The 50 most-cited articles in The American Historical Review, 2016

This essay explores the consequences for historians’ research of the twinned transnational and digitized turns. The accelerating digitization of primary and secondary sources and the rise of full-text web-based search to access information within them has transformed historians’ research practice, radically diminishing the role of place-specific prior expertise as a prerequisite to discovery. Indeed, we can now find information without knowing where to look. This has incited remarkably little reflection among mainstream historians, but the consequences are profound. What has become newly possible? How do the new digital affordances relate to the current boom in transnational topics and approaches? How do the reach, speed, and granularity of digitized search impact our ability to reconstruct the supranational past? This essay heralds the novel forms of knowledge-generation made possible by technological transformations. It also attempts an accounting of all the ancillary learning that international research in an analog world once required. What kinds of knowledge and insight did…

This article traces the history of the Nestlé boycott, one of the most well-known and successful boycotts of the 1970s. As part of the campaign to end bottle-feeding in Third World societies, it called for the global regulation of controversial marketing strategies implemented by Western formula companies. The story adds a crucial yet understudied aspect of rights discourse in the 1970s, when humanitarian activists strove to reform the global market and create ethical forms of capitalism. The history of the boycott may seem like a marginal tale within this history, but it is illuminating both for what it teaches us about the role of multinational companies, ethics, and the market in the period, and for what it reveals about the global history of human rights and humanitarianism. The history of the campaign allows us to uncover how in the 1970s not only diplomats and non-governmental organizations, but also ordinary people, business experts, and even multinational corporations became part of the project of feeding the world’s hungry. By politicizing breastfeeding, the Nestlé boycott…

Recent writing in economic and business history is reexamining major transformations in world history—industrialization, capitalism, the global economy. This new literature avoids the structural determinism of old with much greater sensitivity to politics, culture, and social institutions. To a lesser degree it bridges the gap between social science–type history, often written by those trained in economics departments, and the more narrative styles of those trained in history departments. Taken as a whole, the recent scholarship offers a substantial rethinking of how we should engage material life, including the natural world, and a challenge to cultural historians who focus exclusively on language and representation. Woven through the various works is a possible new ontology that grants agency to things as well as people without the traditional tension between the power of external structures and the autonomy of human consciousness. This new materialism offers a way for historians to bring markets, finance, capital, technology, corporations, and other economic features of the past…

This article examines the 1763 slave uprising in Dutch Berbice, a small colony next to Suriname on the Caribbean coast of South America. Interested in the lived experiences of all enslaved people, I move beyond the military conflict between rebel leaders and colonial slave owners on which historians most often focus. Using the unusually rich records generated in Berbice over more than a year of insurgency, I argue that the rebellion did not encompass all enslaved people in the colony, but was the work of a determined minority who used coercion, including re-enslavement, to get others to join. Many enslaved Berbicians were neither purposeful rebels nor committed collaborators or loyalists. Eager to stay alive and preserve their independence once slavery was overthrown, such people, many of them women, struggled to dodge both the Dutch and the rebels. A focus on the internal politics of rebellion, or the struggle over who will rule at home, reveals that as an emancipatory process, armed rebellion was profoundly gendered, hierarchical, and exacerbated existing divisions within the…

Did the Nazis persecute lesbians? In recent decades, their murderous campaign against gay men has drawn growing public attention. But historians are still at odds over the question of whether lesbians were persecuted as well. This article argues that historians ought not to limit themselves to the notion of “persecution” and rather ought to consider risk, that is, how lesbians, “transvestites,” and gender-nonconforming people ran pronounced, particular risks in a society that stigmatized same-sex sexuality, transgender, and gender-nonconformity. This argument involves some fundamental reconsiderations—of the category “lesbian” as well as of how the Gestapo, the secret state police, functioned. A close reading of a single Gestapo investigation reveals the important role that witnesses (as opposed to denouncers) played in producing risk as well as the ways in which the category “lesbian” can be complicated. This article thus puts forward new ways to think about the history of lesbianism, some kinds of gender nonconformity, and trans history, as well as a new idea about how the Gestapo…

In August 1944, as Allied troops approached the French capital, Parisians rose up and fought to liberate their city. Despite its secondary status in military terms, the Liberation of Paris became one of the founding myths of postwar France, sold in pictures at the cinema but above all in photographically illustrated books and pamphlets and at a photo exhibition at the Musée Carnavalet, Paris’s history museum. The fact that the Liberation was so extensively photographed presents a paradox: the sheer quantity of photos proved its importance as a historical event at the same time that their circulation helped construct it. Historians often use these images as illustrations for other arguments or windows onto what happened. This article looks closely at them to argue that photographers participated in the battle by forging links between those August days and Paris’s revolutionary history. Tracing their photographs’ circulation and exhibition reveals an investment in photography as a unique means of accessing and transmitting the emotionally rich history of the recent past. The article…

In the early modern period, devotion to black saints began to spread throughout the Catholic World. First envisioned as a tool for the conversion of newly baptized black slaves, the cults of black saints spread rapidly throughout Iberia and the Americas. This article examines hagiographies written by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century clergy about three important holy people of color: Benedict of Palermo, Martín de Porres, and Teresa Juliana de Santo Domingo; it focuses on this genre to explore the circulation of ideas that hagiographies could both reflect and create. Moving beyond the study of local devotional practices to the larger history of black saints opens up new ways to think about Catholic missionary endeavors, early modern ideas about race and color difference, and the role that a rapidly changing religious culture played in the spiritual beliefs of early modern people. The genesis of a typology of black sanctity led not only to the rise of holy people of color, but to the development of complicated and unexpected discourses about color difference and salvation that…

When he arrived back from his first voyage, Columbus reported that he had taken possession of lands and people beyond count. This typically confident statement encapsulates the key act of European expansion: the claim to possession over distant territories. This article considers European claims to possession in early modern Asia and in particular a string of territorial acquisitions made by the Dutch East India Company in the first half of the seventeenth century. My focus is on legal claims, how the Company justified its hold over territory, and the counterclaims that these prompted. The process of looking for counterclaims is, I suggest, a productive one, revealing connections between otherwise neglected events or actions that cohere to form patterns of legal opposition. Put together, these patterns reveal that legal resistance was the pervasive byproduct of expansion and that different groups were able to mobilize arguments that struck at the heart of the Company’s claims to territory.

This article investigates the relationship between politics, decolonization, and museums. It explores the curation of the Asian and African collections at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, 1950–1970, in the context of U.S. involvement in the “end” of European empire, Third World nationalism, and the Cold War. Close analysis of museum archives reveals the diversity, dynamism, and occasionally progressive nature of museum anthropology during a period often considered uninteresting and even moribund. It demonstrates the myriad entanglements between museums and U.S. government policy, and how cultural representation in the U.S. was influenced by the specificities of colonization and independence in different regions of the Global South. Museums are positioned as agents in mediating wider political change. In focusing on the cultural realm, the article reveals the denial and stasis involved in decolonization, even as it was understood in the ostensibly anticolonial U.S. By mapping museum practice onto global politics, and applying recent scholarship on…

This article examines the Atlantropa Project of the German architect Herman Sörgel as a window onto the interconnected histories of environmental anxiety and technological optimism in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. In the late 1920s, Sörgel conceived of Atlantropa as an answer to Oswald Spengler’s warnings about Europe’s inevitable cultural decline. The main feature of the project was a gigantic dam across the Strait of Gibraltar, which would not only create a connected and climate-engineered Afro-European super-continent, but also provide a potentially inexhaustible source of hydropower. Sörgel was convinced that the availability of cheap and boundless energy would ring in a new, peaceful era, and form the basis for a coming unified and revitalized European society. Despite the unprecedented and utopian scale, the plans were more than the expression of an eccentric mind. Sörgel’s anxieties about environmental decline and resource exhaustion paired with his belief in the absolute primacy of technology reflected contemporary debates and struck a chord with the…

This article reconstructs and interprets the early history of the Liberated African villages of Sierra Leone, a group of settlements built to settle former captives rescued from the Middle Passage by British ships following the 1807 Slave Trade Act. The Act, which abolished the British slave trade, was designed to be most effective in wartime, making slave ships into prizes eligible for capture. In Sierra Leone, a colony with a longstanding association with British anti-slavery, the end of the Napoleonic Wars caused an economic shock. The colonial Governor, Charles MacCarthy, established the Liberated African villages to organize the labor of former captives and to manage and distribute colonial resources. The “village system” was organized from the colonial capital, Freetown, but was managed in the hinterland villages by missionaries, recruited by the Church Missionary Society. What began as a plan to shore up the postwar colonial economy became, in practice, a potent engine for social engineering, cultural transformation, and labor control. In the Liberated African Villages,…

Recent research on food history has challenged the Cartesian mind-body dualism, revealing important connections between the material-sensory properties of foods and the mental-discursive meanings attached to them. The concept of the embodied imagination provides scholars with a useful tool for analyzing the social and cultural fantasies inspired by sensory perceptions and the ways that cultural meanings attached to taste, purity, and hunger shape the physical experience of these sensations. The brain’s multisensory interpretation of food—understood as flavor or physical taste—is filtered through the memory of past meals, thereby providing the mechanism for constructions of taste as social distinction. By developing an archive of taste and examining historical moments of changing food preferences, scholars have begun to reveal the dynamic interrelations between social and sensory expressions of taste. Purity, another concept that is simultaneously embodied and imagined, has begun to figure in present-day debates about the industrial transformations of food. Engaging with these…

Microhistory and global history are often seen as opposing strategies of historical inquiry, with irreconcilable research methods, central questions, and strategies of narration. This article combines both approaches, telling the story of a nineteenth-century Japanese maidservant both as a microhistory and as a global history. The maidservant, Tsuneno, is not an obvious protagonist for a global history. She never manufactured a product for export, conversed with a foreign person, wore imported cloth, or traveled beyond the shogun’s realm. Yet her experience of urban migration, service work, and marriage resembled those of other women across Eurasia in the years between 1600 and 1900. Situating Tsuneno’s mundane story in both local and global frames challenges the microhistorical approach by considering how questions of agency might be answered with reference to transnational and long-term trends as well as close attention to intimate contexts. It also shows how attention to overlooked historical actors might challenge the periodization and spatial imagination of global history.…

This article examines the tragic case of San Dwe, a young Karen man from Burma who was employed as one of London Zoo’s elephant drivers. In 1928 his roommate, the famous and celebrated mahout Said Ali, was murdered in his bed, bludgeoned to death with a sledgehammer. San Dwe claimed that Ali had been attacked by a group of white men. However, this explanation of events proved inconsistent and was swiftly dismissed by the police. In the days that followed, San Dwe was arrested and charged with Said Ali’s murder. Yet, despite being the prime suspect for this brutal crime, in the archival records San Dwe is depicted as a sympathetic character. This was because his case garnered public sympathy, particularly from loyalist Karen nationalists, London Baptists, and retired colonial officials. All three of these groups campaigned on his behalf. Their petitions and letters to the Home Office in his defense deployed normative imperial understandings of race, gender, and sexuality to make their cases. Historicizing the sympathy that underpinned this support demonstrates how emotion,…

This response to Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy examines the scholarly merits of these novels as works of microhistory, in which the author’s devotion to what we might term “thick description” (following the anthropologist Clifford Geertz) produces numerous fresh understandings. It argues that the standout features of these novels are Ghosh’s re-creations of historical spaces and historical languages, both of which provide invaluable insights for scholars and students, who rarely have the available time and resources to recover the same degree of microscopic detail. In addition, this essay addresses Ghosh’s credentials as a historian who tackles broader historiographical concerns by comparing his depiction of the British imperial trades in indentured labor and opium with the arguments made by certain revisionist historians. It suggests that one weakness of Ghosh’s first installment in the Ibis Trilogy is his failure to read Victorian primary sources with a sufficiently critical eye. However, it concludes that overall Ghosh remains a historiographical torchbearer who over much of his…

Throughout the Atlantic world, from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, technology trumped humanity in visual representations of sugar plantations and their enslaved workforces. European artists presented the production of sugar as technologically progressive, while minimizing its crucial conjunction with slave labor. The sugarmill, with its vertical three-roller mills and trains of evaporative vats, became a synecdoche of the most intensive and expansive industry in the early modern world. Yet a major historiographic debate—whether the dependence on slave labor made the production of sugar economically regressive—has simply ignored the abundant visual evidence on the issue. As a humanitarian abolitionist movement mobilized in late-eighteenth-century Britain, its images emphasized the abuse of slaves individually but overlooked plantations, while artistic clients of anti-abolitionist patrons responded with picturesque landscapes showing slave plantations as tranquil manorial communities that happened to have intensive productive technology. And in defiance of…

Co-op City in New York City and Marzahn in East Berlin were constructed in the late 1960s and late 1970s, respectively. This article explores both the intentions of their planners and the experiences of their residents in these two very different societies. It challenges the standard narrative of urban modernism, which sees its demise with the growth of new urbanist critiques of the 1960s. Instead, it posits that urban modernism proved flexible enough to respond to this challenge with developments like Co-op City and Marzahn, which were simultaneously more ambitious, more defensive, and more thoughtful about the nature and meaning of urban community than their modernist predecessors in the immediate postwar period. Finally, I argue that late modernist ideas about community, in particular a kind of urban community that offered a contrast to American-style consumerism, provide a connective thread across the Iron Curtain in the later Cold War.

This article explores the relationship between “history” and “fiction” in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy. The novels constitute a means of exploring the relationship between the local and the global in the making of the modern world, in particular by focusing on ordinary people’s experiences of empire. Ghosh uses opium as a narrative device to articulate forms of imperial degradation, and connects it to the history of forced labor mobility. Despite a shared political project that seeks to give dignity to subaltern people in history, the novels’ literary representation of the lives of men, women, and children is in some ways more nuanced than historians’ empirical constructions, which are necessarily pieced together from fragmented colonial archives. Thus the line between Indian Ocean “history” and “fiction” becomes unquestionably blurred.

This article contextualizes Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy as part of a growing scholarly interest in oceanic narratives of the colonial encounter. It argues that Ghosh’s earlier writings on transoceanic and transnational connections provide a useful frame for reading the trilogy. Attention is paid to the ways in which the materiality of the ocean and non-human agency are important foci of the narrative. The article ends with a consideration of the ways in which postcolonial scholarship arising primarily from the African and South Asian contexts might usefully engage with the work of Sinologists and vice versa.

This article explores the role of interwar Paris as a marketplace for the global spread of anticolonialism. By examining the social bedrock for the flourishing of ideas, it anchors the early intellectual history of liberation movements in the everyday lives of migrants in the metropole, thus combining urban with global history. Migrants from across the French Empire who in Paris became the leaders of ethnic community associations receive particular attention. Their politicization owed much to the fact that the global disparities of the imperial order became much more visible from a vantage point such as Paris. On the other hand, cross-community exchange further highlighted these disparities and encouraged a process of mutual learning. Anti-imperialist activists from beyond the empire—for instance, fledgling Chinese communists such as Zhou Enlai—therefore also contributed to turning Paris into a production center of anticolonialism. Rather than concentrating on the bilateral relationship between France and one colonial setting, the article thus engages with a gamut of different…

In the first decade of the twentieth century scholarly reformers around the world became newly aware that universities were assets that could be harnessed to achieve national economic and cultural goals. Yet universities remained local institutions, nested in the cities that benefited from—and contributed to—their success. Focusing on scholarly reformers in Germany and America, including Daniel Coit Gilman, Nicholas Murray Butler, Felix Klein, and Karl Lamprecht, this article shows how competition and cooperation developed among universities, in which scholarly managers negotiated often conflicting local, national, and international goals. In contrast to the classic story of the history of the research university, I reveal that educational models were transported not only from Germany to America, but also, nearly a decade before World War I, in the reverse direction. And in contrast to the recent “international” turn in the field, I argue that placing the university in a transatlantic framework reminds us that the local remains a critical ingredient in histories of knowledge…

This article brings into dialogue two distinct moments of encounter between Western and American indigenous traditions of kinetic-manual expression, challenging predominant paradigms in the study of human sign language and cross-linguistic communication in the process. When European explorers and settlers first came across American Indian verbal and signed languages in the late fifteenth century, the interactions that resulted were less defined by misunderstandings than has previously been suggested, in part because the participants all associated the nonverbal with eloquence rather than with speech incapacity. This initial reading was later obscured in the late 1890s, when ethnologists working for the Smithsonian embarked on a “rediscovery” of Indian sign language in the Western Plains, and initiated enduring misconceptions about indigenous nonverbal communication being geographically restricted, inspired by Westerners, comparable to the sign systems of the deaf, and subordinate to speech. Deconstructing the process through which rich indigenous communicative technologies were…

In reflecting on Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy, set in the waters of the Indian Ocean, this essay highlights the role a historical imaginary can play in undergirding the claims to explanatory truth made by historians in their interpretations of the past. While historians work within the conventions and strictures of professionalized practice and are uneasy about utilizing historical fiction to animate their work, the essay suggests, through a consideration of the books of Ghosh, that bringing these two modes of inquiry into relation with one another can produce a mutually beneficial dialogue about the nature of sources, archives, and the methodologies we use in producing accounts of the past. This is especially so for those stories involving individuals at the “margins” of history whose voices it is challenging to recover. The essay draws attention in this regard, though, to some of the problems in Ghosh’s attempts to reinscribe into the history of the ocean the idea of an Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism that is seen to have been eroded over time. It challenges, further, the trilogy’s…

This article is a response to four contributions to a forum on the author’s cycle of novels, the Ibis Trilogy, consisting of Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011), and Flood of Fire (2015). The novels are set in India and China around the time of the first Opium War (1839–1842 c.e.). The author argues that historical fiction is one of several modes of discourse about the past, and that while academic history is certainly the most authoritative of these discursive fields, it also shares certain commonalities with historical fiction. There are, for example, some areas of overlap between historical fiction and such branches of academic history as microhistory and military history, especially in their envisaging of time. There are areas of overlap also between historical fiction and histories of affect and emotion. The article also touches on the expansion of India-China studies in recent years, and the rich possibilities that have been opened up by this development.

“1968,” widely used to mark the vast transformations of the decade of the 1960s and some years beyond, has long been the subject of obsessive German reflection and vast scholarly production. In West Germany and the Global Sixties: The Antiauthoritarian Revolt, 1962–1978, Timothy Scott Brown has given scholars studying the period a great gift: a masterful synthesis of swirling currents of rebellion placed in a groundbreaking conceptual frame. Exhaustively researched and elegantly argued, the book functions both as a comprehensive account of a major swath of postwar history and a provocative rethinking of the terms in which scholars have represented it. Chief among Brown’s ambitions is to bring under one roof the disparate forms of political dissent and cultural ferment that together made up the antiauthoritarian revolt. Rudi Dutschke, the chief ideologue of Germany’s Socialist German Student Union, and Dieter Kunzelmann, cofounder of Berlin’s Kommune I, loom large in Brown’s study. As occasional allies, each sought to unite political vanguardism and the cultural avant-garde and thus…

Slave Revolt in Jamaica uses animated digital cartography to explore contested movements in space. The project addresses elementary historical questions—what happened, when, and where—hoping the answers will reveal something about why the greatest slave insurrection in the eighteenth-century British Empire played out as it did, and with what implications. It shows how scholars can advance the pursuit of knowledge by creating narrative interfaces for databases of information, but it also raises important questions about the production, circulation, and reception of historical narrative beyond the print medium. Multimedia works of history can find unexpected audiences, but there is no necessary correspondence between the interests of the creators and those of the users. What can we learn from these multimedia histories that we don't already know, or couldn't just as easily learn from print? What can historians expect anyone to learn from an analytical story in the form of an animated visualization? I conclude that even as digital scholarship reaches and informs its audience in new…

Using a multiscopic approach to the study of global history, this article shows how a military campaign of rural pacification in southeastern China fostered entangled state-building in China and in the British colony of the Straits Settlements on the Malay Peninsula. Two nineteenth-century polities in the early stages of development—one colonial, one provincial—sought to subjugate the same set of freewheeling Chinese sojourners who long had operated beyond the orb of governmental authority. In so acting, these states became transformed themselves. Entangled state-building is a transnational process in which emerging states approach developmental equilibrium as a result of shared historical experiences and global economic trajectories. In the case of China and Southeast Asia, entangled state-building was accelerated by the circulation, consumption, and taxation of the most profitable commodity traded in the region, opium. Multiscopic analysis enables us to discern the human experience of global change and thereby determine how disparate local arenas are shaped by similar global…

Daegan Miller, “Reading Tree in Nature’s Nation: Toward a Field Guide to Sylvan Literacy in the Nineteenth-Century United States”: In the nineteenth-century United States, trees were used for nearly everything: fuel, food, shelter—even for roads. But individual trees also were freighted with a host of specific cultural connotations: white pine trees signified, among other things, New England, and palms, the South; oaks were often figured as royal, Christian, and male, while apples were a bedeviling mix of intoxicating female temptation and the promise of virtue’s everlasting life. Trees were symbols, and as symbols they constituted a sylvan literacy on wide display throughout the nineteenth century’s images and texts. This essay traces a history of sylvan literacy, from its rise in the nature-based cultural nationalism of the 1830s to its eclipse in the early twentieth century by the language of professional scientists. It is also a theory of how sylvan literacy worked: more like poetry than a dictionary, open to multiple competing interpretations, put to contesting uses.…

Over the last decade, this journal has published eight AHR Conversations on a wide range of topics. By now, there is a regular format: the Editor convenes a group of scholars with an interest in the topic who, via e-mail over the course of several months, conduct a conversation that is then lightly edited and footnoted, finally appearing in the December issue. The goal has been to provide readers with a wide-ranging and accessible consideration of a topic at a high level of expertise, in which participants are recruited across several fields. It is the sort of publishing project that this journal is uniquely positioned to undertake. The initial impulse for the 2016 conversation came from a Mellon Sawyer Seminar on “Reinterpreting the Twentieth Century,” held at Boston University in 2014–2015. That seminar, convened by Andrew Bacevich, Brooke Blower, Bruce Schulman, and Jonathan Zatlin, invited participants to “challenge our assumptions about the twentieth century, its ideologies, debates, divides, and more,” in a broad-based effort to “create new chronologies and narratives that…

This article argues that before the transformative impact of the income tax in the second decade of the twentieth century, a hitherto undocumented fiscal revolution occurred in the 1860s and 1870s as well. While this fiscal revolution actually increased economic inequalities, it also prepared the foundation for a new state-society relation, which was essential for the creation of the income tax, by deploying these extraordinary new revenues toward state spending and debt financing far beyond the military—especially toward new services like mass public education and transportation, among other areas. By uncovering this earlier fiscal revolution, the article points toward a revisionism of some of our central historiographical assumptions on state-building. To explain why this earlier fiscal revolution has remained largely hidden from view, it argues that while it was highly inegalitarian, its invisibility was largely intentional, especially for those who paid these new taxes. Similarly, an intellectual history of taxation during this period reveals that the development of a…

The application of an empire analytic has revitalized the fields of British, French, and United States history and transformed our understanding of their objects of study. Much of this scholarship focuses on the many ways that empire abroad shaped the development of metropolitan imperial cultures and identities. “Metropolitan Cultures of Empire and the Long Moment of Decolonization” introduces a forum of three essays that chart new approaches to the topic. The essays reflect the growing interest in the final decades of colonial rule and three emerging themes within imperial studies, in particular: the history of emotions and affective politics of empire; the role of imperial metropoles as sites and organizers of anticolonial activity; and metropolitan manifestations and repercussions of decolonization on particular institutions. This introductory essay situates the essays within broader historiographical trends and highlights some lessons that they offer to historians of the metropolitan reverberations and afterlives of imperialism.

This essay evaluates the significance of the website Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760–1761, which was created by Harvard historian Vincent Brown in order to both respond to and provoke questions regarding a series of interconnected slave uprisings and their eventual repression by Jamaica’s colonial government. Locating this digital resource within the technological and scholarly developments that made its creation both possible and desirable, the essay assesses the site’s value as a source for both undergraduate teaching and academic research, and offers some observations about the ongoing technological and intellectual development of the field of digital humanities.

There must be some kind of fatal attraction between environmental historians and mountains. Many books and articles are dedicated to that subject. Mountains are also—or also might be—a crucial laboratory of multidisciplinary studies where environmental historians, anthropologists, geographers, and sociologists, just to mention some of the disciplines, can work together in order to understand the complexity of that environment. Coping with this intricate blend of themes and scholarly knowledge, Andrew Denning has decided to focus his book on a specific aspect of the recent appropriation/reinvention of the Alps, that is, skiing. The title Skiing into Modernity: A Cultural and Environmental History clearly outlines the content of the volume. Nonetheless, Denning’s book goes beyond a mere history of skiing in the Alps; rather, Denning employs skiing as a starting point for unpacking some wider issues concerning human/nature relationships. Modernity is without any doubt the crucial trope of Denning’s narrative; throughout the book, the author analyzes how skiing has imposed its vision…

In a recent essay (“Rights vs. Duties,” Boston Review 41, no. 3 [2016]: 42–47), Samuel Moyn calls attention to the urgent need for a renewed focus on the idea of “duties” in history, juxtaposing a lacuna on that topic with what he sees as an overemphasis on the study of “human rights” over the last several decades. Rights and duties go hand in hand, inasmuch as every right suggests correlative obligations, yet there has been no corresponding public or academic discussion of duty’s place in the pursuit of the public good. Not incidentally, Moyn begins his essay with, and weaves the threads of his argument around, the ideas of Mohandas Gandhi, for whom duty was an important guiding principle. Aishwary Kumar approaches these issues tangentially in his thought-provoking new book Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy. Gandhi’s philosophy, and his politics, Kumar suggests, were ultimately built around a set of duties and obligations that structured society and guided all human relations. But significantly, Gandhi’s “conception of social obligation [was condensed]…

Jedediah Purdy joins scholars from many disciplines in declaring the “Anthropocene Age”: a time of massive human impact upon the global biosphere whereby our choices have shaped our world, which “will henceforth be the world we have made” (3) and its fate, along with our own, is determined by us. Rather than celebrating humanity’s power as Baconian/techno-utopian liberation from natural limits, Purdy contends that the Anthropocene imposes on us heavy new duties to choose our common future responsibly and exercise self-restraint. This will require a new sort of “environmental imagination” (6)—new systems of concepts, ideas, and beliefs regarding our relationship to the biosphere, and new ways to describe, express, and practice them. Purdy explains how humans’ relationship to and understanding of nature has always depended upon words and concepts we use to socially and politically construct “nature,” and he traces how this sociopolitically constructed understanding of the North American environment has evolved through various stages from colonial times to the present, including four…

In Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents, Lisa Gitelman provides a provocative set of microhistories that expand our conceptualization (and confusion) of the history of physical and electronic documents. Five cases over two centuries broaden our understanding of the evolving, contested worlds of documents and offer a historical context for and explicit probing of digital humanities. The intended reader is not just the historian but everyone thinking about the future of the humanities. Gitelman wants to move from studying concepts of information and print culture to understanding the more encompassing notion of how documents present an “embarrassment of material forms” (6) and how they emerged in specific settings and were closely tied to how people thought, worked, and lived. This wide-ranging media history of documents, very broadly defined, sheds fascinating light on how people and organizations took advantage of new technological possibilities. The chapters examine mechanized textual reproduction in the 1870s, new media for reproducing documents in the 1930s,…

Ethnicity in Zimbabwe: Transformations in Kalanga and Ndebele Societies, 1860–1990 is both a history and a comparative study of Ndebele and Kalanga peoples in the Matabeleland region of Zimbabwe. While this premise for a book may appear somewhat old-fashioned, this project nonetheless comes face to face with the political violence pursued by Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe since independence in 1980, and his then-named party, the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), in this particular region during the 1980s. This period of atrocity—known as Gukurahundi, a Shona word that translates as “early spring rains that erode the chaff” (227)—reflected an effort by Mugabe and ZANU to consolidate power by deliberately killing off political opponents and their supporters, specifically those who sustained Mugabe’s rival, Joshua Nkomo, and the competing Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU). The resulting death toll in Matabeleland has been difficult to confirm, with estimates ranging from several thousand to tens of thousands. Nevertheless, this period, which still weighs heavily on…

Journal Article Digital Primary Sources Get access The American Historical Review, Volume 121, Issue 4, October 2016, Pages 1420–1421, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.4.1420 Published: 03 October 2016

Tom Papademetriou’s book is a compact, well-written, and comprehensive study of the status of the Greek Orthodox Church under the Islamic Ottoman Empire. I strongly believe that as a textbook, it will be extremely useful for a wide variety of Ottoman or Middle Eastern history courses. In terms of originality, though, I am afraid that the book relies too heavily on the earlier studies on this particular subject by the Turkish Ottomanist Halil Inalcik (“The Status of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate under the Ottomans,” Turcica 23 [1991]: 407–436) and the Greek Ottomanists Elizabeth A. Zachariadou (Déka tourkiká éggrapha gia tēn Megálē Ekklēsía, 1483–1567 [1996]) and Paraskevas Konortas (Othomanikes Theoriseis gia to Oikoumeniko Patriarcheio: Beratia gia tous prokatehmenous tes Megales Ekklesisas (17os–arches 20ou aiona) [1998]). Furthermore, Papademetriou’s dismissal of the conventional idea of fragmentation of the Ottoman society along ethnoreligious lines according to the “millet system,” supposedly established at the time when Mehmed the Conqueror (r. 1444–1446, 1451–1481) “gave…

The large-scale historical transformations of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century world demand accounts that break with the dominant frames provided by the nation-state. That premise drives Lisa Lowe’s book The Intimacies of Four Continents and its discussion of settler colonialism, slavery, trade, and European liberalism. The crucial insight that archives, far from being “stable, transparent, collection[s] of facts,” often lend an “architecture” to the information they provide grounds Lowe’s work (4). Because archival classifications separate rather than connect institutions, functions, territories, and peoples, they belie the various relationships between matters classified within the distinct stores. Writing against this organizing principle, Lowe explores transnational, inter-institutional, and cultural connections between European and non-European sites, using the concept-metaphor of “intimacy” as the glue to bring the various accounts and archival domains into proximity with one another. The book uses the notion of intimacy in two ways: the first is geographical, where the…

In their fine book Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie, Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf provide an outstanding account of the role of religion in the Congress of Industrial Organizations’s (CIO) campaign to organize industrial workers in the South after World War II. Labor historians tend to know little about American religious history, and historians of American religion tend to know little about the history of the American labor movement. Equally at home in both fields, the Fones-Wolfs employ a wide array of secondary and archival sources, including workers’ own oral histories, to illuminate an episode crucial to understanding southern society and American politics in the second half of the twentieth century. Rightly or wrongly, the CIO focused its Southern Organizing Campaign on the textile industry, which had relocated to the South to avoid unionization. Because most textile workers were white, it was thus able to finesse its commitment to racial unity—a commitment not shared by the more conservative American Federation of…

At the beginning of All Eyes Are upon Us: Race and Politics from Boston to Brooklyn, historian Jason Sokol makes a bold claim: “The Northeast best illuminates the conflict that stands at the center of American race relations” (xi). Shrouded by a great “mystique” (xx), the region was rooted in New Deal liberalism and interracial democracy and was also marked by racial violence and endemic levels of racial discrimination and segregation. Against this backdrop, Sokol explores a number of experiments in racial democracy and the ways in which African Americans took advantage of “the region’s traditions of political and racial progressivism” (xi) to craft an interracial politics and to advance concerted challenges to segregation and inequality in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York. Sokol reminds us that migration north did not amount—in an absolute sense—to African Americans’ escape from the Jim Crow South. They faced, as Sokol demonstrates, concerted white opposition to efforts to advance racial equality. Still, many blacks believed that they had “traded up” (xxiii) for new homes…

Edward Beatty’s book analyzes the transfer of technology in Mexico from 1870 to 1920, a period that spanned the apogee of liberal modernization and the military phase of the Mexican Revolution. Beatty concludes that while Mexicans quickly adopted the technological innovations of the Second Industrial Revolution, they did not assimilate these innovations to a sufficient degree. As a result, the adoption of foreign technologies failed to spawn the cycle of research and inventions that allowed other latecomers to nineteenth-century industrialization, such as Germany, Japan, and the U.S., to attain rapid economic development. This conceptualization explains what Beatty sees as an enduring contradiction in Mexico’s economic history. Even though Mexicans imported foreign-made technology to lessen their dependence on imported goods, they remained beholden to foreign expertise as their scientists, technicians, and workers only incompletely learned the skills needed for optimal use of the new technology. The book therefore casts a new angle on the much-maligned dependency paradigm, which…

Peter Gough has written a history of an unprecedented government venture, the Federal Music Project (FMP), with a focus on the largest territory in the program: the American West. Drawing extensively from materials from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and other archives, he argues that the FMP not only resulted from an increased awareness of and enthusiasm for regionalism in American politics and culture, but that millions of people ultimately benefited from a program that hired almost sixteen thousand musicians. Sounds of the New Deal: The Federal Music Project in the West is an intriguing narrative that, like the program itself, nonetheless encounters some difficulties along the way. The book is organized into seven chapters. The first chapter outlines some of the early goals of the FMP (founded in 1935 as part of the Federal One arts program) and its relation to New Deal idealism. Three chapters follow on various regions of the U.S. (chapter 2 on Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada; chapter 3 on California; and chapter 4 on Colorado, Utah, Oregon, and…

Christopher R. Boyer’s superb history of forests, forestry, and conservation in Mexico makes innovative contributions to the historiography of the Mexican Revolution and postrevolutionary state formation, as well as to Mexico’s environmental history. Based on exhaustive research in regional and national archives, most notably the archive of the forest service, Political Landscapes: Forests, Conservation, and Community in Mexico traces the dynamic between government forestry policy designed in Mexico City, and indigenous and mestizo villagers in the states of Chihuahua and Michoacán during the twentieth century. Boyer’s thesis is that deforestation in Mexico during the twentieth century was driven by the “politicization” of landscapes. He builds on James Scott’s Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1999) by arguing that state intervention to adjudicate local conflicts over forests and impose rational forest management, even when paired with a commitment to both conservation and social justice following the revolution, created “political…

Imagine one of the most iconic images of western Americana: the solitary trout fly-fisherman casting his line amidst a backdrop of stunning Rocky Mountain scenery (reminiscent of Norman Maclean’s A River Runs through It and Other Stories [1976]). What could be more natural than man communing with nature by fishing for wild trout in a remote flowing river in the American West? Almost anything, according to Jen Corrinne Brown, who spends the entirety of her brilliant history of fly-fishing in the Rocky Mountain West disabusing us of our simplistic, romantic notions and revealing how “the exceptional (and oversold) trout fisheries of the West are neither wild nor natural” but “rather the product of anglers, fisheries managers, tourists, guides, local business people, and regional boosters and their century-long profound manipulation of the Rocky Mountain environment” (3–4). The title of this wonderful book—Trout Culture: How Fly Fishing Forever Changed the Rocky Mountain West—is a clever play on words: culture refers to the human constructs of class, race, gender, imperialism,…

Ian Mosby’s Food Will Win the War: The Politics, Culture, and Science of Food on Canada’s Home Front is an important piece of historical scholarship in a number of categories, including histories of food and nutrition, gender, and Canadian history. Well written and thoroughly researched, Food Will Win the War is based on a wealth of archival sources that consist of federal, regional, and municipal documents, cookbooks, periodicals, and visual materials, all well-informed and supported by secondary sources. In his introduction, Mosby lays out the broadest of arguments, asserting “The government . . . set out to transform Canadians’ dietary habits through a range of both voluntary and coercive means” (5). Moreover, he notes, mobilization “not only led to very real changes in the way Canadians shopped for, cooked, and consumed food but also transformed the broader symbolism of food and eating” (5). Gender is central to Mosby’s analysis, given that women were primarily responsible for food procurement and preparation. “[T]he state mobilized women’s unpaid labour on a scale that has gone…

Pedro Machado’s Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1850 is an in-depth study of the commercial world of the Bania (Vāniyā) maritime merchants of Diu and Daman (ports on the Gujarat coast) in a period that is generally understood in the literature as that of European imperial and commercial domination and in which indigenous South Asian networks of trade were greatly undermined by or subordinated to a European-dominated capitalist world economy. Divided into five chapters, an introduction that sets the historiographical context for this study, and a brief conclusion summing up the main arguments, the book challenges this conventional view and calls for a more nuanced understanding of the history of the Indian Ocean world economy and the interaction of colonial-imperial and indigenous structures of trade within it. Machado explores the dynamics of the flourishing Bania maritime trade between Diu and Daman and Mozambique from 1750 to 1850. This trade was based on the exchange of Gujarati textiles for African ivory and slaves. The book…

Since 1377, when the municipal council of Ragusa on the Dalmatian coast mandated a thirty-day period of isolation for those coming from places known to have been menaced by plague, governments have sought to safeguard the health of their populations from diseases originating abroad. Ragusa’s quarantine became the model. However, in the nineteenth century, England sought an alternative to quarantine that would offer protection from disease while not inconveniencing commerce, the economic lifeblood of the empire. That scheme, known as the English System, was adopted in 1872. Krista Maglen explains this arrangement in detail in The English System: Quarantine, Immigration and the Making of a Port Sanitary Zone. It is a significant contribution to the history of medicine and public health, as well as to the history of migration in Victorian Britain. Quarantine sought to contain specific diseases from abroad that might pose a danger to the healthy. The English System, in contrast, was focused not on the disease but on the traveler who had been stricken. As Maglen explains, under the…