HERODOTUS Volume XXVIII • Spring 2018

Stanford University Department of History Stanford University Department of History HERODOTUS Volume XXVIII • Spring 2018 Department of History Stanford University Stanford University Department of History HERODOTUS Herodotus is a student-run publication founded in 1990 by the Stanford University Department of History. It bears the name of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, the 5th century BCE historian of the Greco-Persian Wars. His Histories, which preserve the memory of the battles of Marathon and Thermopylae, were written so that “human achievements may not become forgotten in time, and great and marvelous deeds . may not be without their glory.” Likewise, this journal is dedicated to preserving and show- casing the best undergraduate work of Stanford University’s Department of History. Our published pieces are selected through a process of peer review. For additional information, please visit us online at herodotus. stanford.edu. EDITORIAL BOARD Editor-in-Chief Naomi Subotnick '18 Managing Editor Zachary Brown '18 Section Editors Gabriela Romero '19 InHae Yap '19 Editors Seth Chambers '19 Jason Seter '18 Benjamin Gardner-Gill '19 Emily Shah '19 Lucia Lopez-Rosas '18 Julian Watrous '19 Rosalind Lutsky '18 Victoria Yuan '20 Jennifer Peterson '18 Faculty Advisor Professor Thomas Mullaney Authors retain all rights to the work that appears in this journal. Cover Image: Stanford Historical Photograph Collection, Green Library West, 1919 Courtesy of Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, CA. Stanford University Department of History EDITOR’S NOTE According to Professor James T. Campbell, studying history is like traveling to a new place. One encounters people and ideas at once utterly foreign and strangely familiar. A journey enables us to see home with new perspective and depth. In Campbell’s analogy, “home” is our own time, and our “travels” enrich our ethical, aes- thetic, and intellectual appreciation of it. The essays in this journal can be seen as a set of such journeys. They demonstrate deep engagement with the past. Selected for their clarity of analysis and depth of research, these papers explore topics from eighteenth-century French political debates to the cultural production of twentieth century New Orleans. They consider a wide variety of source material–– paintings, correspondence, news articles, statistics, and literature. The papers presented here reflect the unique intellect of each of their authors, who have tack- led complicated historical subjects with curiosity and insight. Their work reminds us that history comes alive when we engage with it–– for its true importance is not so much in recording the past but in changing our relationship to it – and perhaps seeing “home” with fresh eyes. HERODOTUS Stanford University Department of History TABLE OF CONTENTS Nicholas Burns, Domesticating Democracy: The Reformist Rationale Behind George Grote's Redemption of Athens Introduction by Jessica Riskin, Professor of History 1 Lauren Wegner, A Female Gaze? Considering the Concealed Objectification in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's "The Turkish Embassy Letters" Introduction by Nancy Kollmann, William H. Bonsall Profes- sor of History 18 Azucena Marquez, Ambivalent Empowerment and a Shift in Bias: Women's Legal Education and Employment in the United States, 1960s-2000s Introduction by Estelle Freedman, Edgar E. Robinson Profes- sor in U.S. History 33 Emily Wilder, Black-Jewish Jazz and its Vilifica- tion in the Early Twentieth Century Introduction by Justine Modica 60 Heath Rojas, A Model of Revolutionary Regicide: The Role of Seventeenth-Century English History in the Trial of King Louis XVI Introduction by Keith M. Baker, Professor of Early Modern European History, and Ian P. Beacock 72 Ramah Awad, Caught Between Two Worlds: The Feminist Arab-American Network, 1981-1985 Introduction by Estelle Freedman, Edgar E. Robinson Profes- sor in U.S. History 94 Stanford University Department of History Nicholas Burns 1 DOMESTICATING DEMOCRACY: THE REFORMIST RATIONALE BEHIND GEORGE GROTE’S REDEMPTION OF ATHENS Introduction by Professor Jessica Riskin In “Domesticating Democracy,” Nick Burns reveals the origins of the widespread modern view of Athens as a humane and enlight- ened polity in contrast with the inhumane and oppressive Spar- ta. Burns traces Athens’ rosy reputation to reform-era Britain, and in particular to the work of George Grote. Previously, Athens and Sparta had held very different reputations. For example, many Enlightenment political thinkers, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, had preferred Sparta for being the more egalitarian society. Burns argues that Grote elevated Athens to serve as an argument for the safety of expanding the franchise, by exemplifying a democracy whose stability resided in a fundamentally conservative voting populace. Burns’ argument elegantly interweaves revisionist read- ings of Grote’s work along two intersecting axes: the politics of reform and the historiography of ancient democracy. Domesticating Democracy 2 Domesticating Democracy: The Reformist Rationale Behind George Grote’s Redemption of Athens Nicholas Burns In 1846, former banker and member of Parliament George Grote published the first British work of Greek history to unreserv- edly praise ancient Athenian government and society. The scion of a Kentish banking family, Grote received the best education money could buy, until his father denied him the chance to go to university so that he might work in the family bank. Undeterred, he kept up a rigorous personal program of reading classical texts, and soon fell in with the sect of British thinkers known as the “philosophical radicals,” befriending famous members of that circle, including James Mill and David Ricardo. After unsuccessfully leading the small radical faction in the British Parliament from 1832 to 1840, he stepped down in order to write his twelve-volume History of Greece. Published starting in 1846, Grote’s History became an instant success across the British political spectrum, as well as on the European continent. The response to Grote’s work is striking, for while appreciation of Athens’ cultural prowess was widespread among thinkers at the time, so was the association of its government with riot and revolution.1 How did Grote manage to portray Athens, widely regarded as a cautionary tale of faction and vio- lence, as a Victorian city on a hill? What motivated him to contra- dict the consensus on Athenian disrepute? Most studies on Grote acknowledge the political character of his historical work, but do not seek to connect the content of his political platform to the details of his historical narrative.2 The few scholars who do analyze Grote from a political angle tend to write positively about his support for reform, with a special focus on 1 See Roberts, Athens on Trial, “The Turning of the Tide”: 214–237. 2 Momigliano, “Grote and the Study of Greek History”; Cartledge, “Introduction,” in Grote, History of Greece, ed. Mitchell and Caspari; Kinzer, “Philosophic Radical and Politician,” in Brill’s Companion to George Grote. Nicholas Burns 3 the more radical aspects of his thought. To Frank Turner, Grote’s obsession with the general interest reflected a strong Rousseauian influence.3 To Nadia Urbinati, on the other hand, Grote sought a middle ground between French republicanism and the English re- action against it.4 Both of these studies emphasize Grote’s attention to Athenian social and political institutions, in particular his analysis of the Athenian court system and the reforms of Cleisthenes in the late sixth century BCE. However, little attention has been paid to Grote’s focus on the cultural foundations of democracy in Ath- ens.5 A closer examination of Grote’s cultural theory of Athenian history makes clear the more hidebound aspects of his political project. That which the early Victorians left unsaid in their theories was often admitted in their histories, and it is in Grote’s work on Greece that we can locate the sense of order and cultural docility that undergirded his principled demands for reform. For Grote, as for both his contemporaries and anteced- ents, debates over the extension of the franchise overlapped with arguments about the virtues and vices of Athenian governance. In a political context where the long shadow of the French Revo- lution loomed over British politics, the aristocratic establishment in Parliament feared any governmental reform as the first step towards anarchy, mass mobilization, and redistribution of property. Consequently, George Grote sought to employ the Athenians as proxies for his argument that reform of the British government would prove harmless to the stability of the nation. Grote based his argument on the existence of a culturally conditioned and deep- set “conservative feeling” among certain peoples, a theory I term popular conservatism, which he articulated through a revision of Athenian history. For Grote, the source of Athens’ artistic and material grandeur lay in the character of its people. He ascribed middle-class, liberal values to ancient Athenians: these included a respect for property and a tendency to defer to virtuous, pub- lic-minded leaders. By drawing consistent analogies between 3 Turner, Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain: 221. 4 Urbinati, Mill on Democracy: 14. 5 See Turner, Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain: 222–7; Roberts, Ath- ens on Trial: 224–227. Domesticating Democracy 4 Athenian and Victorian society, Grote sought to apply this theory to British politics: the British people, possessing the same middle-class ethos, respect for property, and deference to aristocratic leaders, ought to be enfranchised so as to bring the interest of government closer to the interest of society at large. Due to the “conservative feeling” of the British people, no ill could come of such reforms, and the British populace would propel Victorian civiliza- tion to new heights of worldly renown.6 I aim to trace the development of Grote’s classically grounded notion of popular conservatism in a roughly chronolog- ical sequence, beginning with an account of his predecessors in the field of classical history in Britain.

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