In This Issue

     This issue contains three articles, an AHR Forum, and a tripartite review essay. The articles analyze knife fighting in Greece, famine and modernization in the Soviet Union, and historical consciousness in Mexico. The Forum discusses the ways in which understanding the history of slavery in the United States requires boundary-crossing analyses. And the review essay contains three different assessments of Alfred W. Crosby's recent study of quantification in Western society. In addition, the issue contains our usual array of book and film reviews.

Articles

     Thomas W. Gallant examines the complex relationship between honor, masculinity, and violence. Using nineteenth-century records from the British colonial courts on the Ionian Islands of Greece, he advances three central propositions: Greek plebian men were exceptionally prone to violence; their violent confrontations were rooted in an ethic of honor; the most common form of interpersonal male violence was the knife fight; and knife fights were as ritualized and rule-bound as the better known aristocratic duel, and thus should be considered a form of lower-class dueling. Gallant contends that the court system imposed by the British on the islands plays a crucial role in the transformation of men's contests over honor and status. He also explains why honor has remained a critical component of the identity of Greek men even though violence has ceased to be an important element in the cultural construction of masculinity. Gallant's persuasive argument that Greek men retained honor as a cornerstone of masculinity but disassociated it from violence makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the reduction of interpersonal violence so ubiquitous in the historical record.

     David C. Engerman analyzes the United States press coverage of the 1932–1933 famine in the Soviet Union. He focuses on the controversies that emerged over the press analysis of the famine to challenge the conventional story of ideologically driven journalism. Engerman explains that in most accounts journalists Walter Duranty and Louis Fischer are blamed for covering up the famine, while reporters William Henry Chamberlin and Eugene Lyons are lauded for revealing the cover-up. However, Engerman argues that the stories the four wrote shared a number of commonalties that reveal their basic agreement about the famine and the Soviet state: stereotypes of Russian "national character," a desire for economic progress even at high costs, and a tendency to understand Russia as an "Asiatic" society. These shared beliefs highlight the emphasis each journalist placed on the relationship between the ends and means of economic growth. Engerman also notes similarities between the American press coverage of the Soviet famine and the foreign reporting on the Chinese famine that accompanied the 1958–1960 "Great Leap Forward." He contends that shared concerns about the ends and means of economic growth were evident not only in these instances of reporting but also in discussions of theories of modernization and development. And he asserts that these concerns have reappeared recently in debates about "Asian values" and the relationship of cultural particularism, political democratization, and economic change. Engerman's analysis compels a new understanding of the role of economic beliefs in the analysis of events in other nations.

     Thomas Benjamin assesses the recent Mayan revival in southeastern Mexico and its connection to the 1994 rebellion of peasant Mayan Indians as a way of exploring the issue of indigenous conceptions of history. He explains that the revival refers to the revitalization of indigenous culture and development of a collective Indian identity that began in the 1970s. The story of the revival focuses on the rise and fall of a monument to a conquistador, which was destroyed by indigenous protest marchers on Columbus Day 1992. The destruction of the statute, Benjamin argues, revealed a newfound understanding of history that was expressed in the symbolic act of rebellion. It was as well a precursor to the violent rebellion that erupted fourteen months later. He also contends that the event, along with the appearance of the first printed indigenous historiography, demonstrated the Mayas' new awareness of their history, which has had a profound influence on Mayan cultural identity and political assertiveness. As a result, he concludes, the Maya are becoming their own historians and demonstrating that they are not a "people without history," but instead indigenous Mexicans who possess the ability and right of self-representation and self-determination. Benjamin's article forces us to examine differing notions of history and the crucial relationship between historical narrative and history as lived experience.

AHR Forum

     David Brion Davis begins the Forum "Crossing Slavery's Boundaries" by arguing that historians and the popular media have long parochialized slavery in the United States by viewing it as an institution of the nineteenth-century American South. Even though he acknowledges that comparative histories have helped broaden our view, Davis maintains that there is also much to be said for grasping the "Big Picture": the interrelationships that constitute an Atlantic Slave System as well as the place of such racial slavery in the evolution of the Western and modern worlds. Drawing on a course and forthcoming book that try to present this "Big Picture," he argues that the history of the entire New World has been dominated by the theme of slavery and freedom, including struggles over emancipation. And, despite the increasing pressures for temporal and geographic specialization, Davis insists the resources are now available to make the theme of slavery and freedom a way of teaching world history. After offering examples of the kind of topics such a course could explore, Davis concludes by noting the pervasiveness of forced labor in the twentieth century, the relative lack of mobilized protest, and the possibility that better knowledge of the evils and triumphs of history will provide more future sensitivity to human exploitation. Comments by Peter Kolchin, Rebecca J. Scott, and Stanley L. Engerman complete the Forum. Their compelling assessments of Davis's proposal raise questions about the meaning and implications of taking a "Big Picture" approach to the history of slavery. These include issues of the definitions of unfree labor, the nature of comparative and transnational analysis, and the very meaning of broadening historical inquiries. Together, the essay and comments address both the enduring problem of understanding slavery as well as the contemporary one of teaching across traditional periods and fields.

Review Essays

     The three review essays use an assessment of Alfred W. Crosby's recent book, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600, to explore the issue of whether a distinctive quantitative perception of reality led to the imperialistic power of the West in the modern world. They each assess Crosby's assertion that the impulse to measure and count explains the rise of Western global domination, a question of recurring importance. And they do so from different analytical perspectives. Roger Hart, a historian of Chinese mathematics, questions whether Crosby has demonstrated a significant shift in quantification in the West or the connection between quantification and specific developments in fields like weaponry and navigation. More broadly, he argues that The Measure of Reality typifies a genre of world history in which the imagined communities "the West," "China," and "Islam" became the central protagonists in praise-and-blame histories of civilizations that narrated the trials, tribulations, and eventual triumph of the West. Margaret C. Jacob, a historian of science in early modern Europe, emphasizes the importance of the "big" questions about Western hegemony that Crosby asks. She concludes, though, that his answers are limited by their use of conventional forms of intellectual history that ignore critical issues of social and political context such as the religious elements of Western science and the commercial implications of state building. Jack A. Goldstone, a historical sociologist who studies revolutions and social moments, concludes the reviews with comparative analysis that raises questions about the uniqueness of Western quantitative ideas and practices. He lauds Crosby's contributions to our understanding of global history, but contends that the emergence of Western power must be explained by multicausal arguments unlike the monocausal emphasis on quantification in this book. Together, the reviews underscore the larger importance of the kind of questions that Crosby asks and the difficulties of crafting persuasive answers to them.

LOCKSS system has permission to collect, preserve, and serve this Archival Unit

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.