Category: Volume 59.4 (2014)

JARED GARDNER, The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2012), 203 pp. Reviewed by Matthew Pethers  Amerikastudien / American Studies 59.4 (2014) In surveying the field that Jared Gardner’s essential new book intervenes into, an optimistic observer might adapt his chosen title to offer the headline: “The Rise and…

NICOLE EUSTACE, 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2012), xvii + 315 pp. ANDREW LAMBERT, The Challenge: Britain Against America in the Naval War of 1812 (London: Faber and Faber, 2012), 538 pp. PAUL GILJE, Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights in the War of 1812 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013),…

ALISON CLARK EFFORD, German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013), 267 pp. Reviewed by Frank Baron  Amerikastudien / American Studies 59.4 (2014)   With persistent attention to the role of German-Americans before and during the Civil War, it is refreshing to see a study that encompasses this important era…

CHRISTINE L. RIDARSKY and MARY M. HUTH, eds., Susan B. Anthony and the Struggle for Equal Rights (Rochester: U of Rochester P, 2012), 245 pp. Reviewed by Franziska Schmid  Amerikastudien / American Studies 59.4 (2014) The nineteenth-century American cultural landscape bears witness to a large variety of reform movements. Susan B. Anthony and the Struggle for…

BRENDA GAYLE PLUMMER, In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956 – 1974 (New York, NY: Cambridge UP, 2013), 372pp. Reviewed by Elizabeth West  Amerikastudien / American Studies 59.4 (2014)   In this historical study of the overlapping but often presumed separate African American Civil Rights period and the Era of Decolonization,…

THOMAS KING, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2013), 287 pp; (originally published in Canada by Doubleday, 2012) Reviewed by Kristina Baudemann  Amerikastudien / American Studies 59.4 (2014)   Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America is not…

KEITH CLARK, The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2013), 264 pp. Reviewed by Julie Naviaux  Amerikastudien / American Studies 59.4 (2014) Clark begins his latest literary study, The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry, with a claim that calls for a complete reframing of Petry’s oeuvre: that Boston University’s Ann Petry archive demonstrates,…

BABETTE BÄRBEL TISCHLEDER, The Literary Life of Things: Case Studies in American Fiction (Frankfurt: Campus, 2014), 292 pp. Reviewed by Martin Brückner Amerikastudien / American Studies 59.4 (2014)   Of the current scholarship driving the material turn in literary studies, Babette Tischleder’s The Literary Life of Things is a major contribution to critical efforts intent on…

DIETER SCHULZ, Emerson and Thoreau, or Steps Beyond Ourselves: Studies in Transcendentalism (Heidelberg: Mattes, 2012), 308 pp. Reviewed by Johannes Voelz Amerikastudien / American Studies 59.4 (2014) In 2013, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society bestowed its highest honor—the “Lifetime Achievement Award”—on Dieter Schulz and thus recognized him as one of a very small group of scholars…