In This Issue

     This issue includes the AHA Presidential Address by Eric Foner, three research articles, a trio of review essays that assess the value and limitations of a recent work of social theory, and our regular array of book and film reviews. It seems fitting, since Foner's theme is the need to internationalize our thinking about America's place in twentieth-century history, that all of the research articles and review essays address issues that are either transnational or comparative in nature. When read as a whole, this issue gives a sense of the varied ways that crossing national boundaries and looking for connections between seemingly disparate case studies can enrich our vision of the past. This is true whether our work focuses on the history of popular culture, the environment, urban space, or the role of the state—to name some of the topical areas discussed in the pages that follow.

Presidential Address

     Eric Foner, drawing on his recent book on freedom in America, focuses on the international dimensions of this topic. How exactly, he asks, have visions of freedom in the United States been understood abroad and been affected by events taking place outside of this nation? In exploring this issue, he makes provocative comments in passing on a great many topics of historical and contemporary relevance. One central concern he has, which shows through most clearly in his provocative ending discussion of "globalization," is to demonstrate that bringing history into the picture can help us not just understand more fully but also sometimes add an important critical edge to debates relating to current affairs.

Articles

     Kate Brown argues that, due to the political and military rivalries of the Cold War, historians on both sides of the now-fallen Iron Curtain have generally stressed the contrasts between the histories, economies, and political systems of the United States and the Soviet Union when looking at the decades of the latter's existence. Brown challenges the notion that these two one-time enemies were actually the polar opposites they are often imagined to have been. She does this by using, as a starting point, the visual similarity of a Soviet gulag city in Kazakhstan and one of Montana's railroad towns. Brown pays particularly close attention to the way, in each context, space was "gridded" as a method for turning it into efficient units for production. Her essay combines impressionistic discussion of a pair of urban settings that turn out to have much more in common than many readers would imagine, relating not just to urban planning but also to methods of social control, and an overarching analysis of the blinders placed on our vision of the Soviet Union in particular (but also the United States) by Cold War polemics and modes of thought.

     Steve Marquardt draws on methods and approaches associated with two disparate historical subfields—labor history and environmental history—in his exploration of the political economy of banana production in Central America and the Caribbean. The main focus of his discussion is a soil-born fungus that devastated banana plantations in this region between the 1890s and the early 1960s, and the varied responses to the disease by the United Fruit Company—responses that were often ineffective and sometimes led to a deterioration of management-labor relations. Marquardt's most fundamental claim is that, to understand fully the history of capitalist agriculture, it is crucial to pay more attention than is often done to the experiences of workers, the nature of the local environment, and the cultural setting in question.

     Charles Ambler takes us into the world of Northern Rhodesian popular culture of the 1940s and 1950s, a time when Hollywood movies, particularly Westerns, routinely drew large crowds of African viewers and affected everything from children's games to colloquial expressions. Ambler argues that, in understanding the meaning of this phenomenon and thinking more complexly about the influence of American films on varied parts of the world, it is crucial to keep in mind the agency of the audience. Drawing on insights from feminist film criticism and some of the literature on cultural imperialism, the piece emphasizes that viewers always can—and often do—ascribe novel meanings to the movies they watch. In addition, discussions of film spectatorship only make sense when historicized and placed carefully into context. His claims about the Northern Rhodesian case, in which films were often treated as "attractions" of a very particular sort, is both locally rooted and broad in its implications.

Review Essays

     Three essays address different aspects of James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, an ambitious new work of comparative social theory that explores homologies between regimes of the recent past that have subscribed to different ideologies. Jane Caplan, a specialist in German history, stresses the insights provided by Scott's use of the metaphor of mapping to analyze the way modern bureaucracies have often tended to think about and respond to social issues in a manner that is too utopian and abstract and insufficiently rooted in local knowledge. She wonders, though, about Scott's failure to look closely at the ways in which official forms of knowledge can be and often are appropriated by unofficial actors. Morton Keller, who specializes in American history, though also finding much of value in Scott's analysis, is troubled by the extent to which this new book downplays the unusual nature of the role of the state in the United States. Rather than challenging ideas about American exceptionalism, Keller claims, paying attention to the role of the state can actually reinforce this notion. Fernando Coronil, an anthropologist and specialist in Latin American history, ends the section by expressing concern over what he sees as an approach by Scott both to the mechanisms of state power and the role of markets in shaping and reflecting social interactions that is too simplistic. For all of its provocative and insightful sections, Coronil argues, Seeing Like a State is, in some ways, a work that plays things too safe by creating too orderly a picture of the world—and hence Scott falls, at times, into one of the very traps that he identifies so skillfully as limiting the effectiveness of modern regimes.

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