Bruce F. Pauley

June 1941: Hitler and Stalin: Lukacs, John: New Haven: Yale University Press, 169 pp., Publication Date: April 2006

accusations. As to poets, dramatists, and writers of histories when discussing contemporaries or fallen heroes of the past, a writer’s freedom from common accusations was appealed either on the basis of actual truth or the widespread knowledge or errancy already known by the wider community. But once these several demands were met, what was to be said of “intent”? What was to be understood as “truth” when opposed to “manner”? What about the right to one’s good name (“honor”)? Had the medieval norms of “polity” been exercised? Although all litigants expected these obligations, only rarely did a hint of freedom from prepublication censorship surface before 1641, illustrated here in a climax by the author in four unique cases briefly summarized with their suggestion of First Amendment rights. The times were rambunctious; the new era provoked an itch for independence in the populace. Monarchs seemed to be unaffected by it. Henry took off their heads; Mary wrought a horrendous purge; Elizabeth did not like Puritans most of the time; James turned out to be a deft, demanding sovereign; and William suffered regicide. With well-reasoned ingenuity against that backdrop, Shuger distinguishes the foundational warp of one empire against the roof of another, predicting itself a new world waiting for the uncensored works and words of scribes such as us.

Fascists: Mann, Michael: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 440 pp., Publication Date: July 2004

intellectuals’ disillusionment with the government’s treatment of the jury helped usher in the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689, and the English “jury ideology” helped ground the political and legal culture of the early American republic. John M. Mumn argues that the American Revolution disrupted the centralizing momentum of the British Empire and allowed the United States to chart a course of expansion of power throughout the western hemisphere, usually through unopposed commercial development. Such a method of national expansion, he argues, made the United States “exceptional.” William H. Sewell Jr. recovers the importance of the French Revolution, emphasizing its achievement of making the term “nation” a sacred source of sovereignty and providing for equality among citizens and uniformity of the laws throughout the national territory. Sewell suggests that revolutionary nationbuilding in Latin America, Eastern and Central Europe, and eventually Asia owes a heavy debt to the French model. Eric Van Young shifts scholarly attention on the Mexican War for Independence from the Creole elite to indigenous peasants, emphasizing the latter group’s ethnocultural idiosyncrasy and thus the hazard of fitting the Mexican case into a cosmopolitan Atlantic model. In introducing the substantive essays, Jack P. Greene explains the rationale for studies of nationbuilding and concludes that among the revolutions assessed in the book, only the French Revolution, in its transformation of the political and constitutional order on behalf of the nation and a unitary state, fulfills the conventional definition of “political revolution.” Peter S. Onuf concludes the book by reiterating scholars’ need not only to continue historicizing the formation of “nations” but also to recognize the historical relevance of international systems. Such systems, he reminds us, existed well before recent global interdependence: the national self-determination on which nationalists asserted authority in the name of particular peoples was first elaborated in the early modem era’s law of nations. Overall, the essays cohere well. Greene’s and Onuf‘s commentaries and the substantive essays’ references to one another are helpful aspects too often missing from collections of conference proceedings. Each author indicates the orientation of his or her work around Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, the current paradigmatic study of comparative nationalisms and revolutions. Meanwhile, however, Revolutionary Currents suggests a variety of ways to study Atlantic nation-building. None of the essays thoroughly shows how important ideologies spread around the Atlantic, a question well worth considering. Nevertheless, this book will reward graduate and advanced undergraduate students interested in the making of nationalism or Atlantic history.

Germany's War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories: Bartov, Omer: Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press 248 pp., Publication Date: April 2003

especially those of David Irving. In general, he sees Germany’s rearmament in the 1930s as defensive, the takeover of Bohemia in 1939 as a move to anticipate a Soviet air threat, the attack on the USSR in 1941 as preventive, and so forth. He has a right to argue these interpretations, but if he expects to be taken seriously, he must do it with a f m e r grasp of the sources than he demonstrates. In addition, although many will agree with Knell’s condemnation of area bombing it is clear that he fails to recognize adequately the strategic bombing offensive’s contribution to Allied victory as a whole. Finally, there are too many errors of chronology to inspire confidence in Knell’s handling of his material. His manuscript badly needed reading by an expert in the field.

Guilty Victim: Austria from the Holocaust to Haider: Pick, Hella: London: I. B. Tauris, 246 pp., Publication Date: October 2000

In a dauling chronological narrative, University of Suxsex professor Pat Thane offers twenty-four distinctive chapters, each the equivalent of a noteworthy stand-alone monograph, with footnotes and references constituting a virtual library of source material. In one sense. this book is a kairos moment for the author: Just as the world of scholarship was ready lor the Arries history of childhood, so here she paints the same broad picture of aging i n England from Greek and Roman civilization to recent times. With keen insight into the elements of aging-retirement, dependency, poverty, and gender-Thane has fashioned a synthesis at once brilliant and ingenious. Over t M o millennia, work was universally expected arid performed in relation not to age but to capability; hence, little notice was paid to the age of workers. However, as England was approaching nationhood, a series of semipolitical measures emerged under the Tudor-Stuart aegis. Consolidated under Elizabeth 1 (and often persisting in attitudes and percep~ions until Elizabeth II), the enactments came to be known as the Poor Law, whether ”Old” ( 1601) or “New” (1834). For the succeeding three centuries, those statutory measures-aligned with an undeniable, sometimes reluctant, readiness of family and friends IO help-played primary roles in support for elders. I t is of interest for American readers to realize that, as colonists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we carried the same mental furniture, including workhouses, almshouses, and poor farms, all of which horc the same stigma as their prototypes in the motherland. From there forward, Thane’s insightful examination of the family and household structul-c i n early modern England from the somewhat rare three-generational household, to the later “dutiful daughter” of storied heroism, to I hc universal compulsion for independence by older persons themselves. Associated with the ever-present dilemma between the capability to work and the fluctuating availability of employment, retirement heciime a primary issue in the nineteenth a n d twentieth centuries. With her expertise o n the topic already established (see for example her Foundation of‘ the Weyure State), Thane appropriately gives over twothirds of her text to the history and politics of pensions. She elaborates on commission-initiated studies and eventual statutes and charts the evolution from the Poor Laws to the contemporary social security apparatus; yet she holds a steady course in the midst of data-rich reports and parliamentary penchants. Without question, this is a definitive work on the “democratization of retirement” and is enthusiastically recommended to social scientists of all categories but especially to serious students of aging as a historical phenomenon. I am honored to have been party to its early introduction to the public.