The 10 most-cited articles in The American Historical Review, 2022

Abstract This article situates the recent phenomenon of historians writing openly about their own familial and kin networks. After a brief discussion of the evolution of family history as a scholarly field, this article foregrounds the experiences and words of a number of African Americans who engaged in a diverse range of historical, genealogical, archival, and memorial “family history” work over the last two centuries. In the context of slavery, I approach family history as a form of enslaved resistance and anti-slavery argument. In the post-emancipation era, I consider African American family history within and beyond the nascent historical profession amid the racist national backlash to Reconstruction and the early Jim Crow era. From the Great Migration and Harlem Renaissance to the modern civil rights era, I explore the popularization of African American family history, the rise of the “new” social history, and the waves of men and women who entered the profession at the intersection of scholarship and social movement. In closing, I reflect upon African American family history…

Abstract This article uses the oral myth of a blood-weeping water well from a small city in the Amazon River to discuss the origins and the significance of haunted waterscapes for Black Amazonians. According to this myth, a well that still exists on the lands of an ancient sugar plantation weeps blood to mourn the slaves whose bodies were carelessly thrown there after a life of exploitation and abuse. The article tracks the history of the myth by interrogating its Indigenous substrate, its arrival to Amazonia in the nineteenth century thanks to Bantu-speaking enslaved Africans, and its additional twenty-first-century changes in a context of post–military dictatorship Black rural mobilization. It points to the centrality of haunted waterscapes and slave ghostlore in present-day processes of identity building and Black mobilization in Amazonia (Brazil), and highlights the necessity to study analog processes across the African diaspora in the Americas.

Abstract Bringing into connection the scholarship on social reproduction and racial capitalism shows that the global history of Atlantic slavery is a gendered story; and the gendered history of Atlantic slavery is a global story. Attending in particular to reproductive labor in all its forms, and to the centrality of gender relations to the transmission of property and status, enables greater understanding of Atlantic slavery as a critically important aspect of modern global history. Indeed, without attention to gender and specifically to reproductive work, the global history of Atlantic slavery will inevitably be partial and incomplete. The reproductive work of women in Africa, as well as in the Americas, should be understood as an integral part of the development of Atlantic slavery, and thus of racial capitalism.

Abstract This forum, curated by Michael Goebel (Freie Univ. Berlin), brings together twelve historians who draw on their own areas of specialization to rethink how we conceptualize the history of nationalism in our present moment of reactivated and often militant nationalist rhetoric.

Abstract In British West African and Caribbean colonies in the 1930s fascism felt urgently close to people’s lived reality. Grappling with the nature of fascism, by comparing it with their lived reality under colonialism, became a site of critical intellectual debate. Yet genealogies of ideas about fascism have overwhelmingly tended to historicise and theorise fascism’s intellectual history from Europe. Histories that include arguments about fascism by colonised people nevertheless leave the impression that these debates occurred primarily among a few intellectuals living in metropolitan spaces, rather than in the colonies themselves. By mining newspapers as sites of intellectual debate, this article shows that questions about the relationship between colonialism and fascism encompassed broad plebeian and intellectual participants in a range of spaces. Their debate revises our intellectual genealogy of fascism by confirming that anti-colonialism was foundational to anti-fascism. It also revises our understanding of fascism. The embodied knowledge articulated by colonised peoples…

Abstract This article focuses on the environment and politics in the Ottoman Empire between 1864 and 1890. Specifically, it traces attempts in the region of the Jazira to match provincial borders with both the desert and the motion of people within it. These efforts culminated in the 1871 formation of the special administrative district of Zor (also known as Deir ez-Zor) and a revolt against the administrative arrangement by the Arabic-speaking nomadic group known as the Shammar. The article explains how the Shammar subsequently became attached to different provincial administrations. But the interplay among borders, desert, and motion also continued to incubate ambiguity about what places should be considered part of one province or another. The history of an empire on the edge thus offers a sense of how people thought about and used the environment and borders alike, topics often overshadowed by the post-Ottoman colonial borders imposed on the region. Moreover, it speaks to environmental histories of borderlands, which often foreground absurd borders transecting coherent…

Abstract This article is about a young farmer named Linga and his encounter with a water spirit in Oubangui-Chari (present-day Central African Republic) in 1930. It is also about the telling and re-telling of Linga’s encounter as the story was transcribed into Banda, translated into French, and rewritten as an ethnographic folktale. Responsible for these transformations were two Banda interpreters and a colonial administrator from the Caribbean. In the last two decades, historians of colonialism have turned increasingly to interpreters and other intermediaries. Often missing from this scholarship, however, are analyses of the granular details—of how colonial intermediaries used transcription, translation, and other methods to create new words, texts, and ideas. Linguistic anthropologists refer to such interventions as “entextualization,” the process by which fragments of discourse are extracted from their immediate settings and rendered into detached texts. Drawing on this scholarship, I argue that tracing the granular processes of entextualization opens up new vantage points from…

Now seems to be a particularly interesting time to be working on or with smell. The COVID-19 virus has caused symptomatic smell loss; government-mandated lockdowns have altered our smellscapes; and the Zoomification of work, education, and sociability has produced a hankering for sensory experiences beyond the audiovisual. There is therefore a heightened attention to the role of the olfactory in everyday life. The last few years have also seen a boom in exciting new studies of smell’s histories and blockbuster olfactory events in museums. However, work on the history of smell has been growing steadily over the past forty years, spurred on by sensory history and the wider interdisciplinary field of sensory studies. Alain Corbin’s pioneering work on smell in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France and Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott’s interdisciplinary study of past and present olfactory cultures have inspired a growing field. Jonathan Reinarz has offered a compelling overview of key themes in this emerging scholarship. Both Mark Jenner and Connie Y. ­Chiang have…

If an explosion occurs and no nose is there to sniff it, does it have a smell? The big bang unleashed a mix of matter that formed—and continues to form—the molecular building blocks of existence. Astrochemists and paleobiologists have illustrated that long before humans existed, before the ostensibly fateful Freudian moment when humans stood up on two legs and elevated their noses a few feet higher in the air than their quadrupedal relatives, a complex mix of odorous compounds were creating and transforming life on earth.1 Among this molecular soup, a human nose would be able to discern the rotten-egg scent of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) and the acrid burned-match stink of sulfur dioxide (SO2). On earth, these odors emerged from erupting volcanoes and oceans of blooming bacteria. They were among the signature scents produced by transformations in land, air, and water that would in turn lead to the emergence, adaptation, and extinction of the life-forms that inhabited them.2 These stench-producing molecules will also be part of our futures. On the one hand, the injection of sulfur dioxide…

Abstract Federal officials in the early United States built an empire by purchase. But rather than hand over lump sums for Native lands, officials offered annual payments, or annuities. This article traces annuities’ material evolution from payments in goods to high-powered money—especially specie—and their financial evolution from straightforward congressional outlays to interest accrued on investments held in trust. Annuities originated as devices that could permit territorial expansion within considerable military-fiscal constraints. But once in use, they became potent instruments of federal power, shoring up officials’ capacity to intrude on Native economies, wrench further territorial transfers, and channel Indigenous wealth as capital for the very infrastructural projects that spread US settlement. Overall, annuities and the trust funds into which they evolved anchored a strategy of dispossession I call fiduciary colonialism: a mode of territorial acquisition and population management carried out through the expansion of administrative control over Native peoples’ wealth. In…