Showing papers in "Reviews in American History in 1984"

The tragedy of american diplomacy: twenty-five years after

Abstract: The influence of William Appleman Williams's The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, published a quarter century ago, is beyond challenge. An iconoclastic attack upon conventional wisdom, it is equally important because it framed arguments about its subject. In both ways it is very much like the study of the Constitution by Charles A. Beard, a scholar whom Williams reveres. And when historians finally escaped the conceptual fetters imposed by Beard and Williams they found that they could not - indeed, did not want to - ignore much that these figures suggested. In 1959, Tragedy made a rather modest splash. The New York Times did review it, and the Christian Science Monitor denounced it as a Stalinist tract. But the American Historical Review, which then used smaller type and fewer words for reviews of minor publications, placed Williams's book in that category. Most reviewers praised the author's originality, then savaged his emphasis on economic factors. A political scientist, who suggested that the book was a mistake unlikely to be committed in his profession, believed it would be ignored: "The approach taken by Williams is no longer in the mainstream of international relations study."1 But within only a few years Tragedy was definitely in the mainstream. Reviewers concentrated on Williams's most persistent theme, that almost

The Creation of the Constitution: Scholarship at a Standstill

Abstract: The historiography of the creation of the Constitution furnishes a vivid example of how contemporary events can influence the writing of history. At intervals from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, partisans of such political reform movements as abolitionism and progressivism, frustrated in their objectives by the Constitution or by the Supreme Court's interpretation of it, investigated the document's origins and produced accounts which influenced at times, dominated the historical literature for extended periods. After World War II professional scholars asserted control over the explication of the creation of the Constitution, but they produced such a Babel of voices and interpretations and created so much confusion about the writing of the document that our current understanding of its creation often seems to be as imperfect as it was during the early days of the republic. In the first decades after ratification, the creation of the Constitution was an enigma to investigators, largely because they had little source material, the members of the Constitutional Convention having scrupulously, even obsessively, observed that body's secrecy rule long after it adjourned. Consequently, historians confronting the Constitution were obliged to skip over it in a paragraph or a sentence. The most important among these early historians were John Marshall and David Ramsay, who had been members of state ratifying conventions, and Mercy Otis Warren, the sole Antifederalist in the group.1 Others whose work at least touched the Constitution ranged from the scholarly Jeremy Belknap to scribblers who have been long and justifiably forgotten: John M'Culloch, John Lendrum, Hannah Adams, Abiel Holmes, Salma Hale, and Charles A. Goodrich.2 As if to compensate their readers for slighting the Constitution, these writers devoted disproportionate amounts of space to the years preceding it. They were the original exponents of the "critical period" thesis, for they regarded conditions under the Confederation as a national disaster. The government was a "jest," "enfeebled," an example of "imbecility," of "total inefficiency."3 Having experienced the impact of Shays' Rebellion, the earliest historians stressed its significance as a symbol of the national sickness and portrayed it as a far more potent catalyst of the Constitution than did subsequent writers.

A Public Interest Lawyer in the 1930s@@@Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights.

Abstract: \"A classic...[It] will make an extraordinary contribution to the improvement of race relations and the understanding of race and the American legal process.\"-Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., from the Foreword Charles Hamilton Houston (1895-1950) left an indelible mark on American law and society. A brilliant lawyer and educator, he laid much of the legal foundation for the landmark civil rights decisions of the 1950s and 1960s. Many of the lawyers who won the greatest advances for civil rights in the courts, Justice Thurgood Marshall among them, were trained by Houston in his capacity as dean of the Howard University Law School. Politically Houston realized that blacks needed to develop their racial identity and also to recognize the class dimension inherent in their struggle for full civil rights as Americans. Genna Rae McNeil is thorough and passionate in her treatment of Houston, evoking a rich family tradition as well as the courage, genius, and tenacity of a man largely responsible for the acts of \"simple justice\" that changed the course of American life.

The new narrative history: how new? how narrative?

Abstract: Once again, there are wars and rumors of wars in the realm of historians and not just along the outer marches. Members of the profession are openly debating the health of their discipline, and concluding that it has lost far too much of its vibrancy and direction. To be sure, the outward signs continue vigorous. Quarterlies roll off the press with merciless regularity, while monographs proliferate like coathangers in bedroom closets. Even the tardiest book reviews appear in enough time for the volumes they praise to be acquired cheaply in remainder. Yet the uneasiness persists. The "impressive advances of a decade ago seem somehow to have faded into a cloud of detail that verges on the antiquarian," concludes one New England colonialist. "Historians do not value popular history and fail to reward it," laments a nineteenth-century specialist. Researchers are tending to "apply more powerful tools to smaller and smaller subjects," warns a twentieth-century historian. Perhaps the most touching acknowledgment of the crisis has come from a social scientist who recently called for livelier historical writing by noting, without the slightest apparent satirical intent, that "one of the pressing tasks of social historians is to bring their dissemination capacity into closer alignment with their research success." 1 Surely this is a sentiment which we may all approbate in the extreme. In any case, the remedy most often proposed in the current crisis is a return to narrative history. In 1979 Lawrence Stone noted the resurgence of such history: "descriptive rather than analytical and [whose] central focus is on man, not circumstances. It therefore deals with the particular and specific rather than the collective and statistical.... It is narrative directed by some pregnant principle,' and which possesses a theme and an argument." In 1981 Bernard Bailyn made eloquent use of the American Historical Association's annual bully pulpit to call for histories written with broader vision and greater coherence. Monographic research, he concluded, "will ultimately prove to be only as important as the historians can make it who will one day use the results . . . to write, not research reports, but history - that is, narrative accounts of large segments of the general story that help explain how

Self-Emancipation in Kentucky@@@Black Liberation in Kentucky: Emancipation and Freedom, 1862-1884.@@@Free Frank: A Black Pioneer on the Antebellum Frontier.

Abstract: We first learn details of Frank's life when in 1795 his owner moved to Pulaski County, Kentucky. We know that he married Lucy, a slave on a neighboring farm, in 1799. Later he was allowed to hire out his time, and when his owner moved to Tennessee, Frank was left in charge of the Kentucky farm. During the War of 1812, he set up his own saltpeter works, an enterprise he maintained until he left Kentucky. In 1817 he purchased his wife's freedom for $800; two years later he bought his own liberty for the same price. Now free, he expanded his activities, purchasing land and dealing in livestock.