Emerson, Frederick Jackson Turner, and the Problem of the West

This article investigates media coverage of 19th and early 20th century river activism and its effect on federal policy to control the Mississippi River. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ “levees-only” policy—which joined disparate navigation and flood control interests—is largely blamed for the Great Flood of 1927, called the largest peacetime disaster in American history. River activists organized annual conventions, and later, professional lobbies organized media campaigns up and down the Mississippi River to sway public opinion and pressure Congress to fund flood control and river navigation projects. Annual river conventions drew thousands of delegates such as plantation owners, shippers, bankers, chambers of commerce, governors, congressmen, mayors and cabinet members with interests on the Mississippi River. Public pressure on Congress successfully captured millions of federal dollars to protect property, drain swamps for development, subsidize local levee districts and influence river policy.

Reviewed by: Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity K. Scott Wong Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity. By Paul Spickard. New York: Routledge, 2007. 744 pp. $95.00 (cloth); $39.95 (paper). With this book, Paul Spickard has produced the best single-volume study of American immigration history available today. Using the latest scholarship in a variety of overlapping fields, Spickard provides both an overview of immigration history from initial contact to the present and a revision of the standard approach to American immigration history, the East Coast–based model of European arrival and eventual assimilation. Instead, Spickard provides three models that can be used to interpret the history of immigration, race, and ethnicity in American society: the immigrant assimilation model, the transnational diasporic model, and the panethnic formation model. In each of these models, Spickard points out that "race" and "race-making" are vital to the understanding of how we interpret immigrants and their experience in the United States, while also paying attention to the impact of American colonialism on why and how certain immigrants arrive at our shores. In other words, Spickard rejects the time-worn model of American immigration history as mainly the story of Europeans who came here willingly and eventually discarded their foreignness to become "Americans." By insisting that immigration history take the issues of slavery, racism, exclusion, and colonialism seriously, Spickard paints a much more complex and truthful portrait of the making of America. At the heart of Spickard's approach to studying American immigration history is his insistence that we depart from the notion that immigration history is primarily about Europeans coming to America, and that "American" denotes an "Anglo-conformity" or "Anglo-normativity." Spickard's first challenge to the older paradigms of immigration history is to present a well-argued chapter that depicts the many indigenous groups living in North America when Europeans first arrived. Using a wide array of photographs, maps, and charts, he clearly demonstrates the diversity of the native population during the pre-Columbian period. (The entire book is graced with a wonderful selection of visuals and information-packed charts and tables.) Once establishing that European, and later Asian, immigrants or settlers did not arrive to a "virgin land," Spickard moves to a discussion of slavery and how it affected the construction of race and racism in America. From there, he explains how naturalization legislation favored white males, thus disenfranchising women, blacks, Native Americans, and Asians. At the same time, immigration from Great Britain, Ireland, and northern [End Page 282] Europe created a society that privileged whiteness, which in turn held nonwhite newcomers or those already in the country in contempt. In addition to blacks, Native Americans, Asians, and Mexicans, many Americans held disparaging views of those whom they encountered through conquest, such as Hawaiians and Filipinos, while bringing them under American colonial rule. At the same time, immigrants were arriving from China and Japan, causing more turmoil to the American conception of racial hierarchies. Spickard deftly ties these racial and class tensions to the rise of American capitalism and the conflicts between race, labor, and management. The racial and class conflicts gave rise to exclusionary legislation and the codification of whiteness as the basis for citizenship. In the course of this discussion, he covers the exclusion of Chinese and other Asian immigrants, the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, which created national quotas for all sending countries and declared that those who were ineligible for citizenship could not immigrate. This law drastically reduced the number of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe because of their countries' low annual quotas for immigrants and nearly eliminated all immigration from Asia because they were ineligible for naturalization. Hence, as Spickard points out, by the first third of the twentieth century, the racial hierarchy that determined citizenship and who could become an American was "cemented" through law and exclusionary practices. The cracks in this cement, however, began to show with the impact of World War II. Japanese Americans were rounded up and incarcerated for the duration of the war, but Mexicans were recruited to fill the labor shortage resulting from...

DUALIST POPULAR CONSTITUTIONALISM A Reply to Michelman

In the summer of 1933, Hector Charlesworth, Chairman of the recently created Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission (CRBC), Canada's first public broadcaster, spoke before the annual assembly of th...

Three dreams run through American history: the elitist dream, the American dream, and the democratic dream. For most people, the American dream means marginal economic improvement; democracy, in all but the formal or legalistic sense, is essentially dropped from the promise of American life. The conservative elitist dream makes no pretense of concern for social democracy, and the liberal American dream offers at best a less oppressive social order than that envisioned in the conservative dream. For true democracy, an earlier dream of America the radical democratic dream envisioned by Thomas Jefferson-must be rediscovered and adapted to contemporary American life. Culturally, the American dream reinforces capitalism and liberal democracy; together, all three push classical democratic values aside. Although it is overwhelmed by the American dream, another dream of America, the democratic dream, recurs throughout American history.

T HOUGH teaching American history in British universities was greatly stimulated by the role of the United States during World War II, and by its unique partnership with Great Britain at that time, not until the mid-1950's did American history come into its own within university curricula. The inauguration of H. C. Allen as Commonwealth Fund Professor of American History in the University of London in 1955 marked the beginning of a new era of commitment to American history, and the next decade and a half saw a steady increase in the quantity and quality of study in American history. Since Britain itself was in the throes of university expansion, United States history undoubtedly benefited from this surge forward, yet in these same years there emerged a number of eminent Americanists who, along with their disciples, guaranteed that this instruction would be of a high order. Since 1970, however, a plateau in this growth having been reached, the British fraternity of American specialists has been forced to re-think the role and the function of American history at the universities. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that a renewed concern for superior achievement in teaching is a likely result. No school of British Americanists could be said to have existed until the close of the Second World War. Before then, from time to time an individual scholar tried his hand at American history, but no pattern of

Regionalism:The Significance of Place in American Jewish Life William R. Ferris (bio), Deborah Dash Moore (bio), John Shelton Reed (bio), Theodore Rosengarten (bio), and George J. Sanchez (bio) "For as Geography without History seemeth a carkasse without motion so History without Geography wandreth as a Vagrant without a certaine habitation." —Captain John Smith, 16241 The following is a transcript of a roundtable session held at the 2006 Biennial Scholars' Conference on American Jewish History in Charleston, South Carolina, June 5, 2006. Introduction, William R. Ferris: It's exciting to see some of our nation's leading figures gathered here who are authorities on both Jewish studies and regional studies, and to consider the intersection of those worlds and their implications. My earlier work at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, especially the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture that we produced, dealt in significant ways with the contributions of Jewish families and their history.2 Later, at the National Endowment for the Humanities, a special initiative on regional humanities centers while I served as Chairman, also embraced the contributions of Jewish families and their history. For over a century, scholars have studied American regions, and their work collectively forms an important context for Jewish studies in America. At the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill a century ago, Howard Odom and his colleagues explored the American South, and today UNC houses over 15 million items organized in more than 4,600 collections on the region. These include rich materials on southern Jews, including the Mordecai family, Gertrude Weil, Moses Cohen, Allard Lowenstein, as well as another collection that I just discovered a few moments ago talking with Alan Kraut about his latest book, Goldberger's War.3 This study of Dr. Joseph Goldberger and his attempt [End Page 113] to wipe out poverty and disease in the South, especially the disease of pellagra, draws upon resources that are part of Southern Historical Collections at UNC. The College of Charleston's Jewish Studies Program, headed by Martin Perlmutter, and the Jewish Heritage Collection, headed by Dale Rosengarten, provide uniquely rich research opportunities on the history of Jewish families in Charleston and South Carolina. It is appropriate that Charleston, the home of one of the earliest Jewish congregations in the nation, Beth Elohim, also boasts an impressive new Jewish Studies Center. Jewish studies, I would argue, can only gain and grow by building ties with regional studies and with the broader field of American studies. The pioneering work of Eli Evans in The Provincials (1973), of Macy Hart and Stuart Rockoff at the Institute of Southern Jewish Life, and of Leonard Rogoff at the Jewish Heritage Foundation of North Carolina, exemplifies the impressive resources that focus on Jewish life in the American South. Equivalent resources exist and are growing in other parts of our nation. So, it's not a question of if, but of how we build these bridges between regional studies and Jewish studies. To argue otherwise is a disservice to Jewish studies and weakens our field as we try to understand how the Jewish experience and the American experience have bonded for over three hundred years. I would argue that there is a symbiotic relationship between Jews and their regions. Jews have been shaped by their regions in profound ways, and in equally profound ways they have defined the regions in which they live. To explore that idea in ways that I think will be especially important as we begin our meeting this week, we've gathered the best minds that we could locate and convince to come here. Deborah Dash Moore: We owe much of historical interest in regionalism to the legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner. Turner published his classic essay on "The Significance of the Section in American History" in 1925, a decade after his influential essay on "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," and the former derives much of its insight from the latter. Turner's discussion of the "section" shares a sense of what has been lost with the closing of the frontier and the rise of industrial cities, but it also looks forward. Although he notes that sectionalism...

On muggy evening of July 12, 1893, World Colombian Exhibition in Chicago included presentations ranging from English Popular Culture in Middle Ages to Early Lead Mining in Illinois and Wisconsin. audience had begun to thin out by time last speaker, little-known teacher from University of Wisconsin, stood before gathering to present The Significance of Frontier in American History. By middle of twentieth century, successors such as George Rogers Taylor would judge Frederick Jackson Turner's paper to be the most widely known essay in American history, one which revolutionized historical thought in United States (v).1 At same time, Turner unintentionally provided an analytical tool that has been little used so far by observers of American culture, particularly as it could be applied to that most public manifestation, stage. If theatre can be argued to be one of most enduringly telling measures of how America views itself,2 its depiction of frontier-or The West-should not only lend itself to Turnerian analysis but also serve as measure of how perceptive Turner actually was in delineating this fundamental, if partially mythic, element of American psyche.3 It was Turner's contention that ft]he existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and advance of American settlement westward was fundamental to establishment of American values and to what might be called abstractly the American character.4 In 1926, he would re-explain this line as edge that served as the barometer of society expanding into wilderness (Jacobs 165). dynamism of line, was, in not only barometric (not only an instrument of measurement) but regenerative, catalyst for human correction and renewal. In compelling way, it helped to create distinctive national personality: perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, its continuous touch with simplicity of primitive society, furnish forces dominating American (Significance 2). Consequently, according to Turner, it is to that the American intellect owes its striking characteristics . . . coarseness and strength, its restless inventiveness particularly, the exuberance that comes with freedom (37). It was as if Frederick Jackson Turner were seeing America itself as dramatic archetype, particularly as he placed this American character into context of future that would be at war with its past. While Turner asserted that fh]e would be rash prophet who should assert that expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased, he nonetheless envisioned poignant possibilities arising from loss of an uncirumscribed frontier: Movement has been its dominant fact, he wrote of American character, and, unless this training has no effect upon people, American energy will continually demand wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For moment, at frontier, bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant (37-38). Under his scenario, American psyche would undergo powerful shift from ever again to never again. This component of Turner thesis has been viewed by some to help in understanding expansionism of American foreign policy at end of nineteenth century.5 Turner himself had speculated in 1891, two years before Chicago Exhibition, that a law of might well see completed filling of American West replaced by an economic colonization of South America (Bogue 97). What he may well have sensed but did not articulate was potential for different sort of imperialism-the colonization of forwardlooking American spirit by its own past. This would be stuff of playwrights rather than socio-economic historians-and when one turns to American stage, safety valve concept has come to its feet through ways in which American frontier characters are defined and redefined by felt presence and felt loss of Turner's moving edge. …

“Their Deeds Shall Be Made Manifest”: The Scandalous Mission of Joseph W. Clements to Great Britain, 1848–1851

ERIC L.JONES. Cultures Merging: A Historical and Economic Critique of Culture. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. xvii, 297. $29.95 (US). Reviewed by Harold James LINDSAY ALLEN. The Persian Empire: A History. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. 208. $39.95 (US). Reviewed by Christopher Tuplin GWYN MORGAN. 6g AD: The Year of the Four Emperors. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xi,322. $40.00 (CDN). Reviewed by Barbara Levick BRUCE L. BATTEN. Gateway to Japan: Hakata in War and Peace, 500-1300. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2006. Pp. xv, 183. $25.00 (US), paper. Reviewed by Mark J. Hudson CARTER VAUGHN FINDLEY. The Turks in World History. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. xvi, 300. $26.95 (CDN), paper. Reviewed by Colin Heywood NORMAN HOUSLEY. Contesting the Crusades. Maiden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Pp. xiii, 198. $29.95 (US)i paper. Reviewed by Peter W. Edbury MICHAELJ. LEVIN. Agents of Empire: Spanish Ambassadors in Sixteenth-Century Italy. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2005. Pp. viii, 228. $39-95 (US); R. J. WALSH. Charles the Bold and Italy (1467-1477): Politics and Personnel. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005; dist. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Pp. xxxiv, 478. $95.00 (US). Reviewed by Toby Osborne MICHAEL A. PALMER. Command at Sea: Naval Command and Control since the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. 377. $29.95 (US). Reviewed by William S. Cormack SUSANNA BURGHARTZ, ed. Inszenierte Welten: Die west- und ostindischen Reisen der Verleger de Bry, 1590-1630. Staging New Worlds: De Brys' Illustrated Travel Reports, 1590-1630. Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2004. Pp. 199. €54.50. Reviewed by Elmer Kolfin ARTHUR JAY KLINGHOFFER. The Power of Projections: How Maps Reflect Global Politics and History. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006. Pp. xv, 192. $49.95 (US). Reviewed by Patricia Seed C. PATTERSON GIERSCH. Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China's Yunnan Frontier. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. xvi, 308. $49-95 (US).Reviewed by Joanna Waley-Cohen N. A. M. RODGER. The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649-1815. New York, NY and London: W. W. Norton, 2005. Pp. lxv, 907. $45.00 (US). Reviewed Daniel A. Baugh RAYMOND HYLTON. Ireland's Huguenots and Their Refuge, 1662-1745: An Unlikely Haven. Brighton and Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 2005. Pp. xiii, 226. $69.50 (US). Reviewed by Ruth Whelan MARIEKE DE GOEDE. Virtue, Fortune, and Faith: A Genealogy of Finance. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Pp. xxvii, 235. $22.95 (US), paper. Reviewed by JU Best ROBIN LAW. Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving ‘Port’, 1727-l892. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004. Pp. xi, 308. $49.95 (US), cloth; $29-95 (US), paper. Reviewed by Davod Eltis COLIN G. CALLOWAY. The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xvii, 219. $35.50 (CDN). Reviewed by Trevor Burnard PAUL D'ARCY. The People of the Sea: Environment, Identity, and History in Oceania. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2006. Pp. xvii, 292. $36.00 (US). Reviewed by I. C. Campbell FRANCIS M. CARROLL. The American Presence in Ulster: A Diplomatic History, 1796-1996. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005. Pp. xi, 281. $29.95 (US), paper.Reviewed by Diane Kirby ERIC BURIN. Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2005; dist. Toronto, ON: Scholarly Book Services. Pp. xiv, 223. $101.95 (CDN). Reviewed by Manisha Sinha MICHAEL L. TATE. Indians and Emigrants: Encounters on the Overland Trails. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006. Pp. xxiv, 328. $29.95 (US). Reviewed by David La Vere ROBERT HOLLAND and DIANA MARKIDES. The British and the Hellenes: Struggles for Mastery in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1850-1960. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. 266. $165.00 (CDN). Reviewed by Robert Frazier DAVID G. ATWILL. The Chinese Sultanate: Islam, Ethnicity, and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwest China, 1856-1873. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 264. $60.00 (US). Reviewed by Evelyn S. Rawski ULRICH PALLUA. Eurocentrism, Racism, Colonialism in the Victorian and Edwardian Age: Changing Images of Africa(ns) in Scientific and Literary Texts. Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 2005. Pp. 263. €39.00. Reviewed by Antoinette Burton HAROLD L. PLATT. Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform, of Manchester and Chicago. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. xvi, 628. $49.00 (US). Reviewed by Helen Meller TIMOTHY H. PARSONS. Race, Resistance, and the. Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial Africa. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004. Pp. xviii, 318. $59-95 (US). Reviewed by Christopher Youé MANUS I. MIDLARSKY. The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xv, 463. $28.99 (US), paper. Reviewed by Howard Adelman VOLKER R. BERGHAHN. Europe in the Era of Two World Wars: From Militarism and Genocide to Civil Society, 1900-1950. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. 163. $24.95 (US); TOM BUCHANAN. Europe's Troubled Peace, l945-2000. Oxford and Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. Pp. xiii, 356. $34.95 (US), paper. Reviewed by Aviel Roshwald MATTHEW S. SELIGMANN. Spies in Uniform: British Military and Naval Intelligence on the Eve of the First World War. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. 272. $139.50 (CDN). Reviewed by David French JAY WINTER and ANTOINE PROST. The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. viii, 250. $28.99 (US), paper. Reviewed by Gary Sheffield MATTHEW HUGHES and WILLIAM J. PHILPOTT. The Palgrave Concise Historical Atlas of the First World War. Basingstoke and New York, NY: Palgrave Mac-millan, 2005. Pp. vi, 108. $19.95 (US)i paper. Reviewed by Elizabeth Greenhalgh JOHN BROOKS. Dreadnought Gunnery and the Battle oj Jutland: The Question of Fire Control. London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2005. Pp. xiv, 321. $115.00 (US). Reviewed by Greg Kennedy NICOLETTA F. GULLACE. ‘The Blood of Our Sons’: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship during the Great War. Basingstoke and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Pp. 284. $24.95 (US), paper. Reviewed by Jeffrey S. Reznick MICHAEL KELLOGG. The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Emigres and the Making of National Socialism, 1917-1945. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xiii, 327. $75.00 (US). Reviewed by István Deák JONATHAN ROSENBERG. HOW Far the Promised Land? World Affairs and the American Civil Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. xiii, 316. $35.00 (US). Reviewed by Warren I. Cohen GEORGE MCKAY. Circular Breathing: The Cultural Politics of Jazz in Britain. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv, 357. $22.95 (US). Reviewed by Lewis Porter RICHARD BESSEL. Nazism and War. London: Orion Books, 2005. Pp. 276. £7.99, paper; KIRAN KLAUS PATEL. Soldiers of Labor: Labor Service in Nazi Germany and New Deal America, 1933-1945, trans. Thomas Dunlap. Washington, DC: German Historical Institute and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 446. $65.00 (US). Reviewed by Michael Thad Allen MANUELA A. WILLIAMS. Mussolini's Propaganda Abroad: Subversion in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, 1935-1940. London and New York, NY: Rout-ledge, 2006. Pp. xii, 238. $120.00 (US).Reviewed by Alexander De Grand CORNELIS A. VAN MINNEN. Van Loon: Popular Historian, Journalist, and FDR Confidant. Basingstoke and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. xvi, 352. $75.00 (US). Reviewed by Bert Zeeman EVAN MAWDSLEY. Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941-1945. London: Hodder Arnold; dist. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. xxvi, 502. $66.50 (CDN).Reviewed by Martin Kitchen ROBERT L. MCLAUGHLIN and SALLY E. PARRY. We'll Always Have the Movies: American Cinema (luring World War II. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2006. Pp. ix, 357. $40.00 (US). Reviewed by Gregory D. Black KEITH D. MCFARLAND and DAVID L. ROLL. Louis Johnson and the Arming of America: The Roosevelt and Truman Years. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005. Pp. x, 452. $35.00 (US). Reviewed by Andrew J. Dunar PRUE TORNEY-PARLICKI. Behind the News: A Biography of Peter Russo. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2005; dist. Portland, OR: ISBS. Pp. xii, 412. $35-95, paper.Reviewed by David Day BARAK KUSHNER. The Thought War: Japanese, Imperial Propaganda. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2006. Pp. ix, 242. $45.00 (US). Reviewed by Peter Duus MARTIN F. AUGER. Prisoners of the Home Front: German POWs and ‘Enemy Aliens’ in Southern Quebec, 1940-46. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2006. Pp. xii, 227. $29.95 (CDN), paper. Reviewed by Chris Madsen ROBERT E. HERZSTEIN. Henry R. Luce, Time, and the American Crusade in Asia. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xv, 346. $30.00 (US). Reviewed by T. Christopher Jespersen ADAM CHAPNICK. The Middle Power Project: Canada and the Founding of the United Nations. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2005. Pp. xiv, 210. $29.95 (CDN), paper.Reviewed by Patrick H. Brennan DEBORAH KISATSKY. The United States and the European Right, 1945-1955. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv, 237. $39.95 (US). Reviewed by Jussi M. Hanhimäki ROBERT L. TIGNOR. W. Arthur Lewis and the Birth of Development Economics. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. xi, 315. $35.00 (US). Reviewed by Alfred E. Eckes BRIAN ANGUS MCKENZIE. Remaking France: Americanization, Public Diplomacy, and the Marshall Plan. New York, NY and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005. Pp. xii, 259. $60.00 (US). Reviewed by Kenneth Moure RADU IOANID. The Ransom of the Jews: The Story of the Extraordinary Secret Bargain between Romania and Israel. Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 2005. Pp. xviii, 217. $26.00 (US). Reviewed by Dov B. Lungu STEPHEN G. RABE. US Intervention in British Guiana: A Cold War Story. Chapel Hill, NC and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Pp. 240. $19.95 (US), paper. Reviewed by David Sheinin ODD ARNE WESTAD. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xvi, 484. $35.00 (US). Reviewed by Thomas Borstelmann MICHAEL D. STEVENSON, ed. Canada: Documents on Canadian External Relations: XXV: 1957-1958, Part II. Ottawa, ON: Department of External Affairs, 2004. Pp. xlii, 1,103. $119-95 (CDN). Reviewed by Lawrence Aronsen DIMITRY ANASTAKIS. Auto Pact: Creating a Borderless North American Auto Industry, 1960-1971. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Pp. xiv, 285. $29-95 (CDN), paper. Reviewed by Duncan McDowall ROBERT K. BRIGHAM. ARVN: Life and Death in the South Vietnamese Army. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006. Pp. xiv, 178. $29.95 (US). Reviewed by Mark W. McLeod MAURICIO SOLAÚN. US Intervention and Regime Change in Nicaragua. Lincoln, NB and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 391. $59.95 (US). Reviewed by Nancy Mitchell ELI NATHANS. The Politics of Citizenship in Germany: Ethnicity, Utility, and Nationalism. Oxford and New York, NY: Berg, 2004. Pp. xvii, 294. $26.95 (US), paper. Reviewed by Oliver Schmidtke JON WESTERN. Selling Intervention and War: The Presidency, the Media, and the American Public. Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Pp. xi, 305. $18.95 (US), paper. Reviewed by Doris A. Graber STEPHEN ERIC BRONNER. Blood in the Sand: Imperial Fantasies, Right-Wing Ambitions, and the Erosion of American Democracy. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2005. Pp. vii, 207. $22.00 (us); VASSILIS K. FOUSKAS and BÜLENT GÖKAY. The New American Imperialism: Bush's War on Terror and Blood for Oil. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005. Pp. xiii, 247. $49.95 (US); JAMES RISEN. State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration. New York, NY: Free Press, 2006. Pp. 240, $26.00 (US).REviewed by Patrick J. Haney MATTHEW A. BAUM. Soft News Goes to War: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy in the New Media Age. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. xii, 353. $19.95 (US), paper. Reviewed by John Corner SHENGLIN CHANG. The Global Silicon Valley Home: Lives and Landscapes within Taiwanese American Trans-Pacific Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Pp. xxii, 264. $55.00 (US). Reviewed by Madeline Y. Hsu LYLE J. GOLDSTEIN. Preventive Attack and Weapons of Mass Destruction: A Comparative Historical Analysis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Pp. xi, 268. $50.00 (US). Reviewed by Richard Ned Lebow BERTHOLD RITTBERGER. Building Europe's Parliament: Democratic Representation beyond the Nation-State. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. xv, 234-$117-95 (CDN).Reviewed by Alan S. Milward ALEXANDER COOLEY. Logics of Hierarchy: The Organization of Empires, States, and Military Occupations. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 191. $35.00 (US). Reviewed by Nicholas Onuf DAVID RUNCIMAN. The Politics of Good Intentions: History, Fear, and Hypocrisy in the New World Order. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. P. xi, 211. $29.95 (US). Reviewed by Richard Falk DAVID A. WELCH. Painful Choices: A Theory of Foreign Policy Change. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 275. $35.00 (US). Reviewed by Barbara Farnham WILLIAM E. RUDDIMAN. Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv, 202. $24.95 (US). Reviewed by Vaclav Smil MATTHEW J. GIBNEY. The Ethics and Politics of Asylum: Liberal Democracy and the Response to Refugees. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. x, 287. $70.00 (US). Reviewed by Niklaus Steiner JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ and ANDREW CHARLTON. Fair Trade for All: How Trade Can Promote Development. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. xxvii, 315. $45-95 (CDN). Reviewed by Jane Kelsey ANNE E. SARTORI. Deterrence by Diplomacy. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005. Pp. x, 164. $32.50 (US). Reviewed by Bradley A. Thayer

S T E P H A N I E S A R V E R Gustavus Adolphus College William Ellsworth Smythe’s Drama of Reclamation i In The Conquest of Arid America (1900, 1905), William Ellsworth Smythe writes the history of American expansion as a national drama, whose final act will culminate with the massive irrigation of the American West.1 Smythe defines American history in terms of tropes, suggesting that we associate different stages of expansion with emblems: the Mayflower, which brought home-builders to New England, is the emblem for the first stage of history; the pack-horse, which carried home-builders into the Kentucky wilderness and the Ohio Valley, is the emblem for the second stage; and finally, the prairie schooner, which brought home­ builders into the West is the emblem of the third stage.2 Smythe focuses on isolated moments as a means of establishing a plot that corresponds to the three stages. United States history is a cavalcade. He tells us, “The first act in the drama of American settlement ended in the eastern foothills of the Alleghany mountains about 1770; the second, in the neighborhood of the Mississippi river about 1860, the third, midway on the plains of Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Texas, about 1890.” He tells us, “The won­ derful drama of American colonization has reserved a fourth and crowning act, for which the scenery is arranged and the actors ready” (18). For Smythe, the history of the United States has been a drama. If the United States has faltered in fulfilling its destiny, he suggests, it is because the drama has been enacted on the wrong “stage”: the eastern United States. The Conquest represents the culmination of Smythe’s efforts to promote irrigation agriculture and the reclamation of desert lands, and documents the role he played in the transformation of popular notions about the feasibility of farming in arid America.3 This paper will consider 214 Western American Literature The Conquest of Arid America and explore the socio-environmental impli­ cations of Smythe’s rhetorical approach, which transforms the desert lands into a “stage” on which the drama of reclamation would be enacted. Smythe was born in Massachusetts in 1861 and followed a career in journalism that eventually led him to Nebraska. When the region experi­ enced a severe drought in 1890, he was in an ideal position to take up the banner for the irrigation crusade (The National Cyclopedia of American Biography). Realizing how Nebraska farmers could avoid future agricul­ tural disasters if they employed irrigation systems, Smythe prevailed upon his editor at the Omaha Bee to allow him to write a series of articles on irrigation—a move that was not without risk of public backlash. As Smythe explained in The Conquest, “it was then considered little less than a libel to say that irrigation was needed in that part of the country” (266). With these articles, Smythe began his career as a propagandist for the irrigation movement. In addition to promoting the irrigation cause in edi­ torials, he helped to form the National Irrigation Congress in 1891, and founded The Irrigation Age, which he edited until 1895. This journal chronicled efforts to garner government support for irrigation, offered advice about irrigation farming, and promoted irrigation colonies by fea­ turing glowing reports of their success. His work also found an audience in numerous popular eastern journals.4 Smythe called for government support of reclamation, which would make possible the formation of irrigation colonies that would transform the West into a perfect agrarian society. These colonies would be sustained by families practicing subsistence agriculture, and would include good schools, ordered streets, and a thriving but wholesome social life. Smythe argued that irrigation would support “common people” on small farms that would be a model of progress: “Irrigation will make its crops absolutely sure and enable its proprietor to cultivate it intensely and scientifically to the end that each acre shall produce the largest possible crop of the best possible quality” (“The Republic of Irrigation” 191). Moreover, Smythe believed, the subsistence-level farmer could remove himself from the larg­ er economic complex and thereby avoid risks of economic depressions.5 Smythe was...

In all countries, labour has war stories to tell, but none are so violent as those of American labour. Since the 1870s at least 700 workers have been killed and thousands seriously injured in labour disputes. Nowhere but in this country have employers so actively fought back against strikes through the use of scabs, surveillance, and mercenary armies.Although much of the violence occurred decades ago, author Patricia Sexton contends that this rich history sheds light on questions that still plague observers of the American political system: Why has the United States been more conservative in its domestic policies than other Western democracies? Why is it almost alone among them in lacking a mass labour or democratic socialist party,or the kind of social policies favoured by such parties? And why has American labour unionism been in serious decline in recent decades?The most familiar answers to these questions involve consensus explanations of what has come to be known as American exceptionalism. America is conservative, observers say, because its citizens have loved capitalism and supported its political policies wholeheartedly or because the nation's open frontier and early voting rights reduced dissent and class consciousness. Other explanations focus on various internal constraints said to be unique to the American working class or its organizations, such as conflict among diverse immigrants, the sectarianism and blunders of leftist groups, and the conservatism or incompetence of labour union leadership. All of these are said to have prevented labour from carrying out successful conflicts with employers and economic leaders.According to Sexton, these arguments ignore the remarkable record in American history of labour-left struggles: the violent suppression of industrial unionism prior to the 1930s, legal and forceful repression of trade unionism, and destruction by various means of left-leaning unions and political organizations. Her book explores instead a neglected explanation of American conservatism,that of a literal war on labour, waged by unusually powerful economic entities using repressive strategies, often backed by police and sometimes by federal forces.The details of this violent history, familiar to labour historians, are recounted here in a new perspective emphasizing the impact on workers of conflict sustained over many years. But the book is much more than a reinterpretation of this history. Patricia Sexton shows how the use of power and repression has played out as well in our institutions of law and government, in economic policies, and in the media. Making these links and showing how America's conservatism is unique among other Western democracies is the contribution of this ambitious book. For only by coming to terms with this history of repression and its legacy can we fully understand America's conservatism today.

Reviewed by: The Genesis of America: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Formation of National Identity, 1793–1815 by Jasper M. Trautsch Lawrence B. A. Hatter (bio) Keywords U.S. foreign policy, Nationalism, Great Britain, France, Diplomacy The Genesis of America: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Formation of National Identity, 1793–1815. By Jasper M. Trautsch. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. 328. Cloth, $49.99.) The United States remained a land of confusion at the end of the War of Independence. While the hastily built union of thirteen disparate states had managed to prosecute a protracted war against their former colonial master, the conflict had failed to create a strong sense of national identity among Americans. The United States did not have a hold on the heart of most Americans in 1783. Jasper Trautsch's new book argues that partisan debates about U.S. foreign policy played a key role in the emergence of national identity in the United States. The Genesis of America seeks to understand how Americans came to conceive of their national community being distinct from the other nations of the world. For Trautsch, U.S. nationalism was not the product of navel gazing among the Founders, but, instead, it was a "process of external demarcation" in which "the American nation needed external enemies to create a sense of national particularity" (9). The Genesis of America explores the emergence of American national identity by focusing on U.S. foreign relations with Great Britain and France. Trautsch justifies his selection by arguing that Britain and France were the two most powerful nations of the time and that they represented the "essential foils against which America's national identity could be forged" (17). The author's decision to exclude Spain from his analysis reflects Trautsch's conviction that most Americans viewed their western neighbors as a "decaying empire," despite the recurring western crises centered on navigation rights on the Mississippi River (17). In Trautsch's formulation, conflict lies at the heart of American national identity. Because American nationalism depended on emphasizing difference between the United States and the two leading European powers, U.S. policymakers pursued a "confrontational" foreign policy. Moreover, diplomacy became a key battleground for protean partisan [End Page 367] politics, as Americans fought about national identity. The Genesis of America charts the course of these political battles by looking at the interaction between policymakers and the partisan press. Building on the work of Jeffrey L. Pasley, Trautsch argues that the relationship between politicians and newspaper editors was not a one-way street, where the press served as a mouthpiece for the powerful.1 Rather, policymakers and the press both participated in a creative process by which national discourse on identity helped to shape diplomatic decisions taken in the national capital. The Genesis of America follows a conventional narrative of the political history of the early republic. The radicalization of the French Revolution in 1793 transformed the nascent partisanship of U.S. politics, with Federalists and Republicans aligning their competing visions of U.S. nationality with Great Britain and France, respectively. The proto-parties looked for ways to discredit their rival's vision of national identity and its association with one of the belligerent powers. The Republicans attempted to precipitate war with Great Britain during the Jay Treaty debates in 1795, while the Federalists succeeded in prosecuting a limited war with France in 1798–1799. The Quasi-War forced Republicans to drop their positive references to France. In their place, Jefferson and his followers articulated a uniquely American identity, grounded in democratic egalitarianism. The War of 1812 was a turning point in the formation of U.S. national identity. Trautsch argues that the conflict finally discredited Federalists' appeal to Britain as a foundation for American nationalism. The Genesis of America challenges Alan Taylor's depiction of the conflict as a thoroughly divisive civil war in which Americans and Britons fought on both sides.2 Trautsch does not deny that Federalists were opposed to the conflict at the beginning, but he argues that Federalists never countenanced serious opposition to the war, and, by 1814, they actually supported a defensive war. Trautsch's revisionism is most...

Reviewed by: Practicing Democracy: Popular Politics in the United States from the Constitution to the Civil War ed. by Daniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith Michelle Orihel (bio) Keywords Whig, Politics, Voting, Democracy, Political parties Practicing Democracy: Popular Politics in the United States from the Constitution to the Civil War. Edited by Daniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Pp. 304. Cloth, $49.50.) In Practicing Democracy, Douglas Bradburn observes: “American historians have overwhelmingly been Whig historians” (26). The phrase “Whig history” originated in Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History, published in 1931. Whig historians used the past, Butterfield argued, to explain and sanction the triumph of liberal democracy in nineteenth-century Britain. By orienting their studies toward that achievement, historians failed to understand the past on its own terms. In the United States, Whig history manifests itself in the democratization model of development. This model presents the nation as democratizing steadily over time, with democracy encompassing free elections, an expanding electorate, and a two-party system. Andrew Robertson contends that historians of nineteenth-century American politics have especially adopted a Whig perspective (99). Many historians search for the roots of democracy in the early republic, and trace its rise from Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Jackson or Abraham Lincoln. The ten essays in this compelling new volume edited by Daniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith challenge that Whig trajectory. While Whig histories chart a linear path to democracy, the essays in Practicing Democracy present case studies of uneven development, improvisation, and instability. John L. Brooke conceptualizes historical time as “lumpy and punctuated” rather than “smooth and continuous” [End Page 155] (75). Similarly, Robertson depicts a “tortuous trajectory” of development, one in which “democratic ideology and practices ebbed and flowed” (99). Political participation also varied by ethnicity, sex, race, and class. Irish and German immigrants in New York City, Tyler Anbinder finds, remained largely disengaged from controversies like the Kansas–Nebraska Act that polarized Americans in the 1850s. Instead, immigrants focused on local issues such as schooling that affected them directly. Reeve Huston further stresses “the geographic and temporal unevenness” of democratic practices (55). Illustrating these variations, Daniel Peart demonstrates that during the Era of Good Feelings voter turnout was much higher in Illinois, a frontier state that lacked organized parties, than in Massachusetts, a state where partisanship persisted. This conclusion challenges the standard interpretation of that era as one of political apathy in which partisanship subsided. The era, Peart claims, should be called “the Era of Experimentation,” a label that applies to early republic politics in general (138). Graham A. Peck also highlights this political improvisation. A rapid turnover in officeholding in Illinois, he argues, gave voters numerous opportunities to elect new representatives. In constant dialogue with voters, politicians changed positions on issues to “reflect voters’ interests and judgments” (145). He concludes that the historical category “Second Party System” fails to convey that dynamism. Yet, many historians remain attached to the “Party System” concept, arguing that competitive political parties fueled democratization. Americans inherited this obsession with a two-party system, Bradburn argues, from early modern England: “The men who built the first party politics in the United States were ideological Whigs whose histories of England were filled with sharp dialectical fights between advocates for prerogative power and martyrs for liberty,” from the Parliamentarians and Royalists of the Civil War to the Whigs and Tories thereafter (40). This legacy, Bradburn maintains, shapes “the way too many American historians still write the history of their country” (41). Whig historians begin their inquiries with the two-party system, and then look backward to explain its origins and development. In his study of the movement to consolidate the city and suburbs of Philadelphia in 1851, Andrew Heath stresses that looking backward can be deceptive. Previous historians have seen consolidation as foreshadowing the urban machine politics of the late nineteenth century, but Heath argues that if one “look[s] forward from [End Page 156] . . . 1851, . . . the rise of boss rule does not seem preordained” (224). Instead, the consolidation movement reflected the reform and anti-party sentiments of elite Philadelphians in the 1850s, a group more...

ABOUT FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, the Anglo-American scholar Paul Kennedy published a book on the fate of empires, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.(1) Kennedy's special field was the British Empire and, not surprisingly, the British imperial experience, rising and falling, occupied a central position in his analysis. Non-professional readers might have been surprised at how long the rise had taken, and how rapid and how recent the fall had been.There were many readers, and the book was a surprise best-seller in the early 1990s, not so much because it dealt with the British Empire, but because it speculated about the American. It was a moment of self-doubt in the history of the United States. With the Cold War just past, could the victorious United States be teetering on the verge of decline? Had the American moment passed, and would the United States cede economic primacy to east Asia, and in particular, to Japan? Some Japanese certainly hoped so; and some Americans feared that it might be true.Kennedy's history therefore hit a nerve. A century before, Great Britain had been at its apogee, its empire girdling the globe, its mighty fleet steaming where it would, its red-coated armies parading from Halifax to Hyderabad, and all of it supported by a rich, if not inexhaustible, treasury. All this was put on display in and around London for the crowned heads of Europe in parades and regattas for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, her sixtieth anniversary on the throne.Among the hordes of invitees were the senior politicians from the empire, including the recently appointed prime minister of Canada, Wilfrid Laurier. Laurier returned from London with an honorary souvenir bauble, Sir Wilfrid, dangling from his name. It was, he reflected, all very seductive and very tempting. The knighthood was politically useful. It showed colonial Canadians that Sir Wilfrid Laurier had attained a certain standing outside Canada, appropriate for English-Canadians, and flattering to French-Canadians. Laurier was all too aware that Canada was an amalgam of two different linguistic elements, and that the two did not fit together very well. He was, moreover, the first prime minister from the French-language minority, and correspondingly distrusted by many English-Canadians, for whom Wolfe at the Plains of Abraham--or Crecy or Agincourt or Waterloo--was as yesterday. The traditional enemy on these occasions was of course the French--and what else was Laurier? So Laurier had to pay ostentatious attention to the totems of empire, like Queen Victoria, and bow before them as many times as he could manage.Imperial visions, conjured up by the British colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, floated past Sir Wilfrid in London. Chamberlain made no secret of his view that the empire was worth preserving, and Laurier would have agreed with that. But when Chamberlain suggested that a contribution from the colonies--especially big, rich colonies like Canada--would be welcome, Laurier demurred. It was not the time. Canada had its own business and its own agenda. Laurier had a country, half-settled, to develop. There was no money to spare to invest in fleets and armies, especially fleets and armies outside Canada's control but under Chamberlain's instead. There was the army Chamberlain was assembling in South Africa, he might have observed. The British government was doing that on its own, and out of its own resources. What need did it have for what little Canada could offer? What would Chamberlain do with that?There is no evidence that Laurier did ask, or that he would have known what to do with the answer. Indeed it is not clear that Chamberlain had an answer, but he and his sympathizers, in Britain and in the British colonies in South Africa, intended to overawe the gold-rich, Dutch-speaking republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The inhabitants actually spoke a variety of Dutch--Afrikaans--and collectively they were known as Boers, or farmers, which most of them were. …