In This Issue

     This issue contains five articles and a review essay. The articles analyze the role of clothing in the triumph of American capitalism, changing Western notions of time in the nineteenth century, the sexual brutality of American slavery, Stalin as a man of the Russian borderlands, and the tensions between exceptionalism and globalism in the telling of American history. The review essay examines the contributions of Frankfurt School theorist Walter Benjamin to studies of the past. In addition, the issue contains our usual array of book and film reviews.

Articles

     Michael Zakim explores the place of capitalism in the American political tradition through an analysis of clothing in colonial and antebellum America. He does so to demonstrate the depth and significance of the triumph of capitalism in the United States. And he also challenges those who assert the existence of a persistent pre-commercial ethos in the American republic. Such assertions, he argues, deny the revolutionary nature of capitalism. By chronicling the place of clothing and clothing styles in the development of American capitalism, Zakim demonstrates how they can be used to chart economic and political change as well as the links between the two, such as the emergence of ideas like market freedom. Similarly, he contends that the transformative sartorial changes also reveal the depth of capitalism's domination of American life through its power to commodify culture. Zakim's essay thus contributes to studies that compel us to understand the ordering power of the marketplace and of commercial values in the past.

     Peter Fritzsche analyzes the reorganization of the Western sense of time over the course of the nineteenth century. He argues that as a result of the French Revolution history began to be recognized as a comprehensive force of irreversible change, which invited contemporaries in the West to recognize and dramatize their public and private lives in historical terms. This new sense of irreversibility also produced widely felt feelings of nostalgia that mourned the past and acknowledged that it could be repossessed only in fragmentary form. Thus, for many Westerners, history came to be regarded as a marauding force that produced ruins, which were no longer interpreted as signs of natural decay and regeneration, as they had been in the eighteenth century, but rather as evidence of untimely deaths, ghostly presences, and alternative lives. Looking at popular autobiographies, Fritzsche stresses the social scale of these new ideas of historical change, particularly how an emphasis on the violence of historical ruptures enabled contemporaries to view alternatives in the records and thereby to undermine the imperatives of the present. Changes like these, he contends, facilitated the creation of a field of difference in which the ideas of temporal periodicity, national particularity, and individual sovereignty flourished. Fritzsche's essay thus contributes to the history of the discipline of history and to the study of the ways in which historical thinking have fashioned modern subjectivity.

     Edward E. Baptist studies the records of one of the largest slave-trading firms in the United States during the boom years right before the Panic of 1837 to understand the multiple meanings, values, and attractions of slaves. In the letters of the men who ran these profitable businesses, he finds language and evidence of acts of terror and tyranny that suggest both commodity and sexual fetishism. Baptist argues that such acts and words reveal more than the psyches of a few traders, because the men were not just significant slave dealers but also powerful planters. Significantly, he maintains that the letters document twin urges of rape and commodification that reveal sources of white motivations in slavery quite different from the paternalistic ideology that many scholars have advanced in recent decades. In addition, Baptist suggests that there was an interconnection between the origins and growth of the modern concept of commodity and the pervasive sexualization of black bodies. His essay thus challenges our understandings of both slavery and the development of colonization and industrialization in the Anglo-Atlantic world.

     Alfred J. Rieber adds a new dimension to the picture of Joseph Stalin. He argues that the Soviet leader must also be considered a man of the borderlands in addition to being depicted as a bureaucratic tyrant and mass killer. Rieber uses frame analysis and studies of ethnic and personal identity to draw a relationship between Stalin's construction of his own multiple identity and his concept of state building. He focuses on three aspects of Stalin's self-presentation: the Georgian (cultural), the symbolic proletarian (social), and the Great Russian (political). Through an analysis of these dimensions of Stalin's self-identity, Rieber tracks the complex process by which the Soviet leader layered real and falsified events during his uncharted "pilgrimage" from the periphery to the core of the Russian Empire and the revolutionary movement. He emphasizes Stalin's pseudonyms as a clue to tracing stages in this process. Rieber concludes that Stalin developed a new concept of a polyethnic, proletarian state that embodied all three aspects of his self-identity. At the same time, he maintains, that concept also served as a legitimating principle in Stalin's struggle for power and maintenance of control over the international communist movement and the Soviet Union. Rieber's essay thus contributes to our understanding of a central figure in modern world history as well as of biography as a method of analyzing the past.

     Michael Adas asserts that most of the contributions to the substantial literature and equally substantial controversies over American exceptionalism have been offered by scholars with European orientations or comparativists who include examples from the United States in their studies. The result, he argues, is the neglect of a fundamental paradox that has been in the literature of exceptionalism since the earliest days of North American colonization: on the one hand, the vision of the American nation as a social and political experiment without precedent or parallel in global history, and, on the other hand, the belief that the American experience represents the vanguard of human history and a model for all humankind. Drawing on evidence from the histories of other settler societies and key themes in the history of non-Western peoples and cultures with which the United States has increasingly interacted, Adas analyzes the tensions between exceptionalism and globalism from a new perspective and addresses neglected issues raised by that inquiry. He interrogates claims of American exceptionalism through an assessment of two of the more definitive, even mythic processes in U.S. history: colonial settlement and frontier expansion. In each case, Adas demonstrates that although American experiences reveal differences, they were by no means exceptional when placed in a comparative and global perspective. And he argues that patterns in the United States can be better understood within this larger frame of reference and, conversely, that an American dimension is critical for a full understanding of world history in the early modern and modern eras. Adas's essay thus compels us to ponder the sources and implications of segregating the United States past from the rest of world history.

Review Essay

     Vanessa R. Schwartz uses the translation of Walter Benjamin's unfinished Arcades Project into English as an occasion to consider what his work might offer historians more generally. While recognizing that no unitary explanation of history can guide the historian's craft, she argues that Benjamin's insights can move cultural history in a new direction: toward the visual. Benjamin's life story has been of interest to historians as an example of the many losses to intellectual life that resulted from Hitler's rise. His work has already been placed in the intellectual context of his colleagues, who formed what came to be known as the Frankfurt School. While art historians and literary and film studies scholars long ago turned to Benjamin to understand the transformation of urban modernity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, historians have lagged behind. Schwartz offers a guide to some of Benjamin's most salient ideas for historians, notably by drawing a connection between his interest in capitalism and urban spectatorship, the rise of film, and a more potentially imaginistic and aphoristic materialist historical methodology. Schwartz's essay is thus both a very compelling analysis of Benjamin's work and an equally compelling argument about how historians can use his work in their interrogations of the past.

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