L'ordine è già stato eseguito: Roma, le Fosse Ardeatine, la memoria. By Alessandro Portelli. Rome: Donzelli, 1999. Pp. vii+448. ISBN 88-7989-457-9. L.50.000.

The battle of Valle Giulia: oral history and the art of dialogue. By A. Portelli. Wisconsin: Wisconsin: University Press, 1997. Pp. xx+354. ISBN 0-299-15374-6. $21.95. [Inc. ‘The massacre at Civitella Val di Chiana (Tuscany, June 29, 1944): Myth and politics, mourning and common sense’, in The Battle of Valle Giulia, by A. Portelli, pp. 140–60.]

Operazione Via Rasella: verità e menzogna: i protagonisti raccontano. By Rosario Bentivegna (in collaboration with Cesare De Simone). Rome: Riuniti, 1996. Pp. 147. ISBN 88-359-4171-7. L.6.900.

La memoria divisa. By Giovanni Contini. Milan: Rizzoli, 1997. Pp. 275. ISBN 88-17-33027-2. L.30.000.

Anatomia di un massacro: controversia sopra una strage tedesca. By Paolo Pezzino. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997. Pp. 243. ISBN 88-15-06054-5. L.26.000.

Processo Priebke: Le testimonianze, il memoriale. Edited by Cinzia Dal Maso. Rome: Il Mondo, 3 edn., 1996. Pp. 220. ISBN 88-8175-010-4. L.18.000.

Morte a Roma: il massacro delle Fosse Ardeatine. Nuova edizione aggiornata. By Robert Katz. Rome: Riuniti, 1996. Pp. xxiv+257. ISBN 88-359-4057-5. L.6.500.

Dossier Priebke. By Robert Katz. Milan: Rizzoli, 1996. Pp. 176. ISBN 88-17-84503-5. L.24.000.

Le radici e le ali: partigiani a Roma (and video). By Fabio Grimaldi et al. Rome: Manifestolibri, 1996. Pp. 160. ISBN 88-7285-098-3. L.29.900.

Via Rasella: leggenda e realtà della resistenza a Roma. By Aurelio Lepre. Bari: Laterza, 1996. Pp. 87. ISBN 88-420-5026-1. L.9.000.

Via Rasella, cinquant'anni di menzogne. By Pierangelo Maurizio. Rome: Maurizio edizioni, 1996. Pp. 123. L.20.000.

Storia e memoria di un massacro ordinario. Edited by Leonardo Paggi. Rome: Manifestolibri, 1996. Pp. 165. ISBN 88-7285-103-3. L.14.000.

Il linciaggio di Carretta: Roma 1944: violenza politica e ordinaria violenza. By Gabriele Ranzato. Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1997. Pp. 254. ISBN 88-428-0418-5. L.25.000.

I grandi processi. 2. Herbert Kappler. Edited by Wladimiro Settimelli. Rome: L'Unità, 1994. Pp. 191. Supplement with L'Unità.

‘Identity history is not enough’. By Eric Hobsbawm in idem, On history. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997, pp. 266–77. ISBN 0-297-81915-1. £20.

The facts: what happened? On 23 March 1944, a column of 156 police troops from the Bolzen regiment attached to the German army were marching through the centre of occupied Rome. Between 15.45 and 15.50 a bomb exploded in the narrow street of Via Rasella killing thirty military policemen (three more were to die later) as well as at least two Italian civilians. The bomb had been placed by an official armed Gap partisan unit which had been active in Rome for some months. The German troops responded by firing indiscriminately into the houses on the street and rounding up the residents of Via Rasella. The next day, 335 people were taken to the Fosse Ardeatine Caves just outside the city and shot over a period of four and a half hours.The best account of the massacre remains that of Robert Katz, Death in Rome (London, 1967), Morte a Roma (Rome, 1996). The victims had been taken from various official and unofficial prisons, Via Rasella, and other areas. Only three had already been condemned to death (for partisan activity), 154 were under investigation by the Germany military police, and seventy-five were in custody purely because they were Jewish. Other victims were taken from Regina Coeli (Rome's prison) or selected from those picked up around Via Rasella. The next day (25 March) a German army poster appeared across Rome and in newspapers. It accused ‘criminal elements’ of planting the bomb and added that ‘The German Command … has ordered that for every German killed ten communist-Badoglian criminals will be shot. This order has already been carried out.’

In recent scholarship, the problem of violence has dominated work on the 1641 Irish rebellion. Unfortunately, no scholarship has addressed the means by which victims of the war survived this conflict. This article uses microhistorical evidence from the 1641 depositions for county Cavan to reconstruct the range of possible survival strategies. Philip MacMulmore O'Reilly, a member of the Irish gentry and kinsman to the Cavan rebels, balanced support for the rebellion with attempts to assist endangered Anglo-Protestant settlers. Although deponents questioned O'Reilly's motives, they agreed that he was instrumental in protecting settlers. George Creichton, a Scottish minister and planter, provides a distinctly different example. Despite his religious views and politics, Creichton forged strong ties to neighbouring Irish before the rising. Although in danger, Creichton mobilized a network of friends, kin, and sympathetic neighbours to protect himself and to assist less fortunate Anglo-Protestant neighbours. These two examples reveal the wider existence of early seventeenth-century social relationships that crossed ethnic and religious lines. In the midst of the chaos of 1641, a significant number of settlers benefited from fragmentation in the rebel ranks and often built their survival strategies upon the social relationships that they had forged in more stable times.

Laying the groundwork for a new way to think through the history of British anti-apartheid activity, this article examines the liminal space between anti-racist and feminist activity through a case-study of Leeds Women Against Apartheid. Founded in 1986, LWAA were comprised of a dedicated nucleus of activists, and were concerned with imbuing international solidarity with a tangible meaning. To LWAA, solidarity had a quantifiable basis that could be articulated through the collection of material aid and the raising of funds. The first attempt to ‘gender’ the history of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement, this article argues for the importance of reconceptualizing women's activism, whilst also reflecting on the ‘value’ ascribed to their political engagement. As the example of LWAA shows, by organizing from an ‘autonomous outside position’, the group did so as a prosaic reaction to the realities of working with a masculinist movement. Furthermore, as is shown, while the movement may have been united by a commitment to anti-racism, matters of sexual equality were certainly understood as secondary, and were seen – on both the national and local level – as an unwanted interpolation. In a broader sense then, the article also reflects on the ‘problem’ of gender in progressive social movements.

Not much is generally known about the career of Sir George Sydenham Clarke as first secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence other than his arrival at Whitehall in 1904 and his departure under something of a cloud three years later. Yet Clarke's career is in many respects worthy of study. He can lay strong claim to being the first defence ‘bureaucrat’, and as such his career served to establish a pattern into which his successors had to fit themselves. His activities during his three years of office do much to illuminate the methods by which strategic decisions were reached and demonstrate the obstructions that beset the professional civil servant in such a milieu. The influence of the committee which he served has been the subject of considerable analysis and comment; Clarke's personal disposition helps to explain die remark of one scholar that, for a body occupying its influential position, the CID achieved relatively little.1 Finally, the manner of Clarke's going illustrates the political strength of the navalist lobby and of Sir John Fisher at a crucial time in the making of defence policy.

The German Democratic Republic (GDR) became the focus of a recurrent and sometimes heated debate within the British Labour party before 1973. The official stance of the party followed an all-party consensus within parliament about the non-recognition of the second German state. Yet many on the left wing of the Labour party came, for various reasons, to perceive such an inflexible stance as governed not by reason but dictated by the West German government. Such ambivalence towards West Germany and the Adenauer government in particular led to ambiguities within the party's policy as a considerable minority, including some key figures within the party, offered alternative strategies for maintaining or improving relations with the GDR. The most radical alternative, official recognition of the GDR as a legal, political entity, was only propounded by a core of hard left campaigners both within and outside the party. This article examines why sections of the Labour left came to sympathize with the GDR and how successful it was in influencing official party policy during the whole period of non-recognition of the GDR between 1949 and 1973.

The newly available documentation from the Russian archives sheds new light upon many aspects of Soviet-British relationship during World War II and the early Cold War. One such relatively unexplored facet of this relationship is propaganda interaction between the two countries. While the organization and technique of both Soviet and British propaganda machines have been studied rather extensively, there has been very little documented analysis of an actual impact of British propaganda on the Soviet regime and society in the mid-1940s (although some internal estimates within the British government must have been made at the time). Now, with the opening of Agitprop (department of agitation and propaganda of the central committee of the CPSU) records it becomes possible to measure this impact, including Soviet steps to manage it. A good case study in this regard can be made out of Soviet internal reaction to the main mouthpieces of the British printed propaganda targeted on the Soviet audience in 1942–8 – a journal, Britansky Soyuznik (The British Ally) and its digest companion Britanskaia Khronika (The British Chronicle).

Medical provision in Civil War armies has generally suffered a poor reputation. Medical matters have been excluded from assessments of how far Civil War armies confirm evidence of the so-called ‘Military Revolution’, whilst Harold Cook argued that it was not until after the Glorious Revolution that the medical infrastructure of the armed forces was brought in line with continental practices, particularly those of the Dutch army. Despite the recent rehabilitation of early modern practitioners elsewhere, frontline military practitioners continue to be dismissed as uneducated, unskilful and incompetent. This is largely due to the lack of a fresh perspective since C. H. Firth published Cromwell's Army in 1902. This article argues that the English were well aware of current medical practice in European armies and endeavoured to implement similar procedures during the Civil Wars. Indeed, almost all the developments identified by Cook for the later seventeenth century can be found in Civil War armies. Whilst failures may have occurred, most of these can be attributed to administrative and financial miscarriages, rather than ignorance of contemporary medical developments. Moreover, there is little to suggest that medics mobilized for Civil War armies were any less capable than those who practised civilian medicine in this period.

This article argues for the understanding of ‘utopia’ as a cultural marker whose appearance in history is functional to the a posteriori chronologization (or typification) of historical time. I develop this argument via a comparative analysis of utopia between China and Europe. Utopia is a marker of modernity: the coinage of the word wutuobang (‘utopia’) in Chinese around 1895 is analogous and complementary to More's invention of Utopia in 1516, in that both represent attempts at the conceptualizations of displaced imaginaries, encounters with radical forms of otherness – the European ‘discovery’ of the ‘New World’ during the Renaissance on the one hand, and early modern China's own ‘Westphalian’ refashioning on the other. In fact, a steady stream of utopian conjecturing seems to mark the latter: from the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom borne out of the Opium wars, via the utopian tendencies of late Qing fiction in the works of literati such as Li Ruzhen, Biheguan Zhuren, Lu Shi'e, Wu Jianren, Xiaoran Yusheng, and Xu Zhiyan, to the reformer Kang Youwei's monumental treatise Datong shu. Altogether, these sketches of utopia provide an imaginary counterpoint to the co-produced regimes of historicity whose genealogies are being traced in this issue.

The challenge of Joseph II's enlightened absolutist reforms in the 1780s imposed upon the Hungarian political opinion the painful dilemma of choosing between ‘fatherland’ and ‘progress’, between ‘nation’ and ‘civilization’, between national identity and modernization. These responses created the conceptual basis for the emergence of the modern Hungarian nation. The following characterizes the Hungarian liberals' and conservatives' intellectual horizons and value systems between 1830 and 1848. These two schools represent at least two different modernization strategies, and at least two concepts of national character and two perceptions of adversaries. The ideas here discussed concern the very bases of social organization and the nature and legitimacy of the state; they reveal how Hungarians conceived of the nation; how they saw foreign countries and the European equilibrium; how they perceived themselves and their adversaries, and how they envisaged their past and future.

The authorship of the Vindidae has been a vexed question for 350 years, and perhaps it is not likely to be solved. The book belongs, in the main, to a body of Huguenot literature which appeared after 1572 and was concerned with the dangerous question of the right of resistance. A good deal of this literature was sedulously and obstinately anonymous. There was a reason. If a writer advocated resistance, and, still more, if he advocated or even condoned “tyrannicide,” he would be committing himself to something as abhorrent to the general opinion of his age as “Bolshevism”is to the general opinion of ours. If in addition he backed his opinions by his name, and his name were that of a known adherent of the Calvinist cause, he would be committing that cause to certain obloquy and possible danger. He would be trespassing beyond the bounds of cautious and guarded discretion which Calvin had imposed upon himself in this matter: he would be giving to the enemies of Calvinism the very handle which they desired. In these conditions anonymity flourished: pseudonyms were rife; and calculated puzzles were set to baffle future ages. Not only are we confronted by problems of authorship: we have also to face other and lesser problems. Sometimes, for example, the place and the date of publication are falsified. There was indeed a particular reason for such falsification. Printers as well as authors—perhaps even more than authors—had to be wary; and a genuine place and date of publication afforded too easy a clue.

This is a selective survey of books published over the last ten years or so and bearing on British naval history in the second half of the long eighteenth century.

The ordinary revenue of the kings of Scotland in the early seventeenth century was drawn from a wide variety of sources. The comptroller received the revenues known as ‘property’ - fixed revenues and rents from Crown lands, payments from royal burghs, customs duties and the impost of wines. Out of these he met the"expenses of the royal household. The treasurer was responsible .for meeting nearly all other official and royal expenses out of the ‘casualty’, which included feudal casualties (irregular payments such as wards and reliefs), escheats, compositions and other profits of justice. The collector general and the treasurer of the new augmentations received various revenues from former church property. Administration of these revenues was simplified in 1610 when the earl of Dunbar, already treasurer, was appointed in addition comptroller, collector general and treasurer of the new augmentations, thus bringing responsibility for all branches of the ordinary revenue into the hands of one man, though he continued usually to be referred to simply as the treasurer. This amalgamation of offices became permanent, though the four offices all continued to exist in name until 1707, and separate accounting for the different branches of revenue continued until 1636.

During periods of recession, both historians and policy-makers have tended to revisit the multi-faceted relationship between health and economic crisis. It seems likely that the current economic downturn will trigger a new revival of efforts to gauge its implications for people's health around the world. This review will reflect on aspects of the relationship between health and economic crisis, exploring some of the unanswered questions within the historiography of the Great Depression and health, and suggest new directions that this work might take. Within a broadly transnational framework, I will reassess the diverse historiographies of interwar public health, in order to highlight ways in which the methodologies used could inspire future studies for neglected areas within this field, such as Southeast Asia. In doing so, I will illustrate that the effects of the interwar economic fluctuations on health status remain imprecise and difficult to define, but marked a transitional moment in the history of public health.

The importance of print in the ‘rage of party’ of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain is well known, but scholars have paid insufficient attention to the press phenomenon that provided the most persistent and undiluted partisan voices of the era, the comment serial. Comment serials – regular printed publications designed explicitly to present topical analysis, opinion, and advice – were fashioned as powerful weapons for partisan combat. Due to their regularity and flexibility, they could be more potent than other forms of topical print, especially pamphlets and newspapers. Although many publications have been individually recognized as comment serials, such as Roger L'Estrange's Observator (1681–7), Daniel Defoe's Review (1704–13), and Jonathan Swift and others’ Examiner (1710–14), their development as a holistic phenomenon has not been properly understood. They first appeared during the Succession Crisis (1678–82), and proliferated under Queen Anne (1702–14), supporting both tory and whig causes. Through widespread consumption, both direct and indirect, they shaped partisan culture in various ways, including by reinforcing and galvanizing partisan identities, facilitating the development of partisan ‘reading communities’, and manifesting and representing party divisions in public. This article focuses on John Tutchin's Observator (1702–12) as a case-study of a major comment serial.

Mid-nineteenth century Imperial trade policy has been discussed mainly from the standpoint of the constitutional historian. It is probably for this reason that the economic events with which the policy is connected have received very little critical analysis, and are usually expounded on lines laid down by contemporary partisans. The orthodox view that the Canadian corn-exporting trade was encouraged by the English grant of increased preference in 1843, and in the midst of consequent expansion was injured by the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, and later revived in some measure by the compensating repeal of the Navigation Laws in 1849, was the view normally held by Canadian writers in 1850. Having its origin in past politics, it characteristically exalts the influence of legislation. It is hoped to show in this article that when disturbing factors besides English tariff policy are taken into account—speculation, harvest fluctuation, and the policies of foreign states, to name no others—the interpretation which has proved so seductive is in the main a legend. A legend, it is true, whose acceptance in the late “forties” is not difficult to understand.