The 10 most-cited articles in The American Historical Review, 2023

Abstract This essay, a product of a reflection and dialogue between a Palestinian and a Jewish Israeli, revisits the so-called "Teddy Katz Affair," a heated debate that erupted first in 2000 but resurfaced recently due to a new documentary. The Affair was triggered by a newspaper article reporting about a master’s thesis, which relied heavily on oral testimonies, that concluded that war crimes against Palestinians were committed during the 1948 War in the village of Tantura. After chronicling briefly the sequence of events — which included a libel suit, a public debate, and retraction of the thesis by the university — this article assesses its broader impact on the historiography of Palestine/Israel. Finally, it proposes to employ the term “agnotology” to describe the mechanisms that were developed to distort and silence Palestinian narratives in Israel. Agnotology, it is suggested, is a concept that better captures the hierarchies of knowledge that were used to distinguish Jewish testimonials from Palestinian memories and the process by which they were absorbed and codified by…

Is it structure or agency that shapes human actions? The question remains a central one for historians, and social scientists more broadly. This forum offers a deep dive into what it means to think about the relationship between agency and structure. It is set in motion with a deliberately provocative essay by the Russian historian Anna Yu. Krylova. “I wonder,” Krylova writes, “whether the challenge for historians has recently become not to find a historical subject with agency but a historical subject without it.” And she asks, “how useful is such an indiscriminately expanded category that no longer asks a historian to make choices in her analysis?” Drawing upon her research on shifting gender roles in the Soviet military during World War II, Krylova advances the novel concept of the “not-knowing actor” to understand the ways in which she argues “historical protagonists can untangle from their learned, internalized, and necessarily ideological societal competence to participate in the construction of alternatives to their historical predicament.” We invited five historians—William…

Abstract The usual way of talking about indigenous peoples in antiquity is to assume analogies between any peoples who were not hegemonic or imperial and the modern victims of European settler colonialism. The merits of such comparison are less often considered, and almost never from the perspective of the population described as “indigenous.” The aim of this article is to define and apply the term more carefully as a concept for premodern historians. A series of case studies from Hellenistic Anatolia illustrate how a casual use of “indigenous” leads to serious misunderstandings of imperial and colonial dynamics and indigenous self-understandings that can be rectified only by a theoretically grounded and transhistorical understanding of indigeneity. Such an approach forces us to examine the logic behind power relations and imbalances, leading to more fruitful comparison with the more familiar colonialism of the modern period.

Abstract From the 1960s onwards, many Iranians closely followed Black American protests during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the United States. This period proved pivotal for Iranian understandings of race, where intellectuals, revolutionaries, and those in media would use US-centric histories of enslavement, racism, and Black Americans to erase nineteenth-century histories of enslavement and racism in Iran, tacitly displacing the existence of Black Iranians across the national landscape. Black American Muslims, particularly Malcolm X, emerged as the ideal form of Blackness. After the 1979 revolution, non-Black Iranians and the Iranian government would continue this focus on US-based racism through an official narrative that repeatedly defined racism as a US-only problem, ultimately cementing the erasures around histories of enslavement and Black Iranians that began with abolition in 1929. Through an analysis of speeches, memoirs, poetry, newspaper articles, photography, and other illustrated media, this article weaves together vignettes to demonstrate how the…

Late in 1982, Edinburgh professor Donald Michie explained the fundamental error that plagued earlier efforts to create artificial intelligence. “The inductive learning of concepts, rules, strategies, etc. from examples is what confers on the human problem-solver his power and versatility, and not (as had earlier been supposed) power of calculation.”1 A minority position in 1982, learning from examples came to dominate artificial intelligence early in the new millennium. In a key 2009 manifesto celebrating the “unreasonable effectiveness of data,” three Google researchers argued “sciences that involve human beings rather than elementary particles have proven more resistant to elegant mathematics.” We should “embrace complexity and make use of the best ally we have: the unreasonable effectiveness of data.”2 The computer scientist John McCarthy coined the term “artificial intelligence” originally in search of funding; in the mid 2010s, the term was dramatically redefined to describe large-scale algorithmic decision-making systems and predictive machine learning “trained” on massive…

Frontis: Detail from Johannes Vermeer, Het melkmeisje (The Milkmaid), ca. 1660, oil on canvas, Rijksmuseum Rijksstudio. We are all familiar with the famous Shakespearian statement that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Yet throughout history the scent of the rose has absorbed, as if by a kind of magnetic attraction, a multitude of meanings. It has often been the flower of power. Contained in expensive casting bottles, the scent of rose oil (commonly known as rose attar) was distributed to the mistresses of Henry VIII. The potent scent evoked an intimacy with the body of the monarch and was a representation of Tudor rule. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European visitors to the Ottoman Empire noted the use of rose-water, sprinkled on the hands, to welcome guests in an expression of hospitality. The corpses of medieval men and women who emitted the odor of sanctity instead of pungent putrefaction were often said to smell of roses. The scent of the rose has also been central to Islam: the first rose supposedly bloomed from the tear of the Prophet, and the…

This AHR History Lab forum brings together scholars and practitioners from within and outside the historical discipline to consider the methodological and epistemological implications of artificial intelligence (AI) on historical practice. It is our hope that the following short essays will be the first of many such conversations on this immense topic in these pages. In conceiving of this interdisciplinary forum, our goal was less to provide an introductory primer on artificial intelligence for historians than to allow the participants ample room to interpret what they consider the relevant issues connecting artificial intelligence with history. In a world increasingly driven by algorithms, historians must adapt to the exponential production of digitized and born-digital evidence. Artificial intelligence has already proven capable in discovering patterns and identifying topics within large visual and textual datasets. Think, for example, of applying algorithms to search and discover correspondence within a vast trove of email messages, or to discover maps, comics, editorial…

Abstract One concern for Salvadoran and other Latin American public health researchers across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the purported link between goiter (bocio) and cretinism (cretinismo). Goiter is empirical medical condition that is inseparable from scenes of social and political inequality, neocolonialism, development, and war, however effectively the tools that measured it often obfuscated these factors. This article draws on more than a century of goiter research and representation in popular culture to argue that goiter research was part of broader health discourse that focused on poor and rural women and girls in an attempt to improve the productive and reproductive potential of El Salvador. It discusses how goiter research positioned El Salvador as a site of knowledge production for global health. It also proposes that goiter is best understood as a disability and uses insights from critical disability studies to understand how certain groups of people were constructed as problem populations. Over time, understandings of goiter shifted and new explanations…

Abstract During the summer of 1940, Sugihara Chiune (1900–1986), the Japanese consul in Lithuania, issued transit visas to several thousand Polish-citizen refugees, mostly Jews. His willingness to do so was instrumental in their departure overseas shortly after the country was taken over by Soviet forces. Almost a year later, as Operation Barbarossa unfolded, the Jewish community in Lithuania, along with the remaining refugees, was brutally annihilated. Decades later, the Israeli state memorial Yad Vashem conferred the title of Righteous Among the Nations on Sugihara, thereby initiating his commemoration as a Holocaust rescuer. Today, Sugihara has become a national hero in Japan and is considered a paragon of virtue in a number of other countries too. This article examines the way Sugihara was transformed from a completely unknown figure into a world-famous symbol of Holocaust-era heroism. It focuses on the transnational mechanisms that facilitated this transformation as well as on the divergent but often also complementary motives in three of the countries most involved in the…

Abstract The article examines the entangled histories of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL) during the post–World War II era. Born of the same global moment, within two decades of their foundation, these institutions had come to represent two opposing visions of world economic order. Yet their mutual antagonism was not a foregone conclusion, and their identities were not so defined from the start. The binary division between them—as well as the very terms of their debate—emerged not in the realm of abstract ideas but rather in their competition over influence in Latin America. Unlike the history of the UN, the story of the IMF continues to be told as one of projection—of power, ideas, and practices—and reception, of dominance by the North and resistance of the South. By looking at CEPAL and the IMF in tandem, as they converged, diverged, and shaped each other, this article shows the impact of a southern institution and Latin America on the northern institution and the structure of global governance. It…