never reveals that England in 1914 imposedna crushing blockade on Germany,none which caused mass starvation in Germanncities and which the British refusednto lift until the Germans signed the humiliatingnTreaty of Versailles. Submarinenwarfare was the only instrument ofnretaliation left to an inferior naval powernfighting for its national life againstnEurope’s maritime leader.nOne must grant that America’s economicnand geopolitical position wouldnhave benefited less from a German victorynin 1918 than from an Anglo-Frenchnone. America’s commercial and culturalnties were with England far more thannwith Germany, and it was perhaps inevitablenthat America should enter the warnon the Allied side. Even one who is sympatheticnto Germany’s ally, Austria-nHungary, can easily understand thenaffinity of educated Americans for thenAllied cause. Less comprehensible arenTuchman’s obstinate, pervasive Teutonophobianand her attempts to revive disaeditednwar propaganda. Even more distastefulnis her refusal to acknowledge thencurrent totalitarian threat to the Americannpeople. Not only is she mute on thendangers of Soviet imperialism, but shenlavishes an entire chapter of panegyricsnon Mao Tse-tung. It might be said in defensenof this lapse of moral judgmentnthat it was committed back in the 70’s,nbefore the Chinese party line hadnchanged.nA he collection of essays by LawrencenStone, although less explicidy biased, isnin some ways more disingenuous thannTuchman’s book. WhileTuchnian statesnher convictions openly and even stridently.nStone reveals his politics to the readernby allusions and name-dropping. It isnsurprising that a social historian with annendowed chair at Princeton would playnthis game at all, but undoubtedly Stonenis concerned about his political accreditation.nHe loudly bemoans the McCarthyiten30’s to impress upon us the evils ofn16th-century religious persecution. Inndiscussing the bloody backlash to thenCatholic aristocrats’ attempt to overthrownthe English government in thenGunpowder Plot of 1605, Stone ostentatiouslynmounts his charger for politicalnbattle. He draws an opportunistic,nflawed analogy between the Englishnpersecution of Catholics and modern anticommunism:n”The mass hysteria generatednby the Popish Plot had few historicalnparallels, apart from the storm whippednup by Senator Joseph McCarthy andnso skillfully exploited by future PresidentnNixon.” He also reveals that he came tonunderstand the political surveillancenunder Henry VIII only after watching Lening H.R. Tawney, a “mild Christian socialist”n(read member of the left wing ofnthe British Labor Party).nStone proves, although unwittingly,nwhy there is need for organized conservativendissent in the historical profession.nAlmost all the names and journals hencites are associated with the political left,nwhile the few nonleftist social historiansnwhom he does consider—GeoffreynElton, Lewis Namicr and Hugh Trevor-nRoper—are made to appear more conservativenthan they were or are. AlthoughnStone writes on the Reformation and thensocial-cultural changes in early modernnEurope, he pays little attention to neo-nWeberians and to those who emphasizenthe role of religion in producing socialnchange.nHis discussions of religion often turnnout to be pretexts for self-congratulation:nfor example, when he praises the radicalnwing of the Protestant Reformation fornpaving the way for “an agnostic reviewernfrom England [who] can share the samenideals of the brotherhood of men of allnclasses, the equality of opportunity fornmen and women, andthesolidarity of alln”An ounce of Stone being usefully wrong is worth a ton of Dryasdust telling us whatnwe already know, or a thousand computer print-outs giving the right answers to thenwrong questions.”n— The New RepublicnChagrin et la Pitie, a leftist propagandanfilm dealing with the German occupationnof France during World War II. Hentwits Hugh Trevor-Roper, a conservativen(read non-Marxist) historian for criticiz-nnnraces.” He naturally asscKiates the mainlinenReformation with witch hunts andnfear of the Devil, a perspective whichnallows him to vent much presentistnspleen under the guise of explaining thenpast. According to Stone: “In this latternhalf of the twentieth century, we knownall too well what happens when otherwisensober and prudent statesmen andnrational and clear-headed intellectualsnbecome obsessed with a Devil-theory: itnblows their minds and the result is bloodshed,ntorture,,and repression on a scalenwhich seems hardly credible to a posteritynwhich has freed itself from a particularnmythology.” To what does this convolutednpassage refer? Is it to the CulturalnRevolution in Maoist China, which occurredndespite the supposed presence ofni2lnMay/June 198Sn