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62CIVIL WAR HISTORY The ordeal of Charles Julius Guiteau in the white glare of publicity following his assassination of President James A. Garfield is no exception. A defendant with a long history of eccentricity, instability, and fraud, who participates freely in the courtroom proceedings; a defense consisting mainly of an obscure lawyer who is the brother-in-law of the accused; a prosecution which includes two of the leading lawyers of the day and which is determined to hang the defendant; a parade of specialists bent on demonstrating his sanity or insanity; a judge whose determination to avoid a mistrial helps to create a courtroom atmosphere not always in keeping with the intrinsic grimness of the occasion; spectators thirsting for blood—these are some of the ingredients with which Professor Rosenberg has to work. But before the reader concludes that this is a routine account of a celebrated trial, he is advised to note the subtitle of the book; it is the author's concern with the theme of psychiatry and law in the Gilded Age which gives the work its significance. He by no means neglects the dramatic aspects of the history, and he well portrays the setting, the actors, and the intense struggle which had its denouement on the gallows on June 30, 1882. Given the material it would have been rather difficult to make a dull book of it. But his primary concern is with ideas, and his study illuminates both professional and public attitudes in regard to mental disease and its relation to the legal question of responsibility. Guiteau's defense was insanity (in the removal of the President he acted, he maintained, as God's man). The major witnesses on both sides were psychiatrists, and in the courtroom was revealed the deep cleavages among the professionals concerning the meaning and manifestations of insanity. The M'Naghten rule dominated legal thinking: Guiteau was sane if he was conscious of the consequences of his act and was aware that it was contrary to law. In their testimony the conservatives among the experts gave support to this simplistic view. A newer school of experts prided themselves on a subtler, more scientific , and more modern approach. WhUe John P. Gray, the distinguished head of the insane institution in Utica, New York, pronounced Guiteau sane ( and hence a fit candidate for the gallows), the young European-trained neuroanatomist, Edward C. Spitzka, was in no doubt at all that the defendant was mentally a sick man. The trial brought the psychiatric thought of the time into bold relief and the essence of the book is the author's detaüed exploration of the subject. His sources range widely; the bibliographical essay is impressive and valuable. Some readers will regret the absence of citations. The book constitutes a very real contribution to our understanding of the intellectual history of the GUded Age. Never again, it is to be hoped, wiU historians use the words "disappointed office seeker" to describe the pathetic creature whose doom seems as inevitable, in the context of the thought and emotion of the period, as that of the protagonist of a Greek tragedy. Harry Brown Michigan State University Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West. By William H. Goetzmann. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966. Pp. xxvi, 656. $10.00.) For the forseeable future this should be the standard history of nineteenth-century exploration west of the Missouri River. At once descriptive and analytical, this is a sound, even brilliant synthesis that is not likely to be replaced in my lifetime or yours. Goetzmann divides his subject into three major eras, "each characterized by a dominant set of objectives, particular forms of exploring activity, distinctive types of explorers, and appropriate institutions which governed these factors." (xiii) Beginning with Lewis and Clark, the period from 1803 to roughly 1845 is treated as an era of imperial rivalry, with the important explorers—men like Manuel Lisa, Zebulon Pike, Donald McKenzie, Jedediah Strong Smith, and Peter Skene Ogden— cast as pawns in the great game of international competition for the West. The sec- BOOK REVIEWS63 ond period, which Goetzmann labels "The Great Reconnaissance...

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