| In This Issue | The American Historical Review, 108.5

In This Issue

This issue contains three articles and an AHR Forum. The articles examine the origins of the United States Civil War, the intellectual history of the later Middle Ages, and the significance of soldiers' letters in World War I. The Forum, which includes a central essay and three comments, tackles the complicated issue of racial and ethnic amalgamation in the history of the United States. In addition, the issue contains our usual array of book and film reviews. The issue, however, is unusual because the lead article, "The Difference Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities," is primarily a work of electronic scholarship. Consequently, the print version of the December AHR contains only a brief overview of the article; the full article is in the electronic version of the journal. The article is part of our continuing attempts to produce new forms of historical scholarship. It can be read at: www.historycooperative.org/ahr/. Comments about the article and the larger subject of electronic scholarship can sent to the American Historical Review, 914 E. Atwater Ave., Bloomington, IN 47405 or to our e-mail address: ahr@indiana.edu.

Articles

William G. Thomas III and Edward L. Ayers constructed this electronic article as an experiment in digital history and as a contribution to debates about the origins of the United States Civil War. Their primary intent is to explore the most effective ways to present historical scholarship in the digital medium. Toward that end, they seek to join the article's form with its argument, using the power of linking in hypertext to make connections among evidence, historiography, and argument and to allow readers to explore lines of analysis on their own. They do so by focusing on slavery and its relationship to modernity in two American communities and addressing a long debate in the historiography. Generations of historians have debated the differences slavery made, particularly in an Atlantic world in which slavery played such a central role. These differences assumed profound importance in the case of the United States, where the Civil War became the largest war waged over the future of slavery. Thomas and Ayers approach this long-running debate by comparing the specific manifestations of slavery and contract labor in detail and in relationship to one another in a close analysis of two communities—Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania. They use the capabilities of new information technologies both for analysis and for presentation of the argument. For analysis, the pair turns in particular to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to understand the way social structures were arranged spatially. For presentation, they rely on Extensible Markup Language (XML) to connect large amounts of evidence with detailed discussions of the historiography on slavery in the United States on the eve of the American Civil War. Through their innovative article, Thomas and Ayers have made a very significant contribution to our understanding of a critical historical event and the methods historians use to produce historical scholarship.

Daniel Hobbins proposes a new way of approaching the intellectual history of the later Middle Ages. He turns the focus from the history of ideas to what he terms the "cultural situation" of the medieval schoolman. Hobbins traces a crucial shift in literary genres to offer clues as to how intellectuals reconceived their public during this period. By the fifteenth century, he argues, the classic school genres such as the commentary had given way to the more flexible and reader-friendly "tract" addressing a specific case. As a way of coming to terms with this shift and thereby rethinking the role of intellectual life in this era, Hobbins proposes the model of "public intellectual," a phrase that he believes captures the new cultural reality of the late medieval schoolman. Hobbins contends that the label applies particularly well to Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, and uses him as a model of the new intellectual actor. Setting Gerson apart, first, was his awareness that earlier schoolmen had thus far ignored lay audiences, or had failed to tailor their delivery so that they could be clearly understood. Second, Gerson attempted to address this oversight through works written in the vernacular and through a clearer, more fluid style—here showing the influence of Italian humanists. Third, evidence on multiple levels indicates that Gerson succeeded in reaching a wide public. In this attempt at outreach, Gerson was entering a public arena where he frequently found himself challenged by medical masters and canon lawyers. Rather than dismiss this outreach as "vulgarization," Hobbins argues that historians should recognize the historical shift that occurred. His engaging article thus illustrates how a fresh conceptual approach can transform our understanding of a historically marginalized period.

Martha Hanna argues that letter writing served an important role in World War I France. It allowed soldiers and their immediate families to maintain contact with one another and preserve bonds of intimacy that would otherwise have been eroded by the enforced absences that war made inevitable. Taking issue with scholars who dismiss frontline correspondence as intentionally uninformative, she demonstrates that soldiers described, often at some length and in harrowing detail, the actual nature of combat. They did so, she contends, because they had internalized the lessons of their childhood, which had impressed on young children both the importance of maintaining contact with one's family when compelled to live far from home and the imperative to speak honestly of one's daily life, however unsettling such honest conversations might be. But, Hanna insists, emphasizing only the descriptive or testimonial quality of frontline correspondence overlooks the affective significance of wartime letter writing. Not only did letters allow husbands and wives, sons and parents, fiancés and their betrothed to share with one another the momentous events and the mundane occurrences of everyday life, they also provided soldiers and civilians alike with consolation in the face of adversity and the reassurance of abiding affection. Well schooled in the art of evading the censors, civilian and combatant letter writers developed codes and discursive strategies that allowed them to speak intimately to one another and thus sustain familial affection. Ultimately, however, frontline soldiers, connected by regular and affectionate correspondence to only a few civilians at home, grew increasingly alienated from other civilians to whom they did not write. As a result, letter writing in World War I France reinforced intimacy within the immediate family while it also fostered alienation beyond it. Hanna's article is thus a compelling example of the importance of understanding the public implications of private acts.

AHR Forum

David A. Hollinger begins the Forum by asking what features the history of the United States displays when we focus our attention on how different "races" and "ethnic groups" have mixed or not mixed. Among these features, he finds, are striking differences between the experiences of the various non-European descent groups. White racism was differently enacted from case to case, yet the anti-discrimination remedies established in the 1960s and 1970s treated the non-European groups alike, ignoring the unique impact on blacks not only of slavery and the Jim Crow system but of miscegenation laws and of the "one-drop rule" that racialized as African American anyone with any discernable sign of African ancestry. Hollinger argues, further, that if we accept as real the black-white mixing that the principle of hypodescent has obscured, and if we simultaneously take into account the mixing in recent decades of immigrant-based populations of ethnically Asian and Latino peoples with Americans of predominantly European ancestry, we confront the fact that "amalgamation" is one of the most prominent themes in the history of the United States when viewed in world-historical perspective. Hollinger also argues that the concept of "amalgamation" frees us from several misleading connotations of "the melting pot."

Three commentators continue the discussion by taking up the critical issues raised by Hollinger.

Thomas E. Skidmore explains that, in the middle of the last century, Brazil and the United States presented sharply contrasting systems of race relations. Brazil, once the largest slave economy in the New World, had abolished slavery through a (largely) orderly legislative process that avoided any civil war. It went on to create an internationally recognized, multi-racially harmonious society. Yet, by century's end, Brazil had discovered racial discrimination and was launching an Affirmative Action program. The United States in 1950 was still a racially segregated society. Since then, it has largely been transformed from a biracial (the "one-drop rule") into an emerging multi-racial system in which Affirmative Action, once a prized tool against discrimination, has been greatly undermined by court decisions. Skidmore concludes his comment by asking us to consider how the apparently contrary directions in the development of these two systems can be explained.

Barbara J. Fields continues the discussion by contending that "race," the concept and the word, has served in American history and historical literature as a euphemism (for slavery, disfranchisement, segregation, lynching, pogroms, and related historical atrocities) and as shorthand (meaning persons of African descent and anything pertaining to them). Substituted for "racism," it disguises the real actions that constitute racism as the fictive traits that constitute race. Efforts to make race respectable by generalizing and extending it (through the question-begging formulas "racialization," "identity," and "culture") only underscore the historical particularity of the stigma attached to persons of African descent. She maintains that, by recognizing these truths, Hollinger's rich analysis offers much of value. But Field also insists that the focus on "ethnoracial mixture" implicitly accepts as a given that the historical problem resides in the persons designated as a race, rather than in the racism that has so designated them.

Henry Yu concludes the Forum by agreeing that Hollinger's essay quite rightly identifies interracial marriage and sex as an interesting topic for examining United States history. Unfortunately, he contends, Hollinger's argument goes too far in claiming that this history of sexual contact is a sign of hope, both for the United States and for the rest of the world. The intellectual interest in interracial sexuality has a long history in itself, defining certain acts of sexual transgression as signs of progress in race relations while ignoring other acts. Indeed, race-mixing as a concept has contributed to race-making, determining the boundaries of racial categories rather than erasing or lessening the effects of racial borders. Rather than seeing interracial sexuality as an indication of progress, Yu charts regional variations in racialization as a historical process, revealing the very different ways that migration and transnational connections have affected and changed definitions of racial difference in the Pacific and Atlantic regions.

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