Communications

ARTICLES

To the Editor:

I am a student at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, majoring in education with an emphasis on history. I am currently enrolled in a human relations class, and an essay in the December 2000 issue of American Historical Review caught my attention. The article, "The Demographic Cost of Sugar: Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas" by Michael Tadman, /journals/ahr/105.5/ah001534.html to me depicts a very sterile view of the slave experience.

     While reading it, I failed to see a human connection in the essay. According to Oppression and Social Justice, the text that we are using in class, an article, "Guidelines for Choosing Books on African American Themes" by Beryle Banfield, illustrates that there should be a portrayal of African-American slaves when writing about this and any topic having to do with slavery.

     The people in this essay were seen as statistics, much the way they were seen then. When the human aspect was discussed, it was in a matter of fact way. Seeing these people as just statistics really did bother me, especially when the author discussed how North American slaves were taller than Caribbean slaves because they were better fed. Banfield also asks the question, "Does the text glorify the plantation system as beneficial to African Americans?" To me, it almost felt like the author was talking about livestock, that they grew taller and stronger because of their diet and better treatment.

     Although the essay was historically accurate in its facts, and written in a very scientific way, I feel that the human side and their suffering should have been portrayed.

Tom Herman

St. Cloud, Minnesota

Michael Tadman replies:

I am sorry that Tom Herman found my article on slavery in the Americas to be a sterile kind of history that lacked a human dimension and tended to turn people into statistics. My purpose was actually to use quantitative history as a way of opening up the true scale of suffering of enslaved black people in the Americas. My intention was not to use slaves as a convenient basis for a technical exercise in quantitative history. Instead, it seemed to me that, in order to explore the extent of suffering and to form a basis for reflecting on some fundamental aspects of slave experiences, quantitative history could in this instance have a key, demystifying and liberating role.

     My aim was to try to resolve a central problem in the history of slavery in the Americas: why did slave populations expand naturally in North America but elsewhere suffer natural decrease? Behind the demographic numbers lie so many arguments, among contemporary slaveowners and among academics—arguments about the treatment of slaves by owners, about "slave breeding," and about the morale, family lives, and cultures of enslaved people. If the central demographic problem could be unraveled, it seemed to me that we could start to discover much about the life experiences of slaves in the Americas. In my article, I also responded to a particular academic literature whose evidence and conclusions seemed to me alarmingly to understate the scale of suffering experienced by North American slaves in particular.

     In my article, I used illustrative quotations sparingly. My purpose was to try to avoid too much reliance on what might be called a "quote and comment" technique, where the historian selects certain convenient quotations and uses them as central supports for assertions and argument. Also, I did not focus on the experiences of individual slaves. Use of slave testimony and a focus on individual slaves would have added to my article, but my overall aim was to unlock a problem of numbers. I was trying to establish interconnections between (and numerical weightings for) certain factors, and so I tried to work in this instance with quantifiable evidence. I would not, however, wish to make any claim that quantitative history is generally of greater importance than non-quantitative. Indeed, in Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (1989, expanded 1996), I tried to combine quantitative and non-quantitative history, and a slavery book on which I am now working makes very little use of quantitative methods.

     Quantification, it seems to me, can be effective in opening up some historical issues, but probably, in most areas of history, qualitative approaches have greater potential. Quantitative slavery history (and probably quantitative social history in general) is not usually valuable for directly exploring human motivations, mentalities, or ideologies, but it can help in establishing both the contexts in which people acted and some of the outcomes of their actions—and the more we know about these things, the more we are able to use a range of historical approaches to explore motivations, mentalities, values, and human experiences.

     The argument in my article was that we should dismiss the notion that North American slaves were well treated by owners, despite the fact that their population grew by births greatly outnumbering deaths. Natural increase in North America came about, I argued, because the truly extreme conditions of sugar plantations were largely absent from the experience of North American slaves. But slave mortality was still enormously high, and U.S. slaveowners, because of their better diet and living conditions, physically towered above their ill-fed slaves.

     My article tried to explain something about human suffering in the Americas. It seemed to me that my analysis might have wide implications for the exploration of slaveholder mentalities and actions, and for discovering more about the cultures, resistance patterns, mentalities, and the family and daily lives of slaves. My hope was that if I could clear away a major demographic puzzle, I could help to open up a fuller understanding of the experiences of enslaved peoples in the Americas.

Michael Tadman

University of Liverpool

To the Editor:

I appreciated a number of articles in the April 2001 issue. As someone with both a professional and political interest in the history of American radicalism, I found the article by James A. Miller, Susan D. Pennybacker, and Eve Rosenhaft on the European angle of the "Scottsboro Boys" case to be very enlightening. The documentation it presents from newly opened archives in the Soviet Union confirms the portrait drawn by many historians in the 1980s of the Communist Party as an internationalist social movement, not merely a conspiracy directed by Moscow, as some recent historians have endeavored to show.

     As one who teaches survey courses in world history, the survey by Gale Stokes of recent conceptual overviews of world history was both timely and useful.

     But I would like to comment more specifically on A. Roger Ekirch's survey of changes in sleep patterns from early modern to industrial Europe, a thesis one is tempted to term "eye-opening." While I am not at all a specialist in European history or in medical history, Ekirch's article reminded me of two primary-source documents I use in my world history classes that refer, broadly speaking, to sleep issues, and that may help demonstrate further Ekirch's point.

     In discussing the persecution of witches in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I use excerpts from the Compendium Maleficarum by Francesco Maria Guazzo, originally published in Italy in 1608. This work is permeated by references to the sabbats, nocturnal gatherings where accused witches allegedly cavorted with devils. I had assumed that tales of these sabbats emerged mainly from dreams. But if indeed many people were up at various points during the night, and even left their homes, as Ekirch says, such accusations become easier to make. The fact of people moving about, combined with the obscurity of the night, would have made it easier for people to imagine that they saw such nefarious gatherings. On the other hand, many of the tales in the Compendium, especially those dealing with sexual temptation, do appear to be recollections of dreams, and such recollections at times had fateful consequences in real trials for witchcraft. So perhaps remembering fewer of our dreams, and those less vividly, as Ekirch suggests we do today, may have some benefits for individuals and society, as well as drawbacks.

     The second instance is a fleeting reference in the testimony of one Elizabeth Bentley before the Sadler Committee of the British Parliament, which in 1831 was investigating the conditions of factory workers. (My citation is from The Human Record, vol. 2, edited by Alfred Andrea and James Overfield, 4th edition [2001], but many documentary collections include this testimony.) Bentley, as a young adult, described her childhood, when her mother was responsible for getting her to work at 5 a.m., with no clock in the house, and with grave penalties for being late. "My mother," Bentley recalled, "has been up at 4 o'clock in the morning, and at 2 o'clock in the morning; . . . and I have sometimes been at Hunslet Car at 2 o'clock in the morning, when it was streaming down with rain, and we have had to stay till the mill was opened."

     I have discussed with my students the importance of this passage in signifying that the social meaning of time changed with the coming of industrialization, and students can readily see the hardships caused by the adoption of standardized clock time in a situation where many workers did not have ready access to clocks. But Ekirch's research suggests as well that Bentley's mother may have been experiencing the difficult transition from one type of sleep pattern to another. If she awoke in the middle of the night, as she may formerly have been accustomed to doing, she might not then be able to awaken on time later; the fear of financial repercussions was undoubtedly a cause of great anxiety for her and for others in her position.

     I am sure that other readers of Roger Ekirch's article will also look at familiar documents in a new way after considering his evidence. I hope that he continues to investigate some of the consequences for social and economic life of the sleep pattern that he has identified, and especially the consequences of the transition from this pattern to the one with which we are more familiar today.

Robert Shaffer

Shippensburg University

A. Roger Ekirch replies:

I much appreciate Robert Shaffer's insights along with other suggestions that I have received in recent months from both historians and sleep specialists. Hopefully, an awareness of this pre-industrial pattern of slumber will help to further our understanding of any number of historical problems, including possibly the nettlesome topic of witches' sabbaths to which he alludes.

     Shaffer is right to single out evidence in the Compendium Maleficarum, to which I would add Nicolas Remy's late sixteenth-century handbook on witchcraft, Demonolatry, from which the former draws. Both contain intriguing accounts of late-night sabbaths that do not always appear to have been the products of dreams. Several instances, in fact, relate how wives left the sides of their slumbering husbands, sometimes after first administering a potion to prevent their awakening prematurely. (Remy, incidentally, at one point cites Apuleius's tale of Telephion of Miletus, who was attacked by a witch in the form of a weasel after the time of "first sleep.") Still, the case for organized assemblies or sabbaths, in my view, remains unproven, apart from the likelihood that individuals or small groups of kindred spirits practiced sorcery in the dead of night (that is, immediately following "first sleep"), which was widely thought the most inviting time for demons of all sorts.

     I further agree that the change from segmented to seamless slumber was anything but smooth, for both individuals and entire societies. Evidence strongly indicates that the transition occurred gradually over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with numerous permutations along the way. And, as I tried to suggest, we may still be feeling the aftershocks today in the form of so-called sleep disorders. As Shaffer recognizes, much work yet needs to be done both on this matter and so many more issues relating to the history of sleep.

A. Roger Ekirch

Virginia Tech

REVIEWS OF BOOKS

To the Editor:

In his review of my book, Religions of the Silk Road: Overland Trade and Cultural Exchange from Antiquity to the Fifteenth Century, Denis Sinor does an injustice to the readers of the AHR by assessing the book in terms entirely irrelevant to its stated purpose [AHR 105 (October 2000): 1272]. Contrary to what Sinor appears to have wished, Religions of the Silk Road makes no claim to be a definitive or exhaustive statement on premodern Asian political or economic history. On the contrary, the book is, as I write in my preface, "an attempt to weave some two thousand years of Asian history around a particular thread—that of the movement and transformation of religious ideas—into a readable and informative account . . . written first and foremost with the student and general reader in mind."

     By focusing narrowly on a few points of detail that in no way affect, or, in most cases, even relate to, the general theme of the book (specifically, the spread of world religions along trade routes), Sinor misleads AHR readers about its content, purpose, and intended audience. As a result, the segment of readers to whom the book is addressed will find little or nothing in Sinor's review that recognizes the needs of one who teaches introductory world history or Asian history surveys. I would like to suggest that a review serves readers best when it assesses a work in terms of its target audience and how well it meets its stated objectives, as opposed to merely in terms of the particular personal interests of the reviewer.

     For the record, Religions of the Silk Road is in fact a book about the history of religions, although which religions it discusses and what arguments it makes about them are topics not mentioned by Sinor in his review. It is not a book about economic history, except tangentially in that merchants played an ongoing role in the transmission of Buddhism, Manichaeism, Christianity, Islam, and earlier, Hebraic and Iranic, ideas, from west to east along the overland trade routes of Asia. It is not a book about political history, especially medieval Inner Asian political history (which happens to be Sinor's field). This subject is briefly mentioned only by way of backdrop to the issue of cultural transmission, yet Sinor has chosen to make it the very basis of his critique, to the exclusion of most everything else in the book.

     Sinor's initial complaint is that the book, at 186 pages, is not long enough. He ignores the possibility that a concise treatment was intended, which gives us a further indication that what he is reviewing is not the book at hand but rather some imaginary work that he wished to see written. He is able to contend that my book fails to live up to its claims only by misrepresenting what those claims are. The "errors of fact" Sinor claims to identify are not as clear-cut as he would have readers believe, even if they did bear on the book's thesis, which they do not. And if he did feel so strongly about his interpretations, he ought to have been willing to share them with me when he was offered the opportunity to review the unpublished typescript, rather than reserving his remarks for the public forum.

     In writing a deliberately condensed book, one can hardly feel too much remorse for not including absolutely everything. If Sinor had been willing to seek out or even acknowledge the book's strong points, he might have judged it in terms of whether enough evidence (as opposed to all possible evidence) was provided to illustrate my central thesis: that the transmission across Asia of ideas from virtually all the so-called "world religions" followed a distinct pattern over a remarkably long period of time.

     Certainly it is easier to write a dismissive review than a thoughtful one, particularly if one feels unconstrained to actually discuss what the book is about. As for Sinor's suggestion that, in writing this book, I "bit off more than I could chew," let me assure him that I bit off exactly as much as I wished to, no more and no less, and that I remain satisfied with the result.

Richard Foltz

University of Florida

Denis Sinor replies:

Soon after the publication of my review of Foltz's book, the author thought it proper and useful to send me an irate e-mail, from which, out of kindness, I will not quote. I then thought that he needed the outburst to let out steam, but the idea that he might wish to go public with his grievance never occurred to me. I was wrong. But he who lives in a glass house should throw no stones. Foltz does his best to instruct me how to write a book review. So far, I have written no more than about 150 to 200, but I am always willing to learn. Why is he unwilling to listen and learn? Could I really be so much off the mark?

     On Foltz's recently published translation of a Persian text, Bruce Wannell had this to say: "Translation is not an easy art: it requires, at the very least, linguistic competence and cultural sensitivity. The present work falls short on both counts. It is a pity that it was done in such a rushed and careless manner" (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 3d series, 10 [November 2000]: 401). Foltz received a similarly dismissive critique in the Journal of Asian History (34 [2000]: 80). In comparison, I was quite gentle when I concluded my own review of Foltz's third book to appear within two years with the words: "In summation, in this book Foltz bit off more than he could chew. Yet I believe that he is capable of more thorough work than this hastily prepared book" (p. 1273). I now wonder whether I was too optimistic; perhaps haste and carelessness are, indeed, the hallmarks of Foltz's scholarship, if this is the right word to use in referring to his writings.

     I sympathize with Foltz insofar as all of us prefer to receive praise instead of blame for our efforts. Clearly, he wished for more praise and milder criticism. But my criticism was mild! I was quite aware that his book had been written "first and foremost with the student and general reader in mind" and cited this sentence in my review. But these two categories of readers deserve something better than what Foltz offers them here. For example, few undergraduates would be so familiar with the name of Narshaki, a tenth-century historian of Bukhara cited several times, that they could go without being told who he was, and they would have deserved to be informed on who fought against whom in the Battle of Talas (p. 8). The brighter among them would probably like to know the original language(s) in which the lengthy citations on pages 76–77 and 79 were written. Of course, in my review I could have enumerated more factual errors than I did. For instance, I kept mum about his placing (p. 80) the Uighur Empire of the eighth century on the South Siberian steppe instead of in Mongolia where it flourished, and I did not rebuke him for stating that the Ming expelled the Mongols in the fifteenth century (p. 139), when the correct date is 1368. A thousand miles here or there, or a misdating by a century, are of little import when one is hell-bent on producing yet another book. A self-styled historian of religions, Foltz is apparently ready to state the enormity that the "Nestorians shunned the symbol of the cross" (p. 120), oblivious of the two fine illustrations (nos. 7 and 8) that in this very book depict Nestorian crosses!

     For the use of sophomores, Foltz wrote a sophomoric book. If he wishes to assure me and his readers that in writing he bit off exactly as much as he wished to and that he remains satisfied with the result, I am bound to believe him. But I feel justified in my belief—not expressed in my original review—that what he gives his readers is shabby scholarship.

Denis Sinor

Indiana University

To the Editor:

Stewart Weaver's comment in his review of Jonathan Haslam's book The Vices of Integrity: E. H. Carr, 1892–1982 (AHR 105 [October 2000]: 1396–97) that What Is History is "the one book of Carr's that is still read" seems curiously parochial. Scholars in International Relations consider The Twenty Years' Crisis both seminal and of enduring value. Unlike Weaver, they do not dismiss it as a mistimed defense of appeasement. Indeed, a leading journal (Review of International Studies) as recently as December 1998 consciously modeled its first special issue on Carr's book in dealing with "The Eighty Years Crisis 1919–1999." It went as far as to use Carr's chapter titles and section headings, so as to acknowledge the continuing relevance of his questions and even of some of his answers. Surely it is not too much to ask that a historian might look over his academic fence and recognize what is being done in an allied discipline?

Peter J. Yearwood

University of Papua New Guinea

Stewart Weaver does not wish to reply.

The Editors

To the Editor:

Having had generally favorable and objective reviews for From Yalta to Berlin, I have been totally amazed by the claim that Heike Bungert made in your review to the effect that the book "assigns to the French the role of the anti-German devils" [AHR 106 (February 2001): 282–83].

     I cannot imagine how Bungert drew this conclusion. I wrote in the book that Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet in 1950–1951 opened the door to Franco-German reconciliation and to a new Europe, that Charles de Gaulle was the real winner of the 1958–1961 Berlin Wall crisis, and that François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl in 1990 sealed the great bargain that gave Kohl his German unity and gave Mitterrand his European currency. I cannot see how any of this "perpetuates the negative American view of the French" that Bungert claims to have discerned.

     I wrote, accurately, that de Gaulle began his policy toward Germany in 1945 with a demand for control over the Rhineland and that Mitterrand was reluctant to have Germany united in 1990, but those statements happen to be historically correct. France changed its policy, as I wrote. That is positive, not negative.

     I might add that some French scholars saw major parts of the manuscript before publication and raised no such objection.

W. R. Smyser

Washington, D.C.

Heike Bungert replies:

Being just as "amazed" as William Smyser that he did not regard my review of his book as "generally favorable and objective," when I called his book "a good overview of Germany's place in international power politics," I only wish to respond to Smyser's direct point of criticism, that he did not "perpetuate the negative American view of the French." Here, I was referring more specifically to the period from 1944 to 1950. Modern revisionist histories of France's policy toward Germany in the postwar era, unfortunately most of them in German or French, all state that the basis for France's policy of cooperation with Germany, which officially started with the Schuman plan of 1950, was laid in 1944 to 1945. (See Henri Ménudier, L'Allemagne Occupée 1945–1949, 2d edn. [Brussels, 1990]; Stefan Zauner, Erziehung und Kulturmission [Munich, 1994]; and Armin Heinen, Saarjahre [Stuttgart, 1996]. See also the works by Alain Lattard, Rainer Möhler, Sylvie Lefèvre, Monique Mombert, and the earlier books by Wilfried Loth, Sozialismus und Internationalismus [Stuttgart, 1977]; and Reinhard Schreiner, Bidault, der MRP und die französische Deutschlandpolitik [Frankfurt am Main, 1985]. Dietmar Hüser already complained in 1996 that German and French findings were not taken into account by Anglo-Saxon historians; compare Hüser, Frankreich's "doppelte Deutschlandpolitik" [Berlin, 1996], 28–29.)

     Most French government officials recognized already by then that a policy of security via integration of Germany was far better and more viable than a policy of French dominance over Germany. In July 1945, a secret French directive spoke out against dismemberment of Germany and instead promoted a politically decentralized German state. By the fall of 1945 at the latest, the French government had informally given up their demands for the Rhineland. (See Rainer Hudemann, "Reparationsgut oder Partner? Zum Wandel in der Forschung über Frankreichs Deutschlandpolitik nach 1945," in Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B 6 [1997]: 31–40, esp. 32, 34, 38.)

     This policy might not always have been visible to the public because the French government was hemmed in by a French public that demanded compensation from Germany for their sufferings during the war; French politicians and diplomats also used recalcitrant French opinion and the threat of a Communist French government as a bargaining chip with the American government. (See Dietmar Hüser, "Druckmittel Deutschland?" in Stephen A. Schuker, ed., Deutschland und Frankreich [Munich, 2000], 185.) Nevertheless, "this image of an at first merciless French policy of security and reparations towards Germany that for decades went nearly uncontested . . . is only so partially true that it no longer suffices for a general characterization of the relationship between both countries since the war. More specifically, this view is simply not true for the policy of the government, nor that of General de Gaulle" (Hudemann, p. 32, my translation).

Heike Bungert

University of Cologne

To the Editor:

In his review of my book, The University Gets Religion (AHR 106 [April 2001]: 572–73), Conrad Cherry asserts that my accusations against the discipline of religious studies "are diatribes" that rest more on my own "dogmatic and supernaturalist convictions than on the history of the field." Although nowhere in the book are my religious convictions (or lack of them) revealed, Cherry's own critique of my study of religion is understandable if only because his interpretation of university divinity schools, a significant partner in religious studies, is completely the reverse of mine. In Cherry's book, Hurrying toward Zion: Universities, Divinity Schools, and American Protestantism (1995), he writes, "For all of its misguided triumphalism and imperialism, the Pan-Protestant vision of divinity education led to unbiased scholarship, the integrity of the life of the mind, and the scholarly exploration of the unusual" (p. 298). Since he quotes me as writing that religious studies "has failed to produce first-rate scholarship," Cherry's reaction to me and my book is not surprising.

     Cherry goes further, however, and claims that my charges are unsubstantiated. That he marshals no evidence in his book for a positive assessment of religious studies is probably beside the point, since my book is the one being evaluated. Yet, in his review, Cherry conveniently ignores that my assertions against academic religion are shared by such leading religion scholars as Jonathan Z. Smith, Jacob Neusner, John F. Wilson, Clyde A. Holbrook, Claude Welch, Mark C. Taylor, Gerald James Larson, Sam Gill—this list could go on. What is more, I quote these primary sources frequently.

     Since reasonable people differ on the merits of any scholarly achievement, choosing between Cherry's or my interpretation of religious studies will not be free from some bias. What is easier to see, however, is that my conclusions are not simply the product of religious bigotry, since I was describing what other experts in the field have said about their academic discipline and I tried to account for the historical roots of religious studies' malaise. Interestingly enough, Cherry ignores such negative estimates of religious studies in his book, and when he encounters them in mine he cheerfully opines that such criticisms, even by insiders, "may be a sign of intellectual vitality rather than of utter confusion."

     This reading of religious studies' critics raises two points that suggest Cherry may be the one tainted by dogmatism and supernaturalism. First, why is my book a diatribe and not part of the same intellectual vitality that characterizes other critical assessments of the field? Second, why does Cherry fail to acknowledge that the accusations I make are based on a trail of evidence from the pens and printers of certain religion scholars written over the last thirty years? Could it be that, because of his faith in the field, Cherry chooses to ignore the reason of religious studies' detractors?

     Whatever the answer to these questions, if Cherry's review is representative of the Pan-Protestant divinity he praises, then it is not clear that its scholarship is as free from bias or as filled with intellectual integrity as he so merrily concludes.

D. G. Hart

Westminster Theological Seminary Escondido, California

Conrad Cherry repies:

D. G. Hart believes that my considerable reservations about his book must be due to a clash between his ideology and mine, mine allegedly deriving from a commitment to the "dogmatism and supernaturalism" of Pan-Protestant liberalism (quite an oxymoron!) and my uncritical "faith in the field" of religious studies. Although my Hurrying toward Zion, unlike Hart's book, does not dismiss the value of the field of religious studies or its parent Protestant liberalism, it does include criticisms of both movements in several of their historical phases. Even the quote from my book that Hart tries to use against me (respecting Protestantism's "misguided triumphalism and imperialism") indicates that my position is hardly uncritical. Truthfully, Hart and I are divided not by some ideological conflict but, instead, by different standards for the discovery and fair-minded measurement of historical evidence.

     As I indicated in my review, Hart marshals no evidence for such verbal assaults as religious studies "has failed to produce first-rate scholarship." As I asked there, "[W]hat would count in favor of the charge apart from a careful evaluation of the thousands of scholarly works in religious studies that have appeared since 1965?" Hart insists in his letter that he has discovered in the "primary sources" of such critics of the field as Jacob Neusner, John F. Wilson, Clyde A. Holbrook, and others a "trail of evidence" justifying his assaults. What Hart fails to point out is that most of the persons he cites have been leaders in, in some cases even creators of, the field of religious studies in its contemporary forms. Yes, those scholars have been critics of their field, especially its hesitation to cut the umbilical cord with American Protestantism, but their criticisms have been offered as a way of moving the field ahead rather than as a way of debunking it. To take one example: Hart's invocation of John F. Wilson as a primary source of his attacks on religious studies would be humorous if it were not so imperceptive. This is the same Wilson who holds a named chair of religion at Princeton University, who has taught numerous graduate students in religious studies who have gone on to distinguished university careers, and whose criticisms of his field in the 1960s and early 1970s helped move religious studies away from the Protestant seminary curricular model. I am puzzled that Hart cannot see the difference between (his) reckless diatribes and (his sources') constructive criticisms, and that he cannot view the latter as a sign of the refusal of a field of study to stagnate.

     Even if the scholars Hart cites were to support his altogether negative perceptions—and they do not—they would constitute no "trail of evidence" for his claims. Hart proposed to write a history of the rationales for the creation of religious studies in the university, and his book lived up to that stated purpose. His is a history of rhetoric that is not based on an examination of curricular developments, institutional contexts, cultural changes, or key scholarly works in religious studies. Thus he asks us to believe that the field has produced no first-rate scholarship because others have supposedly said so, rather than because of his own analysis of that allegedly inferior scholarship. Without the provision of quantitative evidence, he invites us to think that religious studies has not found a welcome home in the research university. Presenting no analysis of contemporary curricula, he asks us to accept his assertion that religious studies has not been shaped significantly by the history of religions or the social sciences. These are trails of evidence?

     Finally, I am surprised that Hart believes that "nowhere in the book are [his own] religious convictions (or lack of them) revealed" and that his assessment of religious studies is in no way tainted by his convictions. I leave it to the reader of this journal to decide whether the following sentences from Hart's book keep secret his religious posture, and whether that posture may not result in his discomfort with the university discipline of religious studies: "'What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?' (Mark 8:36). If believers really hope they will receive enduring rewards in the world to come, then they should have faith that eternal bliss will more than make up for whatever suffering and ignominy the university exhibits toward them here and now. In effect, Christ's question was a variation on the theme that you can't have it both ways. It may be time for faithful academics to stop trying to secure a religion-friendly university while paying deference to the academic standards of the modern university" (p. 251).

Conrad Cherry

Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis

To the Editor:

After more than twenty years as a working historian, I remain fascinated with the evolving scholarly categories of the AHR's book review section.

     In 1989, an AHR review of my case study of the transnational labor activism of migrants from one small Sicilian town was reviewed as a "general" work—presumably because it touched on two national histories. Yet in 2001, my book Italy's Many Diasporas appears instead as a work on "Early Modern and Modern Europe."

     Might not a book written by an Americanist, that analyzes immigrant life on five continents, that appears in a series called "Global Diasporas," and that was assigned for review to a historian of Latin America, more logically belong under the newer rubric of "Comparative/World History"?

     Perhaps this is a small point. Authors are generally grateful for favorable reviews. But my point may not seem completely trivial to younger colleagues—whose future employment is often determined by the pigeonholes deemed appropriate for their dissertations and first books. Nor is it a trivial point for authors hoping their books will find use in the classrooms for which they were actually written.

Donna R. Gabaccia

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

ERRATUM

In the June 2001 issue, p. 910, Hue-Tam Ho Tai meant to say that Marie Louise, not Marie Thérèse, was Napoleon's second wife. Her thanks to the reader who pointed this out.

The Editors

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