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From Elias Mandala's, "Beyond the 'Crisis' in African Food Studies"

The Ethiopian and Sahelian famines of the 1970s and 1980s, and the publicity surrounding them, generated new scholarly interest in food matters. The disasters attracted the attention of young people looking for dissertation topics, and encouraged older specialists in rural and development studies to re-examine their research findings and assumptions in light of the problem. Africa's agricultural and agrarian history thus witnessed a rush to relevance. Every annual meeting of the African Studies Association (ASA) featured many sessions dedicated to the problem. But concern for relevance in the midst of "crisis" also exposed the limits of historical research not firmly grounded in the specific cultural and historical reality of the world of African peasants. Thus, neither those who made the predictions about the looming disaster nor their students have pursued the story beyond the 1980s. Few spoke of hunger in the 1990s and even fewer in the twenty-first century. Only one panel¾out of about 300¾at the 2002 annual meeting of the ASA was specifically devoted to food matters, and the June 2003 annual congress of the Association of African Political Scientists offered no section dedicated to the subject. These scholars met nowhere else but in Southern Africa, where ordinary people were not talking about "development"¾the over-riding theme of the congress (whatever that means)¾but about hunger. Southern Africa's recent food shortages caught the academic world sleeping, for reasons I will presently show.

This essay identifies two main streams of thought in the debates of the 1970s and 1980s, which I call the "crisis literature," for they were preoccupied with sudden and dramatic scarcity. The first gives priority to environmental factors in the etiology of famine, directing our attention to natural conditions such as soil structures, rainfall patterns, and climatic variability. Liberals reject environmental determinism and propose to understand Africa's food deficits in political, social, and economic terms. Instead of engaging the crisis literature by invoking the authority of Marx, Malthus, and other big guns in the pantheon of post-industrial philosophies, this study turns to peasants whose knowledge about the problem rests on their lived experiences as food producers, consumers, and victims of hunger. They have developed not only sophisticated agricultural systems, but also ideas that seek to make sense of this important aspect of their lives. Above all, they make and implement the decisions that determine the indigenous food supply on a daily and seasonal basis.

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From John Higginson's, "Making Short Work of Traditions: State Terror and Collective Violence in South Africa"
It is impossible to make much sense of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) unless one ties it to the political settlement arrived at between 1990 and 1993 and its most palpable institutional expression, the TNE, which grew out of the miscarried reforms of the closing phases of apartheid. The arrangement created a situation in which the white power structure, backed up by the army and security forces, was unable to suppress black opposition. Meanwhile black opposition and the other forces arrayed against apartheid did not have the immediate capacity to overthrow the state-hence the negotiated settlement. But even the most generous understanding of "negotiated settlement" failed to touch on how subordinate groups would gain access to socioeconomic resources, whether aggregate income would be distributed in a more democratic fashion, and how living conditions and access to education would be enhanced for the black majority. Also, the distance between disclosure of the state's atrocities and justice continued to be substantial.

The testimony and proceedings of the South African TRC are voluminous and instructive. They mark the first time in modern South Africa's history that an official body has encouraged people to speak freely about recent events and to speculate about how the violent excesses of the past might instruct the creation of a better, more democratic society. It may also mark one of the first times a modern state has frankly admitted that the prerequisites of a truly just society do not already exist. These frank admissions have encouraged discrete groups of people to assume a certain smugness about the authoritarian single-mindedness of the apartheid and segregation eras. Much like people of another time who admired Mussolini and the Italian fascists because they appeared to make Italy's trains run on time, some in South Africa still believe that a measure of commonplace virtue existed in the certainties of South Africa's previous forms of social engineering. Political virtue, however, is never commonplace. It requires more courage than force to maintain, and it demands a degree of skepticism about motives, interests, and outcomes that authoritarian governments find disturbing. Skepticism soon became the hallmark of the TRC, which aimed to establish a process for democratic procedure in which sustained inquiry about motives and intent would be focused on the former South African state and its opponents. But could such a high-minded charge hold up under wide-ranging and numerous accounts of atrocities and state terror?

I propose to examine how the testimony of ordinary South African witnesses from the former districts of Marico and Rustenburg, and also from the fictional political convention of Bophuthatswana, enabled the TRC to pursue its expanded charge of "establishing as a complete a picture as possible of the causes, nature and extent of the gross violations of human rights which were committed during the period from 1 March 1960, including the antecedents, circumstances, factors and context of such violations.

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From Hugh Ragsdale's, "Comparative Historiography of European Revolutions"
The historiography of the Russian Revolution differs from that of its two predecessors in a variety of ways. Most obviously, the Russian is the only one that collapsed under the observation of historians currently writing about it, which must have influenced their views. The Russian Revolution-cause célèbre or écrasez l'infâme-is now a lost cause, and yet, no Russian Restoration has occurred. Thus historians lack the long-term perspective we enjoy on the other two revolutions, and the very immediacy of the phenomenon means we have yet to achieve emotional distance.

The Soviet collapse has gratified conservative historians, discomfited left-leaning social historians, and influenced their writing. The collapse itself necessarily damaged the legitimacy of the regime and raised doubts about the very viability of Marxism, and historical writing has necessarily been concerned with uncovering the sources of Marxism's illegitimacy and lack of viability from its very beginnings. Improved access to archival sources and their aggressive exploration by native Russian historians-Afanas'ev, Seliunin, Tsipko, Volkogonov, and Zubkova, among others-have rendered the aggressive initiative and notorious brutality of the Soviet regime ever more difficult to ignore and, at least in the early post-Soviet days, elicited a vocal native disapproval of the record of Soviet government that had never been possible until the Gorbachev era. These phenomena have unavoidably influenced our Western colleagues as well. Thus a considerable, though not unanimous, retreat from the radical positions of historical interpretation on the part of many of the social historians/revisionists has occurred in the wake of the Soviet debacle. While a genuine convergence of the American and Soviet systems that Brzezinski and Huntington foresaw never took place, the views of the social historians and their old enemies, the predominantly political historians, have-awkwardly and with difficulty, perhaps-conspicuously converged.

Political affinities open fissures among historians and define conflicting interpretations to all these revolutions, and so inevitably does the passing of generations. As Peter Lake wrote of the changing fashions in the historiography of the English Revolution, "We are surely dealing here only with another revolution of the wheel of historiographical fortune of the sort produced by the institutionalized need for novelty of interpretation among professional historians." Each generation of historians revises history in pursuit of originality, as our academic criteria require us to do-to finish the dissertation, to acquire tenure and promotion, and to avoid the excessive aping of the preceding generation. As Gypsy Rose Lee put it, you gotta have a gimmick, and though hers is not literally shared by our profession, we do stubbornly strip the preceding generations of their academic dress in the natural drive for innovation and originality, none of which necessarily corresponds constructively to the criteria of professional or disciplinary integrity. The pursuit of fashion or the flight from convention in a discipline whose charge is the preservation of tradition threatens now and then to drive historical writing ever farther from what the common reader can recognize as history. When one abstraction has been extracted from another, which was similarly lifted from yet another, and so on, the end result may have some charm for dabblers in word babble, but it amounts to little more than esoteric periphrasis. The medium, or methodology, becomes the message. As Robert V. Daniels recently put it, "No truth is solid and everything depends on the imagination if not the whim of the observer. History is 'constructed,' not discovered. At best this means a skeptical relativism, at worst a free hand to subordinate history to political agendas."

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From David F. Krein's, "Birth Dates Matter: Generational Voting in the British House of Commons, 1841-1859"
Is there such a thing as generational behavior? It would seem so, or at least generational analysis has existed since the earliest of times. From the Old Testament to Homer, from Herodotus to Thucydides, from Hesiod to Philo to Polybius, attempts to explain human activity have turned to the concept of the social, as distinct from the familial or demographic, generation. Every generation seems to produce thinkers who play with the idea, perhaps because generational behavior appears instinctive and rooted in the human unconscious. Generally, these efforts at understanding have emerged sporadically, even fitfully, although the twentieth century produced more systematic and sophisticated versions of them.

Contributions to generational analysis include Karl Mannheim's work on generational social conditioning, and Ortega y Gasset's focus on the generational "group mind," followed by his student Julian Marias' work on generations and historical methods. Anthony Esler provided a convincing argument for historians' use of generational analysis, while Alan Spitzer presented a thoughtful treatment of its problems and possibilities. And a decade ago, William Strauss and Neil Howe introduced an overarching theory that linked four recurring generations to a repetitive four-fold historical cyclical process similar to the Etruscan Saeculum.

A general consensus seems to have emerged among those who work with historical generations: they do exist; they are shaped by experiences shared as children and young adults; and history makes generations and generations make history. Yet, much of the evidence adduced for this consensus has been impressionistic, which raises the question, can generational behavior be empirically demonstrated? My work with voting records in the British House of Commons in the 1840s and 1850s strongly suggests that it can be.

The possibility of an empirical demonstration first struck me when I ran a test on the data I had already accumulated on the British Reformed House of Commons to see if voting behavior differed by age. I had already organized all the Parliaments and their personnel from 1833 to 1868, recording their votes on various issues, including the three divisions on the Corn Laws in 1846, so it was a simple matter to graph these votes by the year of birth of the members voting. To my surprise, supporters of the Corn Laws, which were protective tariffs on imported grain, appeared significantly younger than those who supported Free Trade and other tests persuaded me to investigate further.

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From Doyne Dawson's, "The Assault on Eurocentric History"

In recent years, "Eurocentricity" has come to mean, not the undeniable fact that the modern world is Eurocentric, but the view that Western cultural traditions have been instrumental in its creation. The authors discussed above share a suspicion of cultural explanations, but the "uniform growth" and "recurrent growth" theories offer quite different justifications for it. The "uniform growth" scholars, all under postcolonialist influence, often give no particular reason for their materialist bias. They simply assume materialism to be "scientific." If they offer a reason, it will usually be the Marxist principle-which exercises a lingering influence on the minds of many who are not real Marxists-that matters essential to survival must always take priority. The argument is deceptively obvious. The necessities of life must override all other considerations, but the necessities of life do not operate all the time. The anthropologist C. R. Hallpike argued that, for primitive cultures, "It is extremely difficult to be maladaptive, because almost everything will work," and so they run most of the time on the principle of "survival of the mediocre." Complex cultures, on the other hand, are subject to more competition, but they also have many more devices to immunize themselves from contamination by foreign values and to manipulate "rational choices."

The nineteenth-century distinction between base and superstructure has always depended more upon ideology than evidence. It seems certain that material factors, demographic and economic, lie behind great worldwide changes of prehistory, like the spread of agriculture and the rise of the state, but these are hardly "history" in the usual sense. In ordinary history, where time is measured in centuries or decades rather than millennia, it seems more useful to adopt Eric Jones's concept of cultural forces as brakes and filters. If the filters are fine enough to block economic change, which Jones has acknowledged can happen "over periods which are quite long in policy terms," then all changes must happen simultaneously, and there is no reason to call one more basic than another. Ample room remains for disagreement about the relative importance of cultural factors-for example, I tend to place more importance than Jones on the power of cultural variables to reinforce or retard economic development. But this is not the place to pursue that argument. I wish to offer a more modest proposal: Until compelling evidence can be presented, any research strategy that asks us to begin by putting on blinders to vast areas of human experience should be politely declined.

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From Douglas Campbell's, "Speaking of Books: Your Loyal and Loving Son"
Dennis Showalter wants readers to know in his commentary for Your Loyal and Loving Son: The Letters of Tank Gunner Karl Fuchs, 1937-41 that Horst Richardson's translation of his father's personal letters offers the story of a man, not an historical model. The letters cover Fuchs' life from service in Nazi Germany's Labor Front to death in action as a tank commander during the 1941 Moscow offensive. His missives reveal a romantic idealist, musical artist, and devoted family man who also dedicated himself to Adolf Hitler and to Nazi Germany's wartime success.

Richardson wants to demonstrate that his father, a Nazi enthusiast, was also a decent man. Reviewing and then discarding historical arguments about group or national culpability for Nazism, Showalter asserts that Fuchs' letters exemplify how people's individual motives often determined Nazism's attraction. Textual annotations highlight Fuchs' parochial, chauvinist worldview, but they also insist that Fuchs was not a monster, opportunist, or group automaton. Fuchs griped as much as any soldier, but like many Germans he had faith in the Nazi state. Nazism was a friendly local presence that also appealed to the romantic's desire for national regeneration. For those examining why average Germans followed Hitler, Fuchs' diary provides one impression of Hitler's regime at its zenith-and not a post-defeat expiation.

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From Jacob Kipp's, "Speaking of Books: Soviet Naval Doctrine and Policy, 1956-1986"
In 1968 the United States Naval Institute Press published retired Navy Commander Robert Waring Herrick's revised dissertation, Soviet Naval Strategy, which, like the works of John Erickson and Raymond Garthoff, broke new ground in the exploitation of open-source materials, especially Morskoi sbornik and Voennaia mysl', in the study of Soviet military and security policy. In 1988, the year of Admiral Sergei Gorshkov's death, Herrick published a second volume devoted to the admiral's thirty-year tenure as Commander in Chief of the Soviet Navy. As Herrick acknowledges in his new book, Soviet Naval Doctrine and Policy, 1956-1986, his earlier work developed out of his own experiences-naval intelligence training; a tour as assistant naval attache in Moscow; and close collaboration with Nick Shadrin, a defector from the Soviet Navy who wrote his own dissertation on Soviet naval development and then was lost in late-1975 Cold War intrigues in Vienna. Herrick was part of a small, dedicated group of professionals who devoted their professional attention to the study of Sergei Gorshkov's oceanic navy, which included the Center for Naval Analysis, theSoviet Writings Group, and the Dalhousie Maritime Workshop, run by Mike MccGwire.

Herrick's three volumes offer a complete and effective treatment of Soviet naval doctrine and policy from its beginnings to the end of the Soviet state. What has yet to added to this discussion is a more detailed and shaded picture of the personalities, especially of Gorshkov and his chief advisors. The scholars who undertake that task will find a solid foundation for their work in Herrick's volumes.

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From Richard Raack's, "Speaking of Books: Stalin's Other War"
Within the last five years, at least five books on Stalin's intent to attack Hitler have been launched into the surging international debate about Stalin's war plans. Most of the new books-like the earlier milestones in the debate from Carl O. Nordling, Joachim Hoffmann (in Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, v. 4, now in English), and Viktor Suvorov-have been produced by writers without university connections . The new books from professors tend to exonerate Stalin of plotting a war. Does that tell us anything?

Weeks's slender volume, based wholly on printed sources, is a must for scholars and history buffs who study the Second World War, and especially for those skeptics who still doubt Stalin's warlike designs. Weeks judiciously weighs his Russian and English-language sources. He tells his story engrossingly. He also provides in appendices key documents that have previously not appeared in English, or which have been hard to find, including Stalin's speech to the Politburo of August 19, 1939. In this long-neglected text the Soviet boss tells why he made the Pact with Hitler, and how he intended to exploit it. Weeks also summarizes some current Russian textbooks on the controversial topic-an outstanding and insightful contribution to understanding Russia's current refusal to face its past.

"Weeks's few errors and his lack of attention to the vast German-language bibliography do not prejudice his main conclusions. Stalin's Other War offers a compelling and insightful assessment of Stalin's plans for an invasion of Nazi Germany.

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MARK NOLL'S AMERICA'S GOD: A SYMPOSIUM

From Margaret Bendroth's, "Wheaton Jeremiad"
For Noll, ideas have immense consequences. He is clearly and unapologetically writing intellectual history, albeit carefully contextualized with other narratives of economic, political, and social change. Though Noll recognizes the importance of economic factors and regularly acknowledges the contributions of African-American and female preachers, he gives formal theological ideas primacy of place. He contends that Protestant theology fundamentally shaped early national culture and proved far more elemental in molding American thought and culture than, for example, the emergence of market capitalism. Thus his analysis offers a deep appreciation of religion's importance and a thoroughgoing critique of its role in American society. In America's God religion receives primary credit for sharpening public awareness of the moral evil of slavery, but it also emerges as fundamentally compromised by its central role in the ultimately secular task of nation-building. Noll's angle of vision often obscures the actions of people on the margins. Unlike much recent work in American religion, Noll's story is written "from the top down," focusing on the overarching structures of American society, not its diverse particularities. Within his framework, his analysis is both cogent and intellectually satisfying; indeed, given the book's extraordinary scholarly depth, any complaint about scope is apt to sound like empty carping at a job well done.

Still, the relative absence of women is worth notice, not least because the religious discourse Noll analyzes would have played to a mostly female audience. Scholars of American religion rarely attempt to account for the persistent two-thirds majority of women in the pews, much less assume that women's dominance had any direct effect on the historical trajectory of churches or denominations. The lack of attention to women in America's God is, in my view, surprising. The problematic role of women as a majority constituency in American Protestant churches routinely banned from public leadership should constitute more than a nuance to any argument about democratization. Even today, many Christian bodies prohibit women from voting in denominational assemblies or from ordination to church leadership, simply because they are female. The issue is not simply a matter of "equal time" for female protagonists, but the explanatory scope of Noll's argument about religion and the development of democracy in America: Does it apply to the majority of church members?

I think it does. Most historians will recognize that Noll's book covers a period of time in which religion was becoming thoroughly entrenched in the female sphere and increasingly tangential to the world of middle-class men. Scholarly analyses of this "feminization" have, on the whole, tended to disparage either women or religion: on the one hand, "feminization" brought about the sentimental horde of women who reduced divine sovereignty to a socially impotent form of Victorian Christianity; on the other, American religion became mired in consumer capitalism incapable of attracting red-blooded men busy in the marketplace. But I think Noll's theological angle on early nineteenth-century culture offers a more generous accounting for Protestantism's gradual drift toward women and away from men. His argument allows us to wonder, for example, whether the contingent post-Edwardsian God simply made the most sense in the domestic sphere. Studies of religious movements dominated by women show a consistent emphasis on suffering and loss, reflecting women's primary role in childbirth and parenting-and suggesting that, for many women, God tends to be immanent rather than transcendent. Alternatively, the fundamentally cooperative God of the nineteenth century did not perhaps relate as easily to a masculine world that denied contingency and demanded instead self-mastery and individual achievement. Though blanket generalizations, of course, are always wrong or at least intellectually risky, perhaps the larger point is clear: Noll's Protestant divines planted the seeds of a particular religious demise, not necessarily a universal one.

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From Laurie Maffly-Kipp's, "A Calvinist Country?"
The devil in America's God is not in the details, which are marvelously rendered. Rather, the bedeviling feature of the book is Noll's nuanced but nonetheless insistent assertion of recurrent themes within American historiography that are, at the very least, worth more analysis. In at least three ways, Noll's story is familiar. He emphasizes the exceptionalism and isolation-if not the altogether positive distinctiveness-of the American intellectual scene; he narrates an intellectual declension from a unified Puritan "canopy" to a less rationally vigorous theological nationalism that eventually topples under its own thin foundations; and he portrays the buildup to the hermeneutical rupture of the Civil War almost exclusively as an argument between northern and southern white Protestants over slavery and the Bible.

Thorough examination of these themes would take several more books, but they can be outlined. Noll argues that the colonial Calvinist theology of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which resembled European theologies in many respects, began to disintegrate under the strain of the importation of Enlightenment political images and language into religious discourse. Morality became "virtue," and the meaning of "freedom" was liberalized and extended to equate political values with the liberties of the soul before God. Jonathan Edwards thus represented both the last great Puritan theologian and the first thinker to "narrow" his vision of the community of the elect to make it consonant with secular understandings. In the decades after the Revolution, the tremendous growth of evangelical adherence and the enormous energy put into organizing the new nation-mounted principally by evangelical denominations, hence the comparison to the U.S. postal service-drew intellectual energies inward as well. American theology became exceptional as it turned its focus away from Europe and towards its own development.

Noll's version of events is all true and makes for a marvelously rich account. But he also paints a geographically isolated picture of the North American religious scene. Strikingly absent are the many ways in which antebellum Americans were simultaneously extending their own reach overseas, across borders, and westward into new territories. The international missions movement, whose birth is commonly attributed to the Andover theology, was fueled by-and, in turn, reshaped-new turns in theology during the early nineteenth century. The movement proved one of the most potent organizing tools in the evangelical arsenal. Although United States imperial reach did not achieve its greatest height until after the Civil War, the early years saw intense activity to extend national borders through a war against Mexico, which generated considerable theological reflection among Protestant clergy. Even organizational efforts often seen as "domestic" causes, such as abolition and tract distribution, engaged Americans in a broad network of international evangelical support. Yes, Methodists in the United States spent considerable time organizing the new nation, but they frequently relied for help, both practical and ideological, upon international contacts. Noll's narrative to the contrary, it is difficult to separate the elements of evangelical development that focused Americans inward on the nation from those that brought them into contact with Christians and non-Christians in other parts of the world.

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From Ann Taves's, "America's Distinctive God"
While Noll's primary concern is with the Americanization of evangelical theology rather than United States history, he makes a strong case that "religion, especially as embodied in a full spectrum of evangelical churches," played a more decisive role in creating a national culture than historians have traditionally recognized (194). The contribution was both ideological and organizational, and Noll gives particular credit to the burgeoning "Methodist web of classes, circuits, quarterly meetings, conferences, and annual conferences" (196). Noll uses a recent study of the role of the postal service-the nation's largest federal agency-in nation building to provide perspective on the evangelical contribution. By 1850, the Methodists alone "had constructed almost as many churches as there were post offices and employed almost as many ministers as there were postal workers." Taken as a whole, he estimates, "the evangelical churches employed nearly double the personnel, maintained nearly twice as many facilities, and raised at least three times the money as the Post Office" (201).

Noll's argument leaves historians with much to ponder. For those specializing in religious history, the differences between evangelical denominations are instructive. Although Methodists played an important role in knitting the nation together organizationally, Congregationalists and Presbyterians elites provided the intellectual leadership. Nor was denominational growth linked to the embrace of an Americanized theology. Methodism grew most rapidly during the Revolutionary Era, when it was still largely untouched by Americanization. As Noll acknowledges, "the Methodist experience shows that it was entirely possible for a traditional Christian message that had not been adjusted to the norms of American ideology to flourish in the new American nation" (340). He further suggests that Methodist theology was "most creative" in the early years, when it was least philosophical and least Americanized. As Methodism became more middle class, the majority-apart from the holiness movement-embraced the common intellectual discourse forged by Congregationalists and Presbyterians and lost much of its distinctiveness.

The case of Methodism, coupled with Noll's depiction of what it meant to Americanize theologically, raises questions about the ways in which other denominations were or were not Americanized. A fair amount of attention has been devoted to the Americanization of denominations such as Catholics, Lutherans, Jews, and Latter-day Saints. Noll's detailed analysis of the Americanization of Congregationalist, Presbyterian, and later Methodist theology provides a foundation for revisiting the question of Americanization, this time with a greater emphasis on the role of theology. To what extent did the Americanization of theology-as opposed to,say, the adoption of the English language or practices that mimicked Protestants-shape perceptions of what was American in the realm of religion? To what extent could traditions that did not abandon all sources of authority but "the [Christian] Bible alone" ever Americanize? Did what it meant to Americanize theologically change significantly in the post-bellum period? If so, how?

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From Mark Noll's Response
It is still my opinion that, comparatively speaking, Lincoln's "Meditation on the Divine Will" from September 1862 was, as I averred in the book, one of the most remarkable theological comments of the period: "In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party." Precisely the tragedy of Christian theology in this period was that it took someone who never joined a Christian church to make this statement. By contrast, the Christian theologians (though to differing degrees) pretty well knew what God was up to. Precisely the tragedy of Lincoln (from my angle as a Christian believer drawn to theologians like Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Barth, von Balthasar who have preserved God's mysterious sovereignty as an essential part of their Christian faith) was as I stated it in the book, that for Lincoln and a few other non-believers like Emily Dickinson, "to be faithful to the God they found in their own hearts-or in the Bible, or in the sweep of events-they had to hold themselves aloof from the organized Christianity of the United States and from its preaching about the message of Jesus Christ." It is not my view that Lincoln gave utterance to adequately Christian theology; it is my view that, compared to the Christian theologians of his day, his vision of God came much closer to what an adequate Christian view should be than did theirs.

In these terms, the question of whether Lincoln realized "the true American mission" lies beyond the scope of my book. While confessing that I do revere Lincoln, as Fox-Genovese notes, I also confess that, to the extent possible for a modern academic, I have as close to no opinion about the nature and destiny of the United States as it is possible to have. America's God is first about theology, not the United States.

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From Robert Herzstein's, "Judgment and Restitution: Goldhagen, the Catholic Church, and Anti-Semitism"
Goldhagen has depicted German culture as Jew-hating and devoid of pity, but he then expects free will on the part of its offspring to defy it-thus ignoring his own evidence regarding the power of anti-Semitism and, worse, overlooking the impact of ten years of relentless and ubiquitous anti-Jewish propaganda. The killers were Jew-hating brutes, sometimes lurking under cultivated exteriors. Goldhagen's expectation that the perpetrators should have overcome the culture that he, more than any other author, has foisted upon them, may be a pious wish, but it is bad history. That a few Germans acted better, or a few bishops helped Jews, hardly vitiates the major point. I can judge the killers and condemn them to death based on my values, and I do not believe it matters much to concede that Eichmann bragged about choosing freely, since his values and ambitions drove him to act as he did. Like a lot of Germans, he thought he was free, and within his own murderous culture he was. But free will cannot coexist with a culture of un-freedom, and the only way to defeat its remorseless, programmed progeny was to crush them and the culture that bred them. In a culture cleansed of state-sanctioned hatred, people could truly make free choices-and most Germans since 1946 have chosen well.

Goldhagen's portrait of the popes and their actions or inactions during the Holocaust presents similar challenges. Pius XII did not care all that much about the Jews, but he worried a lot about his Church and the safety of the Vatican. He, too, acted "freely" in conformity with prejudice and cultural blinders. True, he was supposed to be a man of great moral stature speaking for and to millions of devout Catholics. But when confronted with Nazi evil, he flinched, negotiated, equivocated-acting more like a lawyer and a diplomat than a moral leader. Goldhagen holds Pius XII to the highest standard of free will after depicting him and his clerical forebears as anti-Semites to the core. Goldhagen describes the anti-Semitic culture that produced Pius XII, then seems surprised and hurt that Pius XII did not act to defend the Jews, choosing instead to act after 1940 as a chief operating officer protecting the interests of the Church. Pius XII did not even necessarily protect the interests of Catholics, for sometimes he placed good relations with the Germans above the interests of persecuted Catholic Poles. Once again, free will in Goldhagen's narrative is the deus ex machina that failed. Goldhagen expects Pius XII to shed anti-Semitic attitudes and beliefs and to intercede on behalf of the Jews. After all, the Eighth Commandment and the Catholic Catechism both forebade bearing false witness, and in Goldhagen's view, Pius XII was supposed to apply the Catechism to anti-Semitism and overlook the synoptic gospels-which Catholics revered. Goldhagen's high moral standards speak well for him, but they respond to history, rather than evoke it. Until 1965, most popes and Catholics did not see the accusation of Christ-killing against the Jews as libel, so why should they have discarded the old view of the Jews in 1935?

The fluke election, well after 1935, of a brash pope, combined with growing unease about his predecessor's silence, combined to change history. Only a revolutionary new pope, John XXIII, a rescuer named Angelo Roncalli during the Holocaust and a great humanitarian unencumbered by past hatreds, could break the mold. His pontificate does suggest a German analogy in one sense: John was to the Church's view of the Jews what the defeat of 1945 was to German culture-a rare cataclysmic event that changed everything. Pius XII most assuredly did not feel free; John XIII began the process of liberation, tragically late.

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From Vincent Lapomarda's, "Reckoning with Daniel J. Goldhagen's Views on the Roman Catholic Church, the Holocaust, and Pope Pius XII"
Goldhagen makes much of the example of the Danish Lutheran Church, which, he argues, shows that the Catholic Church could have helped the Jews by speaking out against the Holocaust (p. 51-55). The example of the Lutheran Church in Denmark only proves how Goldhagen fails to recognize that people and circumstances differ. Even if one were to concede that Goldhagen and his sources are correct in their view of Pius XII's alleged silence, Peter Steinfels, in his column in The New York Times (May 24, 2003), offered a more likely comparison when he recalled how vocal Pope John Paul II had been against the war in Iraq: "Those who imagine that the Holocaust could have actually been halted by a clarion call from Pope Pius XII should take note."

Although the words and actions of the Church under Pius XII could not stop the Holocaust, the objective evidence shows that the papacy was not as silent in word and deed as Goldhagen alleges. When, for example, Pius XII spoke out in his Christmas Message of 1942 to defend the victims of the war, The New York Times characterized this intervention as "a lonely voice crying out in the silence of a continent," and the Nazis interpreted it as an attack on Germany and a defense of the Jews. The testimony of German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop at Nuremberg confirmed that the Nazis had received "a whole deskful [sic] of protests from the Vatican" during the war. To this testimony can be added the fury of the Reich's Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels at the protests broadcast on Vatican Radio. Overwhelming praise from Jewish sources for Pius XII, as recorded in the appendix of Hans Jansen's latest book, Pius XII (2003), suggests that the Church did more than any other international agency, person, or state to help the Jews during World War II.

Godhagen's pursuit of moral judgment justifies, for him, the culpability of the Catholic Church under Pius XII. On the one hand, the Church supported and committed political transgressions, crimes, criminal incitement, and acts of anti-Semitism, thereby incurring moral and political blame. Its interventions on behalf of the Jews were, at best, ambiguous. On the other hand, the Church was guilty of sins of omission before, during, and after the Holocaust. The Church under Pius XII was also forsaking the souls of Catholics. For Goldhagen, who has accepted John Cornwell's interpretation in Hitler's Pope (1999), Pius XII was not only an anti-Semite, a blind anti-Communist, a servant of Adolf Hitler, and an appeaser in the pursuit of peace, but he was afraid to risk his life for the Church-he failed to issue a public condemnation of the persecution of the Jews, even when he knew about the Holocaust; he was negligent in remaining silent or in making no public display of his protests against the Holocaust; he was wrong to fail to excommunicate the Nazi leader; and he helped the Jews less than any other world leader. What Goldhagen lacks is a true appreciation of the Church's traumatic struggle for survival against the Nazis, who were determined to eradicate Christianity itself. In those circumstances, the Church under the Pope was quite limited in its ability to defend Catholics, not to mention Jews, against the Nazi reign of terror. Goldhagen's analysis offers no sense of the complexity of the decisions Pius faced when, as one of latter's contemporaries observed, with respect to Communist Russia and Nazi Germany, the choice for the Pope was between the cholera and the plague.

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From Barbara Finlay's, "Was Tertullian a Misogynist? A Reconsideration"
Perhaps no church father has received as much condemnation for his attitudes toward women as Tertullian (Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullianus, c. 155-c. 225). From Simone de Beauvior's The Second Sex, which claimed that Tertullian associated woman with the body, temptation and evil; to Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza, who accuses him of having a "deep misogynist contempt and fear of women," many scholars and students have made similar charges. Marie Turcan, in a 1990 article in Vita Latina, claims that "The woman is in [Tertullian's] eyes a public menace" and describes his attitude in his essay on women's dress (De cultu feminarum) as follows: "The man has everything to fear from her, and the first Adam would have done well to be wary about her. The eye with which he looks at her is singularly critical, and not only in De cultu. No occasion is lost to show her vain, conceited, sensual, frivolous, avid and at the same time stupid and cunning."

Such claims have been picked up by a wide variety of non-specialists and widely repeated. A current sociology textbook on sex and gender, citing a brief comment and quotation by Rosemary Radford Ruether, asserts that"Tertullian, a Church Father of the second century, laid the blame for the fall of humankind entirely on the shoulders of Eve and all of her daughters. It was woman and woman alone who was to blame for sin and evil." The textbook then lays the blame for later misogyny at Tertullian's feet: "Tertullian felt no compunction in preaching his antifemale beliefs, thus setting the stage for others to follow in one long litany of misogynous sentiment." In short, the cliché that Tertullian was uniquely and wholly misogynist has become widespread.

The majority of writers illustrate their charges against Tertullian primarily, if not solely, by reference to one infamous passage from one essay (De cultu)-a passage often taken out of context and as the sole exemplar of Tertullian's attitude toward women. In it he accuses women of being "the devil's gateway." Even so, a few recent scholars have questioned the widespread attributions of misogynism to Tertullian, usually pointing to other essays that do not support the impression given by the "devil's gateway" passage. While De cultu does appear to blame women for the origin of sin and for encouraging men's sin through appealing to their sexual desire, it is not wholly representative of Tertullian's expressed and lived attitudes towards women. The corpus of his writings includes comments and sections relevant to his views of women scattered among different treatises, many of which are overlooked by critics. A broad survey of his comments about and to women and their roles and experiences in the church indicates a more complex thinker than is often assumed. The current clichéd assertions about Tertullian's misogyny are based on a superficial reading of his works, and a closer reading raises questions about the validity of the accusations. Specifically, we need to explore the various nuances of Tertullian's attitudes toward women and their role in the church, as expressed in his surviving written work.

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INTRODUCTION
by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

As a rule, the goal of revolutions is, in John Higginson's words, "to make short work of traditions." Typically, they seek to wipe the slate clean, frequently with violence and in blood. Those who approve them, follow the sensibility of Jean Paul Sartre in Les Mains Sales (Dirty Hands), his play about the consequences and benefits of collaboration with the Communists in the 1940s. The roughest fights will dirty your hands, no matter how pure your goals. Arguably, history even suggests that the purer the goals, the dirtier the hands that effect them. Or, in a more familiar version: You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. Those who balk at these necessities reprove the shedding of blood and the trampling of lives in any cause, no matter how worthy. The ends do not justify the means, and the power required to realize the ends is more than likely to prove both oppressive and corrupting. The road to freedom is too often strewn with corpses, and, to borrow again from Higginson, "the dead cannot collect what is owed them."

Yet even a clear-sighted recognition of the dangers does not entitle us to settle for a unilateral view of the matter. War and revolution have been the midwives of countless changes that most of us regard as beneficial. It is hard to contest the benefits of abolishing American independence or the abolition of slavery. Occasionally great changes, like the fall of the Soviet Union, come with an astounding absence of violence-but even when effected peacefully, they may leave everyday life fraught with persisting violence, struggle, and lack of basic necessities. If nothing else, we should recognize the early years of post-Soviet Russia as a preview of what is occurring in Iraq. The end of an evil regime-whether through violent overthrow in war or revolution or through quiet collapse-will not necessarily, or even probably, give way to the emergence of a peaceable kingdom.

Any attempt to grasp the nature of major historical change, must begin with an understanding that the past-however battered-does not just lie down and die. Revolutions aspire to erase tradition for the excellent reason that the more astute revolutionary leaders recognize it as their most dangerous foe. To take one brief but telling example, neither the French nor the Russian revolutions ultimately succeeded in their attempts to abolish or radically transform marriage. Sexual freedom, including the easy availability of divorce, enjoyed a brief sway, but eventually succumbed to the people's attachment to the organic units that provided their best defense against the intrusions of state power and, however ironically, the state's need for the regular reproduction of population and its early socialization.

Our efforts to understand and interpret historical change, whether violent or peaceful or the more familiar combination of struggle and compromise, only complicate the problems, especially when the changes are provoked by natural phenomena like drought or flooding. This issue opens with Elias Mandala's reflections upon the crisis in African food studies-a different problem, let it be noted, than the recurring crises in African food supplies. Mandala does not minimize Africans' wrenching problems in assuring adequate supplies of food for their people, but here he primarily focuses on the ways in which Western scholars portray those problems. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Ethiopian and Sahelian famines spurred a flurry of scholarly interest, but thereafter interest rapidly declined and has now virtually disappeared. Meanwhile the problems of basic provisioning persist. But even when scholarly discussions of African food problems flourished, they missed a fundamental problem.

Scholars have primarily viewed African food supplies from two main perspectives, the environmentalist or the whiggish or liberal. Both, but especially the second, follow the logic of what Mandala calls "time's arrow"-a linear model that focuses upon the consequences of the transition from precapitalist to capitalist social relations of production. This "whig" or liberal model has the great advantage of revealing the ways in which the advent of capitalism, not infrequently through the efforts of foreigners, effectively destroys traditional agricultural practices and relations, not least by revolutionizing property relations among African peasants. But the premises and methods of this work, to which Mandala initially subscribed, failed to account for much of what was occurring. On the verge of abandoning his project, he turned to a radically different set of sources: the peasant women of Malawi. From them he learned of the preeminent importance of time's cycle in their lives. If famine was the dramatic product of time's arrow, recurring dearth was the product of time's cycle.

Both the linear and the cyclical models figure in any convincing historical account, although few historians regularly combine them. In the case of Malawi, the rural and the academic perspectives on the availability and communal distribution of food rarely meet, with the result that academics simply do not see the ubiquity of recurring periods of hunger among peasant populations. As Mandala argues, it is misguided to assume that the extraordinary-in this case, famine-necessarily illuminates the ordinary-the routine of the everyday, which is punctuated with bouts of dearth. Where famine can kill, dearth can stunt children's physical and mental growth. Dearth can also strain community relations and even introduce tensions into the communal meal. Yet if we can ill afford to ignore the cyclical quality of everyday life, it is no less dangerous to ignore time's arrow, which illuminates changes that are affecting the ways in which people throughout the globe experience and attempt to cope with the ordinary, everyday aspects of their lives.

John Higginson's discussion of state terror and collective violence in South Africa during the brief period following the lifting of the state of emergency in 1990-91 also highlights the potentially disastrous consequences of linear change for rural people. In this instance, the goal was to "wipe out" the potential rural constituency for recently "unbanned" parties, thus controlling the outcome of the first "free" election. As Higginson insists, "Violence and aggression in any society automatically embrace related problems of social and political costs, morality, social cohesion, and authority to pose a critical question: Who, through the agency of the state, can do violence to whom?" During South Africa's revolutionary transition, the rural population suffered a disproportionate share of violence, which ultimately resulted in an increase-not the usual decrease-in the rural population from 44 percent of the total in 1993 to more than 51 percent in 1997. With this increase of more than seven percent in less than five years, has come a dramatic increase in the percentage of economically vulnerable black people who live in rural areas-a percentage that has risen faster than the increase in rural black people over all.

Higginson suggests that historians might learn much about the events of the past decade-or century-in the Transvaal from the great French historian Georges Lefebvre's Les Paysans du Nord, but the lesson would be a negative one. For what centuries of peasant protest, culminating in the full-scale revolt of the French Revolution, accomplished in France, died stillborn in South Africa. Rather than gain access to land, the peasants of the Transvaal were herded into compounds, assigned to an arbitrarily created fictive state, and consigned to a life of partial, piecemeal employment and grinding poverty. Although the current South African government describes them as "fully employed," their condition eerily resembles the condition of cyclical hunger that weakens the peasants of Malawi. In both cases, tradition has been trampled under the feet of large indigenous and foreign economic interests, and the rural groups that cling to its shreds have been rendered powerless to introduce it into national politics or policies.

In the 1960s, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, studying Indonesia, advanced the notion of involution to capture the effect of the expanding global market upon peasant economies in third world societies. Similarly, Ester Boserup, an economist, studying Africa, analyzed the way in which the British introduction of private property in land effective stripped rural women of any claim upon the land and its fruits. Since their pioneering contributions, scholars in various fields have called attention to the many ways in which rural populations-especially women and children-can be immiserated by so-called development. Agricultural regions, as both Mandala and Higginson demonstrate, do not remain in a steady state while change swirls around them: most of them become poorer, while a few became capitalist enterprises that produced for a global market. They are also likely to retain, in Mandala's words, a strong allegiance to cyclical as opposed to linear time.

The claims of tradition challenge historians no less than these historical actors. Barbara Finlay's essay on the purported misogyny of Tertullian, a second century Christian Church Fathers, which together with Mandala's frames this issue, challenges us to look at these questions from another-and unaccustomed-angle. Tertullian is known as a man of learning and intellectual influence, which has increased his vulnerability to feminist charges of misogyny. Too polite to say that the charges derive from inadequate familiarity with Tertullian's work or respect for the context within which he wrote, Finlay carefully demonstrates that most of his accusers rely on a single passage in which he accuses women of being "the devil's gateway." She acknowledges that his De Cultu in which the passage occurs "does appear to blame women for the origin of sin and for encouraging men's sin through appealing to their sexual desire," but she cautions that before rushing to judgment we should consider the broader context of his work, especially his adherence to the Montanist heresy.

Finlay dispels a host of misunderstandings in her discussion of second-century Christian teachings, especially Tertullian's, on the origins of sin, the relations between the sexes, the proper place of sex in human life, the role of women in the early church and among the Montanists, and, above all, on the strong sense of mutuality between women and men. Her discussion reintroduces a semblance of balance and historical perspective into our assessments of men's attitudes towards women during the first centuries of Christianity. Contemporary presentism has made it exceptionally difficult to recognize the possibility that the meaning of and standards for respect for women may have varied historically and differed radically from our own modern expectation, much less that women may have been more likely to see themselves as members of groups than as individuals in the modern sense of the word. Today in many circles, resentment of religions that ascribe different roles to women and men runs so high that it virtually negates the ability to understand women's experience and aspirations in societies and historical epochs other than our own.

Finlay makes a signal contribution to clarifying Tertullian's thought and discrediting the most extreme feminist outrage. She notes that Tertullian saw as different from men and held them, conjointly with men, responsible for original sin. She also, although doubtless inadvertently, adds another dimension to our understanding of Mandala's Malawi peasant households. Tellingly, it was a woman who instructed Mandala in the dynamics of dearth and introduced him to the economics and rituals of food distribution within the community. Mrs. Zachepa introduced Mandala to njala, recurrent or seasonal hunger, and, in doing so revealed much about the social dynamics of her rural community. Strange as it may seem, that community probably shares many features with the communities of the second-century Mediterranean amid which Tertullian lived. And notwithstanding the vast difference in intellectual sophistication, both kinds of communities belong to the world of rural households that has dominated most of human history. In such worlds, women may be denigrated, even abused, but they are seen as essential to the spiritual life of the group; are recognized as necessary to the survival of the family and beyond it the community; receive respect for their specific functions; are required to observe the sexual standards of the community-and often cruelly punished if they do not.

Few, if any, traditional societies did not foster some combination of misogyny and idealization of women. Immune to the homogenizing principles of modern individualism, must societies have taken the difference between women and men as foundational and, in the measure that men have disproportionately controlled culture, represented women as "the other." From any other perspective than that of the modern Western world, Tertullian's treatment of women would be remarkable not for its misogyny but for its respect for women's dignity as women and the interdependence of women and men. Ironically, the individualist principles that so sharply color modern and postmodern views of the world are distinctly Western in origin and owe a special debt to Christianity, with its insistence on the equality of all souls in the eyes God.

If the strands that converged into modern individualism derived from many sources, the French Revolution of 1789 proved central to their political consolidation. The great Latin American historian, Frank Tannenbaum, enjoyed telling his students-teasing the left-wingers among them-that the Russian and Chinese Revolutions they considered important were but mere footnotes to the French Revolution: "It upset a perfectly good and stable society, and we have not stopped paying for it yet." Lecturing in the 1950s, Tannenbaum could take for granted a general understanding of revolution as the violent change in political regime presumably provoked by a measure of unrest in prevailing social and economic relations. Disagreements about causes and the desirability of the results abounded, and opinions varied from the French men and women who pulled the curtains as a sign of mourning on Bastille Day to Maoists, and everyone in between. Few would admit to disapproving the results of the American Revolution, but even those who saw it as an unequivocal good differed about its causes and the implications of its results. On one point only did something like consensus prevail: The revolutions had occurred and had brought significant change in their wake.

Today, as Hugh Ragsdale argues, it would be rash to expect even that modest level of agreement. Focusing primarily on the Russian Revolution, Ragsdale explores the dramatic changes in scholars' assessments of the causes, nature, and results of the English, French, and Russian Revolutions. Around the middle of the twentieth century, in his account, the historiography of both the English and French Revolutions was heavily influenced by materialist interpretations, frequently with a socialist or explicitly Marxist cast. Differences notwithstanding, the leading historians all embraced a whiggish-even teleological-perspective, which links them to Mandala's category of time's arrow. They all viewed these revolutions as monumental steps in the progress toward increased political freedom, respect for the rights of the individual, the separation of church and state, and the recognition of absolute private property. To Marxists, who viewed the revolutions as bourgeois, they were at least necessary steps toward the ultimate goal of socialism.

The main attacks on this dominant narrative initially came from historians who questioned the progressive social content of the revolutionaries' goals and, especially, the revolutions' beneficial social results. Alfred Cobban suggested that the French Revolution may have retarded rather than promoted the advent of capitalism in France. Those who followed Cobban's lead moved toward the position that the Revolution had not been social at all, but political. Their conclusions opened the way to what has become known as the "linguistic turn," which, according to Ragsdale, effectively reduces the Revolution to the "private sexual problems of the royal family" or other cultural microcosms. Ragsdale applauds the contributions of a groups of historical sociologists who have restored structure and causation to the discussion, but in the end he suggests that the scholarship of recent decades has left us with little more than a gragbag.

Historians of the Russian Revolution have faced a different order of problems, for which the recent work on the English and French Revolutions has offered little help. The collapse of the Soviet Union has influenced the ways in which historians perceive its revolutionary origins, with different consequences for those of different political persuasions. The many left-wing historians who were drawn to the study of the Russian Revolution now face difficult questions about Marxism and socialism as both theory and politics. Sheila Fitzpatrick, a leading historian of revolutionary Russia, earns Ragsdale's admiration for her ability to rethink fundamental issues. Her recent work, Everyday Stalinism, on everyday life in the Soviet Union exemplifies the general tendency of the field, namely to reverse the pattern for the English and French Revolutions by moving from political to social history. But notwithstanding the existence of such fine discrete studies, the field seems to lack direction. The situation is not one in which time's circle has replaced time's arrow: one would be hard pressed to find a historian of any of these revolutions who viewed it as part of a cyclical pattern endemic to human affairs. If cycle there is, it lies in recurring historiographical fashions. As Ragsdale writes, "The pursuit of fashion or the flight from convention in a discipline whose charge is the preservation of tradition threatens now and then to drive historical writing ever farther from what the common reader can recognize as history."

In a discussion of the significance of birth dates, David Krein proposes a new pattern of classification, which, in turn, suggests new aspects of causation. Krein has studied the British House of Commons from 1841-1859, meticulously tabulating a series of decisive votes. If nothing else, his work demonstrates the unique value of quantification in forcing us to look beyond received opinion and our own expectations. Historians have made it easy to assume that party affiliation, which may be taken as a rough indicator of political leanings or philosophy, provides a good preliminary guide to voting blocks in the Commons. Krein demonstrates that it may not. Analysis of specific votes reveals that the most important bond among members may be that of generation, which often led members to cross party lines in important votes. Ragsdale also notes that at least one study of the English Revolution found generation to offer the best explanation for the behavior of individuals. And it is hard to doubt the significance of young people's living through the same experiences at the same age. Problems nonetheless remain, beginning with the plasticity of generational boundaries. But generations do have the charm of joining time's arrow-they succeed one another-to time's circle-they are always with us. And Krein helps us to see what historians can gain by considering their impact.

The articles in this issue illustrate the vast reach of big historical questions. Sooner or later, every historian confronts the competing claims of linear and cyclical theories of history, even if only indirectly-or even unwillingly. Is this person or situation or event something new under the sun or simply a new version of a familiar story? Even agreement upon these difficult questions does not ipso facto determine how we tell the story, and how different historians tell the story-what they choose to emphasize, what they choose to ignore, and how they choose to present it-is a recurring theme in this issue. Our times have sharply, and sometimes noisily, called the writing of history into question. This epidemic of self-conscious agonizing has led some to doubt the possibility of writing history at all: "how do I position myself in relation to the other, the past, the multiplicity of subjectivities"? Or, in a shameless paraphrase, "Do I dare to write a line"?

Beneath the flurry of postmodern questions about the nature of facts and the position of the historian, an older generation of questions sometimes seems to get buried, notably the longstanding debate between idealists and materialists. Writing of the "Assault on Eurocentric History," Doyne Dawson returns them to center stage, but in what I at least find a disconcerting new guise. Dawson argues that the struggle between the so-called Eurocentrists and their opponents pits idealists against materialists. As he presents the case, the attack on Eurocentric history is being waged as an attack on the noxious idea that culture-superstructure as it used to be known-accounts for the gap in development between Europe and the rest of the world. Apparently, the argument is that only some form of geographical and ecological determinism can explain that gap in an equitable and non-racist manner. What those who have cast themselves as champions of the non-Western world cannot countenance is any suggestion the cultural superiority in any way explains Western development.

Dawson opens a plethora of questions. It would seem that those who deny the significance of culture are also, in some way, trying to defend equality among the races-and presumably among their cultures as well. At issue is the refusal to credit any special status to, for example, Western scientific thought. As Dawson allows, beyond a certain point a rigid distinction between idealist and materialist factors makes little sense. As he says, the world is Eurocentric in the measure that Western technological and economic power has set the standard for everyone else. He also insists that this outcome was not foreordained and that "if the push into modernization had not happened in Europe, it would probably have been made somewhere else sooner or later, most likely in Japan, followed by Korea and China. Perhaps. But Japan is something of a loaded choice since it is the only non-Western society to have passed through a recognized period of feudalism. In the end, Dawson follows Eric Jones in viewing culture as providing the brakes and filters for material factors. This position offers one version of the sensible view that materialist and idealist factors interact in ways so complex as to preclude any unilateral determinism. The entire debate nonetheless offers a delicious example of prevailing intellectual confusions, for it reveals the postmodern enemies of Eurocentrism as hard-core materialists, who deny any decisive role to culture-a position that is difficult to reconcile with their insistence upon the plasticity of "reality," which is constructed by the observer.

In Speaking of Books, short reviews by Douglas Campbell, Jacop Kipp, and Richard Raack turn to different aspects of military history, all of which intersect with the themes in this issue. How do we evaluate the German tank gunner, Karl Fuchs, who emerges from his letters as a "decent man," who "had faith in the Nazi State"? Jacob Kipp and Richard Raack take us from the personal experience of war to the intentions and strategies of those who plan and wage it. Kipp raises questions about aspects of a three-volume work on Soviet naval doctrine and practice, notably its lack of attention to individual personalities and motives. Raack strongly endorses a "slender volume" that, in his view, fully confirms Stalin's intent, as early as 1939-1941, to wage war against Hitler. The reviews' focus on Germany and Russia during World War II reminds us that those wounds have yet to heal and that many, as Raack suggests about the Russians, still find it difficult to face their past.

The Holocaust enjoys a special place among the World War II wounds that remain open, and Daniel Goldhagen continues to probe them. In this issue, we pick up the debate over his work with an exchange between Robert Herzstein and Vincent Lapomarda over Goldhagen's new book, A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfinished Duty of Repair. For Goldhagen, who, according to both of our authors, has done little if any primary research on his topic, the Catholic Church bears major responsibility for the Holocaust, which the Vatican failed to denounce or oppose. Herzstein does his best to give Goldhagen the benefit of the doubt, but even he seems to find many of Goldhagen's charges improbably. Lapomarda, who knows the Catholic sources better than Goldhagen, displays less even patience. In the end, it almost seems that the differences between Herzstein and Lapomarda are more differences of degree than of substance-at least with respect to Goldhagen.

The more serious and potentially divisive questions concern the nature of the Holocaust, responsibility for it, and appropriate responses today. Goldhagen, who had initially laid the blame on ordinary Germans now lays it squarely on the Catholic Church. In the case of ordinary Germans, it was difficult to prescribe a fully satisfactory response. An entire change of heart and mind, together with an admission of culpability, would seem the obvious response, but they are notoriously difficult to monitor and enforce. In the case of the Catholic Church, Goldhagen devises a much neater solution: The Church must reform its very structure, doctrines, and sacred texts in such a way as to eradicate all traces of anti-Semitism from its past and all possibilities for its recurrence in the future. In other words, the Church must cease to be the Church and transform itself into something like a democratic and decentralized Protestant denomination. And to ensure the a genuine transformation of hearts and minds, it must rewrite the entire New Testament, especially the Gospel of St. Matthew, removing all negative references to the Jews, especially any part they may have played in the death of Christ.

Proposals to reform Christianity have been with us since the first century, and many have favored some form of liberalization or democratization. The great challenge for the most radical, namely the Reformation, lay in preserving the essentials of denominational unity and discipline. Our continuing debate over Mark Noll's America's God has touched upon some of the main issues as they played themselves out in America. In this issue, we conclude the formal symposium-although not discussions of the topic-with contributions from Margaret Bendroth, Laurie Maffly-Kipp, and Ann Taves, followed by Mark Noll's response to the entire symposium. The contributors to the symposium all warmly praise Noll's impressive work, which they clearly expect to stand as the cornerstone of American religious history for the foreseeable future. Each also has criticisms, and their criticisms generally fall into a common pattern. Bendroff points to Noll's tendency to view the story of American Protestantism after Jonathan Edwards as one of loss-a falling off from a vision that could encompass both intellectual and religious passion. She, like Maffly-Kipp and Taves, also calls attention to Noll's tendency to restrict the active cast of characters, mainly at the expense of women and African-Americans.

All of the contributors note Noll's primary focus on Calvinism, mainly at the expense of Methodists, and Taves suggests that he slights the importance of the missionary impulse. Bendroff credits him with offering "a more generous accounting for Protestantism's gradual drift toward women and away from men," which included a growing preference for an immanent rather than a transcendent God. And she concludes by noting "the almost eerie relevance of his narrative to the events of the past year, in which God's will has been regularly invoked on behalf of military and political ends." Similarly Laffly-Kipp concludes with the evocation of African-American biblical hermeneutics and a protest against Noll's inclination to encase American religion in a "Calvinist box," while Taves ends with the question of religion's role in supporting the sense of American exceptionalism in the world. All, in other words, gently challenge Noll on the significance of the past for the present and, perhaps unintentionally, raise the question of whether present standards may appropriately be applied to the past.

America's God belongs firmly in the orbit of time's arrow, notwithstanding Noll's sense of what we have lost. In this respect his admirable intertwining of the religious and secular stories invites the queries of his commentators about contemporary implications. And his response to the commentators could hardly be more gracious and appreciative, even as he holds firmly to the ground he has carved out. In this perspective, I was more than a little surprised that he devoted considerable attention to one of my sentences from the introduction to the previous issue. I had queried his apparent claim that Abraham Lincoln, an unbeliever, embodied the ultimate significance of American religion. Here, he responds, "It is not my view that Lincoln gave utterance to adequately Christian theology; it is my view that, compared to the Christian theologians of his day, his vision of God came much closer to what an adequate Christian view should be than did theirs." And, in these words, he effectively gives away the ground he thought he was reclaiming-and confirms my main point. By the Civil War, American Protestantism had undergone a hefty infusion of secular concerns. The problem was not that people had abandoned the faith of their fathers but that they were demanding that it conform to their lives in the world.

In more ways than one, Abraham Lincoln embodied that revolutionary impulse which "makes short work of tradition." His defense of a glorious cause depended upon breaking with the past rather than realizing its promise. The ensuing omelet may well have been worth the broken eggs, but we gain little by banishing them from story. The gains and losses of previous revolutions, like the tragedies that engulf contemporary Africa, may have much to teach us about assessing the respective claims of time's arrow and time's circle in the history of the modern Western world.

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