The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 59, July 1955 - April, 1956 Page: 246

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

them, "A City that Art Built," is a favorite that has been too long
out of print. Their range is wide, since they concern themselves
with such varied subjects as education and medicine during the
Middle Ages, the Crusades, and the Italian Renaissance, as well
as Historiography and the Modern World. But they still manage
to present to us an over-all orderly view of the importance to our
present age of a knowledge of the Medieval past of Western
Europe. No doubt each reader will have his own favorites, but
my own choice would be "A Society Without Education" which is
the first essay in the volume, and "The Social Web," from which
the title of the book is drawn.
Particularly to be recommended for those American historians,
who consider that the history of this country has little to do with
the remoter European past, is the brief essay entitled "What is
American History?" From it and from other pages of this slender
volume one can draw the mature wisdom, sense of proportion and
common sense which a scholar-teacher has developed during a
lifetime. Any reader, scholarly or otherwise, can profit from read-
ing these pages.
ARCHIBALD R. LEWIS
The University of Texas
Nationalism: Myth and Reality. By Boyd C. Shafer. New York
(Harcourt, Brace and Co.), 1955. Pp. 319. $5.00.
This is an excellent book based on twenty years of reading a
large number of English, French, and German works in the fields
of history, anthropology, sociology, literature, social psychology,
and politics. Although the author by no means pretends to have
written a definitive work, he has enlarged upon such impressive
pioneer works as those of Hayes, Kohn, Weill, and Meinecke, to
whom he frequently acknowledges his obligations, and has made
a significant contribution to the already extensive literature on
nationalism.
Although stress has been placed mainly on nationalist develop-
ments in France, England, and the United States, the work is
general and interpretive in nature. The frequent references to
nationalist writings are all part of a well-integrated unity, not
just a series of quotations to impress the reader. Throughout the

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