The political work of Northern women writers and the Civil War, 1850-1872

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John M. Grammer

In a group of five biographical and critical sketches that cover the period from 1810 to 1861, John M. Grammer explores the process by which "the South" was created as a concept in American culture. Three of the five Virginians Grammer examines were politicians with a literary bent - John Taylor, John Randolph, and Nathaniel Beverley Tucker. The other two, George Fitzhugh and Joseph Glover Baldwin, were fiction writers fascinated with politics. United in their desire to represent the South as a refuge of pastoral and republican order in an America where, as Emerson observed, "the ancient manners were giving way," all of these men aspired to speak for their region; and all of them, sooner or later, found that they had to begin by reinventing it. Grammer relates the debate over southern identity not only to the wish to defend slavery or agrarian life but to the larger search for order in the aftermath of an age of revolution. He also connects it to the long-standing American concern, born of the ideology of republicanism, over the mortality of American society. Southerners' search for a stable identity and their at times fierce defense of slavery were, according to Grammer, a response to what J. G. A. Pocock has called "the Machiavellian moment" in republican cultures - the moment when the republic is made to recognize its finitude in time. He maintains that we can best understand our antebellum southern writers by thinking of them not as the unwitting ancestors of Faulkner, but as the fully self-conscious contemporaries of Emerson and Whitman, the heirs of Jefferson and Hamilton - as citizens of a young republic facing what looked more and more like its imminent demise. With increasing mechanization and westward expansion transforming their formerly stable world, all antebellum Americans lived in a Machiavellian moment, and as Grammer deftly demonstrates, the long effort to mold the South into a symbol of order, like Whitman's search for a suitably symbolic America, must be understood in relation to that condition. A major, innovative contribution to the fields of both southern history and southern literary criticism, Pastoral and Politics in the Old South is a valuable volume for all students of the South.

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David Goodman

Here, David Goodman focuses not on the lost possibilities and defeated reformers of broadcasting, but on what did happen as the beginning of another chapter in the story of the struggle over the meaning and purpose of American broadcasting in the 1930s.

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Eric Lohr

"In this study of the treatment of "enemy" minorities in the Russian Empire during the First World War, Eric Lohr uncovers a dramatic story of mass deportations, purges, expropriations, and popular violence. An imperial campaign initially aimed at restricting foreign citizens rapidly spun out of control. It swept up Russian subjects of German, Jewish, and Muslim backgrounds and drove roughly a million civilians from one part of the empire to another, becoming one of the largest cases of forced migration in history to that time. Because foreigners and diaspora minorities were prominent among entrepreneurial and landowning elites, the campaign against them also became an explosive element in class and national tensions on the eve of the 1917 revolutions." "During the war, the imperial regime dropped its ambivalence about Russian nationalism and embraced unprecedented and radical policies that "nationalized" the economy, the land, and even the population. The core idea of the campaign that the country needed to free itself from the domination of foreigners, internal enemies, and the exploitative world economic system - later became a central feature of the Soviet revolutionary model."--Jacket.

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Jean Sasson

Chronicles Mayada Al-Askari's experiences after being thrown into Iraq's Baladiyat Prison, the headquarters of Saddam Hussein's secret police.