Tag Archives | History

David Rawson

Rawson, David. “Burundi: Burundi: Biography of a Small African Country.” African Studies Review 52, no. 3 (December 2009): 190-191.

Abstract: In its first ten years of independence, the emergent state of Burundi suffered the assassination of two prime ministers, several political massacres, two attempted coups, two successful coups, and in 1972, a revolt in the south followed by state-organized genocide. Except for path-breaking studies by Rene Lemarchand {Rwanda and Burundi [Praeger, 1970] and Burundi: Eth-nocide as Discourse and Practice [Cambridge University Press, 1994]), these events went largely unreported in English-language media and unexplored in scholarly analysis. In 1988 communal violence broke out in the north, followed by another brutal repression. This time, however, pressured by external demands and internal necessity, the military ruler, Pierre Buyoya, engineered a national political accommodation and free elections in 1993, which were won by his opponent, Melchior Ndadaye.

Mark Correll

Correll, Mark R. “Kevin P. Spicer, Hitler’s Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism.” Fides et Historia no. 1 (2009): 111.

Abstract: Kevin P. Spicer’s new work, Hitler’s Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism, examines Catholic-Nazi cooperation by inspecting the role of the small but vocal group of clerical Nazi supporters, the so-called “brown priests.” Hitler’s Priests explores the brown priests’ lives through their correspondence, parish records, and publications. Spicer describes the pastoral and theological results of the brown priests’ worldview, as well as the rationale for their open support of the Nazi party. Taking nine of the most active clerical supporters of the Nazis, he sketches biographies of these individual priests, outlining their respective entries into a pro-Hitler stance, their agitation for the Nazis, and the difficulties they encountered either with the church hierarchy or party leadership.

Robert Eells

Eells, Robert J. “Where did the Party Go?: William Jennings Bryan, Hubert Humphrey, and the Jeffersonian Legacy.” Fides Et Historia 39, no. 1 (Winter, 2007): 149-152.

Abstract: “To use a biblical analogy,” according to the author, “one could say that the Democratic Party exchanged its birthright for a mess of pottage” (271). The birthright was true, principled Jeffersonian liberalism-incarnate in the third president and later embodied in Andrew Jackson, Martin VanBuren, and especially in William Jennings Bryan’s evangelical populism. Pottage, on the other hand, was the disastrous direction first taken by Woodrow Wilson, then quickly followed by the Hamiltonian statism of FDR, LBJ, and the author’s particular nemesis, Hubert H. Humphrey.