Craig Nelson. Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution and the Birth of Modern Nations. New York Penguin Books, 2007. 396 pp. $16.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-14-311238-9.
Reviewed by Michael J. Turner
Published on H-Albion (November, 2008)
Commissioned by David S. Karr
An Interesting Work That Will Do Much Good
Historians have long debated the importance of Thomas Paine's writings and ideas and the contribution they made to revolutionary movements in Britain, America, and Europe. Craig Nelson's book is a welcome addition.
It traces Paine's personal, political, and intellectual development; places him in the relevant social, cultural, ideological, and political contexts (in an era when so much was changing, and quickly); and offers one of the most interesting and thorough portraits of Paine that has yet been published. It is stronger on Paine's American activities than on those in Europe and Britain, and although Eric Foner's Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (1976) remains useful, Nelson's book can profitably be read alongside it. Similarly, other writers on Paine have been more analytical--notably the contributors to Ian Dyck's edited collection, Citizen of the World: Essays on Thomas Paine (1987)--but Nelson's book also repays a careful reading.
Nelson clearly admires his subject. Occasionally this leads him to exaggerate Paine's influence and importance. We are repeatedly told of the friendship and respect that existed between Paine and such figures as Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, but the correspondence between them, and other parties, only reveals so much, and we cannot be sure about what these prominent Americans really thought of Paine and his conduct. Another problem is that Nelson's grasp of British history and understanding of how British institutions operated in the late eighteenth century are not all that they could be, and one is left wondering why--if conditions for most people in Britain were as bad as Nelson thinks--there were not more Thomas Paines around to complain, enlighten, and agitate. The book has some stylistic shortcomings. Nelson is not always kind to his readers; it is not uncommon to be faced with long, rambling sentences that ought really to have been broken up (one, on p. 48, has twelve commas and contains over one hundred words). The format used by Penguin for notes and references also leaves a lot to be desired.
However, the expertise that Nelson displays >>
Peter Reichel. Robert Blum: Ein deutscher Revolutionär 1807-1848. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007. 232 pp. (cloth), ISBN 978-3-525-36136-8.
Reviewed by Jonathan Sperber
Published on H-German (November, 2008)
Commissioned by Eve M. Duffy
Popularizing a Popular Forty-Eighter
The beginning of the twenty-first century brings with it the onset of bicentennial commemorations of nineteenth-century figures, institutions, and events. The two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Robert Blum (1807-48) occurred in 2007, and this little book offers a brief life of the nineteenth-century German democrat, republican, revolutionary, and martyr. Based primarily on secondary literature, some contemporary printed primary sources, and occasional use of unpublished manuscripts, and fluidly and elegantly written for a broader public, this work by Peter Reichel evokes the events of Robert Blum's life but does not probe very deeply into their significance.
The book is primarily a narration of Blum's life story. A bright, intellectual child born into a poor artisan family in Cologne, Blum escaped his social milieu through a job as a theater secretary and administrator, first in Cologne and then in Leipzig. It was in Leipzig that he first became involved in politics, developing a reputation as one of Germany's most prominent Vormärz oppositional orators and political organizers. His politics moved on a steady leftward trajectory, encouraged by his affiliation with the radical German-Catholic sect. Following the outbreak of the 1848 revolution, Blum became a member of the Frankfurt pre-parliament and its committee of 50. He was then elected to the German National Assembly, where he quickly became one of the leading figures on the Left, and a prominent parliamentary and extra-parliamentary orator. His commitment to both republican and democratic causes, as well as to parliamentary legality (a difficult enough course to follow) became increasingly problematic as a result of growing political polarization in the fall of 1848. On behalf of the members of his caucus in the Frankfurt Parliament, Blum journeyed to Vienna in October of that year, as the confrontation between the radicals in the city and the Habsburg troops of Generals Windischgrätz and Jelaçic' was reaching its high-point. Blum decided to stay in Vienna and fight with the insurgents against the Habsburg forces. Following the revolutionaries' defeat, he was arrested, brought before a court-martial, and executed, his death making him the great martyr of the radical cause in the mid-nineteenth-century German revolution.
Reichel tells this story well, but >>
Bryan D. Palmer. James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. 576 pp. $50.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-252-03109-0.
Reviewed by Deborah Marinski
Published on H-SHGAPE (December, 2008)
Commissioned by James Ivy
An American Radical
Bryan D. Palmer writes an interesting and informational piece on the history of American working-class radicalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in his work, James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left. Palmer uses rich details about Cannon's life to identify the beginning and evolution of an American leftist movement through the problems the faction faced from within its own ranks, the American social and political pressures from outside the movement, the struggle to legally politicize the party, and the impact of international affairs on the American Left from the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 through the process of Stalinization in the 1920s. Through his balanced and explicit descriptions of the working-class revolutionary Cannon and the rise of American communism, Palmer composes a fair and thorough examination of a topic that is often pushed aside and misunderstood.
In his introduction, Palmer clearly places his book within the historiographical context by establishing it as a study of a native American radical movement and the influences of foreign communists on that movement. Palmer highlights three points that separate his book from previous works. First, he places a homegrown radical, Cannon, at the center of the development of an American Left, while at the same time recognizing the importance of international theory and practice on Cannon and the American Left. In doing so, Palmer transitions the different approaches to the historiography of radicalism that either emphasize foreign influence or the complete Americanization of communism. Palmer transcends Theodore Draper's interpretation that American communism was bred by the Soviets as well as those social historians of the 1980s and 1990s who neglect the influence of foreign involvement in the American Left.
Second, Palmer's emphasis on >>
Andy Wood. The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xix + 291 pp. $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-83206-9.
Reviewed by Jasmin L. Johnson
Published on H-War (December, 2008)
Commissioned by Brian G.H. Ditcham
Remember Jack Cade! Backwards to Early Modern England?
Historians have a tendency to divide their subject into periods, forgetting that for the people who lived the experience, the soubriquet "late medieval" or "early modern" would be meaningless and that if people like the Norfolk rebel leader,Robert Kett looked anywhere for the inspirations for their acts, it would be to the past--to the leaders of previous rebellions such as Wat Tyler, Jack Cade, and Jack Straw.
Andy Wood informs the reader that it is his intention to "tell the story of the 1549 rebellions" (p xiii) and argues that rebels are not necessarily the inarticulate peasants which history tends to make them appear. Popular culture had, we are informed, more political insight than it is usually credited with and he makes the important point that the English Reformation was not just done to people, but with them and by them.
Wood admits that it is his intention to write a political and social history, so the military history of the various rebellions in 1549 is only briefly addressed. In addition, the overwhelming majority of the book concerns itself with the social and political background to Robert Kett’s Norfolk Rebellion (to be fair to the author, though, this is by far the best documented of the rebellions of 1549 ). Nevertheless there were also risings in Yorkshire, Cambridgeshire, Kent, the Midlands, and many other areas in that same year, so it is important to address the question: why so many rebellions and why that year?
There was, of course, a tradition of popular revolt stretching back to Wat Tyler and the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, with at least a further half dozen major insurrections in the century and a half which followed. Wood argues, cogently, that there is what he describes as a "red thread" linking these rebellions and suggests an "ideology of popular protest" (p. 1) stretching back over the period.
What, then, made 1549 different?
Reiss, Matthias (Hrsg.): The Street as Stage. Protest Marches and Public Rallies since the Nineteenth Century (= Studies of the German Historical Institute). Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007. ISBN 978-0-19-922678-8; geb.; 367 S.; £ 60,00.
Rezensiert für H-Soz-u-Kult von:
Uwe Fraunholz, Lehrstuhl für Technik- und Technikwissenschaftsgeschichte, Technische Universität DresdenE-Mail: [mailto]uwefraunholz@hotmail.com[/mailto]
Der Siegeszug der Neuen Kulturgeschichte hat die in den 1970er-Jahren boomende historische Protestforschung für geraume Zeit auf eine Nischenexistenz verwiesen. Ihre Nähe zur Arbeiterbewegungsforschung machte sie insbesondere nach 1990 unmodern. Dass sich aber das neue Interesse an Symbolen, Ritualen, Narrativen und Raum auch hervorragend durch die Beschäftigung mit Protestereignissen stillen lässt, verdeutlicht der vorliegende, von Matthias Reiss herausgegebene Band zu Protestmärschen und öffentlichen Kundgebungen auf eindrucksvolle Weise.Das Buch geht auf eine vom Deutschen Historischen Institut London organisierte Konferenz zurück, die Protestforscher und Protestpraktiker zusammenführte. Insgesamt 17 Beiträge beleuchten die verschiedensten Facetten der Thematik, wobei die Schwerpunkte in zeitlicher Hinsicht im 20. Jahrhundert, in geografischer Hinsicht in Westeuropa und den USA liegen. Positiv hervorzuheben ist insbesondere die komparative Anlage der meisten Aufsätze, wobei oft transnationale Bezüge hergestellt werden.
Nach der Einführung des Herausgebers >>
Linebaugh, Peter; Rediker, Marcus: Die vielköpfige Hydra. Die verborgene Geschichte des revolutionären Atlantiks. Berlin: Assoziation A 2008.ISBN 978-3-935936-65-1; 427 S.; 29,90 EUR.
Linebaugh, Peter: Magna Carta Manifesto. Liberties and Commons for All. Berkeley: University of California Press 2008. ISBN 978-0-520-24726-0;376 S.; EUR 19,09.
Rezensiert für H-Soz-u-Kult von:
Patrick Eiden, Exzellenzcluster "Kulturelle Grundlagen von Integration", Universität Konstanz
E-Mail: [mailto]Patrick.Eiden@uni-konstanz.de[/mailto]
"Die vielköpfige Hydra" erzählt die "verborgene Geschichte" eines historischen Subjekts, dessen Existenz keineswegs gesichert vorausgesetzt werden kann. Denn dass es ein "atlantisches Proletariat" als bestimmbare historische Größe überhaupt gibt, ist selbst schon eine der zentralen Thesen dieses Buches. Die Autoren rekonstruieren die Geschichte ihres Subjekts im Zeit-Raum von 1600 bis 1835 im atlantischen Dreieck England - Westafrika - Nord- und Mittelamerika. Den Beweis, dass das "atlantische Proletariat" wirklich existiert, dass es kämpft und sich bewegt, erbringt das großartig erzählte und daher auch für historische Laien (der Rezensent ist selbst kein Historiker, sondernLiteraturwissenschaftler) hervorragend zu lesende Buch schließlich ebenso überzeugend wie überschwänglich. Dass das im Original 2000 bei Beacon Press erschienene und im englischen Sprachraum mittlerweile zu einen Standardwerk avancierte Buch nun endlich in einer vorzüglichen deutschen Übersetzung von Sabine Bartel vorliegt, muss dem Verlag Assoziation A hoch angerechnet werden. Dieser linke Kleinverlag veröffentlicht seit Jahren verdienstvollerweise hervorragende Erzeugnisse der linken angloamerikanischen Academia, die in den USA zumeist bei den einschlägigen University Presses erscheinen, an die sich die renommierten deutschen Wissenschaftsverlage aber offensichtlich nicht heranwagen.
"Die vielköpfige Hydra" ist forschungsgeschichtlich der neueren New Labor History zuzurechnen. Obgleich es mit dieser alle wesentlichen theoretischen Grundentscheidungen teilt - der Ausgang von der "Erfahrung" der Subjekte, der Blick "von unten", die Orientierung an den "Kämpfen" der Geschichte -, versuchen die Autoren zugleich auch eine Revision ihrer Forschungstradition. Die Revision zeigt sich in einem durchgängigen Dialog mit Edward P. Thompson, dessen Schüler Linebaugh ist. Wo Thompson in seinem legendär-monumentalen Hauptwerk die Herstellung und "Entstehung der Englischen Arbeiterklasse" aus deren eigener Perspektive untersucht hat [1], da arbeiten Linebaugh und Rediker die Löschungen und Spaltungen heraus, die historisch und historiographisch vollzogen werden mussten, damit von einem national gehegten Subjekt wie der "englischen Arbeiterklasse" überhaupt gesprochen werden kann. Das "atlantische Proletariat" ist mehr als "der weiße, männliche, ausgebildete, lohnbeziehende, nationalistische, Eigentum besitzende Handwerksbürger oder Industriearbeiter". Es ist "landlos, enteignet", "arm", "mobil und transatlantisch", es besteht aus "Frauen und Männern" und umfasst "alle Altersstufen", und es ist schließlich entschieden "multiethnisch" (S. 356f). Der eigentliche Held in Linebaughs und Redikers Geschichtserzählung ist denn auch die "motley crew", der "buntscheckige Haufen" oder die "Menge".[2]
Die Rekonstruktion der "verborgenen Geschichte" dieser Klasse
Paul A. Pickering. Feargus O'Connor. Monmouth Merlin Press, 2008. vii + 172 pp. $29.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-85036-561-0.
Reviewed by Nancy LoPatin-Lummis
Published on H-Albion (January, 2009)
Commissioned by Michael De Nie
A Political Life
Paul A. Pickering is recognized as one of the leading scholars on Chartism and popular and radical politics in Victorian Britain. His new book, a political biography of Feargus O'Connor, Chartism's "Lion of Freedom," is a completely accessible historical biography, intended for a popular audience. There is another feature to this book that also makes it unique. Pickering's intention was to give voice to the areas of O'Connor's life and career not typically examined, specifically his pre-Chartist and later Chartist activities. By giving less attention to the most closely examined and successful period of O'Connor's story, Pickering has chosen to look at his personal maturation and mental decline to "better understand his ideas, both those which were quickly overtaken and those that were ahead of their time" (p. 2).
This book does just that. The first four chapters, nearly half the biography, tell not just the story of Feargus as a boy and young man, but the story of the O'Connor family and the expectations that went with such an association. O'Connor was born to fight injustice, lead others, and raise the expectations of the poor that they were entitled to do more and have more. The son of Roger O'Connor, a compassionate landlord and barrister and nephew of United Irishman leader Arthur O'Connor, Feargus was fully aware of his family's reputation as descendants of the "royal" O'Connor clan, champions of the defeated and vulnerable Irish peasants, and passionate nationalists. The declining family fortunes, death of his mother, and arrest of his father for a coach robbery ended his formal education; his decision to begin legal training in Dublin was divisive within the family that saw this as an affront to O'Connors' Celtic roots.
Study law, he did however, and this, we learn, solidified his moral and political beliefs, as well as launched his public career. O'Connor's first prominent defense was >>
Grampp, Sven; Kirchmann, Kay; Sandl, Marcus; Schlögl, Rudolf; Wiebel, Eva (Hrsg.): Revolutionsmedien - Medienrevolutionen (= Historische Kulturwissenschaften 11). Konstanz: Universitätsverlag Konstanz - UVK 2008. ISBN 978-3-86764-073-2; Paperback; 699 S.; EUR 59,00.
Rezensiert für H-Soz-u-Kult von:
Thomas Birkner, Institut für Journalistik und Kommunikationswissenschaft, Universität HamburgE-Mail: [mailto]thomas.birkner@uni-hamburg.de[/mailto]
"Womit beginnen?" fragte Wladimir Iljitsch Lenin 1901. Womit beginnt man eine Revolution? Lenins Antwort führt mitten hinein in die Frage nach Revolutionsmedien und Medienrevolutionen: Er gründete eine Zeitung.
Bereits im Jahr 2004 hatten die Autoren Kay Kirchmann, Marcus Sandl und Rudolf Schlögl mit Fabio Crivellari in dem Band "Die Medien der Geschichte" festgestellt: "Medialität der Geschichte" akzentuiert also nicht nur die Tatsache, dass uns Geschichte ja nur in medialer Überlieferung überhaupt zugänglich ist, sondern stellt sehr viel weitgehender darauf ab, dass Medien selbst elementare Produktivkräfte des Geschichtlichen sind." In diesem Zusammenhang wird dann auch an gleicher Stelle von der "hinlänglich nachgewiesenen Rolle der elektronischen Bildmedien für den und beim Sturz der kommunistischen Regime Europas" gesprochen, sowie über die "nicht weniger evidenten Funktionen der Medien für neuzeitliche Geschichtsverläufe überhaupt - Stichwort: Buchdruck und Reformation oder Französische Revolution und Flugblatt".[1]
Diesen Zusammenhängen spürt das neue Buch nach. Je nach Fachrichtung werden dabei geschichts-, medien-, literatur- und kunstwissenschaftliche Blickwinkel eingenommen, was zu einer kreativen Vielstimmigkeit führt. Gerade hierin liegt der Mehrwert dieses Bandes für all jene, die sich im Spannungsfeld zwischen Geschichte und Medien befinden. Die unterschiedlichen Herangehensweisen, die dieses Buch vereint, verbinden gleichsam ein hohes Maß an theoretischer Abstraktion mit konkreter Forschung. Dabei gehen alle Beiträge, so die Medienwissenschaftler Nicole Wiedenmann und Kay Kirchmann, davon aus, dass es Revolutionen gibt, "auch und gerade dort, wo sie dem je verhandelten Gegenstand nach eingehender Prüfung die kategoriale Zuweisung "revolutionär" letztlich absprechen oder diese als rein rhetorische Strategie decouvrieren" (S. 25). Revolution sei eben kein ""Ding an sich", sondern die wertende Klassifizierung einer Begebenheit" (S. 55). Dabei ist der Anspruch des Bandes interdisziplinär, auch wenn Wiedenmann und Kirchmann provokant fordern, den "Gegenstand "Revolution" den angestammten Geltungssphären der Geschichts-, Politik- und Sozialwissenschaften zu entreißen" (S. 64). Doch bleibt kritisch anzumerken, dass der reichhaltige konstruktivistische Fundus der Kommunikationswissenschaften zur "Wirklichkeit der Medien"[2] weitgehend ungenutzt bleibt, obschon dies der eigentliche Tenor des Buches ist: Medien konstruieren Wirklichkeit, Historiker konstruieren Geschichte(n) und auch Revolution(en) - und diese wiederum konstruieren sich selbst. "Die Unterschrift erfindet den Unterzeichner" (S. 60), wird Jacques Derrida zur Amerikanischen Unabhängigkeitserklärung zitiert.
Robert G. Hall. Voices of the People: Democracy and Chartist Political Identity, 1830-1870. Chartist Studies Series. Monmouth Merlin Press, 2007. ix + 218 pp. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-85036-564-1; $32.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-85036-557-3.
Reviewed by Rohan McWilliam (Anglia Ruskin University)
Published on H-Albion (January, 2009)
Commissioned by Mark Hampton
The Most Chartist of All the Factory Towns
In June 2008, I was privileged to speak at the annual Chartism Day conference at the University of Wales, Newport. During the course of the event, there were four papers followed by a walking tour of some of the nearby locations most associated with Chartism. We were taken to see where John Frost and the Chartists had gathered prior to the Newport rising in November 1839 and then proceeded to the Westgate Hotel where the catastrophic confrontation with the military took place. One of the most encouraging aspects of the day was the large number of people (not all of them academics) for whom Chartism still matters. There was a passion and an excitement for people's history that reminded me of the old History Workshop conferences.
Chartist studies continue to flourish in a quite remarkable way. The volume under review is part of the Merlin Press Chartist Studies series (seven titles published so far). The Chartist Ancestors Web site has proven to be extremely popular (www.chartists.net). The Chartist newspaper, The Northern Star, is now available in a searchable, digital form. Not long ago, Malcolm Chase produced his narrative history of the movement, Chartism: A New History (2007), which is clearly going to be a standard work. This is not bad for a movement that often has been written off as a failure.
The first historians of Chartism were >>
McDermott, Kevin; Stibbe, Matthew: Revolution and Resistance in Eastern Europe. Challenges to Communist Rule. Dorset: Berg Publishers 2006. ISBN 978-1-84520-259-0; 224 S.; £ 19,99.
Rezensiert für H-Soz-u-Kult von:
José M. Faraldo, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
E-Mail: [mailto]jm.faraldo@ghis.ucm.es[/mailto]
Das von Kevin McDermott und Mathew Stibbe herausgegebene Buch wird vom Verlag als "an excellent overview of the great turning points in the history of communist-dominated Eastern Europe" sowie als "a comprehensive critical analysis of the varying forms of dissent in the East European socialist states" gefeiert. Das Buch soll, laut Umschlag, auf "archive material only accessible since 1989" basieren. Allerdings werden diese Erwartungen teilweise nicht erfüllt, da der Band keine neuen Erkenntnisse für Spezialisten bringt. Als Überblick sind die verschiedenen Teile jedoch zu unterschiedlich und lassen zu viele wichtige Themen und geographische Bereiche unberücksichtigt. Die Herausgeber versuchen, die unstrukturierte Vielfalt des Bandes durch die Einleitung zu überwinden. Diese ist jedoch eher von phänomenologischer als von theoretischer Natur, was nur bedingt hilft, das komplexe Verhältnis von Revolution und Widerstand im ehemaligen Sowjetblock zu verstehen.
Das Buch ist in drei Teile mit je drei Aufsätzen aufgeteilt. Dazu kommen das Vorwort, die Einleitung und ein Nachwort. Die Teile sind chronologisch von 1945 bis 1989 geordnet, der behandelte geographische Raum erstreckt sich von der Sowjetunion bis zur DDR, Jugoslawien "bis 1948" eingeschlossen, jedoch ohne Albanien.