In This Issue

     This issue contains an American Historical Association Presidential Address, two articles, a forum, and a review essay. The presidential address connects the British colonial experience in Southeast Asia with the American presence in Vietnam. The articles analyze female spirituality in medieval Europe and the international context of domesticity in the United States. The Forum presents a debate over the revolutionary implications of the invention of printing. And the review essay explores the role of synthesis in contemporary historical scholarship. In addition, the issue contains our usual array of book and film reviews.

Presidential Address

     Wm. Roger Louis uses his Presidential Address to reflect on three themes: British imperialism in Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 1960s, the connection between the British colonial experience and the American presence in Vietnam, and the implications of these experiences for our understanding of the ideas of memory, time, and place. His larger intent is to suggest how the 1960s and the debate about the Vietnam War can for the first time be studied in a detached way that produces unexpected insights. He links the themes together by explaining how a sense of moral degeneracy among British colonials in Malaya became indelibly associated with the fall of Singapore to the Japanese in 1942. The memory and pain for the British lived on, he contends, from one generation to the next, just as for Americans the memory and pain of Vietnam have not faded. In addition, he narrates how those memories led the British to help create a stable, independent Malaya first by defeating Communist guerrilla forces and then by promoting independence. Louis goes on to explain the gradual British withdrawal from Southeast Asia and its refusal to participate in the Vietnam conflict. He also compares the British military and political actions of the 1950s to those pursued by the Americans in Vietnam a decade later. Louis's address thus provides a compelling example of the analytical potential of subjecting recent events to historical analysis.

Articles

     Dyan Elliott examines the theoretical aims and practical effect of the discourse of spiritual discernment—the ability to discern between divine and diabolical inspiration—for women in late medieval Europe. She maintains that an avid interest in spiritual discernment emerged in response to the rise of female mysticism and prophecy in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, an era of considerable spiritual unrest. And she identifies John Gerson, the chancellor of the University of Paris, as one of the most important writers who attempted to use the discourse of discernment and the procedures of the Inquisition to contain female spirituality by bringing it under clerical control. However, Elliott reveals, when Gerson attempted to defend the divine inspiration of Joan of Arc, he was defeated by the very success of his earlier efforts because his positive assessment of Joan immediately spawned a negative counterpart. This development raised the possibility of two Joans: one divinely and one diabolically inspired. As a result, Elliott concludes, rather than providing a mechanism for distinguishing counterfeit from genuine spirituality, spiritual discernment led to a blurring of boundaries—a confusion that would continue to taint perception of female spirituality. Her article thus provides a vivid and concrete historical example of the incalculable effects of discourse.

     Kristin Hoganson challenges conceptions of households as preeminently local spaces by contending that they should be considered instead as points of global encounter. Drawing on government import figures, photographs of household interiors, catalogs, and decoration writings from the end of the United States civil war through World War I, she finds that bourgeois American women eagerly embraced foreign objects and decorating styles. The result, she asserts, was a seeming paradox of cosmopolitan domesticity: its adherents regarded foreignness itself as a decorating objective. Though premised on and conducive to commercial and imperial expansion, Hoganson argues, cosmopolitan domesticity revealed itself to be more receptive to foreign artistic production than to more domestic ones. As a result, the emergence of cosmopolitan domesticity provides a counterpoint to export-oriented historical narratives that emphasize the cultural expansion of the United States in this period. And it demonstrates how bourgeois women as consumers participated in international relations. Consequently, as Hoganson makes clear, cosmopolitan domesticity was more than simply a reflection of expanding international markets; the women who purchased imported goods actively contributed to the globalizing developments of their day. Her article is thus a significant contribution to the internationalization of United States history and to an expanded conception of the history of international relations.

AHR Forum

     The Forum is a spirited exchange about the nature and meaning of the invention of printing by two historians who have penned pathbreaking books on the subject. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein is the author of the seminal 1979 book The Printing Press as an Agent of Change; Adrian Johns wrote the award-winning 1998 volume The Nature of the Book. Eisenstein begins the debate by challenging Johns's analysis of early modern printing. She focuses on three main issues: whether or not the standardization that came into play after the widespread adoption of the new duplicating system meant that print outperformed script and thus the significance of the shift from the latter to the former; the geographic scope of the new technology and particularly the need to take a broad continental perspective rather than focus on one nation; and questions about whether to periodize the "printing revolution" as an event of the fifteenth century or as an evolutionary development whose impact emerged most clearly in the eighteenth. In each case, Eisenstein expresses her reservations about Johns's study of the advent of printing culture in early modern England. Instead, she sustains her initial contention that the new form of production be considered a print revolution. Johns responds by identifying and analyzing what he considers to be the broader issues at stake in the historiography of the printing revolution in early modern Europe. He highlights his own three major issues: the history and powers of reading practices; the role played by representations of cultural change in shaping such change; and the prime importance of local communities' perceptions and labors in shaping even the most sweeping historical transformations. He contends that these issues warrant closer attention, and that Eisenstein's approach, though useful for answering different questions, cannot adequately be used to address them. And Johns insists that there are real advantages to seeing the construction of print as historical in the fullest sense of the word. Thus, he maintains, we need not just a history of other things that is cast in terms of print culture but a cultural history of print itself. Eisenstein ends the Forum by reiterating her concerns about the critical role of periodization in understanding the history of printing.

Review Essay

     Thomas Bender explains that while questions about the need or dangers of synthesis in the field of history were debates in the 1980s, that discussion was superseded in the 1990s by the publication of a wide range of synthetic histories. He argues that present social, political, and intellectual developments raise new questions for any national synthesis. Bender develops that argument by using examples from United States history to explore different ways of framing narratives and the relation of narrative strategy to the interpretive agenda of these works. He suggests that synthesis is a distinctive and valuable genre that invites its own particular mode of critical examination, distinct from that familiar in reviews of monographs. Ranging widely over historical periods, themes, and methods, Bender raises questions about a number of critical issues: teleology; causation, agency, and subjective meaning; inclusion and exclusion; the possibilities of democracy as a focal point of analysis and narrative; and the place and use of professional history in the broader public culture. He concludes by proposing a frame larger than the nation for synthetic narratives, suggesting that a history of the nation cannot be its own context. With such a larger framing, Bender argues, the study of the United States—or of any other nation or people—is much more effectively historicized, more clearly explained as the product of history.

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