Using a variety of methodologies and approaches—postcolonial theory, cultural studies, linguistics, performance theory—“Whole Oceans Away” offers a valuable body of criticism for students of nineteenth-century American literature and history, cultural studies, and Pacific Rim studies.
The dispatches included in Volume 1 of The American Civil War through British Eyes offer insight into contemporary Anglo-American relations. This period witnessed the election of Abraham Lincoln, the secession crisis, the formation of the Confederacy, and the first military confrontations of the war. It also raised a host of problems for Great Britain’s relationships with both the Union and the Confederacy, such as how the war would affect British nationals residing in the United States, what course official British policy should take regarding diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy, and the effect that the likely interruption of exports might have on British manufacturing.
On June 2, 1854, crowds lined the streets of Boston, hissing and shouting at federal authorities as they escorted the fugitive slave Anthony Burns to the ship that would return him to his slaveholders in Virginia. Days earlier, handbills had littered the streets decrying Burns’s arrest, and abolitionists, intent on freeing Burns, had attacked with a battering ram the courthouse in which he was detained, leaving one dead, several wounded, and thirteen in custody. In the end it would take federal officials nearly 2,000 troops and $40,000 to send Burns back to Virginia. No fugitive slave would be captured in Boston again.
The Websters has the rare distinction of containing both sides of a correspondence between an “Old Army” officer and his socially prominent wife, one that reflects both their private lives and many of the public events of the times and that interweaves their responses to each other’s experiences.
Charles Doolittle Walcott (1850-1927) is a highly respected figure in the history of geology and paleontology. Perhaps his most notable contribution to his field was his discovery of the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale, one of the most important fossil discoveries ever made. In addition to his distinguished field work, Walcott’s career included years of service as an administrative leader in the scientific community: as director of the U.S. Geological Survey, as secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, as organizer of the National Space and Aeronautics Administration, as a founding member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Fiction as Fact: “The Horse Soldiers” and Popular Memory is a thorough examination of this famous military action through three genres—Dee Brown’s 1954 historical account, Grierson’s Raid; Harold Sinclair’s 1956 novel The Horse Soldiers; and John Ford’s 1959 film The Horse Soldiers. Neil Longley York demonstrates how historical “truths” are often omitted, fragmented, and altered before being assimilated into popular culture and how the events of our past are often molded to fit the constraints of the present.
James Jessen Badal reexamines the events leading up to Beverly Potts’s disappearance and the subsequent police investigation and over-the-top, sensational publicity in the Cleveland press. His interviews with detectives assigned to this still-open case and his examination of police records provide a chronology of the false leads and hoaxes that culminated in this disturbing case of dead end after dead end. Badal draws comparisons between investigative techniques of the time and more modern ones and examines the social and historical context in his analysis of the more than half-century of public fascination with this case.
This is an introduction to the principle writers of the Enlightenment in Eighteenth Century France. French thinkers of this century made a long series of devastating attacks on old ideas, usages, and institutions that had been handed down from the past. And, at the same time, these thinkers proposed a series of thorough-going reforms in social, economic, political, religious, and educational ideas and institutions. France was the center of the Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, but there were important thinkers that belonged to the movement in other countries, such as Vico and Beccaria in Italy; Lessing, Herder, and Kant in Germany; and Hume, Adam Smith, and Bentham in Britain. France, though, took the lead, and, outside of France, there were no thinkers of quite the influence of the French writers, Voltaire and Rousseau.
“The Civil War was a crucial experience in shaping the character and political life of William McKinley. In this engrossing and well-researched study, William H. Armstrong provides the most thorough treatment of McKinley’s military career and shows how his wartime record influenced his emergence as the first modern president. Armstrong is balanced and fair-minded, and his work should become the definitive account of the Civil War years of an important figure of the Gilded Age.” —Lewis L. Gould, author of The Presidency of William McKinley
e carefully analyzes the objective of dividing the Sino-Soviet alliance as a goal of Anglo-American policies and uses recently available Chinese Communist materials—including inner-party documents, diaries, memoirs, and biographies by and about former Chinese leaders, generals, and diplomats—to reconstruct Chinese foreign policy initiatives and responses to Western challenges. With its unique international and comparative dimensions, this study allows the first clear view of early Cold War history from the Chinese as well as Western perspectives. Washington and London differed widely in their assessments of Beijing’s intentions and capabilities, as reflected in their respective policies toward recognition and containment of China. Zhai examines the mutual influences and constraints—distinct strategic concerns, divergences in political structures, public opinion, interest groups, and diplomatic traditions, as well as the perceptions and idiosyncrasies of the top policymakers—that affected Anglo-American relations and shows how consideration of each other’s reactions further complicated their policy decisions.
