Archives: Book Reviews

Story: A collection of essays that explore how museums, theme parks, and other cultural institutions preserve and sometimes distort the past, and what can be done to give citizens a more sophisticated understanding of history.

Review: That the rich and powerful in America have dictated the interpretation and portrayal of American history, particularly in popular institutions, probably shouldn’t come as a surprise. Still, there’s something shocking about the vividness with which Mike Wallace (a history professor, not the guy from 60 Minutes) discusses the issue in “Mickey Mouse History.” Whether it’s the original, slave-free version of restored colonial Williamsburg or the corporate-designed exhibits at Disneyland and EPCOT, the depictions of America’s past that have been most heavily marketed to the American public are free of almost any real historical context, or any inkling that there is debate over the positive and negative effects of various events of the past. The strength of this book, other than its detail, is that it takes conclusions others have reached – such as those about Americans’ connection to their own pasts or about the need to commemorate the lives of “average” Americans, minorities and women – and marries them to a need for historical rigor and standards. Wallace makes clear that the past should not be sanitized or exaggerated for any purpose, no matter how noble. And he makes clear how dangerous distortions of the past can be, particularly in chapters that discuss Ronald Reagan’s or Newt Gingrich’s…shall we say, passing acquaintance with history as it happened as opposed to how they wish it had happened.

Story: When Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a segregated bus, Montgomery, Alabama’s civil rights community settles on a young pastor named Martin Luther King, Jr. as its main spokesman and leader. The lengthy boycott eventually pushes King to national prominence. King and other activists formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to promote nonviolent protest against segregation. While protests in Birmingham and Selma helped motivate reluctant politicians to pass important legislation, and the 1963 march on Washington produced one of the twentieth century’s most famous speeches, SCLC was almost always underfunded and understaffed, swept along by events as much as it initiated action. Caught between politicians who wanted to move more slowly and radical activists who felt he wasn’t moving nearly fast enough, King pursued a breakneck schedule of speaking engagements, meetings, and protests while the FBI sought to use his private life and friendships with suspected Communists to turn the country against him. Even as the Vietnam War distracted the country from the civil rights movement, King worked to call attention to the economic and social inequities inherent in American society, until an assassin’s bullet ended his life.

Review: David J. Garrow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography is a fascinating read for those who might know only the most basic details of the civil rights movement. I myself was often struck by how the movement often asked for relatively small concessions, which communities would resist with seeming disproportionate force. During the initial Montgomery bus boycott, for example, King and the rest of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) were not asking for an end to bus segregation – they merely asked that blacks and whites be segregated in such a way that blacks would not have to give up their seats or stand while seats reserved for whites went unused. The bus company itself, damaged by the boycott, was more than willing to go along with this compromise, but it took a year before the local government would make any concessions. (Thus the boycott provides an early example not only of how economic interests could put pressure on political centers of power, but on how long it might take that pressure to work.) While looking back, such resistance appears hopelessly misguided, in truth it was also a boon for the civil rights movement. Garrow describes a number of incidents like SCLC’s failed protests in Albany, Georgia, where the local law enforcement showed restraint, allowed blacks to march, and never allowed the galvanizing moment that would motivate blacks and whites against segregation to occur.

Story: Pulitzer Prize-winning author James M. McPherson explores the political and military history of the Civil War; he traces its roots to the dispute between North and South over the institution of slavery and argues that while the Union held significant advantages over the Confederacy, the outcome was far from guaranteed.

Review: One remarkable element of the book is that almost 275 pages pass before the Confederacy fires on Fort Sumter and the war officially begins. McPherson uses those pages to carefully establish the political and social context of the time and make his argument as to the central cause of the war. Here he pulls no punches – while issues such as states’ rights and industrial expansion were bandied about, the fundamental, irreconcilable conflict between the North and South was the presence of slavery in the South and its expansion into the territories. Southern legislators were dominant in the 1850s, holding legislation such as the Homestead Act and the transcontinental railroad in check, and overturning the Missouri Compromise through the Dred Scott decision.

Story: “Domesticating History” is a well-researched exploration of the contexts in which the homes of four different prominent Americans (George Washington, Louisa May Alcott, Thomas Jefferson and Booker T. Washington) were turned into museums. Unfortunately, the book does not provide much in the way of description of the museums themselves, nor of the particular interpretations that visitors did in fact take away from their viewing of the exhibits – West seems most interested in providing intellectual biographies of the museum founders and discussions of the political maneuvering required to establish and fund these museums.

Review: It is all interesting and very readable material, yet in the end, the lack of depth regarding the museums themselves leaves me feeling as if, at the core of the study, there’s no “there” there.