Showing papers in "The American Historical Review in 1991"

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson.

Abstract: List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgements Chapter 1 Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art Chapter 2 The Birth of the Western Eye Chapter 3 Apollo and Dionysus Chapter 4 Pagan Beauty Chapter 5 Renaissance Form: Italian Art Chapter 6 Spenser and Apollo: The Faerie Queene Chapter 7 Shakespeare and Dionysus: As You Like It and Antony and Cleopatra Chapter 8 Return of the Great Mother: Rousseau vs. Sade Chapter 9 Amazons, Mothers, Ghosts: Goethe to Gothic Chapter 10 Sex Bound and Unbound: Blake Chapter 11 Marriage to Mother Nature: Wordsworth Chapter 12 The Daemon as Lesbian Vampire: Coleridge Chapter 13 Speed and Space: Byron Chapter 14 Light and Heat: Shelley and Keats Chapter 15 Cults of Sex and Beauty: Balzac Chapter 16 Cults of Sex and Beauty: Gautier, Baudelaire, and Huysmans Chapter 17 Romantic Shadows: Emily Bronte Chapter 18 Romantic Shadows: Swinburne and Pater Chapter 1 9 Apollo Daemonized: Decadent Art Chapter 20 The Beautiful Boy as Destroyer: Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray Chapter 21 The English Epicene: Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest Chapter 22 American Decadents: Poe, Hawthorne, Melville Chapter 23 American Decadents: Emerson, Whitman, James Chapter 24 Amherst's Madame de Sade: Emily Dickinson Notes Index.

Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression

Abstract: Between 1929 and 1941, the Communist Party organized and led a radical, militantly antiracist movement in Alabama -- the center of Party activity in the Depression South. Hammer and Hoe documents the efforts of the Alabama Communist Party and its allies to secure racial, economic, and political reforms. Sensitive to the complexities of gender, race, culture and class without compromising the political narrative, Robin Kelley illustrates one of the most unique and least understood radical movements in American history. The Alabama Communist Party was built from scratch by working people who had no Euro-American radical political tradition. It was composed largely of poor blacks, most of whom were semiliterate and devoutly religious, but it also attracted a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, iconoclastic youth, and renegade liberals. Kelley shows that the cultural identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the development of the Party. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals. In the South race pervaded virtually every aspect of Communist activity. And because the Party's call for voting rights, racial equality, equal wages for women, and land for landless farmers represented a fundamental challenge to the society and economy of the South, it is not surprising that Party organizers faced a constant wave of violence. Kelley's analysis ranges broadly, examining such topics as the Party's challenge to black middle-class leadership; the social, ideological, and cultural roots of black working-class radicalism; Communist efforts to build alliances with Southern liberals; and the emergence of a left-wing, interracial youth movement. He closes with a discussion of the Alabama Communist Party's demise and its legacy for future civil rights activism. |Between 1929 and 1941, the Communist Party organized and led a radical, militantly antiracist movement in Alabama -- the center of Party activity in the Depression South. Hammer and Hoe documents the efforts of the Alabama Communist Party and its allies to secure racial, economic, and political reforms. Sensitive to the complexities of gender, race, culture and class without compromising the political narrative, Robin Kelley illustrates one of the most unique and least understood radical movements in American history.

American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History

Abstract: IN AN ERA OF UNPRECEDENTED INTERNATIONALIZATION in historiography, the legacies of nationalism and exceptionalism still haunt the study of American history. History conceived as the origins and growth of the nation-state on the German model took root in many countries, yet nowhere has a nation-centered historical tradition been more resilient than in the United States. There, modern historicism, with its emphasis on the uniqueness of all national traditions, was grafted onto an existing tradition of exceptionalism. The pre-historicist idea of the United States as a special case "outside" the normal patterns and laws of history runs deep in American experience. Its origins, Dorothy Ross shows, lay in the merger of the republican and millennial traditions that formed an ideology of exceptionalism prominent in American historical writing. In this liberal world view, the United States avoided the class conflicts, revolutionary upheaval, and authoritarian governments of "Europe" and presented to the world an example of liberty for others to emulate.' This exceptionalist ideology persisted into the twentieth century, influenced such luminaries as Frederick Jackson Turner, and surfaced again in "consensus" historiography in the 1950s.2 The rise of historical specialization has shattered these confident assumptions

The English urban renaissance : culture and society in the provincial town 1660-1770

Abstract: The urban scene landscape - the house, street and square, prospects, planning and public buildings leisure - the arts, arenas of display, sport society - the economic foundations, the pursuit of status, civility and sociability, cultural differentiation town and nation. Appendices: provincial urban squares 1680-1770 provincial town halls and mayoral residences 1655-1770 provincial urban theatres 1700-1770 provincial urban music 1660-1770 provincial urban assemblies, assembly rooms and balls 1660-1770 provincial urban walks and gardens 1630-1770 horse-race meetings 1500-1770.

The History of the Family and the Complexity of Social Change

Abstract: This is a survey of developments in the study of family history over the last 25 years. Consideration is given to the development of such studies in France the United Kingdom the United States and other countries. Topics considered include changes in family characteristics households the family life cycle kinship networks and the familys interaction with processes of social and economic change. (ANNOTATION)

A History of Modern Tibet, 1913-1951: The Demise of the Lamaist State.

Abstract: The 'Tibetan Question', the nature of Tibet's political status vis-a-vis China, has been the subject of often bitterly competing views while the facts of the issue have not been fully accessible to interested observers. While one faction has argued that Tibet was, in the main, historically independent until it was conquered by the Chinese Communists in 1951 and incorporated into the new Chinese state, the other faction views Tibet as a traditional part of China that split away at the instigation of the British after the fall of the Manchu Dynasty and was later dutifully reunited with 'New China' in 1951. In contrast, this comprehensive study of modern Tibetan history presents a detailed, non-partisan account of the demise of the Lamaist state. Drawing on a wealth of British, American, and Indian diplomatic records; first-hand-historical accounts written by Tibetan participants; and extensive interviews with former Tibetan officials, monastic leaders, soldiers, and traders, Goldstein meticulously examines what happened and why. He balances the traditional focus on international relations with an innovative emphasis on the intricate web of internal affairs and events that produced the fall of Tibet. Scholars and students of Asian history will find this work an invaluable resource and interested readers will appreciate the clear explanation of highly polemicized, and often confusing, historical events.

Shinto and the State, 1868-1988.

Abstract: Helen Hardacre, a leading scholar of religious life in modern Japan, examines the Japanese state's involvement in and manipulation of shinto from the Meiji Restoration to the present. Nowhere else in modern history do we find so pronounced an example of government sponsorship of a religion as in Japan's support of shinto. How did that sponsorship come about and how was it maintained? How was it dismantled after World War II? What attempts are being made today to reconstruct it? In answering these questions, Hardacre shows why State shinto symbols, such as the Yasukuni Shrine and its prefectural branches, are still the focus for bitter struggles over who will have the right to articulate their significance. Where previous studies have emphasized the state bureaucracy responsible for the administration of shinto, Hardacre goes to the periphery of Japanese society. She demonstrates that leaders and adherents of popular religious movements, independent religious entrepreneurs, women seeking to raise the prestige of their households, and men with political ambitions all found an association with shinto useful for self-promotion; local-level civil administrations and parish organizations have consistently patronized shinto as a way to raise the prospects of provincial communities. A conduit for access to the prestige of the state, shinto has increased not only the power of the center of society over the periphery but also the power of the periphery over the center.

Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers, and Social Change.

Abstract: 1. Gender Segregation and the Politics of Culture 2. Writers and the Victorian Publishing System 3. Novel Writing as an Empty Field 4. Edging Women Out: The High-Culture Novel 5. Who Gained from Industrialization? 6. The Invasion, or How Women Wrote More for Less 7. Macmillan's Contracts with Novelists 8. The Critical Double Standard 9. The Case of the Disappearing Lady Novelists. Appendix A: The Samples. Appendix B: Additional Tables. Appendix C: Authors' Contracts and Reviews

Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s.

Abstract: In the 1920s, revolution, war, and imperialist aggression brought chaos to China. Many of the dramatic events associated with this upheaval took place in or near China's cities. Bound together by rail, telegraph, and a shared urban mentality, cities like Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing formed an arena in which the great issues of the day - the quest for social and civil peace, the defense of popular and national sovereignty, and the search for a distinctively modern Chinese society - were debated and fought over. People were drawn into this conflicts because they knew that the passage of armies, the marching of protesters, the pontificating of intellectual, and the opening and closing of factories could change their lives. David Strand offers a penetrating view of the old walled capital of Beijing during these years by examining how the residents coped with the changes wrought by itinerant soldiers and politicians and by the accelerating movement of ideas, capital, and technology. By looking at the political experiences of ordinary citizens, including rickshaw pullers, policemen, trade unionists, and Buddhist monks, Strand provides fascinating insights into how deeply these forces were felt. The resulting portrait of early twentieth-century Chinese urban society stresses the growing political sophistication of ordinary people educated by mass movements, group politics, and participation in a shared, urban culture that mixed opera and demonstrations, newspaper reading and teahouse socializing. Surprisingly, in the course of absorbing new ways of living, working, and doing politics, much of the old society was preserved - everything seemed to change and yet little of value was discarded. Through tumultuous times, Beijing rose from a base of local and popular politics to form a bridge linking a traditional world of guilds and gentry elites with the contemporary world of corporatism and cadres.

Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fifth Century.

Abstract: 1. Christianity presented the Arabs with new human types unknown to them from their pagan and Peninsular life -the priest, the bishop, the martyr, the saint, and the monk -and the Arab community in Oriens, both Rhomaic and federate, counted all of them among its members. In the fourth century, it contributed one saint to the universal Church -Moses, whose feast falls on the seventh of February -and in the Roman period it had contributed Cosmas and Damian. In the fifth century the Arab episcopate grew in number, both Rhomaic and federate, as is clear from conciliar lists and from the number of Arab bishops compared to those of the fourth century. As a result, the Arab ecclesiastical voice was audible in church councils, and was at its most articulate at Ephesus in defense of Cyrillian Orthodoxy.

Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past.

Abstract: Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Orality, Literacy, and the Sense of the Past Ch. 1. History, Literature, Textuality Ch. 2. Medieval Literacy, Linguistic Theory, and Social Organization Ch. 3. Romantic Attitudes and Academic Medievalism Ch. 4. Literary Discourse and the Social Historian Ch. 5. Language and Culture: Saussure, Ricoeur, and Foucault Ch. 6. Max Weber, Western Rationality, and the Middle Ages Ch. 7. Textual Communities: Judaism, Christianity, and the Definitional Problem Ch. 8. Tradition and Modernity: Models from the Past Notes Index

Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England.

Abstract: A revisionist interpretation of Anglo-Saxon England. Nicholas Howe proposes that the Anglo-Saxons fashioned a myth out of the 5th-century migration of their Germanic ancestors to Britain. Through the retelling of this story, the Anglo-Saxons ordered their complex history and identified their destiny as a people. Howe traces the migration myth throughout the literature of the Anglo-Saxon period, in poems, sermons, letters and histories from the sixth to the eleventh centuries.

African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion

Abstract: THE STONO REBELLION OF 1739 was one of the largest and costliest in the history of the United States. In studying it, historians have generally not appreciated the extent to which the African background of the participants may have shaped their decision to revolt or their subsequent actions. This essay addresses this upheaval in South Carolina in terms of its African background and attempts to show that understanding the history of the early eighteenth-century kingdom of Kongo can contribute to a fuller view of the slaves' motivations and actions. In some ways, the failure to consider the African background of the revolt is surprising, since a number of historians have recently explored the possibility of African religions, cultures, and societies playing an important role in other aspects of South Carolina life. Peter Wood, author of the richest examination of Stono, was one of the pioneers in considering African competence at rice growing as important in shaping the decisions of slave buyers, a point followed up in great detail by Daniel Littlefield.1 Wood also argued that the African origins of the slaves can do much to explain a range of behaviors, from health patterns to language.2 Tom Shick showed that African concepts of health and healing influenced the development of folk medicine in South Carolina, and Margaret Washington Creel explained religious development in terms of African religion and religiosity.3 Historians have yet to apply the same sort of approach to the Stono Rebellion. Scholars of the United States interested in the African background of American history have usually sought general information about African culture by reading the accounts of modern anthropologists and ethnologists, which are not always

Diaghilev's Ballets Ruses.

Abstract: In the history of twentieth-century ballet, no company has had so profound and far-reaching an influence as the Ballets Russes. It existed for only twenty years--from 1909 to 1929--but in that brief period it transformed ballet into a vital, modern art. The Ballets Russes created the first of this century's classics: Les Sylphides, Firebird, Petrouchka, L'Apres-midi d'un Faune, Le Sacre du Printemps, Parade, Les Noces, Les Biches, Apollo, and Prodigal Son, all of which continue to be performed today. It nurtured many of the century's greatest choreographers--Fokine, Nikinsky, Massine, Nijinska, and Balanchine--and through them influenced the direction of dance to this day. It brokered the century's most remarkable marriages between dance and the other arts, forging partnerships between composers such as Stravinsky, Debussy, Falla, Ravel, Prokofiev, and Satie, painters like Picasso, Bakst, Matisse, Derain, Braque, Gris and Rouault, and poets on the order of Hoffmansthal and Cocteau. From the dancers who passed through its ranks emerged the teachers and ballet masters who continued its work in cities large and small throughout the West. And, as if all this were not enough, the company also created a following for ballet that anticipated today's popular audiences. The era of the Ballets Russes is probably the most chronicled in dance history, yet this book is the first to explain the company as a totality--its art, enterprise, and audience. Taking a fresh look at familiar sources and incorporating fascinating archival material previously unexamined by Diaghilev scholars, Lynn Garafola paints an extraordinary portrait of the Ballets Russes, one that is bound to upset received opinion about the wellsprings and impact of early modernism. She traces the company's origins not only from Diaghilev and his circle but also from Fokine's revolutionary secession within the Russian Imperial Ballet, shows for the first time how the art of the Ballets Russes reflected its status as a complex economic enterprise, and reveals how Diaghilev created an audience that in turn shaped his company's changing identity. It is an amazing story with characters from all walks of life--titans of art, grandes dames of Continental society, anonymous stagehands, long-forgotten dancers, and theater managers from Monte Carlo to Tacoma--and Garafola tells it brilliantly. Anyone interested in our century's dance, music, art, fashion, and cultural history will have to read it.\

Freedom Then, Freedom Now: The Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement

Abstract: WHILE THE UNITED STATES tilted in the direction of political conservatism during the past decade, the history of the civil rights movement gained in popular appeal. Martin Luther King's birthday became a national holiday. Hollywood fictionalized the events surrounding the Mississippi Freedom Summer, drawing millions of customers to the box office. The multipart documentary series, Eyes on the Prize, I and II, portrayed this history much more accurately and won numerous awards and wide acclaim.' Much of this interest can be attributed to the regular cycles of nostalgia that prompt Americans to recall the historical era of their youth. In this instance, memories dredged up turbulent and unsettling times, yet they also harked back to inspirational moments when ordinary people exhibited extraordinary courage. Images of civil rights heroes and heroines making great sacrifices to transform their country and their lives contrasted sharply with the prevailing Reagan-era mentality that glorified the attainment of personal wealth and ignored community health. Returning to civil rights yesteryears made many Americans feel better about themselves and what they might accomplish once again in the future. This recent popular curiosity about the subject follows on a longer professional concern with charting the course of the civil rights struggle. Scholars who began writing about the movement in the late 1960s and 1970s focused on leaders and events of national significance. They conceived of the civil rights struggle as primarily a political movement that secured legislative and judicial triumphs. The techniques of social history, which were beginning to reconstruct the fields of women's, labor, and African-American history by illuminating the everyday lives of ordinary people, at first left the study of civil rights virtually untouched. Civil rights historians were not oblivious to these new approaches, but the most accessible evidence generally steered them in traditional directions. The documentary sources on which historians customarily drew, located in the archives of presidential administrations and leading civil rights organizations, revealed a political story that highlighted events in Washington, D.C.2 Even the oral histories contained in

Reading the Shape of Nature: Comparative Zoology at the Agassiz Museum

Abstract: "Reading the Shape of Nature" vividly recounts the turbulent early history of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard and the contrasting careers of its founder Louis Agassiz and his son Alexander Through the story of this institution and the individuals who formed it, Mary P Winsor explores the conflicting forces that shaped systematics in the second half of the nineteenth century Debates over the philosophical foundations of classification, details of taxonomic research, the young institution's financial struggles, and the personalities of the men most deeply involved are all brought to life In 1859, Louis Agassiz established the Museum of Comparative Zoology to house research on the ideal types that he believed were embodied in all living forms Agassiz's vision arose from his insistence that the order inherent in the diversity of life reflected divine creation, not organic evolution But the mortar of the new museum had scarcely dried when Darwin's "Origin" was published By Louis Agassiz's death in 1873, even his former students, including his son Alexander, had defected to the evolutionist camp Alexander, a self-made millionaire, succeeded his father as director and introduced a significantly different agenda for the museum To trace Louis and Alexander's arguments and the style of science they established at the museum, Winsor uses many fascinating examples that even zoologists may find unfamiliar The locus of all this activity, the museum building itself, tells its own story through a wonderful series of archival photographs

The French Monarchy and the Jews: From Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians.

Abstract: From 1179 to 1328 relations between French Christians and Jews were chronically unstable--exploitation, repression, and expulsion were sanctioned by a government dedicated to a purified Christian state. The French Monarchy and the Jews tells in rich and compelling detail the fate of the Jews in Capetian France. William Chester Jordan assesses the relationship between \"Jewish policy\" and the development of royal institutions and ide- ology in the period during which the foundations of the French state were being laid. The royal policy in the early period (the reign of Philip Augustus) was erratic. Official efforts to humiliate the Jews and ruin their businesses were alternated with attempts to provide a climate that encouraged their business while at the same time imposing economic and social disabilities that made other aspects of their lives intolerable. Louis IX, on the other hand, was single-minded in his efforts to induce the Jews to convert. Whatever the policies, Jordan attempts to measure their impact on Jewish and Christian communities. During the reign of Philip the Fair, the Jews were expelled and their property confiscated to the financial benefit of the crown. Jordan comprehensively evaluates the effects of the expulsion of the Jews themselves, especially during the first years of their exile to the principalities bordering the French king's domain. The experience of the Jews during the Middle Ages has been a subject of increasing scholarly interest, and The French Monarchy and the Jews will prove useful to any student or scholar of medieval history.

Shops and shopkeeping in eighteenth-century England

Abstract: This original and scholarly study of shopkeeping in eighteenth century England draws on hitherto little used material providing a unique analysis of the pattern of retail trading in England just before the Industrial Revolution. This book should be of interest to students and teachers of social and economic history.