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THE MANY-HEADED HYDRA

Name: THE MANY-HEADED HYDRA
Author: Peter Linebaugh
ISBN: 0-8070-5006-7

THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF THE REVOLUTIONARY ATLANTIC

by Peter Linebaugh & Marcus Rediker ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2000

An intriguing and welcome addition to the historical literature of the period.

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A revealing work of leftist revisionist history whose cast includes sailors, seamstresses, farmers, and a Founding Father or two.

Linebaugh (History/Univ. of Toledo) and Rediker’s (History/Univ. of Pittsburgh) sweeping account of the stateless poor of the 16th- and 17th-century Atlantic opens with a telling anecdote. In 1609, an English vessel was shipwrecked off the coast of Bermuda, where the survivors found not a hellish land of cannibals and devils (as the charts had promised) but an “Edenic land of perpetual spring and abundant food”—and where, for the first time ever, these children of post-Restoration England could be free. When, some months later, rescuers arrived, they had to chase these new noble savages out of the woods and haul them off to the Virginia colony by force. Such, the authors suggest, was often the case in the New World: the earliest crossings of the Atlantic Ocean were undertaken by men and women who had nothing to lose, the multiethnic dispossessed who struggled to make new lives at a remove from the emerging capitalist order of Europe (whose spokesmen in turn portrayed the resistant mob as a “hydra-headed monster” against which only a crowned Hercules could prevail). Linebaugh and Rediker document a series of little-known rebellions large and small—most fomented by sailors, who were accustomed to struggling with masters for food, pay, and work and who “brought to the ports a militant attitude toward arbitrary and excessive authority.” Though sometimes fashionably dense in the postmodern manner, Linebaugh and Rediker’s “hidden history” is in the main both accessible and persuasive, and not without its share of surprises—including a startling new view of the African-American revolutionary martyr Crispus Attucks, whose biography extends well beyond mere victim of the Boston Massacre.

An intriguing and welcome addition to the historical literature of the period.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-8070-5006-7

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Beacon Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL HISTORY

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF AMERICAN CULTURE

by Robert M. Crunden ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1994

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Reworking a book first published abroad, Crunden (American Civilization/Univ. of Texas at Austin) provides readers in these United States with a useful overview of their cultural history. The narrative presents American creative endeavor as gradually increasing in scale and growing more integrated into the world. Crunden (American Salons, 1992, etc.) begins with ``local culture,'' looking in turn at Puritan Boston, Enlightened Philadelphia, and the Virginia of the Founding Fathers. Discussing the subsequent era of North, South, and West, he shifts his emphasis from culture's religious and political dimensions toward the fine arts. Especially strong pages treat Washington Irving and John James Audubon. Somewhat scanting the Civil War, Crunden moves quickly to a discussion of the national culture that found progressives and pragmatists tempering capitalist excesses. Mini- biographies—e.g., of William and Henry James, of Alice Hamilton- -convey much information. Paradoxically, the emergence of international modernism crowns Crunden's narrative of the specifically American. Charles Ives and Frank Lloyd Wright, we find, were following European leads by formalizing indigenous national styles. The author further gestures toward an apotheosis of the American with a final section on ``cosmopolitan culture.'' A profile of William F. Buckley Jr. nicely encapsulates the emergence of a ``conservative hegemony,'' while an examination of T. Coraghessan Boyle's fiction as exemplary post-60s literature works surprisingly well. Crunden represents contemporary academic thought by rehashing David Lehman's denunciations of Paul de Man and followers—this is a letdown in the wake of his superb account of transatlantic intellectual exchange around the time of the Second World War. But this history aspires to start, not finish, debates over coverage; its risky choices work to stimulate rather than to conceal. Leavening common information with uncommon insights and skillfully managing—without directly addressing—the difficulties of its mission, Crunden's work should provoke fine conversations on what Americans might want to say next.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994

ISBN: 1-55778-705-0

Page Count: 288

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY

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THE SPECTER OF COMMUNISM

THE UNITED STATES AND THE ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR, 1917-1953

by Melvyn P. Leffler ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1994

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A brief but thoughtful essay outlining the terrible misapprehensions that led to escalating tensions between the US and the Soviet Union from the close of WW I to the end of the Korean conflict. Although anti-Bolshevik feelings ran high even at the time of the Russian Revolution, fear of the USSR didn't dominate American foreign policy until after WW II. Drawing on materials newly available from Soviet, East European, and Chinese archives, Leffler (winner of the 1993 Bancroft Prize for A Preponderance of Power) deftly traces the history of US-Soviet relations in prÇcis, from the Bolsheviks' rise to power through the uneasy truce in Korea. Begining as an ideological clash, the tension between the two nations only gradually became a power struggle as well. Indeed, it was only when the USSR became a player on the same global scale as the US (albeit considerably weaker in key strategic areas after the pounding it took during WW II) that the Soviets were perceived as an active threat abroad. On the other hand, seen through the distorting mirror of obsessive anti-Communism, domestic American radicals were regarded as a danger almost from the first murmur of the word ``Bolshevik'' in the popular press, and it was the specter of homegrown subversion rather than foreign invasion that haunted American policies for a long time. Leffler retells this often familiar material methodically, using the new documentation to reveal Stalin as hesitant and tentative in foreign policy, primarily concerned with erecting a security buffer around Russia rather than building an evil empire. The portrait that emerges is of two superpowers-in-formation engaged in a grim dialogue of the deaf, with terrible consequences for humanity. Although much of the ground covered is well trod, this is an admirably complete introduction to the history of the Cold War.