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50 Years ago, James Michener published his iconic Centennial, a novel of the American West
Author James Michener and three of the editions of his best selling historic novel: the cover of the original hardcover edition, the first pocket paperback edition and the 2015 paperback version with an introduction by Steve Berry.
50 years ago, as America was preparing for its bicentennial celebrations, James Michener, a celebrated author of historic novels, published a monumental work of fiction that many consider his best. Centennial skyrocketed to the very top of the best seller lists of 1974. At the time, Americans were realizing that the war of Vietnam was all but lost. Many doubts about America's identity were troubling scores of U.S. citizens. The civil rights movement and other progressive initiatives seemed to be stagnating, especially after the landslide election of Richard Nixon representing a strong grassroots conservative reaction, almost immediately followed by the Watergate scandal. But this was also a time, during these pre-celebration months, when the beauty of America, its landscapes and its people of all races and faiths, was celebrated in the media with slightly greater maturity and self-criticism than before. A documentary series by Alistair Cook or the pages of the National Geographic that had never been of such inspiring quality in its texts and photos learned how to comment on the history and culture of what the French called “l’ Amérique profonde” without the pitfalls of nationalism and White supremacy. James Michener's Centennial is iconic of that period, with a deeper critical outlook.
Author James Albert Michener attends an observance commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Location: Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Michener, a middle-aged veteran of the war in the Pacific, became known to the public through his Tales of the South Pacific and Return to Paradise (two collections of essays on the same theme). The success of his first historic novel, Hawaii, with which he created the genre of the historic-geographic novel covering millenia of natural history and human historic geography is what made him one of the best-selling authors American writers of the 1960s to the present. Photo. by Robert Wilson (US Navy).
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Born in 1907 James Albert Michener (… 1997), raised in a rural environment by a family of Amish farmers, came very late to literature in his forties. Tales of the South Pacific, his first book, was a collection of short stories based on his personal observations and experiences in the Pacific islands during his life there as an officer during World War Two. The great diversity of populations, the profound interaction between people of different races confronted to racism and racial tensions, and the beauty of the landscapes, were the central themes that would become Michener's signature in almost all his future works of fiction. Already very successful in the bookstore, Tales of the South Pacific were adapted by Rogers and Hammerstein (creators of the king and I, Oklahoma, and The Sound of Music) into a musical which became one of the greatest hits of Broadway’s history, and later, a very popular movie.
After a few other novels and a second collection of short stories, Michener returned to the Pacific islands with a historic novel, Hawaii. With this opus magnus, Michener inaugurated an entire new genre in literature. Instead of covering a century or two, or three or four generations of the same family, Hawaii tells the stories of several families of different backgrounds and races intertwined over… 1100 years! Hawaii begins with the first Polynesian explorers to leave Bora Bora and settle in the Hawaiian archipelago in the 9th century, then follows the destiny of their descendants as waves of new settlers arrive between the 1700s and the late 1950s. Also, the novel concentrated exclusively on the local human geography. Michener’s second novel to adopt this type of narration was Centennial which focused on the story of the region of the Platte river in Colorado. The titles of Michener’s next historic novels immediately revealed the places where he was taking his readers: Chesapeake, Poland, Alaska, Texas, Caribbean. The Source was about Israel from Biblical times to the 1960s and The Covenant told the story of South Africa from the 1600s to the late 1970s (the novel was banned by the South African government until the end of Apartheid). The work of research that took years before Michener’s manuscripts would be completed after challenging travels across the terrain (Michener had a mobility impairment and was already a senior citizen when he wrote most of his historic novels), then in libraries, and consulting dozens of experts (historians but also geologists, geographers, ethnographers and other specialists of the region) was such a titanic task that only a very few number of authors have had the courage to invest the same energy in producing similar novels in the genre created by Michener: Edward Rutherfurd (Sarum, Dublin: Foundation, Ireland: Awakening, London, Paris, New York, China) and
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(with much less media coverage) David Cruise and Allison Griffiths (Vancouver). With a a total of 70 weeks on The New York Times best-sellers list (number one for 24 weeks) Centennial, remains either Michener’s bestselling book or in second position after Hawaii (53 weeks at the number one position, #54 as on the day of publication of this issue of Nature & Cultures on Amazon.com vs. for Centennial’s #100 in Fiction Sagas -- not bad for two books from fifty and sixty-four years ago!).
There is something almost biblical about the way time flows in James Michener’s Centennial :
When the earth was already ancient, of an age incomprehensible to man, an event of basic importance occurred in the area which would later be known as Colorado.
To appreciate its significance, one must understand the the structure of the earth, and to do this, one must start at the vital center.
Since the earth is not a perfect sphere, the radius from center to surface varies. At the poles it is 3950 miles and at the equator 3963. At the time we are talking about, Colorado lay about the same distance from the equator as it does now, and its radius was 3956. Those miles were composed in this manner.
At the center then, as today, was a ball of solid material very heavy and extremely hot, made-up mostly of iron…
Thus, the story begins even before the time of dinosaurs telling how the geology of Colorado formed over millions of years which already makes the narration relevant to the characters that will be found in the chapters about the 19th century miners and the agriculturalists. This natural history ends with the animals of Colorado, concluding with the story of an old widowed female beaver finding a new companion and the digging a new home under the banks of the Platte River. This last episode of the chapter on natural history also seems to preclude a murder mystery affecting modern lives in the 1970s when the narrator sees one of the local oligarchs removing a mysterious bag hidden where centuries earlier the beaver couple dug its burrow. The narrator, a historian writing a book about the town of Centennial--a barely veiled self-portrait of Michener--whose story we follow at the beginning or at the end of each chapter as he is conducting his research, is the thread that links all the stories together from the eras before the dinosaurs to the 1970s. The lives of the animals, their ecosystem, their behavior, and their interaction with the seasons introduces us to the indigenous hunter gatherers, whose nomadic way of life is described in great detail. Arapaho chief Lame Beaver is the first character in the novel. His story is told from his youth to his old age. The first European to appear in the region is the Frenchman trapper canoeing up the Platte River, Pasquinel, who will marry Clay Basket, Lame Beaver’s daughter. These three characters will be ancestors of all the other main characters of the novel up to the 1970s. These are the brothers Jake and Marcel Pasquinel, who grow up with the Arapahos and are tormented by their double heritage, suffering from the racism of the first White settlers. Their sister Lisette Pasquinel marries Levi Zendt, the very first individual to settle on the spot of what will become his trading post, then the settlement and town of Centennial. His escape from his Amish family in Pennsylvania, his first marriage and his unsuccessful attempt to move to California offers remarkable descriptions of the wagon trains that crossed the continent in the 1840s. Michener’s realism cleans the readers mental maps from all the clichés attached to the stories of wagon trains depicted in western movies and novels (for example Indian attacks barely ever occurred and Levi's story even shows how Native Americans could help immigrants).
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Two of the trailers run by a great number of stations throughout the United States and Canada advertizing the 1978 mini-series, a faithful adaptation of the novel
Hans Brumbaugh, a German farmer who abandons the idea of making a living with other German immigrants in Russia, is the first to start farming the land. His attempts to hire farm hands among the successful waves of new immigrants over the decades, such as Spanish Americans and even Japanese settlers, always fail because of these the new colonists wanting to start their own independent farms and businesses. An important chapter is devoted to what can be described as no less than the genocide of Lame Beaver’s people by the U.S. Army and a troop of militiamen led by the fanatic Frank Skimmerhorn. Very much inspired by the American family of Winston Churchill's mother, the story focuses on the creation and the rise to fortune of the immense Venneford ranch, run for absentee owners in England by Seccombe an Englishman who arrived as an idealist, believing that the unspoiled nature of the West was the land of “Noble Savage” and evolved into a ruthless oligarch. John, Skimmerhorn’s son, becomes the trail boss who takes tens of thousands of Venneford cows across the great plains and helps a poor farmer’s son, Jim Lloyd, an adolescent, grow from an apprentice cowboy to future trail boss and more. Jim becomes one of the main characters of the novel and links us with the stories of his descendants and their relatives and their environment onward into the 20th century. The daily life of cowboys is also remarkably described, not forgetting that many of them were Blacks, which had almost never been mentioned previously in other novels or westerns. Centennial also describes the brutal range wars between farmers trying to protect their crops, shepherds protecting their sheep (but ruining the environment) versus the ranchers and their hired killers. The arrival of the train brings new waves immigrants and real estate speculators. Michener focuses on the crooked Wendells who will become the rich and crooked businessmen in the growing town of Centennial and the Grebbes who bought land from them for dryland farming and whose decades on the farm will be narrated until the cataclysmic Dust Bowl. How this continental disaster occurred is shown very well through the sort of microeconomic-microgeographic and environmental narration with Centennial serving as a model for not only Colorado but also for other agricultural areas of the American West. We finally meet the last of the main protagonists in the story, Paul Garrett, descendant of most of the main characters of the novel (Lame Beaver, Pasquinel, Levi Zendt, Jim Lloyd…) running candidate for the Colorado legislature (not explicitly although obviously as a Democrat, with an environmentalist agenda), losing to a Wendell (obviously a Republican) but managing to prevent the 1976 Olympic Games being held In Colorado which would have gravely impacted the natural environment. The last episode of the more than faithful television mini-series adaptation (James Michener appears in the first episode to introduce the story) ends nostalgically with Merle Haggard's song “I'd rather be in Colorado”.
James Michener’s most important contribution to literature is also a contribution to geographic culture. Centennial more than any other of his novels is not only a historic novel, it is a geographic novel, which made it unique and the first of its genre.
Michener’s fiction reflects exactly how in the 20th century history itself, as a discipline, has undergone a major reform in the way historians investigate, write, and teach about the past. Historiography is no longer about events. It is about processes. Historians are no longer interested in lining up one after the other, in chronological order, what would have been the headline news of the period they study. They analyze the elements of civilization as they evolve as slowly as slowly as landscapes, over centuries if not millennia and they identify situations that almost never change. It is a method of focusing not on fleeting events but on what changes or is permanent in the long duration--la longue durée as advocated first by Marxism and then, since the 1920s, by the French historiographic school of the Annales. This is exactly what Michener does when he describes how the landscape of Colorado evolved so slowly from the times of the formation of the earth, through the era of dinosaurs and all the way to its colonization by modern mammals and humans followed by the slow changes from hunting-gathering societies to contemporary industrial beet processing factories, the compressing of time with the introduction of railways (Levi Zendt comfortably retraces in a week the road he took months to travel with oxen in perilous conditions), and real estate speculation. When he tells us in his preamble that the Platte River behaves in his novel “as described”, i.e. without much change, we can observe continuity in the description of life along its banks between times immemorial when the two beavers dug their burrow, and the 1970s. “Only the rocks live forever” a saying of the Native Americans in the novel, is one of the major themes of Centennial. While it expresses the passing of time in the lives of the human beings it also establishes a strong sense of continuity, since the rocks (the Rocky Mountains or the buttes in the great plains) are such important features in the narrative. Just as the school of the Annales has advocated, Michener’s historic retrospective shows the interaction between evolving human societies, their cultures, mentalities, and the world views of different communities. He shows their sociology and their relation over time with the natural history of their environment, and their shaping of the human and physical geography of one area.
But just as the historians that revolutionized historiography in the 20th century were also able to focus on individuals (like Lucien Febvre’s biography of Martin Luther’s describing his personal torments and his personal motivations in creating a new religion), Michener tells us very vivid stories of characters who are representative of great historic trends and situations. This is what Tolstoy attempted in War and Peace--the first historic novel since Homer to diverge from the historic genre as presented by Walter Scott, Fenimore Cooper, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo or more recently in the Poldark series by Winston Graham, where history is only as a backdrop to the soap opera agitating the lives of the protagonists. Michener’s Lame Beaver, Clay Basket, Pasquinel, McKeague, Levi Zendt or Jim Lloyd are stereotypes, yes, but they are excellent illustrations of all the historic situations and trends, just like Natasha, Pierre or Prince Andrew and Maria, based on real persons from the generation of Tolstoy’s parents, could have been real and are excellent illustrations characterizing history in their era. Like Tolstoy’s characters, Michener’s are also interesting and lovable.
Contrary to several of his other historic novels, (or to the works of Edward Rutherford) Michener’s Centennial is not just a collection of short stories set in the same region nothing but the genealogical lines between the characters to connect the stories. Each episode introduces the next one very smooth and seamless continuation. It is why, considering all the other qualities of the novel as well, many could claim Centennial as their favorite, superior to his number one better-selling Hawaii.
Michener’s fiction reflects exactly how in the 20th century history itself, as a discipline, has undergone a major reform in the way historians investigate, write, and teach about the past. Historiography is no longer about events. It is about processes. Historians are no longer interested in lining up one after the other, in chronological order, what would have been the headline news of the period they study. They analyze the elements of civilization as they evolve as slowly as slowly as landscapes, over centuries if not millennia and they identify situations that almost never change. It is a method of focusing not on fleeting events but on what changes or is permanent in the long duration--la longue durée as advocated first by Marxism and then, since the 1920s, by the French historiographic school of the Annales. This is exactly what Michener does when he describes how the landscape of Colorado evolved so slowly from the times of the formation of the earth, through the era of dinosaurs and all the way to its colonization by modern mammals and humans followed by the slow changes from hunting-gathering societies to contemporary industrial beet processing factories, the compressing of time with the introduction of railways (Levi Zendt comfortably retraces in a week the road he took months to travel with oxen in perilous conditions), and real estate speculation. When he tells us in his preamble that the Platte River behaves in his novel “as described”, i.e. without much change, we can observe continuity in the description of life along its banks between times immemorial when the two beavers dug their burrow, and the 1970s. “Only the rocks live forever” a saying of the Native Americans in the novel, is one of the major themes of Centennial. While it expresses the passing of time in the lives of the human beings it also establishes a strong sense of continuity, since the rocks (the Rocky Mountains or the buttes in the great plains) are such important features in the narrative. Just as the school of the Annales has advocated, Michener’s historic retrospective shows the interaction between evolving human societies, their cultures, mentalities, and the world views of different communities. He shows their sociology and their relation over time with the natural history of their environment, and their shaping of the human and physical geography of one area.
But just as the historians that revolutionized historiography in the 20th century were also able to focus on individuals (like Lucien Febvre’s biography of Martin Luther’s describing his personal torments and his personal motivations in creating a new religion), Michener tells us very vivid stories of characters who are representative of great historic trends and situations. This is what Tolstoy attempted in War and Peace--the first historic novel since Homer to diverge from the historic genre as presented by Walter Scott, Fenimore Cooper, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo or more recently in the Poldark series by Winston Graham, where history is only as a backdrop to the soap opera agitating the lives of the protagonists. Michener’s Lame Beaver, Clay Basket, Pasquinel, McKeague, Levi Zendt or Jim Lloyd are stereotypes, yes, but they are excellent illustrations of all the historic situations and trends, just like Natasha, Pierre or Prince Andrew and Maria, based on real persons from the generation of Tolstoy’s parents, could have been real and are excellent illustrations characterizing history in their era. Like Tolstoy’s characters, Michener’s are also interesting and lovable.
Contrary to several of his other historic novels, (or to the works of Edward Rutherford) Michener’s Centennial is not just a collection of short stories set in the same region nothing but the genealogical lines between the characters to connect the stories. Each episode introduces the next one very smooth and seamless continuation. It is why, considering all the other qualities of the novel as well, many could claim Centennial as their favorite, superior to his number one better-selling Hawaii.
One of Michener's longest and informative interviews on his life, his work, and his views on America filmed in 1971, when the began working on Centennial
Let's face it, however, as much as creating the historic genre that will always be mitchner's landmark achievement, this Marks more the history of pop culture and educational fiction rather than great literature.
Characters draw sympathy but mostly to the historian or to the teacher. These characters are useful for the educator as are actors portraying Julius Caesar, Winston Churchill, or Malcolm X in a docudrama or a movie shown to high school students. Pasquinel, Zendt, or Jim Lloyd or after all stereotypes Without the depth of Tolstoy’s Rostovs or Pierre. Michener’s heroes, no matter how colorful and sympathetic, cannot be compared to even secondary characters such as Hugo’s Gavroche or Platon Karataev, the wise peasant soldier with a little dog being held prisoner by the French in War and Peace. These limitations in Centennial come to light when reading his other novels. They become so stereotypical, That they not only lose the educational purpose of the historic figures he invented the for Centennial, but they are as superficial as in a pulp western novel. In Alaska, they are worse than in a James Bond novel. Which then forces the demanding reader and maybe even the historian to look back at the fictional people in Centennial and wonder if mitchner could not have done better. This is particularly true for the need of Americans that he portrays.
Anthropologists have been particularly critical of Michener's competence in describing the arapahos. As many of us were expecting Michener's visit to Alaska when he was preparing a great novel about the 49th state, I had a conversation on that subject with a leading American anthropologist, Alaska University Professor Lydia Black. She had great doubts about how Alaskans would look in the new novel once it would become available. When it did, it was even worse than what was feared (it was trashed in the peer reviewed journal Alaska History but became another great bestseller ruining people's understanding of the history of Alaska). Again, this sheds a shadow over Centennial.
One of the problems in Centennial is that it completely forgets about the minorities once a chapter has been devoted to them. The Native Americans are almost completely absent from the second half of the novel, although they are the founders of the dynasty whose story is being told. The capstone story of the book is the description of Paul Garrett. It is very interesting that he is the descendant of almost all the characters in the preceding chapters, but he seems to have completely forgotten his personal connection to the most important ones, the Arapahos, except for very elusive remarks that almost sound like the “my grandmother was a Cherokee Princess” trope. So are we to conclude that Garrett, master of the Venneford ranch, is the best that all of this saga has produced and that this is a happy end because the rancher happens to be a Democrat and an environmentalist?
Finally, as in almost all his historic novels, you feel as he approaches the end, the author is becoming exhausted and wants to move on to his next project. He is in a hurry to finish and the last 100 pages read like a series of obituaries of the characters in his last chapters.
My encounter with the great man who had been one of my favorite authors was a painful experience. I greeted Michener in the museum of history and ethnography of which I was the curator and which I had help put together and inaugurate a couple of years earlier on Kodiak Island in 1985. This was a rich collection of Russian era artifacts as well as objects made by Indigenous people such as a unique 19th century Yupik kayak and numerous other objects of memory. Michener looked so bored that I began feeling embarrassed of bothering to explain to him the significance of what he did not even seem to look it. Suddenly, he woke up and with great delight rushed towards one object that attracted his interest. It was a late 19th century iron stove manufactured somewhere in the United States in the late 19th century that somehow made its way to Alaska but that had little or nothing to do with anything else on display in the museum. I tried to explain to him how Native Americans in Alaska had appropriated the Orthodox religion as have many Native Americans done with Catholicism through forms of syncretism in South America. He did not seem to listen. Two Native American students were present to express their Indigenous point of view about the exhibit and about the Russian experience of their great-grandparents and great-great- grandparents. I could not notice any eye contact between Michener and these young indigenous persons. They never got to talk because the great author never asked any questions. His mind had obviously already been made up about Alaska’s history and he knew better than us what the two centuries between 1740 and 1867 were all about.
Never meet your heroes.
However, the delightful person who accompanied him, to our museum asked very pertinent and profound questions. Something made me believe that she was the one who actually wrote much of what was in Michener’s novels... That Michener did not write everything by himself was discovered after his death as mentioned in the introduction to the 2015 edition of Centennial by Steve Berry (page xiii). Another disappointment.
Characters draw sympathy but mostly to the historian or to the teacher. These characters are useful for the educator as are actors portraying Julius Caesar, Winston Churchill, or Malcolm X in a docudrama or a movie shown to high school students. Pasquinel, Zendt, or Jim Lloyd or after all stereotypes Without the depth of Tolstoy’s Rostovs or Pierre. Michener’s heroes, no matter how colorful and sympathetic, cannot be compared to even secondary characters such as Hugo’s Gavroche or Platon Karataev, the wise peasant soldier with a little dog being held prisoner by the French in War and Peace. These limitations in Centennial come to light when reading his other novels. They become so stereotypical, That they not only lose the educational purpose of the historic figures he invented the for Centennial, but they are as superficial as in a pulp western novel. In Alaska, they are worse than in a James Bond novel. Which then forces the demanding reader and maybe even the historian to look back at the fictional people in Centennial and wonder if mitchner could not have done better. This is particularly true for the need of Americans that he portrays.
Anthropologists have been particularly critical of Michener's competence in describing the arapahos. As many of us were expecting Michener's visit to Alaska when he was preparing a great novel about the 49th state, I had a conversation on that subject with a leading American anthropologist, Alaska University Professor Lydia Black. She had great doubts about how Alaskans would look in the new novel once it would become available. When it did, it was even worse than what was feared (it was trashed in the peer reviewed journal Alaska History but became another great bestseller ruining people's understanding of the history of Alaska). Again, this sheds a shadow over Centennial.
One of the problems in Centennial is that it completely forgets about the minorities once a chapter has been devoted to them. The Native Americans are almost completely absent from the second half of the novel, although they are the founders of the dynasty whose story is being told. The capstone story of the book is the description of Paul Garrett. It is very interesting that he is the descendant of almost all the characters in the preceding chapters, but he seems to have completely forgotten his personal connection to the most important ones, the Arapahos, except for very elusive remarks that almost sound like the “my grandmother was a Cherokee Princess” trope. So are we to conclude that Garrett, master of the Venneford ranch, is the best that all of this saga has produced and that this is a happy end because the rancher happens to be a Democrat and an environmentalist?
Finally, as in almost all his historic novels, you feel as he approaches the end, the author is becoming exhausted and wants to move on to his next project. He is in a hurry to finish and the last 100 pages read like a series of obituaries of the characters in his last chapters.
My encounter with the great man who had been one of my favorite authors was a painful experience. I greeted Michener in the museum of history and ethnography of which I was the curator and which I had help put together and inaugurate a couple of years earlier on Kodiak Island in 1985. This was a rich collection of Russian era artifacts as well as objects made by Indigenous people such as a unique 19th century Yupik kayak and numerous other objects of memory. Michener looked so bored that I began feeling embarrassed of bothering to explain to him the significance of what he did not even seem to look it. Suddenly, he woke up and with great delight rushed towards one object that attracted his interest. It was a late 19th century iron stove manufactured somewhere in the United States in the late 19th century that somehow made its way to Alaska but that had little or nothing to do with anything else on display in the museum. I tried to explain to him how Native Americans in Alaska had appropriated the Orthodox religion as have many Native Americans done with Catholicism through forms of syncretism in South America. He did not seem to listen. Two Native American students were present to express their Indigenous point of view about the exhibit and about the Russian experience of their great-grandparents and great-great- grandparents. I could not notice any eye contact between Michener and these young indigenous persons. They never got to talk because the great author never asked any questions. His mind had obviously already been made up about Alaska’s history and he knew better than us what the two centuries between 1740 and 1867 were all about.
Never meet your heroes.
However, the delightful person who accompanied him, to our museum asked very pertinent and profound questions. Something made me believe that she was the one who actually wrote much of what was in Michener’s novels... That Michener did not write everything by himself was discovered after his death as mentioned in the introduction to the 2015 edition of Centennial by Steve Berry (page xiii). Another disappointment.
And yet there is still something that attracts irresistibly to Centennial. As Steve Berry wrote in that same introduction on that same page, Michener’s flaws made him human. The most touching trait of this gruffy, even rude, but remarkably generous person (he gave away an astonishing percentage of his income to educational projects) was his sincerity in celebrating how races can come together, particularly through love. All his three wives were Asians. This was not some sort of fetishism or wish for male domination over an inferior race (as very well portrayed in another great historic epic, about India, the Raj Quartet by Paul Scott), on the contrary. It was genuine, profound love for the Pacific and for the people who characterized it. I could feel this as I met with the Micheners, after a rich conversation with the delightful Mari Yoriko Sabusawa, the author’s third wife. Whether she wrote much of his fiction does not matter as much as she is one of those who very probably inspired the humanity that you do find in the novels after all.
There is much bitterness and cynicism in how James Michener developed his characters in most of his historic novels. This is not the case in Centennial. While the reader does find humanity here and there in the other novels, there is a lot of it in Centennial. Love stories, for example, are realistic and profound. Pasquino being torn between his German wife in Saint Louis, and his Arapaho wife in Colorado cannot be compared to doctor Zhivago's love for both Lara and Tonya, But it is a good story. The tragedy of Pasquinel's children is almost Shakespearean even though it falls into the trope of the “half-breed” gone rogue because they are unfit for any society— the white man's or the Natives’. Levi Zendt, having lost everything including his wife, stranded in the middle of nowhere, manages to reconstruct a life more significant than what he had hoped for in California. He becomes the founding father of Centennial and is a beacon of decency and humanity, living in harmony with the Arapahos as well as with white people sharing his values. It is an inspiring story and is not to be snubbed as if his long-lasting love with Lisette Pasquinel came out of a Hallmark TV movie. Indeed, this is the kind of person that you still find in rural America and who makes it livable despite all the rednecks (portrayed in abundance in Centennial as well in all Michener’s novels about America). One of the most touching storylines in the novel is the dispute between the two trappers, Pasquinel and McKeough. The reliable Scotsman takes care of the abandoned family of the rogue and uncontrollable Frenchman during his many absences which leads to the two becoming almost enemies. But during a fur rendezvous (a great outdoors annual market and reunion of Native American and European trappers—a beautifully described festival), Pasquinel and McKeough run into each other in their old age, and warmly reconcile after performing a silly dance to the tune of a fiddle.
Centennial is no material for Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature, but it certainly makes great stuff for lovers of the National Geographic or Outside magazine. James Michener makes you travel across breathtaking landscapes, all in your head, as if you were walking through those incredible dioramas of the New York Natural History Museum or of great IMAX documentary on American national parks. Better, it often is as if in that mess of Colorado. Mitch nurse talent is to make you truly feel as if you were feeling the summer heat of the great plains of Colorado or the extreme winter cold once they are covered with snow or when the action takes you to the Rocky Mountains nearby. When I was traveling for the first time across Colorado in September and we were hit by a blizzard, I not only remembered Michener’s explanation about that part of the American West having a climate that sometimes resembles Siberia’s, but I also saw from the great windows of my train exactly the landscape that was created in my imagination by the descriptions in Centennial. Reading Centennial you can almost feel the wind of the endless prairie blowing in your hair, smell the needles of the evergreens and hear the piercing cry of eagles soaring above the mountain tops.
There is much bitterness and cynicism in how James Michener developed his characters in most of his historic novels. This is not the case in Centennial. While the reader does find humanity here and there in the other novels, there is a lot of it in Centennial. Love stories, for example, are realistic and profound. Pasquino being torn between his German wife in Saint Louis, and his Arapaho wife in Colorado cannot be compared to doctor Zhivago's love for both Lara and Tonya, But it is a good story. The tragedy of Pasquinel's children is almost Shakespearean even though it falls into the trope of the “half-breed” gone rogue because they are unfit for any society— the white man's or the Natives’. Levi Zendt, having lost everything including his wife, stranded in the middle of nowhere, manages to reconstruct a life more significant than what he had hoped for in California. He becomes the founding father of Centennial and is a beacon of decency and humanity, living in harmony with the Arapahos as well as with white people sharing his values. It is an inspiring story and is not to be snubbed as if his long-lasting love with Lisette Pasquinel came out of a Hallmark TV movie. Indeed, this is the kind of person that you still find in rural America and who makes it livable despite all the rednecks (portrayed in abundance in Centennial as well in all Michener’s novels about America). One of the most touching storylines in the novel is the dispute between the two trappers, Pasquinel and McKeough. The reliable Scotsman takes care of the abandoned family of the rogue and uncontrollable Frenchman during his many absences which leads to the two becoming almost enemies. But during a fur rendezvous (a great outdoors annual market and reunion of Native American and European trappers—a beautifully described festival), Pasquinel and McKeough run into each other in their old age, and warmly reconcile after performing a silly dance to the tune of a fiddle.
Centennial is no material for Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature, but it certainly makes great stuff for lovers of the National Geographic or Outside magazine. James Michener makes you travel across breathtaking landscapes, all in your head, as if you were walking through those incredible dioramas of the New York Natural History Museum or of great IMAX documentary on American national parks. Better, it often is as if in that mess of Colorado. Mitch nurse talent is to make you truly feel as if you were feeling the summer heat of the great plains of Colorado or the extreme winter cold once they are covered with snow or when the action takes you to the Rocky Mountains nearby. When I was traveling for the first time across Colorado in September and we were hit by a blizzard, I not only remembered Michener’s explanation about that part of the American West having a climate that sometimes resembles Siberia’s, but I also saw from the great windows of my train exactly the landscape that was created in my imagination by the descriptions in Centennial. Reading Centennial you can almost feel the wind of the endless prairie blowing in your hair, smell the needles of the evergreens and hear the piercing cry of eagles soaring above the mountain tops.
Granted, Centennial will never be featured in the history of literature textbooks like the novels of Jane Austen, Proust, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. As a historic novel, it is not even close to anything written by Shūsako Endō, or Marguerite Yourcenar (whom Michener admired, by the way), not to mention Gabriel García Márquez. However, if you want some intelligent entertainment, a novel about nature that is much better than an outdoorsy adventure with a New York lawyer coming to Alaska or rural New Zealand with a roll-on suitcase and high heels falling in love with a park ranger after they spend much time arguing with each other, or if you are looking for a history novel much better than the soap operas of Alexandre Dumas or John Jakes, or Jeff Shaara's Gods and Generals with its oodles of dialogue sounding like speeches, Centennial is a great novel that can be a great educational experience and make you feel like you were in the great outdoors. Thus, I can tell my students, my friends or you: read it. If you haven’t and if you make the effort to open the first page of more than the thousand in the novel, you will have great moments of pleasure ahead of you.
In Memoriam: Georges Bortoli, Jennifer Locke
It is a coincidence that on this Wednesday June 28, 2023, two anniversaries should remind us of two journalists separated by two generations. These were two television journalists, who some of us at our American University of Paris knew well. As founder and editor in chief of Nature & Cultures, a publication of the American University of Paris that has been read by over 30,000 people, I thought that it would be appropriate to commemorate both of these personalities. I had the chance to know both of them. I am indebted to the older of these two talented people to have introduced me to AUP; without this extraordinary boost to my career, I would have had the chance to known the younger one.
Today June 28th 2023, Jennifer Locke, American University of Paris alumni, would have been 40 years old. She was a brilliant student And a very pleasant personality, the kind of person who, through her participation, makes the classroom and a teacher’s career a delightful experience. I crossed her path again when she interviewed me for Fow News; By then, she had become and enthusiastic and idealistic journalist. Her career was cut short by whoever at Fox News did not realize that their channel did not deserve her talent, and then by a fatal disease at an age when life only begins.
Today June 28th 2023, Jennifer Locke, American University of Paris alumni, would have been 40 years old. She was a brilliant student And a very pleasant personality, the kind of person who, through her participation, makes the classroom and a teacher’s career a delightful experience. I crossed her path again when she interviewed me for Fow News; By then, she had become and enthusiastic and idealistic journalist. Her career was cut short by whoever at Fox News did not realize that their channel did not deserve her talent, and then by a fatal disease at an age when life only begins.
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Today June 28th 2023 is also the 100th anniversary of the birth in Tunis of a remarkable journalist and one of the world's greatest experts on the Soviet Union and Russia: Georges Bortoli who died in 2010 at 87 in the suburbs of Paris. He knew AUP (then "American College in Paris") through his friend and colleague journalist, political analyst Pierre Salinger, former White House Press Secretary. At the end of World War II, G. Bortoli began his career in Tunis and for ten years dedicated himself to covering the problems of North Africa and the Third World. Towards the end of the 1950s, he turned to television and became, among many other activities, one of the anchormen of the sole French national broadcasting corporation (RTF) television news in Paris. In the 1960s, Georges Bortoli established himself as a specialist in the Soviet Union. He resided for several years in Moscow as a correspondent, living with his family (his delightful wife Catherine, born in the Russian diaspora in Tunisia, always full of support with her energy and sense of humor, and his children, future composer Stéphane and future scholars Anne and Catherine) for the Figaro newspaper and French television bureaus in Moscow for several years. He was subsequently an editorialist in international relations for several decades. He authored several important books on the USSR and Russia, such as The Death of Stalin (you can read the English translation) published ahead of most studies on the same subject. His Vivre à Moscou, remains one of the best witness accounts of life in the USSR in the middle of the Cold War.
Here at N&C - Nature & Cultures we wish to use this opportunity to recommend three other books that, with Bortoli’s book, we consider as the best on the subject. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s most famous interview was conducted in dangerous clandestine conditions by correspondents Hedrick Smith and Robert Kaiser. Each of these remarkable observers of Soviet life under Brezhnev published The Russians (Smith), and Russia: the Power and the People (Kaiser). For generations, these will be primary sources to understand how the Soviet régime functioned and how Soviet citizens lived under it in the 1970s. They may last as long as Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Nine and Jean Kehayan were French Communists when they decided to move to the USSR, the country that their ideals made them believed was the model for any society based on progress and happiness. Upon their return, tragically disillusioned, they published Rue du Prolétaire Rouge (Red Proletarian Street – where they lived in Moscow). If you can read French, this is a more recent report than Smith’s and Kaiser’s that, in retrospective, illustrates the decay of a society leading to its complete collapse only a few years after the authors released their book, causing great scandal in left-wing circles in French speaking countries.
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Our selection for Issue No.3 :
IR Theory, Historical Analogy, and Major Power War has been recently published by our own American University of Paris Professor and prolific author Hall Gardner, former Chair of the International Comparative Politics Department.
Sara E. Davies. Containing Contagion: The Politics of Disease Outbreaks in Southeast Asia is more than relevant in this period when Asian countries' approaches to the Covid 19 pandemic has been either decried, or on the contrary presented as an example of what should have been the model for Western countries that have been overwhelmed by the situation.
But first, we wish to explain why we fell in love with the following book: (scroll down to read our other reviews)
Tricia Nuyaqik Brown & Joni Kitmiiq. Roy Corral (Photographer). Alaska Native Games and How to Play Them: Twenty-Five Ancient Contests That Never Died. University of Alaska Press, Fairbanks: 2020. ISBN-13:9781602234185 |
Photo © Roy Corral - reproduced with his kind permission
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In his foreword to this delightful book, Nick Iligutchiak Hanson, a World Eskimo-Indian Olympics champion" writes :
Across the country, fans of the NBC show American Ninja Warrior know me as the “Eskimo Ninja.” We Ninjas follow a demanding course that requires balance, strength, endurance, and focus, the same attributes required to play the Alaska Native Games of my ancestors: Seal Hop, Eskimo Stick Pull, Blanket Toss, and more. Our games are a bridge from the past that helps us find the best in ourselves and each other. If it weren’t for World Eskimo-Indian Olympics (WEIO) and Native Youth Olympics (NYO), I wouldn’t be where I am today. " The word "Eskimo" may immediately cause a problem in this first text appearing on page ii and therefore, needs clarification: in Alaska, the Inuits are not the only... "Eskimos". While in Canada, only the Inuit were called that name and have banned its use, the Yupik and the Inuit of Alaska, culturally and especially linguistically extremely close to eachother as well as the small group of Yuit people, have, in modern times, progressively recognized themselves as belonging to one nation: the Eskimo nation. Which is way the term is perfectly acceptable and officially used in Alaska.
As this little vocabulary precision indicates, the minute a reader opens this book, he or she is challenged with issues that open horizons far beyond those expected in a book for children or young adults. It all begins with Nick Hanson, who grew up in an indigenous village, telling us about his moving story of a Native boy whose European ancestry makes him look "White" in an almost all-Native community. He finds his identity and acceptance by practicing indigenous sports and becoming famous statewide as a champion. Nick Hanson's foreword, in just a few paragraphs, not only brings up very serious issues of identity. Because of his looks as a "white boy" little Nick was beaten up almost every day by a boy called Axel. Eventually, impressed by Nick's skills as a basketball player, Axel who, meanwhile, became the captain of the local basketball team encouraged the former victim of his abuse to practice Native Games. Axel even offered to coach Nick. Out of this experience grew a new friendship and Nick became a sports celebrity among all indigenous youths in the North West of the Americas. Later, alas, Axel committed suicide.
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One of Nick Hanson's main motivation as an advocate for Native sports is that these activities serve as a tool for suicide prevention. But it is mainly because, as Hanson writes, it is a gateway for indigenous kids to reconnect with their own culture in a contemporary environment completely obliterated a reference to the culture of Eskimos, Aleuts or Indians (again a word Condemned by politically correct standards... White people's standards according to acclaimed native American writer Sherman Alexie who says that Indians call themselves Indians, and that "Native American" is a word made up "a liberal white man's guilt" trip).
Again, from the start, we discover a far wider picture in this publication than what is expected from a book for high school kids or in a vade mecum on sports which only seems to have been the authors' intention. Joni Kitmiiq Spiess is an Iñupiaq woman born in Nome, Alaska, who has been a traditional games competitor, and coach. After her studies in Anchorage, Joni returned to Nome and taught physical education to elementary school children from 2005–2012. She also began demonstrating the Native games to her students and coaching them in these disciplines. Back in Anchorage, she is now involved in health education for young children. Tricia Brown (now bearing the indigenous name Nuyaqik which indicates adoption by Native Alaskans), a well-known former reporter and editor of Alaska Magazine (Alaska's local equivalent of both the National Geographic and Outside Magazine), is now a freelance author who penned eight picture books for children, nearly two dozen nonfiction books for adults including the now classic Children of the Midnight Sun, which received national critical acclaim for its profiles of Alaska Native children and was, already then, illustrated by Roy Corral. Photojournalist Roy Corral, has been covered with awards in Alaska and his photography has appeared in The National Geographic, Forbes and on the walls of the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center, Anchorage Museum, and the Alaska Native Heritage Center. His photographs for which epithets are superfluous illustrate almost every page of Alaska Native Games providing each of them with great visual power.
Alaskan Games and How to Play Them... is, as it's name indicates, very well detailed manual for those who wish to learn what it takes to practice sports that were created in times immemorial by indigenous Alaskans. In this book, you will get to know everything about the Alaskan High Kick, the Eskimo Stick Pull, the Greased Pole Walk the Knuckle Hop / Seal Hop (to mention only the ones with the most exciting names) and scores of others. One of the most fun, exciting and iconic of all Alaskan games (often seen on post cards, touristic brochures or in documentaries) is the blanket toss. Father Michael Oleksa, a well known anthropologist and Native rights activist,fluent in several indigenous languages and who has been living immersed in Aleut and Eskimo communities (his wife is Yupik) for more than half of a century, once explained how the blanket toss is more than it seems: it was originally believed by Europeans that soaring in the air, several feet above the ground, allowed to spot whales from afar in very flat coastal regions. "It was for te whales to see us" would very confidentially say some indigenous people to outsiders whom they trusted with their most intimate beliefs. Indeed, many indigenous populations, not only in Alaska but in other parts of the world believe that animals -- the villagers' only source of food -- come to sacrifice their own lives for which the people are eternally grateful to them. That cultural dimension is perceptible throughout the pages of Alaskan Games and How to Play Them....
This is why this how-to book for kids, is not an ordinary one. Not only have these games rarely been systematically gathered in a monograph intended for the general public and young people in particular (there exists one interesting website at the University of Alaska - Fairbanks' Alaska Native knowledge Network: Alaska Native Games: A Resource Guide by Roberta Tognetti-Stuff) "What is the human body capable of doing? If you’ve faced a life-or-death situation, you’d want to know that answer about your own body. Surviving in the wilderness—or worse, surviving when something goes wrong in the wilderness—requires physical strength and mental toughness"' write the co-autors. "Could an Iñupiaq seal hunter who is stranded on the ice jump from one floe to another? Could the Athabascan moose hunter load a hundred pounds of meat on his back and then quickly get to his feet? Could the Yup’ik fisherman’s hands maintain a strong grip after hours of pulling fish? Each of the Alaska Native games emulates real-life situations like these."
This is why this how-to book for kids, is not an ordinary one. Not only have these games rarely been systematically gathered in a monograph intended for the general public and young people in particular (there exists one interesting website at the University of Alaska - Fairbanks' Alaska Native knowledge Network: Alaska Native Games: A Resource Guide by Roberta Tognetti-Stuff) "What is the human body capable of doing? If you’ve faced a life-or-death situation, you’d want to know that answer about your own body. Surviving in the wilderness—or worse, surviving when something goes wrong in the wilderness—requires physical strength and mental toughness"' write the co-autors. "Could an Iñupiaq seal hunter who is stranded on the ice jump from one floe to another? Could the Athabascan moose hunter load a hundred pounds of meat on his back and then quickly get to his feet? Could the Yup’ik fisherman’s hands maintain a strong grip after hours of pulling fish? Each of the Alaska Native games emulates real-life situations like these."
The last pages read like a Hall of Fame on paper dedicated to the great champions of the past -- Brian Randazzo Sr. and Brian Randazzo Jr. of Anchorage, Robert "Big Bob" Aiken Jr. of Barrow, Brian Walker of Anvik and Eagle River, Reggie Joule Sr. of Kotzebue, Nicole Johnstone of Nome and Anchorage, Ben Snowball of Stebbins and Anchorage, Rod and Kyle Worl of Juneau, and Greg Nothsine of Anchorage.
We asked Trisha Brown, one of the co-authors, whether she was not worried about a potential side-effect of the book's success if it were (as we hope it would be) even greater than her classic Children of the Midnight Sun. What if the games start to be practiced by non-indigenous people in LA or Miami who would adopt these games and turn them into their own custom without ever acknowledging the games' origins, which is what has happened for example, generations ago, with the game of lacrosse. In other words, isn't there a risk of cultural appropriation? Trisha answered the following: "Non-Natives are already welcome to play them in the NYO and JNYO games. The cultural base and reason for play is already firmly documented. It's not a concern from what I can tell. One SE tribe is suing a fashion designer for appropriating their tribal symbols in clothing, but that's a different matter..."
Alaska Native Games and How to Play Them... is an inspiring book that could actually even become a life saver. This is what Nick Hanson writes in his preface: "I want kids to know that if they come from a broken home, like me . . . if they come from a community, like mine . . . if they’re going to a dark place, like I have . . . they can still stay positive. Through Alaska Native sports, I found my lifeline in physical challenges, healthy friendships, and connection to my culture. Alaska Native sports saved my life, and they still help point the way to hope."
Don't miss Nature & Cultures' other features on the Great North: The Arctic: A New Middle East? and Renewable Energy and the Reindeer
Hall Gardner. IR Theory, Historical Analogy, and Major Power War. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 339 pp. $84.99, ISBN 978-3-030-04635-4.
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The originality of Hall Gardner’s most recent book (maybe the most interesting one, since he has been digesting all of its themes since his early publications as a graduate student) is to define (although implicitly rather than explicitly) what calls this being an “alternative realist”. Every argument made in the monograph is a rejection of clichés and a defense of alternative interpretation of the present conflictual situation between the USA and its allies vs. Russia, China and their allies. While criticizing the numerous preconceptions that always seemed to be the substance of realism (e.g. zero-sum game or the inevitability of war) or of liberalism (e.g. the indisputable universality of values such as human rights which risks becoming a pretext for neo-colonial military adventures presented as “crusades” for freedom), Gardner seems to attempt (not unlike Stanley Hoffmann) to reconcile what seems to be irreconcilable by focusing on the common denominator of realism and liberalism which is their potential to reduce the dangers of conflagration of devastating conflicts–--the former by seeking stability through balance of power, the latter by making peace as the ultimate standard in diplomacy.
A realist himself, Gardner nevertheless attacks some of the deep-rooted paradigms of Realpolitik. Always writing as a historian, he confronts, for example, the idea that the treaty of Westphalia established indisputable principles of state sovereignty. In his review in H-Diplo, Sarang Shidore (The University of Texas at Austin) summarized Gardner’s interpretation of the famous 1648 treaty
A realist himself, Gardner nevertheless attacks some of the deep-rooted paradigms of Realpolitik. Always writing as a historian, he confronts, for example, the idea that the treaty of Westphalia established indisputable principles of state sovereignty. In his review in H-Diplo, Sarang Shidore (The University of Texas at Austin) summarized Gardner’s interpretation of the famous 1648 treaty
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"widely seen to have inaugurated a new era in European and world affairs, by reifying state sovereignty as a global governing principle. Westphalian sovereignty, Gardner argues, is substantially a myth. While Westphalia did put aspects of state sovereignty in place, such as the right of almost three hundred German princes to be free of the control of the Holy Roman Empire, it also limited sovereignty in important ways, for instance, by “denying the doctrine of cuius regio, eius religio (the religion of the prince becomes the religion of the state) ... established by the 1555 Peace of Augsburg” (p. 118). Rather than a strict enshrining of the principle of noninterference, Westphalia legitimized “power sharing and joint sovereignty” by giving the new powers France and Sweden the right to interfere in the affairs of the German Protestant princes (p. 117)''.
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While accomplishing that, Gardner provides analytical criticism of such 1990s myths as Fukuyama’s “end of history” and of “liberal democratization”, and other Western normative values such as what the author calls “universal democratic moralism”, or social engineering by the US in other countries . The disillusion that came after the collapse of such utopic predictions after the wars of succession of Yugoslavia, the sinking into extreme corruption of Eltsin’s Russia and the rise of Putin (or of populist leqders in the West) could explain the excessive hostility shown to Russia today – a hostility than only fuels Putin’s own paranoia and aggressiveness. It is to be noted that Fukuyama was one of Gardner’s main critics twenty five years ago, and while Fukuyama’s “end of history” has now become a typical subject of study of typical 20th century utopian political thought, Gardner’s books from the 1990s –-- several of which are synthesized in IR Theory, Historical Analogy, and Major Power War –- have proven to have been far more accurate in their predictions about the future 21st century, neither wildly optimistic like the liberal “End of History”, nor fatalistic like “The Clash of Civilizations”.
Among Gardner’s warnings against destroying a hornet’s nest by hysterically beating on it with a stick without protection are several analyses such as this one on the Arab Spring:
Among Gardner’s warnings against destroying a hornet’s nest by hysterically beating on it with a stick without protection are several analyses such as this one on the Arab Spring:
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Both neo-conservatives and particularly neoliberals have argued that the US and other democratic countries need to more strongly support, with greater diplomatic and financial assistance, a number of ostensi-bly universalistic socio-political movements that have begun to strug-gle against various authoritarian regimes, even if official government pronouncements in favor of those movements appears to represent an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the regime in power. The dilemma, however, is that perceived US and foreign support for democratic movements and reforms in human rights policy within differing authoritarian countries has tended to antagonize many of those same regimes, including China, Russia, Belarus, Iran, Bahrain, Syria, while destabilizing other regimes, including Ukraine, Georgia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Tunisia, Venezuela, among others. (p. 18)
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Subsequently, Gardner criticizes the notion of “sovereign” decision-making and polarity in the analysis of international relations and defense politics (he explains, in 11 points, that the geopolitical situations in world affairs are far more complex) and in general, all attempts by trendy contemporary analytical systems to oversimplify our grids of interpretation. He says for example, that
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Contrary to the neorealist stereotype, states do not always interact with other centers of power and influence (states, inter-governmental actors and differing non-state, alt-state, and anti-state actors) in conditions of perpetual conflict or in circumstances of extreme tension in all cases. It may be true that the “post-bipolar” global system has attempted to stabilize itself through oligarchical cooperation in the Group of 7 (G-7) or Group of 8 (G-8 when Russia is included) and Group of 20 relationship to the dangerous exclusion of the Group of 77 But the same hegemonic and opposing states have also sought near universal cooperation in the 2015 UN COP-21 Climate Change Conference—that is, until the hegemonic US, under the Trump administration, opted to drop out. (p. 55)
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He proposes instead to consider the soundness of a concept of “highly uneven polycentrism”.
The mainstream press journalists and sometimes even academics often label the present tensions between the US and its allies and Russia or China as a “Cold War II”. Gardner’s monograph is the first to systematically explain why the analogy is “not entirely relevant to today’s circumstances even if there are some similarities” as he explains in his introduction. Numerous arguments are listed to support an alternative view : the present situation resemble just one of the periods preceding a great conflict–World War I or World War II–or the Cold War, but resembles all of them at the same time. Which is the foundation of his concept of "alternative realism", the central theme of this book.
According to Sarang Shidore, whose review of Gardner's IA... is otherwise rather positive, this is the books main weakness. He writes the following:
The mainstream press journalists and sometimes even academics often label the present tensions between the US and its allies and Russia or China as a “Cold War II”. Gardner’s monograph is the first to systematically explain why the analogy is “not entirely relevant to today’s circumstances even if there are some similarities” as he explains in his introduction. Numerous arguments are listed to support an alternative view : the present situation resemble just one of the periods preceding a great conflict–World War I or World War II–or the Cold War, but resembles all of them at the same time. Which is the foundation of his concept of "alternative realism", the central theme of this book.
According to Sarang Shidore, whose review of Gardner's IA... is otherwise rather positive, this is the books main weakness. He writes the following:
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Gardner even proposes some grand bargains that such contact groups could arrive at. For Ukraine, this means recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea but with Russian compensation paid to Kiev, a free-trade arrangement with Europe and the United States to give them a deep role in Crimea’s economy, and a pathway to future shared sovereignty over the annexed territory. A similar joint sovereignty approach is recommended to resolve the multi-stakeholder South China Sea dispute. A contact group could also resolve the Syria dispute with a resultant coalition government comprising all Syrian combatants, including the current members of the Bashar al-Assad government, and the Yemen war with the Omani proposal as a starting point.
How could these grand bargains come about? This is where Gardner starts to slip. He claims this approach will work on the parties’ realization “that political, economic, and technological cooperation will most likely bring benefits for all sides in the long term than perpetual conflict” (p. 110). The problem with this assumption is not that long-term win-wins do not rationally exist (they often do), but rather that in a time of acrimony, nationalism, and tendencies toward greater authoritarianism on all sides, such rationality could well be overwhelmed by other more potent rationalities of short-term aggrandizement and saving face. Though the idea of an informal contact group has its advantages, Gardner’s argument that a change of diplomatic format would do the trick is less than credible. The Ukraine dispute, for example, has degenerated into bitter acrimony on both sides with an ongoing hot conflict. This is the case notwithstanding the work of the Trilateral Contact Group—precisely the sort of approach that Gardner recommends. But walking back from the mutual US-Russian antagonism will likely take more than the right negotiating format. There first must be a will to meet the adversary part of the way—a difficult challenge to overcome when the conflict is portrayed in starkly moralistic terms, particularly on the side of Washington. Gardner has no convincing practical proposition that addresses this challenge. It is in his inability to adequately define his theoretical concept of “alternative realism,” however, where Gardner truly falls short. Alternative realism seems to be defined more by what it is not than what it is. Time and again (and convincingly on many occasions), Gardner rebuts many cherished axioms of neorealism. This includes the assurance of nuclear deterrence, state sovereignty, the concepts of polarity and balance of power, unitary states, and anarchy.[4] Alternative realism is equated with a constructivist critique of Hans Morgenthau and preventive diplomacy. William Fulbright’s quote “morality of decent instincts tempered by the knowledge of human imperfections” is also depicted as a guiding principle (p. 20). Later in the text, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev is held up as a practitioner of alternative realism, with his revolutionary contributions to ending the Cold War, while at the same time developing good relations with China as a hedge against NATO. There is also a reference to alternative realism as a “critical comparative historical approach” (p. 26). All this, though useful, does not amount to a coherent theory with with clear and testable principles and demonstrated explanatory (far less predictive) power. The elements that seem to constitute Gardner’s alternative realism—the centrality of historical influences, polycentrism as representing the world order, the importance of non-state actors, absolute gains trumping relative gains, and the promise of informal diplomacy—appear to come more out of various well-trod pathways of liberal and constructivist thinking than any brand new theoretical approach. But the reader is left even more confused at one point by an extensive taxonomy of states centered on space and power, apparently drawn from theoretician George Liska, which bears more than a passing resemblance to the early twentieth-century framework of geopolitics. Is “alternative realism” then simply a smorgasbord of various international relations frameworks, excluding neorealism? The reader is never provided a clear answer. |
Asked to respond to this criticism, Gardner sent N&C - Nature and Culture reviewers the following text:
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Sarang Shidore has argued that the concept of “Alternative realism seems to be defined more by what it is not than what it is.” Yet this argument misses the point that alternative realism does clearly define priorities in terms of national interests---but with a broader conception of that "national interest" than that of neo-realism and traditional realism.
The first priority of alternative realism is to avoid situations that would draw a state and its population into major power wars or into interminable wars with no clearly defined goals or objectives. While powerful interest groups and factions may possess personal interests in engaging in destructive conflicts, the state and society as a whole rarely possess a strong interest in engaging in such conflicts. And rarely do the opposing states and societies. Even if one side believes it can “win” such a conflict, the human suffering and direct and indirect costs can be enormous. So-called winners could turn out to be losers in the long term. Alternative realism recognizes this dilemma and argues that the power of such groups and factions that push for war must be challenged and neutralized---if possible---in order to prevent even deeper domestic social and political conflict that could also widen and intensify. One of the major reasons for placing major powers with conflicting interests on the UN Security Council is to sustain a dialogue between those rivals. Such a dialogue is intended to prevent either direct conflict or proxy wars between those rivals. Traditional realists, such as Henry Kissinger, may have been more tolerant of so-called “limited” wars, but only so long as "limited" wars did not provoke major power wars. But even those so-called “limited” wars do not serve the general interests of the state and population if they become costly, interminable, and destructive to national morale---much as Hans Morgenthau, in opposition to Kissinger, argued in response to the brutal American conduct in the Vietnam war. Surprising many, Morgenthau, as an alternative realist, opposed the Vietnam war. This brings me to the concept of Contact Group diplomacy which is designed to help transform if not resolve both major and regional power conflicts (and so-called "limited" conflicts) by incorporating into discussions as many states (and third actors such as NGOs and anti-state movements) that are concerned with such a conflict or dispute as is possible and practical. In criticizing my concept of Contact Groups, Sarang Shidore argues, “Though the idea of an informal contact group has its advantages, Gardner’s argument that a change of diplomatic format would do the trick is less than credible. The Ukraine dispute, for example, has degenerated into bitter acrimony on both sides with an ongoing hot conflict. This is the case not withstanding the work of the Trilateral Contact Group—precisely the sort of approach that Gardner recommends.” But this is not the case: I do not recommend the Trilateral Contact Group as a final step in the negotiation process as Shidore argues that I might. The Trilateral Contact Group (which involves Ukraine, the Russian Federation, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) can only represent a first step in a concerted negotiation/ conflict transformation process. The Trilateral Contact Group by itself will not succeed if it is not soon followed up by American and NATO participation leading to a rapprochement with Moscow. As I argue in World War Trump (Prometheus Books 2018) and in IR Theory, Historical Analogy, and Major Power War (Palgrave Macmillan 2019), the conflict in eastern Ukraine and over the Crimea will not be transformed toward less conflictual situation until Washington—in working with NATO and the European Union— resolves to engage in full-fledged diplomacy with Moscow that is designed to forge a general entente between the US, EU and Russia over a neutral Ukraine, among other issues to be negotiated As I argued in IR Theory, Historical Analogy, and Major Power War, such an alternative realist position may have failed to have established a major power entente between Britain, France and Germany (that did not concurrently thoroughly alienate Russia/ Soviet Union) before both World War I and World War II—but this historical analogy does not necessarily mean the quest for a general entente relationship between the US, European Union and Russia (that will not concurrently alienate China) will fail in contemporary circumstances. What is needed is effective leadership with foresight that is willing to sustain negotiations in the long term despite the domestic and international hurdles that such leadership will face in seeking such a major power entente. Whether such a leadership that is willing to engage in a truly peace-oriented strategy will come to power in the United States given domestic circumstances remains another question. But that is not the fault of alternative realism! |
The best is now to let readers decide on the merits of this defense of "alternative realism". Whether said readers will remain skeptical or be convinced, it is a good mental exercise which should be one more reason to purchase the book.
Another quality is Gardner’s constant historic approach (going all the way back to the 17th and even 16th century) in his discussion of such theoretical problems in the domain of political science theory only underline how relevant is the discipline of history. It is an implicit argument that is also recurrent throughout the text.
Many will object to the somewhat normative nature of IR Theory, Historical Analogy, and Major Power War for being. But given the dangerous circumstances we are in, why not defend such norms as diplomacy and peace as opposed to let the situation degenerate into World War III.
Finally, those who know Gardner's books very well (for example Lee Huebner, George Washington University, former International Herald Tribune boss or Robert Jackson of Carleton University, Canada, who both favorably reviewed this last opus) have witnessed over the years how the author’s style has evolved from extremely lengthy convoluted sentences to limpid prose that is easily and immediately understandable, while surrendering nothing to the ambition of conveying extremely complex subject matters and theoretical analysis.
Sara E. Davies. Containing Contagion: The Politics of Disease Outbreaks in Southeast Asia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. 224 pp. $54.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4214-2739-3.
Reviewed by Eva Hilberg (Hebrew University of Jerusalem/ University of Sussex)
Originally published on H-Diplo (March, 2020) Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)
In a time that increasingly questions the efficacy of diplomacy and multilateral treaties, Sara E. Davies’s most recent work serves as a well-researched reminder of the transformative potential that can reside in the making of agreements and in the creation of diplomatic structures between regional partners. Containing Contagion focuses on the politics of disease outbreaks in Southeast Asia, where recent epidemic outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and H5N1 (avian influenza or “bird flu”) created a strong political will for cooperation in response to public health emergencies—which by their very nature do not respect boundaries and thus are truly transnational. Against the backdrop of the simultaneous implementation of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Health Regulations (IHR, revised in 2005), this book explores the different ways this cooperation was institutionalized and made to work in Southeast Asia, all the while asking the core question of whether diplomacy can actually make a measurable difference—and if so, why and how? This question goes to the heart of the study of international relations, and this book is a valuable contribution not only to the study of global health diplomacy but also to wider discussions within this field.Challenging the prevailing perception of a general failure of IHR implementation, this book presents a meticulously researched reevaluation of state performance with regard to the eight core capacities enshrined in the revised IHR. This account is contextualized with different layers of institutional international organizations that are region specific to Southeast Asia—including the two WHO regional offices that cover this geographical area, Western Pacific Regional Office (WPRO) and South-East Asia Regional Office (SEARO); the preexisting Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); the extended ASEAN Plus Three (including Japan, China, and South Korea); the regional Mekong Basin Disease Surveillance (MBDS) network; and the unique organization specifically created for the implementation of the IHR in Southeast Asia, the Asian Pacific Strategy for Emerging Infectious Diseases (APSED). The region’s combination of technical and political institutions in the field of disease diplomacy is particularly notable as Southeast Asia is known for its long-standing commitment to the principle of noninterference, making the implementation of the IHR an unusual case in which states “acquiesce to an international regulation coupled with a framework that permitted evaluations, even interference and judgment, from an international organization, the WHO” (p. 4). Davies argues that what emerges from this “curious case” of collaboration in a noninterference environment is an empirical account of “compliance pull” through informal processes (p. 8).
The book’s central argument focuses on the effectiveness of APSED, which is a region-specific framework supporting the implementation of the IHR that has thus far run in three phases. Previous evaluations of APSED and more generally of IHR implementation emphasize that “two-thirds of states have failed to meet the IHR core capacities” and find APSED to bring about “only thin, mainly instrumental and rhetorical, cooperation that drives only minimal institutional and behavioral change at the regional or domestic level” (pp. 9, 6).[1] In contrast, Davies finds that “the narrative of compliance failure risks downplaying what has been achieved in a short time and the very real evidence that the IHR have exerted considerable ‘compliance pull’ across a sizable majority of states” and argues “whatever their limitations, regional political institutions continue to play a vital role in bridging the gap between the global and the local, between the ambitions of WHO headquarters and the realities on the ground in Southeast Asia” (pp. 41, 158). The book makes its case over six chapters, beginning with the development of the IHR and the political context in Southeast Asia in chapters 1 and 2. Chapter 3 provides a careful dissection of the political pressures enacted by disease outbreaks in Southeast Asia, giving rise to a normative shift toward an understanding of health security threats as collective threats. Against this backdrop, chapter 4 traces the emergence of APSED as a regional “middle path” toward implementation, which is then backed up in chapter 5 with a detailed comparative appraisal of disease outbreak reporting behavior of ASEAN member states. Chapter 6 then discusses the likely reasons for statistical anomalies and contradictions arising from the reporting statistics, finding that in the end “capacity assessments ... are all political statements about the efficiency and stability of the [state’s] regime” (p. 157).
The strength of this book is its close attention to detail, especially in its meticulous and contextualized discussions of reporting behavior and core capacity fulfillment statistics over time. These empirics form a solid basis for Davies’s findings, which skillfully pick apart the above-mentioned statistical value of two-thirds of states not meeting IHR core capacities. Her account carefully differentiates between changes across the eight different capacities and compares states’ performance with their overall reporting behavior, finding “a strong trend toward more open and prompt communication of disease outbreaks and enhanced freedom to report” (p. 115). The influence of APSED, the WHO, and other dedicated organizations via processes of international standard setting here emerges as a pivotal factor for improving surveillance and reporting of designated international public health threats and also of endemic disease outbreaks. This process, however, is not working in the same way in every context. Throughout, Davies balances her assessment with discussions of “a small number of states [that] have remained consistent in the inconsistent practice of detection and verification” (p. 158). She also points out that the “outstanding problem is that endemic diseases without regional or WHO-level attention continue to go undetected” (p. 137). Overall, her findings somewhat lessen worries about the creation of compliance “silos,” through which international priorities deviate funds and operational capacity from other potentially more significant public health issues (p. 160).
Davies builds her argument with great clarity and focus—which, however, at times comes at the expense of taking a wider view of APSED’s and Southeast Asia’s track records in comparison with the experiences of other regions regarding IHR implementation. For example, the book briefly mentions criticism engendered by the WHO’s failure to deal effectively with the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, thus illuminating the WHO’s emphasis on regional reporting and its pitfalls. Comparative insights such as these could have been introduced more frequently throughout in order to give the reader a deeper understanding of the central argument’s wider implications. This could have contextualized important concluding statements, which, for example, find that “disease surveillance emerged as a priority for Southeast Asia even prior to the IHR revisions, perhaps explaining in part why the region accepted the IHR revisions” (p. 142). Statements such as this raise the question of how much Southeast Asia’s experience differs from other regions and whether this particular experience can be replicated in other regions. A comparative angle is covered more thoroughly in Davies’s co-authored work with Adam Kamradt-Scott and Simon Rushton, Disease Diplomacy: International Norms and Global Health Security (2015), but would have added a further valuable dimension to the discussion in the present book.
The wider implications of the book’s core argument could have also been foregrounded more throughout, as this is essentially a book about some of the central questions for global health security today. Presenting the book’s remit as exclusively focused on the politics of disease outbreaks in Southeast Asia slightly undersells the potential impact. The book directly contributes to discussions of whether the securitization of health issues is advisable, about the conflict between appraisals of the influence of hard power and soft power in international relations, and about the role of human rights standards for and within global health instruments. It also engages with theoretical debates on the relationship between health and governance by discussing the correlation between “health spending, regime type, and political stability,” and shows that no definite correlation can be established (p. 47). Further critical global health issues, such as the use of metrics, also feed into the discussion, as statistics are then used to diminish the impact of grand numbers often used for the promotion of global health programs and priorities. All these different aspects together make this book a compelling showcase for why the study of global health matters and illustrates what a closer look at health governance can add to the understanding of diplomacy.
Notes
[1]. The study referenced by Davies is Suerie Moon, et al., “Will Ebola Change the Game? Ten Essential Reforms before the Next Pandemic. The Report of the Harvard-LSHTM Independent Panel on the Global Response to Ebola,” The Lancet 386, no. 10009 (2015): 2204–21.
Eva Hilberg is a postdoctoral fellow at the Federmann School of Public Policy and Government, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and an honorary research fellow at the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, UK. Her work traces the politics of knowledge circulating in the global bioeconomy and analyzes the inscription of new priorities into the global health agenda, such as in the field of global mental health. Her PhD focused on the normalization of biomedical knowledge by means of intellectual property rights and the exclusion of patients from this field of politics (“Promoting Health or Securing the Market? The Right to Health and Intellectual Property between Radical Contestation and Accommodation,” in Third World Quarterly [May 2015]).
Citation: Eva Hilberg. Review of Davies, Sara E., Containing Contagion: The Politics of Disease Outbreaks in Southeast Asia. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. March, 2020. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54319
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
The book’s central argument focuses on the effectiveness of APSED, which is a region-specific framework supporting the implementation of the IHR that has thus far run in three phases. Previous evaluations of APSED and more generally of IHR implementation emphasize that “two-thirds of states have failed to meet the IHR core capacities” and find APSED to bring about “only thin, mainly instrumental and rhetorical, cooperation that drives only minimal institutional and behavioral change at the regional or domestic level” (pp. 9, 6).[1] In contrast, Davies finds that “the narrative of compliance failure risks downplaying what has been achieved in a short time and the very real evidence that the IHR have exerted considerable ‘compliance pull’ across a sizable majority of states” and argues “whatever their limitations, regional political institutions continue to play a vital role in bridging the gap between the global and the local, between the ambitions of WHO headquarters and the realities on the ground in Southeast Asia” (pp. 41, 158). The book makes its case over six chapters, beginning with the development of the IHR and the political context in Southeast Asia in chapters 1 and 2. Chapter 3 provides a careful dissection of the political pressures enacted by disease outbreaks in Southeast Asia, giving rise to a normative shift toward an understanding of health security threats as collective threats. Against this backdrop, chapter 4 traces the emergence of APSED as a regional “middle path” toward implementation, which is then backed up in chapter 5 with a detailed comparative appraisal of disease outbreak reporting behavior of ASEAN member states. Chapter 6 then discusses the likely reasons for statistical anomalies and contradictions arising from the reporting statistics, finding that in the end “capacity assessments ... are all political statements about the efficiency and stability of the [state’s] regime” (p. 157).
The strength of this book is its close attention to detail, especially in its meticulous and contextualized discussions of reporting behavior and core capacity fulfillment statistics over time. These empirics form a solid basis for Davies’s findings, which skillfully pick apart the above-mentioned statistical value of two-thirds of states not meeting IHR core capacities. Her account carefully differentiates between changes across the eight different capacities and compares states’ performance with their overall reporting behavior, finding “a strong trend toward more open and prompt communication of disease outbreaks and enhanced freedom to report” (p. 115). The influence of APSED, the WHO, and other dedicated organizations via processes of international standard setting here emerges as a pivotal factor for improving surveillance and reporting of designated international public health threats and also of endemic disease outbreaks. This process, however, is not working in the same way in every context. Throughout, Davies balances her assessment with discussions of “a small number of states [that] have remained consistent in the inconsistent practice of detection and verification” (p. 158). She also points out that the “outstanding problem is that endemic diseases without regional or WHO-level attention continue to go undetected” (p. 137). Overall, her findings somewhat lessen worries about the creation of compliance “silos,” through which international priorities deviate funds and operational capacity from other potentially more significant public health issues (p. 160).
Davies builds her argument with great clarity and focus—which, however, at times comes at the expense of taking a wider view of APSED’s and Southeast Asia’s track records in comparison with the experiences of other regions regarding IHR implementation. For example, the book briefly mentions criticism engendered by the WHO’s failure to deal effectively with the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, thus illuminating the WHO’s emphasis on regional reporting and its pitfalls. Comparative insights such as these could have been introduced more frequently throughout in order to give the reader a deeper understanding of the central argument’s wider implications. This could have contextualized important concluding statements, which, for example, find that “disease surveillance emerged as a priority for Southeast Asia even prior to the IHR revisions, perhaps explaining in part why the region accepted the IHR revisions” (p. 142). Statements such as this raise the question of how much Southeast Asia’s experience differs from other regions and whether this particular experience can be replicated in other regions. A comparative angle is covered more thoroughly in Davies’s co-authored work with Adam Kamradt-Scott and Simon Rushton, Disease Diplomacy: International Norms and Global Health Security (2015), but would have added a further valuable dimension to the discussion in the present book.
The wider implications of the book’s core argument could have also been foregrounded more throughout, as this is essentially a book about some of the central questions for global health security today. Presenting the book’s remit as exclusively focused on the politics of disease outbreaks in Southeast Asia slightly undersells the potential impact. The book directly contributes to discussions of whether the securitization of health issues is advisable, about the conflict between appraisals of the influence of hard power and soft power in international relations, and about the role of human rights standards for and within global health instruments. It also engages with theoretical debates on the relationship between health and governance by discussing the correlation between “health spending, regime type, and political stability,” and shows that no definite correlation can be established (p. 47). Further critical global health issues, such as the use of metrics, also feed into the discussion, as statistics are then used to diminish the impact of grand numbers often used for the promotion of global health programs and priorities. All these different aspects together make this book a compelling showcase for why the study of global health matters and illustrates what a closer look at health governance can add to the understanding of diplomacy.
Notes
[1]. The study referenced by Davies is Suerie Moon, et al., “Will Ebola Change the Game? Ten Essential Reforms before the Next Pandemic. The Report of the Harvard-LSHTM Independent Panel on the Global Response to Ebola,” The Lancet 386, no. 10009 (2015): 2204–21.
Eva Hilberg is a postdoctoral fellow at the Federmann School of Public Policy and Government, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and an honorary research fellow at the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, UK. Her work traces the politics of knowledge circulating in the global bioeconomy and analyzes the inscription of new priorities into the global health agenda, such as in the field of global mental health. Her PhD focused on the normalization of biomedical knowledge by means of intellectual property rights and the exclusion of patients from this field of politics (“Promoting Health or Securing the Market? The Right to Health and Intellectual Property between Radical Contestation and Accommodation,” in Third World Quarterly [May 2015]).
Citation: Eva Hilberg. Review of Davies, Sara E., Containing Contagion: The Politics of Disease Outbreaks in Southeast Asia. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. March, 2020. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54319
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Nature & Culture archives: reviews from our past issues:
Sonja D. Williams. Word Warrior: Richard Durham, Radio, and Freedom. New Black Studies Series. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Illustrations. 264 pp. $26.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-252-08139-2.
Reviewed by Ida Jones (Morgan State University)
Published on Jhistory (September, 2016)
Commissioned by Robert A. Rabe
The Revolution Will Be an Audiophile
Early black radio broadcasts in the community were an essential staple of modern communication. Often the disc jockeys were local people with flair and appeal. These men and few women did their best to celebrate their heritage and hometown culture over the airwaves. The era of syndication muted local radio disc jockeys, as they were increasingly replaced by nationally known celebrity personalities. Initially, after the rise and domination of the black press, black radio provided common ground for intergenerational discourse, played our music, and/or served as a virtual platform for aspiring and established preachers, singers, and dramatists. Sonja D. Williams rightly situates the late Richard Durham within the tradition of black communication and black radio, reaching back to his antecedents who assumed the significant cultural role of the griot-educator-activist.
Williams entered the world of Isadore Richard Durham in 1994 while working on a Smithsonian documentary radio project Black Radio: Telling It Like It Was. Here she encountered the recordings from Destination Freedom broadcasts. Williams writes that this “African American writer [Durham] created this series in 1948 and served as its sole scriptwriter. A master storyteller, [he] seductively conjured aural magic, inventively dramatizing the lives of black history makers” (p. xvii). Astounded that a full-length book about Durham and his crusade did not exist, Williams committed to articulating his life’s story and journey to the airwaves.
Word Warrior is an apt telling of the life and times of Durham organized into twelve neat chapters with a prologue, epilogue, and appendix. The appendix is a detailed two-year radio log of Destination Freedom broadcasts. Williams informs the reader that forty-two original broadcasts are available online via the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection while others are available at the Schomburg Center for Black Culture. This information is a delight for a generation of scholars who never experienced the sounds of local black radio hosts. Each chapter opens with a unique writing by Durham, at times a poem or a radio transcript. This method places the reader within ear shot of an intriguing exchange between Durham and Williams. The second chapter provides a glimpse into the origins of an unusual African American family whose enslaved ancestors within one generation became landowners, of some eighty acres, in Mississippi. Their landed wealth propelled them into the northern migration ending in Chicago. Durham’s life is teased out of national and local issues in concert with the lives of his parents, siblings, future spouse, and notable personalities of the day. His life is woven throughout the rich tapestry of American history. Williams uses his own words to capture and situate remarkable moments in Durham’s life. He opens with Durham’s observation: “Somewhere in this ocean of Negro life, with its crosscurrents and undercurrents, lies the very soul of America.... It lies there because the real-life story of a single Negro in Alabama walking into a voting booth across a Ku Klux Klan line has more drama and world implications than all the stereotypes Hollywood or radio can turn out in a thousand years” (p. ix). These are more than mere words; Durham experienced this reality directly or vicariously through research. He intended to utilize those stories of success, survival, and overcoming as ammunition.
In journalistic style, Word Warrior begins with the funeral of Durham on May 2, 1984. The description places the reader in the midst of a large, crowded, and diverse array of attendees. “Some ... came straight from work in their best business attire. Others dressed more casually, wearing light sweaters, jackets, and shawls in Chicago’s mild, near-sixty-degree weather.... City officials and congressmen, educators and social workers, labor leaders and artists, journalists and other writers were just a few of the hundreds who came to remember—and to say goodbye” (pp. 1, 2). A modicum of sadness radiated through the service because Durham had died expectedly of a heart attack. His widow Clarice Durham recruited friends and family to share their recollections about him. Their forty-two years of marriage welcomed children and a constellation of friends whose recollections stoked memories of good times, a great man, and a lasting legacy.
The legacy of Isadore “Izzy” Richard Durham began on September 6, 1917, in Raymond in Hinds County, Mississippi, on eighty acres of farmland. He was the fifth of seven children born to Curtis George Durham and Chanie Tillman Durham, hardworking providers for their children. Curtis owned land and provided opportunities for two families as tenant farmers. Chanie was a school teacher in Hinds County’s Negro schoolhouse, produced soap, and styled hair to supplement the family income. Chanie’s thirst for education and Curtis’s two years at Alcorn University infused their children with an understanding that education was a needed companion to hard work and integrity.
Mississippi became a poetic memory for Durham, when the family moved to Chicago when he was five years old. Durham poetically described Chicago as “a baked brick desert, with oases of parks, a necklace of streets” (p. 18). Chicago became the soil in which the seed of writer-broadcaster Richard nicknamed Izzy would be planted. Here he flourished and participated in a variety of activities, from amateur boxing to poetry to labor union organizing. Novelist Richard Wright influenced Durham, while Langston Hughes offered suggestions to Durham’s unsolicited poems. According to the text, “Durham welcomed Hughes’ advice. Building on this initial correspondence, the two men established a friendship that would last more than two decades. He liked the way I wrote, and the way I organized writing particularly” (p. 33). Hughes contributed to Durham’s selection of the pen name Richard Durham.
Williams’s Word Warrior is an engrossing, at times poetic excavation of one man’s dealing with life and learning as an African American man. Durham answered the call to arms through the artistry of storytelling, advocacy, agency, and learning. He swirled those elements together throughout his inquisitive life. He shared his historical findings through his radio broadcast, Destination Freedom, as well as published short stories and poems. He pursued a variety of ghost writing jobs for money, despite the exhausting nature of his work. Inwardly, he harbored a private desire to write about Aesop, whom Durham believed was an African diplomat who moved between nations, making agreements by employing his extraordinary wit as method of getting his point across. In this sense, Durham was an heir of Aesop, an activist using the airwaves as his medium to broadcast the revolution while stirring the people to consciousness.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/jhistory.
Citation: Ida Jones. Review of Williams, Sonja D., Word Warrior: Richard Durham, Radio, and Freedom. Jhistory, H-Net Reviews. September, 2016.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=45363
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Reviewed by Ida Jones (Morgan State University)
Published on Jhistory (September, 2016)
Commissioned by Robert A. Rabe
The Revolution Will Be an Audiophile
Early black radio broadcasts in the community were an essential staple of modern communication. Often the disc jockeys were local people with flair and appeal. These men and few women did their best to celebrate their heritage and hometown culture over the airwaves. The era of syndication muted local radio disc jockeys, as they were increasingly replaced by nationally known celebrity personalities. Initially, after the rise and domination of the black press, black radio provided common ground for intergenerational discourse, played our music, and/or served as a virtual platform for aspiring and established preachers, singers, and dramatists. Sonja D. Williams rightly situates the late Richard Durham within the tradition of black communication and black radio, reaching back to his antecedents who assumed the significant cultural role of the griot-educator-activist.
Williams entered the world of Isadore Richard Durham in 1994 while working on a Smithsonian documentary radio project Black Radio: Telling It Like It Was. Here she encountered the recordings from Destination Freedom broadcasts. Williams writes that this “African American writer [Durham] created this series in 1948 and served as its sole scriptwriter. A master storyteller, [he] seductively conjured aural magic, inventively dramatizing the lives of black history makers” (p. xvii). Astounded that a full-length book about Durham and his crusade did not exist, Williams committed to articulating his life’s story and journey to the airwaves.
Word Warrior is an apt telling of the life and times of Durham organized into twelve neat chapters with a prologue, epilogue, and appendix. The appendix is a detailed two-year radio log of Destination Freedom broadcasts. Williams informs the reader that forty-two original broadcasts are available online via the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection while others are available at the Schomburg Center for Black Culture. This information is a delight for a generation of scholars who never experienced the sounds of local black radio hosts. Each chapter opens with a unique writing by Durham, at times a poem or a radio transcript. This method places the reader within ear shot of an intriguing exchange between Durham and Williams. The second chapter provides a glimpse into the origins of an unusual African American family whose enslaved ancestors within one generation became landowners, of some eighty acres, in Mississippi. Their landed wealth propelled them into the northern migration ending in Chicago. Durham’s life is teased out of national and local issues in concert with the lives of his parents, siblings, future spouse, and notable personalities of the day. His life is woven throughout the rich tapestry of American history. Williams uses his own words to capture and situate remarkable moments in Durham’s life. He opens with Durham’s observation: “Somewhere in this ocean of Negro life, with its crosscurrents and undercurrents, lies the very soul of America.... It lies there because the real-life story of a single Negro in Alabama walking into a voting booth across a Ku Klux Klan line has more drama and world implications than all the stereotypes Hollywood or radio can turn out in a thousand years” (p. ix). These are more than mere words; Durham experienced this reality directly or vicariously through research. He intended to utilize those stories of success, survival, and overcoming as ammunition.
In journalistic style, Word Warrior begins with the funeral of Durham on May 2, 1984. The description places the reader in the midst of a large, crowded, and diverse array of attendees. “Some ... came straight from work in their best business attire. Others dressed more casually, wearing light sweaters, jackets, and shawls in Chicago’s mild, near-sixty-degree weather.... City officials and congressmen, educators and social workers, labor leaders and artists, journalists and other writers were just a few of the hundreds who came to remember—and to say goodbye” (pp. 1, 2). A modicum of sadness radiated through the service because Durham had died expectedly of a heart attack. His widow Clarice Durham recruited friends and family to share their recollections about him. Their forty-two years of marriage welcomed children and a constellation of friends whose recollections stoked memories of good times, a great man, and a lasting legacy.
The legacy of Isadore “Izzy” Richard Durham began on September 6, 1917, in Raymond in Hinds County, Mississippi, on eighty acres of farmland. He was the fifth of seven children born to Curtis George Durham and Chanie Tillman Durham, hardworking providers for their children. Curtis owned land and provided opportunities for two families as tenant farmers. Chanie was a school teacher in Hinds County’s Negro schoolhouse, produced soap, and styled hair to supplement the family income. Chanie’s thirst for education and Curtis’s two years at Alcorn University infused their children with an understanding that education was a needed companion to hard work and integrity.
Mississippi became a poetic memory for Durham, when the family moved to Chicago when he was five years old. Durham poetically described Chicago as “a baked brick desert, with oases of parks, a necklace of streets” (p. 18). Chicago became the soil in which the seed of writer-broadcaster Richard nicknamed Izzy would be planted. Here he flourished and participated in a variety of activities, from amateur boxing to poetry to labor union organizing. Novelist Richard Wright influenced Durham, while Langston Hughes offered suggestions to Durham’s unsolicited poems. According to the text, “Durham welcomed Hughes’ advice. Building on this initial correspondence, the two men established a friendship that would last more than two decades. He liked the way I wrote, and the way I organized writing particularly” (p. 33). Hughes contributed to Durham’s selection of the pen name Richard Durham.
Williams’s Word Warrior is an engrossing, at times poetic excavation of one man’s dealing with life and learning as an African American man. Durham answered the call to arms through the artistry of storytelling, advocacy, agency, and learning. He swirled those elements together throughout his inquisitive life. He shared his historical findings through his radio broadcast, Destination Freedom, as well as published short stories and poems. He pursued a variety of ghost writing jobs for money, despite the exhausting nature of his work. Inwardly, he harbored a private desire to write about Aesop, whom Durham believed was an African diplomat who moved between nations, making agreements by employing his extraordinary wit as method of getting his point across. In this sense, Durham was an heir of Aesop, an activist using the airwaves as his medium to broadcast the revolution while stirring the people to consciousness.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/jhistory.
Citation: Ida Jones. Review of Williams, Sonja D., Word Warrior: Richard Durham, Radio, and Freedom. Jhistory, H-Net Reviews. September, 2016.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=45363
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Gregory Evans Dowd. Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier. Early America: History, Context, Culture Series. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. 408 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4214-1865-0.
Reviewed by Zachary Bennett (Rutgers University)
Published on H-War (September, 2016)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey
Rumors abounded in early America. Today it is difficult to comprehend how people communicated across the immensity of the American expanse hundreds of years ago. Travel was arduous, slow, and fraught with danger. Moving over mountain ranges, navigating vaguely marked trails, or crossing into territory ignorant to the disposition of the local inhabitants were all bewildering experiences. Verifying information was extremely difficult. Gregory Evans Dowd takes readers on a journey into the minds of early Americans as they struggled to separate fact from fiction across the great distances of the North American frontier. In Groundless, rumors take on lives of their own, misleading colonists, Indians, and even professional historians in telling ways.
Groundless is ambitious in scope. Dowd bookends his pursuit of “bad evidence” in the purported gold fields of the North American Southeast (p. 14), opening with sixteenth-century Spaniards and concluding some three centuries later in Jacksonian America. Facts bear out that neither conquistadors nor Americans found much gold in the region. However, both events illustrate an important point: what people believed in their head often mattered more than what existed on the ground. Spanish rumors of gold gleaned from Indians spurred colonization efforts in the Southeast which produced the very real consequences of “invasion, sickness, and enslavement” for Native peoples (p. 37). Despite repeated failures to add substance to legend, mutterings of gold endured into 1830s, precipitating the state of Georgia’s infamous destruction and removal of the Cherokee nation.
Dowd chases false whispers up the Appalachian Mountain range to the Carolinas, eastern Pennsylvania, Canada, and westward to upper Michigan, all the while recording echoes reverberating far from the frontier in London, New York, and Philadelphia. Chapters are divided into two forms of the bogus: “longitudinal stories and singular episodes” (p. 278). Longitudinal stories are legends that persist through time, such as gold in the Georgia upcountry or blankets infested with smallpox. Both legends were based in kernels of truth but long outlived those original events and were consistently embellished over time. In contrast, singular episodes occur in highly local, time-specific moments, such as seeking out the identity of a murderer or determining whether frontier neighbors were about to attack. Although Groundless progresses thematically and chronologically, it darts across the North American continent covering events of varying historical and regional contexts. Such structure eludes a clear narrative arc and may prove baffling for those unfamiliar with early American historiography.
That being said, Groundless bears tremendous insight on the “widely shared beliefs and understandings” of early Americans (p. 14). Dowd rightly points out that professional historians usually dismiss unreliable information in pursuit of what actually happened. Such an approach overlooks the context in which people lived, where rumor “commanded as much attention in early America as did crops, weather, and shipping news” (p. 2). Grounding his analysis in twentieth-century sociological scholarship, Dowd frames the act of rumor mongering as an attempt to seek out the truth or to make sense of the world. Focusing on rumors instead of dismissing them offers a glimpse into the hopes, fears, and prejudices of early Americans, providing important cultural context for their actions. It is this ingenious methodological approach that future historians should heed.
In the process of mining bad information, Dowd uncovers some surprising revelations about colonial North America. The persistence of particular rumors collapses chronologies many scholars are familiar with. For example, Cherokees and Creeks still feared the prospect of enslavement and deportation well past the Seven Years’ War, fifty years after the Indian slave trade ended in the Southeast. Whispers among Cherokees in 1751 of impending betrayal by their South Carolina allies, although unfounded, reveals that memory of the slave trade weighed heavily on their minds and contributed to a legacy of diplomatic tension throughout the eighteenth century. On the other side of the frontier, patterns of rumor surrounding war show that colonists feared or suspected the intervention of rival imperial powers more than Indian attack or slave rebellion. Dowd then identifies historians who have assumed that Indians and slaves shared some “ideological solidarity” against colonists in the eighteenth century (p. 151). Such an alliance between Indians and slaves cannot be found in the sources or the rumors of otherwise anxious colonists. That contemporary historians would conclude that Indians and slaves posed a great threat “says more about our world” today “than it does about theirs” (p. 163). In this and other instances, Dowd skillfully demonstrates that by listening to rumor, historians can gain valuable perspective into the worldviews of historical subjects, and in the process, they can check twenty-first-century assumptions when they attempt to recreate those worlds.
Dowd casts a wide net in his survey of three centuries of North American rumor. Consequently, it is often difficult for the reader to discern a consistent narrative angle in Groundless. Additionally, little attention is paid to the varied and contested communication networks of early America, which Matt Cohen, Katherine Grandjean, and recently Alejandra Dubcovsky have shown to be so important. More attention to the geography, routes, and messengers through which faulty news passed would undoubtedly have provided valuable context for many of the rumors traced in this volume. Regardless, Dowd’s work has much methodological import for historians of early America and beyond who will certainly benefit from the approach he presents. Groundless shows that paying attention to falsities can uncover important cultural truths.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-war.
Citation: Zachary Bennett. Review of Dowd, Gregory Evans, Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier. H-War, H-Net Reviews. September, 2016.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=45906
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Reviewed by Zachary Bennett (Rutgers University)
Published on H-War (September, 2016)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey
Rumors abounded in early America. Today it is difficult to comprehend how people communicated across the immensity of the American expanse hundreds of years ago. Travel was arduous, slow, and fraught with danger. Moving over mountain ranges, navigating vaguely marked trails, or crossing into territory ignorant to the disposition of the local inhabitants were all bewildering experiences. Verifying information was extremely difficult. Gregory Evans Dowd takes readers on a journey into the minds of early Americans as they struggled to separate fact from fiction across the great distances of the North American frontier. In Groundless, rumors take on lives of their own, misleading colonists, Indians, and even professional historians in telling ways.
Groundless is ambitious in scope. Dowd bookends his pursuit of “bad evidence” in the purported gold fields of the North American Southeast (p. 14), opening with sixteenth-century Spaniards and concluding some three centuries later in Jacksonian America. Facts bear out that neither conquistadors nor Americans found much gold in the region. However, both events illustrate an important point: what people believed in their head often mattered more than what existed on the ground. Spanish rumors of gold gleaned from Indians spurred colonization efforts in the Southeast which produced the very real consequences of “invasion, sickness, and enslavement” for Native peoples (p. 37). Despite repeated failures to add substance to legend, mutterings of gold endured into 1830s, precipitating the state of Georgia’s infamous destruction and removal of the Cherokee nation.
Dowd chases false whispers up the Appalachian Mountain range to the Carolinas, eastern Pennsylvania, Canada, and westward to upper Michigan, all the while recording echoes reverberating far from the frontier in London, New York, and Philadelphia. Chapters are divided into two forms of the bogus: “longitudinal stories and singular episodes” (p. 278). Longitudinal stories are legends that persist through time, such as gold in the Georgia upcountry or blankets infested with smallpox. Both legends were based in kernels of truth but long outlived those original events and were consistently embellished over time. In contrast, singular episodes occur in highly local, time-specific moments, such as seeking out the identity of a murderer or determining whether frontier neighbors were about to attack. Although Groundless progresses thematically and chronologically, it darts across the North American continent covering events of varying historical and regional contexts. Such structure eludes a clear narrative arc and may prove baffling for those unfamiliar with early American historiography.
That being said, Groundless bears tremendous insight on the “widely shared beliefs and understandings” of early Americans (p. 14). Dowd rightly points out that professional historians usually dismiss unreliable information in pursuit of what actually happened. Such an approach overlooks the context in which people lived, where rumor “commanded as much attention in early America as did crops, weather, and shipping news” (p. 2). Grounding his analysis in twentieth-century sociological scholarship, Dowd frames the act of rumor mongering as an attempt to seek out the truth or to make sense of the world. Focusing on rumors instead of dismissing them offers a glimpse into the hopes, fears, and prejudices of early Americans, providing important cultural context for their actions. It is this ingenious methodological approach that future historians should heed.
In the process of mining bad information, Dowd uncovers some surprising revelations about colonial North America. The persistence of particular rumors collapses chronologies many scholars are familiar with. For example, Cherokees and Creeks still feared the prospect of enslavement and deportation well past the Seven Years’ War, fifty years after the Indian slave trade ended in the Southeast. Whispers among Cherokees in 1751 of impending betrayal by their South Carolina allies, although unfounded, reveals that memory of the slave trade weighed heavily on their minds and contributed to a legacy of diplomatic tension throughout the eighteenth century. On the other side of the frontier, patterns of rumor surrounding war show that colonists feared or suspected the intervention of rival imperial powers more than Indian attack or slave rebellion. Dowd then identifies historians who have assumed that Indians and slaves shared some “ideological solidarity” against colonists in the eighteenth century (p. 151). Such an alliance between Indians and slaves cannot be found in the sources or the rumors of otherwise anxious colonists. That contemporary historians would conclude that Indians and slaves posed a great threat “says more about our world” today “than it does about theirs” (p. 163). In this and other instances, Dowd skillfully demonstrates that by listening to rumor, historians can gain valuable perspective into the worldviews of historical subjects, and in the process, they can check twenty-first-century assumptions when they attempt to recreate those worlds.
Dowd casts a wide net in his survey of three centuries of North American rumor. Consequently, it is often difficult for the reader to discern a consistent narrative angle in Groundless. Additionally, little attention is paid to the varied and contested communication networks of early America, which Matt Cohen, Katherine Grandjean, and recently Alejandra Dubcovsky have shown to be so important. More attention to the geography, routes, and messengers through which faulty news passed would undoubtedly have provided valuable context for many of the rumors traced in this volume. Regardless, Dowd’s work has much methodological import for historians of early America and beyond who will certainly benefit from the approach he presents. Groundless shows that paying attention to falsities can uncover important cultural truths.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-war.
Citation: Zachary Bennett. Review of Dowd, Gregory Evans, Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier. H-War, H-Net Reviews. September, 2016.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=45906
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Toby C. Rider. Cold War Games: Propaganda, the Olympics, and U.S. Foreign Policy. Sport and Society Series. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016. 288 pp. $95.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-252-04023-8; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-252-08169-9.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Montez de Oca (University of Colorado Colorado Springs)
Published on H-Diplo (September, 2016)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach
I recently received an e-mail from a friend with the subject line “a new cold war.” My friend studies doping among elite athletes and he had just been interviewed about the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) sanctions of Russian athletes. People who have grown up since the fall of the Berlin Wall may not realize the impact that the Cold War had on all aspects of human life, including sport. Indeed, much of what we take for granted today, including popular culture, was affected by the Cold War. For instance, the enduring success of the James Bond films is one reminder of the cultural Cold War. The growth of sport, especially international sport, during the Cold War can be easily forgotten.
Toby C. Rider’s Cold War Games provides a very impressive history of how the United States and the Soviet Union used the Olympics during the 1950s for propaganda purposes. Both nations, Rider explains, saw the Olympics as spectacular stages of competition upon which their respective political-economic systems could be displayed. In this sense, athletic performance was a signifier of social and economic life on either side of the Iron Curtain. In his 1960 “Soft American” article in Sports Illustrated, John F. Kennedy explained that the United States and the Soviet Union offered the same modernizing promise to the world: “We face in the Soviet Union a powerful and implacable adversary determined to show the world that only the Communist system possesses the vigor and determination necessary to satisfy awakening aspirations for progress and the elimination of poverty and want.”[1] So while the goal of the Cold War was control over territory and resources, the promise was an improved standard of living. And who is better suited to demonstrate improvements in health and wealth than elite athletes? As a result, US athletes, and popular entertainers, were widely used as cultural ambassadors to warm up the Cold War.
The strength of Cold War Games does not lie in its original insight. The use of sport to achieve foreign policy objectives was no secret during the Cold War. Indeed, commentators throughout the 1950s and 1960s criticized the Soviet Union for using sport as a propaganda tool and US leaders for missing propaganda opportunities. Even comedic spy films, such as The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz (1968) and S*P*Y*S (1974), humorously feature athletes that defect to the West. Instead, the strength of Cold War Games lies in its detailed explication of historical documents only recently made public. Through extensive review of government documents, Rider demonstrates in great detail that the United States developed extensive propaganda capabilities during the Second World War that were mobilized during the Cold War. Cold War Games shows how both countries invested in professionalizing sport in order to win medals. He also contends that the United States had extensive ties between the state and the market, which Rider calls the “state-private network,” that obscured the degree to which the US government produced messaging that supported its foreign policy objectives.
The detailed research in Cold War Games also allows Rider to show that the use of the Olympics for propaganda purposes was not extraordinary. Rider begins by demonstrating how the persuasive powers of propaganda, or psychological operations, became central to achieving foreign policy objectives by nations throughout the twentieth century. Communicating the superiority of the so-called American way of life and Western freedom was a key message sent to discourage people behind the Iron Curtain. Similarly, Cold War Games shows the contradictory nature of the modern Olympic Movement. For instance, the Olympic Movement attempts to foster global peace through sporting spectacle but it is also rooted in nationalism. This means that as much as the IOC attempted to protect amateurism and keep politics out of the Olympics, the very logic of elite sport (Citius, Altius, Fortius) encourages professionalization and the Olympic festival is inherently political. As Rider states regarding the early years of the Olympics, “Almost immediately, the U.S. media began to suggest that the success of Uncle Sam’s athletes was synonymous with the nation’s strength and prestige” (p. 35). As a result, no matter how much the IOC resisted politicization of the Olympic Games during the Cold War, geopolitical struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union caused it to grow into the mega-events that we now know. As Rider states, “Cold War rivalries and politics captured worldwide attention, expanded the brand, and created a product that was perfect for television and, therefore, commercial exploitation” (p. 48).
Rider reminds us that the Soviet Union was a relatively late entry into international competition. Under Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union wanted to insulate itself from Western influences. However, by 1945 Stalin had realized that international sports competition and the chance to compete directly with Western nations presented invaluable propaganda opportunities. “The Soviets came to view international sport as a strategic device in propaganda and diplomacy” (p. 42). The Soviet Union then built a state-centered sport system that allowed it to quickly develop its sporting infrastructure and elite athletes. In their first Olympics, the 1952 Helsinki Summer Games, the Soviet Union nearly matched the United States’ medal count (76 to 71). The Soviet Union won more medals than the United States at the 1956 Stockholm Summer Games (98 to 74). The United States did not “win the medal count” again in either the Summer or Winter Olympics until 1968 in Mexico City (107 to 91). There was, as Rider points out, a hue and a cry in the United States in reaction to the Soviet’s Olympic success. The result was an increased effort in the United States to counter the Soviet’s athletic propaganda. This resulted in increased US investments in international sport, especially women’s sport, in order to match the Soviets. The net result was that geopolitical competition spurred the professionalization of international sport.
In the rest of the book, Rider illustrates examples of how the state worked with private individuals and organizations to create Cold War propaganda in support of US foreign policy objectives. The Campaign of Truth in the 1950s used the international language of sport to paint a picture of the American way of life. The United States tried to flip the Cold War script on the Soviet Union by using a group of Hungarian refugees known as the Hungarian National Sports Federation (HNSF) to demonstrate the negative conditions behind the Iron Curtain. Although the HNSF had limited impact, thirty-eight East European athletes who defected during the 1956 Melbourne Games provided a propaganda boon for the United States against the backdrop of Soviet tanks rolling into Hungary. At every step, Rider shows ways in which the US government was covertly involved in propagating its messaging and attempting to influence the IOC. The degree to which the United States was successful is an open question. The IOC resisted state influence despite being unsympathetic to the Communist cause and it is very difficult to measure the success of any psychological operation. At the same time, people in the US government and private sector felt they needed to stand up to the Soviet challenge.
Rider’s analysis is narrowly focused on the uses of the Olympics for propaganda purposes by the Soviet Union and the United States. This allows him to provide readers with tremendous detail and intricacy. But it also overlooks some of the Cold War’s complexity. The Cold War was never really “cold.” Indeed, the new nations of the Global South (née Third World) were embroiled in terrible wars as the United States and Soviet Union embarked on their foreign policy objectives. The propaganda efforts by the United States and the Soviet Union were never directed exclusively at each other but also at the Global South that represented resources and markets. Athletes, especially African American, were regularly used to counter the Soviet claim throughout the decolonizing world that Jim Crow racism was the same as European colonialism. Cold War Games would have been strengthened by a broader focus on the larger geopolitical implications of Olympic propaganda efforts. Similarly, better contextualization of anxieties related to the performance of US athletes to the broader “culture of the Cold War” would have helped readers understand why the supposedly apolitical world of sport seemed so urgent at the time. It strikes me that Rider is a little too quick to accept the US claim that its athletes were unsupported by the state. While the US sport system was never statist like the Soviet system, it did rely heavily on public middle schools, high schools, and universities as well as non-state institutions, such as the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and Amateur Athletic Union, to develop athletic talent. I also would have liked to see Rider engage a little more thoroughly with the existing literature on sport and the cultural Cold War. This is especially so given that his stated goal is correcting the fact that “for too long sport has been neglected in the tale of the U.S. cultural Cold War” (p. 8). There are a few books on sport and the cultural Cold War that Rider could have cited, including Russ Crawford’s The Use of Sports to Promote the American Way of Life during the Cold War: Cultural Propaganda, 1945-1963 (2008), Kurt Edward Kemper’s College Football and American Culture in the Cold War Era (2009), or my book Discipline & Indulgence: College Football, Media, and the American Way of Life during the Cold War (2013).
Even considering my reservations, Cold War Games is a strong addition to the literature on sport and the cultural Cold War. It is well researched and provides a highly detailed picture of political intrigues that unfolded behind the scenes of the Olympics in the 1950s. It sheds valuable light on how the US government tends to operate through private sector actors to obscure, and make more effective, its propaganda. It also makes clear that much of the reporting on international sport in the mainstream media is at least indirectly influenced by the US government. When we look at the ritualized coverage of medal counts, human interest stories about Chinese children brutalized in elite sport centers, or the characterization of such Russian athletes as Yulia Efimova, Cold War Games helps us to realize that those stories are not simply neutral sports reporting. Much of what we take for granted was developed within the geopolitical frame of the Cold War and further contoured by the politics of today.
Note
[1]. John F. Kennedy, “Soft American,” Sports Illustrated (December 26, 1960), http:// sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1134750/index.htm.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-diplo.
Citation: Jeffrey Montez de Oca. Review of Rider, Toby C., Cold War Games: Propaganda, the Olympics, and U.S. Foreign Policy. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. September, 2016.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=46941
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Montez de Oca (University of Colorado Colorado Springs)
Published on H-Diplo (September, 2016)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach
I recently received an e-mail from a friend with the subject line “a new cold war.” My friend studies doping among elite athletes and he had just been interviewed about the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) sanctions of Russian athletes. People who have grown up since the fall of the Berlin Wall may not realize the impact that the Cold War had on all aspects of human life, including sport. Indeed, much of what we take for granted today, including popular culture, was affected by the Cold War. For instance, the enduring success of the James Bond films is one reminder of the cultural Cold War. The growth of sport, especially international sport, during the Cold War can be easily forgotten.
Toby C. Rider’s Cold War Games provides a very impressive history of how the United States and the Soviet Union used the Olympics during the 1950s for propaganda purposes. Both nations, Rider explains, saw the Olympics as spectacular stages of competition upon which their respective political-economic systems could be displayed. In this sense, athletic performance was a signifier of social and economic life on either side of the Iron Curtain. In his 1960 “Soft American” article in Sports Illustrated, John F. Kennedy explained that the United States and the Soviet Union offered the same modernizing promise to the world: “We face in the Soviet Union a powerful and implacable adversary determined to show the world that only the Communist system possesses the vigor and determination necessary to satisfy awakening aspirations for progress and the elimination of poverty and want.”[1] So while the goal of the Cold War was control over territory and resources, the promise was an improved standard of living. And who is better suited to demonstrate improvements in health and wealth than elite athletes? As a result, US athletes, and popular entertainers, were widely used as cultural ambassadors to warm up the Cold War.
The strength of Cold War Games does not lie in its original insight. The use of sport to achieve foreign policy objectives was no secret during the Cold War. Indeed, commentators throughout the 1950s and 1960s criticized the Soviet Union for using sport as a propaganda tool and US leaders for missing propaganda opportunities. Even comedic spy films, such as The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz (1968) and S*P*Y*S (1974), humorously feature athletes that defect to the West. Instead, the strength of Cold War Games lies in its detailed explication of historical documents only recently made public. Through extensive review of government documents, Rider demonstrates in great detail that the United States developed extensive propaganda capabilities during the Second World War that were mobilized during the Cold War. Cold War Games shows how both countries invested in professionalizing sport in order to win medals. He also contends that the United States had extensive ties between the state and the market, which Rider calls the “state-private network,” that obscured the degree to which the US government produced messaging that supported its foreign policy objectives.
The detailed research in Cold War Games also allows Rider to show that the use of the Olympics for propaganda purposes was not extraordinary. Rider begins by demonstrating how the persuasive powers of propaganda, or psychological operations, became central to achieving foreign policy objectives by nations throughout the twentieth century. Communicating the superiority of the so-called American way of life and Western freedom was a key message sent to discourage people behind the Iron Curtain. Similarly, Cold War Games shows the contradictory nature of the modern Olympic Movement. For instance, the Olympic Movement attempts to foster global peace through sporting spectacle but it is also rooted in nationalism. This means that as much as the IOC attempted to protect amateurism and keep politics out of the Olympics, the very logic of elite sport (Citius, Altius, Fortius) encourages professionalization and the Olympic festival is inherently political. As Rider states regarding the early years of the Olympics, “Almost immediately, the U.S. media began to suggest that the success of Uncle Sam’s athletes was synonymous with the nation’s strength and prestige” (p. 35). As a result, no matter how much the IOC resisted politicization of the Olympic Games during the Cold War, geopolitical struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union caused it to grow into the mega-events that we now know. As Rider states, “Cold War rivalries and politics captured worldwide attention, expanded the brand, and created a product that was perfect for television and, therefore, commercial exploitation” (p. 48).
Rider reminds us that the Soviet Union was a relatively late entry into international competition. Under Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union wanted to insulate itself from Western influences. However, by 1945 Stalin had realized that international sports competition and the chance to compete directly with Western nations presented invaluable propaganda opportunities. “The Soviets came to view international sport as a strategic device in propaganda and diplomacy” (p. 42). The Soviet Union then built a state-centered sport system that allowed it to quickly develop its sporting infrastructure and elite athletes. In their first Olympics, the 1952 Helsinki Summer Games, the Soviet Union nearly matched the United States’ medal count (76 to 71). The Soviet Union won more medals than the United States at the 1956 Stockholm Summer Games (98 to 74). The United States did not “win the medal count” again in either the Summer or Winter Olympics until 1968 in Mexico City (107 to 91). There was, as Rider points out, a hue and a cry in the United States in reaction to the Soviet’s Olympic success. The result was an increased effort in the United States to counter the Soviet’s athletic propaganda. This resulted in increased US investments in international sport, especially women’s sport, in order to match the Soviets. The net result was that geopolitical competition spurred the professionalization of international sport.
In the rest of the book, Rider illustrates examples of how the state worked with private individuals and organizations to create Cold War propaganda in support of US foreign policy objectives. The Campaign of Truth in the 1950s used the international language of sport to paint a picture of the American way of life. The United States tried to flip the Cold War script on the Soviet Union by using a group of Hungarian refugees known as the Hungarian National Sports Federation (HNSF) to demonstrate the negative conditions behind the Iron Curtain. Although the HNSF had limited impact, thirty-eight East European athletes who defected during the 1956 Melbourne Games provided a propaganda boon for the United States against the backdrop of Soviet tanks rolling into Hungary. At every step, Rider shows ways in which the US government was covertly involved in propagating its messaging and attempting to influence the IOC. The degree to which the United States was successful is an open question. The IOC resisted state influence despite being unsympathetic to the Communist cause and it is very difficult to measure the success of any psychological operation. At the same time, people in the US government and private sector felt they needed to stand up to the Soviet challenge.
Rider’s analysis is narrowly focused on the uses of the Olympics for propaganda purposes by the Soviet Union and the United States. This allows him to provide readers with tremendous detail and intricacy. But it also overlooks some of the Cold War’s complexity. The Cold War was never really “cold.” Indeed, the new nations of the Global South (née Third World) were embroiled in terrible wars as the United States and Soviet Union embarked on their foreign policy objectives. The propaganda efforts by the United States and the Soviet Union were never directed exclusively at each other but also at the Global South that represented resources and markets. Athletes, especially African American, were regularly used to counter the Soviet claim throughout the decolonizing world that Jim Crow racism was the same as European colonialism. Cold War Games would have been strengthened by a broader focus on the larger geopolitical implications of Olympic propaganda efforts. Similarly, better contextualization of anxieties related to the performance of US athletes to the broader “culture of the Cold War” would have helped readers understand why the supposedly apolitical world of sport seemed so urgent at the time. It strikes me that Rider is a little too quick to accept the US claim that its athletes were unsupported by the state. While the US sport system was never statist like the Soviet system, it did rely heavily on public middle schools, high schools, and universities as well as non-state institutions, such as the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and Amateur Athletic Union, to develop athletic talent. I also would have liked to see Rider engage a little more thoroughly with the existing literature on sport and the cultural Cold War. This is especially so given that his stated goal is correcting the fact that “for too long sport has been neglected in the tale of the U.S. cultural Cold War” (p. 8). There are a few books on sport and the cultural Cold War that Rider could have cited, including Russ Crawford’s The Use of Sports to Promote the American Way of Life during the Cold War: Cultural Propaganda, 1945-1963 (2008), Kurt Edward Kemper’s College Football and American Culture in the Cold War Era (2009), or my book Discipline & Indulgence: College Football, Media, and the American Way of Life during the Cold War (2013).
Even considering my reservations, Cold War Games is a strong addition to the literature on sport and the cultural Cold War. It is well researched and provides a highly detailed picture of political intrigues that unfolded behind the scenes of the Olympics in the 1950s. It sheds valuable light on how the US government tends to operate through private sector actors to obscure, and make more effective, its propaganda. It also makes clear that much of the reporting on international sport in the mainstream media is at least indirectly influenced by the US government. When we look at the ritualized coverage of medal counts, human interest stories about Chinese children brutalized in elite sport centers, or the characterization of such Russian athletes as Yulia Efimova, Cold War Games helps us to realize that those stories are not simply neutral sports reporting. Much of what we take for granted was developed within the geopolitical frame of the Cold War and further contoured by the politics of today.
Note
[1]. John F. Kennedy, “Soft American,” Sports Illustrated (December 26, 1960), http:// sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1134750/index.htm.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-diplo.
Citation: Jeffrey Montez de Oca. Review of Rider, Toby C., Cold War Games: Propaganda, the Olympics, and U.S. Foreign Policy. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. September, 2016.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=46941
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
We wish to inaugurate this section (which will be featured in each issue of N&C) with the review of a recent book on a subject very close to us here at the American University of Paris. The reason is obvious.
Charles Glass, Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation, New York: Penguin Press, 2010. Illustrations. xvi + 524 pp. $32.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-59420-242-1.
Reviewed by Anne Berg (University of Michigan)
Published on H-TGS in August, 2014 (reproduced with permission). Commissioned by Josh Brown.
These American Lives
Americans landed on the beach of Normandy on June 6, 1944, and slowly pushed the Nazi menace back across the Rhine, liberated France, linked up with the advancing Red Army just south of Berlin in late April, and presided over German unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945. Charles Glass’s Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation tells an altogether different and refreshing story of American involvement in Europe during World War II. Unlike the title of the book suggests, this is a story of life and sometimes of love, a story of moderate privation but hardly one of death. It is also a story of negotiation, collaboration, and occasional resistance, and the binary juxtaposition of the latter two function as the main theoretical frame explicitly provided in the introduction.
The book reads like a novel and features an unusual cast of characters. Instead of soldiers and politicians, Glass recounts the experiences of war through the eyes of American expats who decided to stay in Paris after the city was occupied by Germany in the summer of 1940. There is Sylvia Beach who ran a bookshop and functioned as a central figure in literary circles in Paris. The countess Clara Longworth de Chambrun, connected to the high society of Vichy France and General Pétain by way of her son’s marriage and to the political aristocracy of America by virtue of her own marriage, maintained a particular dedication to her work at the American Library of Paris. At the American Hospital, the chief surgeon Dr. Sumner Jackson together with his wife Toquette worked tirelessly to thwart the occupiers. In contrast, the cast includes Charles Bedaux, the American businessman turned war profiteer and opportunistic collaborator, all the while continuing to play the role of the “unpolitical man.” Lastly, here is, of course, the “American mayor of Paris,” American ambassador William Bullitt, who found himself in charge of a city abandoned by the French government.
The Americans featured in this book were exclusively members of upper (middle) classes and part of a transnational intellectual bourgeoisie. They spoke with statesmen and presidents, they courted Nazi officials, and they befriended such renowned literary figures as Ernest Hemingway; one of them relied on forced labor and many found themselves in prison camps or under house arrest once the United States officially entered the war. Nonetheless, the protagonists, members of an odd elite, generally did not have to contend with excessive brutality, callousness, and whimsicality of the occupiers. Beach was able to move freely through Paris still in 1943 but allegedly her life in the city was more exhausting than in the internment camp she had escaped from at Vittel. Jackson and his wife were notable exceptions. After having actively assisted the organized French resistance, Sumner Jackson died in Neuengamme concentration camp in Hamburg, Germany. His son, imprisoned with him, and his wife, interned at Ravensbrück, survived the war.
There are additional though less prominently featured characters who enter and leave the narrative that Glass so skillfully constructs, but one in particular requires mention. Charles Anderson is not only left with the last word; his blackness literally bookends Glass’s cautiously celebratory tale. He was born in 1861 in Illinois, ran away from home, and fought with the U.S. Army “as it was completing the annihilation of the Indian tribes,” came to Europe in 1884, enlisted in the French Foreign Legion, and fought in Africa during the Great War (p. 17). He and his French wife remained in Nazi-occupied Paris. When the U.S. Army liberated Paris and American troops marched through the city, Glass imagines Anderson to only notice “their white faces” (p. 411). But since his story does not intersect with those of the other Americans in this book, the details of his Parisian life remain shrouded in silence.
Having chosen to let the narrative drive the book, Glass misses the opportunity to forge connections between such glaring silences and the historical record in more explicitly analytical terms. Nonetheless, the author illustrates that Paris was less segregated than the United States, and that black Americans faced not only less outright racism but also fewer social barriers while abroad. The struggle of Eugene Bullard, an African American from Columbus, Georgia, is instructive in this regard. Bullard had traveled to Europe at the age of eleven and fought with the French against the Germans during the Great War at age nineteen. He remained in Paris where he later owned a nightclub, married, had two daughters, got divorced, and eventually worked for the French intelligence as a spy. When the Germans arrived in 1940, Bullard left Paris and joined the French Infantry in Orleans to fight the Germans. Wounded in battle and fleeing on a bicycle, he managed to secure a passport and escape to the United States. Bullard’s story, although hardly typical, nonetheless illustrates a central point that Glass wishes to make, namely, that Nazi racism made life exceedingly dangerous, if not impossible for black Americans in Paris. The survival of Anderson thus stands out even more starkly as an illustration of the questions the book raises but is unable to answer.
By virtue of his novelesque style, Glass makes two important interventions. First, he demonstrates through the different perspectives engaged that America played multiple, complicated, and at times conflicting roles in the European conflict. The book moreover demystifies (perhaps inadvertently) the concept of everyday life and ordinariness since hardly anything was ordinary in the lives of the Americans who remained in Nazi-occupied France. Secondly, the book illustrates how, different ideologies not withstanding, members of the international elite, whether businessmen, professionals, politicians, diplomats, bohemians, aristocrats, or intellectuals, maintained and forged connections across national and sometimes even frontlines. Beach’s literary circle, Bedaux’s business ventures, and Clara’s political connections are particularly revealing in this regard. Through such examples, the book suggests that personal histories and convictions rather than national sentiment determined the action and allegiances of Americans in ex-patria.
Glass claims at the outset that Americans in Paris “were among the most eccentric, original and disparate collection of their countrymen anywhere” (p. 1). By implication, and the narrative mode confirms this implication, their action or inaction and their collaboration or resistance (to keep with this problematic juxtaposition) are the logical result of their personal qualities and idiosyncracies, rather than the direct consequence of Nazi occupation and the harsh political, social, and racial realities that affected the lives of non-Americans in the city of Paris. Glass is obviously familiar with the important scholarship on German-occupied France. But only rarely does he allow this complex history to intrude on this American story. Parisians only enter the narrative in their relations with Americans. The city of Paris remains a backdrop to their lives and object of their desires. Similarly, the occupiers are relegated to the background, their villainous nature asserted but unexplored. Nazi practices, policies, and actions, as well as their views of Paris and Parisians and of America and American expats, are implied but seldom scrutinized. Americans are the sole actors in this story.
Thus the main weakness of Glass’s book—its narrow focus—also engenders the book’s main strength. The actors we do encounter are beautifully complex. They are far from unanimously good or steadfast in their anti-Nazism or their commitment to democratic principles. Thus their individual life stories collectively illustrate the slippery slope that links the spectrum of practice flattened by binaries of collaboration and resistance. In their daily pursuits, their desires, their relationships, and their occasional struggles, they appear entirely and wonderfully human. One might almost forget that for ordinary Parisians of different racial, social, and national characteristics, as for most of Europe, of course, the Nazis’ genocidal war was the only meaningful frame of reference.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.
Citation: Anne Berg. Review of Glass, Charles, Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation. H-TGS, H-Net Reviews. August, 2014.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=40476
Reviewed by Anne Berg (University of Michigan)
Published on H-TGS in August, 2014 (reproduced with permission). Commissioned by Josh Brown.
These American Lives
Americans landed on the beach of Normandy on June 6, 1944, and slowly pushed the Nazi menace back across the Rhine, liberated France, linked up with the advancing Red Army just south of Berlin in late April, and presided over German unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945. Charles Glass’s Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation tells an altogether different and refreshing story of American involvement in Europe during World War II. Unlike the title of the book suggests, this is a story of life and sometimes of love, a story of moderate privation but hardly one of death. It is also a story of negotiation, collaboration, and occasional resistance, and the binary juxtaposition of the latter two function as the main theoretical frame explicitly provided in the introduction.
The book reads like a novel and features an unusual cast of characters. Instead of soldiers and politicians, Glass recounts the experiences of war through the eyes of American expats who decided to stay in Paris after the city was occupied by Germany in the summer of 1940. There is Sylvia Beach who ran a bookshop and functioned as a central figure in literary circles in Paris. The countess Clara Longworth de Chambrun, connected to the high society of Vichy France and General Pétain by way of her son’s marriage and to the political aristocracy of America by virtue of her own marriage, maintained a particular dedication to her work at the American Library of Paris. At the American Hospital, the chief surgeon Dr. Sumner Jackson together with his wife Toquette worked tirelessly to thwart the occupiers. In contrast, the cast includes Charles Bedaux, the American businessman turned war profiteer and opportunistic collaborator, all the while continuing to play the role of the “unpolitical man.” Lastly, here is, of course, the “American mayor of Paris,” American ambassador William Bullitt, who found himself in charge of a city abandoned by the French government.
The Americans featured in this book were exclusively members of upper (middle) classes and part of a transnational intellectual bourgeoisie. They spoke with statesmen and presidents, they courted Nazi officials, and they befriended such renowned literary figures as Ernest Hemingway; one of them relied on forced labor and many found themselves in prison camps or under house arrest once the United States officially entered the war. Nonetheless, the protagonists, members of an odd elite, generally did not have to contend with excessive brutality, callousness, and whimsicality of the occupiers. Beach was able to move freely through Paris still in 1943 but allegedly her life in the city was more exhausting than in the internment camp she had escaped from at Vittel. Jackson and his wife were notable exceptions. After having actively assisted the organized French resistance, Sumner Jackson died in Neuengamme concentration camp in Hamburg, Germany. His son, imprisoned with him, and his wife, interned at Ravensbrück, survived the war.
There are additional though less prominently featured characters who enter and leave the narrative that Glass so skillfully constructs, but one in particular requires mention. Charles Anderson is not only left with the last word; his blackness literally bookends Glass’s cautiously celebratory tale. He was born in 1861 in Illinois, ran away from home, and fought with the U.S. Army “as it was completing the annihilation of the Indian tribes,” came to Europe in 1884, enlisted in the French Foreign Legion, and fought in Africa during the Great War (p. 17). He and his French wife remained in Nazi-occupied Paris. When the U.S. Army liberated Paris and American troops marched through the city, Glass imagines Anderson to only notice “their white faces” (p. 411). But since his story does not intersect with those of the other Americans in this book, the details of his Parisian life remain shrouded in silence.
Having chosen to let the narrative drive the book, Glass misses the opportunity to forge connections between such glaring silences and the historical record in more explicitly analytical terms. Nonetheless, the author illustrates that Paris was less segregated than the United States, and that black Americans faced not only less outright racism but also fewer social barriers while abroad. The struggle of Eugene Bullard, an African American from Columbus, Georgia, is instructive in this regard. Bullard had traveled to Europe at the age of eleven and fought with the French against the Germans during the Great War at age nineteen. He remained in Paris where he later owned a nightclub, married, had two daughters, got divorced, and eventually worked for the French intelligence as a spy. When the Germans arrived in 1940, Bullard left Paris and joined the French Infantry in Orleans to fight the Germans. Wounded in battle and fleeing on a bicycle, he managed to secure a passport and escape to the United States. Bullard’s story, although hardly typical, nonetheless illustrates a central point that Glass wishes to make, namely, that Nazi racism made life exceedingly dangerous, if not impossible for black Americans in Paris. The survival of Anderson thus stands out even more starkly as an illustration of the questions the book raises but is unable to answer.
By virtue of his novelesque style, Glass makes two important interventions. First, he demonstrates through the different perspectives engaged that America played multiple, complicated, and at times conflicting roles in the European conflict. The book moreover demystifies (perhaps inadvertently) the concept of everyday life and ordinariness since hardly anything was ordinary in the lives of the Americans who remained in Nazi-occupied France. Secondly, the book illustrates how, different ideologies not withstanding, members of the international elite, whether businessmen, professionals, politicians, diplomats, bohemians, aristocrats, or intellectuals, maintained and forged connections across national and sometimes even frontlines. Beach’s literary circle, Bedaux’s business ventures, and Clara’s political connections are particularly revealing in this regard. Through such examples, the book suggests that personal histories and convictions rather than national sentiment determined the action and allegiances of Americans in ex-patria.
Glass claims at the outset that Americans in Paris “were among the most eccentric, original and disparate collection of their countrymen anywhere” (p. 1). By implication, and the narrative mode confirms this implication, their action or inaction and their collaboration or resistance (to keep with this problematic juxtaposition) are the logical result of their personal qualities and idiosyncracies, rather than the direct consequence of Nazi occupation and the harsh political, social, and racial realities that affected the lives of non-Americans in the city of Paris. Glass is obviously familiar with the important scholarship on German-occupied France. But only rarely does he allow this complex history to intrude on this American story. Parisians only enter the narrative in their relations with Americans. The city of Paris remains a backdrop to their lives and object of their desires. Similarly, the occupiers are relegated to the background, their villainous nature asserted but unexplored. Nazi practices, policies, and actions, as well as their views of Paris and Parisians and of America and American expats, are implied but seldom scrutinized. Americans are the sole actors in this story.
Thus the main weakness of Glass’s book—its narrow focus—also engenders the book’s main strength. The actors we do encounter are beautifully complex. They are far from unanimously good or steadfast in their anti-Nazism or their commitment to democratic principles. Thus their individual life stories collectively illustrate the slippery slope that links the spectrum of practice flattened by binaries of collaboration and resistance. In their daily pursuits, their desires, their relationships, and their occasional struggles, they appear entirely and wonderfully human. One might almost forget that for ordinary Parisians of different racial, social, and national characteristics, as for most of Europe, of course, the Nazis’ genocidal war was the only meaningful frame of reference.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.
Citation: Anne Berg. Review of Glass, Charles, Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation. H-TGS, H-Net Reviews. August, 2014.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=40476
Mark S. Monmonier, No Dig, No Fly, No Go: How Maps Restrict and Control, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. xiii + 242 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-53467-1; $18.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-226-53468-8.
Reviewed by Richard Harris (University of Bristol)
Published on H-TGS in July, 2010 (reproduced with permission). Commissioned by Robert J. Mayhew
Maps: Restricting and Enabling.
Had this book arrived without its cover, the author would have remained obvious. This is a Mark Monmonier text through and through: well written, engaging, mildly provocative, quirky at times, lavishly illustrated (albeit in black and white) and underpinned by a dry but generous sense of humor. It is full of interesting examples of how maps are used to naturalize claims to territory and then to restrict access.
As it happens my copy came fully intact with the blurb describing it as “a worthy successor to his critically acclaimed How to Lie with Maps.” Well, yes, it is a successor and its predecessor has been critically acclaimed (rightly so). There is also a return to previous themes, most notably an expanded discussion of gerrymandering boundaries for political gain (with the passing note that its namesake, Governor Elbridge Gerry, has been somewhat unfairly associated with the process).
However, as Monmonier himself writes, the new book is better understood as the fourth in a series of short cartographic histories exploring the evolution and impact of a map symbol or feature. The first, Rhumb Lines and Map Wars (2004) is about grid lines. From Square Tit to Whorehouse Meadow (2006) is about standardized place and feature names. Coast Lines (2008) is about how mapmakers frame the world and chart environmental change. In his new book Monmonier turns to “prohibitive cartography”--how cartography works as a mapping tool, leading to “our unconscious acceptance of cartographic boundaries of all types as natural, beneficial, and worth obeying” (p. xii).
The key point is that boundaries matter. They delimit and (literally) ground a claim to territorial possession. By doing so they shout to would-be trespassers, “keep out!” This is true at multiple scales.
Monmonier begins by looking at property properties, how they have been surveyed and marked, and the challenges of recovering a boundary described by historical landmarks. A discussion of frontier lands shows how large tracts of the United States were carved into apparently regular grids but ones that converge towards the North Pole. Hence the phenomenon of otherwise long and straight roads having occasional and seemingly inexplicably bends: they are due to the offset of land boundaries, correcting for converging meridians.
Turning to geopolitics, Monmonier considers the construction of physical barriers such as the Israeli security fence around the West Bank, the creation of national boundaries based on ethno-cultural and economic criteria of “self-determination” after World War I, and present-day territorial boundaries claimed by “absentee landlords” (Monmonier’s phrase). An example of the third is in Antarctica where neat but not undisputed boundaries divide the polar pie into national slices, the boundaries of which extend out and are defined by conveniently located coastal positions, islands, and landmarks on other continents.
Even more natural boundaries are scrutinized for the false sense of obviousness they attempt to bestow. Water rights are particularly problematic. Who, for example, owns the land that is eroded from one shore and deposited on another? And what if that changing landscape also happens to define a nation’s boundary? How about maritime boundaries? It’s all very well to say they extend a certain distance from the shoreline but coastlines are fractal so what is the appropriate level of generalization to apply to the map before making the measurement? Then there are the complications of estuaries, submerged land, continental shelves, and offshore islands. The use of cartography to defend, define, and contest territorial claims is fascinating, as are the legal-cum-moral asides: does an island nation retain its claim to maritime waters if it is submerged by rising sea levels due to climate change? It’s less of a moot discussion for residents of the Maldives.
Whereas some boundaries define ownership, others delimit what can take place within, or what or who should be kept out. Examples including municipal zoning plans that range from micro-managing the architectural and physical appearance of “historic neighborhoods” to controlling the types of commerce and business that may take place within. But not entirely: adult shops have the right to operate somewhere. The dilemma for the city official is where: away from schools and religious buildings, of course, but then all together in a single “adult use district” or dispersed across the region? Or perhaps they could be directed to a corner of the municipality where the only access route is from across the border?
Throughout the book Monmonier eloquently describes a wide range of case studies in a manner that retains but does not the swamp the reader in detail, the uniqueness and, often, outright bizarreness of particular circumstances. At the same time, the studies come together to demonstrate how simple lines on a map belie protracted negotiations, legal complexities, claims and counterclaims, and the ulterior motivations behind the questionable logic that lays claim to territory. It is, perhaps, a little too descriptive. The text lacks a discussion of the power of maps (to cite another book title) to beguile and seduce. How actually do maps work? Do they really restrict or are they simply the end product--the cartographic visualization of prior decisions to restrict and control? Each chapter has only a brief introduction and the end tends to be left hanging. Whilst this leaves readers free to draw their own conclusions, some may want a little more sign-posting about the path the text is taking and what is to be learned along the way.
A second minor criticism I have is that the title frames a generally negative view of how maps operate: no dig, no fly, no go. However, as the book itself makes clear, boundaries are constructed and maps make them visible. That means they can be contested. Perhaps the book might have ended on a more positive note, looking at participatory mapping or so-called (but dubiously named) neogeography, where new technologies and access to data enable the world to be mapped and imagined from multiple points of view.
These are quibbles. The book is excellent and scholarly throughout, well written for anyone who is interested in the importance of maps in society and on the world stage. It should be required reading for all students of geography and is a highly recommended addition to the Monmonier canon.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.
Citation: Richard Harris. Review of Monmonier, Mark S., No Dig, No Fly, No Go: How Maps Restrict and Control. H-HistGeog, H-Net Reviews. July, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30716
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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Note from N&C editors:
To find out more on Monmonnier, one of the most enjoyable authors of scholarly publications who makes geography and geopolitics as easy and exiting to read as novel, consult his personal website, the entry on him in the faculty pages of the Syracuse University website, an interview by Colette Labouff Atkinson, and other book reviews such as those found in the Spectator or published on line by scholarly reviewers as found on the aforementionned personal websites, or Tuft's Fletcher School's Patrice Philippe Meier's review of Monmonnier's now classic How to Lie With Maps
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Stephen C. Neff, Justice among Nations: A History of International Law, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. 640 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-72529-4.
Reviewed by William E. Butler (Pennsylvania State University)
Published on H-TGS in July, 2014 (reproduced with permission). Commissioned by Seth Offenbach
Toward a History of the Law of Nations
For those few hardy souls who offer a course or seminar on the history of the law of nations, better known by its Benthamite appellation “international law,” Stephen C. Neff’s recent treatise Justice among Nations: A History of International Law will be a heaven-sent and long overdue addition to the small category of general works on the subject suitable for instructional purposes. IThis is not the author’s first work on the subject; on the contrary, he has been an impressively productive presence in the field for more than two decades whose specialized monographs have set the stage for this most recent addition. He commenced with Friends But No Allies: Economic Liberalism and the Law of Nations (1990); followed by "Report of a Mission to Sri Lanka on Behalf of the International Commission of Jurists" (1991), Reading Human Rights: An Annotated Guide to a Human Rights Library (1997) published in Colombo, and The Rights and Duties of Neutrals: A General History (2000). More recently, he published a broader study, War and the Law of Nations: A General History (2005); a specific study devoted to the American Civil War, Justice in Blue and Gray: A Legal History of the Civil War (2010); and a student edition of Hugo Grotius on the Law of War and Peace (2012).
Following T. S. Eliot’s line “in the end there is beginning” (recently an inspiration for a hymn), I commence with the substantial bibliographic essay which concludes the volume. Much better than a mere list of sources, the essay evaluates the superior contributions to the field and is a proper place for graduate students in international law and relations to commence their reading. At once we encounter the paucity of available general studies. Douglas M. Johnston’s The Historical Foundations of World Order: The Tower and the Arena (2008)--a magnificent work--was priced beyond the range of most individuals. Wilhelm Grewe’s The Epochs of International Law, translated by Michael Byers (2000), concentrates on the medieval and postmedieval periods; it is, as Neff describes the volume, “a political history of international law” (p. 462). Still valuable but difficult to find in the market is Arthur Nussbaum’s A Concise History of the Law of Nations (second edition, 1954). Otherwise one is left to work with studies from the late eighteenth century to the outbreak of the Second World War--from Robert Ward (1795) onward. Alternatively, one would need to read German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, or Ukrainian for surveys of the subject from a variety of points of view.
The volume here reviewed is organized into four parts containing eleven chapters which combine thematic and chronological periodization. Chapters 1 to 3 encompass the period up to 1550; part 2 contains chapters 4 and 5 which embrace the years 1550 to 1815; part 3, devoted to chapters 6 to 8, addresses the century between 1815 and 1914; and part 4 treats the century from 1914 to the present. There is a brief conclusion, followed by endnotes (which would have better served the reader as footnotes), the bibliographic essay noted above, and an index.
The book is intended for university students and a general readership of all ages and beyond. Neff is guided in his coverage by his own perception of what students need to comprehend when studying international law. He describes the history of international law as the “scientific study of the emergence of order out of chaos.” How, he says in asking the eternal question, “is it possible--even in theory let alone in practice--to have a ‘legal system’ of any kind between states when there is no ruler to promulgate it? Where does it come from? And why is it obeyed?” International law for Neff, therefore, “is not so much a list of rules” as a response of states and the international community to the challenge of “devising answers” to these queries (p. 2).
His book, therefore, may be described as “the story for answers to these questions (and similar ones) over the course of human history” (p. 2). Neff’s concern is less for the actual substance of international law and more for how international law has been interpreted, how it has been applied in practice, and “above all” how the answers to the questions he raises have changed over the years. Thus Neff endorses the value of comparative international law. Indeed, he observes that it would be a “great error” to imagine international law to be a “single, unitary phenomenon” (p. 3). He enjoys maritime analogies: international law as a large ship subject to constant refittings; or as a river perpetually in flow but constantly eroding its banks, changing shape, sometimes in flood, other times drought.
Neff treats all developments in international law up to circa 1550 as a single period. During these centuries, Neff observes, there were numerous deities for “justice,” but none for international law; that is, there were no guardians among the gods and goddesses of justice between individual nations. It was left to the populace of nations to find a means of interposing justice into interstate relations. For Neff, it “appears all the more striking that glimmers of international law can be discerned nearly as far back as historical records will take us” (p. 7). It is a singular merit of this study that Neff addresses the early origins of international law in Greece and Rome, to be sure, but also Mesopotamia, the Middle East, India, and China. However, his conclusions are hardly routine. He perceptively notes the difficulties inherent in a community accepting that peoples outside the cultural horizon of another should entertain a belief that there could exist a single source of legal duty or single “font of justice” that would or could be recognized “transculturally” (p. 34). The overriding view was that rulers were subject to their own deities and not by a deity purporting to govern all the peoples of the world.
Neff cites Plato and Aristotle for the proposition that neither imagined their precepts of moderation and justice in war would extend to non-Greeks: “There would appear to be no record of a Greek polis ever concluding a treaty with a barbarian State” (p. 35). Nonetheless, dealings with strangers were essential. Neff persuasively argues that a comparison of the three principal regions of Eurasia--India, China, and the Mediterranean--offer instructive insights that “would be decisive for the shape that international law would take throughout its history.” India and the West opted for what Neff calls “universal religious--cum--philosophical systems” that posited the equality of all peoples. Imperial China preferred a different approach based on an “explicitly sinocentric outlook” that relegated individuals who were culturally alien to the Chinese world to a marginal place, at best, in the larger scheme of things (p. 37).
Neff’s perception of China is of considerable interest. When China was divided into the Warring States, there was considerable reflection on and invention in international relations. Once the Warring States merged in 221 BC into a single centralized empire, China had no further reasons to direct its attention to international legal doctrine. Thereafter, China’s international concerns, by land, were with its northern frontiers, inland Asia. The Confucian world outlook at the time restrained the Chinese from regarding various nations outside China as independent equals or as compatriots within a single world system. The outcome, Neff says, “was to make the very idea of international law ... as a law between independent States” impossible in principle (p. 39).
In an entirely different context than one usually encounters, Neff concludes that “in a world that is regarded as containing, ultimately, only one country or one single system, there can hardly be any such thing as international law” (p. 39). One encounters similar sentiments in interwar literature on comparative law (for example, H. C. Gutteridge’s Comparative Law [1949]), where it was argued that the law of nations had no place in comparative law because of its avowed universality (there was nothing to compare it to) or because of the uniqueness as a legal system in principle. Similar argumentation was adduced with respect to natural law, which has held to be universal and eternal, that is, the same for all historical time periods.
The role of comparison is far more subtle than these observations suggest; it matters little to comparative law whether the comparative method is deployed within or outside of a legal structure. The Chinese tradition of exacting or imposing tribute on neighboring communities was, in the view of many, a reinforcement of the Chinese perception of their place in the world. Neff, however, is entirely plausible when he suggests that “the stubborn and continued denial of that equality in principle constituted a firm conceptual barrier against the development of an image of a world of independent states of equal legal status--that is, against the very idea that would be at the core of later international thought” (p. 42).
China and Rome each entertained a belief of sorts in a “global law” (p. 48). But in the Chinese view, the Chinese emperor would be the head of a world state, whereas the Roman vision rested on the idea of an impersonal and universal rule of law rather than on a benevolent ruler. The historical outcome is that the Roman path proved to be durable, whereas the Chinese approach did not.
Neff accords natural law considerable space: “The significance of natural law for the development of international law can hardly be overstated. In a nutshell, it was the idea that there is a body of law above and beyond that of state governments ... it was the notion that this law actually constrains governments themselves just as it constrains ordinary people” (p. 51). Natural law, Neff says, was a force of unity in the world, albeit most powerful in medieval Europe, together with the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy. Seemingly the weakest of the triad of unity factors, natural law as an intellectual design was more durable than empire or church and continues to this day to be viewed by many as the foundation of international law. Neff observes that natural law predates Christianity by a considerable period of time, being entirely a product of Greek and Roman civilization. It is impossible, Neff argues, to overstate the importance of this point: “Natural law was not religious either in content or origin, nor did the Christian faith have any privileged status within it.” However, natural law was a law for the entire world, transcending national entities or subjects; “natural law … was a radically cosmopolitan, universalist corpus of thought,” together with the jus gentium and the jus commune (p. 59).
In the High Middle Ages, a new perspective on the law of nations appeared, which Neff calls the “rationalist approach.” Associated, he believes, with the medieval rediscovery of Aristotle’s work and the writing of Thomas Aquinas, this perspective was completely independent of the will or command of God and could not be the property of any individual culture, religion, or civilization. In this version, Neff concludes, natural law “exerted a powerful influence on international legal thought” (p. 63). Not until later, however, when the firm grip of natural law on the jus gentium was released, could international law as we know it come into being in the seventeenth century.
The “crowning achievement” of the jus gentium in the Middle Ages, according to Neff, was the just-war doctrine. This doctrine was present in all the major theories of the jus gentium, which Neff discusses. He comments that the just-war doctrine was entirely nonreligious in character even though theologians were the principal expounders of the doctrine; the religious affiliation of the parties at war played no role in the general approach to the theory. The just-war doctrine addressed the situations in which one might resort to force and take offensive measures by striking the first blow and commencing hostilities; it was not concerned with issues of self-defense, which in medieval writing was governed by natural law.
In daily life, the jus commune predominated--the law that was common to the whole of Catholic Europe. The province of legal practitioners and judges and recorded in the records of judicial proceedings and judgments, or the opinions of jurists, on specific issues put to them, these materials have yet to be fully explored, Neff observes, for their impact on the development of international law. “It is … apparent that many of the principles employed by later writers in the natural-law tradition actually came from this source rather than from the actual natural-law writing of the Middle Ages. Moreover, within the jus commune, the canon law contribution to international law has been especially overlooked” (p. 73).
Doctrines of papal superiority over secular rulers, Neff claims, originate in the canon law; a considerable portion of diplomatic law and practice came from church practices and, therefore, from canon law. Despite its all-European presence, however, the jus commune was a European and a Christian law and did not purport to reach further.
Against the aforementioned elements of universality and unity in law, Neff turns to the forces that undermined unity. Not least was the emergence of independent states in Europe. Among these were the Italian communes, and eventually the various European kingdoms. Neff attributes the impetus to create independent states primarily to the emergence of Aristotelian writing that encouraged mutual independence of states and were opposed to concepts of universal dominion. In due course the jus gentium detached itself from natural law. In the medieval world, both natural law and the jus gentium “existed on the margins of medieval legal consciousness” (p. 80). Attention is then accorded to the development of maritime law, the law of war, and the Law Merchant.
The chapter on new worlds (chapter 3) addresses the Age of Discovery, as would be expected, but also the Islamic world. Neff distinguishes neatly between the Islamic concepts of “jihad” and actual practices with the world outside Islam. The harshness of Islamic doctrines of jihad was softened, Neff believes, by the introduction of legal devices, such as the truce, or the payment of tribute by an infidel state to a Muslim one, or the granting of safe conducts. The safe conduct was the device through which Islamic countries engaged themselves in extensive commercial links with European Christian states during the Middle Ages. We are rightly reminded that European expansionism dates back to at least the Crusades, rather than the sixteenth century. Europeans in those times sought to recover the Holy Land; liberate Spain from the Muslims; extend Christianity into the Baltic; and seek new discoveries in Iceland, Greenland, and momentarily North America. Here Neff explores the pagans as sovereigns, the justifications for crusading, peaceful ties between states, finding new territories outside Europe, the famous papal division of the world, claims of Spanish sovereignty, the acquisition of title by just war, and others. Against these elements, Neff juxtaposes expansive claims to maritime territory and alternative theories regarding the acquisition of title to newly discovered lands.
We dwell on this rather detailed account above of part 1 of Neff’s treatise because he raises original thoughts on the early period of the development of the law of nations that was either neglected or was addressed in the most cursory manner by earlier writers. He opens chapter 4 with the anecdote of the Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus carrying a copy of the 1625 edition of Hugo Grotius’s On the Law of War and Peace with him on military campaigns, noteworthy for the heft of the volume but also because the Swedish court appointed Grotius to be their ambassador in Paris. Between 1550 and 1815, Neff notes, the subtle movement toward abandoning the “just” and “unjust” war doctrines and accepting the practical result that, given the ambiguity of who was acting “justly,” both sides would be regarded as having equal rights to “exercise the normal prerogatives of just belligerents” (p. 147). This is one example of numerous instances in Neff’s treatise where he identifies and argues most eloquently that the publicists were having an actual impact on state practice.
“Putting Nature and Nations Asunder” as the title of chapter 4 is the characterization that Neff gives to the clear separation in the period considered between natural law and the jus gentium. Francisco Suarez is credited with setting out the first and most systematic case for this separation which Grotius carried to a wider audience. Although Neff believes the Grotian impact to be exaggerated by his followers, the formation of the “Grotian tradition” rests on his dualist perspective that distinguished between natural law and so-called voluntary law: “His reputation only seemed to grow, even as the actual reading of his famous book fell increasingly out of fashion” (pp. 165, 166). But Grotius was not, in Neff’s view, the Isaac Newton or the Galileo Galilei of international law: “His instincts were firmly in the past, in the rationalist tradition of natural law extended back to Aquinas” (p. 166).
One of Grotius’s protagonists was Thomas Hobbes, and around these two individuals emerged rival schools of international law. On the one hand, Hobbes’s followers were styled the “naturalists”; they believed the sole body of law binding between states was natural law. On the other hand, the “dualists,” sometimes called the “Grotians” or “eclectics,” understood there to be two separate and distinct systems of law between states--natural law and the jus gentium.
Subsequent developments in international legal doctrine, Neff contends, turned less on the divisions between naturalists and Grotians and more on rival approaches that emerged within the Grotian camp. Chapter 5 is devoted to these approaches, epitomized in the writings of Sir Francis Bacon, Immanuel Kant, Christian von Wolff, Baron Zouche, Johann Jacob Moser, Emer de Vattel, G. F. Martens, and others--“rationalists versus pragmatists” in Neff’s perception, with the last becoming predominant.
The remainder of the book is essentially divided into two centuries, the first following the Congress of Vienna to the outbreak of the First World War, and the second from 1914 to the present. For most readers this will be more familiar ground. Neff deftly transports the reader through the three principal variants of positivism (empirical, common-will, voluntarist) and their ultimate synthesis into a “rough harmony”--an amalgamation that Neff calls “mainstream positivism” (p. 243). Dissident voices were heard, however, and continue to be so--the tenacity of natural law, liberalism, nationality, and solidarism. By the early twentieth century, international law was, in Neff’s words, “in full flower,” with increased emphasis on dispute resolution, lawmaking or codification, and enforcement measures (p. 298).
The promising foliage of international law was severely burned by the First World War, but nonetheless optimistic realists among international lawyers hoped for a “lasting peace” in which a “new international law” might emerge to prevent such appalling conflicts (p. 346). The League of Nations plays a prominent role in Neff’s account of this period, as one would expect, and the establishment of the United Nations is seen as “building anew” (p. 395). All credit to the author for bringing his account to the present, for yesterday already is history. His concluding observation is well taken: developments of the early twenty-first century “provided further evidence ... that the efficacy of international law is not something to be taken for granted” (p. 478). Yet “one of the more remarkable facts of world history ... is how well this precarious mechanism of largely voluntary compliance actually works in practice” (p. 479). The schools of thought, Neff suggests, in international law have been remarkably stable since the late nineteenth century.
Rich in insights, thoughtful in argument, sometimes elegant in presentation, well structured, masterful in its command of the material, sweeping in its coverage of the multiple past and present international legal systems that have formed on the planet, Neff’s newest publication will take its due place as the leading English-language work on the history of international law.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.
Citation: William E. Butler. Review of Neff, Stephen C., Justice among Nations: A History of International Law. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. July, 2014.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=40871
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Heather E. McGregor, Inuit Education and Schools in the Eastern Arctic, Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010. 220 pp. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7748-1744-8.
Reviewed by Jon Reyhner (Northern Arizona University)
Published on H-TGS in August, 2010 (reproduced with permission). Commissioned by Jonathan D. Anuik
Inuit Education in the Far North: Progress and Pitfalls
Heather McGregor’s Inuit Education and Schools in the Eastern Arctic examines the history of Inuit education in the Far North of Canada. She finds that colonization only occurred there in earnest after World War II and she divides the Far North’s history of education into the pre-1945 traditional, 1945-70 colonial, 1970-82 territorial, and 1982-99 local periods. Throughout the book the author demonstrates a real effort to complement and contrast the reports of government bureaucracies and outside researchers with the voice of the Inuit.
A century ago, missionaries entered the Arctic and often stayed long enough to learn the Inuit languages. Around 1900 missionaries developed a syllabary for Inuktitut and reading and writing it spread. During the colonial period after World War II small government schools were established in the new settlements, often built around Hudson Bay Company trading posts, where the Inuit could buy food and rifles, leading to a move away from traditional Inuit ways of life.
Teachers recruited from southern Canada to staff village schools lacked training in cross-cultural education and usually did not stay long enough to learn much about the Inuit. Besides the language gap these teachers faced, there was a fundamental contradiction between their values and those expressed in the teaching materials they used, and Inuit values. McGregor quotes Mary A. Van Meenen’s 1994 doctoral dissertation stating, “The core of the problem was that neither the federal nor territorial governments understood the peoples they were trying to educate” (p. 87). The resulting culturally assimilationist education led to a loss of Inuit cultural identity and “widespread … spousal abuse, alcoholism, and suicide” (p. 81). McGregor quotes Alootook Ipellie as to the effect of this colonial education that could be found across the world: “For years, all three generations had different goals and values, and all suffered. The educational system failed Inuit youth. They dropped out in swarms year after year, creating a society of half-educated young men and women who could not adjust fully to either of the cultures they were being brought up in. They became sons and daughters without destiny, without pride in their past and without much of a future--dropouts, social sores, listless vegetables. Many of them chose the easy way out by committing suicide” (p. 81). McGregor notes the need to bring along adults educationally as well as their children to avoid these generational splits.
McGregor cites various studies and interviews that describe traditional Inuit education as “learner-centered,” “fundamentally experiential,” and based on the need for environmental knowledge to survive in the harsh northern environment. It was family-based and focused on experiential knowledge and “ecocentric identity” (p. 39). Family members taught “the ways the Inuit live with, and know about, their environment” (p. 31). She notes that “children [were] named after a respected Elder who had recently passed” and that “treating a child with disrespect or imposing one’s will was equal to acting in that manner toward the child’s Elder namesake and was therefore unacceptable” (p. 42). McGregor quotes Taqtu from Susan Cowans's edited book, We Don’t Live in Snowhouses Now: Reflections of Arctic Bay (1976): “Later on the children had to go to school, which was all right too: they had to learn if they were not going to be staying in camp. They had to take jobs, which was also all right. There was really no choice, and I accepted it gladly because our children had to learn. I wanted them to learn English so they can have good jobs when they grow up” (p. 70). Inuit parents saw that the greatest benefit of education was learning English because this could lead to jobs, which the loss of the traditional nomadic hunting life made increasingly necessary.
Some teachers, but not nearly enough, responded to the meaninglessness for Inuit children of southern textbooks used in northern classrooms. In 1960 R. A. J. Phillips noted in the journal North, “teaching should begin with the familiar and move at the appropriate pace to the new and challenging” (p. 80). And in 1968 a primary-level Arctic Reading Series was printed.
In the 1970-82 territorial period First Nations in Canada demanded more voice in the education of their children, and the Canadian government began exhibiting more sensitivity towards cultural differences. In southern Canada this meant more band-operated schools and in 1976 in the North a Linguistics Division was formed in the Northwest Territories Department of Education to develop materials in Aboriginal languages. More Inuit teaching assistants were employed, and some Inuit received teacher training because of the 1968 formation of the Northwest Territory Teacher Education Program. McGregor notes, “For Inuit to own the education system they had to first become familiar with it and involved in its operation” (p. 97). There was a call for more Inuit studies in the 1970s, but curriculum materials were still lacking. McGregor quotes Mi'kmaw education scholar Marie Battiste to the effect that, "Through ill-conceived government policies and plans, Aboriginal youths were subjected to a combination of powerful but profoundly distracting forces of cognitive imperialism and colonization. Various boarding schools, industrial schools, day schools, and Eurocentric educational practices ignored or rejected the world-views, languages, and values of Aboriginal parents in the education of their children. The outcome was the gradual loss of these world-views, languages and cultures and the creation of widespread social and psychological upheaval in Aboriginal communities" (p. 23). However, despite all the problems, this education helped develop an Inuit leadership that could resist federal paternalism and work for self-determination.
At the start of McGregor’s local period, in 1982, three regional boards of education were established and culturally appropriate teaching resources were developed. There was a call for culture-based and bilingual schooling so that education would “be community-based, culturally relevant, student-centred, activity-oriented, balanced, integrated, collaborative, and process-oriented” (p. 134). Despite this educational progress, McGregor finds that educational issues were largely ignored in the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement negotiations, leading to the establishment of the Nunavut Territory in 1999, with the result that the three regional school boards were dissolved. Today, there is more local governmental control but less local educational control and there are fewer educated local people to qualify for government jobs. McGregor finds that, “Inuit are living with very low standards in one of the richest countries in the world” (p. 161).
McGregor notes that there is a danger of trivializing Inuit culture when bringing it into the classroom and that tradition is not static. In an appendix, she lists the eight guiding principles of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit agreed on by consensus of Inuit elders to be included in Inuit classrooms. They include “respecting others,” “being open, welcoming,” “developing collaborative relationships," “environmental stewardship,” “knowledge and skills acquisition,” being “resourceful,” “consensus decision-making,” and “contributing to the common good” (pp. 173-174). She finds there is more culture-based education today, but schools still rely on Alberta standardized tests to determine graduation, leading to an increased dropout rate.
McGregor concludes that, “The evidence thus far is that schools continue to rely on the methods and structure of schooling established by Qallunaat [white] education, whereas learning opportunities that reflect traditional Inuit methods are exceptional,” which helps foster a 70 to 75 percent dropout rate and the highest recorded levels of suicide among the approximately 35,000 Inuit today (p. 166). Because of the current re-centralization of school administration, “parents … are increasingly disengaged from involvement in educational decision making” (p. 168). The use of English as the instructional medium has been problematic from the beginning of colonial education. As the 1972 Northwest Territories Department of Education’s survey noted, “Language is such a vital aspect of the culture of any people that its loss frequently constitutes a seriously traumatic experience for those involved and constitutes an automatic denigration of their whole culture” (p. 91). McGregor cites the passage of a 2009 Inuit Language Protection Act in her afterword as giving some hope for the acknowledgement of the cultural needs of the Inuit but, overall, McGregor’s book does not end on an optimistic note.
Inuit Education and Schools in the Eastern Arctic is a valuable contribution to the history of colonial education worldwide and in Canada. It complements Anne Vick-Westgate’s book, entitled Nunavik: Inuit-controlled Education in Arctic Quebec (2002). What is particularly interesting about Inuit education is how compressed in time the changes that have taken place are. In southern Canada, New Zealand, the United States, and many other places, governments got involved in indigenous education in the nineteenth century; the colonial and territorial periods of indigenous education lasted more than a century; and, in some contexts, those periods are likely still ongoing.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.
Citation: Jon Reyhner. Review of McGregor, Heather E., Inuit Education and Schools in the Eastern Arctic. H-Education, H-Net Reviews. August, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30893
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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For more on the Arctic in this issue of N&C: read our feature article- "The Arctic: A New Middle-East?"
— N&C staff
Reviewed by Richard Harris (University of Bristol)
Published on H-TGS in July, 2010 (reproduced with permission). Commissioned by Robert J. Mayhew
Maps: Restricting and Enabling.
Had this book arrived without its cover, the author would have remained obvious. This is a Mark Monmonier text through and through: well written, engaging, mildly provocative, quirky at times, lavishly illustrated (albeit in black and white) and underpinned by a dry but generous sense of humor. It is full of interesting examples of how maps are used to naturalize claims to territory and then to restrict access.
As it happens my copy came fully intact with the blurb describing it as “a worthy successor to his critically acclaimed How to Lie with Maps.” Well, yes, it is a successor and its predecessor has been critically acclaimed (rightly so). There is also a return to previous themes, most notably an expanded discussion of gerrymandering boundaries for political gain (with the passing note that its namesake, Governor Elbridge Gerry, has been somewhat unfairly associated with the process).
However, as Monmonier himself writes, the new book is better understood as the fourth in a series of short cartographic histories exploring the evolution and impact of a map symbol or feature. The first, Rhumb Lines and Map Wars (2004) is about grid lines. From Square Tit to Whorehouse Meadow (2006) is about standardized place and feature names. Coast Lines (2008) is about how mapmakers frame the world and chart environmental change. In his new book Monmonier turns to “prohibitive cartography”--how cartography works as a mapping tool, leading to “our unconscious acceptance of cartographic boundaries of all types as natural, beneficial, and worth obeying” (p. xii).
The key point is that boundaries matter. They delimit and (literally) ground a claim to territorial possession. By doing so they shout to would-be trespassers, “keep out!” This is true at multiple scales.
Monmonier begins by looking at property properties, how they have been surveyed and marked, and the challenges of recovering a boundary described by historical landmarks. A discussion of frontier lands shows how large tracts of the United States were carved into apparently regular grids but ones that converge towards the North Pole. Hence the phenomenon of otherwise long and straight roads having occasional and seemingly inexplicably bends: they are due to the offset of land boundaries, correcting for converging meridians.
Turning to geopolitics, Monmonier considers the construction of physical barriers such as the Israeli security fence around the West Bank, the creation of national boundaries based on ethno-cultural and economic criteria of “self-determination” after World War I, and present-day territorial boundaries claimed by “absentee landlords” (Monmonier’s phrase). An example of the third is in Antarctica where neat but not undisputed boundaries divide the polar pie into national slices, the boundaries of which extend out and are defined by conveniently located coastal positions, islands, and landmarks on other continents.
Even more natural boundaries are scrutinized for the false sense of obviousness they attempt to bestow. Water rights are particularly problematic. Who, for example, owns the land that is eroded from one shore and deposited on another? And what if that changing landscape also happens to define a nation’s boundary? How about maritime boundaries? It’s all very well to say they extend a certain distance from the shoreline but coastlines are fractal so what is the appropriate level of generalization to apply to the map before making the measurement? Then there are the complications of estuaries, submerged land, continental shelves, and offshore islands. The use of cartography to defend, define, and contest territorial claims is fascinating, as are the legal-cum-moral asides: does an island nation retain its claim to maritime waters if it is submerged by rising sea levels due to climate change? It’s less of a moot discussion for residents of the Maldives.
Whereas some boundaries define ownership, others delimit what can take place within, or what or who should be kept out. Examples including municipal zoning plans that range from micro-managing the architectural and physical appearance of “historic neighborhoods” to controlling the types of commerce and business that may take place within. But not entirely: adult shops have the right to operate somewhere. The dilemma for the city official is where: away from schools and religious buildings, of course, but then all together in a single “adult use district” or dispersed across the region? Or perhaps they could be directed to a corner of the municipality where the only access route is from across the border?
Throughout the book Monmonier eloquently describes a wide range of case studies in a manner that retains but does not the swamp the reader in detail, the uniqueness and, often, outright bizarreness of particular circumstances. At the same time, the studies come together to demonstrate how simple lines on a map belie protracted negotiations, legal complexities, claims and counterclaims, and the ulterior motivations behind the questionable logic that lays claim to territory. It is, perhaps, a little too descriptive. The text lacks a discussion of the power of maps (to cite another book title) to beguile and seduce. How actually do maps work? Do they really restrict or are they simply the end product--the cartographic visualization of prior decisions to restrict and control? Each chapter has only a brief introduction and the end tends to be left hanging. Whilst this leaves readers free to draw their own conclusions, some may want a little more sign-posting about the path the text is taking and what is to be learned along the way.
A second minor criticism I have is that the title frames a generally negative view of how maps operate: no dig, no fly, no go. However, as the book itself makes clear, boundaries are constructed and maps make them visible. That means they can be contested. Perhaps the book might have ended on a more positive note, looking at participatory mapping or so-called (but dubiously named) neogeography, where new technologies and access to data enable the world to be mapped and imagined from multiple points of view.
These are quibbles. The book is excellent and scholarly throughout, well written for anyone who is interested in the importance of maps in society and on the world stage. It should be required reading for all students of geography and is a highly recommended addition to the Monmonier canon.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.
Citation: Richard Harris. Review of Monmonier, Mark S., No Dig, No Fly, No Go: How Maps Restrict and Control. H-HistGeog, H-Net Reviews. July, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30716
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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Note from N&C editors:
To find out more on Monmonnier, one of the most enjoyable authors of scholarly publications who makes geography and geopolitics as easy and exiting to read as novel, consult his personal website, the entry on him in the faculty pages of the Syracuse University website, an interview by Colette Labouff Atkinson, and other book reviews such as those found in the Spectator or published on line by scholarly reviewers as found on the aforementionned personal websites, or Tuft's Fletcher School's Patrice Philippe Meier's review of Monmonnier's now classic How to Lie With Maps
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Stephen C. Neff, Justice among Nations: A History of International Law, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. 640 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-72529-4.
Reviewed by William E. Butler (Pennsylvania State University)
Published on H-TGS in July, 2014 (reproduced with permission). Commissioned by Seth Offenbach
Toward a History of the Law of Nations
For those few hardy souls who offer a course or seminar on the history of the law of nations, better known by its Benthamite appellation “international law,” Stephen C. Neff’s recent treatise Justice among Nations: A History of International Law will be a heaven-sent and long overdue addition to the small category of general works on the subject suitable for instructional purposes. IThis is not the author’s first work on the subject; on the contrary, he has been an impressively productive presence in the field for more than two decades whose specialized monographs have set the stage for this most recent addition. He commenced with Friends But No Allies: Economic Liberalism and the Law of Nations (1990); followed by "Report of a Mission to Sri Lanka on Behalf of the International Commission of Jurists" (1991), Reading Human Rights: An Annotated Guide to a Human Rights Library (1997) published in Colombo, and The Rights and Duties of Neutrals: A General History (2000). More recently, he published a broader study, War and the Law of Nations: A General History (2005); a specific study devoted to the American Civil War, Justice in Blue and Gray: A Legal History of the Civil War (2010); and a student edition of Hugo Grotius on the Law of War and Peace (2012).
Following T. S. Eliot’s line “in the end there is beginning” (recently an inspiration for a hymn), I commence with the substantial bibliographic essay which concludes the volume. Much better than a mere list of sources, the essay evaluates the superior contributions to the field and is a proper place for graduate students in international law and relations to commence their reading. At once we encounter the paucity of available general studies. Douglas M. Johnston’s The Historical Foundations of World Order: The Tower and the Arena (2008)--a magnificent work--was priced beyond the range of most individuals. Wilhelm Grewe’s The Epochs of International Law, translated by Michael Byers (2000), concentrates on the medieval and postmedieval periods; it is, as Neff describes the volume, “a political history of international law” (p. 462). Still valuable but difficult to find in the market is Arthur Nussbaum’s A Concise History of the Law of Nations (second edition, 1954). Otherwise one is left to work with studies from the late eighteenth century to the outbreak of the Second World War--from Robert Ward (1795) onward. Alternatively, one would need to read German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, or Ukrainian for surveys of the subject from a variety of points of view.
The volume here reviewed is organized into four parts containing eleven chapters which combine thematic and chronological periodization. Chapters 1 to 3 encompass the period up to 1550; part 2 contains chapters 4 and 5 which embrace the years 1550 to 1815; part 3, devoted to chapters 6 to 8, addresses the century between 1815 and 1914; and part 4 treats the century from 1914 to the present. There is a brief conclusion, followed by endnotes (which would have better served the reader as footnotes), the bibliographic essay noted above, and an index.
The book is intended for university students and a general readership of all ages and beyond. Neff is guided in his coverage by his own perception of what students need to comprehend when studying international law. He describes the history of international law as the “scientific study of the emergence of order out of chaos.” How, he says in asking the eternal question, “is it possible--even in theory let alone in practice--to have a ‘legal system’ of any kind between states when there is no ruler to promulgate it? Where does it come from? And why is it obeyed?” International law for Neff, therefore, “is not so much a list of rules” as a response of states and the international community to the challenge of “devising answers” to these queries (p. 2).
His book, therefore, may be described as “the story for answers to these questions (and similar ones) over the course of human history” (p. 2). Neff’s concern is less for the actual substance of international law and more for how international law has been interpreted, how it has been applied in practice, and “above all” how the answers to the questions he raises have changed over the years. Thus Neff endorses the value of comparative international law. Indeed, he observes that it would be a “great error” to imagine international law to be a “single, unitary phenomenon” (p. 3). He enjoys maritime analogies: international law as a large ship subject to constant refittings; or as a river perpetually in flow but constantly eroding its banks, changing shape, sometimes in flood, other times drought.
Neff treats all developments in international law up to circa 1550 as a single period. During these centuries, Neff observes, there were numerous deities for “justice,” but none for international law; that is, there were no guardians among the gods and goddesses of justice between individual nations. It was left to the populace of nations to find a means of interposing justice into interstate relations. For Neff, it “appears all the more striking that glimmers of international law can be discerned nearly as far back as historical records will take us” (p. 7). It is a singular merit of this study that Neff addresses the early origins of international law in Greece and Rome, to be sure, but also Mesopotamia, the Middle East, India, and China. However, his conclusions are hardly routine. He perceptively notes the difficulties inherent in a community accepting that peoples outside the cultural horizon of another should entertain a belief that there could exist a single source of legal duty or single “font of justice” that would or could be recognized “transculturally” (p. 34). The overriding view was that rulers were subject to their own deities and not by a deity purporting to govern all the peoples of the world.
Neff cites Plato and Aristotle for the proposition that neither imagined their precepts of moderation and justice in war would extend to non-Greeks: “There would appear to be no record of a Greek polis ever concluding a treaty with a barbarian State” (p. 35). Nonetheless, dealings with strangers were essential. Neff persuasively argues that a comparison of the three principal regions of Eurasia--India, China, and the Mediterranean--offer instructive insights that “would be decisive for the shape that international law would take throughout its history.” India and the West opted for what Neff calls “universal religious--cum--philosophical systems” that posited the equality of all peoples. Imperial China preferred a different approach based on an “explicitly sinocentric outlook” that relegated individuals who were culturally alien to the Chinese world to a marginal place, at best, in the larger scheme of things (p. 37).
Neff’s perception of China is of considerable interest. When China was divided into the Warring States, there was considerable reflection on and invention in international relations. Once the Warring States merged in 221 BC into a single centralized empire, China had no further reasons to direct its attention to international legal doctrine. Thereafter, China’s international concerns, by land, were with its northern frontiers, inland Asia. The Confucian world outlook at the time restrained the Chinese from regarding various nations outside China as independent equals or as compatriots within a single world system. The outcome, Neff says, “was to make the very idea of international law ... as a law between independent States” impossible in principle (p. 39).
In an entirely different context than one usually encounters, Neff concludes that “in a world that is regarded as containing, ultimately, only one country or one single system, there can hardly be any such thing as international law” (p. 39). One encounters similar sentiments in interwar literature on comparative law (for example, H. C. Gutteridge’s Comparative Law [1949]), where it was argued that the law of nations had no place in comparative law because of its avowed universality (there was nothing to compare it to) or because of the uniqueness as a legal system in principle. Similar argumentation was adduced with respect to natural law, which has held to be universal and eternal, that is, the same for all historical time periods.
The role of comparison is far more subtle than these observations suggest; it matters little to comparative law whether the comparative method is deployed within or outside of a legal structure. The Chinese tradition of exacting or imposing tribute on neighboring communities was, in the view of many, a reinforcement of the Chinese perception of their place in the world. Neff, however, is entirely plausible when he suggests that “the stubborn and continued denial of that equality in principle constituted a firm conceptual barrier against the development of an image of a world of independent states of equal legal status--that is, against the very idea that would be at the core of later international thought” (p. 42).
China and Rome each entertained a belief of sorts in a “global law” (p. 48). But in the Chinese view, the Chinese emperor would be the head of a world state, whereas the Roman vision rested on the idea of an impersonal and universal rule of law rather than on a benevolent ruler. The historical outcome is that the Roman path proved to be durable, whereas the Chinese approach did not.
Neff accords natural law considerable space: “The significance of natural law for the development of international law can hardly be overstated. In a nutshell, it was the idea that there is a body of law above and beyond that of state governments ... it was the notion that this law actually constrains governments themselves just as it constrains ordinary people” (p. 51). Natural law, Neff says, was a force of unity in the world, albeit most powerful in medieval Europe, together with the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy. Seemingly the weakest of the triad of unity factors, natural law as an intellectual design was more durable than empire or church and continues to this day to be viewed by many as the foundation of international law. Neff observes that natural law predates Christianity by a considerable period of time, being entirely a product of Greek and Roman civilization. It is impossible, Neff argues, to overstate the importance of this point: “Natural law was not religious either in content or origin, nor did the Christian faith have any privileged status within it.” However, natural law was a law for the entire world, transcending national entities or subjects; “natural law … was a radically cosmopolitan, universalist corpus of thought,” together with the jus gentium and the jus commune (p. 59).
In the High Middle Ages, a new perspective on the law of nations appeared, which Neff calls the “rationalist approach.” Associated, he believes, with the medieval rediscovery of Aristotle’s work and the writing of Thomas Aquinas, this perspective was completely independent of the will or command of God and could not be the property of any individual culture, religion, or civilization. In this version, Neff concludes, natural law “exerted a powerful influence on international legal thought” (p. 63). Not until later, however, when the firm grip of natural law on the jus gentium was released, could international law as we know it come into being in the seventeenth century.
The “crowning achievement” of the jus gentium in the Middle Ages, according to Neff, was the just-war doctrine. This doctrine was present in all the major theories of the jus gentium, which Neff discusses. He comments that the just-war doctrine was entirely nonreligious in character even though theologians were the principal expounders of the doctrine; the religious affiliation of the parties at war played no role in the general approach to the theory. The just-war doctrine addressed the situations in which one might resort to force and take offensive measures by striking the first blow and commencing hostilities; it was not concerned with issues of self-defense, which in medieval writing was governed by natural law.
In daily life, the jus commune predominated--the law that was common to the whole of Catholic Europe. The province of legal practitioners and judges and recorded in the records of judicial proceedings and judgments, or the opinions of jurists, on specific issues put to them, these materials have yet to be fully explored, Neff observes, for their impact on the development of international law. “It is … apparent that many of the principles employed by later writers in the natural-law tradition actually came from this source rather than from the actual natural-law writing of the Middle Ages. Moreover, within the jus commune, the canon law contribution to international law has been especially overlooked” (p. 73).
Doctrines of papal superiority over secular rulers, Neff claims, originate in the canon law; a considerable portion of diplomatic law and practice came from church practices and, therefore, from canon law. Despite its all-European presence, however, the jus commune was a European and a Christian law and did not purport to reach further.
Against the aforementioned elements of universality and unity in law, Neff turns to the forces that undermined unity. Not least was the emergence of independent states in Europe. Among these were the Italian communes, and eventually the various European kingdoms. Neff attributes the impetus to create independent states primarily to the emergence of Aristotelian writing that encouraged mutual independence of states and were opposed to concepts of universal dominion. In due course the jus gentium detached itself from natural law. In the medieval world, both natural law and the jus gentium “existed on the margins of medieval legal consciousness” (p. 80). Attention is then accorded to the development of maritime law, the law of war, and the Law Merchant.
The chapter on new worlds (chapter 3) addresses the Age of Discovery, as would be expected, but also the Islamic world. Neff distinguishes neatly between the Islamic concepts of “jihad” and actual practices with the world outside Islam. The harshness of Islamic doctrines of jihad was softened, Neff believes, by the introduction of legal devices, such as the truce, or the payment of tribute by an infidel state to a Muslim one, or the granting of safe conducts. The safe conduct was the device through which Islamic countries engaged themselves in extensive commercial links with European Christian states during the Middle Ages. We are rightly reminded that European expansionism dates back to at least the Crusades, rather than the sixteenth century. Europeans in those times sought to recover the Holy Land; liberate Spain from the Muslims; extend Christianity into the Baltic; and seek new discoveries in Iceland, Greenland, and momentarily North America. Here Neff explores the pagans as sovereigns, the justifications for crusading, peaceful ties between states, finding new territories outside Europe, the famous papal division of the world, claims of Spanish sovereignty, the acquisition of title by just war, and others. Against these elements, Neff juxtaposes expansive claims to maritime territory and alternative theories regarding the acquisition of title to newly discovered lands.
We dwell on this rather detailed account above of part 1 of Neff’s treatise because he raises original thoughts on the early period of the development of the law of nations that was either neglected or was addressed in the most cursory manner by earlier writers. He opens chapter 4 with the anecdote of the Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus carrying a copy of the 1625 edition of Hugo Grotius’s On the Law of War and Peace with him on military campaigns, noteworthy for the heft of the volume but also because the Swedish court appointed Grotius to be their ambassador in Paris. Between 1550 and 1815, Neff notes, the subtle movement toward abandoning the “just” and “unjust” war doctrines and accepting the practical result that, given the ambiguity of who was acting “justly,” both sides would be regarded as having equal rights to “exercise the normal prerogatives of just belligerents” (p. 147). This is one example of numerous instances in Neff’s treatise where he identifies and argues most eloquently that the publicists were having an actual impact on state practice.
“Putting Nature and Nations Asunder” as the title of chapter 4 is the characterization that Neff gives to the clear separation in the period considered between natural law and the jus gentium. Francisco Suarez is credited with setting out the first and most systematic case for this separation which Grotius carried to a wider audience. Although Neff believes the Grotian impact to be exaggerated by his followers, the formation of the “Grotian tradition” rests on his dualist perspective that distinguished between natural law and so-called voluntary law: “His reputation only seemed to grow, even as the actual reading of his famous book fell increasingly out of fashion” (pp. 165, 166). But Grotius was not, in Neff’s view, the Isaac Newton or the Galileo Galilei of international law: “His instincts were firmly in the past, in the rationalist tradition of natural law extended back to Aquinas” (p. 166).
One of Grotius’s protagonists was Thomas Hobbes, and around these two individuals emerged rival schools of international law. On the one hand, Hobbes’s followers were styled the “naturalists”; they believed the sole body of law binding between states was natural law. On the other hand, the “dualists,” sometimes called the “Grotians” or “eclectics,” understood there to be two separate and distinct systems of law between states--natural law and the jus gentium.
Subsequent developments in international legal doctrine, Neff contends, turned less on the divisions between naturalists and Grotians and more on rival approaches that emerged within the Grotian camp. Chapter 5 is devoted to these approaches, epitomized in the writings of Sir Francis Bacon, Immanuel Kant, Christian von Wolff, Baron Zouche, Johann Jacob Moser, Emer de Vattel, G. F. Martens, and others--“rationalists versus pragmatists” in Neff’s perception, with the last becoming predominant.
The remainder of the book is essentially divided into two centuries, the first following the Congress of Vienna to the outbreak of the First World War, and the second from 1914 to the present. For most readers this will be more familiar ground. Neff deftly transports the reader through the three principal variants of positivism (empirical, common-will, voluntarist) and their ultimate synthesis into a “rough harmony”--an amalgamation that Neff calls “mainstream positivism” (p. 243). Dissident voices were heard, however, and continue to be so--the tenacity of natural law, liberalism, nationality, and solidarism. By the early twentieth century, international law was, in Neff’s words, “in full flower,” with increased emphasis on dispute resolution, lawmaking or codification, and enforcement measures (p. 298).
The promising foliage of international law was severely burned by the First World War, but nonetheless optimistic realists among international lawyers hoped for a “lasting peace” in which a “new international law” might emerge to prevent such appalling conflicts (p. 346). The League of Nations plays a prominent role in Neff’s account of this period, as one would expect, and the establishment of the United Nations is seen as “building anew” (p. 395). All credit to the author for bringing his account to the present, for yesterday already is history. His concluding observation is well taken: developments of the early twenty-first century “provided further evidence ... that the efficacy of international law is not something to be taken for granted” (p. 478). Yet “one of the more remarkable facts of world history ... is how well this precarious mechanism of largely voluntary compliance actually works in practice” (p. 479). The schools of thought, Neff suggests, in international law have been remarkably stable since the late nineteenth century.
Rich in insights, thoughtful in argument, sometimes elegant in presentation, well structured, masterful in its command of the material, sweeping in its coverage of the multiple past and present international legal systems that have formed on the planet, Neff’s newest publication will take its due place as the leading English-language work on the history of international law.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.
Citation: William E. Butler. Review of Neff, Stephen C., Justice among Nations: A History of International Law. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. July, 2014.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=40871
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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Heather E. McGregor, Inuit Education and Schools in the Eastern Arctic, Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010. 220 pp. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7748-1744-8.
Reviewed by Jon Reyhner (Northern Arizona University)
Published on H-TGS in August, 2010 (reproduced with permission). Commissioned by Jonathan D. Anuik
Inuit Education in the Far North: Progress and Pitfalls
Heather McGregor’s Inuit Education and Schools in the Eastern Arctic examines the history of Inuit education in the Far North of Canada. She finds that colonization only occurred there in earnest after World War II and she divides the Far North’s history of education into the pre-1945 traditional, 1945-70 colonial, 1970-82 territorial, and 1982-99 local periods. Throughout the book the author demonstrates a real effort to complement and contrast the reports of government bureaucracies and outside researchers with the voice of the Inuit.
A century ago, missionaries entered the Arctic and often stayed long enough to learn the Inuit languages. Around 1900 missionaries developed a syllabary for Inuktitut and reading and writing it spread. During the colonial period after World War II small government schools were established in the new settlements, often built around Hudson Bay Company trading posts, where the Inuit could buy food and rifles, leading to a move away from traditional Inuit ways of life.
Teachers recruited from southern Canada to staff village schools lacked training in cross-cultural education and usually did not stay long enough to learn much about the Inuit. Besides the language gap these teachers faced, there was a fundamental contradiction between their values and those expressed in the teaching materials they used, and Inuit values. McGregor quotes Mary A. Van Meenen’s 1994 doctoral dissertation stating, “The core of the problem was that neither the federal nor territorial governments understood the peoples they were trying to educate” (p. 87). The resulting culturally assimilationist education led to a loss of Inuit cultural identity and “widespread … spousal abuse, alcoholism, and suicide” (p. 81). McGregor quotes Alootook Ipellie as to the effect of this colonial education that could be found across the world: “For years, all three generations had different goals and values, and all suffered. The educational system failed Inuit youth. They dropped out in swarms year after year, creating a society of half-educated young men and women who could not adjust fully to either of the cultures they were being brought up in. They became sons and daughters without destiny, without pride in their past and without much of a future--dropouts, social sores, listless vegetables. Many of them chose the easy way out by committing suicide” (p. 81). McGregor notes the need to bring along adults educationally as well as their children to avoid these generational splits.
McGregor cites various studies and interviews that describe traditional Inuit education as “learner-centered,” “fundamentally experiential,” and based on the need for environmental knowledge to survive in the harsh northern environment. It was family-based and focused on experiential knowledge and “ecocentric identity” (p. 39). Family members taught “the ways the Inuit live with, and know about, their environment” (p. 31). She notes that “children [were] named after a respected Elder who had recently passed” and that “treating a child with disrespect or imposing one’s will was equal to acting in that manner toward the child’s Elder namesake and was therefore unacceptable” (p. 42). McGregor quotes Taqtu from Susan Cowans's edited book, We Don’t Live in Snowhouses Now: Reflections of Arctic Bay (1976): “Later on the children had to go to school, which was all right too: they had to learn if they were not going to be staying in camp. They had to take jobs, which was also all right. There was really no choice, and I accepted it gladly because our children had to learn. I wanted them to learn English so they can have good jobs when they grow up” (p. 70). Inuit parents saw that the greatest benefit of education was learning English because this could lead to jobs, which the loss of the traditional nomadic hunting life made increasingly necessary.
Some teachers, but not nearly enough, responded to the meaninglessness for Inuit children of southern textbooks used in northern classrooms. In 1960 R. A. J. Phillips noted in the journal North, “teaching should begin with the familiar and move at the appropriate pace to the new and challenging” (p. 80). And in 1968 a primary-level Arctic Reading Series was printed.
In the 1970-82 territorial period First Nations in Canada demanded more voice in the education of their children, and the Canadian government began exhibiting more sensitivity towards cultural differences. In southern Canada this meant more band-operated schools and in 1976 in the North a Linguistics Division was formed in the Northwest Territories Department of Education to develop materials in Aboriginal languages. More Inuit teaching assistants were employed, and some Inuit received teacher training because of the 1968 formation of the Northwest Territory Teacher Education Program. McGregor notes, “For Inuit to own the education system they had to first become familiar with it and involved in its operation” (p. 97). There was a call for more Inuit studies in the 1970s, but curriculum materials were still lacking. McGregor quotes Mi'kmaw education scholar Marie Battiste to the effect that, "Through ill-conceived government policies and plans, Aboriginal youths were subjected to a combination of powerful but profoundly distracting forces of cognitive imperialism and colonization. Various boarding schools, industrial schools, day schools, and Eurocentric educational practices ignored or rejected the world-views, languages, and values of Aboriginal parents in the education of their children. The outcome was the gradual loss of these world-views, languages and cultures and the creation of widespread social and psychological upheaval in Aboriginal communities" (p. 23). However, despite all the problems, this education helped develop an Inuit leadership that could resist federal paternalism and work for self-determination.
At the start of McGregor’s local period, in 1982, three regional boards of education were established and culturally appropriate teaching resources were developed. There was a call for culture-based and bilingual schooling so that education would “be community-based, culturally relevant, student-centred, activity-oriented, balanced, integrated, collaborative, and process-oriented” (p. 134). Despite this educational progress, McGregor finds that educational issues were largely ignored in the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement negotiations, leading to the establishment of the Nunavut Territory in 1999, with the result that the three regional school boards were dissolved. Today, there is more local governmental control but less local educational control and there are fewer educated local people to qualify for government jobs. McGregor finds that, “Inuit are living with very low standards in one of the richest countries in the world” (p. 161).
McGregor notes that there is a danger of trivializing Inuit culture when bringing it into the classroom and that tradition is not static. In an appendix, she lists the eight guiding principles of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit agreed on by consensus of Inuit elders to be included in Inuit classrooms. They include “respecting others,” “being open, welcoming,” “developing collaborative relationships," “environmental stewardship,” “knowledge and skills acquisition,” being “resourceful,” “consensus decision-making,” and “contributing to the common good” (pp. 173-174). She finds there is more culture-based education today, but schools still rely on Alberta standardized tests to determine graduation, leading to an increased dropout rate.
McGregor concludes that, “The evidence thus far is that schools continue to rely on the methods and structure of schooling established by Qallunaat [white] education, whereas learning opportunities that reflect traditional Inuit methods are exceptional,” which helps foster a 70 to 75 percent dropout rate and the highest recorded levels of suicide among the approximately 35,000 Inuit today (p. 166). Because of the current re-centralization of school administration, “parents … are increasingly disengaged from involvement in educational decision making” (p. 168). The use of English as the instructional medium has been problematic from the beginning of colonial education. As the 1972 Northwest Territories Department of Education’s survey noted, “Language is such a vital aspect of the culture of any people that its loss frequently constitutes a seriously traumatic experience for those involved and constitutes an automatic denigration of their whole culture” (p. 91). McGregor cites the passage of a 2009 Inuit Language Protection Act in her afterword as giving some hope for the acknowledgement of the cultural needs of the Inuit but, overall, McGregor’s book does not end on an optimistic note.
Inuit Education and Schools in the Eastern Arctic is a valuable contribution to the history of colonial education worldwide and in Canada. It complements Anne Vick-Westgate’s book, entitled Nunavik: Inuit-controlled Education in Arctic Quebec (2002). What is particularly interesting about Inuit education is how compressed in time the changes that have taken place are. In southern Canada, New Zealand, the United States, and many other places, governments got involved in indigenous education in the nineteenth century; the colonial and territorial periods of indigenous education lasted more than a century; and, in some contexts, those periods are likely still ongoing.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.
Citation: Jon Reyhner. Review of McGregor, Heather E., Inuit Education and Schools in the Eastern Arctic. H-Education, H-Net Reviews. August, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30893
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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For more on the Arctic in this issue of N&C: read our feature article- "The Arctic: A New Middle-East?"
— N&C staff
Also in this Issue 1, N&C's reporters take you to sea to face the extreme dangers of modern piracy, to the far North to understand Arctic geopolitics, to the zoos of the world targeted by political controversy, to the home of the Ladins (not Latins) -- a lost culture in a hidden valley of Europe. Don't miss the visual poem on Africa, the debate about overpopulation, nor the N&C e-library, a portal to numerous resources on nature and human geography.
In Issue 2 (Fall 2014): the Ukraine, Russian geography, conflicts over water and many, many more features. To receive notification of its release, go to N&C's Facebook page and sign up (Issue 1 will remain available on a special archives section).
In Issue 2 (Fall 2014): the Ukraine, Russian geography, conflicts over water and many, many more features. To receive notification of its release, go to N&C's Facebook page and sign up (Issue 1 will remain available on a special archives section).