Showing papers in "The American Historical Review in 2010"

Making men: Enlightenment ideas of racial engineering

Abstract: This essay suggests a colonial and Enlightenment genealogy for racial ideas more commonly associated with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nelson exposes unfulfilled pseudo-eugenic plans, focused on the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue, in which racial engineering through controlled "breeding" was seen as a solution to challenges to stability after the Seven Years' War.

The League of Nations' rescue of Armenian genocide survivors and the making of modern humanitarianism, 1920-1927.

Abstract: The essay centers of the efforts by the League of Nations to rescue women and children survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide. This rescue -- a seemingly unambiguous good -- was at once a constitutive act in drawing the boundaries of the international community, a key moment in the definition of humanitarianism, and a site of resistance to the colonial presence in the post-Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean. Drawing from a wide range of source materials in a number of languages, including Turkish, Armenian, and Arabic, the essay brings the intellectual and social context of humanitarianism in initiating societies together with the lived experience of humanitarianism in the places where the act took form. In so doing, it draws our attention to the proper place of the Eastern mediterranean, and its women and children, in the global history of humanitarianism. The prevailing narrative of the history of human rights places much of its emphasis on the post-World War II era, the international reaction to the Holocaust, and the founding of the United Nations. yet contemporary human rights thinking also took place within practices of humanitarianism in the interwar period, and is necessarily inseparable from the histories of refugees, colonialism, and the non-West.

Holocaust Memorials: The Emergence of a Genre

Abstract: AHR Forum Holocaust Memorials: The Emergence of a Genre HAROLD MARCUSE in: American Historical Review, 115(Feb. 2010), 53-89 T HE EVENT WE NOW KNOW as the Holocaust has been widely represented in a variety of media, from autobiographical and scholarly books; to literature, photography, and film; to art, music, and museums. 1 There has even been an extensive discussion about whether it can be represented at all: Saul Friedlander has described it as being “at the limits of representation.” 2 Even before the event itself was defined, however, it was being commemorated in monuments and memorials. Today there are many thousands of memorials marking sites of Nazi persecution and mass murder, and dozens more in cities around the world, with additional monuments being erected each year. 3 In order to investigate how the Holocaust has been memorialized, we must first delimit what we mean by the term. Not until the 1970s did “Holocaust” become the most widely used word to denote the Nazi program to systematically exterminate all Jews; since the 1990s, it has expanded to include Nazi programs to decimate or eradicate other groups as well. 4 In fact, an awareness of Nazi genocide as a program 1 The works of Lawrence Langer on Holocaust literature and testimony are standard-setting: Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven, Conn., 1975); Langer, Holocaust Tes- timonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, Conn., 1991). See also James E. Young, Writing and Re- writing the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington, Ind., 1988). For art, music, and museums, see, for example, Philip Rosen and Nina Apfelbaum, Bearing Witness: A Re- source Guide to Literature, Poetry, Art, Music, and Videos by Holocaust Survivors (Westport, Conn., 2002). 2 Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cam- bridge, Mass., 1992), 3. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel has been one of the most outspoken proponents of the view that the Holocaust cannot be adequately portrayed. 3 See Ulrike Puvogel, Gedenksta ¨tten fu ¨ r die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus: Eine Dokumentation, 2 vols. (Bonn, 1995). Puvogel’s location indexes list more than 3,000 sites for Germany alone. The equiv- alent publication for Poland, Council for the Preservation of Monuments to Resistance and Martyrdom, Scenes of Fighting and Martyrdom Guide: War Years in Poland, 1939–1945 (Warsaw, 1966), lists more than 1,200 sites. Similar books have been compiled for Austria and the Netherlands: Erich Fein, Die Steine Reden: Gedenksta ¨tten des o ¨sterreichischen Freiheitskampfes, Mahnmale fu ¨ r die Opfer des Faschismus, eine Dokumentation (Vienna, 1975); Wim Ramaker, Sta een Ogenblik Stil . . . : Monumentenboek, 1940–1945 (Kampen, 1980). A front-page New York Times article from January 29, 2008, “Germany Confronts Holocaust Legacy Anew,” lists seven major projects in progress for Germany alone. I do not distinguish rigidly between “monuments” and “memorials,” although the choice of terms can be used to reflect objects that may be more heroic versus those that are more contemplative, as in the Washington Monument versus the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. 4 See Jon Petrie, “The Secular Word ‘Holocaust’: Scholarly Myths, History, and 20th Century Mean- ings,” Journal of Genocide Research 2, no. 1 (2000): 31–63. See also David Engel, “What Is The Ho- locaust?” in Gordon Martel, ed., A Companion to Europe, 1900–1945 (Malden, Mass., 2006), 472– 486. Peter Novick discusses the emergence of an awareness of the Holocaust in the United States in The Holocaust in American Life (Boston, 1999), 133–134.

"If you eat their food ... ": diets and bodies in early colonial Spanish America

Abstract: IN JANUARY OF 1494, Christopher Columbus found himself in the disagreeable position of having to explain to the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella why so many of the European settlers on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola had fallen sick and died. The explanation was simple, but it had alarming implications for the nascent Spanish colony: Europeans did not thrive in the very different environment of the New World. The “change in water and air,” Columbus believed, was the principal cause of the dreadful ailments afflicting the small Spanish settlement. Fortunately, he explained, the mortality would cease once the settlers were provided with “the foods we are accustomed to in Spain.”1 European food, Columbus insisted, would counteract the deleterious effects of the New World environment and make feasible the dream of colonization. He was not alone in this belief. Columbus’s assertion that European food was vital to the survival of such settlements forms part of a vast current of discourse that links diet to discussions of Spanish health, Indian bodies, and overseas colonization. Diet was in fact central to the colonial endeavor. As we shall see, food played a fundamental role in structuring the European categories of “Spaniard” and “Indian” that underpinned Spain’s colonial universe in the early modern era. Beyond this, attending to food’s place within that universe illuminates the profound but incompatible desires that characterized Spain’s colonial mission, which sought simultaneously to make Amerindians like Europeans and to keep them separate. Many aspects of early modern colonial expansion proved unsettling for its European protagonists. The encounter with entirely new territories and peoples raised doubts about the reliability of existing knowledge and also posed theoretical and practical questions about the proper way for Europeans to interact with these new peoples and places. Far from being an enterprise based on an unquestioning assumption of European superiority, early modern colonialism was an anxious pursuit. This anxiety is captured most profoundly in the fear that living in an unfamiliar environment, and among unfamiliar peoples, might alter not only the customs but also the very bodies of settlers. Perhaps, as Columbus suspected, unmediated contact with these new lands would weaken settlers’ constitutions to such an extent that they

Getting Out of Iraq—in 1932: The League of Nations and the Road to Normative Statehood

Abstract: ON OCTOBER 3, 1932, THE thirteenth annual assembly of the League of Nations voted unanimously to admit the Kingdom of Iraq to membership. Part of the Ottoman territory occupied by the Allied powers during the First World War and then turned over to British administration under League of Nations oversight, Iraq was the first—and would, in fact, remain the only—mandated territory to shed its tutelary status and be granted independence through collective agreement. The significance of the moment was not lost on the assembled delegates, and British foreign secretary Sir John Simon, speaking “as representative of the country whose privilege it had been to guide the State of Iraq through the period of adolescence to the full status of manhood,” insisted that it vindicated the mandates system itself. “When that regime was instituted there were not wanting critics and cynics who hinted that the whole Mandatory system had been devised merely as a cloak for colonization and annexation . . . The admission of Iraq to the League was a sufficiently emphatic answer.”2 But behind the scenes, and even within the hall itself, many were not so sure. Neither the League Council nor its Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC), which oversaw the administration of the mandated territories, had welcomed Britain’s plan. Indeed, as one Colonial Office official admitted privately in late 1931, practically all the members of the Commission “were wholly unconvinced that Iraq was fit to be released from the Mandate and were most reluctant to agree to her eman-

Rival Ecologies of Global Commerce: Adam Smith and the Natural Historians

Abstract: This essay explores how the defense of global commerce pioneered in the Enlightenment was tied to the improvement of the natural order Two rival ecologies, one made by natural historians and the other developed by Adam Smith and his liberal successors, vied for intellectual precedence as well as for practical application in the metropole and the colonies Together they constitute the beginnings of an ongoing quarrel over the environmental foundation of capitalism

“Out of the Land of Bondage”: The English Revolution and the Atlantic Origins of Abolition

Abstract: in the Bay Colony militia. Inspired by the prospect of thoroughgoing reformation in revolutionary England, he returned to London in 1651 and entered the radical republican underground. By 1654, he had joined the millenarian Fifth Monarchist movement, which opposed the Protectorate regime of Oliver Cromwell as another form of kingly government. In January 1661, Venner led his London Fifth Monarchist cell in a four-day rebellion to overthrow the newly restored king, Charles II. In the course of the fighting, Venner’s forces attacked the Comptor Prison in Wood Street and attempted to free the prisoners to rescue them from potential transportation to the colonies to work as “bond slaves.” In tracts written before the rising, the rebels condemned the trade “in the slaves and souls of men” and prophesied the doom of those who engaged in this traffic. Shortly after their capture on the fourth day of battle, Venner and ten of his followers were hanged, drawn, and quartered. Prints such as this quickly followed, depicting Venner as a traitorous fanatic. He would not be the last abolitionist to be vilified in such terms. Engraving by unknown artist, 1861. From Charles Knowles Bolton, The Founders: Portraits of Persons Born Abroad Who Came to the Colonies in North America before the Year 1701, 3 vols. (Boston, 1919), 3: 827.

The Price of Discretion: Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and the American Military in France, 1944–1946

Abstract: IN SEPTEMBER 1944, WHILE LEADING the 29th Infantry Division across Brittany to liberate France, the American general Charles Gerhardt decided that his boys needed sex. So he instructed his chief of staff to start a house of prostitution.1 The task went to the St. Renan office of Civil Affairs, the military section assigned to address the needs of the liberated civilian population. Asa Gardiner, the local civil affairs officer, called upon his contacts in the French police force, who produced a pimp named Morot. The pimp, in turn, recommended four prostitutes currently refugeed nearby. Gardiner and Morot rode an army jeep to interview them, and on the way back Gardiner asked Morot to manage the business. For the actual brothel, they billeted a house outside St. Renan that had recently been vacated by the Germans.2

Martin Luther's body: the "stout doctor" and his biographers.

Abstract: PERHAPS THE MOST DISCONCERTING monument to the Reformation is the double statue of Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon in the city market at Wittenberg. There they stand, their feet locked onto grandiose Schinkel pedestals, and can do no other, as they gaze grimly out from under their neo-Gothic baldachins. Melanchthon was an afterthought: Luther’s statue was unveiled in 1821, and Melanchthon’s followed a generation later in 1865, the monumental design of the first dictating the form for the second.1 The two Reformation heroes tower over the meat stands and vegetable stalls like two caged giants. But the effect of their being seen side by side like this, even with the nineteenth-century attempts to minimize the difference, is disastrous: the stout Luther confronts the cadaverous Melanchthon. In the contemporary double portraits by Heinrich Aldegrever and the Cranach workshop, it is even worse: Luther and Melanchthon are twinned like Laurel and Hardy.2 This dilemma takes us to the heart of the representational problem: Luther was stoutly built. Saints and pious clerics tend, on the whole, to come in Melanchthonian shape, their thinness underlining their indifference to the temptations of the flesh. In the history of Western Christianity, Aquinas aside, there were few spiritual figures who were corpulent. From Lucas Cranach the Elder’s painting of the bulky Luther of 1529 to the jowly, double-chinned head of Luther that looks out at us from the iconic woodcut of Lucas Cranach the Younger of 1546, Luther was large.3 After

Instead of Waiting for the Thirteenth Amendment: The War Power, Slave Marriage, and Inviolate Human Rights

Abstract: IN THE FATEFUL YEAR before peace came at Appomattox—as slaves pursued their exodus from bondage and the Civil War dragged on—a counterpoint arose between two antislavery decrees under debate in the United States Congress. That counterpoint illuminates conceptions of universal human rights forged at an epic moment in the downfall of New World slavery. One decree became the Thirteenth Amendment; all but forgotten is the other, a congressional act to “encourage Enlistments” in the Union Army. The amendment provided for abolishing slavery everywhere in the United States and its territories. The enlistment measure freed soldiers’ wives and children owned by masters in the loyal border states exempt from the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. As destroying slavery became inseparable from vanquishing the South, bondsmen refused to go to war unless, in exchange, they won their families’ freedom as well as their own. “It is a burning shame to this country,” affirmed congressional abolitionists, “to hold the wives and the children in slavery of men who are periling their lives before the rebel legions.” A month before the war’s end, on the very day of Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural, March 4, 1865, the measure took effect. As the Thirteenth Amendment awaited ratification and as the president spoke of malice toward none, upwards of 50,000 slave wives and children went free.1 In a world in flux, where constitutional

Suicide in Late Colonial Africa: The Evidence of Inquests from Nyasaland

Abstract: IN THE EXTENSIVE LITERATURE on the history of suicide, the societies of the African continent barely feature, except in brief discussions of folk beliefs and practices.1 A simple explanation for the relative lack of attention given to this issue is that historically African societies have been assumed to have very low rates of suicide. But that assumption itself needs historicizing. The statistical evidence for suicide in most African countries is extremely weak, and longitudinal data is almost nonexistent, so while there are reasons to suggest the need for a reevaluation of suicide rates in Africa, it is not currently possible to provide one. However, the intellectual history of suicide in Africa can shed light on the issue, as can some evidence from the British colony of Nyasaland (now Malawi) in the late colonial period. In contemporary southern and eastern Africa, concerns over apparently rising suicide rates are being expressed both by mental health professionals and in the popular press. It is tempting to argue that these parts of Africa are experiencing the equivalent of the intensification of anxiety about suicide that surfaced periodically in early modern and nineteenth-century Europe—a kind of “moral panic.”2 As in

Transcending Identity: Gandhi, Nonviolence, and the Pursuit of a “Different” Freedom in Modern India

Abstract: IN THE PAST TWO DECADES, subaltern historians and postcolonial scholars have brought to our attention the need to question the generally assumed universality of Western categories in framing the histories of the rest of the world.1 The exclusive deployment of Western concepts to explain historical development in India and other non-Western countries, they say, not only has marginalized indigenous systems of knowledge and practices, but has also resulted in the histories of these countries being presented in negative terms as a deviation from the universal trajectories of capital, democracy, and liberalism, which are themselves grounded in particular historical experiences of the West. Thus, as Dipesh Chakrabarty, among others, has argued, most scholars trained in this intellectual tradition have characterized India as “not modern” or “not bourgeois” or “not liberal.” The new intellectual sensitivity toward non-Western systems of thought has resulted in a significant number of works that deploy the critical category of difference. Yet none of the four major schools of historiography on modern India—Marxist, Cambridge, nationalist, and subaltern—has extended this notion of difference to the discourse of freedom associated with the Gandhian nonviolent resistance movement against British colonialism. This is a surprising omission, given the striking ways in which the Gandhian discourse of freedom departed from the Western discourse of freedom. While the distinctiveness of the Gandhian movement in relation to other forms of anticolonial resistance of the day was evident to Gandhi’s contemporaries and has been noted by scholars, the use of difference as an analytical category to

Lessons on the Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Conquest, Commerce, and Decline in Enlightenment Italy

Abstract: THOUGH THE THEME OF HIS Sidgwick Memorial Lecture at Cambridge was “Decadence,” and though he knew that “somewhere in the dim future” decline lay inevitably ahead, former British prime minister Arthur Balfour saw in 1908 “no symptoms either of pause or of regression in the onward movement which for more than a thousand years has been characteristic of Western civilisation.” 1 Just over a century later, his “dim future” has become our grim present. With the relative decline of the West upon us, historians have an important role to play in supplying the perspectives necessary to make sense of changing circumstances. It might aid us in this process to revisit the debate embedded in the political economy of Enlightenment Italy, which was almost certainly the most advanced debate on decline in the history of the West. Why? Because, uniquely, Italy had twice declined from a hegemonic position: once through conquest, with the barbarian invasions that toppled Rome’s Western Empire; and once through commerce, with the economic competition from territorial monarchies that signaled the end of the Italian Renaissance. These two catastrophes provided theorists there with unique insights into the nature of decline and inspired ceaseless (though now little-known) debate about the means of overcoming it. As a guide through these uncharted and often melancholy lands, we can look to the nearly forgotten poet Agostino Paradisi (1736–1783) of Modena, the peninsula’s third professor of political economy and one of his century’s most acute theorists of decline. Our poet presents us with an ideal case study for rethinking not only the political economy of decline, but the very nature of Enlightenment itself. The time when one could speak boldly of “the Enlightenment” is long gone. The old Enlightenment was Parisian, ruthlessly reforming the Old Regime in reason’s name. 2 Commended and condemned by historians, it ostensibly gave birth to democracy and to the rights of man, as well as to Nazism and the gulags. 3 Today the I would like to thank Robert Fredona, Istvan Hont, Jacob Soll, Anoush F. Terjanian, and particularly Francesca L. Viano for their comments on earlier versions, as well as Robert A. Schneider and the anonymous reviewers for the American Historical Review for their incisive critiques. Jane Lyle has been an extraordinary copyeditor. 1 Arthur James Balfour, Decadence (Cambridge, 1908), 39, 59. 2 The classic synthesis of this historiographical paradigm remains Peter Gay, The Enlightenment, 2 vols. (New York, 1966–1969).

Picturing Grief: Soviet Holocaust Photography at the Intersection of History and Memory

Abstract: DESPITE THE EXTENSIVE BOOKSHELF of historical works about World War II and the Holocaust, the scholarly study of war and Holocaust photography has generally been carried out not by historians, but by journalists or cultural theorists. Scholars generally use these “photographs of trauma,” to quote Ulrich Baer, to explore the nature and meaning of photography. The late critic Susan Sontag did much to raise awareness of the power of photography, and her 2004 book Regarding the Pain of Others reflects in depth on the function that war photography plays (or doesn’t play) in politics and national memory.1 Historians have rarely touched the field of Holocaust photography. This is a major gap, especially since photography and film were the primary means of representing the war visually to the public worldwide, and because they have become primary means of memorializing the Holocaust. It is also surprising given the deep interest in questions of Holocaust history and memory that historians such as Saul Friedlander, Charles Maier, and Jeffrey Herf have wrestled with since the 1980s. In fact, one could argue that it was the attempt to historicize the Holocaust that forced historians to engage in theoretical questions about history and memory, as a result

Comrades in the Labor Room: The Lamaze Method of Childbirth Preparation and France's Cold War Home Front, 1951–1957

Abstract: IN JUNE 1951, SOVIET PROFESSOR A. P. Nikolaev traveled to Paris from Leningrad to participate in the International Congress of Obstetrics and Gynecology, where he gave a presentation on the work that he and others had been doing on the psychoprophylactic method (PPM) of childbirth. Departing from the Western trend toward obstetric anesthetics and analgesics, PPM sought to eliminate or alleviate the pain of childbirth through psychological conditioning, physical training, and education. PPM proponents believed the pain almost universally experienced in normal labor to be psychogenic in origin, the product of social conditioning that led women to anticipate and thereby preordain pain. Women studied patterned breathing techniques to conquer labor pain in two ways. First, building on six weeks of prior training, the use of patterned breathing at the onset of active labor triggered a conditional response of relaxation. Second, a focus on the breath occupied the laboring woman’s attention, distracting her from pain and interfering with the reception and interpretation in the cerebral cortex of potentially painful sensations originating in the uterus. Expectant Soviet mothers mastered several breathing patterns, from slow and

The Many Deaths of a Kazak Unaligned: Osman Batur, Chinese Decolonization, and the Nationalization of a Nomad

Abstract: “IN ALL OF CHINA, XINJIANG is the most desolate and remote province,” wrote Governor Yang Zengxin in 1925. “And in all of Xinjiang,” he added, “Altay is the most desolate and remote region [juedi].”1 It was here, beneath the canopy of a windbeaten Kazak yurt, that Osman son of Islam was born in 1899. Nothing of his life is known for certain until he was within a decade of his death. In 1943, eight years before he was bound and shot on the execution grounds of Urumchi, he confessed to the president of Mongolia that he would be content only when he was recognized as Khan of the Altay.2 He went to his grave, however, as Osman Batur, a title conferred by his peers upon a self-made “hero” of non-noble birth. The agents of far-off powers, coveting the minerals buried beneath the Altay Mountains, gave him a host of other names. From Moscow, Lavrentii Beria called him the “Kazak Robin Hood.” From Nanjing, Nationalist Chinese officials called him “incorrigible” and “unpredictable” only weeks before they called him an “ally.” Years later, hot on his heels, the Chinese Communists decried him as a “bandit.” Yet the first American to perish during a covert CIA operation viewed him as an “asset” who could play a crucial role in World War III. Somewhat later, Kazak refugees in Turkey and Kazakstan crowned him a “martyr” before finally deciding that he was the aborted second coming of Genghis Khan. Osman the myth is alive and well. But who was Osman son of Islam? In order to understand Osman, we must first understand Xinjiang against the backdrop of Republican China (1912–1949). This far northwestern province, roughly

The Return of the Enlightenment

Abstract: THE SECOND DECADE of the twenty-first century finds the Enlightenment in robust health As a designation of period, as an intellectual clustering, as a method of experimental inquiry, and as an ideal, even, of rationality and toleration to be pitted against the world's zones of intolerance, it is back in circulation and generating new historical work