ERA Reviews

Most students who first take a constitutional law course learn the Lochner era in the same fashion: that the justices of the Supreme Court forced their view of proper market relations on the rest of the country (the Holmesian view). This view is perpetuated by the selective choice of cases that most students are exposed to, usually only Lochner, Adair, and Hammer v. Dagenhart. But this view begins to break down as one studies further cases and it becomes clear that for the most part the Court struck down a fairly limited number of laws in this area and upheld the vast majority of state regulations. The subject has needed a coherent, systematic revision for some time and Howard Gillman delivers such a study with clarity and surprising brevity.

Gillman begins with a clear thesis: that the Lochner era jurisprudence was grounded in a constitutional tradition rooted in the founders' desire to form a faction free republic. This tradition held that the states' police powers could only be used in a neutral manner to benefit the general welfare; that the state couldn't use its regulatory power to benefit one faction only. This tradition was based on the assumption that the American economy could provide for everyone in a manner that would protect against social dependency as experienced in Europe. Gillman traces this legal tradition from the founders through the nineteenth century and up to the final demise in 1937. Gillman places the Lochner decision in the context of this tradition and explains that it wasn't really motivated by laissez-faire market views but instead was a good faith attempt to preserve a tradition that was increasingly undermined by the changing industrial relations of America. This work is well worth the read for anyone interested in American constitutional history.

One final word of praise. Gillman is not interested in justifying and resurrecting Lochner in the modern day, as some economic rights activists have called for. Instead he is focused on defusing the claim that the Lochner era was one of rampant judicial activism. Gillman succeeds admirably in his task.

Thomas Baldwin's introduction to contemporary philosophy in English is simply outstanding. Baldwin writes very clearly, a great virtue when writing about philosophy and ought not to be unappreciated. Philosophy itself is hard enough and there's no need to add to the confusion by writing badly about it. But in my oppinion Baldwin does a superb job of introducing the main themes and currents of Anglo-American philosophy in the latter half of the 20th century, as well as setting the scene in the first chapter, in a way that everyone can understand and is completely free of all philosophical jargon. If you want to acquaint yourself with 20th century philosophy, I recommend you start by reading this book. It will get you far and help you put things into perspective. There are also helpful suggestions for further reading in the book. But I also recommend this book to those who are already familiar with 20th century philosophy. You might gain a better perspective of what you're already familiar with, and, again, this book is just fun to read.

My only real complaint relates to something entirely outside the author's control: the price. Put simply, this book is darned expensive. But my recommendation to potential readers is: bite the bullet and shell out the dollars. THE BOOK IS WORTH IT!

Professor Ballard (who used to be a colleague in my own institution, but is now in the US again, I'm told) has based his book on a solid bedrock of French primary sources, few of them consulted by scholars before, and all of them used responsibly and creatively by Ballard.

Ballard's analysis is consequently sound and very convincing. I learned a great deal about life in revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and gained many unique insights into the way an 'ordinary' literate and cultivated Frenchman -- who just wanted to get on with life despite the chaos and instability that plagued his nation before Napoleon took power and the far greater degree of governmental interference after he did -- saw and understood the turmultuous events of his era.

The book's uniqueness lies in the fact that, by tracing one man's life throughout the entire period, it demonstrates the constantly evolving nature of the ideas, policies and practices that emerged and shaped French society.

The prose is clear and engaging, and helps to enliven what might at first glance seem an unimportant story about a man of no great repute. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, and would recommend it without reservation to all readers, including French history specialists and the "lay" readers like myself.

Guelzo is a distinguished intellectual historian and author of the recent superb biography, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President. The Crisis of the American Republic is enjoyably well-written. Social aspects of the Civil War, such as the roles of women and African-Americans, are thoughtfully considered along with the military history. Guelzo is particularly good on the issues underlying the conflict; the chapter on religious and intellectual history is most enlightening.

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Back when most of the readers of this review went to college to learn to be teachers, we were good girls and good boys. We took our required courses and we studied pedagogy. We learned about Maslow's hierarchy, about Ausubel's anticipatory set, about Skinner's rewards and punishments, Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives, Piaget's and Erikson's stages of development. We became certified. We entered our schools in the morning and we came home at night to our families. If we weren't teaching in our home town, our students were themselves from families, communities, cultures, that sometimes confused us. But if we didn't have knowledge of the students' families, communities, and culture, we didn't mind, for our training in the subjects we taught and our training in how to teach those subject matters told us that we were to be objective, that certain purposeful goals and plans would work to teach all students, if only we filled out our behavioral lesson plans and had enough classroom management. We believed fervently that the world of the classroom was indeed manageable, and all students could be taught no matter what by the methods of the pedagogical methodologists- the Jerome Bruner of the Woods Hole Conference (1960), who said we should teach through the structure of the discipline; the National Science Foundation who said we should engage in the new math and in MACOS (Man: A Course of Study); Benjamin Bloom, and his colleagues (1969), who made taxonomies of behavioristic objectives of learning in the affective and the cognitive domains, and who went on to invent a system called "mastery learning," which said we could "teacher proof" the curriculum so that it could be "delivered" to all students in a certain amount of time; Robert Gagné (1974) , who invented a "system approach" to teaching and learning. "The Curriculum," we had been taught, is a written document with a certain selection of materials to be read or covered, a scope and a sequence, and defined goals. This view is based on what is called the Tyler Rationale, based on the work of Ralph Tyler, who in 1949 stated four purposes for curriculum: 1. What educational purposes should the school seek to attain? [objectives]; 2. What educational experiences can be provided that are likely to attain these purposes? [design]; 3. How can these educational experiences be effectively organized? [scope and sequence]; 4. How can we determine that these purposes are being attained? [evaluation]. We came to believe that we, as good girls and boys, would be good curriculum people if we were organized and followed the systems and suggestions of these gurus. But when we got home from those schools, when we went to lunch with our friends, when we confessed to each other that our well-laid plans were not working. Or at least not the way we thought they would. In many of our schools, chaos reigned. The leaders weren't leading; the students weren't filling in the bubbles properly on the required true and false and multiple choice tests; they said we weren't teaching them to spell; the objectives to be evaluated weren't evaluatable. We were in the world of the school, a world that encounters all of society's ills through its students, their parents, and the expectations of the larger society, the business community, the elite colleges we hope our students will be able to attend. Here we were, trundling our materials in and out of our car trunks, teaching in closets and furnace rooms, aliens in the school communities we entered for pullout classes a few hours a week, and we were being greeted not with welcome but with chaos. This wasn't the way teaching was supposed to work! As a former school principal, I often had to wearily shake my head at the notion that I would be a visionary educational leader, when every moment of every day was spent putting out fires, from pulling up the pants of the kindergartner trapped in the stall in the big girls' bathroom, to speaking soberly to the boys who put gum in the elevator keyhole. By the time I wrote my thank you notes, had my nonstop round of meetings, walked down the halls nodding and speaking to everyone, I had little time to read theory, to reflect on curriculum, and to lead my school to victory. Slattery's has been a teacher, a principal, a coach, a social activist. He's not writing from our so-called ivory tower of academe, but from a solid base in parochial schools. Slattery is of the second generation from the curriculum thinkers who formed the "reconceptualist movement" in the 1970s. A student of William Pinar's and William Doll's at Louisiana State University, he became co-author with Pinar of the recent synoptic curriculum text Understanding Curriculum (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman, 1995). The reconceptualists formulated a curriculum theory that was new. In 1970, Joseph Schwab declared that the curriculum field was "moribund," and that the Tyler Rationale has reached the end of its usefulness for school planning, first because it has a false technicalism, and second because it is politically naive. The humanistic open classroom, the emphasis on values clarification, the push for affective education formed the context of the reconceptualist position. Eisner joined in with his emphasis on aesthetics, delineating five conflicting conceptions of curriculum that educators hold (Eisner 1979). Slattery's book comes out of this history, and it takes its focus not from the pretentious scientistic modernistic attempts to force human behavior (the student) and human creative work (the canon) into a list of behaviors and goals. It swiftly went to a second printing. Slattery says, "the demoralization of educators, disenfranchisement of students, and the dissatisfaction of stakeholders in educational systems are all indications that something is terribly wrong. These theories . . . have proved to be impotent in the face of growing turmoil in the modern world" (p. 245). Embracing a theory of kaleidoscopic chaos in relation to schools, Slattery points to conditions within the schools such as "departmental isolation," where colleagues don't talk to each other; where tenured teachers castigate the bureaucrats but languish in their own malaise. "Curriculum committees spend their time reviewing course proposals, clarifying goals and objectives, and debating changes in the state curriculum guides . . . oblivious to the contemporary curriculum discourses" (p. 246). As I am myself a veteran and experienced observer and participant in the schools as well as the university, when I read this I began to wake up. I began to read curriculum theory again. I began to let my moribund curriculum gene, lulled to sleep in the comfort of Tylerism, begin to question again. I began to attend innovative curriculum conferences where theory was discussed by eager and brilliant young theoreticians with flashing eyes and spiked hair. I came to consider these to be the "gifted and talented" of the education profession. Chapter 1 is called "Introduction to Curriculum Development and Postmodernity," and it discusses the various definitions and interpretations of postmodernity, for example, Giroux's conception of the border crossing taking place between feminist theory, critical theory, race theory, and multiculturalism. Slattery seems to align himself with a constructivist postmodernism as described by David Ray Griffin, where postmodernism "seeks to integrate the best features of premodern, rural, agrarian societies (e.g., spirituality, cosmology, family/tribal community values) and the best features of the modern urban, technological societies (e.g. advances in health care, global communication, transportation) in order to construct a more balanced and ecologically sustainable global economy" (p. 31). Chapter 2 considers "Historical Perspectives On Curriculum As A Field of Study" and takes into account Lyotard's influence on modern thinkers, not only thinkers in curriculum. Lyotard (1984) posited the idea that the overarching view of history is one more metanarrative, even though it is dominant. The story of the Enlightenment being a narrative of freedom and progress, the story that the Civil War was a war about slavery, the story that World War II was "The Good War," are subject, in the postmodern critical consciousness, as "they privilege one historical analysis without acknowledging their own contextuality and without acknowledging the validity of other discourses" (p. 37). Slattery comments that the emphasis on critical thinking, sets "boundaries around thinking in which the parameters of knowledge are limited by specific interpretations of human history" (p. 39). Telling a story of his own family's visit to Vicksburg and finding their own family history in the Civil War there, he asserts that social studies wouldn't be boring to students if they engaged in autobiographical encounters with the material. Chapter 3, "The Reconcept

Cyber_Reader compiled and edited by Neil Spiller is an impressive and erudite anthology of texts and essays on the theme of cyberspace. Most of the essays are from the 1990s, though a few appropriate excerpts from earlier cyberspace history are included. An amazing and eclectic selection of learned opinions and analysis make Cyber_Reader an engaging, informative, seminal, at times challenging, and always highly recommended study of how virtual reality shapes our living world to this very day.

This is a story about a family of baby skunks who had to survive their 1st year without the guidance of their mother, who was killed by an automobile while trying to save one of her babies. It is a compassionate and true-to-life story about a species that one will truly learn to love and appreciate after reading the book. The author obviously understood animals' multitude of challenges faced living in the wild, in particular the skunks. I read this story each year to my 3rd grade students, and it was always one of the favorites. Such a wonderful story should never go out of print, but I understand this book is fairly difficult to find now. I will never let go of my copy!

This is one of those books readers might dismiss as too specialized. That would be a mistake. Kurk Dorsey is one of the first American diplomatic historians to treat relations with Canada. Beyond that he sees how transborder issues raised by wildlife treaties run into conflicting national agendas. The Canadian-American wildlife treaties anticipate more recent efforts to negotiate environmental issues. The writing in this book makes it an engaging read.

I bought this book to supplement a course I was taking on Japanese literature, and it was one of the few "optional" texts I ever actually read. Donald Keene is the first person to look to if you are interested in Japanese literature. Not only does he know the literaure inside and out, he puts everything in a context of history and culture that makes you appreciate the actual works even more. This book is comprehensive, well thought out, and very accessible.

Dr. Sullivan presents a fascinating account of an important--but often overlooked--era in the American Civil Rights movement. Days of Hope is an authoritative account of the roots of the civil rights struggle. The book is interesting, comprehensive, and impeccably sourced and researched. A must for any student of the movement.