In This Issue

This issue contains three articles (on medieval France, nineteenth-century Louisiana, and Mexico in the 1920s, respectively), an AHR Forum (on harmony and conflict among men in Chinese history), and a trio of Review Essays (that explore issues of urban theory and urban change). It also includes our usual array of book and film reviews. Although many times and places are discussed in the pages that follow, perhaps the most interesting type of diversity in this issue is methodological. The first article is an exercise in semiotics, the second employs demographic analytical methods, and the third makes use of a mixture of interpretive strategies associated with social and cultural history. The Forum includes an essay on Confucian ideas about masculine friendships that analyzes canonical texts in a fashion typically associated with forays into intellectual or religious history, as well as a case study that illustrates the value of applying the methods of legal history to China's long imperial era. In addition, one of the very latest additions to the historian's methodological toolkit—digital technologies that can be used to represent and make sense of the past—is showcased in a multimedia text on "Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge" that was developed to accompany the Review Essays. This electronic complement to the print essays is available on-line in the e-AHR, which is accessible via www.historycooperative.org, a web site that contains full-text versions of all recent issues of this journal. The multimedia text on L.A. includes animated maps and other visual materials as well as an illustrated essay on epistemology. A hint of what is provided in this digital creation is given on the cover of the print edition, since the photographic collage that appears there is part of the multimedia text just described.

Articles

     Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak uses insights derived from semiotic anthropology to rescue the wax impressions produced by individualized seals in medieval Europe from their status as objects of merely antiquarian interest. She does this through a careful and sustained look at how northern French lay elites of the eleventh and twelfth centuries used insignias in their discourse with one another as symbolic representations of their identities. Sigillography (the study of seals) needs, she insists, to be seen as much more than an auxiliary science to cultural history. Seals were not peripheral by-products but objects at the very heart of understandings of and debates about the nature of the self.

     Michael Tadman directs our attention to an important demographic puzzle, for which he has a novel answer. The puzzle is that, on the one hand, by the 1850s the natural rate of increase of North American slaves was very high—exceeding even that of members of the white population. On the other, there were almost always more slaves dying than being born in other parts of the Americas at that time. The author argues that the comparative demographic "success" of the U.S. slaves did not arise out of exceptionally favorable treatment or circumstances, but instead was the result of a demographic regime where very high death rates were offset by even higher rates of birth. Decreases in other parts of the Americas, meanwhile, need to be understood as reflective of the peculiarities of a sugar production system in which slaveowners made intense physical demands on their slaves and required a perpetual surplus of males in their work gangs. The article combines careful economic analysis with consideration of the broad implications that predominately male slave populations in specific settings may have had for familial life, the incidence of revolts, and slaveowner ideas about blacks.

     Christopher R. Boyer delves into the conflict between rival groups of workers at a textile mill in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution. He argues that labor leaders consciously misrepresented their essentially regionalist rivalry as a question of inter-union politics and working-class mobilization. Boyer claims that this sort of misrepresentation can be a key mechanism through which one social identity becomes articulated with another, and explores the effects of this process on ideas associated with mill-owner paternalism, the legitimacy of the Mexican state, and struggles for the control of women's sexuality. The article sheds light on a wide range of issues associated with the language of class (and how it is inflected by gender) and the role of regional tensions in limiting the activities of unions (as well as sometimes facilitating worker solidarity). It combines intriguing detail of specific individuals and events with efforts to connect the Mexican material to debates that have engaged historians working on factories and mills located in very different sorts of settings.

AHR Forum: Gender and Manhood in Chinese History

     In recent decades, historians focusing on varied times and places have argued that we will not have a real understanding of the workings of gender as a historical category until more attention is paid to how men as well as women are gendered subjects. The impressive accomplishments made by women's historians notwithstanding, these scholars have argued, it is crucial that efforts be made to problematize masculinity and explore the definition of manhood and the place of men within particular historical contexts. This Forum is an effort to do just that, via a look at relationships between men in China from imperial times up through the 1940s. It opens with a contextual overview by Susan Mann, who draws on her extensive work in women's history to provide nonspecialists with a solid enough grounding in the historical and historiographic terrain of gender in China to make the most of the three case studies that follow. The first of these, by Norman Kutcher, on male friendship, makes the provocative claim that, in many ways, nonsexual affective bonds between men (which tended to be egalitarian) were more threatening to the Confucian order than were ones of the sort we would now label homosexual (which tended to be hierarchical in nature). The second, by Adrian Davis, explores the curious fact that, while China is often described as a place where familial harmony was all-important and fraternal rivalries were muted due to the lack of a system of primogeniture, brothers sometimes killed one another. The third, by Lee McIsaac, turns from biological to fictive forms of fraternity, looking at the many meanings of sworn brotherhoods in a Chinese city in the middle of the twentieth century. The Forum closes with a comparative comment by Robert A. Nye, a Europeanist whose works have dealt with masculinity in nineteenth-century France and the history of sexuality.

Review Essays

     Three historians turn their attention here to a recent interdisciplinary volume devoted to Los Angeles at the end of the twentieth century. Robert A. Schneider, an early modern Europeanist who has written extensively on Toulouse, questions some of the assumptions made by postmodern geographers and other members of the "L.A. School" of urban studies about the novelty of the structure and workings of the contemporary metropolis. Michael E. Engh, a California historian, both provides background on his state's most controversial metropolis and also draws attention to some issues—such as the activities of civic and religious groups—to which the urban theorists fascinated by the City of Angels have sometimes given short shrift. Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, writing from Paris and from the perspective of an Africanist, is concerned with a mixture of methodological and comparative issues, including the similarities and differences between Los Angeles and Johannesburg, another urban center that has recently grown rapidly in size and undergone a dramatic series of changes. The articles section of the print AHR ends here, but the discussion of Los Angeles and urban history continues in the e-AHR with a multimedia text by Philip J. Ethington, which combines epistemological concerns with cartographic and photographic explorations of Southern California's largest city.

     A final note is in order here, which relates to a behind-the-scenes matter of which readers of an academic journal are rarely made aware. We could not have produced this issue, or, for that matter, the last 150 issues, without the wise assistance of Thomas "Mac" McDaniel at Cadmus Professional Services, who has set the AHR into type for literally the last thirty years. He begins a well-deserved retirement after this issue, and we will sorely miss his advice and counsel on how to make the journal look good. We wish him the very best fishing hole that Virginia has to offer.

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