Showing papers in "The American Historical Review in 1997"

Democracy's discontent : America in search of a public philosophy

Abstract: Preface PART I: THE CONSTITUTION OF THE PROCEDURAL REPUBLIC 1. The Public Philosophy of Contemporary Liberalism 2. Rights and the Neutral State 3. Religious Liberty and Freedom of Speech 4. Privacy Rights and Family Law PART II: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF CITIZENSHIP 5. Economics and Virtue in the Early Republic 6. Free Labor versus Wage Labor 7. Community, Self-Government, and Progressive Reform 8. Liberalism and the Keynesian Revolution 9. The Triumph and Travail of the Procedural Republic Conclusion: In Search of a Public Philosophy Notes Index

The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Abstract: As far back as we know, there have been individuals inca-pacitated by memories that have filled them with sadness and remorse, fright and horror, or a sense of irreparable loss. Only recently, however, have people tormented with such recollections been diagnosed as suffering from "post-traumatic stress disorder". Here Allan Young traces this malady, particularly as it is suffered by Vietnam veterans, to its beginnings in the emergence of ideas about the unconscious mind and to earlier manifestations of traumatic memory like shell shock or traumatic hysteria. In Young's view PTSD is not a timeless or universal phenomemon newly discovered. Rather, it is a "harmony of illusions, a cultural product gradually put together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, and treated and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments mobilising these efforts. This book is part history and part ethnography, and it includes a detailed account of everyday life in a psychiatric unit specialising in the treatment of Vietnam veterans with PTSD. To illustrate his points, Young presents a number of fascinating transcripts of the group therapy and diagnostic sessions that he observed firsthand over a period of two years. Through his comments and the tran-scripts themselves, the reader becomes familiar with the individual hospital personnel and clients and their struggle to make sense of life after a tragic war. One observes that everyone on the unit is heavily invested in the PTSD diagnosis: boundaries between therapist and patient are as unclear as were the distinctions between victim and victimizer in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

Nationalism and the genealogical imagination : oral history and textual authority in tribal Jordan

Abstract: This book explores the transition from oral to written history now taking place in tribal Jordan, a transition that reveals the many ways in which modernity, literate historicity, and national identity are developing in the contemporary Middle East. As traditional Bedouin storytellers and literate historians lead him through a world of hidden documents, contested photographs, and meticulously reconstructed pedigrees, Andrew Shryock describes how he becomes enmeshed in historical debates, ranging from the local to the national level. The world the Bedouin inhabit is rich in oral tradition and historical argument, in subtle reflections on the nature of truth and its relationship to poetics, textuality, and power. Skillfully blending anthropology and history, Shryock discusses the substance of tribal history through the eyes of its creators - those who sustain an older tradition of authoritative oral history and those who have experimented with the first written accounts. His focus throughout is on the development of a 'genealogical nationalism' as well as on the tensions that arise between tribe and state. Rich in both personal revelation and cultural implications, this book poses a provocative challenge to traditional assumptions about the way history is written.

Producing hegemony : the politics of mass production and American global power

Abstract: 1. Introduction 2. Marx, Gramsci and possibilities for radical renewal in IPE 3. The quality of global power: a relational view of neoliberal hegemony 4. The emergence of mass production practices and productivist ideology 5. State-society relations and the politics of industrial transformation in the USA 6. Fordism vs. unionism: production politics and ideological struggle at Ford Motor Company, 1914-1937 7. Unionism is Americanism: production politics and ideological struggle at Ford Motor Company, 1937-1952 8. Fordism and neoliberal hegemony: tensions and possibilities Notes Bibliography Index.

Writing the Individual Back into Collective Memory

Abstract: PERHAPS THE MOST BANAL THING that could be said about history, in general, is that "it happened," or something happened. But of course, history is not only the past or pasts that "happened" or continue to happen, it is also what is written or produced about those pasts both then and now. And so whenever we think about history, we are thinking in terms of commemoration, or, in Mark Strand's words, the "gift" sent into the world so that the future might mourn. This "present" (the gift of/from the now) to the coming generations encapsulates a historical consciousness that attempts to transmit memory and identity as corporate, corporeal entities.2 That the future might mourn is the projection of nostalgia; it is also the supposition of historical thinking, which charges itself with the preservation of what would otherwise be lost both mentally and materially. Practitioners of history have tended to distinguish history and memory by their distinct functions and modes of operation. But what has prompted one of the most significant, ongoing debates about the nature and practice of history in the twentieth century is a proposition that came from outside the historical profession, and that has stimulated the creation of divisions between types of memory: the suggestion that another venue of memory and identity transmission has operated simultaneously and competitively with history, namely "collective memory."13

Books and readers in the early church : a history of early Christian texts

Abstract: This fascinating and lively book provides the first comprehensive discussion of the production, circulation, and use of books in early Christianity. It explores the extent of literacy in early Christian communities; the relation in the early church between oral tradition and written materials; the physical form of early Christian books; how books were produced, transcribed, published, duplicated, and disseminated; how Christian libraries were formed; who read the books, in what circumstances, and to what purposes. "In this extremely well-written and thoroughly researched work, Gamble asks to what extent the early church used books, how were they produced, and for what audiences? ... An enormously instructive and provocative work on an original topic. I recommend it highly to anyone with an interest in Christian history and a taste for future-oriented speculation". -- Commonweal "His study merits careful reading and continuing use because of its valuable collections, insightful comments, and thoroughness. In essence he has provided a 'companion to early Christian literature' which should be required reading". -- Robert M. Grant, Catholic Historical Review

Mental Ills and Bodily Cures: Psychiatric Treatment in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

Abstract: "Mental Ills and Bodily Cures" depicts a time when psychiatric medicine went to lengths we now find extreme and perhaps even brutal ways to heal the mind by treating the body. From a treasure trove of California psychiatric hospital records, including many verbatim transcripts of patient interviews, Joel Braslow masterfully reconstructs the world of mental patients and their doctors in the first half of the twentieth century. Hydrotherapy, sterilization, electroshock, lobotomy, and clitoridectomy - these were among the drastic somatic treatments used in these hospitals. By allowing the would-be healers and those in psychological and physical distress to speak for themselves, Braslow captures the intense and emotional interplay surrounding these therapies. His investigation combines revealing clinical detail with the immediacy of 'being there' in the institutional setting while decisions are made, procedures undertaken, and results observed by all those involved. We learn how well-intentioned physicians could rationalize and regard as therapeutic treatments that often had dreadful consequences, and how much the social and cultural world is inscribed within the practice of biological psychiatry. The book will interest historians of medicine, practicing psychiatrists, and everyone who knows or has seen what it's like to be in mental distress.

The first moderns : profiles in the origins of twentieth-century thought

Abstract: Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: What Modernism Is and What It Probably Isn't 2. The Century Ends in Vienna: Modernism's Time Lost, 1899 3. Georg Cantor, Richard Dedekind, and Gottlob Frege: What Is a Number, 1872-1883 4. Ludwig Boltzmann: Statistical Gases, Entropy, and the Direction of Time, 1872-1877 5. Georges Seurat: Divisionism, Cloisonnism, and Chronophotography, 1885 6. Whitman, Rimbaud, and Jules Laforgue: Poems without Meter, 1886 7. Santiago Ramon y Cajal: The Atoms of Brain, 1889 8. Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau: Inventing the Concentration Camp, 1896 9. Sigmund Freud: Time Repressed and Ever-Present, 1899 10. The Century Begins in Paris: Modernism on the Verge, 1900 11. Hugo de Vries and Max Planck: The Gene and the Quantum, 1900 12. Bertrand Russell and Edmund Husserl: Phenomenology, Number, and the Fall of Logic, 1901 13. Edwin S. Porter: Parts at Sixteen per Second, 1903 14. Meet Me in Saint Louis: Modernism Comes to Middle America, 1904 15. Albert Einstein: The Space-Time Interval and the Quantum of Light, 1905 16. Pablo Picasso: Seeing All Sides, 1906-1907 17. August Strindberg: Staging a Broken Dream, 1907 18. Arnold Schoenberg: Music in No Key, 1908 19. James Joyce: The Novel Goes to Pieces, 1909-1910 20. Vassily Kandisky: Art with No Object, 1911-1912 21. Annus Mirabilis: Vienna, Paris, and St. Petersburg, 1913 22. Discontinuous Epilogues: Heisenberg and Bohr, Godel and Turing, Merce Cunningham and Michael Foucault Notes Select Bibliography Index

Translating the Enlightenment : Scottish civic discourse in eighteenth-century Germany

Abstract: This is a study of the transmission of political ideas across languages and cultures, and in particular of a notably fruitful encounter between two distinct branches of eighteenth-century political discourse: the reception of Scottish civic ideas, developed most powerfully in the works of the Edinburgh historian-philosopher Adam Ferguson, by Geman intellectuals of the Enlightenment and Romantic eras. Fania Oz-Salzberger's detailed and challenging analysis places Ferguson in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment, and explores the impact of his theories on German Enlightenment thinkers. She traces the passage of Ferguson's civic humanism across linguistic and cultural borders, and highlights the linguistic stumbling-blocks and conceptual tensions that resulted. Dr Oz-Salzberger argues that there resulted a complex and largely unintentional shift of Scottish civic concepts into a German vocabulary of spiritual perfection and inner life, and that the misreading of Ferguson and other Scottish thinkers contributed much to the richness of German intellectual life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Paper Bullets: Print and Kingship under Charles II

Abstract: The calculated use of media by those in power is a phenomenon dating back at least to the seventeenth century, as Harold Weber demonstrates in this illuminating study of the relation of print culture to kingship under England's Charles II. Seventeenth-century London witnessed an enormous expansion of the print trade, and with this expansion came a revolutionary change in the relation between political authority -- especially the monarchy -- and the printed word.Weber argues that Charles' reign was characterized by a particularly fluid relationship between print and power. The press helped bring about both the deconsecration of divine monarchy and the formation of a new public sphere, but these processes did not result in the progressive decay of royal authority. Charles fashioned his own semiotics of power out of the political transformations that had turned his world upside down.By linking diverse and unusual topics -- the escape of Charles from Worcester, the royal ability to heal scrofula, the sexual escapades of the "merry monarch," and the trial and execution of Stephen College -- Weber reveals the means by which Charles took advantage of a print industry instrumental to the creation of a new dispensation of power, one in which the state dominates the individual through the supplementary relationship between signs and violence. Weber's study brings into sharp relief the conflicts involving public authority and printed discourse, social hierarchy and print culture, and authorial identity and responsibility -- conflicts that helped shape the modern state.

From Barbarians to New Men: Greek, Roman, and Modern Perceptions of Peoples of the Central Apennines.

Abstract: The Central Apennine peoples, represented alternately as decadent and dangerous snake-charming barbarians or as personifications of manly wisdom and virtue, as austere and worthy \"new men\", were important figures in Greek and Roman ideology. Concentrating on the period between the later fourth century BC and the aftermath of the Social War, this book considers the ways in which Greek and Roman perceptions of these peoples developed, reflecting both the shifting needs of Greek and Roman societies and the character of interaction between the various cultures of ancient Italy. Most importantly, it illuminates the development of a specifically Roman identity, through the creation of an ideology of incorporation. The book is also about the interface between these attitudes and the dynamics of the perception of local communities in Italy of themselves, illuminated by both literary and archaeological evidence. An important new contribution to modern debates on Greek and Roman perceptions of other peoples, the book argues that the closely interactive conditions of ancient Italy helped to produce far less distanced and exotic images than those of the barbarians in fifth-century Athenian thought.

History and Imperialism: A Century of Theory, from Marx to Postcolonialism

Abstract: IMPERIALISM RESEMBLES DARWINISM, in that many use the term but few can say what it really means. This imprecision is encouraged by a surfeit of synonyms. Two stand out: imperialism is taken to be interchangeable with colonialism and reducible to the word "empire." Add to these the compounding effects of elaborations such as hegemony, dependency, or globalization and the definitional space of imperialism becomes a vague, consensual gestalt. In its stricter Marxist-Leninist applications, the word "imperialism" dates from the end of the nineteenth century and minimally connotes the use of state power to secure (or, at least, to attempt to secure) economic monopolies for national companies. On this basis, imperialism is not necessarily an extranational project, which would appear to distinguish it from colonialism. Moreover, the monopoly criterion excludes open-door policies, relegating "U.S. imperialism" and "cultural imperialism" to the realm of rhetoric but seeming to leave "Soviet imperialism" with at least a leg to stand on.1 Since the term "imperialism" has been so closely associated with Left opposition to U.S. foreign policy, it is apparent that later usage of the term has not been too respectful of Marxist technicalities. In what follows, I shall not presume to dispense a received definition of imperialism. Rather, the term will be used heuristically to group together a somewhat disparate set of theories of Western hegemony (including Marxism, dependency, postcolonialism, globalization, etc.).2 Although these theories have most often been discussed in relative isolation from each other, taken together, as they will be here, they make up a multifaceted debate that continued for most of the

Crossing Frontiers: Gerontology Emerges as a Science.

Abstract: Introduction Two Precursors Keywords OLD AGE BECOMES A 'PROBLEM' WORTH INVESTIGATING SCIENTIFICALLY 1. Surveying the Frontiers of Aging 2. Setting Boundaries for Disciplined Discoveries 3. Establishing Outposts for Multidisciplinary Research on Aging GERONTOLOGY TAKES SHAPE IN THE ERA OF BIG SCIENCE 4. Organizing the Gerontological Society to Promote Interdisciplinary Research Amid Disciplinary and Professional Constriction 5. Risk-taking in the Modern Research University - The Fate of Multidisciplinary Institutes on Aging 6. The Federal Government as Sponsor, Producer, and Consumer of Research on Aging 7. Gerontology in the Service of America's Aging Veterans Conclusion The Current State of the Field Reconstructing Gerontology

Literature and Culture in Early Modern London.

Abstract: Introduction Part I. The Invention of London: 1. The city and humanism 2. London and the languages of Tudor complaint Part II. Fictions of Settlement: 3. From matron to monster: London and the languages of urban description 4. The emergence of a Tudor capital: Spenser's epic vision 5. Scripts for the pageant: the ceremonies of London Part III. Techniques of Settlement: 6. To be a man in print: pamphlet morals and urban ideology 7. Essential difference: the projects of satire 8. The uses of enchantment: Jacobean city comedy and romance Part IV. The Dissemination of Urban Culture: 9. Metropolis: the creation of an august style 10. In place of place: London and liberty in the puritan revolution.

Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: The Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe

Abstract: In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness-that which was turned within as that which was turned without-lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation-only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of the state and of all things of this world became possible. The subjective side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such. In the same way the Greek had once distinguished himself from the barbarian, and the Arab had felt himself an individual at a time when other Asiatics knew themselves only as members of a race. It will not be difficult to show that this result was due above all to the political circumstances of Italy.

The origins of Christian morality : the first two centuries

Abstract: By the time Christianity became a political and cultural force in the Roman Empire, it had come to embody a new moral vision. This wise and eloquent book describes the formative years-from the crucifixion of Jesus to the end of the second century of the common era-when Christian beliefs and practices shaped their unique moral order. Wayne A. Meeks examines the surviving documents from Christianity's beginnings (some of which became the New Testament) and shows that they are largely concerned with the way converts to the movement should behave. Meeks finds that for these Christians, the formation of morals means the formation of community; the documents are addressed not to individuals but to groups, and they have among their primary aims the maintenance and growth of these groups. Meeks paints a picture of the process of socialization that produced the early forms of Christian morality, discussing many factors that made the Christians feel that they were a single and "chosen" people. He describes, for example, the impact of conversion; the rapid spread of Christian household cult-associations in the cities of the Roman Empire; the language of Christian moral discourse as revealed in letters, testaments, and "moral stories"; the rituals, meetings, and institutionalization of charity; the Christians' feelings about celibacy, sex, and gender roles; and their sense of the end-time and final judgment. In each of these areas Meeks seeks to determine what is distinctive about the Christian viewpoint and what is similar to the moral components of Greco-Roman or Jewish thought.

Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society

Abstract: In this book Thomas H. Bestul constructs the literary history of the Latin Passion narratives, placing them within their social, cultural, and historical contexts. He examines the ways in which the Passion is narrated and renarrated in devotional treatises, paying particular attention to the modifications and enlargements of the narrative of the Passion as it is presented in the canonical gospels. Of particular interest to Bestul are the representations of Jews, women, and the body of the crucified Christ. Bestul argues that the greatly enlarged role of the Jews in the Passion narratives of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is connected to the rising anti-Judaism of the period. He explores how the representations of women, particularly the Virgin Mary, express cultural values about the place of women in late medieval society and reveal an increased interest in female subjectivity.

Imperial legacy : the Ottoman imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East

Abstract: 1. The Background: An Introduction, by L. Carl Brown Part 1: Perceptions and Parallels 2. The Meaning of Legacy: The Ottoman Case, by Halil Inalcik 3. The Problem of Perceptions, by Norman Itzkowitz Part 2: The Arab World and the Balkans 4. The Ottoman Legacy in the Balkans, by Maria Todorova 5. Yougoslavia's Disintegration and the Ottoman Past, by Dennison Rusinow 6. Memory, Heritage, and History: The Ottomans and the Arabs, by Karl K. Barbir 7. The Ottoman Legacy in Arab Political Boundaries, by Andre Raymond Part 3: The Political Dimension 8. The Ottoman Legacy and the Middle East State Tradition, by Ergun Ozbudun 9. The Ottoman Administrative Legacy and the Modern Middle East, by Carter Vaughn Findley 10. Ottoman Diplomacy and its Legacy, by Roderic H. Davison Part 4: The Imperial Language 11. The Ottoman Legacy to Contemporary Political Arabic, by Bernard Lewis 12. The Ottoman Legacy in Language, by Geoffrey Lewis Part 5: Europe, Economics and War 13. The Economic Legacy, by Charles Issaw 14. The Military Legacy, by Dankwart A. Rustow Part 6: Religion and Culture 15. Islam and the Ottoman Legacy in the Modern Middle East, by William Ochsenwald 16. The Ottoman Educational Legacy: Myth or Reality?, by Joseph Szyliowicz 17 Epilogue, by L. Carl Brown

The White Woman's Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia during British Colonial Rule.

Abstract: In The White Woman's Other Burden, Kumari Jayawardena re-evaluates the Western women who lived and worked in South Asia during the period of British rule. She tells the stories of many well-known women, including Katherine Mayo, Helena Blavatsky, Annie Besant, Madeleine Slade, and Mirra Richard and highlights the stories of dozens of women whose names have been forgotten today. In the course of this telling, Jayawardena raises the issues of race, class, and gender which are part of current debates among feminists throughout the world.