January 2011

by Oscar Handlin. The McGraw-Hill Book Company. 282 pp. $3.75.

In this book, Dr. Handlin considers the three centuries of Jewish life in America as “an adventure in freedom.” Seeking to provide an interpretation rather than a complete history of the Jews in the United States, he remarks that when the Jews came to America they moved into a society unlike any that they had previously met. They came together from all parts of Europe, where they had lived—often in isolation from one another—in established, sharply-regulated communities; in America these separate groups came together, no longer forced to live apart from the broader community, under circumstances which permitted almost any degree of dispersion and which tended to break down the rigid caste lines which previously had operated both within and without the Jewish community. The Jews, in short, experienced democracy—to the enrichment both of Jewish life and of the life of the nation as a whole.

by Dumas Malone, with pictures by Hirst Milhollen and Milton Kaplan. Oxford University Press. 282 pp. $10.

With an abundance of text and pictures, planned and arranged with excellent taste, the authors present their tribute to the great document itself. There is a remarkable presentation of portraits of all of the signers and pictures of their homes; certainly, this is the last word on this subject.

by James Thomas Flexner. Harcourt, Brace & Company. 306 pp. $10.

Mr. Flexner, who has the gift of making art and artists spring to life in his writing, has now produced the second in a projected many-volume history of American painting. First Flowers of Our Wilderness (1947) dealt with the beginnings, while the new book covers the Revolutionary period and its aftermath, the years to 1835, when the headquarters of American art shifted to England, following Copley, Stuart and Trumbull to what seemed more hospitable and appreciative shores. West, Peale, Morse, Vanderlyn, Allston and others are subjects of well developed studies in what is certainly an important book. The only flaw is that none of the hundred plates in the book is in color—which one might reasonably expect in a work on painting. There was a day, only a few years ago, when four-color engravings might be made for less than a prince’s ransom.

by Robert S. Holzman. The Macmillan Company. 297 pp. $5.

Nobody ever felt neutral about Ben Butler. He was a great hero to some, and an unmitigated scoundrel to others, but he was always impressive. His career extended from 1818 to 1893, and while he devoted himself chiefly to the personal advancement of Ben Butler he did play an important role, in war and in peace, during some of the most eventful years of American history. You can do everything with him but ignore him.

He was a lawyer—one of the best; a soldier—one of the worst; and a politician, in which field he was at least one of the most active. Controversy hangs over almost everything he did, and much of it still unresolved. A modern life of Butler has been greatly overdue.

by Carl Sandburg. Harcourt, Brace & Co. 762 pp. $7.50.

Not the least remarkable of Carl Sandburg’s achievements is his success in reducing the six volumes of his massive study of Lincoln to one volume without sacrificing the brooding, poetic and evocative quality that infused the earlier work. The reduction represents a skillful act of revision and rewriting rather than a mere cut-and-stitch job, and the result is a meaty single volume which will be welcomed by many readers who tend to shy away from the lengthier original. Very little has been lost in the condensation: the book is still Sandburg, and Sandburg at his best.

by Thomas B. Costain. Doubleday & Company. 482 pp.

Once again Mr. Costain demonstrates that the ability to write interesting and swiftly-moving prose is a talent badly needed in historical writing. In this book he tells the story of the French in Canada, from the earliest days down to the end of the Seventeenth Century—the period during which French Canada produced great explorers, leaders and administrators—and he makes of it, as the saying goes, a story that is “fascinating as a novel.” And why not? Like most other segments of history, the story is fascinating: all it needs is someone who can tell it so that the fascination gets a fair chance to come through to the reader. This talent Mr. Costain has, and he couples it with a solid capacity for factual research.

by William Frank Zornow. University of Oklahoma Press. 264 pp. $4.

A careful examination of the presidential campaign of 1864, showing why and how the opposition to Lincoln within the Republican party collapsed, and discussing the failure of the Democrats with insight and understanding. In the final canvass, the author concludes, the only real difference between the parties was the Republican insistence on a Constitutional amendment to abolish slavery; both stood firmly (surviving campaign legends to the contrary notwithstanding) for victory in the war and restoration of the Union. The chief difficulty, as the author sees it, was that the campaign drew from the electorate no mandate whatever regarding reconstruction, so that the way lay open for the “ultra” group of Republicans to seize control after Lincoln’s death.

by Anita Leslie. Henry Holt & Co. 312 pp. $4.

Leonard Jerome was a personable and talented man from upstate New York who set out to be a lawyer, served for a time as a publisher, and then went to Manhattan to enter the lists in Wall Street, which he did with such marked success that he became very wealthy and emerged as one of the city’s more prominent yachtsmen, horsemen, bon vivants and men-about-town. His claim to fame now is that his daughter, Jennie, one of the numerous American heiresses of the post-Civil War era to attract the regard of bachelor sprigs of European nobility, made a marriage which was both happy and historically important. She became the wife of Randolph Churchill, younger son of the seventh Duke of Marlborough, and bore a son who was to become world-famous in our own generation as Winston Churchill. Jerome himself appears to have been a moderately interesting man, and the story is entertainingly told.

by Louis C. Starr. Alfred A. Knopf. 367 pp. $5.

Here is a useful discussion of the work of newspapers and newspapermen in the Civil War. The author is much less concerned with the editorial influence exerted by the war-time press than with the speedy, though somewhat imperfect, development of the concept of the newspaper as primarily a news medium rather than a political organ. A revolution in journalism was going on during the war, he asserts, and the country’s insatiable hunger for news from its armies compelled editors to expand the purely news-gathering function immeasurably. If at times he gives editors and reporters better marks than they altogether deserve for impartial reporting, he provides an interesting account of a significant development in the newspaper world.

by Leonard D. White. The Macmillan Company. 593 pp. $3.

The purely administrative system of the Federal government has an importance often overlooked by historians, and in this book Dr. White goes far to remedy this oversight. He examines the results of the advent of Jacksonian democracy, when the people laid their own hands on large parts of the administrative mechanism, and concludes that the democratic character of governmental administration which resulted was in reality the great contribution of the Jacksonians. This, he says, “brought endless sources of vitality into the body administrative from the body politic,” and made it certain that “the relationship between the people and their administrative system was not again to suggest preference to the well-born and the well-to-do.”