The 50 most-cited articles in The American Historical Review, 2018

In response to recent discussions of the possibility of writing global intellectual histories, this essay asks what that might involve for world regions beyond the West, particularly for ethnically and linguistically diverse areas that make up the necessarily complex units of analysis with which global historians must reckon. This methodological task is undertaken here by way of a case study of the Indian Ocean during the high tide of European colonization. Two dominant historiographical tropes are challenged to clear sufficient interpretive room for the variety of intellectual transactions across so heterogeneous a space. The first is the routine characterization of the Indian Ocean as an arena of “cosmopolitanism.” The second is the premise that oceanic actors operated under the intellectual hegemony of a “colonial episteme.” To test these claims, and widen the remit of what global intellectual history might mean, the focus here turns to the vernacular spheres of writing that rapidly widened in the era of print. Overall, the essay argues for understanding the Indian Ocean through…

Countering the growing hostility to Israel and Zionism in the decades that followed the 1967 war, proponents of the “new anti-Semitism” have identified Arabs and Islam at the epicenter of anti-Semitism in the world. With the purpose of advocating for Israel, scholars and political activists have created a myth of “Islamic anti-Semitism,” producing a biased view of the history of Muslim-Jewish relations. Critics of these politicized writings have created a tendentious counter-narrative with the aim of condemning Zionism and Israeli policies, obfuscating the history of Judeophobia among Muslims. Discourses of Arab and Islamic anti-Semitism have evolved since the late 1960s in three phases. The first focuses on “Arab anti-Semitism,” a consequence of the national conflict between Israel and the Arabs. The second, with the turn to radical Islam, emphasizes the Islamic basis of anti-Semitism among Muslims, and especially Palestinians. In the third phase, following 9/11 and the expansion of global jihad, scholars have stressed the eternal enmity of Islam to the Jews, and opponents to…

“Making a Living” moves the gendered analysis of sex work in an economic direction. Using examples from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Venice, the analysis focuses on the ground-up economics that provided women as well as men with disposable income, economic value, and agency. Based on the firsthand testimonies of ordinary women from throughout Europe summoned before Venice’s moral tribunal of the Executors against Blasphemy, the research illuminates the larger story in world history about the economic potential of the sex trade for household and family and how market demands undermined gender norms and religious traditions. The Bestemmia’s microstories refine our picture of the trade in relation to household composition and alternatives to patriarchal rule. Both individual and corporate behavior on the part of Venice’s sex workers lend themselves to a different interpretive paradigm for prostitution, one that departs from conceptualizations that view the trade in primarily moralistic terms as external to or even opposed to the family unit. In Venice, sex work did not…

Is maternal love biologically determined and independent of class and culture, or is it fluid and changeable, shaped by the social context within which individuals find themselves? Recent work on the history of emotions has encouraged us to regard not simply the outward cultural configurations of human emotion as mutable and changeable, but also the actual emotions themselves. Yet so deeply rooted is the Western belief that mothers’ love for their children is natural and innate that scholars have struggled to envisage parental love in the past as differing significantly from that in the present. Looking at working-class mothers in Victorian Britain, this article argues that the very different norms and values surrounding motherhood in this historical context did indeed create a different range of emotional experiences. It also, however, seeks to deepen our understanding of why emotions take the precise forms they do. By shifting focus away from the social elites who form the mainstay of most emotions history, this article offers new insights into the ways in which societies…

Abstract This article discusses an Ottoman circumcision ceremony for three princes held in the summer of 1530. The event stemmed from a new Ottoman court ceremonial, and its sundry activities, including gift exchanges, mock battles, processions, skills demonstrations, and feasts, were spread over a twenty-day period. These activities enabled individuals and groups within the Ottoman political-military elite, and within the city of Constantinople, to perform their identities and assert their place in the Ottoman social order. The ceremony allows us to discuss the origins and contents of Ottoman ceremonial culture, which borrowed themes and motifs from the Byzantines, the Venetians, and the myriad Turko-Muslim polities with whom the Ottomans maintained intense diplomatic and cultural relations. Next, it highlights the elevation of male circumcision, a fundamental ritual in all Islamic societies, to the status of a major dynastic event that addressed the entire Ottoman polity as well as its competitors in East and West. Finally, it shows how, in early modern societies, public…

Abstract British non-governmental organizations (NGOs) became a part of the modern aid industry in the 1960s, particularly across Africa. At the moment of decolonization, humanitarian charities were recast into modern NGOs focused on small-scale grassroots initiatives nevertheless tied to long-term official development planning. NGOs and charities were popular because they represented many things for many people. For the late colonial state, they were the agents that would step in where government retreated, providing vital lessons in self-help for the future leaders of the country. For newly independent governments, they were both suppliers of Western funds and props to impoverished social service departments. For donors and international aid agencies, they were a route through which liberal internationalist sympathies could be directed. That no one in these early decades of development was certain which aid initiatives actually worked on the ground was therefore of less importance than the optimistic hopes placed upon charity to tackle global poverty. Indeed, it was the ad hoc,…

This article probes the historical relationship between anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and colonialism. Scholars have typically employed two frameworks in writing about anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: treating the Muslims of contemporary Europe as “the new Jews,” and regarding anti-Semitism and Islamophobia as coterminous hatreds within broader Orientalist systems of exclusion. These approaches both miss the mark: anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, defined substantially by the colonial context, constitute an entangled history of Othering. French North Africa, particularly Algeria, offers a suggestive starting point for writing this history. The article examines closely three fragments of entangled history: sections of Edouard Drumont’s 1886 bestseller La France juive; a memo from the French resident-general of Tunisia during World War I; and the manifesto of a pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic French Muslim. In each instance, we see how a document ostensibly focused on Jews is also deeply concerned with Muslims and the two groups’ interrelationship. These fragments point up the necessity of placing…

This essay traces the changing meanings of the term “anti-Semitism” from the late nineteenth century to the present. Focusing on Britain, it demonstrates that anti-Semitism, like any other concept, has a history—but in this case, one that remains largely uncharted. The essay draws a contrast between early usages of the term that regarded anti-Semitism as a specifically modern phenomenon and later meanings that have conceived anti-Semitism as a continuous and deep-seated malaise. Changes in the history of the concept of anti-Semitism were closely bound up with the history of minority rights and with the changing relationship of Jews to states. The foundation of the State of Israel in 1948 was a revolution in the relationship of Jews to state power that also led to radical changes in the meanings of anti-Semitism. Acknowledging the sedimented layers of meaning that lie within the concept of anti-Semitism will help us understand why the term has become so contentious in the present.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the majority of U.S. states adopted a novel code of legal practice for their civil courts. Legal scholars have long recognized the influence of the New York lawyer David Dudley Field on American legal codification, but tracing the influence of Field’s code of civil procedure with precision across some 30,000 pages of statutes is a daunting task. By adapting methods of digital text analysis to observe text reuse in legal sources, this article provides a methodological guide to show how the evolution of law can be studied at a macro level—across many codes and jurisdictions—and at a micro level—regulation by regulation. Applying these techniques to the Field Code and its emulators, we show that by a combination of creditors’ remedies the code exchanged the rhythms of agriculture for those of merchant capitalism. Archival research confirmed that the spread of the Field Code united the American South and American West in one Greater Reconstruction. Instead of just a national political development centered in Washington, we show that…

1960. It was the “Year of Africa,” or at least that is what many called those heady days of African independence that witnessed seventeen former colonies (of France, Britain, and Belgium) win their freedom from colonial rule in a single year. What began as a trickle—with Sudan, Tunisia, and Morocco in 1956—gained massive momentum with Ghana’s independence in 1957, followed by Guinea’s in 1958. By 1960, the flags of Britain, France, and Belgium were lowered on vast expanses of African territory. The Portuguese held on to their colonies until the mid-1970s, and white settler regimes in southern Rhodesia, Southwest Africa, and South Africa clung tenaciously to power (the last until 1994) despite rising international condemnation. But increasingly they did so as international outcasts. By 1960, the direction of change seemed clear. Even British prime minister Harold Macmillan had to acknowledge that very same year in Cape Town that “[t]he wind of change is blowing through this continent, and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.”1 As we…

In his introduction, Jonathan Judaken surveys theories and debates about anti-Semitism. He makes three salient observations about what hampers the field. First, it lacks agreed-upon definitions of its central concepts and terms. Second, how anti-Semitism compares to Islamophobia, anti-black racism, and other forms of oppression is unresolved. Third, periodization of anti-Semitism remains vague. In particular, he underscores and counters eternalist and teleological narratives, claims about uniqueness, and apologetics. He argues that these impediments are in part a product of the shadow of the Holocaust and the continuing conflict over Israel/Palestine. To move out of these theoretical impasses, Judaken makes two recommendations. First, he suggests replacing the term “anti-Semitism.” He argues that as a term for the fear and fascination about Jews and Judaism, “Judeophobia” better lends itself to conceptual clarity, periodization, and comparability. Second, he calls for more meta-level considerations, drawing from work in critical social and literary theory, postcolonialism, and…

This article sheds light on the history of anti-imperialism in the years of the global authoritarian surge of the 1930s and 1940s, looking at the evolving relations between anticolonial nationalists and the Nazi regime. At the height of the Second World War, scores of anticolonial revolutionaries flocked to Germany from North Africa, the Middle East, and Central and South Asia, turning wartime Berlin into a hub of global anti-imperial revolutionary activism. Driven by the contingencies of war, German officials made increasing efforts to mobilize anti-imperial movements, reaching out to the subjects of the British and French empires and the minorities of the Soviet Union. The history of Berlin’s anticolonial nationalists illuminates the broader phenomenon of right-wing authoritarian anticolonialism that emerged in the shifting political landscape of the interwar years and reached its peak during the Second World War. In this global authoritarian moment, many anticolonial nationalists, in search of an alternative to (Wilsonian) liberalism and socialism, turned to the rising…

“Bereft, Selfish, and Hungry” is a history of “the poor” as a concept in East Africa in the Common Era. It shows how people speaking Greater Luhyia languages reconceptualized poverty as they settled new lands, interacted with other communities, and dealt with social and political change. Their notions of the poor ranged from connecting them with bereavement to associating them with selfishness; from an early emphasis on want to later ideas of deceit. Paying attention to these changes in different, yet related, historical speaker communities allows us to see the dynamism in Greater Luhyian economic thought. This article thus makes the case for writing longue durée histories of vernacular ways of knowing in oral societies. Doing so requires drawing on methods from other disciplines. In this case, comparative historical linguistics allows for the reconstruction of words and their meanings to different proto-languages, whether proto-Greater Luhyia or its descendant languages. Those words and meanings can then be contextualized with evidence from archaeology, climate science, oral…

Abstract While the history of U.S. immigration policy has traditionally been directed “inward,” toward questions of American law, institutions, policy regimes, and modes of national belonging, an emerging historical scholarship is asking how U.S. immigration policy has been shaped by U.S. foreign relations. This essay draws together, builds on, and transforms this literature by foregrounding new questions of transnational, imperial, and global inequality in the making of U.S. immigration politics and policy, and by problematizing not only closures and exclusions, but selective openings in the U.S. immigration regime. Despite conventional claims that immigration is and has been a matter of “domestic” politics, in fact, U.S. immigration policy has long been self-consciously engaged with transnational realities. Indeed, as the essay argues, while serving as a way that Americans could define the nation against an “outside,” U.S. immigration policy has simultaneously been instrumentalized to project U.S. national-imperial power out into the world. This geopolitics of mobility has taken…

From its initial engagement with questions about the emergence of sexual identity formation, community life, and social movement activism, LGBT/queer history has expanded to consider the ways in which sexual and gender nonconformity are imbricated in broad histories of power, politics, and the state. Rather than a bounded identity category, “queer” operates in some of this work as a powerful critical lens and mode of analysis, one that exposes and unsettles a range of taken-for-granted assumptions, institutions, and arrangements. This essay explores dynamic new work in the field of LGBT/queer history, most of it focused on the modern U.S., to consider historians’ efforts to render sexuality a “useful category of historical analysis,” illuminating the imbrication of sexuality and power across a broad range of historical narratives and fields.

This article examines the different ways that anti-Semitism and Zionism have confronted and influenced one another through a tension-filled dialectic that is simultaneously self-evident and counterintuitive. The essay begins with a discussion of the central place of anti-Semitism in canonical Zionist texts such as Leon Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation and Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State. Both Pinsker and Herzl believed that anti-Semitism was a permanent or immovable force, and this interpretation of anti-Semitism led them to embrace, if not create, political Zionism. The following section analyzes the works of two émigré scholars, Salo W. Baron and Hannah Arendt, who wrote fervently about the need to avoid “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history” and the school of “eternal antisemitism,” and to focus instead on the actions that Jews undertook as historical actors in specific contexts. Despite their influence, the study of anti-Semitism over the past two generations has returned to a perspective that is strikingly similar to traditional Zionist interpretations. The penultimate…

This article explores how American and European humanitarian workers and organizations treated, and represented, a group of Armenian women who were among those “absorbed” into Turkish, Kurdish, and Bedouin households during the genocide of 1915. Taken into Bedouin households, they were tattooed on their faces and hands, according to Bedouin custom. While the “recuperation” of “absorbed” women and children was a core element of these humanitarian organizations’ postwar programs of Armenian national reconstruction, most relief workers viewed the “recuperation” of the tattooed women as far more “difficult”—if not impossible—because of the physical marks they bore, and what those signified to the relief workers. Using both official and private documentation and a range of visual sources, this article unpacks differing discourses and practices around the “troubled” reclamation of the tattooed women, among a number of humanitarian organizations and their varying constituencies of relief workers. Their differences in response expose the complex shifts in interwar humanitarianism, but…

Abstract The Cold War is far from over on the Korean Peninsula. Korean history—especially for the northern half—remains deeply shaped by the legacies of transnational anti-communism even as historians who study socialism in other settings have shed many of the Cold War–era assumptions about the extensive power of the state. By putting North Korea in a comparative perspective with other socialist countries such as the USSR, the People’s Republic of China, and the German Democratic Republic, this article suggests ways of integrating the constitutive power of social forces beyond the state into our histories of North Korea, as seen through an examination of population movement. Beginning with the dissolution of the Japanese Empire, the mobility of people has always been a politicized issue between the two Koreas. Historians have taken up this issue, yet dependence on sources produced by the North Korean state has led many narratives—however harshly critical of the regime—to reproduce within their own analytical frameworks key assumptions originally produced in Pyongyang in support of…

Decolonizing the AHRLong after the actual transfer of power from colonial masters to liberated peoples, the sovereign nations that emerged from imperialism's grasp struggled to shake off empire's hold on the national imagination, not to mention postcolonial social and class structure.Indeed, with political sovereignty, the process of decolonization had only just begun.Similarly, fifty years-yes, a half-century!-after the initial victories of the civil rights revolution in the United States, parts of the country have only now contemplated tearing down monuments to white supremacy and started to acknowledge and apologize for the history of racial terror that shaped and scarred many-probably most-American communities.This comes at a time when the current president of the United States persists in recycling some of the most shopworn tropes from the nation's long history of racism and xenophobia, all while loudly (and unconvincingly) claiming, "I am not a racist."Many historians find ourselves wondering if the culture at large has listened to a word we have been saying for at least a…

In recent years Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) has become a common point of reference for those within postcolonial studies—such as Paul Gilroy, Aamir Mufti, and Michael Rothberg—who wish to explore the historical intersections between racism, fascism, colonialism, and anti-Semitism. “Postcolonialism and the Study of Anti-Semitism” relates Arendt’s comparative thinking to other anticolonial theorists and camp survivors at the end of the Second World War—most prominently, Jean Améry, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Primo Levi, and Jean-Paul Sartre—who all made connections between the history of genocide in Europe and European colonialism. The article then compares this strand of comparative thought with postcolonial theorists of the 1970s and 1980s who, contra Arendt, divide the histories of fascism and colonialism into separate spheres. It also contrasts postcolonial theory with postcolonial literature by exploring the intertwined histories in the fiction of V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, and Caryl Phillips. Said’s late turn to Jewish exilic thinkers…

This article provides a queer, transnational account of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1965 articulation, in Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965), of a constitutional right to privacy. The right in question trumped a Connecticut statute prohibiting contraceptive use even by married couples. But historians emphasizing its emergence from tort privacy and criminal procedure law have neglected an alternative source of its articulation beyond obvious jurisdictional and sexual borders: Britain’s 1957 Wolfenden Report on homosexual offenses and prostitution. The government-commissioned report famously recommended the decriminalization of gay sex on the basis of “a realm of private morality and immorality which is . . . not the law’s business.” In doing so, it not only captured the attention of U.S. homophiles and advocates, who had particular interests in overturning state sodomy laws, but also inspired transatlantic reportage and legal debate that helped to make a sexual privacy right conceptually legible and politically realizable. Elaborating the connection between Wolfenden and…

The gangster, especially the coloured (“mixed race”) gangster, is a loaded cipher in South Africa. He is simultaneously a figure of panic, an outsider, a loser, an avatar of moral decline, a byproduct of apartheid’s negative effects, a defiant outlaw, and, more recently, a reflection of the deep, systematic failures of the twin promises of post-apartheid and capitalist society, as well as a neoliberal entrepreneur (figures, when they’ve reformed, like Kenny Kunene, Jerome Booysen, and Gayton McKenzie are particularly familiar to South Africans). The gangster has baffled academics, mostly sociologists and historians, tabloid journalists, and filmmakers alike. Noem My Skollie (in English, Call Me Gangster or Call Me Thief), released in 2016, explores some of these themes. The film is set in 1960s Cape Town, and the action moves over a ten-year period between Kewtown, a section of Athlone township, and Pollsmoor prison, an infamous institution on the southern edge of Table Mountain next to a white suburb and vineyards. The protagonist, Abraham, or AB, is molested as a teenager, forms a…

The young protesters in the United States and Western Europe had no idea about the parallel revolutions taking place east of the Elbe. The historian Tony Judt, one of the rebels, would admit later: “What does it tell us of the delusions of May 1968 that I cannot recall a single allusion to the Prague Spring, much less the Polish student uprising, in all of our earnest radical debates? … Looking back, I can’t help feeling we missed the boat … What did we know of the courage it took to withstand weeks of interrogation in Warsaw prisons, followed by jail sentences of one, two, or three years for students who had dared to demand the things we took for granted?”1 But as I look at the Western revolutions, I have the impression that they were not parallel processes but rather a mirror image of what was going on in Poland. On the face of it, the same things were happening: young people rebelled, and the establishment reacted. And yet, in this mirror image everything is different.

Journal Article Museum Reviews: Introductory Note Get access The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 4, October 2018, Page 1267, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy198 Published: 04 October 2018

The Central Asian city of Shahrisabz has long been a historical footnote, widely regarded as an unruly “province in rebellion” plaguing its more powerful overlords in Bukhara during the seventeenth through late nineteenth centuries. In fact, it was an autonomous city-state in its own right, and the mechanisms through which it has been written into submission in the historiography reveal much about historical methodology and premodern logics of sovereignty. To recover Shahrisabz’s story, this article pursues a non-hegemonic reading of hegemonic Persian writing (a strategy more frequently applied to colonial sources) and pieces together scattered textual fragments composed in the city itself. In doing so, it illustrates the ways in which variegated forms of symbolic submission and coercive power intersected to create complexes not easily mappable to modern binaries. Seemingly contradictory forms of sovereignty routinely coexisted within a single polity, and greater specificity is necessary to capture a kaleidoscope of permutations. Thus source methodology and sovereignty stand as two…

This opportunity to reflect on the significance and legacy of 1968 is particularly meaningful for me. Born that year, I became a scholar of U.S. history largely inspired by the liberation movements of that era. My family and I emigrated from Taiwan in 1975, ten years after the Hart-Celler Act eliminated discriminatory quotas that had previously disadvantaged migration from Asian countries.1 As one of just a handful of students of Asian ancestry in my public schools in Spokane, Washington, I met other Asian newcomers who began arriving as refugees, collateral damage from the U.S. War in Vietnam. In college in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I participated in multiracial political movements to demand full inclusion of people of color in the academy and transformation of the university curriculum. Inspired by the divestment movement against South African apartheid, the critiques of Western civilization as the primary core of a college education, and the redress and reparations movement for Japanese Americans incarcerated by the U.S. government during World War II, our coalition of…

The Statue of Liberty is the most famous and recognizable image of freedom in the modern world, and a cherished national icon of the United States. In this article I consider an important yet usually unacknowledged part of the statue’s history: its role as a racial symbol. Looking at both the statue’s origins in France and its history as a public monument in America, I will explore its broader significance to the racialized nature of freedom in the modern world.

Historians have long understood rootedness as a hallmark of the Nazi regime and German race thinking. Blood and Soil implied an intimate bond between lands and peoples, and the Nazis co-opted ideas of Heimat to claim that members of the German race were indelibly marked by their milieu. Meanwhile, German designs on living space and the creation of a land empire are hallmarks of the territorialized logic of “heavy” modernity. Closer attention to German engagements with mobility complicates this picture, however, demonstrating how the material effects, embodied experiences, and discursive renderings of movement in Nazi Germany influenced geopolitical calculations and everyday life in equal measure. The Nazis celebrated mobility as much as they cherished rootedness. Mobility politics lay at the foundation of power relations in the Third Reich, and the Nazis developed a set of institutions in the form of a circulatory state to manage the productive potential and disruptive danger of mobility. Systems and logics of mobility connected seemingly distinct realms of historical experience in…

In October 1968, the Lebanese professor of political science Hassan Saʿb published Thawrat al-Tullab fi-l-ʿAlam (The Students’ Revolt in the World). Halfway between a study of contemporary politics and a fiery manifesto, the professor’s book urged Arab students to revolt. Coming from the left side of the political map and echoing the official Arab ideologies of the 1960s, the call Saʿb issued was total in its scope and ambition. In no uncertain terms, he reminded his readers that freedom demands sacrifice. Invoking Albert Camus, he gave his readers a fashionable phenomenological take on an old truth: “I rebel, therefore I exist.”1 He wrote with verve about the revolutionary exploits of Chinese youth and of how Western students were playing second fiddle in their harmonious revolutionary symphony. There was no question as to who set the revolutionary tone, who led by example, and who, on the other hand, was merely following the trail they blazed. Granted, the battle against reaction rested on foundational texts by Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and others, but successful revolutionary…

This essay is a meditation on what it means for a historian to have a deep and abiding relationship with the pasts of a place, while experiencing the present only through the lens of nostalgia and loss. I argue that the discipline of history is implicated in the Mughal historian’s experience of the past as an object of study, of Mughal monuments as relics from the past, and of lived religious rituals as having little bearing on historical inquiry. Drawing on a visit to a seventeenth-century Mughal mosque in Thatta, Pakistan, I propose an engagement with historical spaces that breaks with linear time and instead attunes itself to how the premodern past still hums at places of worship, forms an undercurrent of desire beneath modern notions of citizenship, and anchors timeless spiritual longings. Such an engagement possesses radical potential; trauma caused by colonialism coupled with nostalgic longings for imagined pasts can be countered by challenging the very premise that the past is in fact behind us.

In settler states such as Canada, indigenous peoples’ claims for sovereignty in the late twentieth century became matters of intense public and political debate. Provoked by widespread indigenous rights activism of the 1970s, the Canadian state embarked on a large-scale examination of claims for rights and restitution. By focusing on the 1962 case of a duck hunter who insisted on his treaty right to hunt as he pleased in a Canadian borderlands region that was becoming more tightly woven into the fabric of the settler nation, this article argues for the value of recovering the discursive strategies of indigenous peoples in making sovereign claims prior to 1970s activism. I suggest that such claims were effective in bending the “settler contract,” which refers to the founding of settler states in dispossession and the silencing of indigenous actors. My approach brings to the fore a distinctive form of non-elite politics, what I call “treaty talk,” or the vernacular stories, civic rituals, and political disputes concerning the treaty promises that Canadian authorities made to northern…

Since 2006, the AHR has published ten “Conversations” on a wide range of topics. By now, we have a standard 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. When participants are able to respond to one another, a unique dialogue emerges, one that exemplifies the interplay of ideas that so much scholarship depends upon behind the scenes. The procedure also throws open a window onto the process by which scholars turn evidence into conceptualization; these are not polished pieces, but thought-in-action. It is the sort of publishing project that this journal is uniquely positioned to undertake.

“And I swear I’ll wrench nothing but the facts from our next batch of eyewitnesses, frail and imperfect as they might be” (119). This fraught promise from the narrator of Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza signals one of the central contradictions of this comic and, in fact, of eyewitness testimony to a historical event. From the foreword of Footnotes in Gaza to the four appendixes and bibliography that conclude its 432 pages, the visual and verbal tone of Joe Sacco’s investigation into the large-scale killing of Palestinians in Khan Younis and Rafah, Gaza, in November 1956 is distinctly different from that of Palestine (1993–1995), Sacco’s earlier comics account of the West Bank and Gaza. If the initially flippant journalist narrator of Palestine thinks he knows the score before he arrives in Palestine and realizes something else in his encounters with Palestinians and their stories, the narrator of Footnotes in Gaza is, from the outset, far more circumspect; the tone of the comic’s verbal and visual narration is somber, even melancholy.

Reviewing James Scott’s Against the Grain and Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler is a salutary experience immediately bringing to mind Walter Benjamin’s famous remark that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Each book is civilizational in historical scope—both authors begins their account with the early human hunter gatherers-foragers who have traversed the earth for most of the 200,000 years in which it has been inhabited by anatomically modern humans—and in their abiding civilizational pessimism, whether it be the early agrarian city-states or twentieth-century modernity. Scott’s message is an echo of Jared Diamond’s famous assessment of the Neolithic Revolution (“the worst mistake in human history”). In sharp contrast to the plenitude, freedoms, and relative equality of foraging lifestyles, domestication of plants and animals and the birth of agrarian states brought drudgery, undernutrition, higher mortality rates, forced and slave labor, war, epidemics, and the threat of almost constant sociopolitical fragility and…

Abstract This contribution focuses on the development of gendered anti-Semitic stereotypes based on material drawn from post-Enlightenment Germany, exploring their ambivalent messages and meanings. It shows that this development was intimately connected with the creation of bourgeois gender roles and images of sexuality that were adapted by middle-class Jewish men and women even as they were used to denigrate them. By ascribing “femininity” to Jewish men as a means of depriving them of their masculinity, on the one hand, and insisting on their specifically immoral sexual behavior, on the other, the highly gendered Judeophobic tropes persistently blurred the line between the norms of masculine and feminine behavioral codes—a phenomenon that appears in strikingly similar ways all over Europe. In the gendered hierarchy of Jewish communities, however, this attack on the most intimate form of identity was internalized by blaming women for giving credence to anti-Jewish propaganda. A gendered perspective on Judeophobia thus broadens our understanding both of the mindsets of anti-Semites…

The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Poland, is an astounding achievement not only for its approach to history and museography, which places it among paradigm-shifting institutions such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Jewish Museum Berlin, but also for its purposeful, nuanced, and ongoing participation in a highly contested arena of historical inquiry. Opened to visitors in 2014, POLIN is the result of at least ten years of advocacy, led initially by Jerzy Halbersztadt and later Marian Turski. These scholar-advocates overcame numerous obstacles, financial and political, to finally forge a partnership between Warsaw city authorities, Poland’s national government, and external donors. The museum finds itself, in 2018, in the midst of a cultural and political battle. The current government of Poland insists that Poland’s history should be a narrative of Poles, ethnically defined as non-Jewish, historically presented as a unified people battered by conquest, and morally untarnished by complicity in the Shoah. To this end, the ruling Law and…

John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality was published in 1980. It sparked immediate controversy because of its claims about the general tolerance toward homoeroticism among ancient Romans, early Christians, and the peoples of the early and High Middle Ages. Most notably, he asserted that there were “gay persons” who lived in these societies of the distant past and were part of sometimes vibrant “gay subcultures.” The book helped to establish the field of LGBTQ history. Scholars after Boswell have challenged, refined, and expanded his ideas, but he remains the starting point for most explorations of queer desires in ancient and medieval history. The large number of books and articles that have been published in the last forty years on sources and topics he first brought to light demonstrates the lasting impact of Boswell’s work.

Symbolizing more than a singular date, 1968 was an international phenomenon. From Paris to New York, from Mexico City to Karachi, students, workers, and peasants mobilized and marched against war and imperialist aggression, for rights, entitlements, and participatory democracy, opposing bureaucratic officialdoms and effete elites. If ’68ers did not always articulate clearly what they were for, they certainly knew what they were against. “It was right to rebel” echoed across barricades and throughout sit-ins. Just how this dissonance sounded, however, always reverberated with the peculiarities of specific locales. Canada’s 1968 was no different. The Combined Universities Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, founded in 1959, morphed into the “student syndicalism” of 1964’s Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA).1 Montreal, the centerpiece of Québécois radical nationalist grievance, fostered a C. L. R. James–influenced Caribbean struggle against racism. Fed up with discriminatory treatment, West Indian students occupied the Sir George Williams University computer complex in…

Late in 1968, just days before the opening of the first Olympics hosted by a “Third World” country, security forces arrested, injured, and assassinated a still-unknown number of students and supporters who had rallied in the Plaza of Three Cultures in Mexico City. The movement had been triggered months earlier by a police assault on a rumble between rival secondary schools, reverberating in clashes at a subsequent march celebrating Cuba’s challenge to capitalist imperialism. Imbibing that classic student alchemy of rage and joy, thousands of students then carried the ’68 onda (“scene”) and demands into markets, schoolyards, buses, and homes, galvanizing hundreds of thousands to protest. Here we offer a rolling retrospective on subsequent ways in which Mexican activists have understood the legacies of ’68. Scholars of Mexico ’68 and other key ’68 sites bemoan the lack of changes in political economy but applaud the sociocultural transformations that expanded participation in multiple realms. To paraphrase the song, “You don’t always get revolution, but if you try sometimes, you get ……

Rohan Deb Roy’s Malarial Subjects: Empire, Medicine and Nonhumans in British India, 1820–1909, is an excellent book that covers the early history of malaria in British India, explaining how quinine became its chief remedy. While many historians of medicine have focused on physicians, pharmacists, and patients, Roy unveils a deeper history of how malaria was framed as a disease culturally, socially, politically, and environmentally. Inspired by the French philosopher Bruno Latour, Roy lays out the ways in which the disease was construed within a network of human and nonhuman agencies. It’s a story of how trees, insects, people, physical structures, and land cause malaria to come about. His story covers, roughly, the period from the discovery of quinine in 1820 to the first Imperial Malaria Conference in 1909. Historians of malaria commonly focus on events leading up to the scientific discovery of the malaria parasite in 1880. The subsequent medical findings in the late 1890s on how mosquitoes transmit these parasites are also widely discussed in the historiography of malaria,…

In a 1981 review essay, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod described the contours of what he termed “Palestiniology”—dominant features in the academic study of Palestine that he viewed as obstacles to understanding “the social and cultural evolution of the Palestinians in modern times” (“The Pitfalls of Palestiniology,” Arab Studies Quarterly 3, no. 4 [1981]: 405). A central tenet of Palestiniology was the tendency to put the question of Zionism at the center of any historical inquiry into the Palestinian experience. In such cases, Palestinian politics, social life, and personal experiences risked becoming at most secondary, and at worst irrelevant to the historiography of Palestine. Zionist settlement and Israeli state action have indeed been fundamental to Palestinian history, and Abu-Lughod does not suggest that these forces should be ignored. The problem is, in part, one of perspective. The body of scholarship on Palestine and the Palestinian experience has grown enormously in the ensuing decades. Scholars have addressed “the pitfalls of Palestiniology” through a significant expansion of the…

The graphic history genre represents an intentional interpretive engagement with the past within a comics medium that features narrative storytelling built on juxtaposed units of images and text demarcated by notional or drawn boundaries, presented in sequential order, and interspersed with gutters or other breaks to allow the reader to, in the words of Scott McCloud, “observe the parts while perceiving the whole” (Understanding Comics [1994], 63). The communication of history through this medium is rooted in the development of mass popular culture in several parts of the world. In the Franco-Belgian tradition, it may be dated back to Second Empire works such as Gustave Doré’s Histoire pittoresque, dramatique et caricaturale de la Sainte Russie (The Picturesque, Dramatic, and Caricatural History of Holy Russia [1854]), and in Japan arguably to the Meiji-era journals Eshimbun Nihonchi (first published in 1874) and Maru Maru Chimbun (first published in 1877). In the United States, “serious” comics date back at least as far as the prewar Golden Age of Comic Books (ca. 1938–1955), when…

Kyle Harper has emerged as without doubt one of the most creative, engaging, and productive scholars currently working in the field of late antiquity. In two major publications (Slavery in the Late Roman World [2011] and From Shame to Sin [2013]) and through a series of punctiliously researched articles, he has added depth and color to our understanding of late antique social history, and of the differences Christianity did (and did not) make. As well as possessing a strong authorial voice, he also works (and writes) well with others, and there is evidently a strong degree of synergy between him and Michael McCormick. That synergy is very much in evidence in Harper’s latest publication, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire. In this study, Harper draws upon what might be termed the “environmental and biological turn” of the early twenty-first century (to which McCormick has contributed), largely synthesizing and distilling a range of recent studies detailing the proxy data of ice cores, tree rings, and other forms of paleobotany, and the increasingly exciting…

In Viktor Frankl’s Search for Meaning Timothy E. Pytell has written an intellectual biography of the Auschwitz survivor and existentialist whose bestselling Holocaust testimony, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), and popularized brand of logotherapeutic psychoanalysis made him one of the most prominent psychotherapists of the twentieth century. Frankl’s logotherapy represented an attempt to expand the reach of psychotherapy beyond physical and psychological explanations by focusing largely on the spiritual dimensions of mental illness. Pytell argues that by stressing the power of the human spirit and its “will to meaning” (3), Frankl can serve as a case study of how twentieth-century existentialism became popular and managed to avoid the pitfalls of nihilism. Pytell traces Frankl’s relationships with Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Otto Pötzl, explicating their respective influence on Frankl’s intellectual development. According to Pytell, Frankl revolted against the “nihilistic reductionism of Freud’s naturalism” (8) and believed that its reliance on psychological mechanisms failed…

Eighty years ago, as a battle over federal anti-lynching legislation loomed in the United States Senate, Walter F. White, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), graced the cover of Time magazine. Behind him hung a painting of a black man hanging from a tree. The portrait was one of fifty pieces featured at the NAACP-sponsored An Art Commentary on Lynching, which ran in Manhattan for two weeks in early 1935. “It may upset your stomach,” a New York newspaper review warned. “If it upsets your complacency on the subject it will have been successful” (quoted in “An Art Exhibit against Lynching,” The Crisis 42, no. 4 [April 1935]: 106). The Equal Justice Initiative’s (EJI) Legacy Museum and its companion site, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, follow in an activist tradition of research, art, and advocacy. Like Walter F. White, who spent years investigating lynchings, lobbying public officials, and pricking the public conscience through any means and medium available, EJI’s recently opened museum and memorial present a…

This book hits home—if by “home” we mean the core of our actual debates on multiculturalism and identity politics, on equality and justice in a globalizing world. And the first surprise it entails for the reader is the proof that these debates are hardly as new as many columnists would like to have it, and that its combat lines have never been as clear-cut as their contemporary interpretations seem to imply. Very conscious about this highly politicized context, Maurice Samuels in The Right to Difference provides a superb example of how engaged historical writing can indeed look for answers to twenty-first-century problems—not by using history as an ideological stone pit, however, but rather by carefully contextualizing sources and thus discovering submerged alternatives, some of which became actually potent for a time, while others did not prevail for long. Given his areas of specialization, it comes as no surprise that Samuels has chosen the case of France in order to intervene in the ongoing general discussion between those scholars who indict the idea of universal individual…

This article asks what historians might have to learn from recent trends in literary scholarship and takes the example of anti-Semitism in literature as a case study. Focusing mainly on New Historicist critical approaches to literary texts about Jews and Judaism, but also touching on other methodologies, including the psychoanalytic, the article examines what anti-Semitic literature has been shown to reveal about ideologies such as nationalism and liberalism, as well as about the affect or emotion underlying historical processes such as modernization. Drawing on recent studies of Shakespeare, George Eliot, Trollope, T. S. Eliot, Balzac, Céline, and other writers, the article aims to show how reading literary texts in conjunction with non-literary texts reveals new dimensions of the “political unconscious” of the period that produced them. The article concludes by pointing to the narrative elements underpinning all forms of anti-Semitic discourse and suggests that attention paid to the literary dimension of texts brings key aspects of the anti-Semitic mindset into sharper focus.

When in 2017 secondary school students protested in a number of Italian cities, occupying school buildings and engaging in ephemeral instances of urban rioting against new legislation that prescribed periods of compulsory apprenticeship for the entire student population, a number of newspapers, as if on cue, covered the events in terms that evoked the period of the contestazione, as the years following 1968 are described in common parlance. In an online discussion forum for the right-wing newspaper Il Giornale, one comment struck me as revealing in its banality. User Pippo1949 found no motivation whatsoever in the protest. Every fall since the “notorious 1968,” he remarked, high school students had marched in the streets and occupied buildings, whether the excuse was “Vietnam or the Budget Review.”1 Such protests, it was implied, were meaningless unless they were amplified by the media. The comment spoke to one aspect of the complex politics of the memory of 1968 and how the latter continues to divide the country as well as to offer a lens through which contemporary Italy may be…

My assessment of 1968 fifty years later is inseparable from my own particulars of time and place. The fateful year that witnessed the Tet Offensive, the Black Power Olympic protests, and the successive assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy happened also to be the year of my birth. As a result, I view the events as only someone from a subsequent generation could, with the distance of received knowledge, but also with a sense of recognition. Given my father’s activism in St. Louis CORE and the ever-present talk about Nixon, the anti-war movement, and black liberation politics in our home, I always felt that researching the late sixties was like trying to recall the lyrics from a familiar melody whose words you never quite knew. Attending the University of California, Berkeley, for graduate school in the late 1990s and early 2000s also informs my view of this pivotal year. Reconstructing the postwar history of the East Bay’s black radical movement as a doctoral student during the George W. Bush years gave me an intimate knowledge of one of the most important sites of…