Showing papers in "The American Historical Review in 1995"

Telling the Truth about History.

Abstract: This text examines the problem of historical truth. Seeking the roots of contemporary historical study in the Enlightenment, the authors argue that a model of historical research, based on neutrality and objectivity, served historians well until World War II. After that post-modernism suggested history could not reveal the truth about the past and the rise of social history produced a great amount of statistics which effectively swamped the search for historical truth. Accepting that much of history teaching has been flawed, the authors nevertheless argue for an affirmation of historical knowledge against the doubts of the sceptics and the relativists, guiding the reader through the complex areas of political correctness and multiculturalism.

The romance of American psychology : political culture in the age of experts

Abstract: Psychological insight is the creed of our time. A quiet academic discipline two generations ago, psychology has become a voice of great cultural authority, informing everything from family structure to government policy. How has this fledgling science become the source of contemporary America's most potent ideology? In this groundbreaking book - the first to fully explore the political and cultural significance of psychology in post-World War II America - Ellen Herman tells the story of Americans' love affair with the behavioral sciences. It began during wartime. The atmosphere of crisis sustained from the 1940s through the Cold War gave psychological "experts" an opportunity to prove their social theories and behavioral techniques.Psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists carved a niche within government and began shaping military, foreign, and domestic policy. Herman examines this marriage of politics and psychology, which continued through the tumultuous 1960s. Psychological professionals' influence also spread among the general public. Drawn by promises of mental health and happiness, people turned to these experts for enlightenment. Their opinions validated postwar social movements from civil rights to feminism and became the basis of a new world view. Fascinating and long overdue, this book illuminates one of the dominant forces in American society.

Marking: Race, race-making, and the writing of history

Abstract: structures and transformations of the world in the small details of life; to re-capture people's expressions-in all media-of their experiences of those abstractions, while also attempting to understand the forces shaping the multiple grids mediating those expressions; and, finally, to analyze how concrete and mundane actions in the everyday may themselves transform the abstract structures of polity and economy.'6 The crucial injunction here is not that we should privilege the study of everydayness over other aspects of human experience but, rather, elaborate the nexus between the remote or global levels of that experience and its immediate or micro-local expressions. The task of sorting out how these different levels of analysis are linked-that is, understanding how the large and "important" are articulated with and expressed through the small and "unimportant," and vice versa-requires that we explicate more precisely the relation between individual agency and structural frameworks, on the one hand, and that we conceptualize more clearly just how one's consciousness of self and other are formed, on the other. The issue of understanding the formation of the human subject is clearly fundamental to such an inquiry and perhaps the least well investigated by historians. Among the diverse approaches to this question, I find Martin Heideg15 This literature is vast, and I will not attempt to provide a bibliography here. Perhaps the practitioner best known to and most influential among American historians is Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Steven Rendall, trans. (Berkeley, Calif., 1984). For an example of de Certeau's influence among African-Americanists, see Robin Kelley, "'We Are Not What We Seem': Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South," Journal of American History, 80 (June 1993): 75-112. (The approach discussed below is quite different from de Certeau's, however.) 16 Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley, Calif., forthcoming, 1995), quoted by permission of the author. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 1995 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.124 on Wed, 22 Jun 2016 05:14:31 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Marking: Race, Race-making, and the Writing of History 9 ger's exploration of the philosophical puzzle of existence a provocative and stimulating place to begin, especially for historians.17 In the process of reengaging the age-old ontological problem of being, Heidegger elaborated a notion of "the everyday" and, through it, a painstaking epistemological reconstruction of how we come to know ourselves as conscious beings. In his inquiry, the everyday is merely part of the method of inquiry, an illustration and instrument of his chain of reasoning, but it underscores and demonstrates, nonetheless, the fact that conscious human selves are socially formed and revealed.18 One of the primordial ways in which the self is knowable or realized-and thus one might say constituted-is through its interactions with everyday life, where other entities and other selves are encountered. The predominant mode of one's conscious living is within and through the physical "out-there" and in relation to the common mass of humanity. Moreover, through one's everyday encounters with existence, through one's consciousness of one's own mortality and selfhood, is disclosed something about the nature and limits of actual human existence. With these insights, Heidegger lays a theoretical basis for our understanding that human experience, motivations, and behaviors must ultimately be understood as grounded in social processes and framed by historical moments. Thus models of human thought and behavior deduced from the premise of an isolated individual-a constellation of emotions, psychology, material aspirations, or rather one whose behavior and motivations are reducible to those terms-are inadequate at best; at worst, simply

From slave trade to "legitimate" commerce : the commercial transition in nineteenth-century West Africa

Abstract: List of contributors List of abbreviations Introduction Robin Law 1. The initial 'crisis of adaptation': the impact of British abolition on the Atlantic slave trade in West Africa, 1808-1820 Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson 2. The West African palm oil trade in the nineteenth century and the 'crisis of adaptation' Martin Lynn 3. The compatibility of the slave and palm oil trades in Dahomey, 1818-1858 Elisee Soumonni 4. Between abolition and Jihad: the Asante response to the ending of the Atlantic slave trade, 1807-1896 Gareth Austin 5. Plantations and labour in the south-east Gold Coast from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century Ray A. Kea 6. Owners, slaves and the struggle for labour in the commercial transition at Lagos Kristin Mann 7. Slaves, Igbo women and palm oil in the nineteenth century Susan Martin 8. 'Legitimate' trade and gender relations in Yorubaland and Dahomey Robin Law 9. In search of a desert-edge perspective: the Sahara-Sahel and the Atlantic trade, c. 1815-1900 E. Ann McDougall 10. The 'New International Economic Order' in the nineteenth century: Britain's first development plan for Africa A. G. Hopkins Appendix: the 'crisis of adaptation': a bibliography Index.

World History in a Global Age

Abstract: A history of the world. To round things off. I may as well—no more nit-picking stuff about Napoleon, Tito, the battle of Edgehill, Hernando Cortez . . . The works, this time. The whole triumphant murderous unstof)pable chute—from the mud to the stars, universal and particular, your story and mine. I'm equipped, I consider; eclecticism has always been my hallmark. That's what they've said, though it has been given other names. Claudia Hampton's range is ambitious, some might say imprudent: my enemies. Miss Hampton's bold conceptual sweep: my friends.

The epidemic streets : infectious disease and the rise of preventive medicine, 1856-1900

Abstract: Introduction 1. Whooping Cough 2. Measles 3. Scarlet Fever 4. Diphtheria 5. Smallpox 6. Typhoid 7. Typhus 8. Tuberculosis 9. The Impact of Local Preventive Medicine Appendix: Statistical Note Bibliography Index

Praying for Power: Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in Late- Ming China.

Abstract: In 17th and 18th century China, Buddhists and Confucians alike flooded local Buddhist monasteries with donations As gentry numbers grew faster than the imperial bureaucracy, traditional Confucian careers were closed to many; but visible philanthropy could publicize elite status outside the state realm. Actively sought by fund-raising abbots, such patronage affected institutional Buddhism. After exploring the relation of Buddhism to Ming Neo-Confucianism, the growth of tourism to Buddhist sites, and the mechanisms and motives for charitable donations, Timothy Brook studies three widely separated and economically dissimilar counties. He draws on rich data in monastic gazetteers to examine the patterns and social consequences of patronage.

Women in late antiquity : pagan and Christian life-styles

Abstract: Law and morality tolerance, prhibition and protection health domesticity and ascetism being female.

The Past and Present of Environmental History

Abstract: THE ANNUAL MEETING of the American Historical Association scheduled in Cleveland, Ohio, for the end of December 1918 never took place. It was canceled, according to the next issue of the American Historical Review, on the recommendation of the health officer of that city "because of the epidemic of influenza then prevailing in Cleveland." When the cancellation was next mentioned in the journal, two decades later, it was blamed on the postwar congestion on the railroads, and the flu was downgraded to "an additional good reason for avoiding nonessential gatherings."' In the last four months of 1918, the Spanish flu, as it was called, killed 3,156 in Cleveland, nearly 20,000 in Ohio, upwards of half a million in the United States, and something in excess of 20 million in the world. It was a more efficient killer than World War I and the greatest single demographic catastrophe, in terms of absolute numbers, yet suffered by humanity.2 But the members of the American Historical Association, whatever their reaction as human beings may have been, as historians were indifferent to this nearly universal calamity. The generation of historians who were twenty-five years of age when the first issue of the AHR appeared in 1895 and seventy-five at the end of World War II was devoted almost exclusively to what Bernard Bailyn called manifest history in his Presidential Address to the Association in 1981, that is to say, devoted to "the story of events that contemporaries were clearly aware of, that were matters of conscious concern, were consciously struggled over, were, so to speak, headline events in their own time even if their causes and their underlying determinants were buried below the level of contemporaries' understanding."3 Professional historians had no interest, certainly no burning interest, in what we today call environmental history, the story of humanity as an often passive or distracted participant in local, regional, and world-wide ecosystems. There was no absence of contemporary events and trends in addition to the flu epidemic to stimulate interest in environmental matters. There were catastrophes: Krakatoa's detonation in 1893 set off a tsunami that drowned 40,000, the explosion of a comet or asteroid over the Tunguska River, Siberia, in 1908, flattened 2,000 square kilometers of forest. There were calamities: from 1896 to 1898, rinderpest, previously unknown in sub-Saharan Africa, appeared in the

Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America

Abstract: Introduction * The Reconfiguration of Wealth: From Fecund Earth To Efficient Factory The Lyric of Plenty The Modernization of Magic The Stabilization of Sorcery The Disembodiment of Abundance * The Containment Of Carnival: Advertising And American Social Values From The Patent Medicine Era To The Consolidation Of Corporate Power The Merger of Intimacy and Publicity The Perfectionist Project The New Basis of Civilization Trauma, Denial, Recovery * Art, Truth, And Humbug: The Search For Form And Meaning In A Commodity Civilization The Problem of Commercial Art in a Protestant Culture The Courtship of Avant-Garde and Kitsch The Pursuit of the Real The Things Themselves

Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Discourse.

Abstract: In this wide-ranging analysis, Marie-Christine Leps traces the production and circulation of knowledge about the criminal in nineteenth-century discourse, and shows how the delineation of deviance served to construct cultural norms. She demonstrates how the apprehension of crime and criminals was an important factor in the establishment of such key institutions as national systems of education, a cheap daily press, and various welfare measures designed to fight the spread of criminality. Leps focuses on three discursive practices: the emergence of criminology, the development of a mass-produced press, and the proliferation of crime fiction, in both England and France. Beginning where Foucault's work Discipline and Punish ends, Leps analyzes intertextual modes of knowledge production and shows how the elaboration of hegemonic truths about the criminal is related to the exercise of power. The scope of her investigation includes scientific treatises such as Criminal Man by Cesare Lombroso and The English Convict by Charles Goring, reports on the Jack the Ripper murders in The Times and Le Petit Parisien , the Sherlock Holmes stories, Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , and novels by Zola and Bourget.

Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture: The Sexual Politics of Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, South Africa

Abstract: http://www.jstor.org Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture: The Sexual Politics of Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, South Africa Author(s): Pamela Scully Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 100, No. 2 (Apr., 1995), pp. 335-359 Published by: on behalf of the Oxford University Press American Historical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2169002 Accessed: 01-03-2016 17:35 UTC

Men against Women on the Shop Floor in Early Soviet Russia: Gender and Class in the Socialist Workplace

Abstract: RUSSIAN WORKERS have carried a heavy burden Branded by conservative historians as uncultured, irrational, and manipulated by Machiavellian political actors, they were long portrayed by cruder spokespersons for Soviet dogma as "men of marble," heroic fighters for proletarian independence, the repository of progress and virtue Within the last twenty years, new generations of scholars in the West and in the USSR have combined to challenge these extreme stereotypes, and they have looked broadly at the experience of workers at work, at home, and in politics Nonetheless, in rescuing workers from their enemies and their friends, in attempting to valorize Russian workers on their own terms, historians have tended to emphasize a new ideal type: the intelligent, autonomous skilled worker, a rational actor in a complicated world, a person who valued dignity and self-worth, oxne who prized solidarity and equality These values and this image of workers underlay organized labor movements before 1917 and helped to shape the course of the revolution and the building of socialism that followed This focus on heroic and independent figures has tended to blur aspects of working-class culture and life that appear less heroic and less worthy These model workers themselves condemned elements of worker behavior that did not conform to their image of true class consciousness, elements that are now receiving new attention by historians of Russian workers: drunkenness, violence, anti-Semitism, and misogyny' It is time to reconsider the extent to which the working-class culture that "made the revolution" was an exclusively masculine

The Cambridge history of Latin America

Abstract: List of maps List of figures General preface Preface to Volumes IV and V Part I. Mexico: 1. Mexico: restored republic and Porfiriato, 1867-1910 Friedrich Katz 2. The Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920 John Womack Jr. 3. Mexico: revolution and reconstruction in the 1920s Jean Meyer Part II. Central America and The Caribbean: 4. Central America: the Liberal era, c. 1870-1930 Ciro F. S. Cardoso 5. Cuba, c. 1860-1934 Luis E. Aguilar 6. Puerto Rico, c. 1870-1940 Angel Quintero-Rivera 7. The Dominican Republic, c. 1870-1930 H. Hoetink 8. Haiti, c. 1870-1930 David Nicholls Part III. The River Plate Republics: 9. The growth of the Argentine economy, c. 1870-1914 Roberto Cortes Conde 10. Argentina: society and politics, 1880-1916 Ezequiel Gallo 11. Argentina in 1914: the Pampas, the interior, Buenos Aires David Rock 12. Argentina from the first World War to the Revolution of 1930 David Rock 13. The formation of modern Uruguay, c. 1870-1930 Juan A. Oddone 14. Paraguay from the War of the Triple Alliance to the Chaco War, 1870-1932 Paul H. Lewis Part IV. The Andean Republics: 15. Chile from the War of the Pacific to the world depression, 1880-1930 Harold Blakemore 16. Bolivia from the War of the Pacific to the Chaco War, 1880-1932 Herbert S. Klein 17. The origins of modern Peru, 1880-1930 Peter F. Klaren 18. Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela, c. 1880-1930 Malcolm Deas Part V. Brazil: 19. The Brazilian economy, 1870-1930 Warren Dean 20. Brazil: the age of reform. 1870-1889 Emilia Viotti Da Costa 21. Brazil: the social and political structure of the First Republic, 1889-1930 Boris Fausto Bibliographical essays Index.

The beast in the boudoir : petkeeping in nineteenth-century Paris

Abstract: Kathleen Kete's wise and witty examination of petkeeping in nineteenth-century Paris provides a unique view into the lives of ordinary French people. She demonstrates how that cliche of modern life, the family dog, reveals the tensions that modernity created for the Parisian bourgeoisie. Kete's study draws on a range of literary and archival sources, from dog-care books to veterinarian's records to Dumas's musings on his cat. The fad for aquariums, attitudes toward vivisection, the dread of rabies, the development of dog breeding - all are shown to reflect the ways middle-class people thought about their lives. Petkeeping, says Kete, helped people imagine a better, more manageable version of the world. It relieved the pressures of contemporary life and improvised solutions to the intractable mesh that was post-Enlightenment France. The faithful, affectionate family dog became a counterpoint to people's experience of isolation and lack of community in urban life, while the autonomous cat incarnated the feeling of anomie. By century's end, however, animals no longer represented the human condition with such potency, and the cat had been rehabilitated into a creature of fidelity and warmth. Full of fascinating details, this innovative book will contribute to the way we understand culture and the creation of class.