TY - JOUR
AB - Fittingly enough, volume 126 of the American Historical Review opens with a plea for “slow history,” AHA President Mary Lindemann’s (University of Miami) entreaty, given virtually as her AHA Presidential Address in January, for taking a deep breath “to consider what benefits going slow offers.” Lindemann cautions that the amazing professional gains made by new digital tools, for instance, might be beneficially tempered by recalling that “the historian’s slowness derives from the very doing of history, in research, writing, and teaching.” In his editor’s column, Alex Lichtenstein (Indiana University) similarly weighs the perils and possibilities of the speeded-up production process for scholarly journals, made possible by editorial management systems and digital platforms. Fittingly enough, because in 2021 the AHR has shifted from our previous breakneck pace of publishing five issues a year to a much more manageable quarterly schedule. Yet, in doing so, each issue will contain more material, giving readers an opportunity to take their time in perusing the contents. In addition to Lindemann’s AHA Presidential Address, the March issue features five full-length articles, two History Unclassified essays, reviews of video games and films, a review roundtable on The Wiley Blackwell History of Islam, and ten featured reviews. The articles run the gamut from the material culture of the Renaissance to the sounds and smells of the Russian Revolution. In “Befeathering the European: The Matter of Feathers in the Material Renaissance,” Ulinka Rublack (Cambridge University) considers the emergence and significance of cross-cultural objects in the context of transatlantic cultural exchange. Rublack charts the spectacular rise in importance of feathers in dress during the Renaissance, their relation to collecting practices, and their material relevance well into the seventeenth century. She argues that the meanings of featherwork in Europe were influenced by encounters with Indigenous peoples in the Americas, whose artistry sixteenth-century Europeans greatly admired. Emphasizing crafts and materials linked to embodied sensory perception and emotional responses, Rublack’s investigation of this “material turn” offers an alternative to accounts that present this era of early conspicuous consumption solely as a means to celebrate the prestige of rich patrons; instead, the article presents an inquiry into how material culture might interact with human perception and the mind. In another essay about the complex transmission of culture across boundaries, Iris Idelson-Shein (Ben-Gurion University) discusses the corpus of translations of non-Jewish enlightenment texts into Hebrew during the early modern period. Her article “Rabbis of the (Scientific) Revolution: Revealing the Hidden Corpus of Early Modern Translations Produced by Jewish Religious Thinkers” argues that such translations suited the combination of attraction and anxiety with which many members of the Jewish religious elite observed the cultural developments of the long eighteenth century. Anxious about the potential hazards entailed in direct exposure to non-Jewish texts and ideas, Jewish translators served as cultural gatekeepers of non-Jewish worldviews. Idelson-Shein shows how they mistranslated both deliberately and accidentally, added and omitted, and ultimately gave new meanings to non-Jewish works and concepts. This allowed them to harness their sources to meet their own unique agendas as they confronted new secular ideas. The works of these translators, Idelson-Shein concludes, reveal a form of cultural transfer that relied on the mindful adaptation and reformulation of new ideas by discreet, almost inadvertent innovators. A third article traverses more modern transnational terrain. In “Cuban Racial Politics in Nineteenth-Century New York: A Critical Digital Approach,” Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof (University of Michigan) reappraises the racial politics of the nineteenth-century Cuban independence struggle in exile through an analysis of the experience of Rafael Serra and other Afro-Cuban activists in New York City. Serra (featured on the issue’s cover) led a community of Afro-descendant Cuban migrants to the city, and this community worked closely with José Martí to create the multiracial Cuban Revolutionary Party. Hoffnung-Garskof makes use of digital tools for network visualization and mapping to illustrate the evidence of race-based, class-based, and nationalist social networks among Serra’s diverse constituents. These networks, drilling down to the residential level, facilitated a range of political strategies and local alliances, including cooperation with African Americans. In presenting the digital evidence, Hoffnung-Garskof also offers his critical appraisal of the digital methods, tools, and labor arrangements made possible by these research techniques. Feathers, ideas, transnational politics … and mold. In “Mold’s Dominion: Science, Empire, and Capitalism in a Globalizing World,” Gerard Sasges (National University of Singapore) traces the scientific discoveries in fermentation that transformed early twentieth-century food processing technology across the globe, especially in the production of alcohol. Focusing on the careers of a pair of biochemists, Albert Calmette and Jōkichi Takamine, Sasges shows how their distinctive experiments with mold were remade by—and in turn helped to remake—the political economies they encountered in colonial Indochina and the Progressive Era United States, respectively. Takamine made his fortune in the midwestern United States with Taka-Diastase, a patent digestive aid once popular around the world; Calmette helped develop the “Amylo Process” of industrial brewing and distilling used as the basis of exploitative alcohol monopolies in colonial Indochina. Understanding how a single technology could take on two radically different forms allows Sasges to explore how empires and capitalist enterprises combined to send mold along pathways that both reflected and transcended imperial boundaries. Today, when the products of mold technologies are part of our daily lives, it’s tempting to see scientific globalization in terms of seamless, uniform, and seemingly inevitable outcomes. This article focuses attention instead on contingent paths and on deeply inequitable processes to show how science, empire, and capitalism produced the modern world. The final article in the March issue returns our focus to a singular event in one country, namely the 1917 Russian Revolution. In “Sounds of February, Smells of October: The Russian Revolution as Sensory Experience,” Jan Plamper (Goldsmiths, University of London) offers a novel approach to this monumental upheaval, insisting on the significance of its sensory elements—the sound of gunshots from unusual places, the smell of burnt police files, the stench of the crowded Smolny Institute where the Bolsheviks plotted their next moves. Using a wide array of diaries and memoirs, Plamper tracks in detail how people of various backgrounds expressed a new experience of time in a sensory idiom, and how they ultimately became habituated to the new sounds and sights that characterized the revolutionary moment as a world-historic event. Moving beyond the dichotomy of discourse versus “raw” experience, Plamper, a historian of emotions, conjoins the histories of experience, the senses, and affect as an integrated, simultaneous sensory-emotional-cognitive process recognized even at the time by the avant-garde artists who were contemporaries of the Russian Revolution. The extra room afforded by the slow(ed) production pace allows the AHR to supplement these full-length research articles with additional material. The March issue has a pair of History Unclassified essays. One, by José Ragas (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile) examines the multiple efforts developed by scholars to collect the vast repertoire of ephemera generated during the massive Chilean street protests of October 2019—graffiti, signs, flags, and testimonies. Such archival activism represented both a contribution to the protests and an effort to document them at the moment. The other, by Andrew Denning (University of Kansas), explores how the act of participating in history in virtual forums frames the public’s view of history. His essay shows how recent video games focused on the Nazis shape public understanding of the Third Reich, as well as how they stage who and what matters in history and assume how historical change occurs. As he notes, video games are a form of “deep play” that build knowledge of the past and present, but that knowledge must be broadened through historians’ attention to structural forces and disadvantaged groups. He concludes with some remarks on how historians might develop strategies to bring the virtues of play into their own research and teaching. Denning’s essay is accompanied by three reviews of video games in the popular Assassin’s Creed series. Those interested in this medium can also listen to an AHR Interview that Denning conducted with Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall (California State University, San Marcos), author of the forthcoming book Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games. The March issue also continues our expanded reviews section, in which we include non-monographical works of interest to historians. Here, we bundle together six film (and television) reviews, both feature and documentary, all dealing with issues of race, ethnicity, labor, and popular radicalism. Feature productions reviewed include Harriet (2019), Peterloo (2018), and the four-episode television docudrama about the Central Park Five, When They See Us (2019). The documentaries are Dying for Gold (2018), Port Triumph (2019), and the five-part PBS series Asian Americans (2020). In addition to ten featured reviews, the March issue includes an innovative version of our AHR Review Roundtable, in which seven scholars of Islamic history offer their assessments of The Wiley Blackwell History of Islam, followed by a response from one of the volume’s editors, Armando Salvatore (McGill University). If anyone still approaches journals in this fashion, readers will have a full three months to work their way through all this material before the June issue, so they needn’t rush through. © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - In This Issue
JF - The American Historical Review
DO - 10.1093/ahr/rhab187
DA - 2021-03-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/in-this-issue-PikxOUnKgD
SP - xi
EP - xiv
VL - 126
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -