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As Nichols acknowledges, the former general was prone to disassociating himself publicly from contentious policy debates and studiously avoided mentioning civil rights in his speeches. The fact is that while Eisenhower fretted over reassuring white southerners anxious about the pace and direction of change, the actual burden of reform fell on individuals like Emmett Till, who suffered the deadly wrath of racists fearful of miscegenation, and movement activists, who faced violent reprisals for their work. His aloofness and dissemblance, coupled with his orientation toward gradualism, effectively invited and condoned the defi- ance. Nonetheless, A Matter of Justice contributes to U. Moreover, in recovering a presidency whose role in the fight for civil rights has been sorely undervalued, Nichols makes a convincing case for rethinking the relationship of postwar black freedom struggles to the Eisen- hower White House. By Mark Puls. Though scholars may desire greater depth and sharper analysis, this is a welcome general study that will serve as the standard Knox biography for some time to come. The connection with Washington was crucial to the life and career of Knox and is a central focus of this book. Puls presents an excellent portrait of the deep, warm, and intimate personal relationship between the two men. He is less convincing, however, on the professional relationship and may have succumbed to the common temptation of the biographer to exaggerate the achievements of his subject. Certainly, Washington and Knox shared similar views and attitudes concerning the major military and political issues of the period. This is unfortunate, as Knox was at the center of the development of American military policy and of critical events, most notably the conflict with the Indians and British in the Ohio Valley, that were crucial to the success of the Washington administration. Still, though there remains more to be told, Henry Knox is well served by Puls. Though he misses the opportunity to provide the definitive account of an over- looked figure, Puls provides a welcome addition to the literature of the revolu- tionary period, one that will have considerable appeal to the general audience. By Ethan Rarick. This study of the Donner party is a comprehensive description and narrative of the experiences of the group of emigrants traveling to California led by George Donner in — The Donner party emigrants set out from Springfield, Illinois, in April and traveled to Independence, Missouri, where they joined a wagon train heading west on May 19, a late date to begin an overland journey to California. Taking the Oregon Trail, the emigrants decided to follow a shortcut to their destination, the Hastings cut-off, a much-touted but untried route from Fort Bridger, Wyoming, to the California Trail. An Ohio promoter, Lansford Hastings, advocated the route in a guidebook widely distributed in the Midwest. After the party of eighty-seven rejoined that trail at Elko, Nevada, in September , a portion of the group determined to push on across the Sierra Nevada, where blizzards marooned it. The people trapped in the mountains became separated from each other, and when food supplies ran out, in desperation they resorted to cannibalism when people in the group died. Forty-five of the original party survived; fifteen were eaten. About half the surviving forty-eight ate human flesh. The ordeal ended in late April when rescue parties brought the last of the emaciated survivors to their destination. Rarick uses new evidence to develop the story of the tragedy. The Donner experience, however representative it was as a rush for safety, was anomalous. The author also speculates about the migrants, the promoters of the route, the rescuers, and journalists who moralized about Donner party cannibalism. The book has photographs and an index. A difficulty with the book is its maps, which are skimpy and lack adequate geographic detail. Anyone who has followed the Oregon and California Trails, or crossed the Salt Lake desert or the Sierras, will find this disturbing story compelling. Mary Baldwin College Kenneth W. Edited by Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. This is a good book with a misleading title. The editors themselves stress the paradox that, for all their growing electoral success, conservative politicians failed to accomplish most of their key objectives. The federal government and its deficit grew larger, not smaller, during the s. Popular culture grew more, not less, raunchy. Abortion remained legal. Still, something happened in the s to dash the hopes of the liberals. The debates over family values, gender roles, affirmative action, and foreign policy will be familiar to most readers, as will the growth of evangelical denominations and the rise of a conservative institutional network. The value of these chapters lies in their clarity, balance, and breadth, making them ideally suited for undergraduates. Specialists, however, will be drawn to the chapters on the less-studied aspects of the decade. Though Crespino tackles race head-on, other contributors pay it only glancing attention—ditto criminal justice. Yet many writers have argued that rising crime, particularly black crime, was central to the decline of liberalism and the rise of the prison state. The reaction was bipartisan: by even Ted Kennedy was calling for stricter sentencing procedures. The Supreme Court decision that death- penalty laws could be constitutional—a ruling that populist state legislators quickly exploited—also belongs in any conservative highlight reel. What is missing, in short, is a chapter on crime and punishment. What remains is a polished collection of original work from rising and established scholars, deftly tied together by Bruce J. Rightward Bound is an outstanding addition to the literature on the politics and culture of the s and an absorbing read in the bargain. University of North Florida David T. By Len Scott. London, England: Continuum, There has been no shortage of scholarly interest in the Cuban missile crisis, often described as the moment when the world came closest to nuclear destruction. Besides, he avers, if policymakers on both sides employed such a tool when framing their own positions during the crisis, does it not make sense to do the same when seeking to understand those positions? First, he notes that John F. In other words, neither really wanted the crisis to spiral out of control. Second, he notes that there were times when lower-level actions threatened upper- level efforts at restraint and accommodation. This is a sobering thought indeed, and an indication that the most important things to happen in a crisis might not be the decisions taken at the highest levels. Without a doubt Scott has produced a volume worth careful study and consideration. The just over one hundred sixty pages of text in this volume are heavily documented with valuable references to the extant literature—a literature Scott obviously knows well—and the counterfactual methodology used throughout provides a useful model that others might employ with much success. By Peter Silver. Almost any serious history is a study of irony. This sophisticated account of the cultural and political effects of Indian wars on the Pennsylvania frontier from the s into the s is no exception. The study is thoroughly grounded in primary sources providing an impressive array of examples and illustrations to support the argument. The book, in short, is a pleasure to read. However, the subtitle is somewhat misleading. Little is said of the effects of border warfare in New England or the South. Irony abounds. The description and analysis of this rhetoric as a cultural form is a most impressive feature of the work. It was used against the French, Quakers, and the British during the Revolution. Nor was it purely literary. Real warfare created real corpses, allowing actual and pictorial display to enormous effect. By Yanna Yannakakis. Durham, N. Covering the period —, Yanna Yannakakis provides a thoughtful and well-researched analysis of the roles of indios ladinos bicultural Hispanized Indians who served as cultural brokers between local indigenous communities and the Spanish state and church. Located at the intersection of state power, Indian identity, and local community rule, these intermediaries, most of them caciques or other nobles, variously employed accommodation, resistance, and negotiation as they inter- preted both the colonized and the colonizers to each other. The author skillfully shows how these intermediaries both defended and exploited local community autonomy while simultaneously defusing colonial tensions, sometimes at great personal risk. Tacking back and forth between the actions of individual intermediaries and issues common to the entire district of one hundred communities, the author begins by exploring the period following the rebellion in neighboring Tehuantepec. The well-known Cajonos Rebellion of and its political consequences are treated in detail. In a final chapter, the author examines the late colonial fate of an entire community of intermediaries. This volume makes two important contributions. Its emphasis on the singular aspects of the Sierra Norte and its contextualization within wider colonial Oaxaca make it a valuable regional history. The roles of colonial native intermediaries are well known, but rarely have their activities been laid bare in such rich detail. The author accom- plishes this through the careful study of a number of lawsuits, paying close attention to the language used by all parties. The volume is particularly effective in tracing the consequences of the Bourbon Reforms, which led to increased state control over Sierra communities. Arizona State University John K. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent. By Ernest Freeberg. This book is an in-depth exploration of the case Debs v. This is a fine work of history written about a remarkable man: Eugene V. Debs, the long-time presidential candidate of the Socialist Party USA at the turn of the twentieth century. There have been biographies written before now about Debs, of course, but Ernest Freeberg goes into fascinating detail about the character of Debs, who stood up and opposed U. Freeberg brilliantly explores the political repression of that time under such laws as the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act, which resulted in about two thousand Americans being arrested for their political opinions. If Freeberg had only done this all along it would have been a fine book, but he does more. It had legiti- mized those freedoms, so by the time that Debs was released from prison after serving three years, the American people began thinking that First Amendment rights meant the right to oppose the government even in time of war. That was a major advance in freedom. Rowan University Donald F. By Thomas W. Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, Thomas W. What readers see is a nuanced struggle to pursue international peace and regional power, equal status and special consideration, global mechanisms and national agendas. Individual personalities and attitudes are effectively interwoven with the inner workings of the League and its subcom- mittees and the concerns of the Japanese government and public. The path to military aggression in the s was but one of many. The Japanese opted to embrace internationalism, but as Burkman also shows, they never gave up on their regionalism and did not see the two as necessarily mutually exclusive. There are other works available on some of the personalities Burkman highlights, but his details on their involvement with the League, their interactions with each other, and their defense of Japan are enlightening. He does assume some knowledge of early- twentieth-century Japanese history and occasionally uses Japanese terms without translating them or mentions events without explaining them. A glossary of terms, a Peace Conference timeline meetings, issues discussed, drafts , and the League Covenant would make useful appendices. This book would be most useful in a graduate-level or upper-level undergraduate course on diplomatic history, but anyone with an interest in early- twentieth-century Japanese or world history would gain new insight. By Calvin Chen. Township and village enterprises TVEs have been an important part of the story of rapid economic growth in China over the past three decades. The two names, Calvin Chen hints, are not the real names of the firms [1]. This change posed a challenge to the solidarity of the enterprises, though management eventually learned ways to recover some of the warmth and cohesion that was lost as the enterprises had expanded. The places that Chen examines are not particularly representative of China as a whole. Wenzhou particularly has long been known to have been an outlier because of the early rise and predominance of privately owned enterprises. It has a strong local tradition, going back to the s, of bucking policies of the central party and state apparatuses. Well into the mids, a much higher proportion of enterprises there were privately owned and managed than in most other localities. Moreover, the two enterprises that Chen analyzes are much larger than typical TVEs. From another standpoint, however, the two businesses may be seen as more broadly representative in that by the end of the s a large percentage of TVEs in China that used to be collectively or publicly owned were privatized, as the two enterprises in question had been for some time. Library collections that seek to provide coverage of contemporary China need to have some works that deal with township and village enterprises. It is a more in-depth look at a specific TVE than is available elsewhere. Translated, with an introduction, by Matthew Akester. Numerous books about the changes in Tibet before and after the Chinese invasion have been published, but this is the most powerful of the dozens this reviewer has read. The book will have great appeal to both general readers and academic audiences. Classes that might use this book are those that consider the Cultural Revolution in China and history classes dealing with memories of traumatic events or colonial occupation. The narrative of life as a Tibetan under the Communist Chinese is gripping reading and could thus be used in anything from a freshman survey as an introductory text to an advanced graduate seminar as a case study of the interaction of memory, nationalism, and political campaigns. He is refreshingly honest in acknowledging that, at first, working under the Chinese was not so bad, and even as late as , conditions were so good that few Tibetans thought to leave. He also is brave to state that high Tibetan officials were against the Tibetan uprising of because they had so much to lose. Avoiding both ungrounded hyperbole and strident complaints about the Chinese, this book exhibits an all-too-rare balanced view of early Tibetan cooperation with the Chinese colonial occupation. This gives real grounding to claims against the Chinese that are usually just stated in broad terms, without this convincing level of anecdote. Instead, he describes how he and others he knew survived or died from the famines: how they ate moldy grain supplies, how they dug up roots for firewood, how they did any work they could to make a few cents. His account also reveals the level of environmental destruction in Central Tibet under Chinese colonial efforts to extract natural resources: deforestation, desertification, ill-conceived wetlands destruction, and loss of biodiversity. His ability to recollect these experiences with such vivid clarity, which will make the book of interest to specialists, is also part of what will make the book so attractive to general readers. By Meir Shahar. This expert and readable distillation of several aspects of Chinese martial arts history sums up, definitively in English for the present, the verifiable facts and intriguing legends about the Shaolin Temple in North China, a perennial though so far unsuccessful Buddhist applicant for UNESCO World Heritage Site status— somewhat reminiscent of its contested reputation in late imperial Ming-Qing China as the birthplace of kung fu, one gathers from this book. With poses and gymnastics named after zodiacal animals and cosmological elements, these disciplines became something less than martial, too. Shaolin, Taiji, and Buddhism have been analyzed in the secondary literature, and so have their legends. In Tang times, Shaolin monks honored the violent Indian guardian god Vajrapani, but later they attributed their skills to the mis- sionary Bodhidharma, traditionally credited with bringing Chan Zen from India to China. Shahar cites and separates the scholarly studies and legends scrupu- lously, spicing his account with translations from primary sources ranging from ancient steles on the temple grounds to portraits of Shaolin fighting techniques in Ming-Qing popular Chinese novels. But how could Buddhist monks become famous for fighting? Historically, Shahar shows how Shaolin monks, perhaps by force of circum- stance, fought for the Tang dynasty and for their own property, not necessarily with special training in those days, but with the result of imperial protection. In the Ming period, they were famed for fighting with the staff, but by the Qing they followed the general Chinese trend toward barehanded training, in accordance with late Ming syncretisms: the union of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism whose breathing and ascetic exercises contributed much to martial arts practices , and also of combat, health, and spirituality. Shahar locates the Shaolin tradition within yet another triad: myth, technique, and community. The Shaolin community, based in a Henan temple, acquired the romantic reputation of itinerant monks beyond imperial and societal control. Chinese characters for terms, people, and books appear in the back-matter. Both the graduate student and the kung fu aficionado can learn from this work. By Tomoko Shiroyama. Since the forced opening of China in , the commercial contacts between China and the outside world became increasingly frequent. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Chinese economy had already been integrated into the world markets. Not surprisingly, China slipped into depression like many other countries in the early s. The impact of the Great Depression, an important topic neglected in the existing literature on modern Chinese history, is the main focus of this work. Acknowledging the experience of interior China might be different, Shiroyama chooses to focus on the Lower Yangzi Delta centered on Shanghai, possibly because Shanghai was the financial hub and its financial market was most affected during the global depression. The interactions between different sectors are well explored to demonstrate how the devastating effects of the depression and the rehabilitating effects of the new monetary policy spread from one sector to another. Therefore, another notable feature of the book is a well-explained Chinese silver standard and its connection with the changing international monetary system. It is the very positive view of the Nationalist government that distin- guishes this study from most of the earlier researches on the Nanjing Decade [—]. The author suggests that the Nationalist government responded promptly and efficiently to the crisis of the early s. Assisted by the British and American governments, the Nationalists implanted a currency reform that suc- cessfully stabilized the financial market in late Although the new economic policies had their limitations, Shiroyama argues that it was the very success in currency reform that refrained the Nationalist government from excessive bud- getary expansion, and thus limited its performance in the recovery of the indus- trial and rural sectors. By Hugh Brogan. As Brogan skillfully demonstrates, de Tocqueville never completely shed his aristocratic beliefs during his writing and political career. As Brogan emphasizes, de Tocqueville loathed political centralization whether it was conducted by the Jacobins, Napo- leon, Louis- Philippe, or Napoleon III: centralization was the fundamental corro- sive of liberty. De Tocqueville fought a lifelong struggle to accommodate the changing political realities of nineteenth-century Europe to his nostalgia for the noblesse life into which he had been born. Brogan also does well to organize his biography by important events—e. Although this tactic complicates the chronology and is rep- etitious at times, it makes the important events more clear. For this reason alone this work should be read by those interested in the antebellum period of American history and by scholars who utilize his tract. How did he and his family sustain themselves and protect their assets during that tumul- tuous period? Regardless of these minor criticisms this is a stunning work and a compelling read. Randolph-Macon College Mathias D. Bergmann A History of Florence — By John M. Malden, Mass. Although Florence is the most studied Italian city of premodern Europe, it has, strangely enough, inspired very few good narratives of its history. Enter John M. Najemy, one of the most accomplished scholars of the last thirty years and a much beloved teacher for several generations of students. His History of Florence is a formidable survey of Florentine history from the Middle Ages to the end of the Renaissance. But the narrative is pure Najemy, and it sparkles with clarity, precision, and insight. To understand Florentine history, readers must first understand the social ties that bound its citizens together and formed the polis. At this point, Najemy opens a parenthesis with an excellent social history chapter in which he reviews the nature of Florentine households, marriages, and dowries; the question of property; the problems with inheritance; the social role and position of women; the place and situation of children; the nature of public and private charity hospitals in particular ; and even the ever-present concerns with policing sodomy — The dynamic differences that had moved the polis forward had now become the insurmountable differences that led each of the two groups to place more trust in a supreme princely ruler than in each other. And so, ironically, in the end the two groups agreed that a Medicean prince was preferable to a popular republic. By Stephen Tomkins. Grand Rapids, Mich. Eerdmans Publishing Company, The most effective advocates of reform are often confident and persistent pillars of the established order. Without denying their influence on later thinkers or advocates and by acknowledging their eighteenth-century origins, Tomkins humanizes the Clapham Sect, especially Wilberforce, in ways that even surpass the efforts of the magiste- rial Bury the Chains [] by Adam Hochschild. The road to abolition was full of unexpected ups and downs, which makes for natural drama. Tomkins clearly spells out the reasons for this long and winding road without drowning in the minutiae of celebrity gossip and legislative battles. Most striking, nevertheless, are the sometimes graphic excerpts from primary sources that preface each chapter. For a man who ironically chided himself for a lack of focus, Wilberforce did keep pushing the envelopes and the issues until his goals were reached, as Tomkins shows. Tomkins tries to resolve some of those seeming contradictions by showing Wilberforce as the epitome of a godly pater- nalist who could combat the excesses of the ancien regime, such as chattel slavery and bull-baiting, while at the same time defending his deeply held faith against radicals and pornographers by means of the suppression of civil liberties. Norfolk State University Charles H. Ford Slave Revolts in Antiquity. By Theresa Urbainczyk. Berkeley, Calif. A number of colleagues tried to dissuade the author from writing this book. The reviewer is glad they failed. Her topic is slave revolts in antiquity, but Theresa Urbainczyk has brought much comparative material from the modern world into the discussion. Classicists are notoriously averse to writing about cross-cultural resemblances, but Urbainczyk is alert to the perils of drawing simplistic parallels. She is also cognizant of the fact that comparing and contrasting slave revolts both ancient and modern is a huge task. Just counting the sheer number of slave revolts listed in her chronology makes the slimness of the volume surprising ix—xii. Any one of these revolts might have produced a book-length study. The goal of this particular volume was to show why ancient slaves rebelled and what impact such rebellions had on ancient societies. The topics of slavery and class struggle have created a battleground for both Marxist and non-Marxist scholars. Is every slave revolt a potential revolution or were the slaves just trying to escape? Did they have a common ideology? Did similar conditions always produce slave uprisings? Many ancient slave revolts remain unrecorded, and those that are written about are highly colored by the fact that they were written by slave owners. The author also suspects that the ancient sources have given more importance to the actions of slaves than have many modern writers. One of the reasons she suspects the revolts have held little interest for modern scholars is that the slaves always lost, slavery was not abolished, and, in fact, there was no abolitionist movement in antiquity. The author suggests that historians fail to comprehend the true impact that such rebellions had on society at large, not to mention history. Because of the nature of the sources, the author is forced to deal more heavily with the Roman Republic since this is where there is the most evidence. A second problem is the nature of the evidence itself. The author relies heavily on Diodorus Siculus, a source much maligned by classicists but who had a great sympathy for the slaves and their point of view. In the end, the intentions of these ancient slaves have been lost forever and so modern commentators are free to speculate. But at least there is a discussion here of the significance of slaves revolts, how they were prepared, and how the slaves maintained their resistance. Urbainczyk discusses the role of the leader, the ideology of the slaves, and finally slave revolts in ancient historiography. Besides those who dismiss Diodorus, there will be many readers who will not find what they are looking for in this book. Urbainczyk does not, for example, discuss the military aspects of the revolts. How did a Spartacus collect the proper intelligence gathering necessary to hold the entire Roman Republic at bay for two years? Have scholars underestimated the strategic thinking of a slave leader who was trained by the Romans? Was the Spartacus rebellion even a slave revolt at all or, as scholars like Piccinin and Rubinsohn have suggested, a nationalist conflict of Italians against Roman rule? Similarly, were the Spartan helots fighting for individual liberty or national liberation? These and many more questions will continue to be debated, but in the meantime this is a start to many interesting discussions. The fact that the Greek is not transliterated will rule out many readers, but this is a stimulating book that will force readers to think about slaves and their experience. By Michelle Allen. Michelle Allen is one of many contemporary literary scholars interested in what would once have been seen as nonliterary texts. Begin- ning with the sanitary reform movement of the s, Allen moves on to the grand sewerage-and-embankment building projects of the s and s. Sewers, opponents argued, were merely delivery systems of deadly sewer gas or means for polluting rivers. And with some good reason: adequate means of trapping drains had not been developed; nor, until the s, were there reason- ably successful and practical means of sewage purification. Most of this material will be familiar territory to British historians and historians of public health; these themes were well explored by an earlier generation whose works are unevenly represented here. Those earlier urban historians and historians of social reform certainly recognized opposition to sanitation, account- ing for them in terms of start up problems, incompleteness, and costs, as well as conflict with vested interests. In the area of housing, it was clear that efforts to reduce density did mean that some must move further away, yet at the same time it was widely appreciated that the language of sanitary reform was often used cynically, as in the conversion of parts of the City of London from residences of artisans and laborers into a modern financial district. To revisit these questions in other contexts may well be important. Allen, however, builds on no single foundation of scholarship; hence it is hard to know what ultimately to take away from the book. Indeed, literary scholars may find the book rewarding precisely where historians find it frustrating. It is about language more than about people, institutions, money, power, custom, law, administration, ideology, or the material problems of living in cities, a focus of much current scholarship in urban environmental history. By Jurgen Brauer and Hubert van Tuyll. The authors of this book set out to analyze military history through the lens of economics. Jurgen Brauer and Hubert van Tuyll suggest that their approach is still considered novel and therefore perhaps suspect among traditional military historians. After the authors note that they will analyze some less well-known aspects of different historical periods and conflicts, they go on to remove any doubt about their thematic approach. The volume is incredibly useful both to historians and economists and makes a strong case for the continued and perhaps enhanced relevance of military history in university education Brauer and van Tuyll analyze case studies across seven periods: 1 castle construction during the high middle ages; 2 military contractors in the Renais- sance; 3 the decision to offer battle during the Age of Battle; 4 intelligence in the Age of Revolution; 5 strategic bombing during the Second World War; 6 nuclear arms in the Cold War; and 7 the economics of twenty-first-century warfare. In each study, the authors apply six economic principles: opportunity costs; expected marginal costs and benefits; substitution; diminishing marginal returns; asymmetric information and hidden characteristics; and hidden actions and incentive alignments. A particularly interesting and timely analysis is the discussion in chapter three of military contracts condotte drawn up between local governments and mercenary leaders condottieri. Just as authori- ties recognized the economic benefits of enduring employment, so did mercenary companies appreciate the attraction of economic stability. Eventually extensive contracting would die out due not only to the asymmetric information of hidden characteristics and hidden action, but also because of the greater benefits of guaranteed state service. In this chapter, they also consider the economics of terrorist organiza- tions and the costs and benefits of various state responses. Even the public abhorrence of terrorism might not be enough to induce nations to subsidize an international antiterrorism effort. It still comes down to cost and benefits. Only the somewhat deeper delving into economic theory in the concluding chapter lessens the impact of an otherwise very useful discussion of economics and military history. London, England: Routledge, Ernst Cassirer and Peter Gay are authors that come to mind. The term then fell on hard times. First, there was increasing acceptance of the notion that rationality, the core value of enlightened thinkers, was suspect. Adorno and Horkheimer had put the case forward forcefully for the Frankfurt School; next followed postmodern and poststructuralist critiques. But at least these attacks seemed to presuppose the Enlightenment as their object. The real devastation came from the pens not of theorists but of historian specialists who pinpointed the limits of the term and considered intellectual developments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in relation to concrete institutions, material cultures, and practices rather than as a ferment of ideas. Both broadening inquiry and focusing it, these historians attended to matters not easily reducible to the championing of rationality: passions, sentiments, and sensibility—not to mention race, gender, media studies, popular culture, history of science, proto- pornography, and much more. Coffee houses, postal services, and colporteurs had pushed aside Voltaire. The irony of the hefty compendium The Enlightenment World is that precisely thanks to all this attention to geographical, chronological, and other details, the topic finds itself reinvigorated. But just how multifarious a beast the so-called Enlightenment was becomes clear as readers proceed through different countries—Holland, France, Germany, Britain— through considered treatments of familiar topics—skepticism, toleration, and politeness—and on to Italian opera, femininity, millenarianism, law, economy, and cross-cultural encounters. Other contributors— and the list is impressive—do much the same. Happily, the editors have vouchsafed clarity and a consistent sense of a project without quashing individual styles. Like the best encyclopedic ventures, this one carries the mark of many, often idiosyncratic, voices and concerns. Is The Enlightenment World for the general reader? Doubtless not. It could serve very well in the classroom, however, and certainly contains sufficient insight into the multiple realities of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought and its institutions to please many a scholar most likely dipped into repeatedly rather than consumed at one go. University of California, Irvine James A. Steintrager The Seer in Ancient Greece. By Michael Attyah Flower. It is perhaps shocking that the figure who provided the most extensive access to divine knowledge for ancient Greeks has never been the subject of a book. Michael Attyah Flower addresses this glaring lacuna with a highly readable study of roles and perceptions of men and women who filled this vital religious and social position. The seer mantis was an expert in the art of Greek divination, which Flower traces from its origins in the Near East to the rise of the Hellenistic world. Understanding Greek history and literature requires familiarity with this figure, whose importance surpasses the more famous oracle. His treatment of Greek historians is thorough, but never overshadows other types of sources and their recursive relationships to each other and to lived Greek experience. Central to the argument are two interrelated methodological stances. First, relying heavily on anthropological work on belief systems, Flower comparatively explores Zulu, Tibetan, Shang, and Han divination. A powerful writer and storyteller, Flower weaves together examples and anecdotes, arguing that the seer reveals the inextricability of a system of knowledge and belief on the one hand from a socially useful exchange system on the other. To put it another way, he rejects pictures of Greek seers as charlatans, duping the people; they were actually both seen as and functioned as legitimate interpreters of divine knowledge. Flower hits several hot button issues, and his work should provoke broad discussion. The distinction if any between magic and religion succinctly engages important discussions 65— An argument about human agency and fatalism posits one role of the seer as avoiding fate moira ; this probably will not convince scholars who read the will of the Greek gods as predetermined and immutable 78 — In sum, Flower presents a compelling and imaginative reconstruction of ancient Greek divination through the person and perceptions of the seer. This reviewer, for one, will never read Herodotus or Homer or Plato or Aristophanes or Xenophon or Sophocles or even Plutarch quite the same way again. Every episode of In Our Time is available to download. Download the best of Radio 3's Free Thinking programme. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of ideas. In Our Time. Main content. Listen now. The Medici In Our Time. Show more. Show less. Available now 42 minutes. Last on. Boxing Day More episodes Previous. Plato's Symposium. Related topics. The diagram of Dante's cosmos Fig. The map of central Italy Fig. A History of Florence , - Oxford: Blackwell, A general history of the city, written in the light of the considerable quantity of scholarship published since Hale Of greatest relevance to Lorenzo is chapter 12, Corporatism and Consensus in Florentine Electoral Politics , — A History of Florence , — London : Blackwell , Nerici , Luigi. Storia della musica in Lucca. Florence | History, Geography, & Culture | Britannica

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When the revived republic collapsed in , as a result of a disastrous pro-French foreign policy, the popolo did not return to the passive acquiescence characteristic of the years between the Ciompi revolt and the rise of the Medici: the Medici rulers were all too aware that Florentines, and particularly the popolo, were unflinchingly attached to their Great Council; the Medici regime became increasingly isolated, falling almost without local resistance after the sack of Rome temporarily emasculated the Medici leader, Pope Clement VII, in Popular fervour, bolstered by renewed Savonarolan millenarianism, had its finest day in the eleven-month siege of Florence in the aristocrat Francesco Guicciardini witnessed the heroics of the endemically non-military Florentine populace with incredulity, confirming him in the view that politics had become totally irrational in sixteenth-century Italy In the end, the popolo and the elite annihilated each other politically, making way for Medici absolutism after For Najemy, Florentine history was not the gradual and inevitable transformation of an elite, riven by faction, into a principate, but rather the tragic conflict of two ultimately irreconcilable social classes, protagonists whose strife in the end destroyed Florentine liberty. Of course, Najemy does not see these centuries as a continual battlefield of class warfare. For Najemy, nevertheless, these classes never dissolved under the vertical pressures of patronage or hierarchy: institutions such as Florentine neighbourhoods the so-called sixteen official districts or gonfaloni into which the city was divided from the mid fourteenth century or confraternities - which embraced both popular and elitist elements - never blurred class consciousness or, in moments of crisis or tension, confrontation. Najemy's vision is, I think, one that requires to be pondered by Italian historians, who need to take seriously the view that a focus on elitism and patronage is not the only or always the most fruitful approach to these rich centuries. A striking and momentous example of how the elite learned from the popolo comes from the development of humanism and the Renaissance. In its origins, Renaissance humanism was anything but an elitist movement. The first humanist, Lovato Lovati, contrasted a singer, 'bellowing the battles of Charlemagne and French exploits' in French, 'gaping in barbarous fashion', with '[the courageous poet] Brunetto Latini could proudly identify with Cicero, the new man who rose to confront the conspiratorial Catiline: 'Tulius was a new citizen of Rome and not of great stature; but through his wisdom he rose to such eminence that all Rome was commanded by his words' Latini's formulation recalls Sallust's description of Cicero as homo novus, previously passed over for the consulate owing to the invidia and superbia of the nobilitas 29 ; Sallust's anti-aristocratic, pro-popular sentiments complemented Cicero's own arriviste biography, giving classical history and literature a powerful social resonance in mid thirteenth-century Italy. For both Lovato and Latini, a return to classical authors or classical language was connected with antipathy to contemporary aristocratic society dominated by courtly mores and hierarchical values; in both cases, one may detect a reaction against the political dominance of the aristocratic elite in the Italian communes. What is remarkable is how the Florentine elite appropriated this originally popular ideology at the end of the fourteenth century. In the generation after the Ciompi rebellion, key elite patrons such as Palla Strozzi realised that humanist learning and classical education were an effective way to differentiate their class from the popolo, who continued to favour non-latinate mercantile education, as imparted in elementary and abacus schools widespread throughout the city; beginning at the turn of the fifteenth century, the elite began to engage private tutors to teach their sons Latin and humanist learning, largely unavailable and unwelcome to the mass of the popolo. Lauro Martines has persuasively called humanism a 'a program for the ruling classes' in the fifteenth century Now John Najemy has, with just as much insight, laid the groundwork for the reinterpretation of humanism as one further innovation of the popolo to be subsequently appropriated and transformed by the elite. Skip to main content. A History of Florence, See Author's Response. Back to 2 F. Perrens, Histoire de Florence 6 vols. Back to 3 F. Back to 4 J. Back to 5 Magnati e popolani in Firenze dal al Florence, Back to 6 Il comune di Firenze alla fine del Dugento Florence, Back to 8 The Roman Revolution London, Back to 9 'I primi anni del Consiglio Maggiore di Firenze ', Archivio storico italiano, , , Back to 12 F. Back to 13 R. Back to 14 R. Back to 15 D. Back to 16 R. Back to 17 Kent, Rise of the Medici ; F. Both these scholars have gone on to write biographies or biographical studies: F. Kent in Giovanni Rucellai e il suo zibaldone , 2 London, ; D. Back to 18 J. Back to 19 L. Instead, to the nobles, knighthood was Najemy, John N. A History of Florence : - Massachusetts: Blackwell. Print, John has recently offered , as author and editor , two major syntheses , A History of Florence , — and Italy in the Age of the Renaissance , — Both are models of how new research in fields such as Q Peter Herde Q John M. The diagram of Dante's cosmos Fig. The map of central Italy Fig. ФЛОРЕНТИЙСКАЯ РЕСПУБЛИКА — информация на портале Энциклопедия Всемирная история

The money comes from banking. In the process he turned himself into one of the richest men in Christendom. Cosimo converted his fortune not only into political but cultural capital, and the two were intricately linked. Now aged 70, Cosimo will be dead in five years, but his long rule has laid the groundwork for the succession of his son Piero and grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent. Yet his pride is matched by fears for his legacy and, like all Florentines, for his immortal soul. During the coup, Sforza troops were waiting in the wings, as they would be again during a failed bid to oust Piero in Nor is Najemy indifferent to intellectual history, especially questions involving political thought and ideology. This book is no mere synthesis of other scholars' work. Indeed, Najemy offers a distinctive interpretation, one which has already stimulated controversy and will doubtless continue to do so. Najemy has done no less than to challenge the orthodox approach to Florentine history as it developed from the turn of the last century. In Gaetano Salvemini published a ground-breaking Marxist interpretation of Florentine politics at the end of the thirteenth century 6 , viewing magnates and popolani as discrete social classes with conflicting economic interests: the magnates were a feudal caste with mainly landed wealth, whereas the popolani were a commercial bourgeoisie. In this thesis was challenged by Nicola Ottokar 7 , who used prosopographical techniques soon to be employed by Lewis Namier 8 and Ronald Syme 9 to demonstrate that these were not distinct classes: by examining magnates and elite non-magnates - both as individuals and in terms of their families - Ottokar showed that such groups were interconnected by a dense network of business associations, marriages and neighbourhood links, with the result that it was impossible to regard them as distinct social classes with divergent interests. In the second half of the last century, Ottokar's interpretation became the orthodox approach, not only among Italian medievalists but also in Anglophone historiography. Here the crucial figure was Nicolai Rubinstein, who became Ottokar's pupil and assistant in the s. Rubinstein remained a devoted admirer of Ottokar throughout his long life , not only recommending his seminal study to beginning postgraduates at the University of London but even planning, in his last year, to write an architectural history of Florence modelled on a similar little-known work by Ottokar. Rubinstein did not court historical controversy unlike his teacher , and he never articulated an explicit methodological or historiographical stance; nevertheless, his two most extensive studies of Florentine politics, an article on the early years of the Florentine Great Council 10 and a book on the Medici government from to 11 , both followed Ottokar in suggesting the limitations of a class-based interpretation of Florentine history: on the one hand, the elite retained a decisive voice under the supposedly popular government inaugurated after , while, on the other, the Medici represented an elitist regime, not a popular alternative to oligarchic rule before Rubinstein's influence was particularly felt among his many postgraduate students. Najemy has spoken elsewhere of 'the veritable school that Rubinstein created' One of Rubinstein's most eminent pupils has taken issue with this characterisation It is certainly true that Rubinstein did not preach a methodology or a historical philosophy to his pupils: his style of supervision was distinctly hands-off. However, his eminence did attract pupils sympathetic to his particular approach: one would hardly have gone to Rubinstein to undertake research on working-class agitation in fifteenth-century Florence! Moreover, Rubinstein did attempt to channel his pupils into biographical currents compatible with and indeed conducive to an elitist prosopographical approach: his first two students wrote biographies of leading Florentine politicians from the early sixteenth century, Francesco Vettori 14 and Piero Soderini 15 ; moreover, he was sceptical about analytical synchronic studies of Florentine politics and society, particularly for a novice researcher, unsuccessfully attempting, for example, to steer one now distinguished Florentine historian from her plan to study the Florentine ruling elite as the context for the rise of the Medici faction 16 into writing a biography of a prominent Medicean politician, Agnolo Acciaiuoli. The result was that many of his pupils wrote biographies 17 , while others studied elite families or factions 18 ; the few who worked further afield, for example on religion and religious movements, did not pursue their topics from a distinctive sociological or economic perspective, focusing instead on institutional 19 or ideological patterns and trends So, whether or not it was Rubinstein's deliberate intention, an elitist approach certainly emerged from his stable. Rubinstein, of course, was not solely responsible for the dominance of elitism in Florentine historiography. The situation developed similarly in North America, albeit for different reasons: in the Cold War era, a Marxist or even left-wing model was distinctly out of favour. The result was that, in Anglophone as well as the Italian political historiography - and certainly as far as Florence was concerned - Ottokarian elitism has been almost universal. Najemy's refutation of this approach is based on a redefinition of Salvemini's and Ottokar's magnates and popolani. But both historians used popolani to refer to upper-class non-magnate families. By this definition Ottokar was correct in arguing that the magnates were not a class and that their economic activities and interests were in many cases identical to those of leading popolani. He and the many historians who followed his approach went on from there to deny any and all class conflicts, a view that reduces Florentine politics to mere quarrels within the upper class. Between an aristocratic ruling class on the one hand and the occasional eruption of the masses in the form of raw street power on the other, this approach to Florentine history sees nothing in between. What such approaches miss is precisely the popolo and the entire alternative political culture that it represented and promoted. The term popolo is crucial here. This label, in contemporary Florentine usage, tended to refer specifically to the middle class of shop-keepers, craftsmen and artisans, as well as to the lower professional ranks including notaries and physicians; such individuals and families tended to hold lesser political offices, to lack ancient family lineages, to be involved in local rather than international trade and manufacturing, to have lesser investments in landed property, to contract marriages outside elite circles and to provide lower dowries for their daughters. On the other hand, the elite tended to be major rural landholders, to be involved in international trade, to boast ancient family lineages, to hold the lion's share of major political offices, to marry into other elite families and to provide ever more extravagant dowries for their children; professionally, they tended to be lawyers rather than notaries, bishops and major ecclesiastics rather than lower ranking clergy. Over the long chronological range treated by Najemy, there were, of course, changing social, economic and cultural patterns. In the thirteenth century, the elite tended to form a knightly military caste, with wealth based mainly in land; as military customs and economic patterns developed and changed into the fourteenth century, they emerged primarily as great bankers, merchants and industrialists, while always maintaining strong roots in the countryside. The popolo evolved too, from a guild-based sector, especially strong in the less dominant branches of trade and industry unlike wool and banking, always monopolised by the elite in the thirteenth and fourteenth century, to a self-conscious, middle-ranking wider political class in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when guild institutions went into terminal decline; the popolo were always distinct from the working class, who were given guild representation only ephemerally following the proletarian revolt in Few contemporary Florentine historians would disagree with these definitions as articulated by Najemy, developed from the important contributions of American historians such as Gene Brucker 22 and Lauro Martines What is distinctive is the spin Najemy puts on this social structure: Ottokar had shown how magnates and upper- class popolani were not in conflict; Rubinstein had minimised the role of the popolo as the silent majority of Florentine politics in the fifteenth century. What Najemy demonstrates is that class consciousness, tension and conflict - in Florentine, not Marxist, terms - were perennial features of Florentine history from the mid thirteenth to the mid sixteenth century. The conflict between these groups was overt from the s to the s, with alternating elitist and popular regimes; thereafter, the popolo, terrified by the spectre of working-class radicalism that they themselves had called into being with the Ciompi revolt of , acquiesced in elite dominance after the s, in exchange for sporadic and mainly honorific major office-holding, as well as to put themselves in line for elite patronage. However, the popolo were far from dead: Najemy has emphasised their self-conscious identity, providing a telling analysis of the non-elitist mid- century chronicler Marco Parenti 24 , as well as underlining their role in backing the attempt to oust Piero de' Medici in by supporting the end of Medicean restrictive electoral manipulation and wider access to political offices. One could add that the popolo had an important role in the near- collapse of Medici power between and , refusing, as the dominant voice in the ancient legislative councils, to renew Medicean constitutional machinations and indeed humiliating Cosimo de' Medici by sacking his old friend and favourite, the renowned humanist Poggio Bracciolini, as chancellor and blocking other Medicean appointees to the chancery 25 ; Cosimo sanctioned a move to reconsolidate his regime's position only after the death of his enemy Alfonso of Aragon at the beginning of removed the possibility of foreign intervention on the side of his popular enemies. The popolo returned to the forefront of Florentine politics with the collapse of the Medici in although the elite's revulsion at Piero de' Medici's princely and courtly ruling style and his disastrous foreign policy brought down the regime, it was pressure from and fear of the popolo that forced the elite to come up with the Great Council as a desperate attempt to salvage their power on the Venetian aristocratic model. Such stratagems failed as the popolo seized the electoral initiative in the later s; even the last-ditch attempt to secure elitist dominance by electing the aristocratic Piero Soderini as Florence's chief magistrate in was a spectacular failure, when it turned out that he supported constitutional structures that favoured the popolo, not the elite. When the revived republic collapsed in , as a result of a disastrous pro-French foreign policy, the popolo did not return to the passive acquiescence characteristic of the years between the Ciompi revolt and the rise of the Medici: the Medici rulers were all too aware that Florentines, and particularly the popolo, were unflinchingly attached to their Great Council; the Medici regime became increasingly isolated, falling almost without local resistance after the sack of Rome temporarily emasculated the Medici leader, Pope Clement VII, in Popular fervour, bolstered by renewed Savonarolan millenarianism, had its finest day in the eleven-month siege of Florence in the aristocrat Francesco Guicciardini witnessed the heroics of the endemically non-military Florentine populace with incredulity, confirming him in the view that politics had become totally irrational in sixteenth-century Italy In the end, the popolo and the elite annihilated each other politically, making way for Medici absolutism after For Najemy, Florentine history was not the gradual and inevitable transformation of an elite, riven by faction, into a principate, but rather the tragic conflict of two ultimately irreconcilable social classes, protagonists whose strife in the end destroyed Florentine liberty. Of course, Najemy does not see these centuries as a continual battlefield of class warfare. For Najemy, nevertheless, these classes never dissolved under the vertical pressures of patronage or hierarchy: institutions such as Florentine neighbourhoods the so-called sixteen official districts or gonfaloni into which the city was divided from the mid fourteenth century or confraternities - which embraced both popular and elitist elements - never blurred class consciousness or, in moments of crisis or tension, confrontation. Najemy's vision is, I think, one that requires to be pondered by Italian historians, who need to take seriously the view that a focus on elitism and patronage is not the only or always the most fruitful approach to these rich centuries. A striking and momentous example of how the elite learned from the popolo comes from the development of humanism and the Renaissance. In its origins, Renaissance humanism was anything but an elitist movement. The first humanist, Lovato Lovati, contrasted a singer, 'bellowing the battles of Charlemagne and French exploits' in French, 'gaping in barbarous fashion', with '[the courageous poet] Brunetto Latini could proudly identify with Cicero, the new man who rose to confront the conspiratorial Catiline: 'Tulius was a new citizen of Rome and not of great stature; but through his wisdom he rose to such eminence that all Rome was commanded by his words' Latini's formulation recalls Sallust's description of Cicero as homo novus, previously passed over for the consulate owing to the invidia and superbia of the nobilitas 29 ; Sallust's anti-aristocratic, pro-popular sentiments complemented Cicero's own arriviste biography, giving classical history and literature a powerful social resonance in mid thirteenth-century Italy. For both Lovato and Latini, a return to classical authors or classical language was connected with antipathy to contemporary aristocratic society dominated by courtly mores and hierarchical values; in both cases, one may detect a reaction against the political dominance of the aristocratic elite in the Italian communes. What is remarkable is how the Florentine elite appropriated this originally popular ideology at the end of the fourteenth century. In the generation after the Ciompi rebellion, key elite patrons such as Palla Strozzi realised that humanist learning and classical education were an effective way to differentiate their class from the popolo, who continued to favour non-latinate mercantile education, as imparted in elementary and abacus schools widespread throughout the city; beginning at the turn of the fifteenth century, the elite began to engage private tutors to teach their sons Latin and humanist learning, largely unavailable and unwelcome to the mass of the popolo. Lauro Martines has persuasively called humanism a 'a program for the ruling classes' in the fifteenth century

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This is not a bad book at all, but it is not for the general reader. Oct 07, Kiely rated it liked it Shelves: grad. Aug 13, Andrew rated it liked it. Najemy's history covers the history of Florence as a republic; that is, until the Medici got outside forces to establish them as dukes in the city. The books details the remarkably complex forces at work: the mix of social classes, the baffling array of political institutions, the increasing influence of outside political actors. Strengths: Najemy builds ideas on top of one another--for instance, taking side chapters to consider social history or art patronage--so that, by the end, I felt I had Najemy's history covers the history of Florence as a republic; that is, until the Medici got outside forces to establish them as dukes in the city. Strengths: Najemy builds ideas on top of one another--for instance, taking side chapters to consider social history or art patronage--so that, by the end, I felt I had a really solid basis for conceptualizing the history of this complex era. Weaknesses: the book often gets listy, with dozens of names or sheafs of prices. Also, it doesn't focus on people much--only their political import. In short: a very thorough book, not good for casual reading, but helpful as a solid historical foundation. Oct 23, Marios Antoniou rated it liked it Shelves: stopped. I am conflicted about this book Najemy is clearly an expert on Florentine history, but i feel the book is too 'listy' and mentions a huge amount of statistics and a multitude of names. This is a bonus in some aspects: it is credible, and fully-evidenced but on the downside I feel that I hardly remember the basic points about major historical figures such as Cosimo de Medici. It put me to sleep, I am afraid to say and I skipped parts of it. Lastly, I would have like some exploration of historiographical issues of Florentine history. I feel that after reading the book i am none the wiser about what Najemy's thesis is on most debates about Florence. Jan 09, Gregg Koskela rated it it was ok. After visiting Florence, I was looking for a book that would give the history of the renaissance in that city, with an emphasis on the arts. This, instead, is more of a meticulously documented political history of the city. It is meticulous and detailed. And it gives a lot of detail meticulously. I skimmed the last half. Apr 06, Joe Scipione rated it liked it. Lots of information packed in this book as with most general history books. I did not read all of this just the pages I needed for research. I would probably only read the rest if I was ever going to visit Florence. That being said it is well written and easy to follow. A good book for anyone interested in the subject. This was an interesting study in a period of Florence's history. It was well written and researched. There were some dull bits, but that was more to do with the subject matter than the writing. Overall, interesting and worth a read if you have any interest in Italy as a whole or the city in particular. Apr 13, Nancy Bielski rated it it was ok Shelves: non-fiction. This was dry and a little slow. Very densely packed with information, especially on the economics side of things, which really isn't what I'm interested in. Apr 29, Lula Leus rated it really liked it. The text a little boring and dry. But despite it, it was very informative. Victoria rated it it was amazing Jun 07, Marie D'amico rated it it was amazing May 04, Kristina rated it really liked it Oct 01, Ray LaManna rated it really liked it Jan 13, Gabriel Purghel rated it really liked it Jan 11, Sanjay Prabhakar rated it it was amazing Dec 11, Guy rated it it was amazing Dec 02, Sep 26, AskHistorians added it Shelves: italian- history , middle-ages. The best, most recent survey of Florence during the Middle Ages written in English. Cosmo Van Steenis rated it it was amazing Feb 19, Brina rated it liked it Sep 09, Tomandrews rated it it was amazing Jun 03, Jo Walton rated it it was amazing Jul 15, Both are models of how new research in fields such as Q Peter Herde Q John M. The diagram of Dante's cosmos Fig. The map of central Italy Fig. A History of Florence , - Oxford: Blackwell, A general history of the city, written in the light of the considerable quantity of scholarship published since Hale Of greatest relevance to Lorenzo is chapter 12, Corporatism and Consensus in Florentine Electoral Politics , — A History of Florence , — London : Blackwell , Nerici , Luigi. Storia della musica in Lucca. In the first phase of Roman history , the clash between the various humours never took such an extreme form as to Najemy , A History of Florence : — Blackwell Publishing ,

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