In This Issue

     This issue contains five articles and one review essay, as well as our usual complement of reviews of individual books and films. Between them, the articles deal with a broad range of places, periods, and topics. One focuses on cultural practices and ideas linked to slumber in pre-industrial England, another uses techniques associated with social and environmental history to analyze a donkey massacre that occurred in South Africa during the 1980s. In addition to these, there is an article that looks at cinema and society in Nazi Germany and an article that interprets the meaning of debates over abortion law in interwar Britain. Also, there is a collaborative study, by three scholars, of the international campaign waged in the 1930s to expose the injustices of American race relations through rallies and publications demanding the release of the "Scottsboro Boys"—a group of young African-American men unjustly convicted of raping two white women. The appearance of this article is particularly appropriate at this moment in time, since the spring of 2001 marks the 70th anniversary of the famous (or, rather, infamous) trials. The review essay that follows the articles extends still further the scope of the April issue. Written by a specialist in East European history who, like many historians of late, has become increasingly interested in subjects with a global reach, it examines a series of recent works that present contrasting interpretations and descriptions of the similarities of and differences between early modern Asian and European economic systems.

Articles

     A. Roger Ekirch focuses on a subject that has typically received little attention from historians: slumber. Even in this era when many of us take for granted the importance of looking at the quotidian existence of historical actors, he argues, history continues, for the most part, to ignore sleep patterns and the significance attached to them. This is unfortunate in the case of the history of Britain, Ekirch insists, for three reasons. First, there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that, in pre-industrial times, many ordinary people were very concerned with the quality of their repose and took steps to improve it. Second, in this setting, dreams and their analysis were considered very important subjects—as indeed has been true in many contexts. Third, and perhaps most surprising, a tradition of segmented as opposed to uninterrupted sleep seems to have been the norm before the arrival of modern lighting and other relatively recent developments. Making use of diverse source materials, ranging from diaries to letters to works of fiction, Ekirch explores the meaning of the practice of segmented sleep and its demise. He also describes the varied ways that British people spent their time during the period of wakefulness between what they sometimes referred to as their "first" and "second" sleep.

     James A. Miller, Susan D. Pennybacker, and Eve Rosenhaft look at a well-studied event, the outrage generated in progressive circles by the treatment of the "Scottsboro Boys," but they place it in a novel and unusually transnational framework. Making use of newly available evidence from the Comintern archives, as well as materials scattered in libraries located in various parts of North America and Europe, they draw attention to the transnational scope of the campaign to free the young African-American defendants from incarceration and to the varied political affiliations and backgrounds—from Communist Party members to non-Communist progressive intellectuals—of those who joined the effort. In addition, through a detailed consideration of the European tour of the mother of two of the defendants, which looks both at her words and deeds and the way audiences responded to them, the authors make a compelling case for the need to find new strategies for dealing with African-American agency and the complexities of competing vernaculars of communication when constructing a more robustly international history of race and politics in the twentieth century.

     Stephen Brooke draws on methodologies and insights associated with fields such as postcolonial studies and feminist criticism to investigate a topic in legal history: abortion law. He illuminates, through close analysis of diverse texts from 1930s Britain, the interplay between class and gender in arguments over the proper role of the state in general and the legal system in particular in regulating natal practices. The topic of abortion remains the subject of considerable controversy in many countries to this day, yet attempts to place earlier debates on the topic into the fullest possible context remain relatively rare. Brooke's article provides scholars interested in the subject with some fascinating information and a model for using the tools of both historians and literary critics to shed light on the political and social dimensions of legal debates.

     Scott Spector directs our attention to the often problematic or underdeveloped treatment of ideology in interdisciplinary work on cinema and society, choosing as an entry point into this subject the rich literature on films produced in Germany during the Nazi era. He discusses a series of books and articles by historians, on the one hand, and specialists in film studies, on the other, but he explicitly distances his approach from that of the author of a review essay. His concern is with making the case for a particular set of techniques that, if used properly, he claims, can do more than has generally been done to bring together the history of ideas and the history of cultural practices. Interdisciplinarity, Spector argues, is much easier to celebrate in the abstract than to actually carry out, and, in many instances, when film studies and cultural history come together, ideological issues end up getting short shrift. The key in looking at the Nazi political project—and, by extension, others as well—is, according to Spector, to create a form of intellectual history that emphasizes ideology yet treats it as a complex concept that cannot be reduced to the dogma explicitly endorsed by a single leader or even an entire regime.

     Nancy J. Jacobs focuses tightly on a little-known but dramatic act of donkey culling that took place in South Africa during the 1980s and has been remembered and talked about by local residents in varied and passionate ways ever since. Treating the event as an episode in colonial history that fits into a long series of efforts by the state to denigrate donkeys and by extension exert control over their owners, she sees the slaughter of these animals as a tragic occurrence and also one that sheds light on power relations associated with class and race. One of her most provocative claims is that historians need to address the different ways that animals figure in the mental and emotional worlds of human actors. In this case, Jacobs asserts, it is crucial to come to terms with the fact that, to their owners, the slain donkeys were fellow beings as opposed to merely objects or possessions. Based largely on interviews, yet attentive to the care with which oral history evidence needs to be handled where controversial and violent episodes are concerned, this article moves between and makes effective use of methodologies and ideas associated with social, cultural, and above all environmental history.

Review Essay

     Gale Stokes examines the theses defended and methodologies employed by the author of several major works of macrohistory that address a common issue: the rise of the West. Why was it, the authors of these books ask, that a relatively small and at one point backward periphery area on the western fringe of the Eurasian continent, rather than some other seemingly more promising regions, became the dominant force in the world in the nineteenth century? Stokes traces the main fault lines in the answers they offer, paying particularly close attention to the contrast between works (such as those of David Landes) that argue that there was something unique in the western European past that facilitated its eventual assertion of economic and political hegemony and works (such as those of Andre Gunder Frank) that deny the validity of this idea. Stokes, an Eastern Europeanist by training who has begun to teach more courses with a global reach, sees both Landes and Frank as trapped by the way they frame their questions, but he is encouraged by recent moves toward new styles of comparative history that stress the similarities as opposed to differences between varied parts of the world in early modern times. Here, he says, in works that make room for reciprocal as opposed to one-way comparisons, we begin to glimpse the possibility for future histories of Eurasia and of the world that will be able to grapple effectively with the development and legacy of a global order that was, for a time, dominated by Europe.

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.