Ohio History Journal

BOOK REVIEWS
and Book Notes

Battle For The Soul: Métis Children Encounter Evangelical Protestants at Mackinaw Mission 1823-1837. By Keith R. Widder. (East Lansing: The Michigan State University Press, 1999. xxiv + 254p.; illustrations, notes, appendices, bibliography, index. $24.95 paper.)

Keith Widder has given us a remarkable, as well as a carefully researched account of the impact of Evangelical Protestantism on the Native Americans and their Métis kinfolk at the Mackinaw Mission in the 1820s and 1830s. Widder was curator for Mackinac State Historic Parks from 1971 to 1997.

Evangelicals, spurred by the revivals of the Second Great Awakening, devised a comprehensive program to Christianize every aspect of American life. In 1821 the Reverend Doctor Andrew Yates of Union College visited Mackinac. Yates interested Reverend William M. Ferry, a native of New England and a former Union College student, in locating on Mackinac Island. Before going to Mackinac, Ferry married Amanda White. Most missionaries were married and both husband and wife became active missionaries who relied on God to furnish the skill to do their work.

In 1823 the Ferrys opened a boarding school on Mackinac for Métis children in the Michigan Territory, setting into motion an intense spiritual battle to win the souls and change the lives of the children, their parents, and all the others living on Mackinac. By 1800, changes in child rearing also effected Evangelism. Freed from the drudgery of household industries by the Industrial Revolution, mothers devoted more time to the religious training of their children. Instead of relying on shame, humiliation, and physical punishment, they guided their children with love and inculcated a conscience, directing them toward benevolence and piety by example as well as precept.

The growth of Nationalism inspired by the Second Great Awakening led the clergy to regard the whole nation as their Parish. After the War of 1812, the Americans strengthend their presence throughout the Western Great Lakes Area. By 1 821 Catholicism had lost much of its vitality in the Mackinac Straits area and its authority had waned. After 1765, the itinerant priests who looked after the spiritual welfare of Catholics at Mackinac noted the diminished impact of the Catholic Church on the lives of its followers. When priests came in 1799, they found that only one of its 1,300 residents had been baptized.

The Missionaries at the Mackinaw Mission assumed the role of parents to the boarding students and together they created a family that met physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual needs of everyone. The Indians were made up of the following groups: Métis children who were French-speaking Indians, the Chippewa, Odawa, and the Menominee. They were taught as a group. The teachers insisted that English should be spoken in the classroom. Students between the ages of four and sixteen studied spelling, arithmetic, geography, and grammar. They also studied the Bible and memorized many verses. Over 150 people resided in the Mission dormatory—many times the number of persons who lived in wigwams or small log houses.

While Catholicism waned in the Straits area, it grew and obtained a fresh vitality throughout the United States. As German and Irish immigrants added to

the Catholic population and as Catholics moved westward, the church hierarchy expanded to meet new needs. In 1821 Rome created the Diocese of Cincinnati under the direction of Bishop Edward Fenwick. The Diocese included Ohio as well as Michigan Territory.

On 9 January 1 83 1 Reverend Ferry gave the first of six lectures on the subject of Catholicism in the Presbyterian Meetinghouse, with Father Mazzuchelli and some of his parishoners present. Then Ferry set off a rancorous debate. Father Mazzuchelli and Reverend Ferry each believed that God was on his side in opposition to the evil intentions and deeds of others. There was indeed little room or opportunity for compromise, much less for love.

By the late 1830s, both the American Fur Company and most of the people who had made up the Evangelical community at Mackinaw had vanished, and the mission closed in 1837. "The mistake made by the 19th Century Americans who viewed Métis and tribal Indians as a single entity must not be repeated. This caused the Americans to miss the Métis as a distinct group of people" (pp. 134-135). The Métis deserved to be studied as important contributors in the evolution of American Society in the Western Great Lakes area.

Victor B. Howard, Morehead State University

FDR and His Enemies. By Albert Fried. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. 26lp.; notes, bibliography, index. $27.95.)

Albert Fried has written a breezy account of the New Deal and America's entry into World War II from the perspective of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's relationship with five of his most bitter foes: Huey P. Long, Alfred E. Smith, Father Charles Coughlin, John L. Lewis, and Charles A. Lindbergh. Fried is a very good writer although he tends to interject obscure words into the text that will send many learned readers in search of a dictionary. Examples include "farrago," "epigones," "fissiparous," "lachrymose," and "brio."

Fried's research unfortunately is limited. He has consulted the Franklin D. Roosevelt Papers at Hyde Park, the Congressional Record, appropriate historical memoirs, and the New York Times, but that marks the extent of his examination into primary sources. Much of his information derives from major biographies of FDR's five enemies. His knowledge of less prominent secondary sources is at best sketchy. Fried, for instance, is apparently unaware of Glen Jeansonne's biographies of Huey Long and Gerald L. K. Smith, Alan Brinkley's critical essay on Long's "Share Our Wealth" clubs, and my own study of the Louisiana Kingfish and American Communists. The result is a book that is often superficial and prone to omissions and errors.

His treatment of Huey Long's career illustrates this inclination. Long's father was not "an unsuccessful farmer entrepreneur." Although Huey Pierce Long, Sr., was hardly well-to-do, he owned one of the largest houses in the town of Winnfield, Louisiana, and engaged in numerous profitable business ventures throughout his life. The Regular Democratic organization (RDO) of New Orleans did not recapture control of city government in 1934 because the urban political machine had never lost it; in that year the organization did abandon a temporary alliance with the Long forces and defeated the Kingfish's candidates in municipal elections. The result was a devastating attack on the city that in

TOP5

1936 led to the RDO's capitulation to Long's successors. Fried also argues that the growing power of the Share Our Wealth movement would have enhanced Huey Long's potential candidacy for the presidency in 1936; this view is in sharp conflict with Alan Brinkley who maintains that Long and Gerald Smith typically overrated the strength and influence of the Share Our Wealth organization and that many chapters existed only on paper. Fried's contention that an organized plot to kill the Kingfish existed advances an argument that has repeatedly earned denials from both anti-Long forces and scorn from serious scholars.

Throughout the work, Fried lavishes high praise on President Roosevelt and his political acumen. According to Fried, Roosevelt was a powerful visionary who instituted important policies and programs that ushered in the American future at home and abroad. In the author's opinion, his foes "lost because in opposing him [FDR] they resisted historic forces which chose him as their instrument." Long, Smith, Lewis, Coughlin, and Lindbergh were, their disagreeable qualities aside, "quaint, old-fashioned, innocent, pathetic, the reliquiae of a bygone age."

Fried's viewpoint is hardly new and at the same time is quite at odds with the works of other Roosevelt scholars such as Paul Conkin who argue that FDR was actually a failure because the president was mired in the past and was unwilling to initiate necessary change. The author admits no evidence of these contrary perspectives. In the final analysis, Fried has written a very readable, interesting work that might be a useful point of departure for those who would like to learn about the New Deal, American entry into World War II, and the role of President Roosevelt and his enemies in these historical events of the 1930s. Other accounts, however, provide greater depth and superior interpretation of these times. If the reader hopes to develop a fuller understanding of this turbulent and admittedly critical era, it is these studies that must ultimately be consulted.

Edward F. Haas, Wright Sate University

Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator. By Arthur Herman. (New York: The Free Press, 2000. 404p.; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $26.00.)

The judgment of most historians and journalists that early cold war Senator Joe McCarthy was a reckless demagogue is mistaken, says Arthur Herman, an adjunct professor of history at George Mason University. More specifically, Herman argues that "McCarthyism" was a positive movement, rather than a political investigative technique that flouted the rights of individuals and, through the cynical (mis)use of information, corrupted human discourse. Before McCarthy's senatorial colleagues censured him in 1954, he had attempted to besmirch the names of presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, secretaries of state George C. Marshall and Dean Acheson, and had subpoenaed dozens of lower profile witnesses, who then faced intimidating charges of disloyalty to their country. Herman ignores the lives of Red Scare victims who were not Communists, of men and women who were accused of wrongdoing, yet were innocent: fired teachers, blacklisted entertainers, and government workers who left their careers in order to avoid further harassment. For that story one must turn to Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (1998).

TOP5

Herman acknowledges that McCarthy sometimes lied and promoted conspiracy theories, but suggests the senator was merely doing wrong in order to do right; perhaps his ugly name-calling was only "needling teasing" (p. 186). Herman considers it unfair that McCarthy should have been expected to prove all of his charges and asserts that between 1950 and 1954 it was McCarthy instead of those he accused who was put upon. It is as though the collapse of the Soviet Union exonerates McCarthy of all misdeeds in his attempt to "cleanse" the U.S. State Department. It comes as no surprise that Herman echoes McCarthy's charge that the Korean War was the fault of " 'highly placed Red counselors' in the State Department" (p. 133) and that General MacArthur was right to threaten the Chinese with a wider war if they opposed the U.S. military in Korea.

Although it is clear from the recent works of Harvey Klehr, et al. (The Secret World of American Communism, 1995; The Soviet World of American Communism, 1998; Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, 1999), and Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev (The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era, 1999), that there existed more subversives in the U.S. government than commonly believed, Herman refuses to recognize widespread economic breakdown as a legitimate reason that many young, nonsubversive idealists during the Depression Thirties looked beyond the two major political parties for solutions. Given these publications, which include new information from Soviet archives on Communist subversion, it is disappointing that Herman offers readers nothing new. Instead, he is content to rephrase early cold war opinions found in periodicals such as the American Mercury, Human Events, and the Freeman, and in the detailed defense of the Wisconsin senator's work, McCarthy and His Enemies (1954), by William F. Buckley, Jr., and L. Brent Bozell.

Herman also fails to address a chronological peculiarity. By 1950, when Senator McCarthy first made the shocking allegation that 205 subversives were employed in the U.S. State Department, the liberal anti-Communist Americans for Democratic Action was firmly established, Henry Wallace's Progressive Party (which drew Communist support) had done miserably in the 1948 presidential election, labor leaders had driven Communist-dominated unions out of the CIO, and the Communist Party of the United States of America (numbering fewer than 50,000 members) was in the midst of an irreversible decline. Abroad the Truman administration had vigorously challenged communism on many fronts, whether with the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan, or by covert CIA activities, the Berlin Airlift, and the establishment of NATO. Yet McCarthyism continued to grow because it was based on fear and worry, much of it politically inspired. Although not intended as a monocausal explanation, readers will sense that a domestic political dynamic was crucial to the rise of McCarthyism—a point buttressed by Herman's recurring assault on American liberalism and the New Deal for their supposed ideological affinity with communism.

Herman heads several chapters with quotations from William Blake, Othello, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Alfred Kohlberg. Missing is one that lay at the heart of McCarthyism—former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall's reminder that "history teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure."

Ronald Lora, The University of Toledo

TOP5

Twisting the Lion's Tail: American Anglophobia between the World Wars. By John E. Moser. (New York: New York University Press, 1999. x + 2fi3p.; notes, bibliography, index. $45.00)

The story of anglophobia and its demise is well known to diplomatic historians. During the nineteenth century, ideological opposition to colonialism, periodic diplomatic conflicts with Britain, and the Revolutionary War-derived national myth led Americans of all stripes to hate and fear the former mother country. By 1900, however, new conceptions of race led elites like Josiah Strong to adopt a favorable outlook towards England that emphasized common language and heritage. The shared experience of World War I extended this positive view to non-elites. By 1920, consequently, the U.S. and Britain had entered a period of close ties culminating in the development of the special relationship maintained to this day.

John Moser takes issue with this chronology. In Twisting the Lion's Tail, he argues that anglophobia did not fade away in the early 1920s but reemerged as a powerful political rallying cry. Throughout the interwar period "a loosely organized coalition" of hyphenate Americans, western progressives, and liberals opposed warmer relations and cast England as a threat to America (p. 6). Only well after World War II, Moser concludes, did anglophobia finally disappear.

The anti-British coalition came together shortly after World War I to oppose the Versailles Treaty. During the 1920s, it helped poison relations with England by challenging the postwar debt settlement, attacking London's refusal to permit naval parity, and condemning Britain's treatment of Ireland. Politicians exploited such anglophobic sentiment. Chicago mayor "Big" Bill Thompson, for instance, won reelection in 1927 partly by claiming that school textbooks were rife with British propaganda. Coupled with a growing naval rivalry, such political demagoguery helped chill relations to the point that by the late 1920s "the prospect of war between the United States and Great Britain ... was now beginning to appear a distinct possibility" (p. 58).

Though talk of war quickly faded, relations remained cool in the 1930s because of the anglophobes' ongoing activities and the continuing resonance of their ideas. As the European crisis worsened, they worked to keep Britain from pulling the U.S. into another war—as they believed London had during World War 1—by helping pass the Neutrality Acts. Anglophobia peaked again in 1938 with popular dissatisfaction toward Britain's appeasement policy. Even after Pearl Harbor, it remained a powerful political current. Americans complained that the British were second-rate fighters, criticized them for poor treatment of subject peoples, and demanded that they dismantle their empire. After the war, liberal anglophobes denounced England for clinging to its empire, while conservatives unsuccessfully attacked the British Loan of 1946 as a needless gift. The fight against the loan was, however, anglophobia's swan song. Britain's rapid divestiture of empire and the onset of the Cold War undermined anglophobia's rationale and made it "a luxury which few believed the U.S. could afford" (pp. 186-187).

Well written and filled with interesting anecdotes, Twisting the Lion's Tail shows persuasively that anglophobia remained an important political force well into the twentieth century. Moser is especially effective at detailing anglophobia's complex relationship with interwar isolationism. Still, his interpretation has its flaws. His assertion that the U.S. and Britain were close to

TOP5

war in 1929—a claim from which he quickly retreats—greatly overstates the situation. More important, Moser's tendency to elevate any criticism of England to the level of full-blown anglophobia leads him to draw a number of dubious conclusions. Anger at appeasement was not indicative of anglophobia, for example, but of popular dissatisfaction with the policies of a friendly government. Despite these flaws, Twisting the Lion Tail is a fine addition to the literature on American relations with Britain that should prove useful to historians exploring America's interwar diplomacy.

Robert J. Flynn, University of Kentucky

Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation. By John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. xviii + 455p.; appendices, notes, index. $35.00.)

When used in the context of the American South, the term "rebel" is almost universally associated with the Confederacy during the Civil War. However, John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger's Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation reveal that the first rebels were enslaved Africans and African Americans who challenged the system of slavery in the United States. In this carefully researched and lucidly written book that examines the nature of runaway slaves from 1790 to 1860, the authors challenge the notion that African slaves accepted bondage as a way of life and that racial violence and resistance against the institution of slavery were mere aberrations.

With the use of an enormous array of historical documents, such as plantation records, court proceedings, petitions from county courts, slave narratives, and local newspaper advertisements, Franklin and Schweninger provide a brilliant description of the nature of slave resistance. More specifically, the authors show how slaves resisted, when and where they ran, how they escaped, how long they stayed in hiding, and how they survived away from their plantation. The authors also describe the "typical runaway" slave and the financial impact escaped slaves had on individual plantations (p. 210). Franklin and Schweninger assert that although many slave runaways came from various plantations, spoke several languages, and possessed a variety of skills, most of those who absconded were male, young, and were of dark complexion. Some Africans that escaped did not fit this description. However, those who did were the ones who "could best defy the system" (p. 233).

Next, the authors examine the topic of the financial cost of slave runaways to individual plantation owners. Franklin and Schweninger maintain that an exact monetary amount lost might never be known. However, those owners of slaves who continued to have problems with runaway slaves gradually began to realize that their loses went far beyond money. These masters eventually concluded that despite their belief that their captives were content and happy workers, "there were blacks who were willing to do almost anything to extricate themselves from bondage" (p. 293).

While the great majority of both those who owned enslaved Africans and those who ran away were men, Franklin and Schweninger's Runaway Slaves does provide the reader with accounts of the hardships placed on single, white, slaveholding women as well as the difficulties encountered by female fugitives.

TOP5

Unfortunately, from a scholarly standpoint, most of the information is not new. Indeed, more analysis could have been done on the role African American women played in the various escape ventures. For instance, we are informed that "Henry Thomas' mother had planned his escape from Nashville," but her specific role in the endeavor remains unclear. Despite this minor weakness, Franklin and Schweninger's splendid and compassionate book provides us with valuable insights into the experience of runaway slaves and adds much to our knowledge and understanding of slavery, power, domination, and resistance in the history of the United States.

Eric R. Jackson and Michael Washington, Northern Kentucky University

A Hundred Days to Richmond: Ohio's "Hundred Days" Men in the Civil War. Edited by Jim Leeke. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. xix + 272p.; illustrations, appendices, notes and sources, bibliography, index. $29.95.)

Jim Leeke's readable history, A Hundred Days to Richmond, recounts the Ohio National Guard's brief venture into the Civil War in the summer of 1864, Governor John Brough's grand scheme to end the war. Gettysburg and Vicksburg had fallen the previous summer, and the victorious general from the West, Ulysses S. Grant, now commanded the Army of the Potomac. As the war drug into its fourth year, there was reason to hope that the final victory was in sight. In April Brough proposed to President Lincoln that Ohio call 30,000 to 40,000 men into the state militia on short-term enlistments. They would be used to relieve regular troops guarding railroads, bridges, and forts, thus freeing seasoned veterans for the last great push to Richmond. Lincoln seized upon the idea, expanded it, and announced a plan to raise 100,000 men for one hundred days from state militias in the Midwest.

In Ohio 35,982 volunteers answered the call in early May—forty-one regiments in all. Leeke, a freelance writer and editor, traces their history using the soldiers' diaries, letters, and memoirs, thus weaving a narrative of their experiences from their own words—the only full-length history of the hundreddays regiments. Leeke first describes "the boys." They represented a crosssection of their communities and included some of the most substantial men left in the state. In spite of the appalling realities of the war, these men clung to an idealist view of their service. George Perkins, a private from Chillicothe, wrote that they "hastily arranged their affairs, and from the stores, workshops, and farms, flocked to the defense of their country in the hour of its direst need."

While the men volunteered expecting garrison or guard duties, they ended up fighting in some of the most memorable campaigns of 1864: John Hunt Morgan's last Kentucky raid; Jubal Early's march on Washington and subsequent defeat in the Shenandoah Valley, and Grant's attack on Petersburg. By most accounts, the men fought well. They were thrown against Morgan's cavalry at Cynthiana, where a regiment of green Ohioans were surrounded by 2,500 Confederates and forced to surrender. They faced Early at Monocacy, where Lew Wallace's forces were defeated, and at Fort Stephens, where Early was finally turned back. They were sent out with Phil Sheridan, who defeated Early in the Valley, thus denying the "granary of the Confederacy." And they were ordered to Petersburg, where

TOP5

they fought in the four-day battle (June 15-18) and then settled into the trenches and fortifications for the siege that followed.

Throughout A Hundred Days to Richmond, Leeke intersperses just enough introductory material to explain and amplify the firsthand accounts. The men wrote not only of battles but also of the hardships of war. According to Sylvester Sherman, first sergeant from Franklin County, "the rebels were not the only foes we had to contend with at this place ... we also had another foe whose approach was more insidious." The Ohio regiments suffered severely from this "other enemy": they lost 868 men to disease and only 66 to combat. Though in smaller numbers, they were also forced to endure the atrocious conditions in the South's prisoner-of-war camps, including the notorious prisons at Libby and Andersonville. Here the diaries and letters reach their saddest. Private William McCommon of Scioto County, captured by John Mosby's raiders at Berryville, wrote, "We thought Belle Island was awful, but this place [Salisbury, NC.] no man can describe .... [T]he dead wagon came in twice a day to collect the dead. The corpses were piled in, one on top of another like so many logs."

As the summer of '64 faded, the regiments began returning home. They received the hero's welcome in many small towns across Ohio. In their brief term of service, the boys had acquired experiences to recall for the rest of their lives and, perhaps, made a material difference in the course of the war. Benjamin Cowen, adjutant-general of Ohio, thought so: "I have never doubted, for I know that Lincoln and Grant and Stanton did not doubt, but that the services of the Ohio hundred-days men shortened the war."

President Lincoln sent a certificate to each of the hundred-days men tendering "the national thanks." We can thank Jim Leeke for an excellent job of telling their story. I agree with him that "it deserves to be remembered."

Harry G. Enoch, University of Kentucky

Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America, 1881-1951. By David Stradling. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. x + 27Op.; illustrations, notes, bibliographical essay, index. $42.50.)

Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America, 1881-1951 analyzes a neglected area of progressive reform concern. Author David Stradling argues that the roots of modern environmental activism reach back to the Victorian era of industrialization. He explains how the problem was defined over time, how public perceptions toward smoke changed, and how these ideas were reflected in an evolving environmental movement. The study identifies a three-phased context: Victorian concern with beauty and morality in the late nineteenth century, a faith in science and technology at the beginning of the twentieth century, and changing fuel supplies by the late 1930s.

Post-Civil War industrialization carried with it a perception that smokestacks signaled progress. Coal, the chief fuel source, produced heavy palls of smoke. Thus, a contradiction developed for progressives who wished to both support the industrial economy and encourage a cleaner environment. According to Stradling, "the psychological attachment to coal and its economic importance created significant barriers for those who hoped to mitigate the most troubling

TOP5

aspect of its use: smoke" (p. 14). Growing concern resulted in studies and reports that recognized soot, health problems, and negative aesthetic consequences of smoke that caused significant losses for business. Nevertheless, the problem had no easy solution as long as suggestions involved sacrifices from industry and urban residents believed that more compelling problems like sewage and pure water existed.

Smoke reform gained momentum by the 1890s as urban female reformers became outspoken advocates for change. Stradling cites Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Cleveland as examples of how "the most active reformers defined the problem in distinctly feminine terms" involving "four interrelated facets: health, aesthetics, cleanliness, and morality" (p. 44). By the turn of the century, public opinion moved in the direction of recognizing air pollution as unhealthful and physicians joined the growing anti-smoke movement. At this stage, abatement tactics focused on what came out of smokestacks, instead of the source of the smoke. Stradling contends these early efforts were more significant in defining smoke as a problem than in lessening the amount of pollutants in the air. "What the women and men who spoke against the smoke nuisance had articulated in the late 1800s and early 1900s was nothing less than an environmentalist philosophy" (p. 59).

Characteristic of progressive activism, anti-smoke spokespersons demanded government involvement. City and state legislative bodies responded and new laws received judicial support. A Missouri case, State v. Tower, "supplied the foundation for a series of rulings which not only affirmed the authority of states to empower municipalities to regulate smoke, but also maintained the broad powers wielded by cities in their attempts to improve air quality" (p. 66). As public support increased, many urban residents came "to assume municipal governments had the obligation to improve air quality" (p. 71). However, new ordinances suffered from limited technology and lax enforcement. An ensuing phase of reform depended on engineering expertise as the federal government, universities, and private interests all sponsored related research. A University of Pittsburgh project, the Mellon study, provided both a model and the necessary scientific grounding for anti-smoke activism, and the Smoke Prevention Association coordinated meetings to discuss strategies. This was accompanied by a shift in focus "from environmental quality concerns toward economic efficiency issues" (p. 110). As the movement came to rely more on expertise, it also became male dominated.

During World War I smoke abatement rhetoric remained strong. However, the national emergency demanded increased production as "coal consumption reached new levels in 1917 and 1918, and the air quality in American cities declined dramatically" (p. 147). Decreased manufacturing in the 1930s, along with a shift away from coal in favor of electricity, natural gas, and diesel fuel, positively influenced urban air quality. By the 1940s industrial hygienists helped to re-prioritize health issues as the primary concern of reformers. These changes prompted a new terminology, from smoke prevention to air pollution control. Although historians have attributed improved air quality to new sources of energy, Stradling claims that earlier smoke abatement work accomplished much. Even with profound economic and demographic growth "the smoke problem did not increase dramatically in the progressive decades" which suggests "some limited success for the movement" (p. 190).

Smokestacks and Progressives not only illuminates a previously ignored

TOP5

aspect of industrial cost and progressive reform, but contributes to our knowledge of the twentieth-century environmental movement. The narrative is carefully organized and clearly written, the argument amply supported with case studies of cities long associated with industry and pollution.

Diane F. Britton, The University of Toledo

Reflections on a Ravaged Century. By Robert Conquest. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000. xv + 3l'lp.; select bibliography, index. $26.95.)

In the "Afterword" to Reflections on a Ravaged Century, the redoubtable historian-poet Robert Conquest notes that "there are many important issues which I have passed by." The reader of Conquest's latest book may be forgiven for doubting this assertion. Conquest has given the reader his reflections on, and analysis of, what he calls the "crucial causes of past disaster" (p. 297). In so doing, he has provided an intriguing tour of history's most brutal century.

Conquest traces the savaging of humanity in the just-concluded century to the power of "Ideas" (his capitalization), which claim the ability to transcend all social problems. Since no such concept can ever fit reality, advocates of Ideas have sought, in procrustean manner, to shape human society to the concept. This has led to the use of violence, in the belief that "dictatorship and terror are needed if the good of humanity is to be served" (p. 7).

Conquest traces the "ideological frenzy" of the twentieth century to the European revolutionary tradition. Here he detects a "childish" mindset, which holds that well-meaning people with enough power can cure all social ills by fiat. This contrasts with the "open society," which has evolved organically over the course of centuries, recognizes the need for consensus, and accepts that there must be a balance between state power and citizens' autonomy. A chronicler of the worst crimes of the Soviet era, Conquest unsurprisingly considers the Marxist "interruption" to have been the greatest threat to democratic civil society in the 1900s. In Marxism, one found a purportedly "scientific" theory which offered both simplicity and sophistication, and promised its adherents that they could shape society in a rational manner. The human tragedies of the twentieth century resulted from the fact that this Idea (and others, such as National Socialism and other radical nationalisms) occupied the minds of people who controlled sufficient state power to "impose doctrinally produced errors on the whole of society" (p. 81).

Terror proved an effective tool for imposing the state will upon entire societies. But how does one explain the tendency of certain residents of "open societies" to ignore, dismiss, or defend the atrocities of Stalinist totalitarianism? Conquest attributes this behavior to a number of causes, including intellectual fashion, the romantic appeal of socialism, and a tendency to tolerate offenses committed on the basis of an ideology for which intellectuals "feel some sort of vague sympathy" (p. 132). In addition, he suggests a lack of "imagination" (p. 149): western academics simply could not grasp the reality of the Soviet system. Conquest does not say why this lack of imagination did not prevent the same people from grasping the horrors of Nazism. Soviet ideology emerges as the "driving force" of the Cold War (p. 150). The leaders in the Kremlin were informed by an ideology which held that all non-communist states were

TOP5

inherently hostile. The Cold War need not have developed precisely as it did, according to Conquest. But something very much like it could not have been avoided.

Conquest next turns to contemporary issues. Here, his primary theme reflects the underlying presumption of his analysis of the past. In Conquest, one finds a scholar who wants to put a face on social phenomena; who is concerned that individual autonomy not be smothered under the weight of impersonal control by large organizations, be they corporations, bureaucracies, or governments. For this reason, he is firmly in the Euroskeptic camp. "Europe" itself has become an Idea. Its goal is a statist and bureaucratic system that will be imposed on people who have no organically developed sense of common citizenship. Many will question his conclusions regarding Europe. Even so, he has given the reader fair warning that the "power of fanaticism" is still not extinguished.

Steven J. Brady, University of Notre Dame

River Jordan: African American Urban Life in the Ohio Valley. By Joe William Trotter, Jr. (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998. xvi + l60p.; illustrations, notes, index. $32.00.)

William Trotter has written extensively on African American history and particularly on the African American working class. Furthermore he had made significant contributions to the history of the Appalachian and Ohio River Valley areas. He is well qualified to offer a synthesis of the literature on African American life in the Ohio Valley, which is exactly his purpose in River Jordan. The book is part of the Ohio River Valley Series by the University Press of Kentucky. The purpose of the series is to "celebrate the story" of the Ohio River and the immediate region "through multiple voices and visions," and to that end Trotter's work is a valuable contribution (p. xi). The role of the Ohio River was particularly important in African American history because it, among other things, served as a boundary between North and South, between freedom and slavery. The Ohio River valley also offers fertile ground for another of Trotter's favorite themes, the transformation in African American life that accompanied industrialization. Thus central to the study of African American life in the region is the migration of blacks from agricultural to industrial work.

Within the regional context, Trotter sets for his study three themes: (1) the role of black workers in the rise of industrial capitalism, (2) the emergence of a black middle class, and (3) to highlight the "similarities and differences in the social history of the Ohio Valley cities" as it relates to African American life (p. xiv). Trotter examines Pittsburgh, Louisville, Cincinnati, and Evansville as case studies. He organizes the book chronologically, beginning in 1790 with an examination of commercial and early industrial capitalism and concluding in 1945 with the industrial age.

Trotter successfully places the Ohio Valley region within a national context and pays particular attention to the variety of the urban experience. Here his ability to contrast northern cities, Pittsburgh being the best example, with southern cities, Louisville being the best example, is valuable as African Americans dealt with differences in economic development and in racial attitudes among the white population. Trotter's examples, however, also point to

TOP5

weaknesses in the existing literature on the Ohio River Valley. Trotter focuses on the movement to urban areas and industrial work. Notably missing, and in all fairness to Trotter outside the scope of his book, is an examination of African American life beyond the urban environment. We need to know more about the people before they moved to the cities. While well-versed in the African American literature and making good use of the literature on industrialization, Trotter does not incorporate literature on regionalism or regional identity that could have offered some additional insights.

River Jordan is a good overview of the topic; however, general readers might be somewhat put off by his use of historical jargon. While generally the book is readable, nonacademic readers might struggle with such sentences as "Rooted deeply in the social forces unleashed by the intensification of capitalist development, anti-black sentiment and social practices emerged above and below the Ohio River" (p. 24).

Trotter successfully synthesizes the work on the urban life of African Americans. River Jordan is an excellent book for those looking for an introduction to the topic and his citations and bibliography are valuable. An historiographical essay in addition to the analytical narrative would have been valuable. The strength of the book is that Trotter pulls together the rather disparate literature on the Ohio River Valley and in doing so illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of the existing scholarship.

Phillip G. Payne, St. Bonaventure University

Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph Over Adversity, 1822-1865. By Brooks D. Simpson. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000. xix + 5133p.; maps, illustrations, notes, index. $35.00.)

After the relatively recent works by William S. McFeely and Geoffrey Perret, is there a need for yet another biography of Ulysses S. Grant? Grant's saga from antebellum obscurity to the White House has been repeatedly told, yet for all this attention the man himself remains somewhat of an enigma for all of us. As this most recent work demonstrates so well, Grant's biographers continue to struggle with an important question: How had Grant's past of hardscrabble adversity given way during a very short period of fractious civil war to yield the indispensable self-confidence of a victorious commanding general and future president?

In Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph Over Adversity, Brooks Simpson, a professor of history at Arizona State University, seeks to answer this question of how Grant repeatedly overcame misfortune and hardship, describing Grant's upbringing, West Point education, regular army career, string of failures at civilian life, and meteoric rise to army command during the Civil War. As has often been told, Grant's early years and antebellum life outside the military were filled with hardship and failure. But Simpson reveals how the former army captain's struggles in the 1850s left their impressions on many of the talents Grant would call on a decade later to save his country, and helped form the resilience and determination in the face of frustration and failure that allowed the young West Pointer to succeed in the face of great challenges.

As these traits grew to maturity, Grant struggled against many personal

TOP5

demons during his short stint at farming and in his military career, but he had always prevailed in the end. Simpson reveals how the combination of sharp intellect, uncanny common sense, and dogged determination gave Grant the tools that he relied upon later in life. Most of the book tells this story of Grant overcoming obstacles, going beyond the narrative to provide analysis while maintaining objectivity and balance. The high point of the story is the detailed and interesting description of what Simpson labels Grant's greatest test: his struggle in the spring and summer of 1864 to remind the Army of the Potomac who was in charge and to overcome the infamous in-fighting within its officer corps.

As Simpson so ably describes, Grant's military success was based on the general's simple axiom on warfare: "The art of war is simple enough," Grant observed. "Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike at him as hard as you can and as often as you can, and keep moving on" (p. 458). The most intellectually rewarding part of this book for many readers will be in Simpson's masterful assessment of how this approach to warfare enabled Grant to gain Union victories that had eluded so many of his peers.

While not drawing upon any new source materials, Simpson presents a penetrating blend of primary sources and secondary interpretations to reach some interesting and compelling conclusions. If the strength of this book is Simpson's detailed analysis of Grant's character, its weakness lies in its explanation of the context of the times and the complex environment in which Grant lived. Grant's complicated relationship with President Abraham Lincoln deserves the attention it receives, yet how this interaction fit into the national events and political issues of the time draws little explanation. But this may be asking too much, given the extraordinarily rich detail the author already gives his subject. In the end, the strength of this biography rests not only in research and analysis, but also in its readability. Benefiting from a very interesting subject to examine, the book is enjoyable to read and is one of the rare biographies that have good maps and illustrations that directly support the narrative.

Major Thomas Goss, United States Military Academy

Lancaster, Ohio, 1800-2000: Frontier Town to Edge City. By David R. Contosta. (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1999. xx + 333p.; illustrations, notes, bibliographic essay, index. $37.50).

David R. Contosta, professor of history at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia and former resident of Lancaster, Ohio, has written an urban biography of that town to coincide with its bicentennial. At first glance, the book appears to be a nice local history of a place that is not particularly important to those outside of Lancaster. It offers a chronological look at the town, first established in 1800 as a speculative venture along Zane's Trace, through its development into a factory town, to its maturation into a new urban form-that of an edge city. The profusely illustrated book is written for the general public and does a nice job discussing the town's economic, social, and spatial development. It is also well documented, as attested by the thirty-seven pages of footnotes. Although the study embraces significant anecdotal material including a sketch of the town's eccentric, and even though it does pay homage to famous

TOP5

Sons (such as William T. Sherman), it goes beyond a simple inward looking study and connects the Lancaster experience to the larger American context within which it occurred.

Indeed, this book benefits from being written by a professional historian familiar not only with the literature of small-town America but with a commitment to "use" Lancaster to explore larger themes in American history. Unlike studies in the 1920s by sociologists who associated towns with provincialism and portrayed them as largely insulated from broader changes in society, Contosta neatly documents the life of a dynamic entity that clearly was affected by the larger forces shaping American life. One not only learns about Lancaster from this study, but one also gets a glimpse at the changing nature of America through the experience of Lancaster. In this regard, the author is particularly effective in his discussion of the founding of Lancaster and reminds us it was part of the wave of speculative town planning that played such an important role in settling the frontier. Although Lancaster eventually lost out in the race for urban superiority to places like Columbus and Cincinnati, the book documents how the town's dominance of its hinterland made it a significant place in Ohio before the Civil War. The author then explores life in Victorian Lancaster and concludes by looking at the various twentieth-century forces that shaped the town.

One of the larger themes of this book is the impact of transportation technologies on the fate of Lancaster. The author neatly documents the relationship between Lancaster's development starting with its location along Zane's Trace, then the coming of the canals and railroads, to the impact of interurbans and finally automobiles. At first a benefit, these transportation technologies eventually worked against the city by making larger places like nearby Columbus more accessible than earlier. The author also explores the role of technology (as well as some other factors) in shaping the morphology of Lancaster and does a nice job in the latter chapters exploring the emergence of Lancaster as a larger edge city in the Columbus region. Lancaster experienced significant suburbanization even though it had a small black population. The author suggests that transportation technologies and federal government facilitation through FHA loans, rather than racism, are the cause of the suburban push if the Lancaster case is typical.

On the whole this book is successful, providing a localized history connected to larger American themes. However the book is disappointing in its limited treatment of civic leadership and politics. At times the book reads as though Lancaster's fate was completely determined by forces beyond its control, rather than exploring how civic choices played into the town's destiny. Such a criticism aside, this is a nicely done volume that provides insight to life in Lancaster through its two-hundred-year history and brings attention to an understudied component of our history, the American town.

Robert B. Fairbanks, University of Texas at Arlington

TOP5

"Logical" Luther Lee and the Methodist War Against Slavery. By Paul Leslie Kaufman. (Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2000. xvii + 275p.; bibliography, index. $59.50.)

Paul Kaufman brings us an interesting description of Luther Lee which helps us understand his motives and life work. He writes, "Born of pure English stock in the Schoharee Valley of New York, Lee was a true son of the early National period." His parents, from Connecticut, were hardworking souls who knew nothing but grinding poverty, and their son had no reason "to expect anything better than the same lot in life" (p. 1). Luther's formal education was practically nonexistent. By the age of nineteen, his only boast was that he had mastered spelling and grammar and nothing else.

His mother's piety, however, deeply influenced him. He later told that as she read to him in early life the narritive of Freeborn Garrittson, an itinerent Methodist minister who was credited with introducing Methodism into New England, Lee had the distinct impression that someday he would be a minister. After a conversion experience at the age of nineteen, Lee was baptised into the Methodist Episcopal Church and shortly thereafter, he began traveling as a preacher. He married Hannah Williams, his former teacher.

Lured into the Anti-Slavery movement, he began to preach sermons denouncing slave holding. As pressure continued to mount against the abolitionist clergy in the Methodist Episcopal Church, the idea of secession and the formation of an Anti-Slave Church became more widespread throughout New England and beyond. The split within the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society had placed William Lloyd Garrison and his Women's Rights and Anti-Slavery following on a divergent course from the remaining clerical agents of the Society. The Bishops stuck to their "Gag Rule" to stop the ministers' sermons on abolition until the abolitionist ministers broke with the church and established the Wesleyan Connection in 1843.

Lee rendered support to the Womens' Rights movement and preached the ordination sermon for Anita Antoinette Brown who became the first female Congregational minister. He stuck to his Masonic pledge although the Wesleyan Connection had a rule against it. He deserted the Whig Political Party and became an avid follower of the Liberty Party. If he were sent to an underfinanced conference it would be a hardship to his wife and five children, so he left the Wesleyan Connection but continued his work with the Liberty Party and as an Abolitionist lecturer.

When the Protestant clergy started the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Lee helped women abolitionists form a Feminine Anti-Slavery Party and got his wife involved with the Ladies Anti-Slavery Society of Boston.

In May of 1844 the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church convened in New York City. The Southern Conference seceded from the Methodist Episcopal Church over the slavery issue. A little later the Church repealed its "Gag Rule." Luther Lee resigned from the faculty of Adrian College and requested membership in the Detroit Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church from which he had earlier seceded.

As an advocate of Women's Rights, Lee evidenced a solid commitment to reform. He steadfastly argued that blacks, along with white women, were entitled not only to their freedom, but to the right to vote.

Lee was an accomplished debator and writer. His main literary productions

TOP5

were: (1) Theology, (2) Universalism Examined, (3) Immortality of the Soul, and (4) Slavery Examined In the Light of The Scriptures.

The Wesleyan Methodist Church that he molded and fashioned reflected the republicanism that characterized Anti-Bellum thinking. His theology remained true to that of Methodism's founder, John Wesley. Lee's story provides students of the Early National Period with a fresh example of the "New Man, The American" (p. 329).

Victor B. Howard, Morehead State University

Designing a New America: The Origins of New Deal Planning, 1890-1943. By Patrick D. Reagan. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. xii + 362p.; notes, bibliography, index. $40.00.)

Patrick Reagan's Designing a New America focuses on the five individuals who sat on Franklin Roosevelt's National Resources Planning Board (NRPB): academics Charles E. Merriam and Wesley Claire Mitchell; entrepreneurs Frederic Adrian Delano (FDR's uncle) and Henry S. Dennison; and philanthropic manager Beardsley Ruml. Between 1933 and 1943, these men advised Roosevelt on matters ranging from executive branch reorganization to economic mobilization during World War II.

Although a diverse lot, the members of the NRPB shared similar perspectives. Each believed, in varying degrees, that a modern urban-industrial nation required federal planning to deal with issues such as unemployment, resource management, and, broadly speaking, social welfare. Quantification, or even "scientific management" principles, they were persuaded, held out endless possibilities in formulating effective national policies.

Before the advent of the Great Depression, Delano had dealt with the escalating demands for quality living and work space in the growing metropolis while Dennison focused on improving labor conditions for his employees. Merriam and Mitchell collaborated on President Herbert Hoover's path-breaking Research Committee on Social Trends. (Their work led to the publication of Recent Social Trends [1933] which documented the enormous socioeconomic changes that had created a new, unsettling America.) Ruml, as director of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, had a deep purse from which he could fund social policy research and try to influence national politics in the 1920s.

Reagan, following in the pioneering footsteps of Otis Graham, Jr.—Encore for Reform (1967)—and Samuel P. Hays—"The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era" (1964)—looks to the first two decades of the 20th century as a formative period in the intellectual evolution of the New Deal planners. Unlike the pre-World War I "progressives" whom Graham and Hays studied, however, Reagan's men, while not "revolutionaries," ultimately concluded that municipal, state, and federal planners had to bury laissez-faire economics. Many of Graham's reformers, in contrast, had reacted negatively to what they perceived to be coercive New Deal programs while Hays's Pittsburghers would have modestly settled for a city with honest, efficient politicians.

The research undergirding Designing a New America is impressive. Moreover, Patrick Reagan has produced a clearly written tome; no mean

TOP5

achievement given that histories of government policies and the bureaucrats who spawned them tend to be on the mind-crushingly dry side. Designing a New America would be a valuable book for a history seminar focused on social-welfare policies in the first half of twentieth-century America. Undergraduate and graduate political science students would also be well served by reading Reagan.

My only lament is that it would have been fascinating to have seen how rising "grassroots" expectations and extraordinary historical circumstances challenged Patrick Reagan's planners and affected the execution of New Deal social-welfare policies. Such an approach, however, would have required a much longer, and muddier, book. Perhaps the very capable author of Designing a New America might deal with those matters head-on in his second book.

Kenneth J. Heineman, Ohio University-Lancaster

Sherman 's Civil War: Selected Correspondence of William T. Sherman, 1860-1865. Edited by Brooks D. Simpson and Jean V. Berlin. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xx + 948p.; illustrations, notes, chronological list of letters, list of letters by recipient, index. $45.00.)

Few Civil War personalities loom above Ohio's William Tecumseh Sherman. His wartime career certainly is well chronicled. Judged "insane" in late 1861 (for predicting impending doom while in command of the Department of the Cumberland), Sherman reversed his early ill-fortune steadily, and at times brilliantly, throughout the conflict's remaining years. By 1863, the general began to shine militarily under the tutelage of fellow-Ohioan Ulysses S. Grant; the next year, Sherman gained international fame with his epochal march through Georgia. Indeed, Sherman's late-war performance is often considered the key component in the collapse of the Confederacy, and has earned him the sobriquet "Fighting Prophet"—an American architect of hard, modern war.

Curiously, almost a century has passed since the publication of a comprehensive edition of Sherman's correspondence. Previous works suffered from methodological deficiencies, including widespread grammatical alterations, the omission of letters concerning military operations, and the deletion of the general's more controversial prose. The appearance of Sherman 's Civil War is therefore welcome news to scholars and enthusiasts alike. Ably edited and annotated by Brooks D. Simpson and Jean V. Berlin, it encompasses Sherman's entire wartime experience and contains some never-before-published letters, including many in the possession of the Ohio Historical Society. But of signal importance was the editorial decision to reproduce selected items of Sherman's correspondence in their entirety. Past omissions have presented to the reader a sanitized Sherman; the chief virtue of this volume is that it sustains the editors' assertion that the general "was never boring, least so in his letters" (p. xi).

A perusal of the more than 400 letters contained within reveals a singularly intense individual, one who fought as earnestly with his pen as he did on the battlefield. Whether his subject was military policy, politicians, or African American soldiers, Sherman was rarely at a loss for trenchant words. Yet his most vituperative language was naturally often directed at secessionists, whom he knew well owing to his prewar tenure as superintendent of the Louisiana State

TOP5

Seminary and Military Academy. For them he voiced utter scorn. To Daniel Martin, an antebellum friend from Tennessee, he wrote in August 1864:

The South BEGAN the war. You know it. I ... know it.... Had they remained true to the country, I would have resisted, even with arms, any attack on their right-even their slave rights. But when, as a people, they tore down our flag, and spit upon it, and called us cowards ... then I took up arms to ... punish the men who challenged us to the conflict .... Will you say the North is craven and cowardly now? (p. 687)

Ohio's citizens too fell under the general's criticism. Commenting upon the growing peace movement sweeping the state in 1863, Sherman half-playfully offered the use of cannon to help sway the October gubernatorial election in favor of the hard-liners. After the capitulation of Vicksburg in July of that same year, the general noted sadly (and perhaps without warrant) that the campaign's heroes were "Grants, Shermans & McPhersons, all natives of Ohio, and we have yet to See the first honest impulse of thanks or appreciation of our native state" (p. 506). And remembering the personal attacks heaped upon him by Cincinnati editors in December 1861, Sherman called the city's press "puerile" (p. 729). Indeed, the general considered American journalists as a whole "a reproach to a civilized People" (p. 517).

Thorough in illustrating the inner complexities of a colorful and enduring figure, Sherman 's Civil War deservedly takes its place at the forefront of Civil War primary-source titles. As such, it belongs on the bookshelf of all who possess an interest in America's most tragic era.

Christopher S. Stowe, The University of Toledo

Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766. By Fred Anderson. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. xxv + 862p.; illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $40.00.)

Occasionally one reads a book destined to become a classic in its field. Fred Anderson's Crucible of War is such a contribution to historical literature. Lawrence Henry Gipson took fifteen volumes to describe what he called "The Great War for the Empire" and its consequences. Anderson narrates the same time span in one long one. In one sense both historians are from the imperial school that approaches the period from the perspective of the British Empire and of the problems of management of the North American world. But Anderson is more sympathetic to the Native Americans' plight and the colonists' ambitions than Gipson ever was. Anderson also benefits from a half-century of scholarship that Gipson never witnessed. Hence, we have in this volume both a new view of the Seven (really nine) Years' War, 1754-63, and its aftermath on the one hand, and a synthesis of recent historical writing on the other.

Anderson, of the University of Colorado, clearly fits into the contingency school of historians who avoid the inevitability of history and concentrate on the nuances of events and the clash of personalities and ideas that point to unexpected outcomes. In other words, American independence was not foreordained, but rather the consequence of this critical struggle for control of a continent and the governance of an enlarged empire. In avoiding the tyranny of

TOP5

hindsight, he offers "a closely focused narrative of events that did not imply or anticipate revolutionary change: events driven by military necessity, chance, miscalculation, desperation, hope, fear, patriotism, hatred, and all the other chaotic corollaries of war" (p. xxii). Such an approach is not new. In 1884, Francis Parkman lamented the concentration on subsequent conflicts and the neglect of this one. But Anderson deals with the topic with a subtlety, irony, and drama not found in previous studies.

Although his prose may lack some of the verve that marks Parkman's masterpieces, Anderson has a literary style that engages both scholars and the general public. For example: "If Occam's Razor could shave historians' arguments as handsomely as it does those of logicians, this [military] factor might fully account for the fall of Canada; but it does not" (p. 454).

Of course the centerpiece of this book is the 1759 Anglo-French encounter on the Plains of Abraham outside Quebec. Anderson argues the Marquis de Montcalm insisted on the military principle of concentration and rejected using Indian auxiliaries. Such a policy allowed the Anglo-Americans to focus on a few critical objectives rather than disperse their forces to protect the vulnerable frontiers from New England to Virginia. Slowly but surely the noose tightened around the St. Lawrence valley—Forts Frontenac, Duquesne, and Louisbourg fell in 1758 and the Royal Navy's victory at Quiberon Bay in November 1759 delivered a decisive defeat to the French fleet that insured no reinforcements would arrive to save New France in 1760.

In Anderson's estimation, General James Wolfe made his famous climb up the L'Anse au Foulon toward his meeting with Montcalm in the expectation of death leading a gallant, but futile charge against superior French forces. As he explains in an endnote, Anderson's analysis is based on "a substantial degree of speculation ... for we cannot know Wolfe's state of mind or his plans for the assault" (p. 789). Instead, Wolfe dies achieving victory over Montcalm and Canada becomes a British colony. It is this willingness to go to the edge of the envelope of historical documentation that makes this effort so fascinating.

The last third of Anderson's masterpiece concentrates on the consequences of the achievements of Wolfe and his contemporaries. The Peace of Paris of 1763 made the British Empire far more geographically, culturally, politically, and economically diverse than that which existed a decade earlier. In a series of reform measures designed to centralize and rationalize imperial governance—the Proclamation of 1763, the American Duties Act, the Currency Act, the Stamp Act, and the Quartering Act—His Majesty's Government slowly alienated its North American colonists who contributed significantly to the war's successful outcome.

One must also compliment publisher A. A. Knopf for a willingness to provide such an extraordinarily handsome volume with its exquisite maps by David Lindroth and its many illustrations, mostly from the W. L. Clements Library of the University of Michigan.

A short review cannot fully explore the insights of such a work. It is narrative history at its descriptive and analytical best. For those wishing to explore the First British Empire at its zenith and the origins of the American Revolution, this is the place to begin.

David Curtis Skaggs, Bowling Green State University

TOP5

Visions of the Western Reserve: Public and Private Documents of Northeastern Ohio, 1750-1860. Edited by Robert A. Wheeler. (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2000. xv + 36Op.; illustrations, maps. $60.00.)

The Western Reserve in northeast Ohio is one of the state's most distinctive cultural regions. The area was created in 1786 when Connecticut, in exchange for relinquishing its claims to land throughout the remainder of the Northwest Territory, retained the region extending 120 miles west from the Pennsylvania border and lying between Lake Erie and the forty-first parallel. Although Connecticut eventually sold its interest in the region to a syndicate of private investors, the area was settled predominantly by New Englanders and the region's unique New England character deeply influenced Ohio's subsequent cultural, economic, and political development throughout the nineteenth century.

In Visions of the Western Reserve: Public and Private Documents of Northeastern Ohio, 1750-1860, Robert A. Wheeler, professor of history and director of the University Center for Teaching and Learning at Cleveland State University, has mined the collections of the Western Reserve Historical Society to compile twenty-seven firsthand accounts that describe the region between 1755 and the early 1860s. These accounts, claim Wheeler, "represent the changing perceptions that contemporaries had of the region and its prospects." Taken together, they form "a patchwork of the prevailing opinions and perceptions of the region and its people in its formative years" (pp. xiii, 3). Wheeler places these documents into one of four broad time periods: the presettlement era of the late eighteenth century; the pre-canal era prior to 1820; the ensuing period of rapid economic growth engendered by the canals; and a period of economic maturity lasting from about 1 850 to the outbreak of the Civil War. The volume opens with a well-written, useful introduction, and each section also begins with a focused overview. Likewise, Wheeler provides context for every account by beginning each with a brief description of both the document and its author. Maps and illustrations give further insight into the documents and the events they describe throughout the volume.

Wheeler has selected a diverse, wide-ranging, and always fascinating collection of documents. Within these pages one encounters Indian missionaries, Indian captives, explorers, speculators, settlers, farmers, canal boatmen, merchants, preachers, men, women, children, immigrants and native born, free blacks, those who have come to stay, those who are just passing through, those who love and admire the region, and those who wish fervently that they were anywhere else. Some of these selections will be familiar. Henry Howe's description of Summit County, for example, can probably be found in every library in Ohio. Likewise, both the James Smith captivity narrative and John Heckewelder's A Narrative of the United Brethren among the Delaware and Mohegan Indians have gone through numerous editions. But many of the others have been published only once and are extremely difficult to obtain. A quick check of the statewide OhioLINK library catalogue found only one bound and four microform copies of Zerah Hawley's 1822 Journal of a Tour, none of which circulate. Still others within this collection exist only in manuscript form. Wheeler is to be commended for assembling a first-rate collection that also allows many of these accounts to be read by a wide audience for the first time.

Visions of the Western Reserve is an important addition to the literature dealing with Ohio's early political, social, and economic development. It can be

TOP5

particularly useful if used in conjunction with standard works such as Harry Lupold and Gladys Haddad's Ohio's Western Reserve: A Regional Reader. Two factors, however, both the responsibility of the Ohio State University Press and not the editor's, seriously undermine this volume's worth. Although the table of contents lists both a bibliography and an index, neither was in the copy that I was given to review (although pages 49 through 80 were duplicated). Whether the omissions are by design or error, the lack of both will limit the volume's usefulness to most serious scholars. Secondly, the volume's sixty dollar price should give faculty members of conscience pause before assigning it in most undergraduate classes.

Larry L. Nelson, Ohio Historical Society

The GI Generation: A Memoir. By Frank F. Mathias. (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2000. xiii + 267p.; illustrations, $25.00.)

The GI Generation by Frank Mathias is an affectionate and nostalgic memoir by a former University of Dayton history professor that recounts his growing up during the 1930s in Carlisle, Kentucky, a small town with a population of 1,500 in the Upper Ohio Valley. Despite the title, the book has very little to say about the Second World War or those who fought it, except that Mathias often mentions which of his boyhood pals eventually saw action, including a number who met their deaths. Instead, the book offers a pleasant portrait of an almost idyllic boyhood of the son of a wholesale store salesman and schoolteacher.

This area of Kentucky suffered none of the ravages of the coal-mining regions and, according to Mathias, he barely knew there was a depression while he was growing up. Like many rural and small-town people during the 1930s, his family found various ways to support themselves including owning a filling station, curing hams, and growing homegrown tomatoes. There appears to always have been plenty of food on the table, and no one seems to have suffered much either economically or psychologically. Mathias notes at one point: "I think my generation generally took a casual view of the Depression, dismissing it whenever possible, like certain disagreeable aspects of school and religion. Perhaps we were too young to do otherwise" (p. 140). The author does offer a highly sympathetic account of the Civilian Conservation Corps camp in his area that provided work to unemployed urban youth. His family is supportive of FDR and the New Deal, as are most residents of this rock-ribbed Democratic Party region, but politics and national or international issues do not figure much in this account. This, of course, is Mathias' central point. In this area, people's lives were still determined by local concerns and issues, though chain stores did threaten his father's livelihood.

Even the fact that Mathias' family is Roman Catholic in this Protestant stronghold does not disturb the generally good relations that exist among neighbors and townspeople. The Klan once had support in this region but anti-Catholicism had faded. There are class divisions but they rarely cause much tension. There is only a tiny African American population. There are no Jews though Mathias becomes aware of their existence when he visits Cincinnati.

Grown men often have fond memories of their boyhoods and Mathias is no exception.Good timesabound especiallyduringsummer when Mathiasenjoys

TOP5

fishing, swimming, summer camp, and visiting wealthier relatives in Marysville, Ohio. Locals are constantly playing pranks on one another. (Mathias often places dialog he could not possibly remember in quotation marks, a technique some may question.) Above all, Mathias loves playing the alto sax, and he eventually finds a spot with a swing band. His fondness for music may have saved his life as it determined his role in the army. His boyhood ends when Mathias graduates from high school in 1943 and is drafted. This is when the book ends.

Mathias is neither particularly introspective nor analytical. This book offers quite a contrast to the portrayal of the Depression in a work such as Russell Baker's Growing Up. Its greatest appeal will probably be to those who come from this area of Kentucky or similar regions. For people who fit this description, it will bring back a rush of memories. Other readers may find it entertaining but it may not add much to their overall understanding of the 1930s.

David J. Goldberg, Cleveland State University

Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America. Edited by John R. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1999. ix + 332p.; notes, selected bibliography, index, $30.00.)

This volume includes ten essays written by authors ranging from established authorities to beginning scholars. While all of the contributions are of acceptable quality, naturally the strengths vary. Besides tying together the book's essays, the introductory chapter by the editors includes a helpful discussion of the downs and ups of the abolitionists' reputations in the writings of twentieth-century historians. Special attention is given to a willingness to endorse violent means to attack slavery, a tendency which according to the chapter increased during the 1850s.

Part I of the book deals with "Black Liberators," the slave rebels whose challenges to the system fascinated many white abolitionists. Douglas R. Egerton and Junius Rodriguez argue convincingly for the inspiration of the slave revolt in Haiti as encouraging the well-known Gabriel conspiracy in Virginia and the revolt above New Orleans not long after the Louisiana Purchase. Rodriguez sees the latter as much more serious than often portrayed. Stanley Hanold effectively demonstrates how the abolitionists romanticized the slave revolt in 1841 aboard the American coastwise slave ship Creole. The very name of the successful rebel leader, Madison Washington, facilitated comparisons with the whites of the American Revolutionary generation! Carol Wilson shows well how the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 stimulated many abolitionists, both black and white, to advocate and practice violent resistance, with an especially effective treatment of the Christiana Riot in Pennsylvania. James H. Cook provides an excellent analysis of the relationship between Frederick Douglass's rhetorical violence and his willingness to engage in "real" violence. Perhaps inevitably Cook does not fully explain seeming contradictions.

The second part of the book focusing on white abolitionists and violent means is likely to be of particular interest to readers of this journal because of its stress on residents of Ohio. James Brewer Stewart begins with an outstanding

TOP5

discussion of the advocacy of antislavery violence by Joshua Giddings, United States congressman from Ashtabula. He shows how it began as early as Giddings's sympathy for the escaped slaves fighting beside the Indians in the Seminole Wars, and how Giddings's stance related to the increasingly polarized congressional culture. Chris Padgett's essay explains how religious enthusiasm in the Western Reserve lent righteousness to violent resistance to the recapture of fugitive slaves culminating dramatically in the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue. On the basis of rather thin evidence, Kristen A. Tegtmeier argues that the free state women of "Bleeding Kansas" were willing both to advocate and practice violence. In an interesting if not wholly convincing essay, John Stauffer contends that several abolitionists, including John Brown, compared their resistance to slavery to that offered by "symbolic" Indians. John R. McKivigan brings the book to a strong conclusion by revealing that many (but not all) of John Brown's followers continued to support his methods after the failure of the Harpers Ferry conspiracy, even to contemplating other raids.

Antislavery Violence will of course be of interest to students of nineteenthcentury reform, especially abolitionism. But it should also be attractive to anyone who wishes to understand the sectional divisions that led to the great Civil War.

Frank L. Byrne, Kent State University

The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890s: Essays on Labor and Politics. Edited by Richard Schneirov, Shelton Stromquist, and Nick Salvatore. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. 258p.; illustrations, notes, index. $49.95 cloth; 18.95 paper.)

For the past sixty or so years, historians have viewed the Pullman strike and the ensuing boycott as pivotal events in the formation of modern America. The 1894 strike helped foster class consciousness among the nation's workers, spur Federal regulation of industrial relations, transform the role of the national judiciary, usher in a period of Republican ascendancy, and motivate the Progressive reformers who worked to create modern liberalism. The essays in this volume do little to undermine these traditional interpretations, but they add depth and complexity to our understanding of these changes by incorporating current methodologies and approaches into a narrative that was largely written by progressive school historians. Like most edited volumes, some of the essays are better than others. This review will focus on the best.

Janice L. Reiff's "A Modern Lear and His Daughters: Gender in the Model Town of Pullman" uses gender analysis to understand the shift of public sympathy away from the strikers. Reiff argues that George Pullman's model industrial town was built upon two paternalistic relationships. The first was between Pullman and his employees and their families, while the second was between the male Pullman workers and their families. When Pullman abandoned his paternal responsibilities by cutting pay, raising rents, and refusing to negotiate with striking workers, the public sided with the workers and their families who were seen as passive victims of economic changes beyond their control. But as the strike continued women played increasingly public roles by harassing strikebreakers and marching on picket lines. The women's public role

TOP5

violated gender norms, and the public perception of both the women and the strike began to change. No longer seen as helpless victims, women were portrayed as "Amazons" thwarting the efforts of strikebreakers to provide for their families.

Melvyn Dubofsky's "The Federal Judiciary, Free Labor, and Equal Rights" uses the judicial proceedings surrounding Pullman to argue against the trend among legal and labor scholars to view the law as mostly autonomous—that language and the rules of legal culture existed and functioned apart from public opinion. Instead, he offers what he calls a "mixed" interpretation. While court rulings surrounding Pullman were based on established judicial precedents and rules, they also reflected a larger societal consensus which valued the right of individuals to enter into contracts to sell their labor. Dubofsky argues convincingly that without broad public support the impact of the Pullman rulings would have been greatly diminished.

Perhaps of most interest to those who study Ohio history will be Shelton Stromquist's "The Crisis of 1 894 and the Legacies of Producerism." Stromquist argues that the Pullman strike and two events in which Ohioans played important roles—the 1894 United Mine Workers' strike and the American Federation of Labor's 1894 convention—formed a crucible in which different strands of producerism and republicanism were thrown into conflict, transformed, and recombined. He concludes that trade unionists were able to survive the crisis by forming alliances with social reformers and that these alliances became the foundation of modern liberalism. More radical producerists found themselves marginalized.

Focusing on Chicago's labor movement in the 1890s, Richard Schneirov's "Labor and the New Liberalism in the wake of the Pullman Strike" covers much of the same ground as Stromquist. But where Stromquist focuses on the interplay of different strands of producerism, Schneirov emphasizes the emergence of what he calls New Liberalism. Scholars have seen the triumph of liberalism as ushering in an era of corporate dominance and foreclosing the emergence of a more democratic nation in which producers enjoyed genuine political power. Schneirov challenges this notion insisting that in their quest to rationalize the competitive market and produce social harmony Chicago's organized workers helped to forge a liberal order in which organized labor accepted the legitimacy of large corporations and looked to collective bargaining to solve labor disputes. Rather than being passive victims, workers were among the creators of the New Liberalism.

As a whole, the essays in the volume provide a nuanced and sophisticated analysis of the political and social changes brought about by the Pullman strike and the crisis of the mid-1890s. However, since many of the essays focus on the Chicago area, I doubt if all of the changes described hold true for Ohio or other areas. Columbus's and Cleveland's labor movements, for example, did not embrace the type of liberalism that Schneirov sees as emerging in Chicago. On this front further investigation needs to be done.

Michael Pierce, University of the Ozarks

TOP5

The Union Must Stand: The Civil War Diary of John Quincy Adams Campbell, Fifth Iowa Volunteer Infantry. Edited by Mark Grimsley and Todd D. Miller. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2000. xxiii + 267p.; maps, illustrations, notes, index, appendix. $38.00.)

Diaries of Civil War veterans abound and many have made their way to publication. However, few diarists thought deeply about the cause of the conflict and the major social and political implications that the war held for the nation. Fortunately, The Union Must Stand is not one of those diaries and students of the Civil War owe a great debt to Mark Grimsley and Todd D. Miller for their editorial work in bringing this diary to publication.

John Quincy Adams Campbell, born in Ripley, Ohio, had moved to Jasper county Iowa shortly before the war began. A newspaper editor by trade, Campbell almost instinctively noticed and recorded events around him. The devout faith of his mother and the abolitionist ideology of his Ripley neighbor John T. Rankin strongly influenced young Campbell's moral and political attitudes. Throughout his life he would abhor the twin evils of alcohol and slavery.

Campbell enlisted in the Fifth Iowa regiment in July 1 861 as a private and eventually rose to lieutenant. Among the major engagements that Campbell participated in were battles at Island No. Ten, luka, Corinth, Vicksburg, and Missionary Ridge. The unit served garrison duty in the Union rear during the Atlanta campaign. Campbell's moralistic outlook made him unpopular with his fellow soldiers and probably prevented his rise to higher rank. Because of his father's death in 1 864 Campbell resigned his commission and returned home to attend to family matters. After the war he moved to Bellefontaine, Ohio, and served as the local newspaper editor. He remained active in the local temperance movement and civic affairs.

A topic of growing interest among Civil War scholars deals with combat motivation. Why do soldiers fight? Older studies by historians such as Bell I. Wiley argued that Civil War soldiers were essentially apolitical and cared little for ideology. John Quincy Adams Campbell was anything but apolitical. Campbell knew he fought for the high ideological goal of ending slavery and frequently commented on the political issues. He frequently wrote letters home discussing current political issues and the Ripley Bee published several of these.

Grimsley and Miller have done an excellent job of editing the diary. The editors include an informative introduction along with a shorter chapter introduction. The editors provide biographical and historical background in the notes to people and events mentioned in passing in the journal. They also include clear maps of the major campaigns. Grimsley and Miller also include Campbell's published letters to the Ripley Bee.

Civil War readers who want to examine more deeply the underlying motivation for volunteering, for unit cohesion, and the interplay between politics and military events will enjoy this work. I feel that The Union Must Stand will join the classics of Civil War diaries and should be on the bookshelf of most Civil War readers.

Damon R. Eubank, Campbellsville University

TOP5

For Honor, Glory & Union: The Mexican & Civil War Letters of Brig. Gen. William Haines Lytle. Edited by Ruth C. Carter. (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1999. xiv + 244p.; illustrations, notes, appendices, bibliography, index. $27.50.)

William Haines Lytle was the favored son of an elite Cincinnati family and a man of many talents. Though possessing little real military experience, he proved to be an effective and inspiring commander during the Civil War. But readers looking for a detailed account of his campaign experiences will likely be disappointed, for Lytle wrote remarkably little about the wars in which he was involved. The value of these letters, rather, lies in what they reveal concerning the world of a wealthy, influential family in mid-nineteenth-century Ohio.

At age seventeen Lytle graduated from Cincinnati College and began to study law. He was restive, however, and in September 1847, against the wishes of his family, he enlisted in the Second Ohio Infantry. By the time Lytle actually reached Mexico the fighting had halted, and his experiences there were confined almost entirely to occupation duties. Thus, aside from brief descriptions of guerrilla raids and camp life, Lytle wrote mostly of the country around him. He was a thoughtful observer with great descriptive abilities, and his portraits of Vera Cruz, Pueblo, and Jalapa were detailed and vivid. Lytle found Mexico quite beautiful, but he condemned the supposed corruption of the government and repressive influence of the Catholic Church. Lytle concluded that only under a democratic, beneficent government could the Mexican people prosper, and he called for the U.S. to absorb the whole country.

Lytle returned home in June 1 848 and for a time settled down. Though he never married, he joined a law firm, helped manage the family business, served several terms in the Ohio legislature, and wrote poetry and essays. Despite his successes, Lytle remained dissatisfied, and when the fighting began in April 1861 he immediately volunteered. Lytle subsequently campaigned in western Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama, was wounded twice, and was promoted to brigade and then division commander in the Army of the Cumberland. He died leading a counterattack at the Battle of Chickamauga.

Most of Lytle's Civil War letters were directed to his two sisters and to older relatives, and he seems to have deliberately shielded his family from the grimness of the war. Generally Lytle wrote of daily affairs and light topics: his living arrangements; problems with his servants; the condition of his horses; visits with relatives in Kentucky and Tennessee; and occasional romantic interests. Lytle was deeply attached to his large family, and he sympathized with their difficulties, mourned the death of several older relatives, and closely followed events at home. Lytle was somewhat freer in discussing the politics of the conflict. Though he called for the vigorous prosecution of the war until the South had fully capitulated, he condemned officers who tolerated plundering and favored lenient and generous peace terms. As Carter notes, these views no doubt reflected Lytle's Democratic politics, rigid code of honor, and Southern connections.

Lytle exhibited a number of traits that many readers may find unattractive. Despite the fact that his sisters were grown women, with husbands and children of their own, Lytle continued to play the role of a father, calling them "dear girls," giving unsolicited advice, and helping them manage their affairs. He was equally paternalistic and condescending toward his personal servants and toward

TOP5

the few freedmen he encountered, being by turns amused and irritated at their difficulties, mannerisms, and conversation. Further, like many other Civil War officers, Lytle frequently complained of delays in his promotion and several times threatened to resign. But Lytle was also unusually literate and observant, and he was devoted to his men and to the cause of the Union. Careful readers will find in these letters rich insight into the mindset of a privileged, gifted man and the world in which he lived.

Noel Fisher, Columbus, Ohio

Cincinnati in 1840: The Social and Functional Organization of an Urban Community during the Pre-Civil War Period. By Walter Stix Glazer. (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1999. xxii + l84p.; notes, index, illustrations. $40.00 cloth; $18.95 paper.)

Four decades ago historian Richard C. Wade reminded Americans that along with the frontier there was also an urban West. Crucibles of cultural baggage, cities were among the first locations to develop in the settlement process, places Wade succinctly termed the "spearheads of the frontier." Like the frontier, cities were forged by what Daniel Boorstin has called the "American Diaspora," the urban quest for place.

Cincinnati in 1840 is a seminal, highly readable examination of urban social pluralism and socioeconomic mobility in the antebellum West. A 1960s case study in Jacksonian urban democracy, Glazer's doctoral research chronicles the effect rapid urban growth had on the consciousness of an American city. The framework and resulting models of his thesis have broader applications. Essentially, Glazer's community framework hinges on ideology, demography, social structure, and voluntary association and civic leadership. Boundless boosterism, what Daniel Aaron aptly called the "eternal wail" of urban promise, where every city had pretensions of greatness, was woven into the very fabric of the Queen City's community identity.

Glazer's quantitative research profiles for the first time Cincinnatians as well as Cincinnati. Drawing on manuscript census, tax rolls, newspaper lists, and a fortuitously detailed 1840 city directory, Glazer constructs a magnetic field model of the city's adult white male population. Admittedly, some readers may be unmoved to learn "immigration was the foundation of development" (p. 47), or that the majority of boarders were single young men, and pauperism was confined to Germans and transients. Occupational unity and group assimilation, evidenced through the "Buckeyes" and the German "Zwanzigers" and "Dreissigern," proved difficult. By 1840 Cincinnati was the nation's fifth densest city and its first German urban center. More revealing, though, we learn only one-tenth of the population were "Yankees" and a remarkably low proportion of its citizens were children and elderly. The "vitality, volatility and variety" of Cincinnati's mobile population living side by side a geographically stable populace was a microcosm of westward expansion (p. 72).

Around 1840, when the fifty-year-old city emerged from river town to a more raucous, heterogeneous urban center, the horizontal demographics were increasingly divided by what Glazer describes as "the masses and the classes." The city's natural axis more and more was artificially based on property and

TOP5

occupational distinctions, which fostered patterns of segregation based along racial and occupational class lines. Remarkably, nearly one-third of the city's total population worked in some occupation, the highest proportion of any major American city in 1840. Sixty percent of laborers were shopkeepers and mechanics, adding credence to Daniel Aaron's 1942 doctoral thesis that Cincinnati was not so much a frontier city, or a western city, but a commercial city. Provisioning, manufacturing and property investment formed the economic engine. Indeed Cincinnati's industriousness fostered its cherished image as that of a "city of self-made men." Yet Glazer and Aaron show that while the common perception was that mechanical employment led men to independence and wealth, evidence suggests accumulation of capital through shrewd property investment marked the road to success.

Amidst all the booster rhetoric of the era, the great majority of Cincinnatians did not own property in 1840, and there were increasing signs of disorder. John Teaford has also noted the Queen City was a place of limited promise for poor residents and African Americans living one step above slavery. Many immigrants may have changed their locale but not their station in society. Cincinnati in 1840 also tells the story of the commercially well heeled, a minority of activists or "power elite" who formed loose "interlocking directorates," principally between the banks, benevolent organizations, and city council (p. 142). For others below the salt voluntary associations gave people an opportunity to get involved in guilds, clubs, and singing societies. The informality of these associations gave way during the 1840s to more formal institutions such as political parties and paid municipal services.

In the final analysis Glazer counters Turner and reaffirms Wade's thesis that frontier cities were characterized more by imitation than innovation. Cincinnatians were like other Americans, representing all that was good and bad, shaped by the practices and pluralistic pressures of a growing city. Still, there did emerge a growing heartland consciousness, a shared value of urban and regional togetherness that influenced attitudes and character. Glazer's work joins Daniel Aaron's Queen City of the West, 1819-1838 and Steven Ross's Workers on the Edge as major contributions to our knowledge and understanding of pre-Civil War Cincinnati.

Stephen C. Gordon, Ohio Historical Society

Ohio on the Move: Transportation in the Buckeye State. By H. Roger Grant. (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2000. xx + 2l0p.; illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $36.00 cloth; $17.95 paper.)

In 2003, the state of Ohio will celebrate the bicentennial of its admission into the federal union. As part of its observance of this significant event, the state created a Bicentennial Commission, which in turn has funded the publication of a series of books on various aspects of Ohio history. Among them is this study of the evolution of different transportation modes and the impact and significance of transportation to the history of the Buckeye State. Wisely, the editors selected the well-known historian and prolific writer, H. Roger Grant, to undertake the task. He has met the challenge in exemplary fashion.

Grant has organized the book into seven chapters, each dealing with a specific

TOP5

mode of transportation: Roads and Highways, River and Lake, Canals, Railroads, Electric Interurban Railways, Urban Transit, and Airways. Using an extensive array of sources, Grant has woven a colorful tapestry of the endless quest of Ohioans to move about, within their state and beyond. Each chapter is organizaed chronologically, and contains the basic events pertaining to that form of transporation. Statistical data, anecdotes, and important developments of each mode are colorfully described. In each chapter, Grant draws conclusions and places the specific transit mode in the context of the overall growth of Ohio and in relation to the other, often competing, types of travel.

Some topics, such as railroads and trolley companies, have been treated extensively in the literature, and Grant draws from them. In other cases, much less secondary literature is available, but the author has done original research in order to uncover basic facts. In either event, the subject is treated with a mixture of broad themes and fascinating detail that easily carries the reader along. The analyses and conclusions presented tie the different modes together in a comprehensive overview of the Buckeye State's transportation network.

Grant is an excellent writer, and his prose makes the book a pleasure to read. Even more importantly, he is an outstanding historian who knows how to handle facts in such a manner that they convey interest and meaning. The book is well designed and laid out; there are more than fifty illustrations, including several maps of transit arteries. Copious notes and a bibliography guide the interested reader to the sources but do not impede the flow of the text. A comprehensive index makes the book a handy reference work as well.

The location of Ohio, west of the mountains and situated between Lake Erie and the Ohio River, guaranteed it an important place in the constellation of the states, but its internal transportation routes, both north-south and east-west, gave it even greater significance. Although today most people think of transportion in terms of road or air, Grant reminds us of the other forms that still play a major role, such as lake, river, and rail, as well as recalling forms that have fallen into disuse, such as canals and electric railways.

Ohioans have many reasons to be proud of their state as it approaches its third century in the union, but underlying them all is the capacity to move people and goods. In this engaging volume, Grant has provided much sound information to buttress the state's claim to greatness.

James N. J. Henwood, East Stroudsburg University

TOP5

County Courthouses of Ohio. By Susan W. Thrane, with photographs by Tom and Bill Patterson. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. 262p; glossary, selected bibliography, illustrations.)

County courthouses, enduring sentinels of civic duty and community pride, command special attention. Susan Thrane has compiled a richly formatted historical, architectural, and pictorial homage to these monuments of Ohio's county government. What distinguishes this nearly three- and- a-halfpound volume from previous works is its superior quality, most notably the rich color photos and crisp, glossy layout. Each of Ohio's eighty-eight county courthouses is depicted chronologically through concise historical narratives and at least two, and in most cases a half dozen, full frame exterior and detail photographs. Coverage of building interiors, courtrooms, and furnishings is a novel, welcome aspect of the book. The author, a practicing attorney and self-described preservationist, covers familiar ground with brevity and vitality. The text is bracketed by a layman's overview of county government and a helpful architectural glossary. Entries are peppered with historical anecdotes and black and white historical images, while misguided examples of insensitive alterations, or "remuddlings," offer readers tangible reminders for vigilant preservation. As Butler County Common Pleas Court Judge George Elliott aptly notes, county courthouses should aspire to something better than "contemporary motel decor" justice, a point this book effectively sustains.

Stephen C. Gordon, Ohio Historical Society

Centennial Buckeye Cookbook. Compiled by the Women of the First Congregational Church of Marysville, Ohio. With Introduction and Appendixes by Andrew F. Smith. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000. xlvii + 352p.)

Begun as a regional project to raise funds for a new church building in Marysville, Ohio, the Centennial Buckeye Cookbook would rise to national prominence as the best-selling American cookbook of its day. Between 1876 and 1905, thirty-two editions were published and more than one million copies sold. Andrew F. Smith's introduction to this reprint of the original 1876 edition offers an enlightening study of the people and circumstances that contributed to the book's remarkable success. In addition to nearly 250 pages of recipes, the reader is given helpful hints concerning duties such as housekeeping, marketing, and caring for the sick, along with advertisements for contemporary household commodities. This Centennial guide to practical living provides the modern observer with an intimate glimpse into the day-to-day affairs of those to whom the book was dedicated: "the plucky housewives of 1876, who master their work instead of allowing it to master them."

Patricia Walsh, Ohio Historical Society

TOP5

Other books received by Ohio History, which might be of interest to our readers, include:

Athens, Ohio: The Village Years. By Robert L. Daniel. (Athens: Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, 1997. xviii + 432p.; illustrations, bibliographic essay, index.)

Selling 'em by the Sack: White Castle and the Creation of American Food. By David Gerard Hogan. (New York: New York University Press, 1997. x + l99p.; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.)

Midwestern Women: Work, Community, and Leadership at the Crossroads. Edited by Lucy Eldersveld Murphy and Wendy Hamand Venet. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. xiv + 276p.; notes, bibliography, index.)

The Business of Charity: The Woman's Exchange Movement, 1832-1900. By Kathleen Waters Sander. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1998. xi + l65p.; illustrations, appendices, notes, index.)

AlabamaNorth: African-American Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915-45. By Kimberly L. Phillips. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999. xv + 334p.; illustrations, notes, index.)