In This Issue

This issue contains three articles, an AHR Forum Essay, and a review essay. The articles analyze the Spanish conquest of Mexico, regionalism in Napoleonic Italy, and the place of law in the rise of militant Islam. The Forum Essay argues that historians have the professional and ethical responsibility to preserve the record of our time for future scholars. It is the sixth of a series that we call Forum Essays. Instead of commissioning comments on the essay, as is our usual practice with Forums, we are opening up the commentary process to readers by soliciting their reactions to the article. We do so by taking advantage of the online AHR to hold a moderated discussion between the author and commentators in early September. Details can be found in the Forum introduction. The article section concludes with an assessment of a new field of historical inquiry: disability history. In addition, the issue contains our usual array of book and film reviews.

Articles

Camilla Townsend argues that our received understanding of the conquest of Mexico is seriously flawed. Thus we need a way of interpreting that significant event. For example, Townsend maintains that there is no real evidence that the indigenous people ever believed that Hernando Cortés was Quetzalcoatl returning from the east and very little evidence that they ever seriously considered the Spanish to be gods at all. Instead, she explains, this construct emerged in imaginary accounts written in the second half of the sixteenth century. And it thrived because it was so gratifying to the cultural heirs of the conquerors and offered a much-needed explanation to the heirs of the defeated Aztecs. Even modern scholars, who might have been expected to deconstruct this rather dehumanizing notion, have failed to do so—apparently because taking such a step has the potential to leave open the unsettling question as to why the conquest was possible. Townsend suggests that a recent contribution of science frees us from this old burden: dating the microscopic remains of plant seeds has proven that 10,000 years ago agriculture was viable as a full-time way of life only in certain places. Only where a constellation of protein-rich crops was available did people proceed in that direction. Scholars have long known that agriculture and a sedentary lifestyle led to the division of labor and the growth of technology. And technology in all its forms—including not merely cannons and guns but also steel lances and armor, horses and ships, books and navigation equipment—clearly explains the conquest when we look at the events themselves without prejudice. Significantly, Townsend explains, when we discard our preconception that the Indians were interpreting the foreigners as gods, and listen to what they had to say about what was occurring, it becomes evident that they themselves recognized very early on that they were defeated not by gods but by Spanish technology. Townsend's article is thus a forceful example of how new insights can compel us to reexamine inherited arguments about past events.

Michael Broers conducts a methodological experiment in the application of some of the standard tools of historical geography in an effort to understand the historical phenomenon of imperial expansion. He demonstrates for historians the ways in which a precise use of terms such as frontier, periphery, and center can give the history of a particular region a better focus. Broers does so by analyzing the specific example of the 1800–1814 annexations of parts of the Italian peninsula to the Napoleonic empire known to contemporaries as the reunited departments. He charts the transformation of the region in north-central Italy from one of small, weak states to their new roles as parts of a powerful, centralizing, pan-European empire. In the course of chronicling this transformation, Broers challenges many stereotypes about the regional configuration of modern Italy. He focuses particularly on the impact of this change on the relationship between center and periphery, and on the altered nature of the relationship between the new imperial state and the various components of this area. Broers thus provides us with a valuable example of how the tools of historical geography can be used to analyze a critical historical development.

Indira Falk Gesink challenges assumptions about the inflexibility of the Islamic legal tradition and its relation to the rise of twentieth-century militant Islamism. She notes that media analyses after 9/11 often blamed the inflexibility of Islamic law for the rise of Islamic militancy. However, Gesink demonstrates that this purported inflexibility is largely a myth, generated both by the attempts of conservative legal scholars to maintain a semblance of unity in the Sunni Muslim community and by nineteenth-century reformers' constructions of a stagnant society as a foil for their programs of reform. During nineteenth-century debates between conservatives and reformers in Egypt, she explains, reformers such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad `Abduh developed new meanings for technical legal terms and ijtihad that conservatives had used to bolster the rule of law and unity of the community. One out come of these debates was that legal interpretation, once restricted to highly trained jurists, became a lay practice. She shows that lay legal interpretation, combined with the rise of state-defined Islams and oppressive political circumstances, helped produce the great diversity of Islamic belief today, including militant groups whose intellectual heritages can be traced directly back to nineteenth-century Egyptian reformers. Gesink thus provides a valuable review of Islamic legal practice and three key arguments: that the telling of Islamic history that informs popular knowledge of Islamic law is based on an invented tradition, that the "inventors" also re-imagined key concepts used in legal derivation that have deeply influenced popular understandings of Islamic law, and that many militant Islamic groups of the twentieth century have roots in those re-imaginings of Islamic legal methodology. Her essay is thus a particularly useful example of how the past helps us understand the present more clearly.

AHR Forum Essay

Roy Rosenzweig considers two sharply different futures that confront historians in the digital era. On the one hand, he explains, no one has figured out how to ensure that the digital present will be available to the future's historians. Every day, vast quantities of digital documentation are being generated without the technical, social, economic, or legal structures that would guarantee their preservation. And yet on the other hand, Rosenzweig insists, if these are solved, in whole or in part, then historians will face a second, profound challenge: What would it be like to write history with an essentially complete historical record? Consequently, he maintains, historians may be facing a fundamental paradigm shift from a culture of scarcity to a culture of abundance. As a result of these two developments, we need to think simultaneously about how to research, write, and teach in a world of unheard-of historical abundance and how to avoid a future of record scarcity. However, he tells us, even though these prospects have occasioned enormous commentary among librarians, archivists, and computer scientists, historians have almost entirely ignored them. Rosenzweig argues that this neglect must stop. We must shift our attention from the past to the present and future and embrace a broadened professional agenda—one, ironically, that was more common among historians a hundred years ago. Rosenzweig's essay is intended to spark discussion about reviving that agenda. AHR readers who want to engage in this debate can do so in an online discussion of the article during the first two weeks of September 2003. Details can be found in the introduction to the Forum.

Review Essay

Catherine J. Kudlick introduces historians to disability as a central yet little-studied category of historical analysis. In are view of several seminal books in this field, she presents disability history as a new subject of scholarly inquiry that has far-reaching implications for both teaching and research about the past. Drawing from the interdisciplinary field of disability studies, this new history challenges traditionally held views that have dismissed disability as an individual's pathological condition of interest only to health professionals. Instead, Kudlick contends, the work of a growing number of scholars throughout the humanities and social sciences reveals disability to be as significant a defining social category as race, class, gender, and sexuality. As a result, she argues, disability should prompt historians in all fields and specialties to rethink virtually every "given" they have taken for granted. Kudlick develops this argument in an review of the literature that first looks at disability broadly to show the diversity of approaches in the field, then shifts to an analysis of deaf history, the field's most highly developed subgenre. She concludes the essay with a provocative contrast that challenges the field's dominant modern and Western assumptions with an example of medieval Islamic society's very different views of blindness. Kudlick's essay thus demonstrates the range and potential of disability history to alter our understanding of the past.

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