Elizabeth Blackmar

Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture (review)

Vernon concludes his study by emphasizing the complexity of the origins of the Welfare State. The heroism and sacrifice of the labor movement in the hunger strikes and marches played a less important role than research documenting the causes and extent of hunger and possible solutions, and the calculus of the losses caused by malnutrition against the potential gains to be attained by government and private efforts to alleviate the problem. Vernon’s study is extremely valuable both for his arguments and the large and up-to-date bibliography in his footnotes. I am writing a similar study of Russian and Soviet attitudes toward famine, for which Vernon’s study provides a useful comparison. This comparison, however, raises a point that Vernon did not follow up: the contrast he cites early in his book between the 2,973 people who died in the September 11 2001 terrorist attack and the estimated 24,000 people who died that day, and who die almost every day, from hunger and related diseases throughout the world. Vernon shows that attitudes toward hunger in a country, among officials, specialists, ordinary people, and the poor themselves, help explain why hunger persists and how hunger declines. Implicit in this is the point that the British government was uncorrupt and genuinely committed to alleviating these problems. Attitudes toward hunger and the poor are much more problematic in developing countries. These range from the mendacity of corrupt dictators like Mugabe to the well-intentioned failures like Nyerere’s ujamaa program and the corruption in too many governments. Development specialists have reported how developing country elites and officials express concern for their country’s poor publicly but think privately and act in often quite different ways, but it is often impolitic to raise these issues or even report on them too publicly. Studies like Vernon’s need to be replicated in many other countries both for historical understanding and policy formation.

The American Historical Association, Part 2

with Naziism, in part because of the openly acknowledged homosexuality of Ernst Roehm, head of the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA), and in part because the left saw the masculinist ideology of the right as homoerotic. The contention of both papers that homosexuals were wrong to see the left as their friends when left-wing parties were the only ones consistently to support the removal of legal restrictions on homosexual behavior seems politically shortsighted and anachronistic. All three sessions raised questions concerning the relationship between the values and ideologies of the left and the existence of cultural contradictions that defy the historical leftist analysis of the centrality of class. Particularly in advanced capitalist countries, these cultural contradictions have required and still require more subtle analysis on the part of the left, particularly with regard to struggles over ethnic and gender issues.