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In This Issue
| This issue contains an American Historical Association Presidential Address, three articles, and a review essay. The presidential address analyzes the difficulties nations face in ending wars. The articles examine the cultural and political history of sensibility, the relationship between mass culture and news, and the contested role of women soldiers. The review essay assesses recent work on the history of human rights. In addition, the issue contains our usual array of book and film reviews. There is, though, a change in the classification and presentation of the reviews. Beginning with this issue, all reviews—books, film, other media—will be placed in the general topical, temporal, and spatial categories that have been used for books. Thus, for example, book reviews and film reviews on nineteenth-century Mexico will henceforth be in the same section. We hope this change will make the reviews more accessible and more useful for readers. |
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Presidential Address | |
| James M. McPherson uses his presidential address to examine the question of why nations find it harder to end a war than to start one. Like World War II, the United States Civil War did not end with a negotiated peace but with unconditional surrender by the losing armies. The issues over which the Civil War was fought—union versus disunion, freedom versus slavery—proved to be nonnegotiable. Nevertheless, during the war there were numerous efforts to achieve peace through negotiations. He argues that these efforts proceeded through three stages: foreign mediation, unofficial contacts, and quasi-official conversations. All failed. McPherson analyzes the aborted effort by Britain and France to mediate the conflict and end the war on the basis of Confederate independence in 1862, the unofficial contacts between Northern civilians and Confederate officials in 1864, and the Hampton Roads conference of February 1865, in which President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William H. Seward met with three Confederate officials, including Vice-President Alexander Stephens. All of these efforts, he explains, foundered on the irreconcilable positions of Lincoln and Confederate President Jefferson Davis. As Lincoln put it in his message to Congress in December 1864, the central issue of union or disunion "can only be tried by war, and decided by victory." In this way, McPherson's chronicle of the failed quest to negotiate an end to this Civil War compels us to consider the unforeseen consequences of going to war. |
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Articles | |
Sarah Knott explores the cultural and political history of "sensibility" in first the United States and, secondly, Britain and France, during and after the American war for independence. She takes as her point of departure the strained reactions to the execution of British "spy" John André. During the war, Knott argues, American officers used sensibility as a means of cohesion and competition, making strangely militarist and fraternal the decidedly heterosocial culture of sensibility they had once shared with fellow Britons. After the war, and in contrast to Britain, where sensibility was being discredited as excessive, feminizing, and foreign, elite Americans made sensibility—especially male sensibility—one basis for building the new nation. This American example, she suggests, in turn influenced the uses of sensibility in French revolutionary political culture. Knott's article thus suggests how attention to military history helps us better understand the political cultures of the Age of Revolutions and the usually literary and domestic history of sensibility.
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Gregory Shaya argues that historians can best understand the new mass culture of fin-de-siècle France by dropping the long-fashionable focus on the flâneur, the urban stroller immortalized by Charles Baudelaire (and later Walter Benjamin), in favor of a close examination of the badaud, the gawker or rubberneck. The badaud, so often disdained in nineteenth-century literary culture as dull and gaping, was taken up by the mass press of Paris and valorized as the model of a mass public—spontaneous, generous, and empathic—that came together outside the spell of class and politics. Steering between Habermasian models of the late nineteenth-century decline of the public sphere and recent historical studies that have emphasized mass culture's role in forging authentic communities, Shaya argues that news and images of crime and catastrophe—and, most important, of the crowd of badauds that flocked to them—served to construct a new understanding of a mass public in France, a public of empathy to be contrasted with (abstract, reasonable) public opinion of the early nineteenth century. By enhancing our understanding of the cultural uses of news and the operating principles of the public sphere in France, Shaya addresses theoretical questions about mass culture of importance to historians who study various times and places.
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| Melissa K. Stockdale investigates the phenomenon of women soldiers in World War I. She takes as her prime example the revolutionary Women's Battalions of Death in the Russian Army. Stockdale places her analysis within the Western tradition of armed civic virtue and its linkage of rights of modern citizenship with the citizen's obligation to bear arms. The creation of the first government-sanctioned female combat units in modern history was, she argues, a product of the intersection of total war, national emergency, and democratizing revolution that profoundly affected ideas about gender roles and citizenship in Russia. Demonstrating that the women's battalions were a national, mass movement that cut across class and political identities, Stockdale's analysis illuminates the contingencies of Russian patriotism in a critical era. And she suggests why gender beliefs and practices, as well as the larger omission of the war experience from Russian historical narratives for some seven decades, ensured that the story of these once-celebrated women soldiers would be largely forgotten. Stockdale's essay thus helps give the important issue of women's performance of citizenship through soldiering a new past. |
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Review Essay | |
| Kenneth Cmiel surveys recent writing on the history of human rights. He asks why there has been, in the past ten years, a spate of new writing on the history of human rights politics. Cmiel answers by tying the new historiography to the more general optimism about human rights that emerged at the end of the Cold War. He argues that historians have taken two basic approaches to the subject: exploring how claims made in the name of universal rights have been implicated in concrete political situations, and examining the history of transnational activism. While both promise to tell us much about modern politics, he closes the essay by raising several cautionary points. First, since much of this recent historiography has been written by those sympathetic to human rights activism, he wonders how the recent past of human rights would look if approached from more critical perspectives. Second, he contends that there should be a better integration of the history of human rights activism with that of human rights atrocities. At present, they are too often treated separately. Finally, Cmiel asks us to consider whether the recent historiography is not a harbinger of something new but simply a footnote to a post–Cold War optimism that will not survive in the post–9/11 era. His essay thus provides a thoughtful and insightful introduction to this emerging body of scholarship. |
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