In This Issue

This issue contains three articles, an AHR Forum, and a review essay. The articles analyze storytelling and early modern European medicine, the practice and writing of history, and the relationship between gender, race, class, and work in World War II South Africa. The Forum examines the creation of national identities in France, Britain, and the United States during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And the review essay treats political citizenship through an assessment of recent studies of the subject by Latin Americanists. In addition, the issue contains our usual array of book and film reviews.

Articles

Guido Ruggiero presents a multilayered analysis of the 1617 death of a Venetian woman. At one level, the essay is a microhistory of the strange death of Margarita Marcellini designed to read like a detective tale. It is an attempt to write a scholarly and methodologically engaged narrative based on archival sources but broadly accessible to readers. Ruggiero embraces storytelling to argue that the revival of the narrative must not be simply a return to previous methods but rather must make narrative a meaningful part of interdisciplinary innovation and development in historical scholarship. At another level, the article reveals the complex world of early modern medical practice in the specifics of diagnosis, treatment, and understanding of a particular illness. Ruggiero conveys how varied understandings of Marcellini's mysterious death make it a revealing example of what can be learned from the multiple readings of a small historical event. Finally, the article uses microhistory to look at the development of the program of learning called science in the early modern period: the slow, irregular, and intermittent cutting of that program of learning away from the complex everyday ways of understanding the body, illness, and ultimately the cosmos. The readings of Marcellini's strange death demonstrate the complexity that science had to leave behind to become modern. Ruggiero's story thus challenges our understanding of the past both substantively and methodologically.

Carolyn Steedman ponders the meaning of archival dust. She takes as her starting point Jacques Derrida's 1994–1996 mediations on the archive. She explains why she decided to use the translation, or perhaps mistranslation, of the phrase Mal d'archive from that essay as "Archive Fever" as a rhetorical device to find things in archives that Derrida did not know were there. Steedman explains that "dust" is one of the things that can be found, particularly the malignant dust that carries a real (or at least a medical and material) Archive Fever. But she also contends that "dust" can be thought of as the symbolic label for the obdurate set of beliefs about the material world that historians have inherited from the nineteenth century and with which we all grapple in our writing. Steedman analyzes that kind of dust by examining the beliefs, rhetoric, and structure embedded in the practice and writing of contemporary historical scholarship. Her provocative argument thus engages central issues in historiography and historical theory.

Nancy L. Clark explores the complex relationship between race, class, and gender in World War II South Africa. Although many commentators have concluded that the war led European powers to abandon colonialism as unprofitable, she contends that precisely the opposite occurred in South Africa. Nor, Clark maintains, did the war enable workers in South Africa like those in other areas of the continent to exact economic and political rights that would later help them achieve independence. Instead, she chronicles the transformation of the South African labor force during the war and the central part played by white women in meeting wartime labor needs while simultaneously preserving segregationist racial boundaries. Clark argues that this dual use of white women allowed South Africa to delay an inevitable confrontation between African workers and the government, while at the same time the women also significantly transformed the nature of the work, leading to a rapid incorporation of Africans into more skilled jobs following the war. She concludes that, by the 1970s, African workers who held the jobs initially filled by women during the war were the ones who initiated the same process of demand and negotiation that the rest of the continent experienced in the midst of the war and with the same result. Clark's article reveals the critical role of gender in social and labor history, not only in South Africa but in other places and times as well.

AHR Forum

David A. Bell begins the Forum on "Creating National Identities in a Revolutionary Era" by arguing that nationalism, as opposed to national sentiment, is not simply a set of ideas but a political program aimed at actively constructing a nation. He argues that such a program emerged in France only at the very end of the Old Regime and the beginning of the French Revolution. It did so because although the "nation" became a fundamental category in French political culture over the course of the eighteenth century, the traditional definitions of the French nation were only seriously challenged and destabilized by the political and cultural crises of the 1770s and 1780s. Nevertheless, he argues, in the years around 1789 even as the revolutionaries were proclaiming the sovereignty of the nation, they were also possessed by the terrible anxiety that the nation did not yet exist, and thus they started to devise plans for its construction. Dror Wahrman shifts the Forum across the Channel with an analysis of the consequences of the American revolutionary war in England. He argues that it was not defeat and loss that made the war so important to the English as much as the belief that it was a civil war and an unnatural conflict among Britons. The war thus defied all conventional attempts to explain it and provoked pervasive concerns about the unreliability of identity and its categories. Wahrman argues that the crisis of confidence produced by the war ushered in modern understandings of identity as innate and essential and therefore distinctly different from those that had been prevalent throughout the eighteenth century. Andrew W. Robertson extends the Forum across the Atlantic to the United States. He analyzes the priority Americans gave to national, local, and political identities between 1787 and 1820. He contends that, in the wake of the French Revolution, America's tenuous postcolonial identity fractured and was supplanted by two partisan "nationalisms" constructed around the Federalist and Republican political parties. These antithetical identities were local in practice but international in orientation, and both claimed to embody "Americanism" while denying that identity to their opponents. Robertson maintains, however, that after the War of 1812 a sense of national feeling reappeared, and the definitions of national identity held by Federalists and Republicans once again converged. The result was the creation of time and opportunity for local and national identity to coexist, at least until coexistence became more and more tenuous as the Civil War crisis emerged. Benedict Anderson concludes the Forum by the placing the issues about national identity raised by Bell, Wahrman, and Robertson into a compelling international comparative framework. Using particular comparisons that span time and space since the late eighteenth century, Anderson suggests how the three essays simultaneously illuminate and complicate our understanding of nationalism.

Review Essay

Hilda Sabato probes the meaning of citizenship at a time when it has become a crucial term in political and academic debates. She draws on a vast body of recent scholarship analyzing citizenship as a means of assessing recent studies of nation-building in nineteenth-century Latin America. She argues that the definition of political citizen and the formation of an actual citizenry became important dimensions in the political transformations that began in the region after colonial bonds had been severed and most former colonies tried to create representative governments. Such an examination, Sabato asserts, brings to light previously unrecognized issues. She focuses on two of those: suffrage, elections, and electoral practices on one side, and the development of civil society, public opinion, and the public sphere(s) on the other. And she notes how those issues also resonate with the historical analyses of state-building in other places that were transformed by the passage from colonial rule to independent government, the constitution of nation-states, or the formation of politics based on principles of modern representation and popular sovereignty. Sabato thus provides readers with an insightful analytical survey that encourages historical comparisons of political citizenship in regions around the globe.

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