native American history. Arguably, the most impactful aspects of Unworthy Republic lie in his explorations of financial and local interests and how they helped to drive the criminal expulsions of native people. Standard narratives of Native American dispossession tend to assert the primacy of the federal government in performing much of the deportations, but Saunt breaks from this model by detailing the role of local banks, militias, and politicians in calling for “Indian removal.” Saunt’s implicit message is that a confluence of national and local interests were responsible for much of the destruction, and without the alliance between national and local interests, Native American deportations may have never happened in the first place.

Scholars of Native American history should read this work, as well as scholars who study the relationship between state and society. The American state’s leviathan-esque machinations, as expressed by federal policy and frontier malice, loom large throughout the narrative of the book, and anyone studying state and society in the early Republic would be remiss if they ignored Saunt’s latest historiographic contribution. The book’s accessible style makes it perfect for introducing undergraduate students and general readers to the history of Native American Indian expulsion. Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory is a powerful indictment of American conduct towards Native Americans in the nineteenth century and a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship on the subject. Claudio Saunt provides an incisive view into a dreadful chapter of the United States’ early history and gives a voice to those who suffered the bitter consequences of federal policy.