History

“Perfect Child, Perfect Faith” studies how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the abolitionist and integrationist community of Berea, Kentucky, the Oneida Perfectionists, and the United Society of Believers (better known as Shakers) raised their children in the nineteenth century. Each of these communities incorporated a specific interpretation of Christianity and rejected “traditional” culture and society in favor of their “perfected” alternative. For each of these groups, children acted as a space to write their own identity. Children embodied hope, patriotism, faith, obedience, and goodness. Exploring childhood and children's experience in history can be difficult as retrieving the voices of children can be a daunting task. They produced less sources and materials than their adult contemporaries. And even fewer of these sources have been preserved. This means that much of their experiences, as they happened, are lost to historians. However, many of these children grew up to write memoirs, diaries, and brief histories of their people, which have provided access to children’s experiences. In addition to relying on memoirs, the dissertation uses handbooks and guides on childrearing and practices produced by each of the communities. Finally, it considers non-textual sources, especially photography of families and children, as well as illustrations in literature and periodicals. To understand how the communities raised their child and why these children did not
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continue their original communal goals, the dissertation is organized into four categories: the symbolic meaning of the child, the definition and role of the family, educational practices, and the connections between work and play. Each section considers both the community’s view of the child and the child’s actual experience. Often a child’s reality differed dramatically from the ideals and expectations of his/ her community. The dissertation argues that Mormons, Bereans, Oneida Perfectionists, and Shakers failed to raise their children in radically different ways and instead raised them similar to nineteenth-century bourgeois America: as innocents with the possibility of perfecting the future.

88 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY the citizen-soldier, even as he points ahead to the development of an effective standing army (243). Skaggs’s narrative is engaging, well researched, and remarkably detailed. The author makes effective use of William Henry Harrison’s published papers, something no military biographer of Harrison has had access to before (xi, 291). He also engages well with the enormous body of secondary literature. The volume also includes numerous helpful maps. Unfortunately, the narrative is not entirely free of typos, but thankfully these are not many or serious. For Skaggs, William Henry Harrison personifies the American conquest of the Old Northwest (245). This book gives Old Tippecanoe his due, making him more important to American history than just the Battle of Tippecanoe. Daniel Williams Auburn University

Spring 2006 Issue of KINEMA THE CINEMATIC "ARAB": FROM THE LONG SHIPS TO HIDALGO IMAGES of "Arabs" have been perennial staples of both Hollywood feature films and US television. The degree to which these are stereotypical has been examined in studies by several critics. In spite of their admonitions, however, they remain fixtures of America's dream factory. The recent film Hidalgo reveals the reproduction of these tried and not so true representations, but also seeks to address some of the criticisms and to make redress for transgressions visited upon the two principal groups depicted within it, "Arabs" and Native American Indians. In the course of doing so, it takes on North American "racial" formation, historical relations between the New and Old Worlds and British imperialism. Finally, Hidalgo is a curiously complex tricolour tapestry of racial binaries, the antinomies of "White" vs "Red," "Black" vs "White," "White" vs "Arab" and "Red" vs "Arab." If it may be argued that several of these oppositions have novel elements, it is also evident that they bear comparison to earlier scenes in both the recent and distant celluloid past. Embedded within this set of representations is the understudied signifier of "Afro-Arab." That racial diversity exists and has existed within the Arab world has long been a subject of Arabists, Islamicists and Africanists. Such scholars as Bernard Lewis and John Ralph Willis have addressed it directly, principally in terms of links between "race" and slavery. Until their compulsory introduction into Kuwait and Saudi Arabia with the onset of the Persian Gulf and Iraq wars, however, most Americans had not taken note of this. Since the emergence of al-Qaeda and the spate of bombings directed at US installations and interests inside the Middle East, Eastern Africa and North America, culminating in the September 11 th attacks, the largely unspoken factor of "race" has formed an undercurrent in the discourse on "Arab," "Islamic" and "fundamentalism-inspired" terrorism which has provoked much heated debate within a terrified American populace and the resort to military expedients to combat a perceived "Islamic threat.

Gostaria de expressar os meus sinceros agradecimentos a todas as pessoas que contribuíram na realização desse trabalho, em particular, Ao colegas Roberto Ribas, Franco Brandolini, José Roberto Oliveira, Madhavarao Narayana Rao (in memoriam), Marcilei Guazzelli da Silveira e Wayne Seale por terem me acompanhado durante toda a minha formação e pelas discussões, apoio e incentivo na realização de inúmeros trabalhos para o estudo da estrutura de núcleos.