Cultures of United States Imperialism

Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds. Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham: Duke UP, 1993).

This (654-page) anthology of essays aims to integrate the study of foreign relations and the study of American culture, breaking down boundaries between internal and external imperialisms and generally rejecting the idea that America is special because it hasn't had an empire (except for those little island states taken over at the end of the 19th century). Authors look at the ways in which America's project has been a fundamentally imperial one since the beginning.

Some of the noteworthy essays that I may need to refer to later:
-Donna Haraway's "Teddy Bear Patriarchy," on the fear of degeneration and white male anxiety in the founding of the AMNH (this essay originally appeared in Social Text and also appears in Primate Visions)
-Bill Brown's "Science Fiction, the World's Fair, and the Prosthetics of Empire, 1910-1915," is fantastic - analyzes the ways that scifi from this period merges man's perfect body and the extensions of his machines to imagine the technological manipulation of distant "prosthetic" places (as exemplified by the Panama Canal - which is the gap which Hercules creates in the body of the earth, in the image appearing on the cover of the book). Brown contrasts this emphasis on the perfect body with the previous century's scifi, and scifi from Europe, which sees science as a way to recuperate lost bodies or make up for deficiencies. Brown is at Chicago and co-edits Critical Inquiry - he also has written on "Thing Theory," which Janet had referred me to earlier this year and which integrates the analysis of the movements of material objects into an analysis of lit
-Vincente Rafael's "White Love: Surveillance and Nationalist Resistance in the US Colonization of the Philippines" contrasts the United States census, which was used as an "educational" tool by American colonizers intent on "lifting" certain Filipinos above others, and which fixed categories of race and gender, with Filipino street theatre which celebrated indigenous gender categories and created a Filipino identity
-Amy Kaplan's "Black and Blue on San Juan Hill" describes the controversy over TR's description of the supposed "cowardice" of the black soldiers during the Rough Riders' surge over San Juan Hill - Kaplan writes that the black community resisted this categorization, and that the way that TR focused on this cowardice, and the supposed disorganization of the Cuban resisters who assisted the United States, shows that race, and the organization of categories, was the most visible "happening" in the middle of a confusing battlefield. This episode also shows how TR lumped Cubans and American blacks together - they are seen as usable, when commanded by a white man, but not effective soldiers if working by themselves.
-In "Anti-Imperial Americanism," Walter Benn Michaels (Univ. of Illinois at Chicago, writes on race, literature and national identity) describes how pro-KKK southern writers saw themselves as "colonized" by Reconstruction.
-In "The Patriot System, or Managerial Heroism," Susan Jeffords talks about the Gulf War (which took up an inordinate amount of space in this book - see pub date, 1993) - she writes that Americans justify the war by describing themselves as the most competent of techno-managers - it's interesting to think about how different this thesis would look if applied to the current Iraq War...

Through Other Continents

Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006)

This book is a call to think outside the limits of American literary study (and study of other literatures as well). Dimock calls for interpreting American culture as an extreme holism incorporating human experiences reaching back into "deep time" and across the globe, a paradigm she sees as best illustrated by the spread of religion and languages. (She also uses Deleuze/Guattari's rhizome idea to illustrate this.)

Articulating an understanding of humans as fundamentally connected through the experience of embodiment, she then goes on to destabilize any number of other supposed "connections" which create the categories by which we define our academic studies. "Eras," she argues, should be seen as more plastic; even death should not curtail our inclusion or exclusion of particular people in categories of inquiry (this is a post-human moment). Dimock argues that the nineteenth century, with its expanding scientific knowledge, created opportunities for some people to see themselves as part of a "species" instead of as nations.

An example of a person in the nineteenth century American scene whose thought must be seen as transcending these boundaries is Thoreau, whose interest in the Bhagavad Gita Dimock sees as a "translation" across time. (John Brown, she argues, is also translated "across death" by his actions and by Thoreau's writings.) The acts of reading, writing, and translation are all radical acts, she argues, which challenge the primacy of time and allow us to hear the dead and reaffirm connections between ourselves and those who live far from us. Ezra Pound and fascism; Henry James in Italy; Robert Lowell and Vietnam all show up in different chapters. Her final chapter, on Gary Snyder and Native American and Japanese thought about tricksters (liminal animal/human figures), animals and ecology, reaffirms her conclusion that embodiment points the way to connection and empathy.

Dimock is in the English and American Studies departments at Yale. She recently co-edited a book on transnationalism and literary studies, Shades of the Planet, with Lawrence Buell; has written a book on Melville and individualism; and co-edited, with Priscilla Wald, a special issue of American Literature which I should read: Literature and Science: Cultural Forms, Conceptual Exchanges (Duke UP, 2002).

1491

Machu Picchu. The Inka, for Mann, are a paradigmatic example of the role of disease and political fragmentation in the conquest of American civilization by the Europeans.

Title: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (New York: Vintage, 2005).

Author: Charles C. Mann, journalist, who writes (mostly) science coverage for the Atlantic Monthly, Nat'l Geo, Vanity Fair, etc. His other books include @ Large: The Strange Case of the World's Biggest Internet Invasion (1998, with David Freedman); Noah's Choice: The Future of Endangered Species (1996, with Mark Plummer); The Aspirin Wars: Money, Medicine, and 100 Years of Rampant Competition (1991, with Mark Plummer); and The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics (1986, with Robert Crease).

My review: Mann's book is an overview of debates in archaeology, anthrophology, ethnobotany, paleontology, paleography, paleobotany, ancient history, and any number of other specialized fields, all of whom are trying to determine what the "New World" looked like before Europeans got here. The overall impact is a shift from a view of a sparsely populated, wild place filled with primitives who lived by the grace of the land, to a conception of continents covered with people who maintained the landscape for their particular needs, sometimes living in balance with the ecology and sometimes failing to do so.

Mann echoes Shephard Krech and William Cronon's lines of argument, discussing some of the same examples as Krech (including the controversy over the Pleistocene extinctions) and citing both authors. He also owes a major debt to Alfred Crosby, previously of UT American Studies, and geographer Jared Diamond.

The book covers a very wide range of subjects, and does a very adroit job of using early chapters to set up a trio of final chapters that bring together his conclusions into a neat bundle. For example, Mann discusses the debates over demography, which run like so: Some posit, based on the difference between early travelers' accounts and later observations, that so many Indians were killed off by early epidemics transmitted by arrivistes such as De Soto that by the time more Europeans came to survey and colonize, there weren't nearly as many Indians as there were a short time before. Thus, when we estimate how many Indians used to inhabit the continent, we should assume many more than we previously thought.

Moreover, those Indians that were left were in a state of political turmoil. Mann illustrates this theory using the story of Squanto, reconstructing it in such a way that Squanto's friendliness toward the Europeans can be explained by the deaths of most of his tribesmen, leaving him vulnerable; and that the willingness of Massasoit of the Wampanoag to cooperate with the Plymouth colony could be due to the same thing (since most of M's tribesmen had died, he was left with little choice but to ally with the English against the Narragansett).

Having set this up, in later chapters Mann describes the new understandings we have of the way in which Amazonian Indians may have managed the growth of fruit trees and sowed charcoal into the soil in order to create a more human-friendly environment. He concludes that, in fact, the entire "untouched" Amazon may be a human artifact. He then adds this to the knowledge we have of the way that Indians on the East Coast burned their forests for ease of access and management of food species (see Krech, Cronon again).

Combining the knowledge we have of these systems of ecological management, with the ideas coming to the fore about the way that populations were affected by early epidemics, Mann posits that the "wild" forests that the Pilgrims saw thronging the coastline, the throngs of passenger pigeons, many of the signifiers of "abundant America", may all have been due to the recent disappearance of the groups of managing Indians who had previously kept these ecosystems at equilibrium. Wow! Now, that's what I call a revelation.

I admire the way that Mann handles the issue of the impact of these debates over the past on the current political situation. Although I was wary of the fact that the New York Sun endorsed the book, and was occasionally annoyed when Mann came down heavily on the wise-use side of environmental ethics, he definitely recognizes that the information in the book could prove useful to conservatives wanting to expiate ancestors from charges of genocide and environmental misuse (like so: "well, if the Indians were all killed by germs, and they were ecological abusers anyway, then what's the big deal?") To this end, Mann distinguishes carefully between the conventional idea of Indians at the mercy of their environment and the importance of a new understanding of Indians as creative maintainers of the landscape.

Artist's rendering of what the city around Cahokia, in modern-day Missouri, may have looked like around AD 1000-ish. This was a real revelation to me, though others may have heard of it - the mounds in that area reveal evidence of a city of 120 acres, holding between 10,000 and 20,000 people.

Reception: All of the popular press reviews of this book were totally in love with it, so there's that.

I love reading the paperback copies of these kinds of books, because the afterwords often tell you exactly what specific criticism the authors received after the publication of the hardback. Mann stepped into many already raging controversies, and he acknowledges that he was bound to make some people mad and get some arguments wrong. (The great thing about this kind of intelligent-layman book is that he has an automatic out whenever questioned on technical matters - well, at least, I think so.) The most pressing criticism is that a lot of these "revelations" are actually over fifty years old - but, as Mann says, if the general public/those in public schools aren't taught about them, they lose their importance. Hence, the book.

Yanomami family, by Victor Englebert (photographing for an advocacy group). Mann points out that by the time the Yanomami were encountered in the seventeenth century, they may already have moved from an agricultural lifestyle to a hunter-gatherer one because of the upheaval caused by disease communicated by other groups which had made contact with Europeans. Thus, the conventional image of their lives is one that fails to acknowledge the full history of the tribe before contact and assumes that they have always been so.

Vocab words: "ramose" ("branching"); "theogony" (theology which studies the origins of gods); "coruscate" ("to give forth intermittent or vibratory flashes of light"); "fissiparous" ("producing new individuals by fission").

Leads: This book has an extensive bibliography. Secondary: Frances Fitzgerald, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (1980); C. Ponting, Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations (1991); Stephen Pyne, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (1982); R. Temple, The Genius of China: 3,000 Years of Science, Discovery, and Invention (1998).

The Sexual Politics of Meat

I'm pretty sure this book did not mention the 1972 movie "Prime Cut", in which Lee Marvin finds Sissy Spacek naked, in a pen full of hay, in a barn, about to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. But it sure should have.

Title: The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 1990)

Author: Carol J. Adams, who has a masters in divinity and an extensive career as an activist outside of her academic writings. She's not affiliated with an academic institution, so far as I can see, but guest-lectures at many, and seems to travel extensively, giving a slide show based on this book. Other books she's written include Help! My Child Stopped Eating Meat (2004); The Pornography of Meat (2004); and Living Among Meat Eaters (2003). Adams lives in Dallas, which is brave on many levels, considering her political commitments.

My review: Adams hopes to make the point that the act of eating meat has been persistently gendered male, and that the inherent assumptions of meat-eating are similiar to the assumptions of woman-oppressing. What are these assumptions? Adams argues that the "sexual politics of meat" include "the idea[s] that the end justifies the means...the objectification of other beings is a natural part of life...and that violence can and should be masked" (24). Adams uses the concept of the "absent referent" to anchor the various implications of these assumptions or ideas. For her, the act of eating meat obscures the life of the actual animal, just as the acts of objectification or violence or misogyny obscure the life of the actual female. Both the woman and the animal are unimportant in the greater system of meaning constructed by the patriarchy. (For this reason, Adams advocates inserting a "[sic]" after any sentence in which an animal is called "it", just as we would after a sentence in which "he" is used as a universal pronoun.) (See chapter "The Rape of Animals, the Butchering of Women", p 50.)

Adams wants to restore what she sees as a lost history of associations between feminism and vegetarianism, arguing that first-wave feminist activists in the nineteenth and early twentieth century recognized the connections between their own struggles for political recognition and the choice to be vegetarian. She also uses a wide array of literary sources, including utopic novels such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915; see Bryson entry); Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906); and children's lit such as Charlotte's Web (1952). She recounts anecdotes from her experience as a domestic violence counselor. She also uses images collected from advertisements and (very interestingly) from publications internal to the meat industry.

"Truck Accident" (2004), by artist Sue Coe, whose Dead Meat is a book of paintings and writings about slaughterhouses.

This book can be difficult for one who lies on the other side of the divide between meat-chewing and meat-eschewing. To her credit, Adams seems to know that the conversion to her "side" can be one that is so absolute as to be almost mystical. But there are moments in this book that feel disingenous, as when she cites a description of a snuff film but neglects to write that the film in question was not actually a snuff film at all (see Snopes.com's debunking of the matter - thanks to Nick for telling me that this was an urban legend and rescuing me from many nightmares); or when she suggests that the school shooters of the 1990s may have shot kids because they were hunters so they were "used to it". Not only that, but the book, I think, assumes too much when it comes to correlation vs. causation. Just because, historically, men have been given more meat to eat even when women require the protein for breast-feeding, does that mean that meat is inherently patriarchal? Did English laborers of the nineteenth century really participate in patriarchy by giving the male members of the family more meat to eat? Should they have tried to find a nice mix of quinoa and kale to serve up instead? Is my skepticism or pickiness about this book derived from some deep guilt about or ambivalence about my meat-eating, which will some day be unearthed in a flood of veganism? Only time will tell.

Reviews of others: In Environmental Ethics, Deborah Slicer wrote that the book should have been written in clearer, easier-to-follow language (it didn't seem too bad to me!) and that Adams' analyses of race and class issues were unnecessarily truncated. (This is true - there was an interesting bit on Western imposition of meat diets on colonized cultures, but it was brief and undeveloped. There's plenty of room for further investigation in this area - and of the questions of diet imposition in general. The Inuit, for example, eat plenty of meat, but American and English explorers still found their diet disgusting.)

Apparently, in a later book Adams addresses the abhorrent PETA ad phenomenon.

Books to follow up on: Primary: Henry Salt, ed., Killing for Sport: Essays by Various Writers (1914); the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children.

Secondary: Linda Birke, Feminism, Animals and Science: The Naming of the Shrew (1994); Gena Corea, The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs (1985); Mary Douglas, "Deciphering a Meal", in Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (1975); Coral Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England (1985); Carolyn Steedman, "Landscape for a Good Woman", in Truth, Dare or Promise: Girls Growing Up in the Fifties (1985).

Additionally, the book's bibliography is helpfully separated into subject areas, including "Vegetarian Writings", "Animal Concerns and Animal Defense", "Feminist Writings", "Sexual and Domestic Violence", "Literary Criticism", "History, Autobiography, Biography", "Fiction, Poetry, Drama", "Medical and Nutritional Writings", and "Other".

The End of Victory Culture

Roll the dice, lady. Roll the dice.

Title: The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (New York: Basic Books, 1995)

Author: Tom Engelhardt, a former journalist and book editor, now working as a fellow for the Nation Institute and writing for/editing the alternative news site TomDispatch.com. One of the things he works on for Metropolitan Books is called The American Empire Project and looks really awesome.

Argument: The time between the Cold War and Vietnam marked the beginning of the end of American triumphalism, which was at a high point at the end of WWII, but marred by the existence of the bomb. Combining a bunch of different previous scholarship about American exceptionalism (see Nash Smith), Native Americans (see Slotkin), narratives of war and racism (see Dower, Drinnon), as well as his own childhood reflections, Engelhardt seeks to answer the question of how Americans lost their loving feeling toward their own country - and especially, how children who grew up during that 1950s got to the point where they began to question the country's mission. All of this questioning added up to what Engelhardt terms The End of Victory Culture. (Problem: Weren't there dissenters and disbelievers in American culture all along? Anti-imperialists and war protestors? Socialists? Communists? Yes, there were... Also, there's still a Victory Culture: just ask any random person on the street in Concord, New Hampshire.)

Chapter-by-chapter:
I. War Story
1. Triumphalist Despair: Basic argument laid out.

2. Story Time: Real-life war stories of America, whose parameters are determined by the victors (see Lepore). Native Americans as central to these stories, while the black story is elided (and haunting in its absence).

3. Ambush at Kamikaze Pass: War stories in the movies. Short history of the Western, pre-1960, and its similarities with the war movies of the 1940s. A bit about captivity narratives; a bit about the "victim complex" (we are always the transgressed upon, never the aggressor).

4. Premonitions: The Asian Death of Victory Culture: How Asia became "the frontier", and how Korea became a precursor of/warning of what was to come in Vietnam.

II. Containments (1945-1962)
1. War Games: How the 1950s mixed wartime with peacetime objectives (see May). Includes section on children's war games (81).

2. X Marks the Spot: Articulation of tensions between inclusionary and exclusionary tactics during the Cold War (how are we safe? by assimilating difference, or rejecting it altogether?)

3. The Enemy Disappears: The invisibility of Cold War adversaries; coverage of the HUAC hearings and blacklisting (emphasis on the performative nature thereof).

4. The Haunting of Childhood: Childhood, during the Cold War, was the "symbolic meeting place" for two fears: the fear of infection by the Other (see juvenile delinquents); and the propensity of the media to "concretize the fantasies of the young and the nightmarish fears of grown-ups into potent products" (137). "Twilight Zone" seen as example of how these secret fears/fantasies emerged in the public eye.

5. Entering the Twilight Zone: The atomic stalemate "reflected the limits of what the American story, American national identity, could withstand" (157): we couldn't picture ourselves killing so many people without "provocation". This meant that adversaries had to be more careful, talk about things more, and that "a certain amount of control over the American war story...was placed in enemy hands" (161). Interesting piece on the invention of the Peace Corps as JFK's plan to Americanize far places through youth (164).

III. The Era of Reversals (1962-1975):
1. The First Coming of GI Joe: Evolution of GI Joe figures seen as marker of how American ideas of heroism and enemy-ship evolved during this time.

2. The Invisible Government: JFK's assassination, and subsequent conspiracy theories, indicated that Americans could now conceive that their government would keep things from them purposefully.

3. Playing with Fire: The story of Morley Safer's atrocity reports from Cam Ne, and how the response to it (people thought he was a Communist plant, and hey, he was Canadian) indicated America's inability to accept the possible moral bankruptcy of their mission in Vietnam.

Morley Safer at Cam Ne, 1965.

4. Into the Charnel House of Language: Vietnam's "backwardness" in the American war story led to linguistic machinations intended to help Americans process what was happening: an interesting analysis of the use of the word "quagmire", which holds that the word implies American victimhood, once again: Who's in the wrong, when men are being "sucked into" a war? The thing doing the "sucking", for sure. I'm never calling Iraq a quagmire again. (199)

5. The President as Mad Mullah: Nixon told advisors that he wanted the Vietnamese to see him as an evil madman so they would lose their nerve - a concept which fascinates Engelhardt, given American need to see their leaders as upright moral beings.

6. The Crossover Point: More on the American state of mind in Vietnam, including the "logic" of body counts, which built on itself, and the idea that America wanted to impose a "story" on Vietnam, not just political rule (214).

7. "Something Rather Dark and Bloody": The story of the My Lai massacre, and response to it. Interestingly, Engelhardt points out, everybody on either side of the protestor/establishment divide was interested in comparing the other side with Nazis.

8. The War Crimes of Daniel Ellsberg: Ellsberg, who worked for RAND and then leaked the Pentagon Papers, is seen as an exemplar of a young American who fell out of love with the war story he'd been raised upon.

D. Ellsberg.

9. Ambush at Kamikaze Pass (II): Reflections of the Vietnam War in film. Also, story of how young war protestors singlehandedly realized the twin fears of the Cold War era: Communism, and the vulnerability of the young.

10. Besieged: How the war protestors used the national media by manipulating symbols such as "Good War" paraphenalia in order to create a sort of living MAD magazine: a subordination of the accepted narrative. Those in charge were horrified: not only the war, but also the home agenda, was slipping from their grasp, due to the death of Victory Culture.

11. Reconstruction: How did post-Vietnam Americans, robbed of their self-image of conquering righteousness, think to recoup their self respect? Through the children, of course...

IV. Afterlife (1975-1994): Attempts to rehabilitate American self image include Star Wars, the first Gulf War (in its spectacular, TV-ready execution). More on GI Joe, and a bit of interesting, if slightly out of place, musing on the way that children's culture seems to drive all meaning before it in the creation of an apolitical, timeless global state of conflict (do I agree? don't know) (301).

Reviews: In Contemporary Sociology, George Lipsitz wrote (a bit scathingly, but rightly) that Engelhardt draws "sporadically and unsystematically" on recent scholarship, pointing out holes in interpretation caused by ignorance of such work as that of Eric Lott and David Roediger. Furthermore, Lipsitz continued, Engelhardt's unfamiliarity with the methods of cultural studies led him to write in a narrow, Myth-and-Symbol-style framework, ignoring contradictory or complicating aspects of his Overarching Narrative; and his lack of context for each cultural object (no analysis of the actors involved in production, etc) leads him to make unsupported guesses about their meanings. In the Journal of American History, Stephen Whitfield wrote that the book's analysis was "sprightly", if thin, and that Engelhardt's overall theory about triumphalism was worth encapsulating in book form. Both reviewers called Engelhardt a "leftist". It's interesting to see how differently a "popular" book is reviewed in scholarly publications...

Vocab words: "osculation" ("close contact, an instance of this; spec. (a) the mutual contact of blood vessels (obs.); (b) Geom., contact of curves or surfaces which share a common tangent at the point of contact (also used analogously of spaces of higher dimension)" - also, "kissing").

Books to follow up on: Primary: Books: Textbook from 1953: America Before Man; Nancy Carlsson-Paige and Diane E Levin, Who's Calling the Shots: How to Respond Effectively to Children's Fascination with War Play and War Toys (1990); MIA Hunter series ("Vietnam snuff novels"). Toys: GI Joe "Soldiers of the World" (p 175) and animal enemies. Movies: "North by Northwest"; "The Long Telegram"; "Fail Safe"; Morley Safer's reports on "The Burning of Cam Ne"; "The Dirty Dozen"; "The Wild Bunch"; "Bonnie and Clyde"; "Little Big Man"; "Soldier Blue"; "The China Syndrome"; "Coming Home".

Secondary: Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (1992); Leslie Daikin, Children's Toys Throughout the Ages (1953); Ruth Miller Elson, Guardians of Tradition: American Schoolbooks of the Nineteenth Century (1964); Frances Fitzgerald, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (1979); Antonia Fraser, A History of Toys (1966); Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984); John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860-1925 (1975); Sydney Ladensohn and Ted Schhoenhaus, Toyland: The High-Stakes Game of the Toy Industry (1990); Edward Tabor Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (1991); June Namias, White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier (1993); David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (1993); Michael Paul Rogin, Ronald Reagan, The Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (1987); Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (1987); Keith Thompson, Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic Imagination (1991).

Fundamentalism and American Culture

A dispensationalist chart, depicting the eras of human history as told by the Book of Revelation.

Title: Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006; originally published in 1980)

Author: George M. Marsden, of the history department at Notre Dame. Teaches "American religious and intellectual history."Has a PhD in American Studies from Yale, 1965 (minted seven years after Tom Wolfe). Author of several other books on fundamentalism, and a couple of books on the state of higher education (The Soul of the American University, 1994; The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, 1997). Most recently, author of a much-lauded biography of Jonathan Edwards.

Argument: Most fundamentally (ha), Marsden argues that fundamentalism needs to be seen (and studied) as a cultural phenomenon, not just a religious aberration; and as a fluctuating cultural organism, not a monolithic set of responses. This history of the evolution of fundamentalist Protestant activity in the era of modernization hits on three major themes, as Marsden writes in his introduction: the tendency of fundamentalists to identify "sometimes with the establishment, and sometimes with the outsiders" (6); ambivalence about major questions such as the church's relationship to society, faith in human intellect, and the organization of the church itself can be traced to fundamentalism's strong ties to the intellectual and theological ideas of its eighteenth and nineteenth century forebears, which emphasized revivalism and pietism; and, finally, as hinted at in the second "theme", major questions about religion's relationship with science and with intellectual activity in general. Marsden argues that fundamentalists' dismay at the way in which modern society developed had much to do with the fact that, with the onset of Darwinism, they were almost immediately demoted (in the eyes of public culture) from keepers of the intellectual flame to foolish, bumbling rubes.

Chapter-by-chapter (These are going to be short, because the sections are numerous):

Part One: Before Fundamentalism
Evangelical America at the Brink of Crisis: Marsden introduces the underpinnings of the fundamentalist movement in the 1870s: the influences of Common Sense philosophy, which held that "common sense" could reveal the truth of the universe to any diligent observer, and of revivalism, which prized the emotional conversion of the individual. He then writes of the crisis which faced the old order in the shape of Darwinism and those within the church who attempted to find ways to reconcile religion with it.

The Paths Diverge: Henry Ward Beecher is an example of a preacher who reaches beyond the boundary of acceptable doctrine, defending evolution and equating religion more with morality than with strict Scriptural interpretation. Meanwhile, the Blanchard family of preachers and educators, father and son, provide examples of how more conservative strains in the church reacted to this challenge. While the father (Jonathan) was initially postmillennial in his thinking (he believed that society could be reformed in order to bring about the second coming of Christ), the son (Charles) took to premillennialism, "seeing little hope for society before God returned to set up his kingdom" (27).

DL Moody and a New American Evangelism: Moody, a transitional figure and extremely popular revivalist, is cited as an important progenitor of fundamentalism - he believed in premillennialism and Biblical infallibility; and he believed first and foremost in individual conversion (as opposed to helping with bodily needs) as part of the "holiness" movement.

Part Two: The Shaping of a Coalition

This Age and the Millennium
Prologue: The Paradox of Revivalist Fundamentalism: Here, Marsden refers to the central tensions in fundamentalism: first, the conflict between exclusivist doctrinal preaching, and the belief that any person can achieve salvation/a holy state through their effort. (Moody, for example, came down firmly in the second camp.) He goes on: "Sometimes [fundamentalism's] advocates were backward looking and reactionary, at other times they were imaginative innovators. On some occasions they appeared militant and divisive; on others they were warm and irenic. At times they seemed ready to forsake the whole world over a point of doctrine; at other times they appeared heedless of tradition in their zeal to win converts. Sometimes they were optimistic patriots; sometimes they were prophets shaking from their feet the dust of a doomed civilization" (43).

Two Revisions of Millennialism: The cultural context of the ideas of dispensationalism and premillennialism, which had the advantage, for evangelicals who saw the faith as shaky and in need of shoring up in the post-Civil War era, of being totally "explicit and concrete" - see, for example, the charts included in this entry, which show how this perspective simplified and concretized the Bible and faith itself (51).

Dispensationalism and the Baconian Ideal: This idea is most interesting! Empirical scientific analysis, in the pre-Darwinian nineteenth century, was associated most firmly with Francis Bacon and his idea that all you had to do to know the "truth" of the world was to process the information available to you. (This also echoed ideals of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, which Angela Miller also talks about in regards to Frederic Church's paintings and the cultural belief that New England and its scenery could be made to "stand in for" the nation as a whole - a belief derived from Common Sense ideas of proof.) Dispensationalism (and fundamentalists, in general) saw the Bible as their trove of information to be processed, and thus believed that they themselves were scientific - more scientific, in fact, than the Darwinists, who were acting on a mere "hypothesis". By looking at the Bible, they believed that they could break human history up into eras - or "dispensations" - and thus, predict exactly when the end of the world would arrive.

History, Society, and the Church: Further describing the fundamentalist context, Marsden points out that contrary to contemporary ideals of progress, fundamentalists believed that civilization was in decline. "The rapid spread of premillennial thought must have reflected some disillusionment with the progress of society," Marsden reflects (67). This complex of thought associated the fundamentalists with the more secular antimoderns, such as Henry Adams, or those described by TJ Jackson Lears, for example. This chapter also discusses reasons why premillennials did not feel compelled to abandon their churches (as a strict adherence to their doctrine might prescribe) - Marsden says that this is because for American religion, the key unit is the individual, not the institution (71).

Sir Francis Bacon.

Holiness
The Victorious Life: Basic ideas of "holiness", as preached by DL Moody, AC Dixon, and the Keswick theologians: "a profound personal experience of consecration, a filling with Spiritual power, and a dedication to arduous Christian service" (73). Especially pre-WWI, "experience and practice" were at the center of the movement. The major conflict over this concept had to do with whether or not the individual was seen to have the capacity for perfection.

The Social Dimensions of Holiness: In the 1890s, holiness teachings led fundamentalists to work among the poor and working class. Postmillennialists were not alone in this project; some premillennialists, Marsden is careful to report, also took it upon themselves to work for prohibition and for humanitarian causes (though most did not).

The "Great Reversal": Why did this interest in social concerns practically vanish by the 1920s? Reactionary reasons, Marsden says. "The factor crucial to understanding this 'Great Reversal'...is the fundamentalist reaction to the liberal Social Gospel after 1900" (91). The fundamentalists saw the Social Gospel as "emphasizing social concern in an exclusivistic way which seemed to undercut the relevance of the message of eternal salvation through trust in Christ's atoning work" (92).

Holiness and Fundamentalism: More on American theologians influenced by Keswick's emphasis on the experiential, personal, and joyful, and the conflicts and confluences between these and conservative Protestants who were ready to fight intellectual and theological battles.

The Defense of the Faith
Tremors of Controversy: Overview of the conflicts which arose within American denominations between the late 1870s and WWI, most of which saw traditionalists ally with dispensationalists and holiness advocates to battle modernists or progressives. (Interestingly, Marsden writes that Southern denominations simply did not have these debates, because dissent was "not tolerated" [103].)

Presbyterians and the Truth: In Presbyterianism, the conflict was between infallibility (Common Sense-influenced views of The Truth) and previously upstanding Presbyterians who were accepting Darwinism and beginning to reject ideas of the miraculous and supernatural.

The Fundamentals: The story of a series of volumes published between 1910 and 1915, funded by a "Southern California oil millionaire" (Lyman Stewart) and characteristic of fundamentalism's opposition to modernism. "These volumes...represent the movement at a moderate and transitional stage before it was reshaped and pushed to extremes by the intense heat of controversy" (119). This moderation was exemplified by the fact that evolutionary ideas were not totally rejected out of hand.

Christianity and Culture

Four Views Circa 1910:
1. This Age Condemned: The Premillennial Extreme: In fundamentalist thinking at this time, the furthest-out idea was that everything about the modern age - including science and technology - indicated that the world was about to end, and that therefore true believers should just give up hope.

2. The Central Tension: This tension was between the ideals of dispensational premillennialism - see above - and the constant commitment to evangelism. "These two...were fused together in spite of the basic tension between them" (128).

3. William Jennings Bryan: Christian Civilization Preserved: Marsden sees WJB as a "representative of the culturally dominant evangelical coalition which took shape in the first half of the nineteenth century" - a coalition whose values held that America, as a Christian nation, had a destiny to guide the world ("Citty on a Hill" style) (132).

4. Transforming Culture By the Word: Baptists and Presbyterians believed that Christianity had "an important mission to civilization" (136), and could provide society with a basis for true faith and thus moral action. Thus, many denominations were bound together by this affinity, despite their lack of a single total understanding.

Part Three: The Crucial Years: 1917-1925
World War I, Premillennialism, and American Fundamentalism: 1917-1918: Why did fundamentalists become more militant after WWI? Marsden argues that this was partially a reaction against theological liberalism, and partially because during and after WWI, evolutionism was seen as more and more dangerous to American society: WWI had been instigated by a German barbarism which was seen to have sprung from the loins of social Darwinism. "The argument was clear: the same thing could happen in America" (149). The war also brought together various factions of conservatives who believed in different doctrinal points, uniting them all under the banner of attempts to save "Christian civilization".

Fundamentalism and the Cultural Crisis: 1919-1920: During this time, after most Americans were returning to an antebellum state, fundamentalists saw their chance to revive a long-gone religious consensus.

The Fundamentalist Offensive on Two Fronts: 1920-1921: Marsden's two fronts were the denominations themselves and the culture as a whole (especially the schools, where they tried to stop the teaching of evolution - a crusade which brought many more non-affiliated civilians into the conservative church, especially in the South). Here Marsden also discusses the importance of the mission in the maintenance of conservatism and dispensational premillennialism.

Would the Liberals be Driven From the Denominations? 1922-1923: Coverage of the crises in Presbyterian and Baptist denominations.

The Offensive Stalled and Breaking Apart: 1924-1925: Liberals began to break up the coalitions aimed at getting them out of the denominations, Marsden argues, by "appealing to the strong American tradition of tolerance" (180). Also, many fundamentalists were unwilling to purge the denominations at the expense of evangelistic efforts.

Epilogue: Dislocation, Relocation, and Resurgence: 1925-1940: Interestingly, the Scopes trial, which had a tremendous impact on fundamentalism's place in the national scene, is relegated to an epilogue. The imagery of "small town, backwoods, half-educated yokels" which emerged into the popular eye was indelible, says Marsden (185). Marsden posits that this popular image, which ignored the urban and Baconian-scientific roots of the fundamentalist idea, began somehow to *become* what the movement was like - because so many moderate fundamentalists were embarrassed by the negative publicity and dropped out of the movement. Where did the rest of the fundamentalists end up? Marsden believes that some remained within the denominations, committed to them despite the presence of inextirpable liberals; some found themselves in the South, in Pentacostal churches, etc; and some formed their own denominations or churches.

William Jennings Bryan. (Are those guys behind him laughing at him, or with him? Hard to tell.)

Part Four: Interpretations
Fundamentalism as a Social Phenomenon: Rejecting the idea of a rural vs. urban divide creating the fundamentalist movement, Marsden proposes that fundamentalism was founded by groups of "Anglo-Saxon" Protestants - especially of the lower middle class - who found themselves, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, filling the role of "immigrants" in their own land. "Faced by a culture with a myriad of competing ideals, and having little power to influence that culture, they reacted by creating their own equivalent of the urban ghetto" (204).

Fundamentalism as a Political Phenomenon: The theological movement's drift toward conservatism was, Marsden contends, partially motivated by the liberalism of the Social Gospel-ites, but was also fundamentally motivated by the idea of saving a "Christian civilization" (which meant that they would reject Marxism, Jewish people, etc.)

Fundamentalism as an Intellectual Phenomenon: This section is basically a recap of the ideas put forth in the section on dispensationalism and Baconian thought. Interestingly, Marsden uses Thomas Kuhn to explain the problems that arise at the junction of the end of one paradigm and the beginning of another.

Fundamentalism as an American Phenomenon: Why did this happen in America? Social factors: ethnic diversity and its threat to a narrowly evangelical religious culture; the recent displacement of fundamentalists from the throne of social dominance. Religious-cultural traditions: The overwhelming influence of revivalism on American religion "contributed to a tendency to see things in terms of simple antitheses": saved or not saved, evil or good (224). Intellectual tendencies: An anti-modern view of history, which did not partake in the idea that "history was natural evolutionary development...and the present can best be understood as a product of the past" (226; again, see Miller on the difference between Cole and his successors), contributed to a tendency to believe in eschatological interpretations of the Bible.

Part Five: Fundamentalism Yesterday and Today (2005): An afterword that focuses mostly on increased political involvement on the part of fundamentalists and the paradox this implies when it comes to premillennial beliefs.

Another dispensationalist chart.

Reviews: In the Journal of American History, Donald Scott wrote that Marsden's book's strengths lie in the visualization of fundamentalism as both a genuine religious phenomenon and a legitimate cultural happening, one which could be analyzed in the same way as other cultural movements. Catherine Albanese, in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, wrote that the number of intellectual currents to which Marsden ties fundamentalism means that his interpretation can become confusing - but adds that since his writing is clear, the difficulty lies in the subject matter itself, and Marsden's book only clarifies the unclarity of the phenomenon. Meanwhile, the book was named one of Christianity Today's 100 "Books of the Century".

Vocab words: "cynosure" ("something that serves for guidance or direction; a ‘guiding star’"; "irenic" ("pacific, non-polemic"); "Pelagian" ("a believer in the doctrines of Pelagius or his followers, esp. in the denial of the transmission of original sin, and in the principle that human will is capable of good without the assistance of divine grace"); "chiliasm" ("the doctrine of the millennium; the opinion that Christ will reign in bodily presence on earth for a thousand years").

Books to follow up on: Primary: Hal Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth (1970); HL Mencken's writings on the Scopes Trial.

Secondary: Anne Loveland, Evangelicals and the US Military (1996).

War Without Mercy

View of the Hiroshima bombing.

Title: War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986)

Author: John W. Dower, professor of Japanese history at MIT. Holds a PhD in history and Far Eastern languages (Harvard). His other books include Empire and Aftermath (1979) ("a study of the life and times of the diplomat and prime minister Yoshida Shigeru"); Japan in War and Peace: Selected Essays (1999); and most recently Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (1999), which won the Pulitzer, the Natl Book Award, and the Bancroft Award. He's also executive-produced a doc called "Hellfire: A Journey from Hiroshima", which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1988.

Argument: During the Pacific War, racism on the part of both the Americans and Japanese made it easier to prosecute a conflict which was notable for its bloodiness and severity. The reason why the Japanese and Americans were able to slip into a friendly postwar relationship even after such carnage is that the stereotypes employed on both sides were multifaceted, mutable, and almost universal in their historical experience. Thus, rather than believing that the postwar years spoke to the possibility of elimination of past historical racism, Dower proposes that the most frightening thing about these kinds of racist ideologies is that they can be stowed away and applied to whatever conflict comes up next, even if the enemy is not of the same race or nationality.

Chapter-by-chapter:

Part One: Enemies
1. Patterns of a Race War: An overview of the racist ideologies at play in the American and Japanese understanding of each other. Dower points out that these ideologies must have made it easier for each side to commit atrocities and carry out full scale war; he also writes that racisms of this kind are mutable and constant conditions of human interaction. The fact that stereotypes and ideologies of the war era were easily adapted to peacetime conditions (instead of being a menacing, base simian, the Japanese were seen as pets; instead of incubating xenophobia, the Japanese ideology of purity led to a desire to purge the nation of the recently failed regime).

2. "Know Your Enemy": An analysis of Frank Capra's "Why We Fight" installment on Japan serves as the centerpiece for an explication of American stereotypes about Japan, as well as background material for an understanding of why the Allies treated Japan as they did in the postwar era. Meanwhile, a parallel description of the pamphlets and manifestos read by Japanese soldiers and citizens shows that inside Japan, America and the West were viewed as aggressors possessed of a traitorous history of empire - aggressors whose downfall was essential to the health of the world. Dower uses these two sources to show how stereotype worked on either side: these types "followed patterns of contrariness", in which the type was seen as the opposite of the favorable national ideal; "the positive self images of one side were singled out for ridicule and condemnation by the other"; both sides espoused surprisingly similar ideologies of "liberation, morality, and peace"; images of the enemy as "incorrigibly evil, base, or mad" led to genocidal policies or practices; and finally, "there was a free-floating quality to portrayals of the enemy - a pattern of stereotyping particular to enemies and 'others' in general, rather than to the Japanese foe or Western foe in particular" (29) (see Richard Drinnon).

3. War Hates and War Crimes: Dower begins with two questions: why were Japanese seen in the US as being so much worse than the Germans in the atrocity department? And why did Japanese propaganda portray the Allies as "the real barbarians of the modern age" (34)? Answers to the first include the idea that the Japanese, unlike the Germans, were "suicidal" or irrational; that the incomplete defeat of the Japanese would only, in the history of such a long-standing nation, mean that the Japanese would begin to build up forces for a revenge blow; and finally, the idea that Japan required a "psychological purge" to free it of its "madness" - we should inflict pain and suffering on all of the citizens, this argument went, as a necessary method of ridding the Japanese of their abnormal psychology (56). Meanwhile, the Japanese saw us as having had a long-term ambition to gain supremacy over Asia; having interfered militarily in Japanese affairs in the past; and having a current plan to commit atrocity in order to send Japan back into the class of "slave state" (58).

Part Two: The War in Western Eyes
4. Apes and Others: Representation of Japanese people as subhuman or inhuman took several forms: representation as animals (monkeys, bees, snakes); representation as madmen; representation as children. Dower uses cartoons, official propaganda, etc., as examplars. These attached representations, Dower writes, "blocked seeing the foe as rational or even human, and facilitated mass killing" (89). Dower points out that while these stereotypes remained somewhat constant and translated from earlier eras, the United States became availed of stronger and stronger technological methods of extermination, resulting in a deadly combination (93).

5. Lesser Men and Supermen: Even ethnographers and anthropologists who were supposedly more sympathetic to the Japanese ended up reinforcing these ideologies of supremacy by espousing condescending or ethnocentric views about Japanese "national character". Before the war, Japanese were seen on the whole as "lesser men", incapable of achieving Western levels of technological dominance; as they began to achieve victories, not the least of which was their strike on Pearl Harbor, their status slid into that of "superman", which was nonetheless not necessarily an upgrade ("subhuman and superhuman were not mutually exclusive...but complementary" [116]).

6. Primitives, Children, Madmen: More coverage of social-science's contributions to Japanology during the war, which often consisted in diagnosing the "problem" of the Japanese character (one theory: they were toilet trained too early and too strictly, which meant that they were control freaks who could not compromise or surrender). The diagnoses generally separated into three categories of primitive, childlike (or adolescent - often the Japanese were compared to teenage gangsters), or mentally ill.

7. Yellow, Red, and Black Men: Dower associates racism against the Japanese with that against the Indians and African-Americans of the United States, specifying that this racism saw the Japanese (or Asians in general) as "the yellow horde", set to invade American shores. The "Yellow Peril" was made all the more perilous by the mass' growing adoption of American and Western technology (Dower uses Fu Manchu novels starring a mad Asian scientist to make this point). Here Dower also includes information about black American sympathies for the Asian nations beset by US racism.



Bugs Bunny cartoon satirizing Japanese culture, using many race stereotypes described by Dower.

Part Three: The War in Japanese Eyes
8. The Pure Self: A major component of Japanese racism against Westerners was situated in the "impurity" of the Westerner or the foreigner, as opposed to the superiority of the Japanese "stock". Dower points out that the concept of Japanese "purity" was rooted in religious practice and mythohistory. The Yamato race, Japanese ideology held, could be traced back to a celestial origin. Purification as an active prescription, Dower writes, "was understood to mean: 1. expunging foreign influences 2. living austerely and 3. fighting, and if need be, dying for the emperor" (228). Late-war developments such as the training of kamikaze pilots were associated with this fundamental idea. The flip side of this iconicity of purity was the essential corruption of the Westerners in opposition to Japan - Japanese belief in this corruption/egotism/weakness, Dower writes, led the Japanese to misread American commitment to the Pacific War, in the early years of the conflict (260).

9. The Demonic Other: Here Dower explicates the role of the "stranger" in Japanese culture, which is an ambiguous and sometimes threatening one. During the war, Westerners were seen as the dark side of the stranger, which would manifest itself in beastly or atrocious behavior. (Dower cites multiple examples of Japanese stories about American war atrocities.) Dower also tells the story of Momotaro, a Japanese folk hero who, as an exceptionally bright and strong young lad, exorcises multiple demons. This story influenced many Japanese ideas about heroism and military service (see: the kamikaze pilot). Dower points out that although Japanese cartoons did depict Japan as Momotaro and the Allies as the demons to be defeated, the fact that specific Allies (Churchill, Roosevelt) were identified as enemies gave them a human identity that was denied the Japanese in the analogous position (256).

10. "Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus": The story of the idea of the Co-Prosperity Sphere, an entity intended to establish Asia as an imperial holding of Japan. Examining an official report which survived the purge of such paperwork after V-J Day, Dower writes that the racism which saw Japan at the middle of this Pan-Asiatic world "reflected Western intellectual influences as well as Western pressures", and that the "patterns of supremacism" embedded in Japanese writing about other Asian races was "analogous" to Western racisms (265).

The USS Saratoga after hits by a series of kamikaze pilots, February 21, 1945.

Kamikaze pilots.

Part Four: Epilogue
11. From War to Peace: Transformation of racist ideas about the Other happened surprisingly rapidly on both sides of the Japanese/American divide. Japanese people employed the alternate vision of "the stranger" - the more positive permutation - in order to facilitate increased acceptance of the American occupying forces. Americans re-cast their "simian" enemies as pets, or saw themselves as "parents" or "doctors" to the Japanese "children" or "patients". However, in later years, Japanese business ascendency has been seen in the West as another indication of Japanese "superhumanity" - shades of old stereotypes continue.

Reviews: In the Pacific Historical Review, D. Clayton James wrote that Mercy was one of the standout books on the Pacific War, called it relevant and provocative, but wished that Dower had not been so obsessed with linking happenings of the Pacific War to later foreign policy interactions: "his thesis might have been more closely reasoned" if he had not tried to do so. In Reviews in American History, Robert Rosenstone called the thesis of racism-as-motivating- factor "simple", but then writes that the inclusion of the Japanese intellectual history complicates what could have been a well-worn argument. Rosenstone also believed that a pile of evidence about racism, such as Dower presents, cannot attach an attitude to a deed - a fault which he attaches not just to this book, but to any so-called "attitudinal history". Moreover, he pointed out, no matter how many historians write books about racism, racist stereotypes still retain a frightening power over human events.

Vocab words: "shibboleth" (a cultural marker of some sort, as "a custom, habit, mode of dress, or the like, which distinguishes a particular class or set of persons"); "ratiocination" ("the process of reasoning").

The burned back of a victim of the Hiroshima bombing.

Books to follow up on: Secondary: Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Towards the Negro, 1550-1812 (1968); David Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-45 (1984).

The Name of War

Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (note the text of the scroll the Indian holds: "Come Over and Help Us")

Title: The Name of War: King Phillip's War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998)

Author: Jill Lepore, at Harvard in the Am Civ department. Her interests are in "early America studies, cultural history of colonial, Revolutionary, and antebellum America, with a particular interest in the history of print and of race and violence." Her other books are Encounters in the New World: A History in Documents (1999); A is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (2002); and New York Burning: Liberty and Slavery in an Eighteenth-Century City (2005).

Argument: This, Lepore writes, is a "study of war before television, before film, before photography" (xi), a story about a short and vicious war and how the victors, the English, used language to construct its meaning. Meanwhile, the vanquished, the Indians, left much less of a historical record, but Lepore sets out to try to "see" what the Indians thought about the war through the record that remains.

Chapter-by-chapter:

Prologue: The Circle: Here, using an English account of the torturing of one rebel Indian by other, English-allied Indians at the end of the hostilities, Lepore asks questions about why the account was told the way it was - why the English were so careful to distinguish themselves from Indian cruelties, but also so seemingly eager that the cruelties happen and be watchable. She sets up the background circumstances of the war: English anxiety about identity in the New World; fears of becoming "too close" to the Indians; fears that the Indians themselves had become "degenerate" from too much contact with the American wilderness environment, and that the same fate would follow for the English. The English also worried about the way they acted toward the Indians because they wanted their actions to be distinct from the cruelty of the Spaniards in South America and Central America (a history which had been used in England as incitement against the Catholic Church). Meanwhile, Algonquian Indians worried that the English influence was taking the lives of too many Indians, either through death by disease or through Christianization.

Part One: Language
Chapter 1: Beware of Any Linguist: This chapter begins with the story of the death of John Sassamon, a Christianized Indian and a go-between for King Philip, which resulted in the (English) conviction and execution of three Wampanoags, an event which touched off the beginning of the war. Lepore holds that the traditional story of Sassamon's murder, which has him killed for being a traitor to Indians, does not exactly explain the circumstances of the death, and although she doesn't have a concrete explanation, believes that the most important lesson to learn from the murder was that Sassamon was killed by "literacy" - the ability to move between the two cultures (25). She then explores this concept - that literacy, and with it, advanced cultural obliteration - was "dangerous" to individual Indians, giving a history of the English involvement with Indian "education" and Christianization. Here is the story of the life of Sassamon's teacher and the translator of Christian literature into Massachusett, John Eliot.

The Massachusett Bible printed in Cambridge in 1663.

Chapter 2: The Story of It Printed: Between 1675 and 1682, twenty-one different English accounts of the war were printed. Why, Lepore asks, did people who experienced the war directly rarely write accounts, while ministers and wealthy people living far away from the battlefields wrote so many? The former, she answers herself, kept silent because of illiteracy, low position on the social ladder, or simply because their suffering was such that they couldn't bring themselves to write down what happened. Meanwhile, Indians were silent, according to colonists, because violence was their only vocabulary.

John Foster's map of New England, 1677.

Part Two: War
Chapter 3: Habitations of Cruelty: Using Elaine Scarry and Mary Douglas, Lepore writes that Indian attacks on the English were understood as "attacks on bounded systems", damaging "bodies, possessions, and political identities" (74) through corporeal violence, destruction of property, and conversion of captives to Indian-ness. Here, Lepore discusses the meaning of clothes and houses to English-ness and their abject terror of Indian ways of dressing, eating, and sheltering. On the other hand, Indians who attacked settlements seemed to purposefully target the things which they perceived Englishmen to cherish the most - cattle and houses - though the English did not recognize the attacks as being calculated in this way.

Chapter 4: Where Is Your O God?: "Was King Philip's War a holy war? And if so, whose?" (99) The English saw the war as a punishment from God, sometimes. The Algonquians would sometimes, apparently, attack Christianity directly (105). Lepore describes the current thought in English and European discourse about what would constitute a "just" war, concluding that the colonists were inconsistent in their assessments of whether or not what they were doing was "just". Ultimately, some English believed that what was going on between them and the Indians could not even be called a war, because the Indians were less than human and used inhuman tactics. Lepore looks at possible explanations for these tactics from inside the Algonquian culture and actions - were they trying to "disorder" the English world? Regardless, "English colonists were either unwilling or unable to place such practices within the broader context of Algonquian culture and to read them as partial explanations for what had provoked the Indians to wage war" (119).

Part Three: Bondage
Chapter 5: Come Go Along With Us: Beginning with the story of Mary Rowlandson, Lepore points out that an analogous story - the history of James Printer, a Christianized Indian made captive by an enemy group and forced by colonial authorities to bring in two Indian heads to prove his loyalty to the white men - shows that Algonquian Indians also underwent experiences of bondage during the war. Lepore also tells the story of the Christian Indians confined to Deer Island without adequate food or shelter.

Chapter 6: A Dangerous Merchandise: In this chapter, Lepore tells the story of the Indians who were sold as slaves after the end of the war: "More than any other story of King Philip's War, it suggests just how furiously the colonists had come to despise a people they had once hoped to convert" (154). Some colonists, however, warned that the Indian cargo being sold away on slave ships represented a "dangerous merchandise", or a moral burden of guilt that the colonists would find crushing in years to come.

Later, and bloodier, image of Mary Rowlandson about to be captured (1773)

Part Four: Memory
Chapter 7: That Blasphemous Leviathan: Cotton Mather's boyhood memory of seeing King Philip's head on a stick serves as the starting point for a story of how colonists saw the war in the century to come. To Lepore, the anxieties about English identity in the wake of engaging with the cruelties of the conflict continued in the story-telling about the events of the war: "The incompleteness of the colonists' victory meant that preserving the memory of the war, and preserving a particular kind of memory, one that depicted Philip as a barbarous villain, became as desperately critical to the colonists' sense of themselves as waging the war had been in the first place" (175).

Chapter 8: The Curse of Metamora: Later, in the early nineteenth century, the story of King Philip's War, especially as re-enacted in the play called Metamora; or, the Last of the Wampanoags, anchored by popular thespian Edwin Forrest, became a catalyst for contradictory national feelings about the Indians. Even as the Trail of Tears went on in real-time, white audiences thrilled to the story of the noble Philip. Lepore adds a twist to this old story of white affection for the vanishing Indian: real-life Indians of the time, including writer and intellectual William Apess and a group of Penobscots who attended a Boston performance of Metamora to plead their case for sovereignty, "turned such images to their own advantage, negotiating the tangled logic of the noble savage and the rhetoric of Indian removal to hold on to their tribal lands and even build momentum for a movement to found a new kind of Indian identity" (193).

Edwin Forrest in the title role of Metamora by John Augustus Stone - Engraving by T. Johnson after a photograph by Mathew Brady, ca. 1859

Epilogue: The Rock: Lepore ends with an expedition into present-day popular memory of the war. For example, a monument in Rhode Island to the massacre of innocent Indians at the Great Swamp was erected in 1906, but since then has been an emblem of present-day Indian attempts to bring a memory of the more bloody events of King Philip's War to the public's attention.

The Great Swamp Monument, South Kingstown, Rhode Island

Reviews: Well, it won the Bancroft Prize, so there's that. In the New England Quarterly, Zubeda Jalalzai wrote that the book manages to be "thrilling" while also "careful" and "astute". The one quibble: why, Jalalzai asked, did Lepore not explore further the reasons for this war's relative anonymity among the general contemporary public (as opposed to its celebrity in the nineteenth century)? In AQ, Phillip Gould pointed out that the book's greatest strength lies in its interdisciplinarity and its use of material culture, which, he said, allowed Lepore to do more with the minimal record of Indian historical documentation. But he faulted Lepore for re-inscribing what he saw as a fallacy coming from the work of Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch - namely, seeing Puritanism as a caldron for all future American-ness. Finally, in the Journal of American History, Patricia Rubertone wrote that the "fascinating" book was satisfying in its investigation of individual motivations of captives, Indians, and ministers, but wished that there was more information about the Indians sold as slaves. Generally, though, Rubertone lauded the book for its ability to listen for native voices between the lines of the history written by the pens of the "winners".

Books to follow up on: Secondary: Jack Greene, Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities: Essays in Early American Cultural History (1992); Mike Featherstone, et al, eds, The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory (1991); Calvin Martin, ed., The American Indian and the Problem of History (1987); Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985); Sue Scott and David Morgan, eds, Body Matters: Essays on the Sociology of the Body (1993); Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (1984), chapter on "the perils of writing about cruelty" (257) (Chapter One).