The 10 most-cited articles in The American Historical Review, 2024

When your home does not even exist in formal records, whether and how your life becomes known is the primary terrain of struggle. Michael Harrington, in his era-defining book The Other America, used census and income data in the early 1960s to show the magnitude of the nation’s poverty in the affluent decades after the Second World War. The nation’s poor, Harrington wrote, lived in an “invisible land” where their numbers exceeded forty million.1 The urban slums and rural settlements he examined featured at least a degree of bureaucratic recognition: the statistics with which he interpreted their destitution. While conclusions about and policies toward the nation’s poorest communities fell woefully short of their needs in the decades following Harrington’s analysis, they were at the very least known. For the thousands of Mexican-born migrants who crossed the Rio Grande and made their lives on the rural, peri-urban border in precisely the same years, it would take many more decades for their America to attract comparable interest. By then, their colonias, as their neighborhoods are…

Digitization has changed many aspects of scholarly research. While many transformations are obvious, some have remained under-remarked and under-theorized. One such under-remarked transformation is the availability of digitized historical newspapers. Millions of pages of newspapers from the eighteenth century onward are available for scholars and the general public to peruse. Many members of the general public use these sources for genealogical research. Meanwhile, scholars have used them for everything from a few citations to new types of digital humanities projects. To name a couple of examples, Kristi Palmer has traced the emergence of the term “Hoosier” for Indiana.1 An interdisciplinary team has created a database of newspaper ads around fugitive slaves in the United States.2 One of the contributors to this AHR History Lab forum, Ryan Cordell, has created an Oceanic Exchanges project to explore transatlantic reprinting.3 Beyond specific projects, scholars’ use of newspapers as a source has increased significantly in myriad ways. Initiatives have sprung up to encourage more use…

We have known since Vico to think of written text and oral traditions as two systems of culture. Social historians have long treated the rise of literacy itself as an important index of modernity, although collectors of oral traditions have typically transcribed folk songs and oral stories into text. Modern historians track the appearance of different genres of writing, from parliamentary blue books to the newspaper to the novel to published transcripts of court cases, as an index of evolving institutions and markets. And knowledge of the way that these texts circulated—whether read aloud in the post office or debated on bulletin board systems on the early internet—is often a clue to important social structures. The knowledge accessible through text does not exhaust in any way the full repository of artifacts that historians use—which of course extends to the formats of texts; to visual and audio media, which may or may not combine graphics, video, or sound with text; to the record of the built and natural environment itself; and to demographic, price, and climate data sometimes…

Abstract This article explores the concept of resilience within the framework of fengshui forests in subtropical southern China over the last millennium. Consisting of small patches of old-growth or old secondary-growth forest associated with graves, temples, and the paths of wind and water into and out of villages, fengshui forests were historically seen as nodes that supplied vital qi(energy, force or substance) to the community, an understanding that persists to the present day. Using a combination of textual, ethnographic, and scientific evidence, we examine how these forests, deeply embedded in the cultural and ecological fabric of the region, have fostered community resilience and sustainability over centuries. We show that fengshui’s vitalist and syncretic conception of the relationship among living people, ancestors, the land, and the trees allowed it to bridge Indigenous and imperial moral ecologies. By foregrounding both the emic and etic implication of fengshui, this article contributes to our understanding of Indigenous moral ecologies, the histories of social-ecological…

Conferences are central to the history of internationalism.1 They enable representatives of countries, organizations, and movements to meet, discuss ideas, debate approaches, and determine a collective purpose: to come together as global publics. Much like the NGOs examined by Sarah Bellows-Blakeley elsewhere in this AHR History Lab forum, international conferences are characterized by structural processes of inclusion and exclusion; one only has to look at the difficulties faced by scholars from the Global South in obtaining visas to attend conferences in the Global North. And like NGOs, conferences, too, have a long and tainted association with empire.2 They have served to entrench imperial power, from the Berlin Conference of 1884, which carved up the African continent for European colonizers, to the Paris Peace Conference, which instituted racial paternalism in doctrines of imperial trusteeship.3 If global publics, as Huber and Osterhammel argue, come in two major forms—“associations” and “audiences”—decolonizing conferences mobilized both at once, serving as a physical meeting…

Indigenous historians engage with and understand resilience through both an interdisciplinary lens and specific community attitudes toward the concept. Scholars of developmental psychology, psychiatry, social work, and education have drawn on resilience to analyze how Indigenous peoples have dealt with the trauma of colonialism, especially settler colonialism, while maintaining distinct beliefs, practices, and identities. Moving beyond the “bounce back” understanding of the concept, Native social work researcher Hilary Weaver defines resilience as “an ability to resist, persevere, survive, and grow despite significant challenges” and broadens those expressing resilience to include communities and the natural world.1 She and others posit that resilience is central to being Indigenous; Stephanie Rotarangi and Darryn Russell, for example, connect it explicitly to indigeneity, arguing that “to be indigenous is to be resilient.”2 These scholars and practitioners showcase resilience to illustrate that there is more to Indigenous peoples than damage and trauma even as they acknowledge that…

Abstract Resilience is a boundary object, holding different meanings for the different groups of scholars who share its use. Here we survey its application in historical research, especially premodern environmental history, and trace how the term entered historical discourse from ecology. A shift in recent decades expanded the term initially toward contemporary social science and subsequently the study of the past. This has resulted in a fuzzy conceptualization of the term within historical discourse. Yet the concept has nevertheless proven important in challenging catastrophist approaches to the societal impacts of environmental stressors (e.g., the fall of the Roman Empire). We demonstrate that today’s discussion continues an earlier twentieth-century debate between an environmentally determinist view and one that emphasizes the role of human factors in the course of history. We conclude that despite the issues accompanying the use of the term and the application of formal resilience theory, both remain valuable, especially in intradisciplinary discourse, primarily as a paradigm…

Abstract The energy crisis of the early 1970s briefly opened up a radically new horizon of energetic possibilities that played out differently around the world. For India, that energy crisis did not begin with the famous Arab oil embargo of 1973. Instead, like many poor oil-importing nations, it experienced the first oil shock as merely one component of a broader climate-food-energy emergency that reverberated throughout the political system. This crisis brought a twinned set of fateful changes. By June 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had resorted to imposing a constitutional dictatorship—the Emergency—for the first and only time in independent India’s existence, one among a series of coups and authoritarian takeovers that swept the Global South. Less noticed was a second transformation with planetary ramifications. Rising popular expectations collided with the energy crisis to impel a state-led embrace of coal, despite elite reservations about the environmental damage that would follow. Analyzing these dynamics is crucial to understanding India’s intensifying coal dependence,…

The invention and maintenance of empire is a complex dance of narrative and action that, together, frame an empire (lowercase, among many empires) as Empire, the only one of its kind that matters for its subjects even in a global context where there are other competing empires. Scholars concerned with the cultural workings of imperialism have approached this reframe by exploring language and representation, and the meanings encrypted in both, as key cogs in empire-building machinery.1 Such coded hierarchical discourses, presented in both text and visual representation, play a role in justifying and naturalizing domination in order to inform and enable support for actions that legitimize the power of ruling or aspiring political elites or groups.2 The justification that makes an empire’s actions meaningful to its subjects requires a narrative engine that manifests particular values of “good” and “bad” as necessary to maintain the empire’s structure. Those values then need to be woven into everyday life, into the daily on-the-ground interactions between imperial agents and local…

Digitized newspapers have become so transformative that a recent collected volume questioned whether they represent a “new Eldorado” for historians.1 Yet, as a historian who works on news media across the Third World in the post-1945 era, it has been difficult to find this Eldorado. Until recently, the discourse around digitized newspapers elided that most collections are focused on and funded by nation-states in the Global North. In the last two decades, the number of digitized twentieth-century newspapers from the Global South has grown exponentially, somewhat mitigating this gap. But unlike what is happening in other historical subfields, there has yet to be a concomitant rise in experimental digital history projects using these digitized newspapers, such as new digital interfaces or text and data mining of these materials. The reasons for this disparity are manifold, from the absence of digital training for historians, to unclear reward structures for even doing this work, to the continued under-resourcing of scholars and archives in the Global South.2 While these obstacles are…