The University of Vermont History Review, Volume XXVII 2016-2017
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The University of Vermont History Review Volume XXVII 2016-2017 0 The UVM History Review is an annual publication of the University of Vermont History Department. It seeks to publish scholarly essays and book reviews of a historical nature written by UVM students and alumni. EDITORIAL BOARD Graduate Co-Editor Daniella Bassi Undergraduate Co-Editor Brendan Hersey Faculty Advisor (spring, 2017) Paul Deslandes Faculty Advisor (fall, 2016) Denise Youngblood Kiara Day Stuart Hackley Zachary Heier Marissa McFadden Samantha Sullivan John Suozzo For ordering information, please contact Kathy Carolin at The University of Vermont History Department 201Wheeler House 133 South Prospect Street Burlington, Vermont 05405 Cover: Medical College Photos Class/Faculty Box, Medical Class Photos 1866-1936 Folder, Special Collections, Bailey/Howe Library. i Contents: Letter from the Editor ......................................................................................................... 1 Rough Specimens of a Prejudiced Period: British Songbooks in the Age of Revolution ... 2 Robin Fitch-McCullough ............................................................................................ 2 Aesthetics and Ideology in the Third Reich ...................................................................... 20 Will Fitz .................................................................................................................... 20 Jabotinsky and Revisionist Zionism .................................................................................. 37 Natalia Korpanty ....................................................................................................... 37 Victory through Air Power: How Walt Disney and Alexander P. de Seversky Argued for the Utilization of the Air Force during World War II ....................................................... 50 Jack Roberts .............................................................................................................. 50 Sexual Violence and Abuse of Antebellum Slave Women ................................................. 60 Laura Sercel .............................................................................................................. 60 2017 Phi Alpha Theta Inductees, UVM Chapter, Alpha Alpha Psi .................................. 77 History Department Faculty News.................................................................................... 78 Author Biographies ........................................................................................................... 81 Editor Biographies ............................................................................................................ 82 ii Letter from the Editor Dear Readers, It gives me great pleasure to release the 2016-2017 issue of the UVM History Review, which collects the very best historical work composed by the UVM undergraduate and graduate student body. In this issue, you’ll find a rich set of papers ranging in subject from British songbooks in the Age of Revolution to Jabotinsky’s revisionist Zionism. This collection is especially notable for the variety of primary sources that the authors drew on to construct their arguments; you will find analyses of films, visual art, songbooks, slave narratives, and more common documentary records within in it. This aspect of the scholarship should serve as a reminder of the influence that ideas and events can have on every aspect of a society, and of the importance of studying history. Both the authors and the editorial board worked very hard on this volume: the authors revised their work extensively, and everyone put many hours into this project, even after the academic year had officially ended. I heartily thank them for straining their eyes as they combed the text for errors, and I commend them on a job well done. As busy students, it can be taxing to participate in a publication, even an annual one, when there is so much else to be done and so little time to live life. But every cohort is responsible for keeping the flame of these campus publications burning through the cold night of student temporality. We are proud to pass a crackling torch on to next year’s Catamount readers and editors. I would like to thank Professors Denise Youngblood and Paul Deslandes for overseeing the production of the Journal. Your advice in the tricky spots was invaluable and essential for maintaining our standard of quality in the publication. I would also like to thank Kathy Carolin and Kathy Truax for answering all my questions as I made the final preparations and for being ready to help with anything at a moment’s notice. You are the History Department’s knights in shining armor. Daniella Bassi, 27 May 2017 1 Rough Specimens of a Prejudiced Period: British Songbooks in the Age of Revolution Robin Fitch-McCullough In 1882, Joseph Woodfall Ebsworth, the Anglican Vicar of Molash, in Kent, wrote to the editors of the Kentish Garland on a recent addition to his personal collection of English folk songs. By the closing decades of the 19th century, the English folk-song revival of the late Victorian era was thriving. Mr. Ebsworth, a member of the Ballad Society then engaged in pouring through the records of the British Museum, had joined the editors of the Kentish Garland and a host of clergymen, publishers, historians, musicians and archivists who were researching and reprinting English ballads and songbooks, especially from the 17th century twilight of pre-industrial Britain.1 The Victorian idealization of a lost, idyllic epoch of ‘Merrie England,’ one that could be captured in song, was a development stemming from the Georgian and early Victorian fascination with the “chivalric ‘olden times’”2 of the Tudor and Elizabethan eras. Rather than a melody of that period, Ebsworth had recovered a much different collection of songs and in 1882, it was a collection still less than a century old. Yet it was a compilation of songs already seen as an anachronism, even for Ebsworth, a conservative Briton with the reputation of having been a “sturdy tory and tireless collector of ballads”3 in a time of jingoist popular politics and nearly perpetual colonial conflict overseas. “Rough in its way it is, but a capital specimen of the prejudiced and almost brutal John Bull of the period,” was how Ebsworth described the songs found in Gower’s Patriotic Songster,4 a marked contrast to the bucolic prose prized by Victorian song collectors. Published in 1793 by George Gower, a middling printer and carpet manufacturer of Kidderminster in the County of Worcester,5 it had the lengthy and bombastic subtitle of “The Loyalist’s Companion: being a Selection of the Most Approved Constitutional and Loyal songs That Have Appeared from the Various Associations in this Kingdom for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers,” with the addition of a soliloquy for Louis XVI.6 It was a title that reflected the songs within; songs urging loyalty to the British monarchy, an adherence to 1 E. David Gregory, The Late Victorian Folk-Song Revival: The Persistence of English Melody, 1878-1903 (Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press, 2010), 15. 2 Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England, 1783 to 1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 26. 3 “Memoirs of Joseph Knight with Notes by the Reverend Joseph Ebsworth,” The Athenaeum: A Journal of Literature, Science, The Fine Arts, Music and Drama, November 20, 1909, 138. 4 Julia DeVaynes and Joseph Ebsworth, eds., The Kentish Garland Volume II: On Persons and Places (Hertford: Stephen Austin and Sons, 1882), 675. 5 Last Will and Testament of George Gower of Kidderminster, the Public Record Office, the National Archives, London. 6 George Gower, Gower’s Patriotic Songster (G. Gower, Kidderminster, 1793), 1. 2 conservative British political values and to a British cultural identity in opposition to the republicanism of revolutionary France. When it was first procured in 1793 by reviewers and booksellers after publication, the English Review echoed Ebsworth’s sentiments of 90 years later by writing only that, “He who expects to find poetry in this collection will be disappointed. The effusions of loyalty, however, may perhaps atone for the disappointment.”7 This critical review was in part due to the republican sympathies of the English Review’s contributors and editors,8 and to the fact that in January 1793 Great Britain was not yet involved in the growing military conflict against the nascent French Republic. Yet the popularity and influence of this book, and the other patriotic songbooks or songsters that came afterwards in great numbers, was underestimated. By the time the news reached Britain that Napoleon had been driven from the field at Waterloo more than twenty years later, patriotic and nationalist songs and songbooks had become a fundamental and defining part of popular British culture. The Age of Revolution in the Historiography of British Culture The influence of the French Revolution and the ensuing decades of war against Republican and Napoleonic France on British national consciousness and culture is well studied. E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, a foundational piece in the historiography of British national and class identity, marks the “Age of Revolution,”9 as the “adolescence” of British working class identity in opposition to “their rulers and employers.”10 While this is certainly true, the flowering of new political and cultural identities was not confined to the development of English