The Historical Society, Boston University

From Edwin Yamauchi "The Reconstruction of Jewish Communities during the Persian Empire"

"In some judicial systems, as in the United States, the accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty. In other judicial systems, the accused is presumed guilty, and the burden of proof rests on the shoulders of the suspect. Biblical archeology appears to have swung heavily to the latter position in recent decades, and the Bible stands accused of offering, at best, incomplete testimony, or at worst, deception in its account of Jewish history. Scholars often seek proof for biblical texts in an external reference in a non-biblical document, but must always beware of the fallacy of an 'argument from silence.' Given the fragmentary nature of the archaeological evidence, the mere absence of evidence does not prove that a text is made up of whole cloth. Often the search for truth is hindered by the decay and disintegration of evidence.

…The period of the Second Temple-that is, the Persian and Hellenistic eras-has received intense recent scholarly attention. According to Paolo Sacchi, today, in contrast to the past, 'scholarly interest has come more and more to be focused on the history of the Second Temple period instead of the history of Israel in general.'….The debate about the reliability of competing claims in biblical archeology can only be tested by considering sources, and the history of the Jews during the Persian Empire (539-330) provides an excellent opportunity for such a test."

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From Dean Miller "Speaking of Books: The Oxford History of Byzantium"
"Perhaps The Oxford History of Byzantium is an odd book suited to an odd discipline. Byzantine studies exist as 'the vermiform appendix of Classical studies,' a description I know to be true because I invented it myself some years ago. Specialists in the field invariably find that they have to explain and even defend Byzantium, a powerful and influential overarching 'imperial' civilization that nevertheless drifted ever downward toward a despised and powerless old age: a Late Antique and then a medieval state that demanded respect as it guarded and continued its special version of the Graeco-Roman inheritance, and as it projected a particular view of church-and-state. And always we have Gibbon-or we used to, when everyone read Gibbon-with his sour aphorisms, his list of eunuchs and murders, his imperial office that tempered a crazed autocracy with brutal assassination, and his crabbed Whig's judgment on 'the triumph of religion and barbarism.'

What the editor of the Oxford History and his contributors have done to counter Gibbon and to inform the ignorant or the innocent but non-knowledgeable is to set chapters that are 'straight' history…between other chapters that expand on other, and certainly important, themes, including the rise of Islam, Iconoclasm, Byzantine missions, and three admirably lucid and generous chapters on Byzantine culture and learning, two of them by Professor Mango himself."

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From Charles L. Glenn "PC Censorship of Textbooks"
"[Diane] Ravitch's glossary of banned words, usages, and topics has been much-quoted in the press, and for good reason. 'Fellowship' is sexist and must be replaced by 'friendship,' although they do not mean the same thing. Neither does 'small house' mean the same thing as the banned 'hut,' or 'nonbeliever' mean the same thing as the banned 'pagan.' 'Snowperson' can perhaps replace 'snowman,' for those who lack a sense of the ridiculous. One could go on, at considerable length, citing the silly examples that Ravitch has documented from publishers' instructions to their writers and editors.

Readers of The Journal of The Historical Society may be especially interested in Ravitch's discussion of how world history textbooks have come to promote the equivalence of all cultures, so that students who read them 'are unlikely to understand why some civilizations flourished and others languished, or why people vote with their feet to leave some places and go to others. Nor will they know that people in some regions have been trapped in grinding poverty for generations. Nor will they have any deep knowledge of the great ideological, political, economic, and military struggles between democratic nations and their totalitarian adversaries in the twentieth century.' Students who learn about world history from these textbooks, Ravitch argues, will never 'perceive the critical importance of freedom, democracy, and human rights in the successful functioning of multiethnic, multireligious societies.' Ravitch concludes that 'the numbing nihilism of the contentless curriculum produced by the puritans of left and right merely feeds the appetite for the exciting nihilism of an uncensored and sensationalized popular culture.'"

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From Nickolas Lupinin "The Tale is Now Told: Women's Memoirs and Recollections in Russia and the Soviet Union"
"Three of the four memoirs reviewed here evince the cruelty of arbitrary incarceration, which endows them with a power greater than fiction. Hampl is correct when she asserts, 'Memoirists, unlike fiction writers, do not really want to tell a story. They want to tell it all-the all of personal experience, of consciousness itself.' Or, in another formulation, 'Memoirists wish to tell their mind not their story.' The dread and the wonder of survival, not to mention the indelible emotional scars that permeate many of the selections in these volumes, reinforce Hampl's formulation. These women wrote not for publication or glory, but for intense personal and psychological needs, because their experiences mattered.

We could take a further step to argue that personal memoirs facilitate historical knowledge, as do the memoirs under discussion here. In the post-Soviet period, numerous debates about Russian history have arisen….With these and other questions comes the demand to expose the record of Russia's past, not only in the form of official documents, but also through the honesty and integrity of personal memoirs. Many memoirs have been published, despite resistance from recidivists, Bolsheviks, and reactionaries, which deepen and complicate the historical record during a time of great change."

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From Richard Hellie "Speaking of Books: The Degaev Affair"

"The Degaev Affair is a masterful production that, in all likelihood, only someone such as Richard Pipes, Harvard Emeritus Professor of Russian history, author of 23 other books, could publish. The book is short, which attracts more and more presses these days, but its unlikely subject, the People's Will terrorist Sergei Petrovich Degaev (1857-1921), a.k.a. Alexander Pell, Ph.D., certainly suggests that American studies of Russian history have matured. Until Pipes's book, it is likely that few American professors of Russian history could have identified Degaev, much less explained his significance. Pipes's book should change that situation.

…Marc Raeff's dust jacket blurb calls Pipes's book of particular 'relevance' to the world's current preoccupation with terrorism. But despite a reference to the German Baader Meinhof gang of the Red Army Faction, Pipes does not pay much attention to contemporary politics. Even though I might not agree with Raeff's claim that the Pipes volume offers a blueprint for fighting today's terrorism, it certainly does provide useful comparative insights into the 'terrorist personality' as seen in al-Qaeda, Hamas, and other Islamic terrorist organizations around the world. There is, nonetheless, a major difference between the People's Will assassination of precise targets who managed the oppressive Russian autocracy, and modern Islamic terrorists who target hundreds and thousands of individuals who just happen to be present in a hotel, nightclub, or the World Trade Center. The People's Will was in many respects a 'mirror image' or tsarism, but it is hard to see how al-Qaeda is a mirror image of the United States or Hamas of Israel."

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From Carol Woodfin "Reluctant Democrats: The Protestant Women's Auxiliary and the German National Assembly Elections of 1919""
German women officially received the right to vote and to be elected to public office on 12 November 1918, by proclamation of the socialist provisional government. Even some German feminists, who had seen woman suffrage as a long-range goal to be achieved after advancements in education and the workplace and after initiation into politics at a strictly local level, were surprised at the action. Many German women felt ill-prepared to deal with political issues and wondered about the wisdom of entering this traditionally male province. Members of the Protestant Women's Auxiliary, the largest Protestant women's organization in Germany, shared their reservations, yet once woman suffrage was a fait accompli, they rushed to educate their members on their new rights and duties and to encourage women's political participation.

Examining the January 1919 election from the vantage point of the Protestant Women's Auxiliary provides a unique perspective, previously unexplored, on a crucial moment in German history. The members of the Auxiliary were among the most traditional in German society and thus viewed the new republic from the perspective of its skeptics, even opponents. Prior to 1918, the organization had opposed woman suffrage, but its rapid transition to encouraging its members to participate politically reveals its willingness to meet new opportunities. Auxiliary leaders and members provide insight on how active church members perceived the shattering events of late 1918 and early 1919 and how they spotted many women's concerns, in particular the status of the Protestant faith and churches in the new order. Since the Auxiliary was closely tied to the Protestant church structures and local congregations, its activities reveal the concerns of women, who made up the majority of church members, and of male clergy attempting to interpret for the laity the events of 1918 and 1919 in light of their Protestant faith."

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From Scott P. Marler "Fables of the Reconstruction: Reconstruction of the Fables"
"Several factors ought to mitigate against a reliance on statutory and case law to view sharecropping as fundamentally a wage labor relationship. Begin with the very terms of compensation. 'Wages paid' under a sharecropping contract were highly variable rather than fixed; that is, the eventual amount of compensation was based on an unknown quantity of product to be sold at an indeterminate future market price, usually after subtractions for supplies advanced at interest. Ransom and Sutch point out that such arrangements radically redistributed the considerable production risks, shifting most of what is normally capital's burden in a fixed-wage system onto the worker's back….The deferral of settlement to an annual basis-what Gerald Jaynes has called 'the long pay'-further decreased the risks that capitalists are usually expected to shoulder. With no obligation to pay cash wages at regular intervals (i.e., weekly or monthly), landowners in effect received interest-free annual loans from their 'employees' toward labor costs, the single most capital-intensive component of production-by no means a minor concession in a cash- and credit-starved society. Such unusual features of sharecropper compensation make it difficult to consider the cropper a wage laborer and complicate any view of New South landowners as classically capitalist.

Southern sharecropping bears important resemblances to nineteenth-century contract labor, best known for its use by industries that imported workers from abroad. The resemblance is enhanced by the centrality of landlord-controlled credits in the southern sharecropping system. Immigrant contract workers were notoriously subject to employer exploitation when their wages were docked for transportation and board, just as many sharecroppers found themselves overburdened by debt for supply advances. But contract labor is not generally considered a form of free wage labor, because of the degree to which contract workers are bound and immobilized by their employers. While all such analogies are imperfect, one could just as easily view cropping as a 'shorter' form of indenture rather than as a 'longer' form of wage labor."

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INTRODUCTION
by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

Much separates our present circumstances from those of all previous ages, but not, sad to say, the incidence of captivity and imprisonment, which, if anything, may now be more frequent and better institutionalized. In the United States, incarceration in prisons and jails has increased dramatically, perhaps as an indication of our woeful failure at solving a variety of social problems. The contemporary climate, shadowed as it is by memories of Nazi concentration camps and the Gulag, discourages us from remembering that, at the dawn of history, captivity-like the slavery to which it usually led-represented a perverse form of progress: warriors took defeated opponents into captivity where previously they would simply have killed them. And in tribal conflicts, the defeat of male warriors often meant the defeat of the entire clan or tribe, including women and children, who most likely would also be taken into captivity.

According to the Pentateuch, captivity in Egypt, followed by deliverance under Moses' leadership, defined the Ancient Israelites as a people. As the parting of the waters of the Red Sea to permit their passage on dry ground confirmed, the real deliverer was not Moses but Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to whom they were bound by a covenant to love, honor, and worship, forsaking all others, especially Baal and the other idols of the Canaanites among whom they now found themselves, and among whom some of them ultimately chose to remain. The Israelites did not learn the lesson-or did not learn it well enough. For if they throve modestly for a time, their demands for a king ultimately led them into a pursuit of luxury and an exercise in state-building that displaced the covenant as the center of their existence as a people. In 922 BC, the kingdom split into two, Israel and Judah. Internecine wars and rivalries weakened both, and Israel soon succumbed to the Assyrians. Judah survived precariously, constantly beset by warring states and rent by religious rivalries, but eventually fell under Babylonian domination. Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians in 597 BC, and in 586 BC, following a two year siege, Nebuchadnezzar destroyed it and took most of the population into exile-the Babylonian Captivity.

Psalm 137 records the pain of the captives,
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?

The psalm captures the psychological pain of captives and exiles throughout history, but the circumstances and consequences of captivity can differ radically. In the case of the ancient Israelites, captivity ended sometime after the Persians overpowered the Babylonians in 539 BC. Cyrus and after him Xerxes, who is best known for his wars against the ancient Greeks, allowed the Israelites to return to their homeland. Not all chose to do so. Like other captives in other times and places-for example occasional American women, captured by Indian tribes-some chose to remain. Most, however, as Edwin Yamauchi argues in the opening article in this issue, seem to have returned with a view to reconstructing Jewish communities in the land of their forbears.

The themes of captivity and imprisonment bind many of the articles in this issue, notwithstanding radical differences in historical moment and location. Thus Scott Marler's article, which concludes the issue and with Yamauchi's frames it, considers the reconstruction of the South in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Marler's "The Fables of Reconstruction, Reconstruction of the Fables," adopts an analytic perspective that leaves even less room for individual actors and personal voices than Yamauchi's discussion of Jewish communities during the Persian Empire, but his article, like Yamauchi's, calls attention to the other main theme that recurs throughout the issue, notably the problem of evidence. For Marler, the main issue concerns the interpretation of evidence, for Yamauchi it concerns the very existence of evidence at all.

Biblical scholarship ranks among the most contested battlegrounds over evidence. The most notorious example may well be the "Jesus Seminar," which purports to evaluate the validity of New Testament texts as reliable sources, but the battles over the validity of Old Testament sources are no less acrimonious and potentially more significant. If most people have at least a nodding acquaintance with the battles over creationism or intelligent design versus Darwinian evolution, even the better educated are likely to have at most only a dim awareness of scholarly battles over the existence of Abraham, the presence of the Israelites in Egypt, and the reign of King David, yet these battles can be as fierce as any of the others. Consider the magnitude of the challenges: in 922, when Israel and Judah split, Homer had not yet composed the Iliad. By the time Cyrus allowed the Jews to return to their homeland and the Greeks were poised on the brink of their Persian wars, chronicled by their first great historian, Herodotus, the kingships of Saul, David, and Solomon were half a millennium in the past, and the Egyptian captivity, not to mention the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, were shrouded in the mists of time.

Evidence has survived for earlier periods. A variety of Egyptian and Babylonian artifacts, including the pyramids, cuneiform tablets, and more offers some knowledge, inter alia, of religious practices, laws, and ruling families. But the ancient Israelites did not rank among the privileged of the very ancient world. A small tribe of shepherds, eking out a living from inhospitable terrain, they lived in tents without a permanent abode for their God. The survival of their history depended heavily upon oral transmission, eventually transcribed by the various authors of the Torah or Old Testament of the Bible. For Jews and Christians, the fragility of this early history does not compromise its truth-not even for those who have abandoned a literal reading. For non-believers the Bible enjoys little credibility as historical evidence. Daunting linguistic and archeological challenges have ensured that the debates have not figured at the center of graduate school curricula, much less popular consciousness. But those very scholarly demands have made Biblical scholarship the common ground of a select international community of impassioned scholars.

Yamauchi's article directly engages those debates, especially taking aim at the scholars who have complacently assumed that all of the questions have been settled in favor of those who reject the Bible as a credible source of evidence. The nature of those specialized arguments inescapably dictates his immersion in a dense scholarship to which most readers are not usually exposed. We trust that the close attention to detail and the careful response to the arguments of specialists will not deter our readers from enjoying what remains an endlessly fascinating scholarly mystery in which scholars track fragments of material and literary evidence the way detectives track clues. The prevailing cultural climate makes it all too easy to brush aside any attempt to confirm the claims of the Bible, although important new archeological digs like the one at Yodefat in lower Galilee, for which William Scott Green was educational director, are doing more of that work than most would have thought possible. Imagine, for one moment, that instead of the Bible we were talking about the earliest recordings of the oral traditions of African slaves or American Indians. Would we easily dismiss the project?

In a lively and engaging review of The Oxford History of Byzantium, edited by Cyril Mango, Dean Miller calls attention to an early manifestation of this mistrust of religious history. Miller quotes Edward Gibbon's "crabbed Whig's judgment on 'the triumph of religion and barbarism'" as the best explanation for the collapse of the Roman imperium. While Miller praises the volume for its responsible treatment of political history, he gently faults its lack of attention to religion, notwithstanding the inclusion of several chapters on culture. As Miller is the first to acknowledge, such edited volumes, especially those which are intended to stand as "official" states-of-the-field, present editors with formidable problems. Mango seems, on Miller's witty and occasionally whimsical showing, to have produced a better than average volume that can serve different readers in different ways.

The problem of evidence does not figure prominently in Miller's review, presumably because discussions of it do not rank high on the list of Oxford University Press' desiderata for its official histories. Byzantine history nonetheless presents its own problems of evidence, deriving from fragmentary sources, linguistic challenges, and more. For the moment at least, it has remained something of the backwater it became after the final collapse of the Byzantine Empire under the onslaught of the Ottoman Turks. Byzantine historians thus enjoy the freedom to wrestle with the nature and adequacy of their evidence outside the glare of contemporary political passions.

Other subjects have not enjoyed such benign neglect, and the closer they come to one or another group's sense of its own experience, the more intense the pressures become. From the start, books used in institutionalized schooling have come under careful scrutiny. In the antebellum United States, for example, both northern and southern educators attended closely to the moral content of the books they taught, although they sometimes differed about which ones passed muster. Sarah Gardner, in her recently published study, Blood and Irony: Southern White Women's Narratives of the Civil War, 1861-1937, has shown that, following the Civil War, southern women carefully scrutinized history texts for their account of the War, including causes and results. None denied that textbooks exercise a privileged influence over students' perceptions of the world. It would be hard to find a better illustration than the treatments of Napoleon in French and British textbooks respectively.

Today, when textbook publishing has become a mammoth business and political passions run high about the respect due various groups, the problem of textbook content has assumed new importance and is beginning to provoke searching criticism. Diane Ravitch's new book, The Language Police, charts the excesses to which the quest for the perfectly non-offensive, politically correct text has led. Ravitch draws upon her experience on the National Assessment Governing Board, which was charged with oversight of the development of new national tests to determine students' level of knowledge-what they have learned. But as Charles Glenn demonstrates, she was also able to build upon the work of others, notably Stephen Bates, Rockne McCarthy, Donald Oppewal, Walfred Peterson and Gordon Spykman, Harriety Tyson-Bernstein, and Paul C. Vitz, all of whom have been following these problems since the 1980s, when they seem to have taken root.

Attention to the sensibilities of women and different ethnic and racial groups had appeared earlier, but the 1980s deserve credit for what we might call the Babylonian Captivity of Education. Contemplating the formidably high stakes of sales and feeling the pressure of the public officials who select texts for schools, textbook publishers began to impose increasingly stringent guidelines upon their authors. Glenn, in this engaging but sobering review of the literature, exposes the magnitude of the problem, which is, he suggests, quoting Harriet Tyson-Bernstein, "perfectly designed to produce textbooks that confuse, mislead, and profoundly bore students," while making all the adults concerned "look good." The resulting books control both students and teachers, who enjoy no freedom to substitute others. Ravitch slashes through the pretenses, exposing the biases that govern the choice and treatment of subjects. Readers of The Journal, Glenn suspects, will especially appreciate her discussion of world history textbooks designed "to promote the equivalence of all cultures, so that students who read them 'are unlikely to understand why some civilizations flourished and others languished, or why people vote with their feet to leave some places and go to others'."

Glenn gives us a good sample of Ravitch's most dramatic examples of textbook distortions and taboos: "friendship" must replace "fellowship," which is sexist; specific place names must be avoided lest they discriminate against children who live elsewhere; women must be shown performing heavy labor, while men must be shown caring for children; no mention may be made of birthday parties or holidays, including Thanksgiving, "'because some children do not have birthday parties and do not share the same religion'." There is no end to the examples, and those who wish should pursue them in the book. But as one's initial outrage settles, it is replaced with a tired feeling of, "same old, same old." New forms of forbidden speech crop up every day, and there seems to be no end to the words that can cause pain or offense, but the cumulative results amount to the kind of mind-numbing manipulation that is said to characterize totalitarianism in everyday life.

While clearly appreciative of Ravitch's slash and burn ability to publicize the issues, Glenn nonetheless singles out Paul Vitz's work as the cornerstone of these discussions. As early as 1981, Vitz called attention to the foreclosing of all moral and political discussion-what some consider freedom of thought. Glenn quotes Vitz, "'Religion, traditional family values, and conservative political and economic positions have been reliably excluded from children's textbooks'." Vitz studied sixty social science text books only to find that none "'contain one word referring to any religious activity in contemporary American life'." Nor did the words "marriage, wedding, husband, and wife" appear once. The books contained no Republican men and only three Republican women: one pro-choice; one not identified; and the final Clare Booth Luce, who had been active during the 1950s, not the period under discussion. The litany of omissions and distortions could be extended, and Vitz does so on the basis of rigorous research, but, the ultimate picture does not change. The textbooks are not merely seeking to avoid giving offense, they are aggressively promoting a view of the United States "of the campaign 'that rendered only the liberal, secular positions familiar and plausible'."

Ravitch, Vitz, and the others do not question the basic freedoms of American society. To the contrary, they write with a view to expanding them. Above all, they protest the captivity imposed on young minds by a complacent ideological conformity. Their criticisms of textbooks do not focus on evidence, although at every turn their arguments implicitly call it into question. Ultimately, the prevailing pieties of the textbooks represent a denial of-or disregard for-evidence: if evidence does not support what "we" know to be true, then the evidence must be swept aside. In altogether more sinister guise, the attitude would have seemed entirely familiar to the Russian women imprisoned in Tsarist or Soviet prisons. In a review essay about four collections of these women prisoners' memories and recollections, Nickolas Lupinin reflects both upon their experiences and the value for historical scholarship of their memories of them. Lupinin's essay thus offers us what we might call a doubled vision on evidence.

In the first instance, we have the "evidence" used to convict the women. On July 5, 1937, the Politburo and NKVD devised the category "'wives of traitors to the Motherland'." In this case, marriage to a "traitor" sufficed as evidence of guilt, although the evidence of treason may have been even murkier. Under the Soviet regime, the evidence for guilt often seemed little more than, "because I say so." Worse even than that arbitrary exercise of power was the internalization of its way of thinking. One of the volumes under review contains the account of Nadezhda Grankina, who recalls that she never enjoyed receiving letters from home because her mother "'could not understand that I was in prison for nothing: she thought that if I had been given such a long sentence, I must have committed a crime, and she blames me for it'." In the mother's view, imprisonment itself became sufficient evidence that it had been merited.

Lupinin is also interested in evidence from another perspective, namely the value of "memories" and "recollections" as evidence. Acknowledging that they are neither literary documents nor objective records of historical events, he describes them as "sometimes-cathartic forays into the depths of human experience of oppression and imprisonment." While Lupinin tries not to exaggerate the reliability of the memoirs as sources for institutional or political history, he demonstrably sees them as a significant addition to the more "impersonal" sources, claiming, "Memoirs offer unique human testaments to historical events." He holds that three of the four collections he is reviewing, "evince the cruelty of arbitrary incarceration, which endows them with a greater power than fiction." He further insists that the captivity memoirs offer a valuable antidote to the memoirs of revolutionary activists, whose perspective has largely shaped Westerners' sense of women's experience of the Revolution.

Lupinin clearly expects these first-person records of Russian women's experience of captivity and imprisonment to dampen naïve and uncritical views of women as naturally predisposed to revolt against conservative forces of "oppression." And there is reason to believe that many will embrace the women's personal testimonials as yet another confirmation of the ways in which women are oppressed as women. Predictably, emphasis will more likely fall on the power of subjective sources than on the larger context of what Sheila Fitzpatrick has called "everyday Stalinism." There is no denying the power of the subjective source. The personal voice carries an immediacy that no impersonal aggregate analysis can match. But however indispensable the power of that voice may be, it cannot bear the entire burden of historical analysis. We can never be sure how memories, captured and recorded at a specific moment, are shaped by that moment. We must always try to take account of the ways in which memory reshapes the past even as it thinks it is merely recording it.

The women's imprisonment and captivity narratives nonetheless make it impossible to doubt the grinding oppression of the Soviet regime-and the brutality of the tsarist regime as well. Lupinin's sources do not tell us the proportion of women who were incarcerated relative to men, or the proportion of single women relative to married women. We do not know how many of the memorialists had been activists and how many had just been in the wrong place-or married to the wrong person-at the wrong time. Overall it seems likely that, in contrast to ancient times, the women were arrested as individuals rather than as members of a people, although their familial and political associations played an important role. The same cannot be said for the Jewish women incarcerated-and often incinerated-by the Nazis. But in neither case does merely being a woman seem to have prompted the arrest, however much it may have influenced subsequent treatment.

Whatever else, the Russian women memorialists testify to the physical and ideological captivity to which twentieth-century regimes might subject women. The violence and paranoia of the soviet regime owed a good deal to its tsarist predecessor. Richard Hellie's review of Richard Pipes' The Degaev Affair: Terror and Treason in Tsarist Russia, paints a picture of terrorism and counter-terrorism, betrayal and counter-betrayal that would have done credit to Lenin and Stalin's henchmen. Degaev himself turns out to have been insignificant if conniving and duplicitous, but in the early 1880s he found himself at the center of a plot by the revolutionary party, The People's Will, to assassinate Alexander II and finally liberate the peasants from the land. Everything turned sour. Degaev betrayed many of his fellow conspirators, helped to murder the police chief who was trying to catch him and destroy the party, and, when the police chief was dead and the party on the verge of collapse, fled to the United States, where he ended his life as a professor of mathematics.

Hellie's engaging account of what he presents as a fascinating book, by one of our most distinguished Russian historians, offers another reminder of the political complexity of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. In this climate of autocratic monarchs and burgeoning socialist parties of various stripes, many forms of real and imagined captivity and imprisonment figured prominently in political life and cultural imagination. World War I dealt a heavy blow to the autocratic monarchs, but its aftermath was grim. Disarray in one form or another stalked all of the major powers, and the congeries of new small states that had been carved from the former empires teetered on the brink of collapse, either from political inexperience or economic vulnerability. Just as the Great War radically transformed the political landscape, so did it transform central aspects of Western culture, not least the position of women. Throughout Europe and the Americas, women gained unprecedented cultural freedoms, including the freedom to bob hair, drink and smoke in public, shorten skirts, and various other less openly discussed freedoms that seemed to flow therefrom. In a number of countries, including Britain, Germany, and the United States, they gained suffrage-the right to vote in local and national elections.

In 1919, The Protestant Woman's Auxiliary, which included half a million members in 3,600 chapters and produced three periodicals, represented the heart of conservative Protestant sentiment in Germany. The Auxiliary had consistently opposed granting the vote to women for they believed that women's voting would open the floodgates to the most dangerous forms of modernization. As Carol Woodfin points out in "Reluctant Democrats: The Protestant Women's Auxiliary and Woman Suffrage in Weimar Germany," the women of the Auxiliary have received no attention from women's historians, who apparently consider them beyond the pale. Yet they left abundant evidence, much of it in conventional and accessible form. Woodfin traces the Auxiliary women's journey from opposition to women's participation in politics to their active exploitation of its possibilities. She primarily grounds her argument in conventional sources, notably the women's own publications and the records of meetings of their various groups. In her hands, these sources reveal a rapidly growing political sophistication among the Auxiliary women at various levels of the organization.

Conservative Protestants had opposed woman suffrage out of fear that it would radicalize political life and undermine the stability of families by bringing women into public affairs and opening the possibility of their disagreement with their husbands. Almost immediately, however, both male and female leaders of conservative Protestant groups grasped the positive possibilities, and before long they were encouraging the rank and file to vote, not out of a sense of self promotion or individual freedom, but out of a sense of "obligation." The postwar years offered them ample cause for concern. The government of Friedrich Ebert announced its support for the Social Democratic Party's Erfurt Program, which supported freedom of religion and declared religion a purely private matter. If anything more distressing, in November 1918, the Prussian government announced support for the separation of church and state and the end of church control of schools. It then claimed state control over the churches.

These declarations were followed by the government's abolition of "clerical supervision of public schools, most of which were 'confessional,' that is Protestant or Catholic." By the end of the month, a governmental decree abolished school prayer and requirements for religious education. Other states were reported to be following the Prussian lead. These developments more than confirmed conservative Protestants in their conviction that political radicals were launching an all out offensive against the place of religion in German society-and against the very fabric of German culture. These dangers not merely justified, but mandated the active political participation of Auxiliary women, especially since they were, according to male leaders, in a unique position to influence the hearts and minds of other women through informal exchange. Almost overnight, conservative Protestant women found themselves dislodged from a position of educational and cultural dominance to one of defensive resistance to the forces of modernization and secularization, which they viewed as little more than social and moral disintegration. Having opposed women's voting for fear that it would open the door to those dangers, they now embraced it in order to hold them in check. In other words, they turned to the weapons of modernity to forestall modernity's advance.

The Auxiliary women would not have thought of themselves as political radicals, much less as terrorists, but they contributed decisively to the ascendancy of Hitler and the Nazi Party. Like so many historical actors, they failed to foresee-and, therefore, to guard against-the unintended consequences of their actions. It would be wrong to hold them directly responsible for the incarceration and death of countless women in the death camps, but it is not unfair to allot them a share of responsibility for Hitler's rise to power. We would all benefit from a fuller understanding of these women and others-including men-like them, from every segment of the political spectrum, for all too often support for causes that appear unimpeachable and even admirable in time and place produces very different results from those intended. This complexity is one of the main casualties of the conformist textbook writers' exclusionary policies. By prevailing standards, devout Protestant, middle class German women would never make it into textbooks, for the same reasons they have never made it into books on women's history: they do not conform to the reigning model of how women are expected to think and to act. Thus do they remain the prisoners of prevailing preconceptions and prejudices, and, by failing to understand them, we risk becoming prisoners of prepackaged models of how the world should be.

In "Fables of the Reconstruction, Reconstruction of the Fables," Scott Marler brings us back to attempts at reconstruction on the part of a people newly released from bondage. Although while in bondage and after emancipation, southern African American slaves often likened President Lincoln to Moses and spoke of him as the deliverer who had led them out of captivity, the similarities between their situation and that of the Israelites in Persia are few. The War had left the South as a whole devastated, and the first challenge was to revive the economy. Praising W. E. B. DuBois' Black Reconstruction in America, Marler begins by insisting upon the importance of individuals in the long struggle for reconstruction. The special greatness of DuBois' work, in his view, lies in his attention to political struggles and what he subsequently calls the "agency" of southern blacks. Intent upon recovering this agency, Marler nonetheless focuses upon the larger economic structure within which it would have operated.

DuBois, a Marxist, wished to explore the economic dynamics of Reconstruction in response to the Dunning school, but he lacked access to the sources that would have provided the evidence for an economic history of Reconstruction and consequently focused upon the political struggles. Since DuBois wrote, a number of scholars have unearthed an impressive store of economic evidence, but they disagree fiercely about its meaning. Here, Marler attempts to assess those debates, primarily by considering the southern economy in the aggregate. Thus, notwithstanding his emphasis upon individual action and agency, he focuses upon general patterns and tendencies. The main objects of his criticism are those scholars, notably Harold Woodman and Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch, who propound what has now become "the conventional wisdom" that the postbellum South was essentially capitalist. The debates are technical and endlessly complex, and space does not permit their rehearsal here. At their core lies the importance of the "consciousness" of workers in any assessment of their class position: if workers do not think of themselves as belonging to a working class can the system in which they work properly be called capitalist?

In the end, we may have a problem of apples and oranges. If we know anything about the former slaves, we know that the vast majority resisted gang labor, which effectively meant all wage labor: they aspired to be independent farmers and would settle for a subsistence or peasant level of farming provided they could be their own masters. Since the majority of whites shared those aspirations, the internal incentives to embrace wage labor were few. The abolition of slavery had nonetheless created the legal framework for capitalist relations of production-had anyone wished to animate them. So long as the landowners preferred various forms of tenancy and sharecropping to capitalist farming or switching their assets to industry, the South continued as a rural, quasi-peasant society-in many ways not unlike France of the same period. Does a rose by any other name really smell as sweet? Some readers, myself included, may see Marler's differences with Woodman et al. more as quarrels within a historical school than as a radical shift in perspective.

Marler is attacking what he views as the reigning piety in Reconstruction history-a piety analogous to those that prevail in the "politically correct" textbooks. In this respect, he offers a serious attempt to reframe important questions. Such debates are the lifeblood of all historical inquiry-and worlds removed from the conformity of textbooks. Debates over issues and evidence-its nature and its bearing upon the arguments at hand-signal freedom from the intellectual captivity that admits of only one way to think about a subject. In explicitly opening a particular discussion about historical interpretation, Marler's essay rejoins Yamauchi's in the broader concern with the relation between interpretation and evidence, and beyond it, in the attempt to understand a people's struggle to recover from captivity.

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