Reviews for Anglo-American relations in the 1920's

The average rating for Anglo-American relations in the 1920's based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-09-23 00:00:00 Karen Stolfo Published in 1961. Some readers may want to stop there. Why read a book on American Secretaries of State published in the mid-century? It probably depends a lot on how pleased you are with the style and presentation of modern histories, I suppose. For myself, it's a tradeoff--although this book misses the last 60 years of the office (and I think you have to look askance at it's evaluation of the ten years or so before its publication date, simply because the authors were too close to the period to see it clearly), the essays contained in An Uncertain Tradition are intelligent, informative, and written in a professorial style that is far more attractive to me than the often folksy, companionable, and all-too-often breezy style that I find in contemporary non-fiction. Thinking also about the historiography of the time--there's no doubt in my mind that the period in which a history is written affects the analyses. Dame Wedgwood said it very well, in a preface written years later to her excellent The Thirty Years War: “It was written in London under the advancing shadow of the Second World War, and it may be that the apprehensions of those years can be felt vibrating from time to time in its pages. The historian, concerned as he is with the most vital of all studies, is often more subject than he realizes to the electric currents of contemporary mood.” I can readily believe this, and so any history written in 1961 of any subject would necessarily have to be different than one written today. It comes down to the fact that I trust mid-century accounts more often than I do contemporary ones. Not all, or at all times--nor do I believe contemporary accounts are useless. But because of the different conditions which lead to different perceptions, I find older accounts valuable in and of themselves, and I also find them less inclined to revisionism for the sake of current goals. An Uncertain Tradition is a compilation of fifteen essays, most written by department heads of selected universities, covering each Secretary of State from John Hay (1898-1905) to John Foster Dulles (1953-1959). The essays are divided into five or six chapters, and cover briefly the biography of the subject up to the time he took the office of SoS, a brief summary of the world's conditions and the challenges of the period, the activity of the SoS and how it affected the department itself, his activity and how it directed foreign affairs, and a short evaluation of his legacy. As I said, the closer the essays moved to the actual publication of the book, I kept a open mind--I think it's too difficult of a task to accurately evaluate events that happened less than fifteen years from the writing. To think also that that task involved the first years of the post-war period, and I think it would be almost impossible to accomplish. Yet even here I thought it was valuable--not because of their evaluation, but relating more to Wedgwood's comment above; it is an opportunity to understand critical concerns of that time which may have become obscured over time. The book really shines--to my mind, a political layman--in the first essays concerning the changes that were taking place in America at the beginning of the 20th Century. As it was closer to the time of this book's publication (but far enough away to begin a critical evaluation), I think it highlights some aspects that might get dropped in contemporary accounts. Maybe, maybe not--still, I felt like I learned a great deal from these beginning essays. Of course I picked this up used somewhere, probably for 50 cents at a library sale, and so I was amply paid back for my time and money. There are, obviously, many other accounts of the office of SoS, and this may only be one among many that are worthwhile (and truly, some other readers may not agree with my assessment of mid-century writing, so the idea that this is worthwhile is debatable), but if I never go back to this subject, I won't feel as if I got shortchanged by this collection

Review # 2 was written on 2020-11-29 00:00:00 Ben Bramley What a fun fun read. If you like history, and especially unusual trivia, then you enjoy this book. There are influences in our culture that go back to some English influences that our pleasant and fun to discover.