Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Butler, Alison

history (7). Indeed, the graphic format has much to offer activists today. In Hill’s
words: “The strength of the comic book is that it uses minimal text with graphic
art to tell the story. This format is useful for reaching children, youth, and adults
who have a hard time reading books or lengthy articles. We may use many
diverse methods of communication—including newsletters, books, videos,
music, posters, stickers, paintings, banners, and T-shirts—because no simple one
will be successful by itself ” (6). There are, of course, limitations to the graphic
medium and to Hill’s work specifically. For example, Hill chooses to exclude the
important political movements fighting for land and dignity through legal chan-
nels. One reason for this choice could be that the logistics of legal battles do not
lend themselves as easily to the graphic artist as do the events of blockades and
occupations. Nevertheless, Hill’s work could have also discussed such tactics and
strategies to render a more nuanced picture of ongoing indigenous resistance to
colonialism.
The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book is both an important contribution
to the literature on colonialism in the Americas and a major intervention in the
emerging field of activist graphic history. In our struggles to renew activist ener-
gy for the twenty-first century, we must embrace graphic histories, like Hill’s
comic book, as significant tools that can help inspire people’s critical engagement
with the past and present.
Sean Carleton
Trent University
Ian Hesketh, The Science of History in Victorian Britain (London:
Pickering & Chatto, 2011).
This is a book about how Victorians wrote history and the struggle within the
discipline in determining history’s appropriate subject matter, methodology, and
boundaries. Intellectual historian Ian Hesketh uncovers a surprisingly complex
conflict in the professionalisation of history. He does this by presenting material
gleaned from diverse sources including public lectures and obituaries. At the
heart of this conflict is the question of whether history is an art or a science.
Through extensive research, the author reveals a much more multifaceted strug-
gle than traditionally perceived in a somewhat aggressive pursuit to make history
a science.
In this detailed analysis, Hesketh depicts an ongoing battle to establish
the proper domain and method of history through the examination of the lec-
tures and letters of renowned historians. Henry Thomas Buckle is presented as a
champion of the scientific method with a soft side for the artistic component.
The more hardcore proponents of an inductive method of science include
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William Stubbs, Lord Acton, J. R. Seeley and Edward A. Freeman. Despite a for-
eign influence on these last, through the work of German scientific historian
Leopold von Ranke, Hesketh is quick to identify parallels between this German
method and a very English tradition of Baconian induction, making such a
model more amenable to Victorian sensibilities. Finally, at the opposite end of
the spectrum, we meet those supporting an artistic, “great men” approach to his-
tory, namely Charles Kingsley and James Anthony Froude. One of the book’s
strengths lies in its exposure of the diverse routes taken by these historians in
pursuing the establishment of a science of history. As Hesketh reveals, this
struggle was a messy business with little consensus as to what kind of science
history should be, what method it should undertake, and what identity was
required by historians in carrying this out.
With the battleground set, the most interesting part of the book com-
mences: the fight itself, or rather, the attempt by the Rankean adherents to
exclude their opponents. This examination of boundary making within the disci-
pline of history presents a cut-throat academic milieu in which scientific histori-
ans attacked their adversaries through scathing criticism in lectures, letters, and
reviews. They further demarcated their field as a professional and scientific one,
by establishing their own journal, the English Historical Review. Yet, as Hesketh
reveals, students of history and the discipline’s general readership were not pre-
pared to turn their backs on a traditional artistic history, as the appeal of a good
story proved stronger than strict adherence to laying out the facts.
By comparing the professionalisation of history with that of science,
this seemingly specialised study is presented as part of a greater struggle for cul-
tural authority. The Rankeans were motivated by the same ideology as the scien-
tific naturalists were in their attempts to demarcate their discipline and rid it of
the perceived fluff that degraded their work. Underpinning this larger context,
Hesketh unravels further ideological conflicts by examining how these scientific
historians were influenced in their campaigns by philosophical and religious
agendas. Of particular interest is Hesketh’s assertion that, in the search for
objectivity, Rankean scientists sought to create a new and separate self, free of
bias and subjectivity, in proclaiming their judgments on the historical record.
This creation of a separate self, or at least a different identity, occurs again in the
case of certain historians, who, in acknowledging the public’s desire for a good
story, would write in one fashion for such an audience and in another for their
peers.
The hostilities dissipated by the beginning of the twentieth century,
with a general acceptance that poetic imagination and primary sources both had
places in the writing of history. While Hesketh makes no direct reference to any
influence from the new sciences of the mind which were emerging at the same
time, it is interesting to speculate that the accommodation of subjectivity within
these new branches of science made it easier for a form of history to emerge
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that would not only tolerate, but encourage both the subjective and the objective.
In writing this history, a history of the conflict over how history should
be written, Hesketh’s own method is inevitably scrutinized and compared to
those of whom he writes. He recognizes this and claims to intentionally employ
a “subtle” form of analysis through description, so that readers might find their
own path. As such, his approach encompasses both the technique of the
Rankeans, in its dependence upon archival sources and the historical record, and
that of the historians who championed a “great men” method of history, with
reliance on biographical detail.
This is a book concerned with parallels. Hesketh compares historians
with leading scientists of the era; he compares historical method with scientific
method and also with philosophical method. This is all part of his subtle analysis
to let readers find their own way. But perhaps it prevents a way – does descrip-
tion and comparison without inference point in any obvious objective direction?
If not, perhaps this is the author’s purpose.
Regardless, this colorful and conflicted history of the battle between
the art of history and the science of history is a welcome addition to the grow-
ing literature on nineteenth-century science and culture. Hesketh’s contribution is
of interest not only to Victorian scholars and intellectual historians, but to histo-
rians of all stripes in demonstrating the concerns of our predecessors in estab-
lishing the boundaries of our discipline, concerns that are still of relevance
today.
Alison Butler
Memorial University of Newfoundland
Kristin Burnett, Taking Medicine: Women’s Healing Work and Colonial
Contact in Southern Alberta, 1880-1930 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010).
In Taking Medicine: Women’s Healing Work and Colonial Contact in Southern Alberta,
1880-1930, Kristin Burnett considers the subverted roles of Aboriginal and set-
tler women in domestic and increasingly institutionalized healing and nursing
practices in the Treaty 7 contact zone. Noting “patterns of persistence, resist-
ance, and change” in Aboriginal women’s curative and caregiving work through-
out these decades, Burnett argues that Aboriginal and settler women’s vital thera-
peutic work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was displaced
with the expansion of white settlement and that it struggled to persist through
the Department of Indian Affairs’ (DIA) internal colonial policies (4,14). By
examining the convergence of colonialism, liberalism, positivism, and gender,
Burnett sets out to challenge the predominance of the “medicine man” in histor-
ical documents and in traditional understandings of Aboriginal and settler heal-
ing practices.
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Ian Hesketh, The Science of History in Victorian Britain (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011).

Lévesque, Jean

from classicist aesthetics. It represented timeless elegance and fitted into the
“socialist slowly moving time.” The other style fulfilled the stylistic synthesis of
modesty and prettiness “by advocating modesty in the cut and quality of fabric
and by suggesting creativity within standardization” (p.212). It was originally
introduced as a contrast to the Stalinist grandiose style and in fact resembled
petit bourgeois taste while relying on practicability, comfort and moderation.
The ideals of classical beauty and harmony certainly were understood
to be timeless, as Bartlett claims, yet seasonal changes guided the creativity of
Soviet haute couture just like in the rest of the world. The post-Stalinist pretti-
ness was not supposed to change all that much. It aimed at finding functional
cuts, harmonious compositions and colours which would not lose their appeal
after the next season. Bartlett reads too much into the opposition of these two
aesthetic principles. Other equally important ambivalences plagued socialist fash-
ion. Fashion designers and experts were very well aware of the gap which exist-
ed between mass produced and individually sewn clothes. It was much easier to
follow fashion in designing individual clothes than it was to meet the demands of
mass production under the limitations of the planned economy. The Soviet
Union never legalized small production series of clothes and boutiques which
were practiced in other Eastern European countries because of their small scale
private production and fashion ateliers. Both the numerous Soviet state owned
ateliers as well as the four parallel administrative systems of fashion design were
in fact created to overcome this gap. However, to the disappointment of the
Soviet experts and economic planners, this gap seemed only to widen with eco-
nomic growth and well-being.
What makes Bartlett’s work especially impressive is that she deals with
the fashion histories of altogether six socialist states. It lays a solid foundation to
this previously largely neglected area of history.
Jukka Gronow
University of Helsinki
Robert Edelman, Spartak Moscow: A History of the People’s Team in the
Workers’ State (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009).
With the notable exception of James Riordan, Robert Edelman has done more
than any other scholar to elevate the study of Soviet sports to academic
respectability. His Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the USSR (1993) laid
the groundwork for the cultural analysis of Soviet sports and can already be
judged a classic in the genre. This was confirmed with its translation into Russian
a few years ago. In this new work, Edelman provides us with a good example of
a special intellectual intersection where the scholar meets the fan; Edelman’s
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sympathy for the People’s Team is quite obvious and he manages to turn this
special locus into a book that will appeal both to scholars of the Soviet Union
and to aficionados of Spartak football. As anyone who has any experience of or
connection to academic sports history will know, this is no small ambition. This
marriage of passion and scholarly interest has its own kind of advantage, as it
leads to vivid descriptions of matches and players, but also its own brand of
shortcoming, such as the scholar’s diminished interest in periods during which
his team was not very successful.
While the Spartak Voluntary Society was an organization involved in
more than 40 sports and famous for its football, hockey, basketball and volleyball
sections, it is on the football club that Edelman focuses his attention. He gives
its entire history, from the side’s beginnings in the Moscow district of Krasnaya
Presna under the name of MKS (Moskovskii Kruzhok Sporta or Moscow Sport
Circle) to the present. In nine chapters Edelman tells the story of the Soviet
Union’s best known and perhaps most popular football team from a largely
chronological perspective, with admirably inserted thematic sections that place
the soccer team into its political, social and cultural contexts in a very flowing
fashion. Besides the obvious underlying objective of writing the first academic
history of the club, Edelman aims at highlighting two particular aspects of sport
history in general and Spartak’s history in particular. First is the link between
politics and popular culture, mostly around the issue of working-class leisure and
political protest, as Spartak is known for its independence from power organs
such as the army or the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which sponsored clubs like
the TsDKA (later TsSKA or Central Sports Club of the Army) or the Dinamo.
The second is the link between politics and the body, namely the models of mas-
culinity that Spartak athletes have offered to their millions of fans.
The first two chapters tell the story of Spartak’s beginnings in the over-
whelmingly working-class district of Krasnaya Presna, which achieved a certain
notoriety for its violent clashes with the authorities in the Russian Revolution of
1905. Spartak emerged from two predecessors, first the ZKS (Moscow River
Sports Club) and then the MKS (Moscow Sports Club), receiving its charter in
1935 as ‘Spartak’. Heavily involved in the birth of the club were the legendary
Starostin Brothers, Ivan Artem’iev and Aleksandr Kosarev, the chair of the
Communist Youth League; also important was the sponsorship of the
Promkooperatsiia or Retail Trade Trust, which may account for the spread of
the nickname ‘meat’ (myaso) among its opponents. The early success of Spartak
once it entered the new Soviet Premier League in 1936 (the subject of the next
two chapters), its working-class origins and the fact that Spartak was not linked
to the power ministries do much to explain the aura of independence from the
regime that its supporters have attributed to the People’s club. However, the
postwar boom in Soviet soccer, the changes in Spartak’s fan base that saw the
arrival of more educated and middle-class fans, and the fierce competition on
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the field from TsDKA and Dinamo have somewhat nuanced the early associa-
tions between the club and Soviet politics. Nonetheless, the club enjoyed a sec-
ond golden age during Khrushchev’s Thaw with the shining stars of Nikita
Simonian and Igor Netto. Success during the Brezhnev and Perestroika periods
was more sparse, a fact which, along with a weaker source base, may explain why
the author devotes to these eras a mere chapter.
In short, the history of Spartak is wonderfully integrated into the major
developments in Soviet politics, society and culture. But there are a few flaws.
First, the December 1935 invitation to Spartak by the French businessman
Bernard Levy to play in France could not be “in the best spirit of the Popular
Front” (79-80), as the Popular Front was elected only six months later. More
troublesome are the claims that Spartak’s image was much more cosmopolitan
than were those of the other clubs during the 1950s, solely for fielding a few
Russified non-Russians, and that the models of masculinity it spread were differ-
ent. In both cases the claims should be more grounded in evidence. The mas-
culinity issue almost disappears from the narrative after the Stalin period, proba-
bly due to lacunae in documentation. Also, given the depth of changes affecting
post-Soviet football for better and worse, it is difficult to understand why the
author deals with it in a mere two pages. Nonetheless, Edelman’s Spartak Moscow
is a labour of love that spans across decades and should set the standard for
much needed histories of Spartak’s competitors.
Jean Lévesque
Université du Québec à Montréal
Jessica Ellen Sewell, Women and the Everyday City: Public Space in San
Francisco, 1890-1915 (University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
Jessica Sewell’s readable and visually stimulating book examines the way women
traversed and domesticated a variety of urban and commercial public spaces at
turn-of-the-century San Francisco. In the process, women of all classes but par-
ticularly middle-class white women transformed the public sphere into a political
stage from which they ultimately demanded and won the right to vote.
Starting with historian Nancy Cott’s now classic notion of separate
spheres, Sewell examines a contradiction that middle-class women faced: relegat-
ed to home and hearth, women nonetheless increasingly occupied the public
sphere in ways that demanded negotiation and, finally, a redefinition of women’s
proper place in the urban environment. Sewell observes that tensions over the
mixed use of public space mark a difference between ideology and reality.
Matching ideology with “imagined landscapes” and reality with “experienced
landscapes”, Sewell draws from the theoretical work of Lefebvre and others to
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Robert Edelman, Spartak Moscow: A History of the People’s Team in the Workers’ State (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009).

Setting Down the Sacred Past: African American Race Histories. By Laurie Maffly-Kipp. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. 341 pp. $29.95. hardcover

Hall, Stephen G.

Recovering A Lost Past: African American Historical Writing in the Nineteenth Century

Boehmer-Plotz, Venetia

that would not only tolerate, but encourage both the subjective and the objective.
In writing this history, a history of the conflict over how history should
be written, Hesketh’s own method is inevitably scrutinized and compared to
those of whom he writes. He recognizes this and claims to intentionally employ
a “subtle” form of analysis through description, so that readers might find their
own path. As such, his approach encompasses both the technique of the
Rankeans, in its dependence upon archival sources and the historical record, and
that of the historians who championed a “great men” method of history, with
reliance on biographical detail.
This is a book concerned with parallels. Hesketh compares historians
with leading scientists of the era; he compares historical method with scientific
method and also with philosophical method. This is all part of his subtle analysis
to let readers find their own way. But perhaps it prevents a way – does descrip-
tion and comparison without inference point in any obvious objective direction?
If not, perhaps this is the author’s purpose.
Regardless, this colorful and conflicted history of the battle between
the art of history and the science of history is a welcome addition to the grow-
ing literature on nineteenth-century science and culture. Hesketh’s contribution is
of interest not only to Victorian scholars and intellectual historians, but to histo-
rians of all stripes in demonstrating the concerns of our predecessors in estab-
lishing the boundaries of our discipline, concerns that are still of relevance
today.
Alison Butler
Memorial University of Newfoundland
Kristin Burnett, Taking Medicine: Women’s Healing Work and Colonial
Contact in Southern Alberta, 1880-1930 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010).
In Taking Medicine: Women’s Healing Work and Colonial Contact in Southern Alberta,
1880-1930, Kristin Burnett considers the subverted roles of Aboriginal and set-
tler women in domestic and increasingly institutionalized healing and nursing
practices in the Treaty 7 contact zone. Noting “patterns of persistence, resist-
ance, and change” in Aboriginal women’s curative and caregiving work through-
out these decades, Burnett argues that Aboriginal and settler women’s vital thera-
peutic work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was displaced
with the expansion of white settlement and that it struggled to persist through
the Department of Indian Affairs’ (DIA) internal colonial policies (4,14). By
examining the convergence of colonialism, liberalism, positivism, and gender,
Burnett sets out to challenge the predominance of the “medicine man” in histor-
ical documents and in traditional understandings of Aboriginal and settler heal-
ing practices.
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In chapter one, Burnett provides a background of the Northwestern
Plains in order to contextualize the “place of curative regimes” in the Treaty 7
region’s history and economy (17). Though rather exhaustive and repetitive in
content for a book of 175 pages, for those unfamiliar with the field, chapter one
offers a helpful introduction to the broad sweeps of colonial and Western
Canadian history. Chapter two considers ethnographical and anthropological def-
initions of medicine and evidence of women’s work in the related records, while
chapters three and four account for the uneven process of white settlement and
the need for Aboriginal women’s healing work in the precarious state of new
communities. In chapters five and six, Burnett traces the struggle for control
over hospitals and school infirmaries between nuns, missionary wives, and for-
mally trained nurses, emphasizing the complicated financial relationship between
the federal government and the churches. She also outlines the gradual imple-
mentation of DIA programs that touted the link between European middle-class
ideals of housekeeping and child rearing and the use of Western medicine (152).
In chapter seven Burnett provides a valuable, well-crafted, and exemplary study
of midwifery and contraception from 1900-1930, arguing that midwifery persist-
ed throughout the period and is “emblematic of the resilience of Aboriginal cul-
ture and the importance of women’s knowledge and work in their communities”
(156).
Unfortunately, chapter seven emerges as the exception to a generally
underdeveloped work. Overall, Taking Medicine contributes a synthesis of, rather
than the proposed challenge to, existing historical research on Aboriginal health
and healing in the colonial project. Indeed, the thrust of Burnett’s central argu-
ment is that Aboriginal women were important, an assertion that is generally
accepted in recent revisionist works. One reason for such a result is, as Burnett
explains, that she did not conduct interviews for this study due to the “political
and social climate of southern Alberta,” the “constant scrutiny of researchers,”
and the lack of elders with living memory of the period prior to 1940 (12). She
turns to oral history collections completed by other researchers to compensate
for the gap in her research, allowing for the possibility to hear the voices of
Treaty 7 Aboriginal peoples. However, without conducting original research or
developing a new critical approach to this existing oral history record, Burnett
allows secondary research to dominate her discussion of an exciting and promis-
ing area of research. Furthermore, charged with the task of examining the com-
plexities of colonialism and gender, one would expect Burnett to develop a more
effective use of the secondary research through an in-depth discussion of the
applicable frameworks, theories, and historiography. Thus, while Burnett touches
on important ideas, Taking Medicine only skims the surface of the complex histor-
ical and conceptual issues in crafting research in such a dynamic discipline. With
Taking Medicine, Burnett takes advantage of the range of possibilities and popular
themes, bringing attention to the traditionally subverted domain of Aboriginal
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and settler women’s healing work. Accessible and concise, this book is well suited
for undergraduate students and non-scholars interested in broadening their per-
spectives of colonial history in Canada.
Venetia Boehmer-Plotz
Brock University
Benjamin Isitt, From Victoria to Vladivostok: Canada’s Siberian
Expedition, 1917–19 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010).
As Benjamin Isitt notes at the beginning of From Victoria to Vladivostok: Canada’s
Siberian Expedition, 1917–19, Canada’s Siberian Expeditionary Force has tradition-
ally been little more than a footnote in the history of the Great War (4). While
Isitt is by no means the first historian to write about the expedition, he is the
first to examine the ill-fated military intervention within the larger context of
class relations in Canada, expansionist capitalism, and the labour revolt and its
suppression. The result is a wide-ranging work that demonstrates the new
insights that can be gleaned from old topics when the sometimes myopic fields
of military and social history converge.
The Canadian Expeditionary Force Siberia (CEFS) was a Canadian led
international military force mobilized in the summer of 1918 in response to the
Russian Revolution of the previous November. Militarily it was a non-event:
although 4,200 Canadian troops were dispatched to Siberia, only once (and
briefly and without incident) did they come in contact with the Bolshevik forces
they were sent to suppress. Perhaps for that reason, it has been somewhat neg-
lected, generating only a few memoirs and military or political historical studies
without much interest from the mainstream historical community.
Isitt uses the CEFS to call for a new dialogue between military and
social historians as well as the importance of transnational history or, at the very
least, the larger international context. (170) In casting the expedition as a
Canadian attempt to simultaneously export western Capitalism while suppressing
growing labour radicalism at home, Isitt calls into question the conventional
nation-building narrative of the Great War. “From Victoria to Valdivostok,” he
argues, “the Canadian government had engaged in a battle against labour radical-
ism…the seething tensions and ambitions surrounding the Siberian
Expedition—among Anglophone and francophone workers and farmers,
Siberian peasants and partisans, White Russian soldiers and motley foreign
troops, and Canadian financiers and the state—exposed the class basis of
Canadian foreign policy. Canada lost in Siberia, its first foray as a world power,
and then quietly ignored this history.” (171) It is an argument which is supported
by in-depth primary research into the contemporary newspaper and periodical
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Kristin Burnett, Taking Medicine: Women's Healing Work and Colonial Contact in Southern Alberta, 1880-1930 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010).

Middleton, Stephen

the Wisconsin Commission’s importance for understanding reform within the
US over the course of the twentieth century. He acknowledges that even more
progressive states, such as New York, Illinois, and California, adopted only parts
of the Wisconsin model, and that workers in the vast majority of states were
provided with far less protection and support than that provided by Wisconsin.
While he is undoubtedly correct that historians have erred in seeing Wisconsin
and a few other states’ institutions as “weak” or “spare,” he does not present the
evidence that would support the notion that the majority  – or even a substantial
minority –  of the states had institutions or programs that came close to achiev-
ing what Wisconsin’s did. Indeed, while the author provides a strong account of
the forces that accounted for the success of the Wisconsin Industrial
Commission, he does not present a strong analysis of the class and political
forces that caused other states’ programs to be inferior. For example, in an effort
to show that occupational disease coverage in workers compensation legislation
was more prevalent than other historians (including this reviewer) have acknowl-
edged, the author overreaches and fails to acknowledge the critical role that
labour and reformers played in securing such legislation.
Finally, Rogers, perhaps in his enthusiasm for the Wisconsin model,
seems to regret the passing of states initiatives that resulted from the establish-
ment of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in
1970. While he acknowledges that none of the states sought to achieve OSHA’s
goal of insuring that employers provide workers with employment “free from
recognized hazards” (180), he judges that federal regulation itself has largely not
lived up to its “idealistic” and “laudable” goals. This, he posits, was not only
because of the “conservative political environment” that almost immediately fol-
lowed the establishment of OSHA, but also because of the “administrative com-
plexity” of the agency itself (181). This is not an adequate analysis of the assault
that OSHA was under virtually from its creation, and Rogers does not provide
any evidence that state programs would have fared any better if they had been
truly committed to protecting the workers in their jurisdictions.
Gerald Markowitz
John Jay College and Graduate Center, CUNY
Mark Reinhardt, Who Speaks for Margaret Garner? The True Story that
Inspired Toni Morrison’s Beloved (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2010).
I became acquainted with Margaret Garner and her family during the mid-1980s
while doing research for my dissertation. Since then, I have included snippets of
her story in various publications. Given my familiarity with the Garner saga, this
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new book excited me. Who Speaks for Margaret Garner delivers the first documen-
tary account of a seminal event in American history. It tells the provocative story
of how Margaret Garner came to kill one of her children. The collection ably
illustrates that this single act simultaneously gave Garner notoriety and renown.
Mark Reinhardt writes an introduction that covers one-sixth of the book, where
he chronicles the escape, capture, and trial of Garner and her family. The
remaining five-sixth of the book consists of documents, including newspaper
reports, sermons, editorials, correspondence, and legislative debates. Scholars,
students, and lay readers will be pleased to find the rich and varied collection of
documents that make up this book.
Most readers will probably ask: who is Margaret Garner? Clearly, she is
not a household name. Readers will discover that Garner had the same passion
that Patrick Henry immortalized in his “Give me Liberty or Give me Death”
speech. Moreover, the challenge that faced Garner and her family was far greater
than that which faced Henry and the colonists. While the colonists could only
claim that London officials had treated them as slaves, Garner and millions of
African Americans were literally slaves. Not only did Kentucky approve the
slave-status of Margaret Garner, the United States enforced it, and empowered
federal marshals and commissioners to participate in the recapture and forcible
return of runaway slaves to bondage. While most American-educated citizens
know about Patrick Henry, therefore, Reinhardt illustrates that the abolitionist
dream that generations would remember Margaret Garner remains illusive.
Today, she is an obscure person in the pantheon of American history.
This book starts with a comprehensive overview of Margaret Garner’s
response to her enslavement. Garner, along with her family—husband, four chil-
dren, and in-laws—joined nine brave souls to escape. They picked an unlikely
time to run away. A violent winter storm had virtually paralyzed Kentucky and
Ohio. The party of seventeen used a horse-drawn sleigh for the children and
supplies. Once they made it to the Ohio River they walked across the frozen
water as if they were on dry land. The Garner family separated from the others
in Cincinnati, and took up refuge with Joe Kite, Garner’s uncle. However, a fed-
eral marshal and posse were in hot pursuit, and followed the snow-laid footprints
to Joe Kite’s home. As Garner sensed that they were losing the gunfight, she
embarked upon a plan to end enslavement for herself and the children. As the
Cincinnati Columbian reported on January 29, 1856, “The negress avowed herself
the mother of the children, and said that she had killed one, and would like to
kill the three others rather than see them again reduced to slavery” (55). This act
set the stage for one of the most litigious fugitive slave cases in the history of
the United States.
Following the overview of the event in the introduction, Reinhardt pro-
ceeds to the documents which he presents in twelve chapters. These sources
cover such matters as the escape and capture of the Garner family, the initial
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proceeding with the commissioner, and the conflict between federal and state
law. Readers will discover that John Jolliffe, Garner’s attorney, chose two areas of
defense. First, he argued that some members of the Garner family had been
allowed to come into Ohio with the knowledge and consent of the owners.
Under the automatic emancipation decisions of state courts, the slave owners
lost the ability to hold them as slaves the moment they had crossed the state line.
Second, Jolliffe had Garner charged with murder in order for the state to shield
her from removal as a slave. The documents clearly illustrate the conflict of law
problem between Ohio and the United States, while state and federal judges
debated various jurisdictional questions. The legal strategies delayed but did not
prevent the removal of the Garner family. Federal district judge Humphrey
Leavitt sympathized with Margaret Garner, and the sovereign rights of Ohio.
Judge Leavitt, nonetheless, upheld the federal fugitive slave law. “In our com-
pound system,” he said, “the National and State governments have their appro-
priate functions and duties; and it is vital to the healthful action of the system,
that each should move within its constitutional orbit…” (120) With that ruling
Marshal Hiram Robinson and over two hundred deputies escorted Margaret
Garner and her family “across to the Covington jail, where [they were] delivered
to the Jailor, Andy Herod, who will retain them in custody until their owners
shall make what disposition of them they may see proper.” (125)
This book is about slavery and freedom, as well as identity, sexual
exploitation, and law and politics. The documents illustrate that Garner contest-
ed her enslavement by choosing a new name, even though Archibald K. Gaines
rejected it by calling her Peggy, the slave name he had chosen. Margaret Garner
was biracial, as were each of her four children, which means that the slave owner
or another white male had his way with the mother and daughter. This book is
about the quest of a single black woman for personal freedom, and that of her
family. Reinhardt does not stop there. He asserts that “Slavery is still with us in
the most literal sense: millions of men, women, and children around the world
are subject to some form of involuntary servitude.” (267) He suggests that mod-
ern-day slavery may be undone if we contest it wherever it may be found. He is
doing his part by donating the royalties from this book to the Free the Slaves
Project.
Stephen Middleton
Mississippi State University
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Mark Reinhardt, Who Speaks for Margaret Garner? The True Story that Inspired Toni Morrison’s Beloved (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

Galer, Dustin

in many ways it feels like a separate project, but Sewell’s analysis of the built
environment points toward middle-class women’s political machinations: “The
increased range of nonpolitical public spaces in which women could and did
move and act was an important aspect of their claim to political rights as mem-
bers of the public and their ability to make that claim” (127). Equally interesting
are the commercialized aspects of the public spaces Sewell documents. Women’s
movements toward direct political engagement seems dependant on women’s
occupation of commercialized public spaces. As a result, women, as consumers
and spenders, become valuable to the state in new ways during this time period,
but only in ways that women of means could experience. Drawing from a rich
trove of sources, Women and the Everyday City examines women’s political mobi-
lization from the perspective of the build environment; as such, it documents a
race- and class-specific movement that re-gendered the urban landscape and
expanded political entitlements for women.
Nan Alamilla Boyd
San Francisco State University
Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early
Baltimore, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).
Seth Rockman provides new clarity and validity to the vision that modern indus-
trial capitalism was built on the backs of poor, downtrodden, and largely anony-
mous masses. Scraping By is about the working poor in early America and the var-
ious ways in which impoverished families and individuals struggled to survive
during the early nineteenth century when urbanization and industrialization
began to transform the social and economic landscape. Readers are immediately
thrust into the ‘dirty work’ of early republic American capitalism, a rapidly
changing political economy where impoverished wage labourers, slaves, and
indentured immigrants ‘scraped by’ in unskilled, precarious, and exploitative
work. Compelled by the exigencies of survival and divided by gender, race, legal
status, and place of origin, a diverse workforce of labourers faced the daily grind
not yet guided by a coherent sense of “shared consciousness, identity, or poli-
tics” (11). The material conditions in which the working poor found themselves
were imposed by an unjust and exploitative market system that created and rein-
forced class distinctions, eventually giving rise to the American working-class.
During this early period, however, Rockman finds only disaggregated masses of
industrious people whose hard (and often dangerous) work collectively trans-
formed Baltimore into an economic powerhouse.
Rockman contends that the transition from slavery to wage work was
essentially incomplete and presented new problems whereby most wage labour-
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ers were unable to exercise much freedom in the marketplace. Both enslaved and
‘free’ labour were confined by a social and material hegemony where entrepre-
neurs derived their wealth from their control and ownership over working bod-
ies. Capitalists benefited from slavery and eagerly hired both enslaved and free
labour, often coexisting in the same workplace, in order to keep wages down. A
simultaneous continuum of enslaved labour, indentured servitude, and wage
work blurred the lines between free and unfree labour. In this context, ‘wage
slavery’ assumed greater relevance and poignancy for ‘free’ labourers who navi-
gated a fairly narrow range of options. According to Rockman, the political
economy that emerged during the period of early capitalism created new social
and economic disparities where only people with capital were able to exercise the
kind of freedom and autonomy so central to the ideals and ethics of the
American Revolution. Rockman believes that prosperity and poverty are linked
and are often “flip sides of the same coin” (2). He argues that the growing afflu-
ence and concentration of wealth during this period directly contributed to the
creation of chronic and debilitating poverty as more and more people became
dependent on wage work in urban economies.
Rockman reconstructs the lives of workers navigating Baltimore’s low-
end job market through careful analysis of newspapers, institutional records of
the local almshouse, courthouse, penitentiary, and municipal records, particularly
petitions by ordinary folks defending themselves against a variety of charges. His
adept handling of these records carries important lessons for social historians
seeking to rescue their subjects from anonymity in the historical record.
Rockman’s evocative analysis of Baltimore’s port workers moves smoothly into
his larger discussion of people drawn to the city in search of work. The key to
the rise of Baltimore as a major commercial and transportation centre was its
port, given the city’s strategic position along the eastern seaboard. Constant
dredging of silt that tended to accumulate at the mouth of the port was required
to keep the port open for business. Finicky mudmachines helped carry dredged
silt away from the harbour wall, but the majority of the work was carried out by
a small army of workers who shovelled out the muck by hand. The work was so
poorly paid, physically exhausting and dangerous that many recruits quit after a
few hours even though much of the other available work in the city was similarly
precarious and underpaid.
Rockman takes us through similar narratives of other jobs filled by
workers of all stripes: immigrant, native-born, women, men, white, black, free
and unfree. In doing so, he pulls away from typical distinctions on the basis of
race, culture and gender so that we are left with an impression of the working
poor as sharing a certain degree of material hardship and oppression in the
developing market system. A focus on women as wage workers, peddlers, and
even prostitutes leads to a discussion about the role of gender identity through
wage work, gender and family dynamics, family economy, and systems of power
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and inequality that shaped the lives of impoverished workers and their families.
With these social and material realities in mind we have a fuller understanding of
the working poor before moving into subsequent discussions of their contact
with institutional sites of power such as state welfare, courts, and penitentiaries.
Finally, Rockman concludes with a discussion of the extent to which the advent
of the free market system and attendant commodification of labour coincided
with a reassertion of a commitment to slave labour. The strategic placement of
early chapters on material hardship and subjugation ahead of later chapters on
state welfare and punishment seems to chart the inevitable path toward which
this new political economy propelled those caught in its web. This organisational
structure forces the reader to grapple with Rockman’s larger contention that cap-
italism is an essentially oppressive system.
Scraping By is a provocative yet convincing work that outlines disturbing
parallels between slavery and wage work in the antebellum period. Rockman
shows how the commodification of labour in the modern capitalist system
entailed the purchase and control of human labour, accruing profit and advan-
tage to a concentrated few with financial means. By focusing on the plight of
subaltern workers in the early American republic, Rockman successfully demon-
strates how early capitalists controlled access to and movement within the mar-
ket system and in so doing, constricted opportunities to ameliorate extreme dis-
parities in wealth. Probably Rockman’s most important contribution is to reaf-
firm that the best indication of whether or not a given society is just is to con-
sider the condition of those at its foundation, which is to say, the material condi-
tion of working people. The poverty, toil, and anguish of early Baltimore’s work-
ing poor as sketched out by Rockman reveal a great deal about the nature of
American capitalism in the early nineteenth century.
Dustin Galer
University of Toronto
Daniel Burton-Rose, Guerrilla USA: The George Jackson Brigade and the
Anticapitalist Underground of the 1970s (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London:
University of California Press, 2010).
Between 1975 and 1977, the George Jackson Brigade took part in more than two
dozen bank robberies and bombings. Daniel Burton-Rose’s Guerrilla USA gives a
critical, but largely sympathetic account of this seven-member armed struggle
group based out of Washington State as they bombed targets ranging from the
prison industrial complex to strike-bound workplaces in an attempt to stir the
masses into action.
Laying the background for the introduction of the brigade, the book’s
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Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

He [a New Testament Scholar] characterizes the [four canonical] Gospels as “history-like witnesses to truths both historical and transcendent,” which is helpful so long as we do not take “history-like” to mean fictional, in the way that historical novels are “history-like.” [He] maintains that they [the Gospels] are not the kind of narrative about past events that modern historians write

Simon, Edith

MacAdam, Henry I.

“In Defense of Historical Fiction”: An Unpublished Essay by Edith Simon (Edited, with Introduction and Commentary. by Henry Innes MacAdam)

Young, Jay

practice” (22) by young people in which they use arts and writing to critique
social conditions. He argues that critical practice can help transcend both games,
resulting in less investment in constructed gender roles. In so doing, he suggests
that art and scholarship should have an activist orientation and can achieve real-
world changes. As a successful example of critical practice, he cites Harmony, a
young woman who was released from the RITS and returned as a teacher.
Anthony, the most frequently discussed example in the book, also represents
critical practice, contributing insightful material to Hidden TREWTH and work-
ing for the Broad Street Studio upon his release. Yet at least implicitly, Anthony
also represents the limitations of critical practice: he fled Rhode Island after
becoming a suspect in a burglary of the Broad Street Studio and a murder.
This book is thought provoking, but not entirely successful. Reich’s
analysis is most compelling when he focuses on the Game of Outlaw and how
young people use the game to achieve their visions of masculinity, even though
some are aware of the artificiality of the exercise. The analysis is somewhat less
compelling when dealing with the Game of Law. Reich is not entirely clear on
whether the Game of Law is a means of fitting into society generally or merely
an adaptation to the artificial circumstances of the RITS. In addition, Reich’s
advocacy of an activist role for art and scholarship might be off-putting for
readers who do not share this view. These reservations aside, Hidden Truth is still
a compelling read and a compelling analysis of why young people involved with
crime do what they do.
David B. Wolcott
Newtown, PA
Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the
American City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).
If I walk across the middle of a busy city street, there is a good chance that a car
will hit me. And chances are that motorists will call me a jaywalker, or something
worse. Onlookers might question why I risked my life by refusing to cross at a
nearby pedestrian crosswalk. City streets, after all, belong to motorized vehicles,
not other uses. Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City
uncovers the emergence of this dominant conception of the street over eight
decades ago.
Fighting Traffic examines the ways in which automobile interests, known
as “motordom,” reconceptualized the American city street as a car thoroughfare
and delegitimated other uses that had enjoyed customary rights. The shift was
not inevitable; rather, it was a “violent revolution” (2) that reached its height in
the 1920s. Norton employs a social constructivist framework to study the city
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street as a technological artifact that was contested by various social groups who
employed “technological frames” (4) to promote different uses. Pedestrians inter-
preted the street through “justice,” which emphasized the dangers that automo-
biles posed to other street users. This conception placed responsibility on
motorists for maiming innocent pedestrians. Traffic engineers understood the
street as a public utility and a site of “efficiency.” They sought to regulate its use
based on utilitarian principles that often restricted automobiles. Both of these
technological frames threatened the automobile’s growth by the mid 1920s, and
motordom responded by constructing the street as a commodity through the
frame of “freedom.” Strong associations of political and economic freedom
with American society, along with motordom’s growing financial and organiza-
tional resources, ensured that its interpretation emerged dominant.
Most studies on the growth of urban automobility during the early
twentieth century are based on a misleading dichotomy between the car and the
street railway. Proponents of the “consumer-demand school” believe that the
automobile was technologically superior to other modes, hence users inevitably
abandoned the streetcar and jumped at the chance to become motorists. The
“elite-imposition school,” in contrast, asserts that the automobile, rubber, and
gasoline industries conspired to eliminate streetcars, deconcentrate populations,
and force urbanites to purchase automobiles. Norton argues that “[t]here were
far more participants in this contest [for the street] than motorists, automobile
manufacturers, street railways, and city planners,” (16) including merchants,
police, engineers, and parents. Because he concentrates on changing meanings of
the street - and not only the automobile’s replacement of the streetcar – Norton
is able to analyze the complexities of these competing and sometimes overlap-
ping interests.
Focusing on the street also enables Norton to show that pedestrians are
essential to the history of urban mobility. In particular, Fighting Traffic examines
the threat pedestrian safety posed to motordom. Automobile interests sought to
place part of the onus on pedestrians themselves. Motordom crafted educational
campaigns that taught pedestrians to have concern for their own safety, in order
to transfer responsibility onto them. The book includes a fascinating discussion
on the shifting meaning of “jaywalker” as a rhetorical example of the broader
shift. The term had referred to walkers who blocked the path of others (includ-
ing pedestrians), but by the mid 1920s, motordom had altered in meaning to
refer to pedestrians who interfered with car movement.
Norton emphasizes that the 1923-1924 slump in car sales motivated the
automobile industry to reconceptualize the city street. Historians have argued
that concern over consumer demand in the 1920s motivated the industry to
implement annual model changes, financing plans, and more advertising. Fighting
Traffic shows that motordom also understood the slump as a problem of supply:
a lack of “floor space” (155) on city streets for the growing number of automo-
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biles. Increasingly consolidated through mergers, motordom emerged from the
slump united and ready to redefine the street.
Highlighting the 1920s means that Norton understates earlier conflict
between new technologies and customary street uses. During the late nineteenth
century, municipalities promoted conceptions of the street as an artery over
other uses when they permitted streetcars to run along city thoroughfares.
Electric streetcars also threatened the safety of pedestrians. Although the dra-
matic increase of automobiles during the 1920s created new problems and esca-
lated old ones, the decade’s fight for the street witnessed significant continuities
with earlier battles between mechanized transport and other street uses.
Fighting Traffic shows how historians can integrate theory – in this case,
the social construction of technology – as a means to conceptualize their empiri-
cal studies. By focusing on the street as a technological artifact and the social
groups that competed to define its uses, Norton has admirably contributed to
the debate on the car’s dominance in American cities, a historical process with
ramifications on current attempts to reduce automobile use. The next time I
cross the street, I’ll walk hesitantly and think of the past.
Jay Young
York University
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Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).

Wisotzki, Paula

Constructing Meaning: The Albany Exhibition of David Smith’s Medals for Dishonor

Carleton, Sean

Canada and the US.
Largely avoiding the debate on acculturation and language loss,
Lorenzkowski repeatedly emphasizes the hybrid nature of the German language
and culture in Waterloo County and Buffalo. Following several US studies, she
argues that particularly in the case of Ontario, a great number of German speak-
ers disagreed with the ethnic leadership and its claims that ethnic identity
required the use of non-anglicized, standard German. The author is critical of
the ideas that “ethnic gatekeepers” propounded in the German-language press.
She describes a tension between two groups in Waterloo County: one that
believed that its ethnic identity could be maintained through song, performance,
associational life, and memory and another that believed that a supposed wide-
spread Kauderwelsch (gibberish or pidgin German) deteriorated the position of
German culture and somehow also threatened to weaken the ethnic identity of
the community leaders themselves.
This well-researched book provides innovative answers to a broad set
of questions, at the same time making two major historiographical contributions.
First, the lens of aural history and the interest in how culture and ethnicity hap-
pened is an important shift away from a long-running debate about acculturation
and language loss for Germans in Canada. This fresh approach to Canadian eth-
nic studies will hopefully have a lasting impact on future studies of other immi-
grant groups. Second, Lorenzkowski’s description of the cultural connections
across the Ontario-New York border through numerous singers’ festivals takes
an important step in understanding how transnational connections repeatedly
shaped ethnic culture within national and local contexts.
Benjamin Bryce
York University.
Gord Hill, The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book ( Vancouver: Arsenal
Pulp Press, 2010).
Gord Hill’s The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book is provocative proof that
graphic history is an important tool for activists today. In the preface, Hill argues
that the dominant narrative of colonial history in the Americas minimizes the
story of indigenous resistance, and he maintains that “such a strategy has been
used to impose capitalist ideology on people, to pacify them, and to portray their
struggle as doomed to failure” (5). To counter this narrative, Hill’s work chroni-
cles the long history of indigenous peoples’ resistance to colonialism by illustrat-
ing the many defeats inflicted on invading European forces and highlighting the
strength of contemporary indigenous resistance movements from Chiapas to
New Caledonia. Indeed, the very purpose of The 500 Years of Resistance Comic
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Book is to “raise levels of historical understanding [about resistance and] warrior
spirit among Indigenous peoples and others” (6). Hill showcases the dialectical
relationship between colonial abuses and ongoing indigenous resistance, and, in
doing so, makes an important contribution to the literature examining the colo-
nial past.
Hill situates the history of indigenous resistance to colonialism and
capitalism in a global context. He begins by recounting the events of the “1492
invasion” and how Columbus sought to conquer, Christianize, and enslave the
hospitable Tainos while creating the first European colony in the Americas, La
Navidad. Hill explains that when Columbus returned to the colony in 1493 he
found it destroyed “after the Taino retaliated against rapes and murders carried
out by the Spaniards” (28). Hill uses this example to set the tone as well as to
show how European colonization unleashed a new “reign of terror and death”
to acquire “gold, silver, wood and food crops” (31). Hill maintains, though, that
the “colonization of the Americas…was not easy. It involved centuries of war as
our ancestors fought a life and death struggle” (37). Hill then outlines the details
of a variety of different indigenous resistance movements from Inca and Aztec
opposition, to the Pontiac Rebellion in 1763, the Battle of Little Big Horn, and
the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890. Instead of ending here, Hill shows how
overt colonial brutality turned into bureaucratic violence and policies of assimila-
tion: “a common strategy of colonial regimes is to assimilate surviving native
peoples into the colonial society…This makes the native easier to control as well
as an obedient worker and consumer” (61). The goal of such policies, Hill makes
clear, is “to destroy all indigenous culture and identity that inspires our spirit of
resistance, and which limits their plans of exploitation” (62). In the second half
of the twentieth century, Hill explains how indigenous peoples, inspired by the
civil rights movement and global decolonization struggles, renewed resistance
tactics resulting in such actions as the occupations of Alcatraz in 1969 and
Wounded Knee in 1973, the Oka conflict in 1990, the Zapatista uprising in 1994,
and the Six Nations confrontation with Ontario police in 2006. Hill brings these
diverse events together creating an impressive picture of widespread destruction
and, simultaneously, impassioned and ongoing resistance.
Of course, what separates Hill’s treatment of the history of indigenous
resistance in the Americas is his use of the graphic history format. The 500 Years
of Resistance Comic Book mixes historical research, primary source material—
including quotes and renditions of historical photographs—with sharp narration
and graphic illustrations. Despite the popularity of graphic histories by Chester
Brown (Louis Riel) and even Howard Zinn (A People’s History of American Empire),
many scholars continue to dismiss the graphic history format. When asked to
write the introduction to Hill’s comic book, Ward Churchill was admittedly skep-
tical; however, the “sophistication and communicative effectiveness” of Hill’s
work quickly “transformed” Churchill’s appreciation for the graphic approach to
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history (7). Indeed, the graphic format has much to offer activists today. In Hill’s
words: “The strength of the comic book is that it uses minimal text with graphic
art to tell the story. This format is useful for reaching children, youth, and adults
who have a hard time reading books or lengthy articles. We may use many
diverse methods of communication—including newsletters, books, videos,
music, posters, stickers, paintings, banners, and T-shirts—because no simple one
will be successful by itself ” (6). There are, of course, limitations to the graphic
medium and to Hill’s work specifically. For example, Hill chooses to exclude the
important political movements fighting for land and dignity through legal chan-
nels. One reason for this choice could be that the logistics of legal battles do not
lend themselves as easily to the graphic artist as do the events of blockades and
occupations. Nevertheless, Hill’s work could have also discussed such tactics and
strategies to render a more nuanced picture of ongoing indigenous resistance to
colonialism.
The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book is both an important contribution
to the literature on colonialism in the Americas and a major intervention in the
emerging field of activist graphic history. In our struggles to renew activist ener-
gy for the twenty-first century, we must embrace graphic histories, like Hill’s
comic book, as significant tools that can help inspire people’s critical engagement
with the past and present.
Sean Carleton
Trent University
Ian Hesketh, The Science of History in Victorian Britain (London:
Pickering & Chatto, 2011).
This is a book about how Victorians wrote history and the struggle within the
discipline in determining history’s appropriate subject matter, methodology, and
boundaries. Intellectual historian Ian Hesketh uncovers a surprisingly complex
conflict in the professionalisation of history. He does this by presenting material
gleaned from diverse sources including public lectures and obituaries. At the
heart of this conflict is the question of whether history is an art or a science.
Through extensive research, the author reveals a much more multifaceted strug-
gle than traditionally perceived in a somewhat aggressive pursuit to make history
a science.
In this detailed analysis, Hesketh depicts an ongoing battle to establish
the proper domain and method of history through the examination of the lec-
tures and letters of renowned historians. Henry Thomas Buckle is presented as a
champion of the scientific method with a soft side for the artistic component.
The more hardcore proponents of an inductive method of science include
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