Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Wrong Hands
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 8/13/1957
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/ann-larabee/ * https://www.amazon.com/Ann-Larabee/e/B001HD12C4
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 99010331
Personal name heading:
Larabee, Ann, 1957-
Found in: Decade of disaster, c1999: CIP t.p. (Ann Larabee) data
sheet (Larabee, Ann Elise; b. 08-13-57)
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave., SE
Washington, DC 20540
Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
PERSONAL
Born August 13, 1957.
EDUCATION:Binghamton University, Ph.D. (with distinction), 1988.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, 1988-, became professor of English and associate chair of writing, rhetoric, and American cultures. Journal for the Study of Radicalism, coeditor.
MEMBER:Gender and Disaster Network, American Studies Association.
Women’s Studies Alumnae Prize and Charles A. Shanklin Award for Original Graduate Research, both from Bowling Green State University, both 1985; grants from Michigan State University International Studies Program’s Special Foreign Travel Fund, 1993, 1996, 1998, 2002; Electronic Text Award for Best Essay, Postmodern Culture Journal, 1994; research grant, Critical Incident Analysis Group, Michigan State University, 1996.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, The Gothic World of Anne Rice, Technology and Terrorism, and Terrorism and Disaster: New Threats, New Ideas. Contributor to journals, including Mid-American Review, American Studies, New England Theatre Journal, and Knowledge, Technology, and Policy.
SIDELIGHTS
Ann Larabee, a professor at Michigan State University, has written on a variety of subjects, including women’s work in theater and drama, especially that of Djuna Barnes and Susan Glaspell; responses to disaster; and the relationship of radicalism and technology. She has also won praise for her work on the history of terrorism.
Decade of Disaster
This book focuses on disasters of the 1980s, including the release of poison that killed many workers at a Union Carbide factor in Bhopal, India; the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger; the meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the Soviet Union; the oil spill from the Exxon Valdez tanker; and the AIDS epidemic. Larabee looks primarily at the cultural response to these catastrophes. Politicians, businesses, thought leaders, and individuals, she writes, attempt to make disasters understandable and search for ways to prevent recurrences, or at least appear to prevent them. Those responsible for the disasters—such as Union Carbide and Exxon—seek to control the narrative so as to allay public fears and portray their companies in the most positive light possible under the circumstances, she notes. There is also a focus on what can be learned from the experience. Larabee sees a danger in these responses, in that they might make disasters seem less disastrous than they are and emphasize “solutions” that provide a degree of comfort but do little to address the problems that led to the events.
Decade of Disaster “is a good example of recent work in what is called cultural studies, generally ignoring historical context and institutional structures to focus … on ‘narratives,’ that is, public responses of grief, outrage, apology, and explanation,” observed Bernard Mergen in American Studies International. He added that “Larabee’s conclusions are brief and to the point” while providing “valuable insights.”
The Dynamite Fiend
The Dynamite Fiend: The Chilling Tale of a Confederate Spy, Con Artist, and Mass Murderer tells the story of Alexander “Sandy” Keith Jr., who spent his life on the wrong side of the law. Born in 1827 in Scotland, he came to Canada as a child, with his family settling in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In that city, his uncle, also named Alexander Keith, was a successful brewery owner. The younger Keith had no share of the family riches, so he turned to crime. In 1857, according to Larabee, he blew up a magazine of gunpowder, belonging to his uncle, in Halifax Harbor, apparently to destroy evidence of his financial misdeeds. During the Civil War, Halifax attracted many Confederate sympathizers and spies, and Keith offered his services to them in schemes that enriched him without doing much to advance the Confederate cause. At one point he agreed to sell the same two locomotives to multiple buyers, took their money, and then alerted Union authorities, who took possession of the railroad cars—and Keith made a profit. He also let Confederate blockade runners list him as the owner of their ships for insurance purposes, and he collected the benefits when the ships sank, leading him to plant a few bombs to produce more shipwrecks.
After the war he moved to the United States and then Germany, where he committed his final and most spectacular crime. He took out insurance on some cargo on a ship leaving Bremen and arranged for explosives and a timer to go on the vessel as well. The explosives, packed in a barrel, went off prematurely when workers were loading it onto the ship, and about eighty people on the dock were killed, with another fifty injured. Keith, watching from a distance, shot himself in the head and died several days later. He became known as the “dynamite fiend.” Larabee, who became interested in Keith while researching Confederate terrorism, draws on numerous archival sources to reconstruct his life and offer theories about his motives. The book was published in Canada as The Dynamite Fiend: The Chilling Story of Alexander Keith Jr., Nova Scotian Spy, Con Artist and International Terrorist.
Several critics considered The Dynamite Fiend fascinating. Larabee “uncovers a web of Civil War and Gilded Age intrigue, white-collar crime, revenge, and mass murder,” observed Greg Marquis in Michigan Historical Review, further noting that her book “is well written and expertly researched.” Larabee, he said, generally “exercises restraint in interpreting the evidence against Keith,” although he thought she assigned Keith responsibility for the Halifax Harbor explosion without proof. New York Times reviewer William Grimes called Keith’s life story “one of the strangest, most twisted tales of deceit and daring that the 19th century has to offer,” but he found it lacking somewhat in the telling. Larabee “does little more than shove the facts of Keith’s life in front of the reader,” Grimes maintained. Also, he said, when she tries “constructing a personality and a set of motives for Keith, an absolute cipher, by working backward from his deeds,” the result “is unconvincing.” Booklist contributor Gilbert Taylor, however, praised the book without reservation, terming it “detailed but never dull” and “a high-quality historical addition to the true-crime genre.” A commentator in Beaver: Exploring Canada’s History concluded: “Those who like a good yarn will like it a lot.”
The Wrong Hands
Explosives also figure prominently in The Wrong Hands: Popular Weapons Manuals and Their Historic Challenges to a Democratic Society, which traces the history of these do-it-yourself guides in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first, along with government attempts to suppress them. The rationale for stopping circulation of these books is that they could fall into “the wrong hands,” even though many readers have no intention of constructing weapons. Larabee explores the conflict between free speech and public safety created by these writings, noting: “Popular weapons manuals test the limits of political tolerance like no other form.” She deals with works from across the ideological spectrum, including Johann Most’s The Science of Revolutionary Warfare, William Powell’s The Anarchist Cookbook, and Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, plus the easy availability of weapons information on the Internet. She further notes that while law enforcement and elected officials have often tried to keep such information out of readers’ hands, politicians have been less enthusiastic about regulating guns, despite incidents of gun violence every day.
Larabee received critical praise for The Wrong Hands, with Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries contributor K.R. Shaffer calling it “an entertaining, enlightening book” that provides a “fast-paced, jargon-free history” of its subject. Howard P. Segal, writing in Times Higher Education’s online edition, termed it a “valuable account of the historical and contemporary context” for “the dilemma of balancing free speech with the potential for technical knowledge to be used for destructive purposes.” Larabee’s work, he reported, “brilliantly guides us through these challenges to American democracy.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
American Studies International, October, 2001, Bernard Mergen, “Slow Fade to Green,” p. 53.
Beaver: Exploring Canada’s History, April-May, 2006, review of The Dynamite Fiend: The Chilling Story of Alexander Keith Jr., Nova Scotian Spy, Con Artist and International Terrorist, p. 51.
Biography, winter, 2006, Michel Basilieres, review of The Dynamite Fiend: The Chilling Story of Alexander Keith Jr., Nova Scotian Spy, Con Artist and International Terrorist, p. 226.
Booklist, June 1, 2005, Gilbert Taylor, review of The Dynamite Fiend: The Chilling Tale of a Confederate Spy, Con Artist, and Mass Murderer, p. 1728.
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June, 2016, K.R. Shaffer, review of The Wrong Hands: Popular Weapons Manuals and Their Historic Challenges to a Democratic Society, p. 1532.
Michigan Historical Review, spring, 2006, Greg Marquis, review of The Dynamite Fiend, p. 13.
New York Times, June 29, 2005, William Grimes, “A Man of Many Facets, All of Them Monstrous,” p. E12.
Reference & Research Book News, November, 2005, review of The Dynamite Fiend.
Skeptical Inquirer, March-April, 2016, review of The Wrong Hands, p. 63.
ONLINE
Michigan State University Department of English Website, http://www.english.msu.edu/ (June 6, 2017), brief biography.
Michigan State University Website, http://www.msu.edu/ (June 6, 2017), brief biography and curriculum vitae.
Oxford University Press Global Website, https://global.oup.com/ (June 6, 2017), brief biography.
Times Higher Education Website, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/ (November 5, 2015), Howard P. Segal, review of The Wrong Hands.
Professor
20th-Century and Contemporary Literature
Office: C626 Wells Hall
Email: larabee@msu.edu
Ann Larabee received her PhD from the Binghamton University, and has taught at Michigan State University since 1988. Her dissertation was on women's theater and drama in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, and she is known for her pioneering work on the drama of Djuna Barnes and Susan Glaspell.
In more recent years, she has been interested in the relationships among technology, culture, and media. In 2000, she published Decade of Disaster, which examines cultural responses to technological disasters, from the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster to the Bhopal chemical leak.
Prof. Larabee remains interested in the cultural impact and representation of disasters. She is currently at work on a historical study of bomb-making among radical groups, exploring issues of technology transfer, constitutional restraints on speech, and the institutional boundaries placed around dangerous knowledge and instruction. With Prof. Arthur Versluis, Prof Larabee is co-editor of the Journal for the Study of Radicalism, featuring interdisciplinary scholarly work on global radical movements. Prof. Larabee is considered an expert on the history of terrorism and has contributed to the formation of the historiography of this emerging field. In 2008, as an offshoot of her larger study of radicalism and technology, she published The Dynamite Fiend, a biography of a Confederate agent who attempted to use a time bomb to blow up transatlantic passenger ships. Prof. Larabee also publishes in the field of media studies, and is especially interested in the global mediascape.
Prof. Larabee has overseen dissertations in women and technological invention, cultural studies and radicalism, media and violence, and global media forms. She teaches modern and contemporary literature, drama, literary survey and introductory humanities.
Ann Larabee
235 Ernst Bessey Hall
Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824-1033
Phone: 517-355-2400
Email: larabee@msu.edu
CURRENT POSITION:
Associate Chair, Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures, Michigan State University.
EDUCATION:
PhD with distinction, English, Binghamton University, 1988.
Areas of specialization: Feminist Theory, Women Dramatists, Shakespeare
Dissertation: First Wave Feminist Theater, 1890-1930
PUBLICATIONS
Books:
The Dynamite Fiend: The Chilling Tale of a Confederate Spy, Con Artist, and Mass Murderer. New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2005. (Published in Canada as The Dynamite Fiend: The Chilling Story of Alexander Keith, Jr., Nova Scotian Spy, Con-Artist and International Terrorist. Halifax, NS: Nimbus, 2005).
Four weeks on the Nova Scotian bestseller list.
Decade of Disaster. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
Chapters:
"A Brief History of Terrorism in the United States." Technology and Terrorism. Ed. David Clarke. Transaction, 1004. 19-40
“Empire of Fear: Imagined Community and the September 11 Attacks.” Terrorism and Disaster: New Threats, New Ideas. Research in Social Problems and Public Policy Series. Vol. 11. Ed. Lee Ben Clarke. Elsevier, 2003. 19-32.
“Negotiating Disaster: Interpretive Networks in Popular Culture.” Forthcoming in The Popular Culture of Disasters. Ed. Gary Webb and E. R. Quarantelli (International Committee on Disaster Research). Xlibris, forthcoming.
“Bhopal.” Forthcoming in Encyclopedia of World Environmental History. Ed. John McNeill, Carolyn Merchant, and Shepard Krech III. Routledge, 2003.
" 'Nothing Ends Here': Managing the Challenger Disaster." American Disasters. Ed. Steven Biel. New York: NYU Press, 2002. 197-220.
Excerpts from "The American Hero and His Mechanical Bride: Gender Myths of the Titanic Disaster" (American Studies, 1990). Reprinted in Titanic: An Anthology. Ed. John Wilson Foster. Penguin UK, 1999.
"'The Drama of Transformation': Settlement House Idealism and the Neighborhood Playhouse." In Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theatre. Ed. J.Ellen Gainor and Jeffrey Mason. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999: 123-138.
" 'We're Talking Science, Man, Not Voodoo,': Genetic Disaster in Anne Rice's Mayfair Witch Chronicles," The Gothic World of Anne Rice. Ed. Gary Hoppenstand. Bowling Green: Popular Press, 1996: 173-184.
" 'Meeting the Outside Face to Face': Susan Glaspell, Djuna Barnes, and O'Neill's The Emperor Jones." In Modern American Drama: The Female Canon. Ed. June Schlueter. Cranbury, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson UP, 1990: 77-85.
"The Early Attic Stage of Djuna Barnes." In Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes. Ed. Mary Lynn Broe. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991: 37-44.
Articles:
“A Brief History of Terrorism in the United States,” Knowledge, Technology, and Policy. 16.1 (2003): 21-38.
"Technology in Popular Culture." Science, Technology, and Society (Fall/Winter 1994): 15-17.
"Radioactive Body Politics: AIDS as Nuclear Text." Literature and Medicine 13 (Fall 1994): 229-242. Excerpts also appeared in Lesbian/Gay Studies Newsletter 21 (Spring 1994): 7.
" 'Remembering the Shuttle, Forgetting the Loom': Interpreting the Challenger Disaster." Postmodern Culture 4 (May 94). Winner of the Electronic Text Award, 1994. Available on-line through Project Muses.
" 'Going Through Harriet': Ritual and Theatre in the Women's Colleges." The New England Theatre Journal 3 (Spring 1992): 39-60.
"Ground Zero: The City, the Bomb and the End of History." Canadian Review of American Studies 22 (Fall 1991): 263-279.
“The American Hero and His Mechanical Bride: Gender Myths of the Titanic Disaster,” American Studies 31 (Spring 1990): 5-23.
“Death in Delphi: Susan Glaspell and the Companionate Marriage.” Mid-American Review 7 (Summer 1987): 93-106.
Journalism:
"It's Not How to Make a Bomb That's the Problem." Reviewed and distributed in 2005 by the History News Network, and published in Taiwan News, Chicago Sun Times, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Athens Banner-Herald.
Review Essays:
“Teen.” In U. S. Consumer Magazines for Women. Eds. Terry Lueck and Katherine Endress. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995: 358-362.
“Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It,” Revisions 6 (Spring 1993): 7-10.
Book Reviews:
Review of Sonja Kuftinec's Staing America: Cornerstone and Community-Based Theater. Theatre Survey 45 (2004). 284.
Review of Cheryl Black's The Women of Provincetown, 1915-1922. Theatre Survey 45 (2004). 121.
Review of Susan C. Haedicke and Tobin Nellhaus's Performing Democracy: International Perspectives on Urban Community-Based performance. Theater Survey 44 (2003). 280.
Review of Eric Klinenberg’s Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster (U of Chicago, 2002). H-Urban, July 2003.
Review of David M. Lubin, Titanic (British Film Institute, 1999). American Studies 42.2 (2001): 186.
Review of Len Ackland. Making a Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West (U of New Mexico P, 1999). Isis 92.4 (2001): 803.
Review of Tyler Cowen, What Price Fame? (Harvard UP, 2000), Biography 24 (2001): 675.
In Progress
Alchemists of the Revolution: A History of Terrorist Bomb-Making in the United States. In Progress.
AWARDS
Research Grant, Critical Incident Analysis Group, Michigan State University, 1996.
Electronic Text Award for Best Essay, Postmodern Culture Journal, 1994.
Participant, Rethinking Technology, NEH Institute, Pennsylvania State University, June-July 1994.
MSU International Studies Program's Special Foreign Travel Fund, 1993, 1996, 1998, 2002.
Charles A. Shanklin Award for Original Graduate Research, Bowling Green State University, 1985.
Women's Studies Alumnae Prize, Bowling Green State University, 1985.
PRESENTATIONS
The Dynamite Fiend. Presentation and book signing. Barnes & Noble, East Lansing. October 30, 2005.
The Dynamite Fiend. Invited presentation. Case Western Civil War Roundtable. Berea, Ohio. October 12, 2005.
"The Case of Alexander Keith, Jr.: Dynamite, Murder, and Terror in 19th C Public Culture." Invited presentation. Dalhousie University, Halifax. October 7, 2005.
Book Tour for The Dynamite Fiend, Appearances on CTV Toronto Provincewide, Global TV Halifax, ATV Halifax Evening News, CTV Breakfast TV, Rogers Radio Halifax, CJCH Radio Halifax. Halifax, October 6-9; Toronto, October 24-25, 2005.
Alexander Keith, Jr., Fiend and Fraud. CBC Radio Halifax, 14 November 2003.
“Technologies of the Revolution: Bomb-Making in 19th C America,” Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association, Hartford, CT, 17 October 2003.
“Alchemists of the Revolution.” Invited paper for the seminar series at the Hagley Center for Business, Technology, and Society, Wilmington, DE, 2 October 2003.
“Sky Terror: A Meditation on the Skylines of Riyadh, Seoul, and Chicago,” Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association, Houston, Texas, 14-17 November 2002.
“Bhopal: The Union Carbide Factory Site as a Place of Witness,” Crossroads in Cultural Studies, Tampere, Finland, 29 June- 2 July 2002. I organized two sessions on disasters as cultural events for this conference.
“Portable Force Unleashed: The Unexpected Consequences of New Explosives in the 19th Century,” 29th Symposium of the International Committee on the History of Technology, Granada, Spain, 24-29 June 2002.
“Gender and the Internet,” online forum for NetLearning 2002, University of Stockholm, August 2002.
“The Ultimate Ten Worst Technological Disasters,” Society for the Social Studies of Science Annual Meeting, Cambridge, MA, 1-4 November 2001.
"Disaster and Reproduction," presented at the Memories of Catastrophe Conference, University of Southampton, April 14-17, 2000.
"The Unabomber as Self-Destructing Artifact," invited for presentation at the Conspiracy
Culture Conference, Winchester, England, July 5-7, 1998.
"Archiving Disaster," American Studies Association's annual convention, Washington,D.C., Oct. 31-Nov. 2, 1997. I organized this panel on disaster studies that included Carl Smith, Steven Biel, and Thomas Birkland.
"The Titanic on the Web," British Association for American Studies annual convention, Birmingham, England, April 4-7, 1997.
Invited Presenter, Charley Stivale's Professional Issues for Languages, Literatures, and Cultural Studies course, Wayne State University, Winter, 1996.
"The Unabomber as Self-Destructing Artifact," American Studies Association's annual convention, Oct. 31-Nov. 2, 1996.
"Chernobyl in American Memory," Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference, Tampere, Finland, July 4-6, 1996.
"Cultural Studies and STS," National Association for Science, Technology, and Society, annual meeting, Arlington, VA, March 2-5, 1995.
"Theorizing Community Theatre: The Neighborhood Playhouse," American Theatre Association's annual convention, Chicago, July 1994.
"Popular Culture and the Philosophy of Science and Technology," NEH Summer Institute, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, July 1994.
"Radioactive Body Politics: And the Band Played On as Nuclear Text," Modern Language Association's Annual Convention, December 1993.
"The Magnetized Predicament: From Theatre to Cinema in the Works of Djuna Barnes," delivered at the Modern Language Association's Annual Convention, December 1992.
"The Magnetized Predicament: From Theatre to Cinema in Nightwood," invited paper for the Djuna Barnes Centennial Conference, University of Maryland, October 1992.
"Technospectacle," delivered at the annual American Culture Association Conference, Louisville, March 1992.
"Radioactive Body Politics: AIDS and the Nuclear Referent," delivered at the Mid-Atlantic American Culture Association meeting, Buffalo, October 30--November 1, 1991.
"Denatured Nature," delivered at the Midwest American Culture Association meeting, Cleveland, October 24-25, 1991.
"Apocalyptic City: Preservation and Decay in the 'Post-Attack Environment,'" delivered at the Canadian American Studies Association's Conference on the City, Montreal, November 1990.
"Star Children: The Rhetoric of Artificial Intelligence," delivered at the Midwest American Culture Association's annual meeting, Toledo, October 1990.
"Suffrage Pageantry," slide presentation at the National Women's Studies Association's annual conference, June 1990.
"Gender Myths of the Titanic Disaster," delivered at the Midwest American Culture Association's annual meeting, Lansing, October 1989.
"The Ecological University," delivered at a Department of American Thought and Language Colloquium, November 1989.
"Ritual and Theatre in the Women's Colleges," slide presentation at the Women in
Translation Conference, SUNY-Binghamton, April 1988.
"The Iconography of the Vote: Women in the Provincetown Players," delivered at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Convention, Chicago, August 1987.
"The Titanic Woman on the Gothic Stage," delivered at the Third International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women, Dublin, Ireland, July 1987.
"Women's Voice and the Provincetown Players," delivered at the American Culture Conference, Montreal, March 1987.
"The Vital Lie: Susan Glaspell and the Companionate Marriage," delivered at a colloquium entitled, "About Women: Thinking, Writing and Dreaming," SUNY-Binghamton, 1986.
COURSES TAUGHT:
American Studies:
Transcultural Persepctives
War, Disaster, and Trauma in America
American Studies Theory, Method, and Bibliography
Body/Technology
Women’s Studies:
Impacts of New Technologies on Women
Introduction to Women’s Studies
American Thought and Language:
Women in America
American Radical Thought
Science and Technology
Men in America
English:
American Women Writers
Short Story
Modern American Drama
Freshman Writing
Literature and Medicine
DISSERTATION COMMITEES
Director:
Mary Gebhart, Feminism, Biologism, and the Michigan Womyn’s Festival, in progress
Denise Pilato, The Retrieval of a Legacy: Perspectives on the Presence and Progress of Nineteenth
Century Women Inventors in American Cultures, 1998. Published by Praeger, 2000.
Committee Member:
Mike Biegas, History of the Rand Corporation, in progress.
Cecilia Samonte, Women’s Travel Writing in the Philippines
April Herndon, (Un)American Fatness and the Body Politic, 2003
Manista, Frank. Negotiating Identity: Voice and Boundary in the Works of James Joyce, 2000.
Pranab Kumar, Possessive Individualism and Self-Destruction: A Recurring Narrative in Selected Plays of
Tennessee Williams
ACADEMIC SERVICE
University-wide:
Chair, Summer Working Group on Faculty Voice, 200-2005.
Chair, University Committee on Academic Governance, 2004-2005.
Elected Member, Executive Committee of Academic Council, 2004-2005.
Elected Member, University Council on Academic Governance, 2003-2005.
Elected Member, Academic/Faculty Council, 2002-2005.
College-wide:
Member, College Graduate Committee, 2003-
Member, Tier I Writing Task Force, 2005.
Department Representative, Committee on College Restructuring, 2003.
Consulting Member, Women and International Development Program, MSU, 1999-.
Consulting Member, Canadian Studies Center.
Communication Skills Component Supervisor, Drew Science Enrichment Laboratory for Minority Students in Science and Engineering, 1998.
American Studies Advisory Board, 1997-.
Women's Studies Advisory Board, 1998-2003.
Presenter, College Fellows Colloquium, 1997.
Faculty Advisor, Tower Guard (MSU Sophomore Honors Society), 1993-2000.
Department-wide:
Elected member, Reappointment, Promotion,and Tenure Committee, 2002-.
Interim Associate Chair, Department of American Thought and Language, Fall 1998.
Chair, Technology Commmittee, 1997-present.
Chair, Ad hoc committee to develop department webpage, 1995.
Elected Member, Curriculum Committee, 1995-1997, 1999.
Elected Member, Advisory Council, American Thought and Language, Michigan State University, 1995-1997.
Member, Course Planning Committees, MSU, 1989--present.
Mentor for teaching assistants, MSU, 1992-1998.
Chair, Co-curricular Programs Committee, MSU, 1989-1991.
External:
Co-Editor, Journal for the Study of Radicalism.
Member, Advisory Board, Fourth Genre
Reviewer, Limina
Reviewer, Journal of Philosophy and Technology, 1998.
Reviewer, Literature and Medicine, 1994.
Manuscript reviewer for Praeger, Simon and Schuster, Norton.
PUBLIC SERVICE
Participant, E-Forum on Gender Equality, Environmental Management and Natural Disaster Mitigation,
Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations, 2002.
Academic Consultant, Public Media Foundation and National Public Radio's "Scribblin' Women" series
which received a Michigan Humanities Council Grant in 1993.
Vice-President (elected), Lansing Area AIDS Network, 1993-1997.
Chair, Client Services Committee, Lansing Area AIDS Network, 1992-1993.
MEMBERSHIPS
Gender and Disaster Network
American Studies Association
Ann Larabee is Professor of English and American Studies at Michigan State University. She is the author of Decade of Disaster and The Dynamite Fiend, and co-editor of the Journal for the Study of Radicalism.
The Wrong Hands: Popular Weapons Manuals and Their Historic Challenges to a Democratic Society: Ann Larabee
40.2 (March-April 2016): p63.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
THE WRONG HANDS: Popular Weapons Manuals and Their Historic Challenges to a Democratic Society: Ann Larabee. For well over a century the United States government has regarded the circulation of weapons manuals and instruction booklets as dangerous and criminal. Ann Larabee traces the nuanced history of do-it-yourself weapons manuals from the late nineteenth century to the present to explain their role in the state's evolving policy toward radical dissent. The book covers a wide variety of topics from The Anarchist Cookbook to Edward Abbey's novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, which have been accused of inspiring domestic terrorists. It is an interesting look at the battle between free speech and the right of the public to have access to information that could be dangerous in the wrong hands. Oxford University Press, 2015. 264 pp., $29.95.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Wrong Hands: Popular Weapons Manuals and Their Historic Challenges to a Democratic Society: Ann Larabee." Skeptical Inquirer, Mar.-Apr. 2016, p. 63. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA443887830&it=r&asid=fc0e2b5fc66cd1c8b85aaea3f947f76c. Accessed 14 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A443887830
Quoted in Sidelights: Those who like a good yarn will like it a lot.
The Dynamite Fiend: The Chilling Story of Alexander Keith Jr., Nova Scotian Spy, Con Artist and International Terrorist
86.2 (April-May 2006): p51.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 Canada's National History Society
http://www.beavermagazine.ca
The Dynamite Fiend: The Chilling Story of Alexander Keith Jr., Nova Scotian Spy, Con Artist and International Terrorist by Ann Larabee Nimbus Publishing, Halifax, 2005 256 pp., $29.95 hardcover
There was Alexander Keith, the prosperous 19th-century Halifax brewer, whose suds we still sip today. Then there was his nephew Alexander--"Sandy"--who had something darker brewing inside of him. A secret agent for the Confederacy, a devious bomber responsible for the gunpowder explosion that rocked Halifax Harbour in 1857, Keith graduated to bigger scams and schemes culminating in a giant explosion in 1875 at Germany's Bremerhaven dock that killed 80 people, earning him the epithet "mass murderer." Today's description would be "terrorist." Author Ann Larabee has scoured the archives of four countries to uncover the true story of hidden identity, technological obsession and unparalleled lust for power and profit of one of the world's most devious criminals. Those who like a good yarn will like it a lot.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Dynamite Fiend: The Chilling Story of Alexander Keith Jr., Nova Scotian Spy, Con Artist and International Terrorist." The Beaver: Exploring Canada's History, Apr.-May 2006, p. 51. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA143919190&it=r&asid=1ce6cda5071ac25705ef3e42dc72db90. Accessed 14 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A143919190
Detailed but never dull
a high-quality historical addition to the true-crime genre
Larabee, Ann. The Dynamite Fiend: The Chilling Tale of a Confederate Spy, Con Artist, and Mass Murderer
Gilbert Taylor
101.19-20 (June 1, 2005): p1728.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Larabee, Ann. The Dynamite Fiend: The Chilling Tale of a Confederate Spy, Con Artist, and Mass Murderer. June 2005. 272p. illus. index. Palgrave Macmillan, $24.95 (1-4039-6794-6). 303.6.
But for the premature explosion of his time bomb--a sensational crime from 1875--Alexander Keith might have disappeared from history to enjoy his ill-gotten gains. Keith's career of swindles stretched from Halifax to St. Louis to the German port of Bremerhaven, site of the deadly explosion, reassembled by historian Larabee into an engrossing narrative. Keith's career prospered with the Civil War, when he posed in Halifax as a sympathizer and agent for Confederate blockade runners; in reality, he ripped them off. Sensing a decline in business as the South staggered toward defeat, Keith, after jilting his girlfriend, decamped for St. Louis in 1865, where one of his victims caught him. He and his new girl fled to Germany, where Keith used his affable ability to deceive in his final sociopathic seam--sinking an ocean liner with a bomb to claim insurance. Detailed but never dull, Larabee's account sets the investigative facts with the look of Keith's haunts and with his amoral bonhomie in a high-quality historical addition to the true-crime genre.--Gilbert Taylor
Taylor, Gilbert
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Taylor, Gilbert. "Larabee, Ann. The Dynamite Fiend: The Chilling Tale of a Confederate Spy, Con Artist, and Mass Murderer." Booklist, 1 June 2005, p. 1728. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA136770465&it=r&asid=108614be2fa1604eba1a42cec554e65f. Accessed 14 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A136770465
Quoted in Sidelights: is a good example of recent work in what is called cultural studies, generally ignoring historical context and institutional structures to focus … on "narratives," that is, public responses of grief, outrage, apology, and explanation.
Larabee's conclusions are brief and to the point
valuable insights
Decade of Disaster. (Review essays: slow fade to green)
Bernard Mergen
39.3 (Oct. 2001): p53.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2001 George Washington University
http://www.gwu.edu
Ann Larabee, Decade of Disaster (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), xii + 194 pp., $42.50 (cloth), $15.95 (paper).
Nature is hot. As global temperatures rise, so does the energy consumption of scholars seeking to explain what is happening and why. These six books represent a fraction of the new writing on human responses to the physical environment. Their authors represent a wide spectrum of disciplines and opinions. It is doubtful that more than two or three of these books will interest any single reader, but there are some similarities among them and the themes and methods of each contribute to a better understanding of the others.
All the authors are concerned, of course, explicitly or implicitly, with "the nature of nature." Contemporary debates over the extent to which it is possible to know and define nature and the degree to which humans are part of what we call nature permeate all of these studies. While political scientists and historians (Andrews, Fiege, and Strandling) generally accept traditional ideas about the prior and separate existence of the physical environment, literary and cultural critics (Buell, Ingram, and Larabee) raise questions about this assumption. Another unifying issue is risk, the dangers posed to humans by nature and exacerbated by technology. The influence of "disasterologists" Ulrich Beck, Kai Erikson, Charles Perrow, Barbara Adam, Vincent Covello and others is apparent. All or the authors agree that we live in what Beck has called "a risk society," increasingly aware of the mostly unseen hazards of nuclear radiation, air and water pollution, and new diseases.
Corollaries to these themes link the books as well. The search for what Andrews calls "a coherent vision of the common environmental good" (370); the meanings of place and affection for nature; and the definitions of waste and the seemingly inevitable loss of both economic and aesthetic natural resources are themes that run through these books like un-dammed rivers. Each author makes important contributions to the discussion of environmental problems and their solutions--Andrews from the perspective of environmental policy and management; Buell from that of an "ecocentric ecocritic," Fiege and Strandling in their historical case studies, Ingram by looking at Hollywood presentations of nature and the environment, Larabee by analyzing political and media responses to technological and health disasters--so I will devote appropriate space to each separately, before returning to one final commonality, their basic optimism about the possibility of preventing further degradations to the earth.
Richard N. L. Andrews is a professor of environmental policy at the University of North Carolina. His book is a comprehensive and readable history of American environmental policies from European colonization to 1996, with the avowed purpose of providing "a systematic account of how American environmental policy has developed, in the larger context of American history" (x). Environmental issues are not, he asserts, just about political and economics, but are issues of governance, everything a government does in both foreign and domestic policy that affects natural resources, definitions of public and private property, the health and welfare of its citizens, and the rules of markets. It is impossible to cover all this in a single book and I will note here that he is more successful in the second half than in the first. Readers familiar with the environmental histories of Samuel Hays, John Opie, J. R. McNeill and others will find little new in Andrews' historical overview, but subsequent chapters on environmental law and management since the New Deal is filled with original and valuable material.
Although Andrews acknowledges a debt to William Cronon and Alfred Crosby for his discussion of the colonial period, he could have benefited from the relevant essays in the Handbook of North American Indians and the work of Shepard Krech III on Indian environmental practices. A clearer picture of the many ways in which Native Americans managed their environments would strengthen his arguments first, by demonstrating how much North America had already been shaped by human action before Columbus, and second by offering some alternatives toward a revised set of environmental values in the 21st century.
Andrews's discussion of the U.S. Constitution as it governs environmental law is excellent. In the space of a few papers he clearly illustrates both the potential and the limits in the Constitution for environmental protection, the most important being Article 6 declaring federal supremacy in all constitutional matters. As he somewhat ruefully acknowledges, however, "by the late 1990s, a conservative Supreme Court majority began to overturn preemptive federal laws ... in rulings that might in the future become precedents for questioning federal environmental protection laws as well." (62) Although his chapter on federal land laws and the acquisition of new territories in the 19th century offers little that is new, his chapter on the agencies created to administer those laws and manage the lands gathers in one place the researches of many scholars. It will be illuminating to most students of American history to read about the haphazard creation and organization of the Department of the Interior (1848) in contrast to the more specific and scientific mission of the Department of Agriculture (1860). Both bureaucracies have functioned as environmental agencies, but their rivalries and changing land use priorities have left them both inadequate for the tasks at hand.
Andrews next considers the public health and sanitation movements of the 19th century that have laid the groundwork for today's environmental pollution control laws. It is a good summary of the work of Martin Melosi, Joel Tarr, and Samuel Hays, and a good introduction to the work of David Stradling reviewed below. Andrews' discussion of the Progressive movement draws heavily on classic studies by Hays, Paul Wallace Gates, Thurman Wilkins rather than more recent scholarship by Donald Worster, Marc Riesner, and David Rowley. Likewise, his discussion of New Deal environmental policies and practices lacks the complexity that reference to Arthur McEvoy on fisheries or John Salmond on the Civilian Conservation Corps could provide.
Beginning with chapter ten, however, Managing the Environment, Managing Ourselves achieves its goal, describing and explicating the tangled interrelationships among Cold War defense policy, nuclear weapons and power, federally subsidized highway construction, the promotion of outdoor recreation, and the rapid shift from a production to a consumption society. Andrews leads us through the maze of federal pollution control legislation following WWII, contextualizing the environmental protection revolution of the 1960s and 70s and explaining why some cities, states, and even private businesses turned to the federal government for help.
Andrews credits the usual heroes of the environmental movement--Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Garrett Hardin--but also calls our attention to some neglected pioneers--Fairfield Osborn, author of Our Plundered Planet (1948) and Lynton Caldwell, author of "Environment: A New Focus for Public Policy" (1963) and one of the principal authors of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA, 1969). Andrews is good at explaining the pendulum swings in popular support of environmentalism from mass movement to interest group politics and the ironies (too many to enumerate here) of President Nixon's support of NEPA and President Reagan's opposition.
The last three chapters--"The Unfinished Business of National Environmental Policy," "Environmental Policy in a Global Economy," and "Managing the Environment, Managing Ourselves"--necessarily raise more issues that they can deal with, but provide wonderful material for classroom discussion. Andrews struggles to find signs of hope in international conferences such as Montreal (1987) and Kyoto (1997) while admitting that there is little hope for global environmentalism without some major economic crisis. "Paralysis by analysis" is his final judgment on the U.S. environmental legislation of the 1970s and 80s. Yet there are constructive, lasting results. Most Americans are more strongly aware of ecosystem interconnectedness than they were before; many new laws require greater citizen participation and provide more openness in reporting on environmental hazards; and finally private industry's growing recognition that pollution is ultimately inefficient and costly. These are all hopeful developments. Moreover, they support his most important point: environmental management is fundamentally human management. We can dam rivers, but we have failed to contain our mindless consumerism; we can genetically engineer foods, but we cannot sate our appetite for gas guzzling automobiles.
At first glance Lawrence Buell's loosely structured meditations on environmental values in literature and popular culture seems totally unrelated to Andrews's policy oriented text. There is, however, a direct link. Buell, professor of English at Harvard University, opens his book with a quotation from Managing Nature, Managing Ourselves concerning the need to find "`a coherent vision of the common environmental good.'" (1) Buell's purpose, in this companion to his 1995 study The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, is to "put `green' and `brown' landscapes, the landscapes of exurbia and industrialization, in conversation with one another" (7). He hopes to make ecocriticism--the joining of literary and environmental studies to promote nature-centered environmental policies--more relevant by focusing on issues of environmental justice (a subject sorely neglected by Andrews) and by carefully analyzing some novels, poems, and nature writing for what they can contribute to a definition of environment as it ought to be.
Buell introduces his book with a brief analysis of Katherine Lee Bates' 1893 poem, "America the Beautiful," which has become a popular patriotic song that some, including the singer Tony Bennett, feel should replace the militaristic "Star-Spangled Banner" as the national anthem. While concluding the lyrics--"O beautiful for spacious skies/For amber waves of grain,/For purple mountains majesties/Above the fruited plain!"--are a distortion of real environmental ethics, Buell uses this verse in contrast to another by Bates in which she condemns the plight of poor children in Chicago to introduce a comparison of the environmental visions of Jane Addams and John Muir. He then proceeds to use the apparent contrasts between America's leading urban and rural reformers to discuss the difficulty or attaining full consciousness of one's physical environment and the ways in which people construe themselves in relation to the earth. This nicely crafted essays establishes the themes of the book: nature-culture dichotomies, the importance of place in finding identity, and the possibility of creating more scientifically based literary metaphors for a new environmental aesthetics.
"Toxic Discourse," the first essay, was originally published in Critical Inquiry (24, Spring 1998). Buell defines toxic discourse "as expressed anxiety arising from perceived threat of environmental hazard due to chemical modification by human agency" (31). He argues that the topic has been neglected by scholars because the health hazards are more important than discussions of them and because literary studies of environmental traditionally focus on threats to nature not humans. This seems reasonable, but his criticism of Carson's Silent Spring for invoking what he calls the naive myth of betrayed Edens is itself ingenuous. Far from imagining some pre-chemical American paradise, Carson's tough-minded expose addressed the specific problems of misapplication of insecticides and the threat to civilian society posed by junk science legitimized by military metaphors. Moreover, the Edenic myth had undergone its own evolution in the settlement of the arid west, which neither Thoreau nor Melville anticipated and which Leo Marx ignored. As Mark Fiege imaginatively reveals in his book discussed below, Idaho farmers redefined Eden in terms of orchards irrigated and reservoirs developed for water sports.
Buell is on surer ground when he sees the trope of betrayed Eden in the newspaper accounts of Love Canal and other toxic disasters, but his point seems obscure. Does the over-simplification of an issue through the employment of traditional metaphors invalidate their use? Linking contemporary technological accidents to apocalyptic disasters is only false when, as Ann Larabee points out in another book to be discussed below, it acts to normalize the failure of the responsible system. He is right to read Terry Tempest Williams' Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991) as a creative synthesis of family cancer narrative and conventional natural history of a threatened place, but he distorts the central point of her book by arguing that it illustrates his preconceived point about the ways in which ecocritics can imaginatively connect real and socially constructed nature.
Buell's range is frequently impressive. He often seems to have read every document relevant to his argument. His notes and index are rich sources for further study, but in "Toxic Discourse," despite an impressive array of references to Todd Haynes's movie "Safe" (1995), Barton Hacker's history Elements of Controversy: The Atomic Energy Commission and Radiation Safety in Nuclear Weapons Testing, 1947-1974 (1994), Don Delillo's novel White Noise (1985), and A. R. Ammons' poem Garbage (1993) he misses the subtleties of discourses on deserts and waste found in recent works such as Valerie Kuletz's The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West (1998) and Kevin Lynch, Wasting Away (1990).
In the end, Buell hopes that public awareness of toxic threats will create a new sense of interdependence that will in turn lead to collective citizen protest and legislative reform. As a step in that direction he turns in his second and third chapters to the meanings of place in novels such as Richard Powers Gain (1998), Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977), and John Edgar Wideman's The Homewood Books (1992). He draws extensively on the philosopher Edward Casey's The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (1997) and Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (1993) and the anthropologist Keith Basso's Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache (1996).
As in his essay on toxicity, Buell tries to see both the positive and negative potential of his topic. A sense of place can be restorative or crippling. Places themselves can be subject to destabilizing change, or provide ways of connecting past and present, the fictive and the real. In attempting to move from literary analysis to "environmental ethic," he offers a number of observations that might serve as working hypotheses: 1. "that place significantly though differentially affects well-being through physical environment"; 2. that place connectedness must allow for contending interpretations of others; 3. that place is more a matter of belonging than possessing; 4. a sense of "thereness" is indispensable whether the place is virtual or immediately perceived; 5. "thereness" allows for places to evolve; 6. "there is no physical space that is not potentially a place;" 7. it is in the interest of every person that every space be converted into place (77-78).
These sensible assertions lead neatly into chapter three on reinhabiting the city and learning to love abandoned places. Here, Buell hits his stride, making creative use of the writings of Walt Whitman, his contemporary, the park designer Frederic Law Olmsted, and the Patterson poems of William Carlos Williams. His pairing of Williams and the contemporary nature poet Gary Snyder is especially effective.
Chapter four continues his discussion of space by considering those who are less free to choose safe and nurturing places. After a brief consideration of climatic determinism, he explores urban environments as a tragically blighting force in some novels by Charles Dickens, Upton Sinclair, and Richard Wright. Then, in a clever set piece, in which he pairs Theodore Dreiser and Robinson Jeffers as exponents of ironic fatalism about the power of place, the poets Wendell Berry and Gwendolyn Brooks as exemplars of principled commitment to a place, and ends with Jane Addams' denunciation of George Pullman for the imposed environmental determinism in his company town. He continues this method in the following chapter on William Faulkner and Aldo Leopold. He does a good job of placing Faulkner in the environmental context of his time, but misses an opportunity to treat Leopold as a creative writer.
In chapter six, "Global Commons as Resource and Icon: Imagining Oceans and Whales," Buell uses Herman Melville and Barry Lopez to explore the appeal of what many natural scientists call CMFs (charismatic mega-fauna). David Ingram approaches this subject from the perspective of popular culture in Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema, reviewed below. After considering six paradigms for global environmental consciousness--risk society, environmental justice, ecotheology, ecofeminist, and sustainability--Buell concludes with the ways in which humans attempt to find in animals ways of understanding nature and producing a new global environmental aesthetic and ethic. This, in turn, introduces a chapter on ways of imagining the experiences of people and animals unlike ourselves. His texts are Mahasweta Devi's Bengali novella about a remote tribe in India, translated in 1995 as "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha"; Canadian Barbara Gowdy's 1998 novel about an elephant clan, The White Bone; and Chickasaw novelist Linda Hogan's 1998 novel, Power. This imaginative discussion of human-animal relationships carries his search for new environmental values in interesting directions.
The final chapter, "Watershed Aesthetics," proposes the use of river basins as a way of uniting imaginative conceptions of bioregions with scientific models. Again, his sources are eclectic--John Wesley Powell's 1878 report on the arid regions of the American west, Derek Wolcott's long poem River (1983), Mary Austin's Land of Little Rain (1903) and The Ford (1917), Percival Everett's novel Watershed (1996), and Ted Levin's essays Blood Brook (1992). This is a stimulating and satisfying conclusion for Buell's book and leads smoothly into Mark Fiege's thoroughly research and elegantly written Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West.
Fiege, an assistant professor of history at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, makes an important contribution to environmental history by carefully documenting both the social and technological history of irrigation in the Snake River Valley of southern Idaho. What makes his book interesting to readers who are not specialists in western U.S. agricultural history is his clear prose style and his larger focus on the issue of the "ambiguous entangling of artifice and nature" (6). His study is replete with concrete (pun intended) examples of the ways in which dams, reservoirs, canals, and ditches created new environments that in time came to be considered "natural" by both humans and wildlife. The myths or the virgin land and lost Edens are reworked in Fiege's narrative. Ultimately, the lost Eden was the inhospitable desert wilderness that the first settlers struggled to farm. "Myths," he reminds us, "allow us to resolve imaginatively our contradictions, conflicts, and fears, and by doing so they can give us hope and summon us to action." (204)
By placing the story of Snake River basin irrigation in the larger context of the creation of western regionalism, Fiege provides a model for environmental historians. Building a strong argument for the necessity of balancing the interplay of nature, technology, and social organization in studies of ecological history, he begins by discussing the geological and climatological history, the raw materials farmers had to work with. Lacking equipment and manpower, the first irrigation ditches were shallow, short, and followed the contours of the land. Nor were they permanent, since that had to be constantly maintained and adjusted to seasonal floods and droughts. Even engineers finally appreciated nature's role in constantly challenging technology. "`Reclamation,'" wrote one engineer in 1928, "`is something like housekeeping. It is never finished'" (40-41).
This allusion to gender differences in shaping the landscape is another strength of Fiege's book, which draws extensively on writing by pioneer women in the region who contributed both labor and literature to the task of domesticating the desert. In describing the habitat that humans created in the valley, Fiege provides numerous examples of the ways in which some species thrive and other decline. Although the farmers often thought that had gained the upper hand in the wars on weeds and varmints like rabbits, they never completely eliminated all pests. Instead, they learned to live with them, even to value some of them. Making a virtue of necessity is mankind's oldest form of environmentalism.
The chapters on the creation of irrigation districts, the private and public irrigation construction companies, and the small and large farms contain just the right amount of detail to support the main points, that is, that irrigation in the arid west is about more than technological dominance and empire building, it is about the constant experimentation and blending of various labor systems--yeoman farmer, migrant worker, industrial agri-business--and irrigation techniques--border flooding, furrow, basin flooding, subirrigation.
Fiege then takes the crops, mostly alfalfa and potatoes, from field to market, showing how complicated and accidental the process of creating the image of the Idaho spud really was. Potato hybrids, grading, and packaging all helped to reduce risk and bring order to the farm communities. By the 1920s, Maine's misfortunes and Idaho's aggressive marketing and good fortune had established an image that was in large part valid. What was concealed behind the image was the decades of individual struggle, the passage of the Pure Seed Act of 1911, and the role of the Union Pacific Railroad in providing transportation to world markets. In the final chapter, Fiege reexamines the idea of an industrial Eden, and what David Nye has the "technological sublime." (All the books under review here could benefit from Nye's insights, only Ingram cites him.) Idahoans spoke often of "harnessing" the river as if it were a horse. In one historical pageant the Snake River was like the serpent in Eden, redeemed in a sense by being put to work. At the dedication of the Bureau of Reclamation's Arrowrock Dam on the Boise River in 1915, the governor (the wonderfully named Moses Alexander), "remarked that the concreted unity of the giant structure, built to stand for the ages, should be the emblem of unity and strength of the people through proper organization ..." (180-181) In a response to the broken worker of Edwin Markham's well-known poem "The Man with the Hoe," Idaho poet Irene Welch Grissom's "The Man with the Shovel" celebrated the irrigation ditch tender:
"He is not at all like the man with the hoe, This man with the shovel, in
Idaho; For the future to him, if he does his best, Is bright with the
promise of plenty and rest." (183)
It is the flexibility of myth, the ways in which the myth itself became a commodity to boost Idaho and the Snake River Valley that fascinates Fiege. Although neither Fiege nor Ingram mentions it, the 1926 movie "The Winning of Barbara Worth" makes the perfect bridge between their books. Based on a 1911 novel by Harold Bell Wright, it is a love story set in the Imperial Valley of southern California that was being irrigated by diversions from the Colorado River at about the same time as the Idaho projects. The love triangle consists of a spunky young woman (Vilma Banky) whose guardian is trying to build an irrigated Eden. The rivals for her affection are a good-natured local boy (Gary Cooper in his first starring role) and an eastern hydraulic engineer (Ronald Colman), who, needless to say, wins Barbara Worth when he saves the project from evil bankers.
Aside from this obscure movie, Ingram, lecturer in American Studies at Brunel University, doesn't miss much. His filmography in Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema contains more than 150 Hollywood movies from the 1890s to the 1990s "in which an environmental issue is raised explicitly and is central to the narrative" (vii). He manages to analyze almost half of these in a dozen short chapters organized around three central themes: the wilderness, wild animals, and the politics of land use including the impacts of the automobile and nuclear power. This book will be valuable to anyone interested in politics and popular culture, American movies, and environmentalist debates on the meaning of nature.
Although film vert clearly precedes the current environmental movement, Ingram dates the emergence of a new Hollywood environmental consciousness to the early 1990s when "Meet the Applegates" (1990), "At Play in the Fields of the Lord" (1991), and "Fern Gully" (1992) reached audiences on the heels of what Ann Larabee, in the next book to be reviewed, calls the Decade of Disaster. The first two movies represent what Ingram calls "the politics of the Amazonian rain forests," the third is an example of ecofeminism. The Amazonian movies are a subgenre of the old jungle movies in which intrepid heroes are either saved by going native, or condemned to madness. "The Applegates" put a satiric twist on the old conventions by imagining an army of giant insects who disguise themselves as a suburban American family in order to sabotage a nuclear power plant in retaliation for the destruction of the rain forest. "At Play," based on a novel by Peter Matthiessen, is a pessimistic tale of the destruction of the forest and its people by gold miners and missionaries. "Fern Gully," and animated feature co-produced by Australians, is a fantasy of nature rescued from technology and consumerism by magic seeds provided by a benevolent goddess.
As I hope these examples suggest, Ingram is best at providing brief synopses of films in a context of discussion of subtopics such as, wilderness landscape ("A River Runs Through It," 1992), ecological Indians ("Pocahontas," 1995), anti-hunting narratives ("Wind Across the Everglades," 1958), ocean fauna (the "Jaws" "Flipper," and "Free Willy" series) wolves and bears ("Never Cry Wolf," 1983), African safaris "The Roots of Heaven," 1958, and "Hatari!" 1962), country and city ("Hud," 1963, "The River," 1984), automobile culture ("The Formula," 1984), and nuclear power ("China Syndrome," 1978), but this brief list does not do justice to his original and suggestive comments.
His conclusions are not fully developed, but rest on a sound foundation. First, he observes that Hollywood usually presents nature, especially the wilderness, as therapeutic, a place where the hero-outlaw can go to renew his power (e.g., "Dances with Wolves," 1990). Second, Hollywood movies usually feature a technological fix for both man-made and natural disasters (e.g, "Silent Running," 1971). Finally, there is no suggestion in any Hollywood film of the end of nature or the end of consumerism (e.g., "Bio-Dome," 1996), a contradiction that lies at the heart of commercial movies and of popular culture in general as Ann Larabee demonstrates in her critique of biospheres, lifeboat ethics, and nuclear sarcophagi.
Larabee's Decade of Disaster takes the release of the poison methyl isocyanate (MIC) at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India (December 1984), the launch pad explosion of the space shuttle Challenger (January 1986), the meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor (1986), then Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska (March 14, 1989), and the AIDS epidemic as case studies of disasters that evoke "a language of violent disruption, containment, and survival in many venues, contributing to the apocalyptic tone of postmodern cultural formations" (x).
Her slender book is a good example of recent work in what is called cultural studies, generally ignoring historical context and institutional structures to focus, as Buell does, on "narratives," that is, public responses of grief, outrage, apology, and explanation. Larabee, an associate professor in the Department of American Thought and Language at Michigan State University, begins with Nagasaki and the subsequent creation of "nuclear criticism," the growing body of literature dealing with the ways in which the existence of weapons of mass destruction have affected attitudes and values. Drawing on Charles Perrow's Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (1984), which argues that complex systems are inherently prone to dangerous malfunctions, Larabee develops several points: 1. that much writing on disasters attempts to normalize them and demonstrate the return of order; 2. at the same time, disaster stories confirm that life is determined by technology and that each failure is merely a symptom of the imminent failure of the whole system; 3. nevertheless, most narratives are survivors tales, suggesting that escape is possible.
One way to assure survival is to have as many "life boats," improved containment shields, fallout shelters, biospheres, backup systems as possible. This raises two further issues, how deeply enmeshed can humans become in technology before they become "cyborgs," more machine than human; and, given finite resources, who gets access to the "life boats"? Larabee presents NASA's problem following the Challenger disaster as not only one of managerial competence, but of the image of space stations and rockets to distant planets as the ultimate "life boat." Her discussion is enriched throughout by quotations from humorless but bizarre government reports on such topic as the disposal of human waste in space.
Her discussion of Chernobyl begins with the Department of Energy's efforts to design warning markers for a Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (nuclear waste dump). A team of anthropologists, designers, and scientists tried to imagine what human life might be like 10,000 years in the future (the estimated time in which the nuclear material would remain dangerous) so it could be warned not to settle near the WIPE Many member of the team had previously been involved in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The result of their labors, as Larabee dryly notes, is a monument to a disaster that has not yet occurred in the U.S. Chernobyl, however, was real and the tons of cement poured on the defective reactor created what was almost immediately names the "sarcophagus," and almost as soon as it was in place it became a site for science and for tourism. Although the illustrations are poorly reproduced, Larabee make effective use of Cornelia Hesse-Honegger's drawings of some of the rapidly mutating insects in the swamps, conveniently renamed "marshlands," near Chernobyl.
The chapter on AIDS seems least satisfactory to me because both the origins and the impact of the disease are different from the sudden technological failures of the other disasters. Nevertheless, Larabee does an excellent job of relating AIDS discourse to nuclear discourse and highlighting the failures of medical technology. Her range of materials is impressive, from Tony Kushner's play "Angels in America," to U.S. military funded HARDI-MAN individual survival suits, to Stephen Hawking's mechanically sustained body, to AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz's performance art.
"Oil and Water," the chapter on the Exxon Valdez crude oil spill in Prince William Sound begins with the clever subheading: "Driving under the Influence," a clear reference to both ship captain Joseph Hazelwood's intoxication and Americans' drug-like addiction to gas guzzling private automobiles. It is interesting that while the Exxon oil spill was less damaging in terms of the less of human life than any of the other disasters, it is probably the best know to most Americans. The media quickly identified heroes and villains, scores of ecologists became instant celebrities, and a relatively new specialty of public relations emerged, the so-called "crisis management industry." Led by firm of Burson-Marsteller, these perception managers redefined disasters as "dramatic events." As Larabee documents, Exxon spent millions to portray themselves as victims of troublemaking environmentalists and their shareholders as, in the words of Exxon CEO Lawrence Rawl, "rape victims." (113)
The final chapter on Bhopal reveals how much cleverer Union Carbide was than Exxon in the perception management game, but they benefited from the difference in victims. Americans were more outranged by images of oil-coated otters and sea birds than they were by the corpses and maimed bodies of 56,000 Indian workers.
Larabee's conclusions are brief and to the point. Whatever the disaster, individuals and institutions involved react in four basic ways: 1. they attempt to contain and scale down unpredictable systems because safety is more conceivable in limited environment, build more life boats, hand out more home survival kits with extra batteries; 2. they attempt to redefine the meanings of the disaster, for example Exxon redefined "clean" beaches to mean those that had been treated by hot water spray, ignoring the sludge beneath the "clean" rocks; 3. they emphasize the productive knowledge gained from the disaster, every disaster site becomes a laboratory for new research; 4. survivors use they stories to press their grievances, even commodifying their grief to promote their causes. One danger, Larabee reminds us is that these strategies will normalize hazards, causing us to forget that many accidents could be prevented by regulation, enforcement, and, as Andrews, Buell, and others would agree, more ecocentric practices.
The link between Larabee's book and David Stradling's Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America, 1881-1951 is what the novelist Don Delillo has termed the "Airborne Toxic Event." Bhopal's cloud of MIC is merely the latest form of the poisons that the petrochemical industries have poured into the atmosphere in the past two centuries. As Stradling's book reminds us, neither the problems of air pollution nor the protests against it are new. Vigorously arguing that origins of contemporary environmentalism with its emphasis on health and aesthetics originated in the struggles of a handful of middle-class women who, using their authority within the domestic sphere, organized to bring pressure on local authorities in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Chicago to use cleaner fuels in municipal furnaces and to urge private industries to do the same.
Stradling, an assistant professor in the Federated Department of History of the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University-Newark, provides a clearly written and well-documented account of the interplay of fuel availability, furnace technologies, medical knowledge, gender roles, social organization, legal constraints, judicial interpretation, and engineering practice in the forty years of his study. As he makes clear, there was little concrete progress toward cleaner air until the early 20th century when medical science began to establish connections between lack of sunlight and bacteria and when society in general began to define progress now by the production of wealth, but how that wealth is spent.
The Scientific Management movement that began about 1911 helped to focus the attention of engineers on pollution as a form of inefficiency. The U.S. Geological Survey sponsored demonstration of more efficient furnaces at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904 was also a stimulus to reform. As both industry and citizens began to see air pollution as a national problem the federal government became more actively involved. The outbreak of World War I was a setback for clean air, opposition to the smoke of industry was deemed unpatriotic. The New Deal brought further government involvement, but the real reduction in coal smoke did not come until after World War II by which time most industries had converted to natural gas or electricity produced by cleaner fuels and railroads had shifted to diesel. One simple indicator of the atmospheric changes, Stradling observes, was the dropping, in 1960, of the term "smoke prevention" from the index of Reader's Guide and its replacement by the terms "smog" and "air pollution."
Since 1951 our air has increasingly been fouled by automobile emissions and invisible chemicals, which require different kinds of monitoring and remediation. Effective control seem doubtful, but, Stradling insists, we must give credit to those who fought the good fight--Imogene Oakley and the Women's Health Protective Association of Allegheny Country, Charles Olney and the Society for the Promotion of Atmospheric Purity, and Dr. Julia Carpenter and the Smoke Abatement League--because they succeeded in raising public awareness and laid the foundation for modern environmentalism.
Each of these books contributes valuable insights and new data to the struggle for a livable environment. Although each author focuses on the myriad problems besetting the American and world ecosystems, none has lost hope Together, they help to push back the rhetorical smog that obscures the primary issues, permitting both the virtual and the real landscape to slowly fade, on screen and in the sky, from gray to green.
Mergen, Bernard
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Mergen, Bernard. "Decade of Disaster. (Review essays: slow fade to green)." American Studies International, vol. 39, no. 3, 2001, p. 53+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA80681924&it=r&asid=3c2cb5fed286fb54be1ea4869813cfd3. Accessed 14 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A80681924
Quoted in Sidelights: An entertaining, enlightening book
fast-paced, jargon-free history
Larabee, Ann. The wrong hands: popular weapons manuals and their historic challenges to a democratic society
K.R. Shaffer
53.10 (June 2016): p1532.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Larabee, Ann. The wrong hands: popular weapons manuals and their historic challenges to a democratic society. Oxford, 2015. 249p bibl index afp ISBN 9780190201173 cloth, $29.95; ISBN 9780190201180 ebook, contact publisher for price
(cc) 53-4531
HN90
2015-1253 CIP
Who has the right to technical weapons information? Do radicals, as late-19th-century anarchists suggested, have the right to liberate destructive material and know-how from oppressors and put them in the hands of the people? Larabee (English and American studies, Michigan State Univ.) explores these questions and others in her fast-paced, jargon-free history of weapons manuals and radicalism in the US since the late 1800s. She introduces radical writings from the Left and Right that most readers will not know, or with which they will only be tangentially familiar, yet which have been instrumental for both US radicalism and US jurisprudence. Johann Most's The Science of Revolutionary Warfare (1978), early-20th-century works on sabotage, William Powell's The Anarchist Cookbook (1971), paramilitary publications, ecotage and monkeywrenching, and internet publications on how to make weapons of mass destruction--all come into Larabee's careful analysis. She also shows how law enforcement has treated these works as "evidence" of criminal intent, and how politicians have used them to try to restrict First Amendment rights in the name of protecting the US or children. As Larabee concludes, "popular weapons manuals test the limits of political tolerance like no other form." An entertaining, enlightening book on what happens when restricted information gets into the hands of the "wrong people." Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.--K. R. Shaffer, Penn State University--Berks College
Shaffer, K.R.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Shaffer, K.R. "Larabee, Ann. The wrong hands: popular weapons manuals and their historic challenges to a democratic society." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1532. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454942942&it=r&asid=93d3565d5e655fbad87daf6eeadf08dd. Accessed 14 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454942942
Quoted in Sidelights: The Dynamite Fiend is well written and expertly researched.
uncovers a web of Civil War and Gilded Age intrigue, white-collar crime, revenge, and mass murder.
exercises restraint in interpreting the evidence against Keith,
Ann Larabee. The Dynamite Fiend: The Chilling Tale of a Confederate Spy, Con Artist, and Mass Murderer
Greg Marquis
32.1 (Spring 2006): p133.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 Clarke Historical Library
http://www.lib.cmich.edu/clarke/mhr.htm
Ann Larabee. The Dynamite Fiend: The Chilling Tale of a Confederate Spy, Con Artist, and Mass Murderer. New York: Palgrave Press, 2005. Pp. 234. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth, $24.95.
In 1875 a bomb detonated on a dock at Bremen, killing eighty people and wounding others. The perpetrator, apparently motivated by insurance fraud, was instantly labelled the "dynamite fiend" and his plot dubbed "the crime of the century" (p. 182). Mistaken for an American, in reality he was a Canadian named Alexander "Sandy" Keith, Jr., and was the nephew of a prominent Nova Scotia brewer.
In this book, Ann Larabee (who teaches at Michigan State University) uncovers a web of Civil War and Gilded Age intrigue, white-collar crime, revenge, and mass murder. She suggests that the young Keith became fascinated by violence and explosives and possibly blew up the Halifax powder magazine in 1857. The author explores Keith's self-interested involvement in helping the Confederacy during the Civil War, which involved blockade running, espionage, and aiding in the escape of a crewman from a captured Confederate commerce raider. At one point Keith was known as "the Confederate consul" (p. 28). Shady dealings took him to New York, then to St. Louis in 1865. Settling in Highland, Illinois, he married a young French-born woman, Cecelia Paris. Posing as an American-born businessman, Keith was tracked down by a persistent creditor and decided to relocate again.
In 1866 the so-called Thompson family, living off Keith's ill-gotten gains, moved to Germany where they were prominent members of Dresden's American community. As Keith's funds began to run out, he turned to a deadly solution: placing bombs on transatlantic steamships and collecting insurance money on lost cargo. In 1873 he hired a German craftsman to manufacture a spring-loaded timer. After the explosion at Bremen, Keith shot himself. Dying a few days later, he neither revealed his true identity nor confessed his complicity in the bombing. In a bizarre twist, the criminal's decapitated head, which had been preserved in alcohol, was stored for many years in a Bremen police station. Keith's real identity was established after a German police inspector turned for help in solving the mystery to the Pinkerton Detective Agency. According to Larabee, Halifax refused to accept that one of its own sons was the perpetrator of the so-called crime of the century.
The Dynamite Fiend is well written and expertly researched. Although the footnote style may perplex academics, the works-cited section is evidence of determined scholarship. For the most part the author exercises restraint in interpreting the evidence against Keith, although the unproven possibility that a younger Keith destroyed a powder magazine later in the narrative becomes a fact. There is also some purple prose associated with Confederates and their sympathizers.
Greg Marquis
University of New Brunswick, Canada
Marquis, Greg
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Marquis, Greg. "Ann Larabee. The Dynamite Fiend: The Chilling Tale of a Confederate Spy, Con Artist, and Mass Murderer." Michigan Historical Review, vol. 32, no. 1, 2006, p. 133+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA149908320&it=r&asid=cf6d1557295c339cbb5aba61740c22cc. Accessed 14 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A149908320
Keith, Alexander, Jr.: The Dynamite Fiend: The Chilling Story of Alexander Keith Jr., Nova Scotian Spy, Con Artist and International Terrorist
Michel Basilieres
29.1 (Winter 2006): p226.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 University of Hawaii Press
http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/t-biography.aspx
Keith, Alexander, Jr. The Dynamite Fiend: The Chilling Story of Alexander Keith Jr., Nova Scotian Spy, Con Artist and International Terrorist. Ann Larabee. Halifax: Nimbus, 2005. 234 pp. $29.95.
"Alexander Keith Jr., nephew of the famous brewer, lied to, cheated and swindled virtually everyone he met.... The Dynamite Fiend is made readable by a combination of the facts themselves and the pop-fiction manner in which it's written. It's full of dramatic scene-setting, cliff-hanger chapter endings and the portentous telegraphing of what is yet to happen. As a historian, Larabee seems thorough and conscientious; as a storyteller, she could use a little more practice. Some digressions are too long, too tedious and irrelevant.... Despite these faults, the story holds the reader's attention."
Michel Basilieres. Globe and Mail, Oct. 22, 2005: D19.
Basilieres, Michel
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Basilieres, Michel. "Keith, Alexander, Jr.: The Dynamite Fiend: The Chilling Story of Alexander Keith Jr., Nova Scotian Spy, Con Artist and International Terrorist." Biography, vol. 29, no. 1, 2006, p. 226. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA146347010&it=r&asid=4686edb761bc5751852823ab92241c32. Accessed 14 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A146347010
The dynamite fiend; the chilling tale of a Confederate spy, con artist, and mass murderer
20.4 (Nov. 2005):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
1403967946
The dynamite fiend; the chilling tale of a Confederate spy, con artist, and mass murderer.
Larabee, Ann.
Palgrave Macmillan
2005
234 pages
$24.95
Hardcover
E608
In a narrative that resonates soundly with our own uncertain times, Larabee tells how an "affable Victorian gentleman" turned out to be the ruthless Dynamite Fiend, who watched as a bomb he had designed killed 80 people and wounded 50 more on a dock in Bremen, Germany. He was also a former Confederate secret service agent who helped organize some of the most infamous plots of the Civil War and, after the war's end, a scammer, con man, and rake. Relying largely on archival evidence from two continents, Larabee (American studies, Michigan State U.) reels out tale of technological obsession and greed. With 16 pages of b&w illustrations.
([c] 2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The dynamite fiend; the chilling tale of a Confederate spy, con artist, and mass murderer." Reference & Research Book News, Nov. 2005. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA138494040&it=r&asid=cd3c4be2bc9a4c82c04fd410288906ec. Accessed 14 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A138494040
Quoted in Sidelights: one of the strangest, most twisted tales of deceit and daring that the 19th century has to offer
does little more than shove the facts of Keith's life in front of the reader
constructing a personality and a set of motives for Keith, an absolute cipher, by working backward from his deeds
is unconvincing
A Man of Many Facets, All of Them Monstrous
William Grimes
(June 29, 2005): Arts and Entertainment: pE12(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
The Dynamite Fiend
The Chilling Tale of a Confederate Spy, Con Artist, and Mass Murderer
By Ann Larabee
Illustrated. 234 pages. Palgrave Macmillan. $24.95.
In December 1875, as the trans-Atlantic steamer Mosel was preparing to leave Bremerhaven, Germany, dockworkers dropped a wooden barrel that they were trying to lift from a baggage cart. Suddenly, an almighty explosion turned the bustling harbor into a war zone. A blast heard more than 50 miles away tore through the dockworkers and family members waving goodbye to the Mosel's passengers, sending body parts flying onto the ship's deck. Onboard, a well-dressed man calmly observing the scene returned to his cabin, took out a revolver and pumped two bullets into his head.
The police quickly established a connection between the man, still alive, and the barrel, which had been packed with explosives rigged to a timing device and a detonator. The man, traveling under the name of William King Thomas, would soon be known throughout Europe as the ''the dynamite fiend,'' but there was much more to Thomas than a single barrel of dynamite. In the several days that it took him to die, he proved to be a maddeningly evasive suspect. Only later would the police find out that he had a lot to be evasive about.
Ann Larabee, a professor of American studies at Michigan State University, chanced upon the case of the dynamite fiend while doing research on Confederate terrorists. Seeking to clear up a small mystery, no more than a footnote to her main interest, she discovered a fat dossier on Thomas that the Pinkerton Detective Agency had delivered to the authorities in Bremerhaven. It cleared up the footnote problem, and then some. In its pages, supplemented by the German police report on the ''Thomas-Katastrophe'' she found one of the strangest, most twisted tales of deceit and daring that the 19th century has to offer.
Alexander (Sandy) Keith Jr. was a Scottish-born resident of Halifax, Nova Scotia, whose life of crime began with a bang. In 1857 he blew up his uncle's gunpowder magazine in Halifax, probably to cover a series of swindles involving railroad contracts. Instead of delivering high-priced gunpowder from the magazine to work sites along the rail line, he had bought a cheaper product on the market and pocketed the difference.
As the poor nephew of a rich uncle, Keith developed a bad case of social envy and a burning desire to cut a big figure in the world. The American Civil War gave him his chance. As Halifax became a favored gathering place for Confederate plotters, couriers, secret agents and blockade runners, Keith rose to prominence as the ''Confederate consul,'' a local fixer who could supply shops and facilitate schemes, no matter how hare-brained. At one point, in a crude bioterrorist attack, he helped ship clothing taken from yellow fever victims to cities where they could infect Northern troops. Keith thrived on secret handshakes, coded messages and the glamour of war. ''A secretly ruthless man himself, Keith had found a closed society in which his darkest obsessions, his unique blend of greed and violence, were welcomed as great virtues,'' Ms. Larabee writes.
Unvarnished swindles also appealed to him. Keith fancied himself a superagent and international man of mystery, but he was not above bouncing checks, forging signatures or endorsing phony bills.
Most Confederate plotters who entrusted Keith with money lived to regret it, none more so than Luther Rice Smoot, the quartermaster-general of Virginia, who gave Keith $25,000 to buy two locomotives from the Norris works in Philadelphia. Unknown to Smoot, Keith had accepted $60,000 from two other men for the same merchandise. When time came for delivery, he tipped off the Union authorities, who confiscated the goods, leaving Keith with a handsome profit. Best of all were the wonderful opportunities offered by marine insurance. Several blockade runners, skirting the law, listed Keith as the owner when buying their ships. When a ship went down, Keith filled out the insurance claim and kept the money. At some point, the light bulb went on. Instead of waiting for a chance gale, why not, after heavily insuring some bogus freight, send a ship to the bottom using a clockwork bomb?
After the Civil War ended Keith, living in Dresden with a free-spending French wife, applied his talents to precisely that end. But the road to the Mosel turned out to be much more difficult than he anticipated. As William K. Thomas or, absurdly, a Russian businessman named Teadro Wiskoff, he approached the finest clockmakers in Germany and Austria and presented them with a challenge: construct a silent timer that could be set to go off 10 or 12 days hence, and strike with a powerful blow. As W.J. Garcie of Kingston, Jamaica, he bought more than 700 pounds of lithofracteur, a kind of dynamite. So far, so good.
Insurance was another matter. Like Edward G. Robinson in ''Double Indemnity,'' maritime insurers on both sides of the Atlantic turned out to have very sensitive noses for deception. When Keith tried to insure valises allegedly filled with gold coins, insurance agents demanded that he count the money in front of them. In the end, Keith settled for about 150 British pounds' worth of insurance on a barrel listed as containing caviar. For that, 81 people died. ''I have had ill luck; that's all,'' an unrepentant Keith told his doctors shortly before he died.
Ms. Larabee, an ungainly writer, does little more than shove the facts of Keith's life in front of the reader. She makes the mistake of constructing a personality and a set of motives for Keith, an absolute cipher, by working backward from his deeds. Since dynamiting the Mosel was a violent act, Keith therefore was a violent man, filled with rage. This is unconvincing.
The author's characterizations of the Gilded Age run to the usual ''age of greed'' cliches. In artistic terms, then, ''The Dynamite Fiend'' barely creaks along. But the Pinkerton men did a splendid job.
CAPTION(S):
Photo: Ann Larabee (Photo by Edwards Photographic Studio)
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Grimes, William. "A Man of Many Facets, All of Them Monstrous." New York Times, 29 June 2005, p. E12(L). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA133631924&it=r&asid=bd601871a5be97b1410041703fd2309d. Accessed 14 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A133631924
Quoted in Sidelights: the dilemma of balancing free speech with the potential for technical knowledge to be used for destructive purposes
valuable account of the historical and contemporary context of such dilemmas
brilliantly guides us through these challenges to American democracy.
The Wrong Hands: Popular Weapons Manuals and Their Historic Challenges to a Democratic Society, by Ann Larabee
Howard P. Segal on a brilliant study exploring the conflict between free speech and instruction guides that may be used for violence
November 5, 2015
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By Howard Segal
Two molotov cocktails
Increasingly, Americans confront the dilemma of balancing free speech with the potential for technical knowledge to be used for destructive purposes. In this valuable account of the historical and contemporary context of such dilemmas, Ann Larabee begins with the story of Anwar al-Awlaki, killed in Yemen in September 2011 by a CIA drone.
A 40-year-old US citizen and Colorado State University graduate, al-Awlaki had converted to radical Islam, became a disciple of Osama bin Laden, and advocated killing fellow Americans. His fluency in English, his regularly updated YouTube presentations and his expertise in cutting-edge digital platforms convinced the Obama administration to target him without either a trial or a court order.
Killed along with al-Awlaki was another US citizen, Samir Khan, who edited Inspire, the online magazine of al-Qaeda, the terrorist group to which both belonged. Among the publication’s contents were manuals for making pressure-cooker bombs in the convenience of one’s home.
Al-Awlaki’s and Khan’s writings were among those presented at the 2015 trial of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and, as Larabee details, their role in the prosecution’s case had a long precedent. In terrorist trials following the 1886 Haymarket labour rally in Chicago in which eight policemen and at least three civilians died, the possession of popular weapons manuals by the accused automatically constituted guilt. Prosecutors successfully argued that anarchist Johann Most’s pioneering Science of Revolutionary Warfare (first published in German in 1885) need only to have been near the defendants to convict them.
Ironically, obtaining such manuals has always been easy. They were usually available as published books and articles and, more recently, online. Ironically, too, many perpetrators’ self-professed technical ineptness and consequent inability to make weapons using those supposedly simple manuals has hardly mattered to prosecutors. Possession, they insist, remains nine-tenths of the law. Yet many owners of these manuals have not intended to act upon their contents, wishing instead only to test the limits of free speech. Mere possession of such manuals, they argue, hardly constitutes a criminal act. As Larabee nicely writes, not “wrong hands”, implying intended action, but “wrong minds”, reflecting only abstractions, might apply here.
Prosecutors, judges and juries, however, have often rejected that distinction, deciding that whatever the cause – from the environment to nuclear power to white supremacy to radical Islam – every critic of the US government and of corporate America becomes a dangerous protester.
At the same time, Larabee observes, gun ownership in the US has become ever more of a sacred right, despite countless episodes of guns killing innocents. Repeated and futile efforts to pass effective gun control legislation contrast with the growing repression of free speech when it comes to building weapons found in those manuals.
The most famous US weapons manual was The Anarchist Cookbook (1971), legendary for the part it played in many trials. But Larabee concludes with a highly controversial 1979 article in The Progressive on hydrogen bombs. Both author Howard Morland and the editors wanted to disseminate to ordinary citizens formerly secret knowledge about the US’ vast H‑bomb facilities, not to incite violence. Indeed, the article lacked step-by-step instructions. The federal government, though, saw things differently and tried to stop publication. It failed.
Today, the internet and social media provide unprecedented opportunities for non-violent critics, actual terrorists and government officials alike to perpetuate their positions indefinitely. The Wrong Hands brilliantly guides us through these challenges to American democracy.
Howard P. Segal is professor of history, University of Maine.
The Wrong Hands: Popular Weapons Manuals and Their Historic Challenges to a Democratic Society
By Ann Larabee
Oxford University Press, 264pp, £19.99
ISBN 9780190201173
Published 20 August 2015