24: The LBJ Edition

Steven M. Gillon, The Kennedy Assassination--24 Hours Later: Lyndon B. Johnson's Pivotal First Day as President. New York: Basic Books, 2009. pp. xvii + 294.

Maybe you suspect that history is boring. Or, maybe you know that it's important and interesting, but it just seems like books take all the fun out of it. If any of that sounds familiar, then this book is for you.

The author, Steven M. Gillon is a fantastic researcher and a good writer, too. His topic is absolutely fascinating, and he's looked at tons of documents only recently declassified.

Most books about the Kennedy assassination deal with questions like: Who shot JFK? Was there more than one gunman? Was the assassination the result of a conspiracy? On and on it goes. Gillon's book is different. The author assumes that the Warren Commission got it right. There was one gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald. And even though Oswald would have loved more attention from the Soviet Union and from Cuban authorities, he did what he did on his own.

Instead of dealing with those questions for the ten thousandth time, Gillon investigates what the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, experienced and what he did during the 24 hours after the assassination. Gillon reveals an LBJ who tried to do several things all at once:

• He tried to assure the American people that the devastating assassination of their president had not destroyed their government. For example, Johnson invited photographers to capture those moments that revealed continuity, as when he took the oath of office aboard Air Force One.
• He did his best to show deference to the people who were closest to the slain president, especially to his widow, Jackie Kennedy. Johnson told Mrs. Kennedy that there was no need for her to quickly vacate the White House. He reportedly said to her, "You stay as long as you want."
• He sought to connect his brand new presidency to the legacy of John Kennedy, and worked to consolidate his authority as the head of the executive branch of the U.S. government. During the first 24 following the assassination, Johnson repeatedly told White House staffers that he wanted them to stay on the job, and that he needed them more than they needed him.

Two of Gillon's main themes are Johnson's personal insecurities and the real disdain that many people who were closest to JFK felt for him. Above all, the dead president's brother and closest confidant, Robert F. Kennedy, hated Johnson.

The book comes packaged in seventeen short chapters, which makes it easy to take in one chapter at a time. It includes 14 black-and-white photos, 30 pages of endnotes, a brief "Note on Sources," and a good index.

Here's a C-SPAN video of Gillon talking about his book not long after it was published. Here is the New Books Network podcast interview with Gillon.

Van Halen, before Anyone Outside Southern California Knew Who They Were

Not long after I'd completed comprehensive exams earlier this spring, I wanted to read something entirely different from what I had been poring over for months. So, I read Greg Renoff's book, Van Halen Rising: How a Southern California Backyard Party Band Saved Heavy Metal (Toronto: ECW Press, 2015).

The book starts with the early lives of the original members of Van Halen, and ends with the 11-month world tour that followed the release of their first album in 1978. During that tour, Van Halen usually opened for Black Sabbath, and they blew them off the stage every night. Renoff reports that the experience sent Ozzy Osbourne and the rest of Black Sabbath into something of a depression. They were getting whipped every time they performed.

If, like me, you bought the first VH album and wore it out, then you simply have to read Van Halen Rising. Some of the more interesting aspects of this one-of-a-kind book:

Renoff has a PhD in American history. So the guy knows how to do research. Speaking of which, he conducted scores of interviews with people who "were there," and he quotes them on almost every page. I don't know the historiography of Van Halen, but I'd bet there's nothing else about the band that matches this book for its depth of research and attention to detail. This seems to be one reason why Renoff decided to write it. He's a fan, and nobody had told the story like this.

One of Renoff's main points is that with soft rock, easy listening, and disco (Fleetwood Mac, Eagles, the Bee Gees, etc.) dominating radio play and record sales in the late 1970s, there was no reason to assume that hard rock or heavy metal was going to survive. The author argues that Van Halen almost single-handedly "saved heavy metal."

Anyway, Renoff was trained to make an argument, and that's his. But that's not the heart of the book. What makes the work stand out is the way that Renoff acts like an ethnologist (seriously) detailing the backyard parties and dive-bar gigs that VH played for years on end before they were discovered by people outside of Southern California. And that dominance of all sorts of styles besides hard rock? That led record executives at the time to think that no new hard-rock bands could break through. So why sign them to a contract? That's why the guys in Van Halen were local heroes to teenagers and bikers in places like Pasadena and Hollywood for years before anyone else knew who they were.

All the while, whether they were playing for hundreds of kids in someone's big backyard, or for a dozen roughnecks at a bar on a rainy night, Van Halen always acted like they were playing Madison Square Garden. So when they exploded onto the world's stage, it all seemed so natural. They'd been practicing hard for a long time.

A few other details: Renoff makes the case that if there was an insecure member of Van Halen, it was their virtuoso guitar player, Edward Van Halen. On the other hand, David Lee Roth (who back in the day was simply "Dave Roth"), musically the weak link in the band, had all the confidence, charisma, and showmanship. And this rubbed off on all the others, especially Edward. Renoff suggests that had it not been for Diamond Dave, Alex and Edward Van Halen might have become two of the greatest undiscovered musical talents ever. When the brothers first met Dave, they played all of their gigs pretty stiff and wearing sneakers, worn out jeans, and flannel shirts. Dave is the one who taught them that they couldn't be just great musicians. They had to do more. They had to dress and act like rock stars.

From the other side: Going into the studio to make the first record, Roth realized that when it came to recording an album, his stage presence wasn't going to help him much. He understood that if he didn't do something to improve his mediocre singing, next to the virtuosity of Edward Van Halen's guitar playing, Roth was going to sound terrible. So he took private singing lessons (insisting that anyone who knew about them should call them "voice lessons"). The guy devoted himself to practicing every day. And by the time VH recorded the first album, Dave's singing had improved. All along, he remained the perfect persona for fronting Van Halen.

Oh, and Michael Anthony? The last of the four members to join the original group, Anthony has always been rock solid on the bass guitar, and was easily the best singer and strongest voice in the band. He's the reason that VH was able to do all of those nice three-part harmonies, a feature that made the band stand out from other big-rock acts. Anthony was always the high tenor, and in the studio and on stage, he never missed a note. When the band was recording their first album, producers and engineers focused on how whiz kid Edward's guitar sounded. Anthony has since regretted that no more attention was given to the bass tracks. At the time, he didn't know any of the tricks for perfecting his own sound in the recording studio. So there are parts of the original record where he doesn't like the way the bass sounds.

Anyway, there's so much more to this book. So if you sometimes think of yourself as "the atomic punk," then you'll probably want to read it.

The Non-Class, One Cup Churches of Christ

Ronny F. Wade, The Sun Will Shine Again, Someday. Springfield, MO: 1986. xvi + 208 pp.

The subtitle of this book says it all: “A history of the non-class, one cup Churches of Christ.” The author, Ronny F. Wade, is a long-time, widely-regarded preacher within this group. As one might expect, the history he writes is characterized by advocacy. He is much like the sports announcer who, while calling the game, always cheers for his team.

A bit of background and explanation. The contemporary mainline non-instrumental Churches of Christ adopted the practice of having various Bible classes—sometimes called Sunday School—around the beginning of the twentieth century. They also adopted the use of individual cups for the Lord’s Supper. But not everyone went along. Ever since then, the “non-class, one cup Churches of Christ” have made up a marginal, though significant, group. Also, they are convinced that other congregations of the Churches of Christ—not to mention the rest of the Christian world—are in sin, unfaithful to the Lord. Thus, Wade refers to those outside the group as “digressives,” even those people who sympathize with the conclusions of "digressives" but who do not treat those conclusions as tests of fellowship.

Wade sometimes provides general background for the story he tells. For example, in Chapter Three he relates the rise of the Sunday School Movement, beginning in Great Britain and moving to America. At other points, Wade focuses on intimate doctrinal and personality conflicts within the non-class, one cup group. For instance, he sometimes quotes at length the correspondence between warring preachers and debaters quibbling over the terms in the propositions to be discussed. In these sections, the book seems more like a chronicle than a history.

Throughout, the author provides little in the way of social or political context for his story. Wade notes in Chapter Seven that the group he belongs to remained pacifist even during and after the Second World War. But he tells the reader very little about the group’s interactions with the federal government, which must have been a fascinating story still waiting to be told. Instead, the author focuses on what he knows so well: minute doctrinal history and the biographies of leading preachers, men like Dr. G. A. Trott, Homer L. King, J. Ervin Waters, and J. D. Phillips. Consequently, his book is almost always descriptive rather than analytical.

The Sun Will Shine Again, Someday includes numerous photos of leading preachers in the non-class, one cup movement. Documentation appears at the end of each chapter. The book is missing an index, which would have been useful.

Readers will likely admire the conviction and tenacity of the group Wade has described, They might also lament what some will view as the narrowness and penchant for remaining small and insular. Thirty years have passed since this book was first published. It would be interesting to know what has happened since then. Perhaps the author, now in his eighties, would consider producing an updated edition of his work. Either way, this book is an important secondary source on its topic.

Demons, Baseball, Skynyrd and More! My Sweet Sixteen Books of 2016

For someone pursuing a doctorate in History, I really didn't do that much reading last year. Much of the time I was skimming books by the dozens and reading lots of reviews. Still, I did manage to read from cover to cover a good number of books that I simply should have read, some of which I actually wanted to read. On occasion, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that a title I had been avoiding was much more engaging than I thought it would be. And, I wound up reading a few books that had almost nothing to do with my academic program. Anyway, out of that group of titles I thoroughly digested last year, here are sixteen of my favorites:

European History

1. Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (Abingdon Press, 1950). Back in the day when I was hanging out at Yale Divinity School, people uttered the name Roland Bainton with something like reverence. The name plate below his giant portrait might just as well have read Solomon or Paul. After reading this book, I understand a bit more about why. Here I Stand was likely the twentieth century's best biography of Martin Luther in English. It was certainly the most popular and influential. Yes, it represents old-school historiography. More recent works, for example, rightly emphasize that Luther was no Lone Ranger of the Reformation. Without other leaders and places like Zwingli in Zurich and Calvin in Geneva, nothing from Luther's legacy would ever have worked out the way it did. But in an age when Europeans and Americans were more comfortable with the idea of a singular, patrician leader like Franklin Roosevelt, this book was the perfect biography. It's still a great read.

2. Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Clarendon Press, 1972). The author begins this contemporary classic with a basic assertion: "the style of pictures is a proper material of social history." In other words, paintings do not simply illustrate history once it is established by documents. Instead, paintings should be thought of and used as primary sources, along with documents. Or, as the author concludes, "the visual is  . . . the proper complementary to the verbal." This book goes a long way in establishing works of art as primary sources for understanding history. Baxandall's reflection at the end of the book about the actual primacy of the visual is by itself worth the price of admission. More historians should know this book.

3. Jerry Brotton, The Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2006). The Very Short Introductions series keeps reeling me back in. A year goes by, I forget everything I didn't like about the last volume I read, and I wind up trying out some other title. It's not that the authors of the series aren't great scholars. They are. The problem, in my opinion, is the format. The small size of these introductions means they're more than an article, less than a complete survey. It's a tough awkward job for any author. However, with this particular volume, Jerry Brotton manages to pull it off. His coverage of the Renaissance begins with a good survey of the historiography, and then proceeds with sections on art, literature, humanism, religious reformation(s), women, exploration, etc. If you don't read any other book on the topic, read this one.

4. George Huppert, After the Black Death: A Social History of Early Modern Europe, 2nd edition (Indiana University Press, 1998). Huppert specifies that his chronological coverage runs from the first outbreak of the Black Death in Europe in 1347 to its last appearance at Marseilles in 1721. Why this periodization? He explains: "After the Black Death had done its work, the survivors became more prudent. They did not allow themselves the luxury of multiplying again to the point of outstripping their resources as dramatically as they once had. To forestall famine, they learned to control population growth" (ix). This is the organizing theme for what has to be one of the most engaging social histories of the period. For students of Early Modern Europe, this is a must read.

5. Giovanni Levi, Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist (University of Chicago Press, 1988). Don't be fooled by the sexy title. This book really isn't about an exorcist. It's about the complex world of a small-town priest in northwestern Italy in the 1690s. Along with a few other Italian historians, author Giovanni Levi is one of the founding fathers of a sub-discipline known as microhistory. No, that word doesn't refer to a tiny topic or bite-sized history. As Carlo Ginzburg explains it, think instead of what you do with a microscope: intense, detailed analysis. That's exactly what Levi gives the reader. If you want to learn about the history of exorcism, read something else. If you're interested in the detailed reasons why, for example, people in the early modern era sometimes got a much higher price when selling land to a family member as opposed to a complete stranger, then Inheriting Power might be for you. Just don't take it to the beach. It's not that kind of book.

6. Gary K. Waite, Eradicating the Devil’s Minions: Anabaptists and Witches in Reformation Europe, 1525-1600 (University of Toronto Press, 2007). According to the author, this work “examines the rhetoric used against Anabaptists and their specific treatment by churchmen, interrogators, and executioners in the light of the magical world view that we know dominated the culture of the sixteenth-century populace.” In other words, Eradicating the Devil’s Minions compares the persecution of religious dissidents with that of the largely fictitious sect of devil-worshipping, magic-performing witches. Bottom line: in the era of the early Reformation, some people treated religious devotees as though they were witches, and vice versa. Seems like that sort of thing has a way of coming back around.

American Religion

7. Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837, 25th-Anniversary edition (Hill and Wang, 2004). The early-nineteenth century Protestant revivals collectively known as the Second Great Awakening have deeply influenced American religion from the antebellum period to the present day. Because of its broad, long-lasting significance, historians have raised questions about how the Awakening began, what contributed to its rise, and what its essential character was. Some time around the 1960s, historians began probing the possibility that the revivals involved something more than just religion. For example, were there social, economic, and cultural contexts to the revivals? First published in 1978, A Shopkeeper's Millennium is one of the seminal works along this line of study. We get a taste of what Johnson is up to when he writes: “Revivals were a means of building order and a sense of common purpose among sovereign, footloose, and money-hungry individualists." Some religious people who have read Johnson's work have accused him of being reductionistic. They think that Johnson has taken a thoroughly-religious episode in American history and has turned it into something else entirely. I'm not sure that that criticism will stick. Read it and see what you think. Either way, like many others, you'll probably be pulled in by this engaging book.

8. Michael J. Lee, The Erosion of Biblical Certainty: Battles over Authority and Interpretation in America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). As the author describes it, this book "examines how learned Americans dealt with the new and often unsettling ideas" coming out of Europe in the early eighteenth century, and that raised critical questions about the status of the Christian Scriptures and how they should be understood. Lee argues that by taking up evidentialist challenges to conventional views and literal interpretations of the Bible, American biblical scholars "gradually became increasingly naturalistic in their understanding of revelation." In effect, they conceded "that the Bible was accountable to outside authorities and needed to be reconciled to new fields of knowledge." The majority of English rational Protestants were confident that true reason would never contradict what the Bible affirmed. They believed that, if anything, rational inquiry would always confirm the Scriptures. Their American counterparts agreed. But neither group seems to have anticipated that their latitudinarian approach would subject revelation to independent investigation to test its veracity. In effect, the assumptions and presuppositions of the debate turned out to be the sources of the decline of traditional positions during the nineteenth century.

9. Ussama Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Cornell University Press, 2008). On one level, Artillery of Heaven simply tells the story of American Protestant missionaries and one As’ad Shidyaq. Born in 1798, Shidyaq lived in that part of the Ottoman Empire now known as the Lebanese Republic. His life forever changed when he became the first convert to Protestant Christianity in that part of the world, and was subsequently tortured and killed. He thus became the first Protestant martyr of the American mission to the Middle East. As interesting and significant as this story is, Makdisi has received special notice for how he tells it. In general, most historical accounts of Christian missionary work are examples of institutional, denominational history. This is only natural since those producing the historiography are members of the community of faith that conceived and conducted the mission activities they describe. Makdisi presents another possibility. As he puts it, "[t]he only way to tell a story of a cross-cultural encounter involving Americans and Arabs is to enlarge dramatically the conventional scope of inquiry."

10. George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture. New edition (Oxford University Press, 2006). The first edition of this book appeared in 1980 and instantly became a classic of American religious history. Marsden's basic conclusion was that fundamentalists of the late-19th and early-20th centuries  "experienced profound ambivalence toward the surrounding culture." He acknowledges that such is true of many distinct groups and movements. But, he notes, conservative Protestants in the U.S. went from being respectable in the 1870s to being peripheral and a laughingstock by the 1920s. What happened? Marsden answers that historians can only respond to such questions not by proving anything—not scientifically, anyway—but by an illumination that comes by way of what he calls "sympathetic insight." In his description of fundamentalism in America, Marsden begins by insisting that the phenomenon was essentially a religious movement. At the same time, like all other religious movements, fundamentalism lived within and responded to a distinctive culture. And that has everything to do with its character.

11. Mark R. Stoll, Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Oxford University Press, 2015). This book begins with an important historical footnote: back in 1967 Lynn White Jr. published an essay in Science magazine "claiming that Christianity had caused the environmental crisis." As Stoll points out, White's idea is one that lingers "in the back of a lot of people's minds when they think about religion and the environment." The author noticed, however, that many figures in the history of American environmentalism grew up in either Congregational or Presbyterian churches, both types "in the Calvinist tradition." What was the connection? Starting with questions like that, Stoll has written a unique book, one that "overlays American environmental history on American religious history." He makes a solid case that, in fact, religion had everything to do with the rise of American environmentalism, and that a person's formative religious outlook brings with it a controlling theology and view of the world, facets of thought that always make a difference in the way a person considers nature. Our environmental crises would not improve with the disappearance of religion, but it might improve with a religious tradition that could, like the old Calvinists, bring about systemic change for the better.

12. Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2014). This book is an intellectual history of conservative Protestantism in America from the end of the Second World War to the early years of the twenty-first century. Worthen defends her approach by pointing out that while not all thoughts and thinkers are equally good, scholars must take into account "that all people think, and that material forces alone cannot explain human experience." Though not herself an evangelical, Worthen evinces a real appreciation for her subjects and what she calls their crisis of authority. So, what does she believe is the crisis? In order to hear her answer, we must first understand her idea that the identity of American evangelicals is revealed not so much by their beliefs, but by their struggles. Worthen insists that what unites modern evangelicals is not their doctrinal conformity--which they have never been able to achieve--but their shared questions "borne out of their peculiar relationship to the convulsions of the early modern era." In other words, if we want to comprehend who evangelicals are, we should listen not to their confident affirmations, but to the questions and doubts with which they constantly wrestle.

American Political and Cultural History

13. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (Yale University Press, 1982). Ever wondered why charades is a well-known game in America? As Karen Halttunen explains, it has something to do with cultural changes that unfolded in the U.S. beginning in the 1830s. The so-called Market Revolution and the growth of cities in America generated a new social phenomenon: anonymity, the problem (and potential) of becoming a face in the crowd. In a sprawling city unknown by the young man who had recently moved there seeking a job, who could he trust? America's response to this question was to establish certain habits, manners, and clothing that would make up the look and the way of respectable people. These kinds of social and cultural markers would indicate, it was hoped, who the good people were. The weakness of the plan, of course, was that when motivated by some less-than-virtuous desire, bad people could adopt the look just as well as good folks could. There are reasons why con men often succeed.

14. Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (Knopf, 2005). Grave suspicions about slave insurrections. The heartless treatment of black people: falsely accused, arrested, jailed, beaten, falsely convicted, and then burned at the stake or hanged, one after the other. It's all the stuff of the antebellum South, right? Not always. In this case, such horrors were perpetrated in pre-Revolutionary New York City! Read it and weep. The detail of this book will engage and impress you. The episode it relates will make you wonder about bigger questions: How is it that we human beings justify inhumanity? How do we legitimize incredible violence? Lepore is one of the most popular American historians of our day, and with good reason. She has an eye for great stories and tales that have yet to be really told.

15. Mark Ribowsky, Whiskey Bottles and Brand New Cars: The Fast Life and Sudden Death of Lynyrd Skynyrd (Chicago Review Press, 2015). Disclaimer: If you check out the Amazon reviews of this book, you'll hear it panned and pummeled again and again. Informed fans and self-appointed sleuths love to hate it. I decided to read it anyway, as a sort of guilty pleasure. Ribowsky is a good writer, maybe a bit too "good," as he often uses sappy language and way too many words for my taste. Sometimes, reading Ribowsky is like watching a B-rate movie that you just can't pull yourself away from. Sure it's kind of cheesy, but you don't want to miss what comes next. He emphasizes the essential and central role played by Ronnie Van Zandt. The band was always his band. In fact, Ribowsky convincingly argues that without Ronnie, there would never have been anything like Lynyrd Skynyrd.

16. George Vecsey, Baseball: A History of America's Favorite Game (Modern Library, 2006). If you're a long-time, well-versed fan of baseball, this book won't tell you much that you didn't already know. On the other hand, if you're more like me--someone who likes baseball, who keeps up with a certain team, but who doesn't know that much about the history of the game--then this book is for you. Vecsey is a veteran New York Times sports columnist who writes chapters as though they were long magazine articles. Some of his chapters tell stories of dark episodes (for example, "The Black Sox" and "Four Scandals"). Other chapters focus on the life and times of incredible players and personalities ("The Babe" and "Jackie Robinson"). Vecsey has a serious crush on almost all of his subjects, but he doesn't allow love to get in the way of insight. Above all, he knows how to write. The result is a book that, if you care anything about baseball, you'll wind up savoring like a good cup of coffee or a favorite dessert.

So, what were some of the better things you read in 2016? Has anyone else read the titles (or authors) I've listed here? And, what's on your reading agenda for 2017?

The Vietnam War: Three Important Titles

Interested in the Vietnam War? Here's a short list of books you might try. Considering that they are only three books, these represent a fairly wide array of style and interpretation. When it comes to viewpoint, the outlier is Mark Moyar's Triumph Forsaken. Moyar is a leading voice among so-called revisionist historians of the U.S. in Vietnam. Milam was the only one of the three authors to actually fight in Vietnam. Sheehan's book has the distinction of winning numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize.

Milam, Ron. Not a Gentleman’s War: An Inside View of Junior Officers in the Vietnam War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Milam was a U.S. Army Infantry junior officer who served in Vietnam. Attempting to remain objective, he brings to his work an interest in defending the reputations of almost all of his fellow platoon leaders. Because Vietnam was a catastrophe for the U.S., finger pointing was inevitable. Much of the criticism was written by “angry colonels” who faulted junior officers. This trend was made all the more easy because of the reputation of the infamous William Laws Calley, Jr. Milam turns the tables, citing a number of poor decisions that were handed down to lieutenants in the field. These mistakes, combined with the ingenious, dirty tactics of the enemy, and other factors made Vietnam something other than “a gentleman’s war.”

Moyar, Mark. Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

This is the first book in a proposed two-volume interpretive survey of the Vietnam War. The dividing line between this and a proposed second book comes at July 28, 1965, when President Johnson announced there would be a huge military build up in Vietnam. The author explains that his approach is an example of what has come to be known as the revisionist position, which stands opposed to the majority orthodox position. Like other revisionists, Moyar attempts to show that the war was not "wrongheaded and unjust." Instead, it was "a noble but improperly executed enterprise" (xi). His over-the-top, demonizing characterizations of certain leaders in his story come across as tendentious. The great value of this book is that it forcefully advances a contested interpretation of the Vietnam War.

Sheehan, Neil. A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. New York: Vintage, 1989.

As the subtitle suggests, this is something like two books in one. But far from presenting a biography of Army Lieutenant Colonel Vann spliced together with a history of the Vietnam War, Sheehan's work is something far more subtle and creative: a complex narrative that features a huge cast of characters and that assumes the microcosm of Vann's hopeful but tragic life is a revealing lens through which to see the macrocosm of America in Vietnam. An incredible achievement written by a journalist who was there, A Bright Shining Lie won the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize.

Race and Politics in Twentieth Century America

Gerstle, Gary. American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

This book explores the most important twentieth-century ideas about what it meant, and means, to be an American. Gary Gerstle sets out to provide a schema, a framework by which readers can understand and make sense of U.S. political, military, and social history during the 1900s.

Gerstle's thesis centers on a competition between what he calls civic nationalism versus racial nationalism. He uses the first phrase to refer to what has been called "the American Creed." That is to say, civic nationalism means American civic principles and rights. It is characterized by its disregard for racial and ethnic distinctions. Consider, for example, the very-American sounding statement, "Here in the U.S., it doesn't matter where you're from or what color you are, if obey the law and are willing to work hard, you'll eventually get ahead." That's an expression of what Gerstle is calling civic nationalism. By contrast, racial nationalism asserts that only people of a certain race and ethnic origin are qualified to lead in America and to enjoy all of the privileges granted by the U.S.

"In this book," says Gerstle, "I argue that the pursuit of these two powerful and contradictory ideals--the civic and the racial--has decisively shaped the history of the American nation in the twentieth century" (p. 5). But this is no liberal-versus-conservative telling of the story. The author says that his is "particularly interested in how liberals and their supporters wrestled with the contradictions between the two nationalist traditions" (6).

In short, Gerstle asserts and sets out to demonstrate that his deceptively simple model--civic nationalism versus racial nationalism--represents a powerful lens through which to look back on the history of the U.S. during the entire twentieth century.

The author acknowledges his dependence on Benedict Anderson's book, Imagined Communities, which, says Gerstle, explains that nations are "sociopolitical creations" and as such are "historically contingent." He also acknowledges the inspiration and direction that came to him through works by W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880; Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom; David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness; Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom; and Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (11-13).

In his "Introduction," Gerstle lays out both his thesis and his interpretation of America during the 1900s. He says that many, perhaps even most American liberals of the early twentieth century believed in "the superiority of a racialized melting pot." But they typically "did not think to include blacks, Hispanics, or Asians in their American crucible" (6). In fact, at that time many Americans with ancestral roots in northeastern Europe believed that even people from eastern and southern Europe would likely never become full-fledged Americans. On the other hand was what liberal Herbert Croly called "the promise of American life," a vision that President Theodore Roosevelt, himself a racist of sorts, placed at the center of his progressivist vision (7).

Gerstle notes that the competition between these two visions of nationhood heated up during times of war. Later, the "Rooseveltian" nation fell apart during the 1960s as a result of the Civil Rights revolution (9). By 1970, "neither the civic nor racial traditions of American nationalism retained enough integrity to serve as rallying points for those who wished to put the nation back together" (10).

In his "Epilogue," which considers the last 25 years of the twentieth century, Gerstle looks back over the wreckage left from the 1960s and early 70s. He says that from 1975 to 2000, Americans identified two new possible and, again, competing directions for the nation: a commitment to multiculturalism versus a renewal of traditional pride in a unified America. He suggests that the presidency of Bill Clinton represented a third option, which drew, in certain ways, on both of those ideas.

I have to confess that as I read American Crucible, I kept waiting for the author to overplay his hand, or for his interpretive framework to break down. From my vantage point, neither of those happened in this book. So I consider Gerstle's thesis a good way of thinking about the history of politics and race in the U.S. during the twentieth century. And, as the great-grandson of people who immigrated to the U.S. from southern Italy in 1897, for me the insights of this book sometimes hit fairly close to home.

PhD Reading List for Twentieth Century U.S. History

Okay, so here's my working list of titles for Twentieth Century U.S. History. I got my start on this project in a course I took at Texas Tech with Dr. Sean Cunningham, who is part of my committee for qualifying exams. The list has been a work in progress over the last six months or so. About 8 or 9 titles that also appear on my Religion list were deleted from this one because of the overlap. But from here, I don't think there will be many changes if any.

If I've posted something here at Frankly Speaking on one of these, I've added a link to that title. Sometimes at the end of an entry, I've included a few tags that identify some of the topics of that book.

I've tried to categorize the list, a project I thought might help me get an overall sense of what's here. So far, I've read or a least gotten into about 75% of these titles. Not knowing very much about the other 25% of the books made them harder to categorize. So I might be moving some of them around later. Trying to gain a good bit of mastery over this material should keep me busy for a while.

Background, Survey, General (7)

Kennedy, David M. Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Klein, Maury. The Genesis of Industrial America, 1870-1920. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Painter, Nell Irvin. Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919. New York: W. W. Norton, 1987.

Patterson, James T. Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Patterson, James T. Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Sitkoff, Harvard, editor. Perspectives on Modern America: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Wiebe, Robert. The Search for Order, 1877-1920. New York: Hill and Wang, 1966.

Cold War, esp. Cuban Missile Crisis (7)

Dudziak, Mary L. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Imagery of American Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Politics. Society.

Gaddis, John Lewis. The Cold War: A New History. New York: Penguin, 2005. Cold War.

Kennedy, Robert F. Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Introductions by Robert S. McNamara and Harold Macmillan. New York: Norton, 1969. Cold War. Cuban Missile Crisis. JFK Administration. Politics.

Leffler, Melvyn P. The Specter of Communism: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1917-1953. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994.

May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books, 1988. Cold War. Gender.

McNamara, Robert S. "The Military Role of Nuclear Weapons: Perceptions and Misperceptions," Foreign Affairs 62 (Fall 1983): 59-80. Cold War. Nuclear Weapons. Military Tactics.

Stern, Sheldon M. The Week the World Stood Still: Inside the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Cold War. Cuban Missile Crisis. JFK Administration.

Culture and Mass Media (9)

Bailey, Beth L. From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.

Berkowitz, Edward D. Mass Appeal: The Formative Age of the Movies, Radio, and TV. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Mass Media.

Boorstin, Daniel J. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Atheneum, 1987. Culture. Mass Media.

Culver, Lawrence. The Frontier of Leisure: Southern California and the Shaping of Modern America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Verso, 1996.

Fraterrigo, Elizabeth. Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Pells, Richard. Modernist America: Art, Music, Movies, and the Globalization of American Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. Culture.

Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Culture. Media. Movies.

Zeitz, Joshua. Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006. Culture. Society. Women.

Politics (13)

Badger, Anthony J. The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933-40. New York: Hill and Wang, 1989. New Deal. Great Depression. FDR Administration.

Brands, H. W. The Strange Death of American Liberalism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. Politics. Liberalism. Vietnam War.

Cohen, Lizabeth, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939. 2nd edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Goldberg, Robert Alan. Barry Goldwater. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Conservatism.

Kazin, Michael. The Populist Persuasion: An American History. Rev. ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.

McGirr, Lisa. Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Postel, Charles. The Populist Vision. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Rodgers, Daniel T., “In Search of Progressivism.” Reviews in American History 10, no. 4 (1982): 113-132.

Rossinow, Doug. The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Rymph, Catherine E. Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism From Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Republican Party. Women.

Schrecker, Ellen. Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1998. Cold War. Senator Joseph P. McCarthy. Political Repression.

Self, Robert O. All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960s. New York: Hill and Wang, 2012.

Wills, Garry. John Wayne's America: The Politics of Celebrity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. Rhetoric. Imagery. Mythology.

Presidents (9)

Brands, H. W. Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Class and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. New York: Doubleday, 2008. Politics. FDR. Great Depression.

Dallek, Robert. Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908-1960. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. LBJ. Politics. Texas.

Dallek, Robert. An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963. Boston: Little, Brown, 2003. JFK. Politics.

Gillon, Steven M. The Kennedy Assassination--24 Hours After: Lyndon B. Johnson's Pivotal First Day as President. New York: Basic Books, 2009. 

Greenberg, David. Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image. New York: Norton, 2003. Memory. Richard M. Nixon. Politics. Media.

Link, Arthur S. Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910-1917. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954.

McCullough, David. Truman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Harry S. Truman.

Pietrusza, David. 1960: LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon: The Epic Campaign that Forged Three Presidencies. New York: Union Square, 2008.

Rauchway, Eric. Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2003.

Wills, Garry. The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power. Boston: Little, Brown, 1981. Politics. Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. Family. JFK.

Race and Civil Rights (10)

Boyle, Kevin. Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age. New York: Henry Holt, 2004. Race. U.S. Cities--Detroit. Law. 1920s.

Borstelmann, Thomas. The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988. Civil Rights. Martin Luther King, Jr. Religion--Black Church.

Brilliant, Mark. The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941-1978. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Race. Civil Rights. California. Politics.

Hobbs, Allyson. A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Race. Society.

Gerstle, Gary. American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Race. Theodore Roosevelt Administration.

Gordon, Linda. The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Lambert, Valerie. Choctaw Nation: A Story of American Indian Resurgence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. American Indians. Oklahoma. Politics.

McLaurin, Melton. Separate Pasts: Growing Up White in the Segregated South. 2nd ed. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998. Race. American South.

Roediger, David. Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 2007.

Sports (5)

Byrne, Julie. O God of Players: The Story of the Immaculata Mighty Macs. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Sports. Gender. Religion--Roman Catholicism.

Oriard, Michael. Brand NFL: Making and Selling America's Favorite Sport. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Sports. Professional Football. Society. Race.

Pope, S. W. "Sport History: Into the 21st Century." Journal of Sport History 25 (Summer 1998): i-x.

Sammons, Jeffrey T. "'Race' and Sport: A Critical, Historical Examination." Journal of Sport History 21 (Fall 1994): 203-78. Sports. Race.

Vecsey, George. Baseball: A History of America's Favorite Game. New York: Modern Library, 2008. Sports--Baseball.

U.S. South and West, especially Texas (8)

Campbell, Randolph B. Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Texas. Politics.

Crisp, James E. Sleuthing the Alamo: Davy Crockett’s Last Stand and Other Mysteries of the Texas Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Texas. Archival Research. Textual Criticism.

Cunningham, Sean P. American Politics in the Postwar Sunbelt: Conservative Growth in a Battleground Region. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Egan, Timothy. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great America Dust Bowl. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Dust Bowl. Social History.

Foley, Neil. The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Phillips, Michael. White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006.

White, Richard. "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A New History of the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993.

Worster, Donald. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Vietnam War (8)

Berman, Larry. Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine Reporter and Vietnamese Communist Agent. HarperCollins/Smithsonian, 2007. Vietnam War. Espionage. News Media.

Bilton, Michael and Kevin Sim. Four Hours in My Lai. New York: Viking, 1992. Vietnam War. Military. Law.

Hammond, William M. Reporting Vietnam: Media and Military at War. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998. Vietnam War. News Media. Society.

Milam, Ron. Not a Gentleman's War: An Inside View of Junior Officers in the Vietnam War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Vietnam War. Military.

Moyar, Mark. Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Vietnam War--Revisionist Interpretation. Politics.

O'Brien, Tim. If I Die in a Combat Zone. 1975. Reprint edition. New York: Broadway Books, 1999. Vietnam War--Memoir/Novel.

Sheehan, Neil. A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. New York: Vintage, 1989. Vietnam War. Military. News Media.

Vuic, Kara Dixon. Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Women. Gender. Vietnam War.

World Wars I and II, Holocaust (5)

Adler, Selig. "The United States and the Holocaust." American Jewish Historical Quarterly 64 (September 1974): 14-23. Holocaust. World War II. Religion--Judaism.

Dower, John W. War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon, 1986. World War II. Pacific Theater. Japan. Race.

Miscamble, Wilson D. The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs, and the Defeat of Japan. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. World War II. Pacific Theater. Truman Administration.

Wyman, David S. The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945. New York: Pantheon, 1984.

Zieger, Robert. America's Great War: World War I and the American Experience. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.

1960s (3)

Anderson, Terry H. The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Flamm, Michael W. Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

Isserman, Maurice and Michael Kazin. America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

A Glimpse of What Historians Actually Do

Farge, Arlette. The Allure of the Archives. Translated by Thomas Scott-Railton. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.

First published in French in 1989, this book is now available to English readers thanks to what appears to be a very fine translation by Thomas Scott-Railton. As the "Forward" by Natalie Zemon Davis explains, author Arlette Farge is a social historian who has focused on eighteenth-century France. But this book of hers is not another historical monograph. It is, instead, a book about the experience, value, and proper uses of archival research. In other words, in The Allure of the Archives, Farge does not practice her craft so much as she elegantly describes and reflects on it.

The author's approach is to toggle back and forth between descriptive, analytical chapters and brief, autobiographical sections--which tend to reveal how petty and annoying some people in the archives can be, and how one easily distinguishes between veterans and rookies. Along the way, Farge puts in a good word for the necessary task of transcribing old, handwritten documents. Though tedious, she insists that there is something essential and rewarding about such work (15-17).

In a section titled "Her Presence," she notes that if traditional histories often omit women, the archives never do: "In every popular expression of emotion, in groups large and small, women were on the scene and dove in headfirst into the action" (39).

Farge is convinced that the prime way of getting at social history is to focus on conflict: "Why not choose to take a deliberately provocative position on this, and assert that society's character manifests itself through antagonisms and conflicts? It is more important to say this than ever, because today there is a tendency to doubt the centrality of conflict" (43).

In another memorable section, the author describes how it is that some manuscripts are much easier to decipher when they are read out loud: "Nothing looks like anything, unless it is articulated, and the tongue delivers the writing from incomprehensibility" (60). Yet, people in reading rooms are supposed to work silently.

Farge also notes several pitfalls associated with archival research. For example, "you can become absorbed by the archives to the point that you no longer know how to interrogate them" (70). She observes that another common trap is to identify a thesis too early, thereby ensuring that you will "find" exactly and only what you were looking for in the first place.

Nearing the end, the author raises and responds to the question of the relationship between truth and written history. She takes a mediating approach, one that says that, while no historian every produces "the definitive truthful narrative," no historian worthy of the name can ever disregard truth, or fail to care about what is true (95-96). 

Here, I noticed a correspondence between Farge's book and one by Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis titled, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Oxford, 2002). Gaddis notes that, on the one hand, historians have always known that arriving at historical consciousness means you have learned "that there is no 'correct' interpretation of the past" and that "the act of interpreting is itself a vicarious enlargement of experience" (10). On the other hand, he rejects the extreme conclusion that because "we have no absolute basis for measuring time and space" we therefore "can't know anything about what happened within them" (34). Both Farge and Gaddis would agree, I think, that historians can and should identify many things that are true, while at the same time recognizing that one's interpretation of a set of facts is just that, an interpretation.

Who Was a Martyr?

Bowersock, G. W. Martyrdom and Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

This book began as the series of Wiles Lectures delivered at Queen's University in Belfast in 1993. The author, G. W. Bowersock, taught Classics and History at Harvard University from 1962 to 1980. Then, from 1980 until his retirement in 2006, he was Professor of Ancient History at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

The central thesis of this book is that the terms martyr and martyrdom should not be associated with pagans who were willing to die for a philosophy, or with Jews who were willing to die for their tradition, or with Muslims who were killed in a holy war. Why? Because, strictly speaking, those two terms originated with and belong especially to Christians who lived in the Roman Empire during the second through fourth centuries. Bowersock offers a set of arguments rooted in philology and history in order to show that in the Roman Empire martyrdom meant something very specific.

In Chapter I, "The making of martyrdom," Bowersock attempts to reveal the precise definitions of martyr and martyrdom. He acknowledges that, of course, there were accounts of non-Christians in the ancient world who "provided glorious examples of resistance to tyrannical authority and painful suffering before unjust judges." So, then, what was different about true martyrdom per se? Bowersock answers that there were two things. First, starting with the Christians of the second century in their imperial Roman context, such courage was "absorbed into a conceptual system of posthumous recognition and anticipated reward." Second, and related to the first point, "the very word martyrdom existed as the name for this system" (5).

Chapter II, "The written record," sets out to corroborate the argument of the first chapter along the lines of literary analysis. Bowersock notes that the distinctive literary form called martyrology bears little resemblance to Jewish stories from the Old Testament book of Daniel, or from the second and fourth books of Maccabees. Instead, judging from their narrative technique and literary style, the Martyr Acts most closely resemble "pagan historical fiction" (26). The author concludes that "like the very word 'martyr' itself, martyrdom had nothing to do with Judaism or with Palestine" (28). Furthermore, Jewish martyrology sounds nothing like pre-Constantine Christian martyrology. In those accounts, for example, the victims are asked, according to formula, if they are ready to change their minds. Such inquisitions have a "distinctively Roman character" (37).

Chapter III, "The civic role of martyrs," begins with the simple observation that the martyr acts "take place in the greatest cities of the Roman world" (41). Why was this the case, and why is it significant? Bowersock explains that, from the Roman side, major cities included the deadly legal authority of provincial governors as well as the crowds who would gather for "spectacles of blood sport in the amphitheater." From the Christian side, "martyrdom in a city provided the greatest possible visibility for the cause of the nascent Church, and it simultaneously exposed the Roman administrative machinery to the greatest possible embarrassment" (42). Under these circumstances, pagans and Jews would unite publicly against Christian martyrs, a fact that underscores the author's thesis that martyrdom was a uniquely-Christian phenomenon vis-a-vis imperial Rome.

In Chapter IV, "Martyrdom and suicide," the author describes the eagerness, good cheer, and even laughter of some early martyrs. In many cases, their dispositions reveal a desire for martyrdom that amounted to suicide by state official (59-61). Because of this development, some Christian theologians examined the distinction between martyrdom and suicide. On the one hand, Tertullian argued that if some pagans voluntarily died for false and foolish notions, how much more should Christians be willing to die for the truth of the gospel? On the other hand, Origen and Clement of Alexandria spoke against all forms of voluntary self harm. The debate reached all the way to the time of Augustine, who argued at length that it is wrong to kill oneself or to provoke someone else to kill you, even for what is true. Augustine's verdict combined with the effects of the Constantinian revolution to bring to an end to this major chapter of Christian history (73-74).

Four Appendixes, a "Select Bibliography," and an index round out this book. Each appendix is a commentary or extended footnote on one of the points in the text. The book could have used a map of the Roman world and a few illustrations. At any rate, Bowersock's lectures assert and advance a provocative thesis. One might quibble with a point here or there. Nonetheless, this book is a tour de force that no student interested in the topic should ignore.

Who's Who? Identity and Peasant Life in Early Modern Europe

Davis, Natalie Zemon. The Return of Martin Guerre. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.

In this book, Natalie Zemon Davis retells the often-told story of Martin Guerre. But as the extensive bibliography and notes suggest, this is the thoroughly-researched, historian's version of the tale (pages 127-57). It is offered, in part, as a reflection on "the significance of identity in the sixteenth century" (viii).

Zemon Davis relates the story as follows: Martin Guerre was a peasant who lived in "the Pyrenean village of Artigat" (vii). In 1538, he was married to Bertrande de Rols, who was also from Artigat. At the time of their wedding, Martin was about fourteen years old, and Bertrande was either nine or ten (16, n.). Apparently, the marriage remained unconsummated for several years. During that time, Martin was subjected to public ridicule due to his impotence. However, several years later Bertrande gave birth to a son named Sanxi (21). In 1548, ten years after the wedding and when Martin was around 24 years old, he was accused of stealing grain from his father. Humiliated for years, and now embarrassed and afraid, Martin abandoned his family and the place he had always known.

Eight years later, "in the summer of 1556," a man presented himself "as the long-lost Martin Guerre. Previously he had been known as Arnaud du Tilh, alias Pansette" (34). Interestingly, the villagers, including Bertrande, welcomed du Tilh as though he were Martin Guerre. Soon, he settled into a peasant's life filled with farm work and family obligation. By all accounts, he and Bertrande enjoyed a blissful relationship. She became pregnant twice more. One of the children, a daughter, survived infancy.

Trouble came four years after the return of "Martin," when he proposed the sale of some of the land that was part of his inheritance, a violation of the Basque norms that his family had always observed. Martin's Guerre's uncle and Bertrande's stepfather, Pierre, had sometimes been uncertain about the identity of the imposter. Once questions about land and money entered the picture, Pierre became the man's determined nemesis. With Bertrande now on his side, Pierre brought the accusation that generated both civil and criminal charges against the impostor.

At his trial, in 1560, the dozens of witnesses were divided on whether the accused was Martin Guerre. However, the impostor was found guilty. On appeal, that decision was nearly reversed. Arnaud du Tilh as Martin Guerre defended himself in what must have been one of the greatest court performances in legal history. Playing up the obvious conflict of interest of Pierre and his family, the impostor was able to provide answers and recite details regarding matters that, seemingly, only the real Martin Guerre would know. For every question, he had a plausible and sometimes even cogent response.

But as fate would have it, just as the appellate court was about to reverse the original decision, the real Martin Guerre appeared. Having "had his leg shot off at the battle of Saint-Quentin" fighting for Spain, Martin Guerre now had a wooden leg (82). Of course, the impostor's charade came crashing down. Having been spared an incorrect judgment, the court then found Arnaud du Tilh guilty of "imposture and false supposition of name and person and of adultery" (86). Within days, he was hanged in front of the Guerre home in Artigat, and his body was burned.

Zemon Davis takes up the question of how the reunited couple might have managed in the years that followed the execution of the impostor. She notes that both of them were culpable: Martin had abandoned his wife and child, and Bertrande had played the wife of a man she must have known was not her husband. The author concludes with this reflection: "The story of Martin Guerre is told and retold because it reminds us that astonishing things are possible. Even for the historian who has deciphered it, it retains a stubborn vitality. I think I have uncovered the true face of the past--or has Pansette done it once again?" (125).