Copyright (c) 2009 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/marshall_poe Recent documents in Marshall Poe en-us Wed, 12 Aug 2009 10:00:13 PDT 3600 http://works.bepress.com/marshall_poe/118 http://works.bepress.com/marshall_poe/118 Wed, 12 Aug 2009 09:59:43 PDT You've heard of "Reconstruction," that is, the reform of the South after the Civil War. But have you heard of "Northern Reconstruction?" Probably not. I hadn't either until I read Leslie Schwalm's superb new book Emancipation's Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). We tend to think of the Civil War as a Northern fight against Southern slavery. It was that to some extent. But, in our rush to congratulate ourselves on liberating those in Southern bondage, we tend to overlook the fact that blacks living in the North were treated none too well by the majority white residents. Being anti-slavery didn't mean being pro-African American. In this meticulously researched book, Leslie traces the history of the African American migration to the Upper Midwest (Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota) during and after the war. It's not a very pretty picture. The whites in the area were not at all receptive to the idea that emancipated slaves would live among them. White Midwesterners had deprived African Americans of their civil rights before the war and they had every intention of doing the same after the war. They were hostile to the emancipated migrants and did everything they could to see that they were kept "in their place." That's why even the North had to be "reconstructed." Read this book. It will change what you think, and that can't be said for every history. Marshall Poe http://works.bepress.com/marshall_poe/117 http://works.bepress.com/marshall_poe/117 Wed, 12 Aug 2009 09:59:41 PDT It's a question I've long asked myself: Why and how did common soldiers fight for so long in the First World War? The conditions were awful, death was all around, and there was no real hope of a "breakthrough" that might bring victory. It was simply one long hard slog to nowhere. Why not just give up? Thanks to Alexander Watson's insightful Enduring the Great War. Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914-1918 (Cambridge, 2008) I now have a better understanding of what allowed the common infantryman to hang on. Watson convincingly explains that the remarkable endurance of soldiers was a function psychological coping mechanisms and leadership. The way the war was fought, Watson argues, was almost uniquely disempowering. In the trenches, men could neither fight nor flee. The shells rained down, and there was nothing they could do about it. They felt powerless and, as a result, anxious. To regain some semblance of control, therefore, they used religion, superstition, humor and, more than anything else, a keen understanding of the risks of life on the line to help them persevere. But these mechanisms were not enough. Leadership was also crucial. The right officer could calm men and help them hold fast. The wrong one could do neither. Both the British and Germans had good junior officiers, but Watson explains that the former had a slight edge. The final part of the book argues persuasively that the German army didn't "melt away" in 1918 as has been thought. Rather, it was lead into captivity and defeat by officers who knew that further fighting was useless. Marshall Poe http://works.bepress.com/marshall_poe/116 http://works.bepress.com/marshall_poe/116 Wed, 12 Aug 2009 09:59:39 PDT Ever wonder where the term "populist" came from? It came from "Populism," a nineteenth/early twentieth-century American political movement. Of course the Populists weren't really the "Populists," they were the "People's Party." But even that isn't a very good description. It would be better to call them the "Farmers' Party," because most of them were farmers. Most, but not all. A lot of them were urban types, and particularly union members. All this and more I learned from Charles Postel and his award-winning book The Populist Vision (Oxford, 2007). The Populists have a bad name (as does Populism, for that matter). It seems that historians erroneously branded them "backward-looking" because most of them were, well, farmers, and farmers are always "backward-looking" don't you know. Charles does a terrific job of correcting this libel. The Populists were the farthest thing from "backward-looking." By almost any contemporary measure, they were forward-looking. They favored market rationalization, labor organization, welfare, education, and even the emancipation of women. They also hated the Gold Standard, which is progressive in my book. There were some warts-the Populists generally favored racial segregation, which they viewed as progressive (so did a lot of other folks at the time). But they look pretty good in hindsight. Maybe we need a new People's Party? Marshall Poe http://works.bepress.com/marshall_poe/115 http://works.bepress.com/marshall_poe/115 Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:56:59 PDT Like it or not, governments need to mobilize their populations in times of crisis and one of the ways they do it is to disseminate propaganda. Now this is uncomplicated if you are, say, Stalin and claim to know what's best for everyone and control the media (and most everything else) completely. But what if you are, say, McKinley, Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, or Bush (II) and you don't claim to know what's best for everyone or control the media (or much anything else) completely? What does "propaganda" look like in a liberal democratic context where the government's line can be challenged by you, me and everyone else? This is the important question Susan Brewer addresses in her fascinating new book Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philipines to Iraq (Oxford, 2009). The answer is not simple. American presidents were always running up against citizens–sometimes organized and sometimes not–who simply wouldn't swallow the administration's line about this or that war. Stalin could tell the Ministry of Truth to tell the people what the Truth was; American presidents couldn't. They had to send their messages out into the "Marketplace of Ideas." Sometimes people bought what was on offer (World War II), sometimes they didn't (Vietnam). And Susan does a fine job of telling the whole story. Marshall Poe New books in history http://works.bepress.com/marshall_poe/114 http://works.bepress.com/marshall_poe/114 Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:56:57 PDT Many years ago I had the opportunity to spend a summer in Germany, more specifically in a tiny town on the Rhine near Koblenz. The family I stayed with looked for all the world like typical Rhinelanders. They even had their own small Weingut where they made a nice Riesling. But they were not originally from the Rhinegau at all. They were from East Prussia, a place where there are no longer any Germans and a place that no longer really exists. They commemorated their erstwhile Heimat by keeping a large, old map of East Prussia on their living room wall. If you're curious as to how my host family made the trek from Baltic to the Rhine, you'll want to read Giles MacDonogh's hair-raising book After the Reich. The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (Basic Books, 2007). The atrocities committed by the Nazis are of course very well known to nearly everyone. But the outrages committed by the Allies in retribution for said crimes are less familiar. Giles sets the record straight by chronicling what can only be seen as an Allied campaign of vengeance. They pillaged and raised much of Germany and they raped, massacred, starved, and deported millions of Germans. The Russians were the greatest offenders, but the Americans, British, and French were hardly guiltless. It's hard to know what to think about what they did. The Nazis were monsters, and many ordinary Germans were complicit in their crimes. They deserved punishment. But was justice served? Marshall Poe New books in history http://works.bepress.com/marshall_poe/113 http://works.bepress.com/marshall_poe/113 Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:56:55 PDT My uncle fought in Vietnam. He flew F-105 Thundercheifs, or "Thuds." He bombed the heck out of an area north of Hanoi called "Thud Ridge." He'd come home on leave and tell us that it was okay "over there" and not to worry. I didn't because I was sure "we" would win and my uncle would come home a hero. Of course, neither of these things happened (though my uncle did come home). Since then, I've read many books about the war In an effort to try to figure out "what happened," which is to say why it all went so horribly wrong. But I'd never read one quite like Mark P. Bradley's Vietnam at War (Oxford University Press, 2009). Mark succeeds in doing something very unusual– and perhaps unique– in the American literature on the Vietnam conflict: he shows us the war from the Vietnamese point of view, and more particularly the North Vietnamese point of view. He's mined Vietnamese archives, literature, and popular culture to see the war through Vietnamese eyes, and he's done a marvelous job of it. My uncle's war was very different from the one Mark presents. He fought the "Vietnam War"; they fought the "French War" and the "American War." He saw it from a cockpit; they lived it on the ground, under the bombs. He was in their country; they were in their own country. He was sure he would leave; they were sure they would stay, and grasp victory once the invaders were gone. Now that I think about it, there is something strangely familiar about this story. Marshall Poe New books in history http://works.bepress.com/marshall_poe/112 http://works.bepress.com/marshall_poe/112 Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:56:53 PDT When I was young, I remember going to my high school library (not to study, mind you) and thinking "Who the hell reads all these books? And who writes them?" Just a few years later I found myself enrolling in a graduate program in history to do both. I'd always been interested in history, by which I mean things that go off, blow up, or otherwise maim and kill. Yes, I admit it, my entry point into history was, well, war. But really my historical career (if you can call it that) was more or less an accident caused by my arbitrary assignment to this man in college. I wanted to play basketball; he wanted me to study history. As it happened, I was better at the latter than the former (though I did school Barack Obama once upon a time). My stumble into academic history was far from unique, as you can read in James M. Banner, Jr. and John R. Gillis's interesting book Becoming Historians (University of Chicago, 2009). Not surprisingly, almost no one grows up wanting to be a historian. Astronaut, baseball player, doctor, yes–historian, no. History–and especially hardcore academic history–is clearly an acquired taste. Banner and Gillis asked nine historians born around World War II to explain how they acquired it. The results are fascinating. Let me tell you, academic history ain't what it used to be. If you want to know how and why, read this book. Marshall Poe New books in history http://works.bepress.com/marshall_poe/111 http://works.bepress.com/marshall_poe/111 Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:56:51 PDT When I was in college about a million years ago, we used to sit in bars and talk about the Revolution. Actually, it was this bar and something like this "Revolution." Clearly nothing ever came of our planning (or drinking). But it wasn't always so, as you can learn in Benjamin Carp's remarkable Rebels Rising: Cities in the American Revolution (Oxford UP, 2007; 2009 pbk). When the American colonists got together to talk revolution in taverns, they made revolution. And, as Ben points out, drinking establishments weren't the only revolutionary loci–docks, churches, assembly halls, and ordinary houses also served as locales in which anger against British "tyranny" was stoked and action against the same planned. Ben's book is really about public spaces and how they aid in the process of "mobilization." These are the places where "civil society" moves from fuzzy concept to real thing. This was true in the American Revolution in 1775, and it was true in the Tiananmen Square uprising of 1989. It was not true in the Grinnell College pub circa 1984. Everyone knows that the real revolutionaries hung out at The Forum (which, I'm sad to report, is no longer "The Forum" but an IT building). Marshall Poe New books in history http://works.bepress.com/marshall_poe/110 http://works.bepress.com/marshall_poe/110 Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:56:48 PDT I have a friend who, as a young child, happened to meet Herbert Marcuse, by that time a rock-star intellectual and darling of the American student movement. Upon seeing the man, he exclaimed "Marcuse! Marcuse! You have such a big head!" I don't know how large Herbert Marcuse's head is, but I do know a lot of other interesting things about him and his Frankfurt School buddies now that I've read Thomas Wheatland's wonderful The Frankfurt School in Exile (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). The story Tom tells casts the Frankfurt School in a new (and more correct) light. For one thing, Horkheimer, Adorno, and the rest really were hard-core empirical social scientists in the beginning, not "Critical Theorists" as we understand the term. They counted, measured, conducted surveys and did everything a positivist sociologist or economist would do. But, of course, that was not how they became idols of the New Left and the founders of "Critical Theory." (Now that I think about it, almost no one ever achieves fame by doing empirical social science. See "Malcolm Gladwell" for more.) No, they–or rather Fromm, Marcuse and Habermas–got famous by telling young Americans that they were "repressed," "alienated," and "downtrodden" at exactly the moment they wanted to hear it, that is, the 1960s. You see, the "old" Marxism was dead; this was the "new and improved" version. In other words, they were in the right Critical-Theoretical place and at the right Critical-Theoretical time. And, as Tom points out, they were bewildered and even a bit disturbed by their fame. Despite what my friend said, Marcuse did not get a big head. Rather the opposite. He, much to his credit, told the students he didn't want to be their guru, that he didn't believe in gurus. But they didn't care–they made him one anyway. Students love gurus. I loved Tom Wheatland's book, and I encourage you to read it. Marshall Poe New books in history http://works.bepress.com/marshall_poe/109 http://works.bepress.com/marshall_poe/109 Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:56:46 PDT Marshall Poe History http://works.bepress.com/marshall_poe/108 http://works.bepress.com/marshall_poe/108 Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:56:45 PDT Marshall Poe History http://works.bepress.com/marshall_poe/107 http://works.bepress.com/marshall_poe/107 Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:56:43 PDT Marshall Poe History http://works.bepress.com/marshall_poe/106 http://works.bepress.com/marshall_poe/106 Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:56:41 PDT Marshall Poe History http://works.bepress.com/marshall_poe/105 http://works.bepress.com/marshall_poe/105 Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:56:39 PDT Memorial day is coming up, and maybe you are going to take a little car trip. It might even be a "road trip," one of the great American enterprises (which isn't to say other folks don't take them, but Americans can rightly say they invented this genre of fun). In 1953, Harry and Bess Truman took a road trip in a shiny new Chrysler. Without any secret service protection at all. Harry wanted to see what it was like to be a private citizen again. He did and he didn't, as Matthew Algeo explains in his charming new book Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure. The True Story of a Great American Road Trip (Chicago Review Press, 2009). Even in those days, it was hard for ex-presidents to keep a low profile. Harry and Bess did their best, but people wanted to see them and talk to them. They did. Perhaps that's what Harry wanted all along. It's hard to say. But this much is sure: no American president could do anything similar today. George Bush (either one) can't go to the store to buy a gallon of milk without his "detail," and he probably couldn't get fifty feet from his door without encountering a mix of well-wishers and protesters. Harry and Bess met a horde of the former and none of the latter. The presidency has changed, and so has America. Read all about it in this most readable of books. Marshall Poe New books in history