The 10 most-cited articles in The American Historical Review, 2021

Abstract Given the blurring of boundaries between historians and archivists in the digital realm, this article urges historians to pay more attention to discussions surrounding digital records and archival practices emerging from critical archival studies. More specifically, this article identifies and summarizes seven key themes and corresponding debates about digital records in contemporary archival studies scholarship: (1) materiality, (2) appraisal, (3) context, (4) use, (5) scale, (6) relationships, and (7) sustainability. A deeper knowledge of digital archival theory and practice—how records came to be in digital archives, the infrastructures that maintain them, and the tools necessary to provide access to and context for them—is not ancillary to historical work, but provides important context to do digital history better.

Abstract Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, across Latin America, expansive rural communities of African descent forged freedom from below in the shadows of highly exploitative extractive economies. Their efforts push us to reconsider established genealogies of the age of emancipation. Freedom through conditional manumission and enslaved people’s reliance on social networks to obtain it opened the door to custom inside first-instance district courts in such areas. Judges turned to vernacular understandings of rights and obligations as they clarified the ambiguous statuses of the conditionally freed for which written law offered few provisions. Through manumission and legal actions to defend freedom, peasants of African descent on the margins of the global economic system grounded their rights in state structures as local custom. Black freedom within such territories represents a mode of community governance that remains invisible if studied by focusing on mobility or nation building. Seen from a place such as Santiago de Cuba, the nineteenth century was not just a…

Abstract Between 1943 and 1945, groups of peasants took over dozens of villages and small towns in southern Italy and proclaimed the birth of independent republics. During their brief existence—sometimes just a few days—the peasant republics implemented revolutionary measures, including the redistribution of land and the establishment of people’s courts. This article draws attention to these forgotten episodes and suggests that they can best be understood by adopting an anthropological perspective and viewing social mobilization through an experiential lens. It draws on court documents and personal accounts to examine the quasi-revolutionary experiences of the southern Italian peasantry. Revolutions in general can be seen as social dramas and political rites of passage in which the successive phases of rupture, liminality, and reaggregation are the distinct stages of a total process that generates a transformation. This approach makes it possible to disentangle the conceptualization of revolutions from structures as well as from ideology, culture, and agency; to comprehend…

Abstract In the first decades of the twentieth century, American radio producers used both artificial and wild-recorded sounds of nature to promote principles of environmental conservation and wildlife management. These techniques were shaped by established listening practices — especially those of birders — and also fostered new ones. Specifically, conservation radio programs like those produced by the American Wildlife Institute and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, made it possible for listeners to experience silence in a new way; as indicative of absence, potentially even extinction, both locally and globally. By examining how conservation radio in the 1930s was a mechanism through which environmental awareness and even action was fostered, this article demonstrates the dividends of working at the intersection of sensory studies and environmental history. New inflection points and temporal framing are made apparent as is the development of the critical sensory perceptual shifts necessary for the environmental movement to come. Tracing the sounds and listening to them in…

Abstract In the past thirty years, historians have deeply renewed our understanding of the state in the early republic period of the United States as much more powerful, deep reaching, and proactive than the traditional image represented. In France, too, new work has revised our vision of the state in the early nineteenth century, which looked different from the triumphant, Napoleonic leviathan that often appears in discourse. Yet both historiographies, having evolved separately, still base their conclusion on implicit comparisons, with an imagined “European” state or with a later “modern” state. This article uses the new historiographies on both countries to go beyond those unstated exceptionalisms to propose a reconstruction of the state in that period. Pulling those studies together, and mobilizing insights from one to shed light on the other, it recovers a common repertoire of statecraft that emerged in the revolutionary era. It hinged on fostering consent of key segments of the population and therefore organized the work of the state in mostly nonbureaucratic forms. States in…

Abstract Video games earned $43.8 billion in revenue in 2018, and many of the most popular and enduring games in recent years are set in historical environments. They are a form of popular art that sheds light on the mentalité of our era. As this article argues, the act of participating in history in virtual forums frames the public’s view of history. This article examines how recent video games focused on the Nazis shape public understanding of the Third Reich, as well as how they stage who and what matters in history and assume how historical change occurs. Historical video games connect the past to present, shaping historical memory and contemporary political debates simultaneously. Video games are a form of “deep play” that build knowledge of the past and present, but that knowledge must be broadened through historians’ attention to structural forces and disadvantaged groups. Historians should understand how video games shape the wider public’s knowledge and philosophy of history, and they should develop strategies to bring the virtues of play into their own research and…

Abstract This paper seeks to position the Scramble for Africa in the context of the continent’s transformative, global nineteenth century. While imperial historiography develops apace, Africa-facing analyses of the continent’s partition and the processes which led to it are increasingly rare. European expansion into Africa was characterized by an aggressive dynamism, and millions of Africans experienced profound crisis in the process of the establishment of colonial rule. Yet Africa’s revolutionary nineteenth century was both driven by, and culminated in, complex processes of co-option on the part of Africans and Europeans. The paper proposes that a more Africa-centered assessment of the Scramble is possible, one which aims to contextualize the partition of the continent as part of an ongoing, endogenously shaped but often exogenously connected, transformation in political, economic, and social organization and behavior. While no single overarching theory can apply to the entire continent, it is possible to identify dynamics and processes for change that recur across Africa, from…

Abstract Scholars have long considered the post–World War I minorities regime—defined and encompassed by a series of “minorities treaties” with various Balkan, Eastern European, and Middle Eastern states and the construction of a “Minorities Commission” in the new League of Nations to enforce them—as a basically well-intentioned, if ultimately misguided, first step toward the concept of internationally guaranteed human rights. In fact, the minorities treaties had vanishingly little to do with European concern for actual minority populations anywhere. Rather, they represented a new iteration of an imperial vision that had marked relations between the Ottoman Empire and the European powers of Britain, France, and Russia since the late eighteenth century: the idea, enshrined in the so-called capitulations agreements, that non-Muslim communities within the Ottoman sphere could represent a site of European economic, political, and military intervention and redefine the Ottoman state—and now the emerging nation-states of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant—as possessing…

Abstract This article contributes to the material turn. It shows how an inquiry into the social life of materiality, with distinctive methodologies such as reconstruction and object-led-approaches, changes our understanding of the past. It advances our thinking about the emergence and significance of cross-cultural objects in the context of cultural exchange. The article charts the spectacular rise in importance of feathers in dress during the Renaissance, its relation to collecting practices and relevance well into the seventeenth century. It argues that meanings of featherwork in Europe were influenced by encounters with the Americas, whose artistry sixteenth-century Europeans greatly admired. The dyeing of feathers in multiple colors for headwear and its crafting into intricate shapes turned into a major European fashion trend. Crafts and materials linked to embodied sensory perception and emotional responses. This revises accounts which present this age purely as one of conspicuous consumption designed to celebrate the prestige of rich patrons and instead enquires into how…

Abstract With its high concentration of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in heavy industry, Manchuria (Northeast China) functioned as a symbol of the “socialist industrialization” in the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC, 1949–). Many Manchurian SOEs nevertheless originated as Japanese colonial enterprises founded before 1945. Drawing on archives and interviews in Chinese, Japanese, English, and Russian, I trace industrial Manchuria’s transformation before and after the Communist Revolution with a particular focus on Anshan Iron and Steel Works (Angang). I argue that the industrial legacies of imperial Japan and Nationalist China in Manchuria facilitated China’s transition to a Soviet-style socialist planned economy under Mao Zedong’s leadership (1949–76). The early PRC developed a new system of socialist industrialization by simultaneously learning from Soviet economic planning and deploying physical assets, human resources, and economic institutions left by the Japanese and the Nationalists. My findings expand on recent scholarship on the pre-Communist origins of…