Jeffrey Zvengrowski

Ever since I noticed that this book was coming out I had been looking forward to reading it, because the influence of, in particular, the French Second Empire on American politics, seemed like it could be interesting. Having finally gotten around to reading this study, I'm here to tell you not to bother, unless you're writing an academic paper. As once you get past the "Introduction," which outlines the friction between the advanced version of the "White Male Jacksonian Republic," of which Jefferson Davis was an adherent of, and the Anglophile, extreme "State Rights" ideology of so many of his Confederate political opponents, this work doesn't impress me. It mostly feels like a grab-bag collection of anecdotes. Further, if you read this work aloud, the tone is that of a run-on drone.

I'll further add, that, there are what seems to be some very strange aspects to this book, which appears to be the published version of Zvengrowski's doctoral thesis. There is no real introduction to talk about his motivation and methodology, or why you should care about this study. There are no acknowledgments. These is no bibliography, which disguises what seems like a shallow dive in the secondary literature. Also, Zvengrowski can't be bothered to properly cite records from the U.S. National Archives. Finally, the only personalization one can find is a very curt dedication to the author's wife and kids in a rather small typeface. When you hunt down the man's capsule biography at the University of Virginia website, you'll notice that what he really appears to do is archival and library work, which raises the suspicion that the doctoral thesis was mostly written to fulfill a job prerequisite; that's fine. It still doesn't explain why the LSU Press published this work in the form it did; it certainly doesn't display any pride in ownership by Zvengrowski.… (more)