Communications

REVIEWS OF BOOKS

To the Editor:

I had no intention on commenting on Patricia W. Romero's "review" of my book, Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism (1996), AHR 103 (February 1998: 185); I changed my mind after reading the exchange between Joseph White and Romero in the October AHR (103: 1398–99).

     Romero writes, "I stand by my review." Readers of the AHR should know exactly what Romero "stands by". . . and for. Two examples from her review should give AHR readers a sense of her professionalism, scholarship, attention to detail, and credibility: "I feel compassion for Barbara Winslow, who in the early 1970s, . . . made the wrenching decision to drop out of academe and stay home to raise her children." This comes as a big surprise to me since I have been professionally active in the academy since 1972. Even the back page and frontispiece of the book state that I was an assistant professor at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York. Along with twenty-six years of teaching at a number of colleges and universities, I have also appeared at countless academic conferences presenting papers on the subject of Sylvia Pankhurst. In 1986, I even appeared on a panel at the Social Science History Conference in St. Louis with Romero on the topic of Sylvia Pankhurst. In no way have I come "in so late to a field," as my conference participation and publications on the subject demonstrate. Why Romero writes these things about my personal life is somewhat of a mystery to me. However, they have no place in a scholarly professional journal such as the AHR.

     Another example from Romero's review: "I am complimented by Winslow's paraphrase of my own description of Pankhurst in her introduction." Aside from the fact that there is no introduction in my book (Sheila Rowbotham wrote the foreword; there is a preface and acknowledgments), there is no mention of Romero in the foreword, preface, or acknowledgments. Romero's book is listed in a bibliographic footnote that includes over twenty-five books and articles on the subject of Pankhurst, suffragism, and communism (p. 196).

     I leave it to the readers of the AHR to decide for themselves whether or not this book is "feminist heroine worship" of Pankhurst; if I "paraphrase" Romero's work or "follow" her chapter chronology, if Jill Craigie (not a suffragette, East London activist, or communist) and Fenner Brockway are a representative sample of peer opinions of Pankhurst, and whether or not my perspective regarding Pankhurst's contributions to socialist feminism is substantially well documented.

Barbara Winslow

Brooklyn College, City University of New York

Patricia W. Romero does not wish to reply.

The Editors

To the Editor:

I write this in response to Karen Leonard's review of Saurabh Dube's Untouchable Pasts [AHR 104 (February 1999): 165–66]. Although the review carries some (seemingly grudging) praise for the book, its tenor is in the main set by its many critical remarks. However, both the criticisms and the compliments remain piecemeal, so that the reader has little context within which to appreciate either. Indeed, it would have been easier to understand the review had it provided a systematic critique of the book.

     The review itself fails to grapple with or coherently present the arguments of the book, or even its terms. Thus Leonard states that Untouchable Pasts is "not a historical or anthropological investigation of the Satnami past, as Dube tells us himself. His book 'constructs a history of the Satnamis'; it is not 'a mere unfolding of a chronologically sequential set of events' but 'an interpretive exercise.'" But Dube's book does not resort to any such easy exorcism of history and anthropology. Here is what Dube actually says in the passage: "This book constructs a history of the Satnamis, but it does not present the past as a mere unfolding of a chronologically sequential set of events . . . [It] is an interpretive exercise, an exercise in which the perspectives of history and anthropology are each inseparably bound to the other; where archival and non-official sources are read in an ethnographic mode and fieldwork is cast as an engagement with the historical imagination" (p. 2). Whatever else may be said of the passage, it is certainly not the rejection of history or anthropology that Leonard makes it out to be.

     The only attempt in the review to deal with the arguments of Untouchable Pasts is a chapterwise summary of the book, with each chapter assigned roughly a sentence. Since many of the book's most important arguments are made across several chapters, this is a particularly unhelpful way of trying to understand it. Furthermore, the summaries are not always accurate. Thus, according to the review, Chapter 4 is about "assess[ing the] benefits and losses to the Satnamis under British rule." Only the apologists for colonialism, and the nationalists who challenged colonialism, would even consider such an assessment necessary. Few serious historians today, and certainly not Dube, would consider such an assessment to be interesting or necessary. Similarly, the summary of Chapter 5 gets so lost in details that it fails, for example, to consider Dube's very interesting emphasis on how Baba Ramchandra's written text retained marks of orality. This is part of a larger problem. The review consistently ignores the creative and critical readings of different varieties of both oral testimonies and written records within Untouchable Pasts.

     The review's lack of engagement with the book is particularly unfortunate since Untouchable Pasts is, to my mind, one of the most exciting books on South Asia to come out in recent times. It is an extremely innovative effort to combine history and anthropology in a precise way, where both are simultaneously bound up and distinct from each other. It is also theoretical in particularly interesting ways, for it "does not cast matters on a resolutely grand theoretical scale, characteristic of writings that turn theory into a touchstone of truth" (p. 4), but seeks to place its theory in relation to everyday life.

     I cannot hope to provide an indication of the book's arguments and scope in this brief response. As one instance of the book's contributions, however, I would like to cite its attempt to think through the "two fetishized concept metaphors of community and state" (p. xii). Dube shows very persuasively that symbols of the colonial state were central to the constitution of the Satnampanth, the sect that the book focuses on. Nor was it as though these signs of dominance were acknowledged only at moments of passivity, only to be erased at moments of resistance. Dube's work shows how, from a historical or anthropological perspective, the distinction between state and community that has been constructed in much theoretically influential recent writing is far too simplistic. Through its narratives, Untouchable Pasts reveals how the intricate relationship between state and community could be reconceived.

Ajay Skaria

University of Virginia

Karen Leonard replies:

My praise for Dube's book was not grudging. I do not know the author, but I was very taken by his obvious brightness, stimulating ideas, and excellent writing, and I was sympathetic to his carving out a theoretical third position. I did not think Dube was rejecting history or anthropology, as Ajay Skaria alleges, but quoted Dube carefully to show that he sought to use methods and insights from both disciplines to construct and interpret a history of the Satnamis. As my review and Skaria's comments make clear, Skaria enthusiastically applauds Dube's "creative and critical readings" of his oral and written sources, while I, troubled by questions about methodology and what I felt was an often sketchy and confusing presentation of research findings, was unable to achieve a full understanding and appreciation of Dube's interpretations.

Karen Leonard

University of California, Irvine

To the Editor:

In her review of Mark Johnston's At the Front Line: Experiences of Australian Soldiers in World War II [AHR 104 (February 1999): 170–71], Margaret Barter hails the book as "a welcome addition to an area recently dubbed the 'New Military History' by Paul Addison and Angus Calder in . . . (1997)." In fact, the term "new military history" has appeared in print so many times since the 1970s that, in an article in the January 1988 Military Affairs, Benjamin Franklin Cooling declared it to be "passé."

     In the first line of his review of Gary Gallagher's The Confederate War [AHR 104 (February 1999): 194–95], John M. McCardell, Jr., declares: "Military history, at least among Civil War historians, has been out of fashion for some time." This statement bewilders me. By "Civil War historians," McCardell might be referring to academic historians who specialize in the Civil War era, as opposed to antiquarians or writers of popular history, both of whom produce an annual avalanche of books on Civil War battles, leaders, and so forth, but neither of whom many academics consider "historians." Yet Joseph Glathaar, Earl Hess, John Marszalek, James McPherson, Reid Mitchell, Carol Reardon, and Emory Thomas, to name a few, all have PhDs, hold academic positions, and have recently written books on Civil War military history. Three recent bibliographic works—Writing the Civil War: The Quest to Understand, edited by James McPherson and William Cooper; The American Civil War: Handbook of Literature and Research, edited by Steven Woodworth; and the more popular The Civil War in Books: An Analytical Bibliography, by David Eicher—contain staggering numbers of references to recently published Civil War military histories, many of which were written by bona fide historians.

     Perhaps by "military history," McCardell means the "drum-and-bugle" genre of operational history, as opposed to the new military history. If so, McCardell's definition of "military history" differs from those who define it as encompassing battles and leaders as well as the interaction between war and society.

     The point is not to quibble about semantics, nor to criticize Margaret Barter or John McCardell or their reviews. However, their statements illustrate the fact that many nonmilitary historians don't seem to understand much about military history.

     I entreat the American Historical Review to invite a senior scholar in the field to write an essay on the state of military history, focusing on current trends in the literature and currently debated topics. Such an article would be useful, both for its informative value and to spark debate, which is what all history is really about.

Robert J. Schneller, Jr.

Department of the Navy, Contemporary History Branch

Margaret Barter replies:

Robert J. Schneller, Jr.'s comments on the need for definition in military history writing are pertinent and would elicit spirited debate among military historians, whether they were academic historians or those seen by Schneller as belonging to a less formal group of practitioners, including antiquarians, aficionados, and "writers of popular history."

     In reply, I confine my views to Schneller's opening paragraph, which dealt with my review of Mark Johnston's At the Front Line: Experiences of Australian Soldiers in World War II. Ironically, by drawing attention to my use of the term "New Military History" as passé, Schneller has emphasized the point that I was intending to convey within the limitations of a book review. Rather than herald Johnston's book as a newcomer to a novel genre in military history writing, I was seeking to recognize the context of the book's publication, and to highlight the salient attributes of its many worthy antecedents. In my review, after noting the use of the term "New Military History" by British historians at a 1996 inaugural conference on the solider's experience of war, I went on to illustrate that the so-called "New Military History" itself had a history of some twenty-five years.

     While these issues are confusing for professional historians, we need also to consider the general reader, who is usually unaware of the nuances under discussion here. To the nonmilitary reader, all books pertaining to war are "war books," and by association the authors of those books are military historians. Increasingly, as more complex topics about war involve historians of all persuasions, those simple equations are no longer true. Thus Robert Schneller's plea for an essay on the state of military history is to be heartily endorsed. Indeed, with much attention focused on the sixtieth anniversaries of events in the Second World War, a commemorative issue of the AHR devoted to military history writing in all its varieties seems appropriate.

Margaret Barter

Artarmon, Australia

John McCardell replies:

Robert J. Schneller's suggestion certainly has merit. Likewise, his letter contributes to readers' understanding of the current state of the field of military history.

John M. McCardell, Jr.

Middlebury College

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