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In This Issue
| This issue contains four articles and a review essay. The articles examine the regulation of the meat trade through a comparative analysis of three cities, the creation of historical narratives in India, the connections between race and benevolence in the early twentieth-century United States, and the place of Islam in modern Japanese diplomacy. The review essay surveys historical studies in the newly emerging field of the scholarship of teaching. In addition, the issue contains our usual array of book and film reviews. |
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Articles | |
| Roger Horowitz, Jeffrey M. Pilcher, and Sydney Watts compare the shifting boundaries between state intervention and market liberalization in the meat trades of Paris, New York City, and Mexico City across three historical episodes: an old regime period characterized by paternalist intervention, a radical era of liberalization, and a period that reinstituted a regulatory regime. Their comparison of the same trade in three major cities reveals how different societies structured the regulation of economic activity. The authors use Ira Katznelson's notion of "the grammar of liberalism" to suggest that a useful strategy in comparative history is not to argue for exceptionalism but instead to identify points of similarity between different national cultures. They present the various configurations of market organization and consumer society as expressions of what they term "market culture." First they explain the various ways that historians have employed market culture to capture the tension between economic rationality and the social relationships in which such concepts and practices are embedded; then they employ the concept as a tool to rethink economic and social processes and to focus on how consumer expectations and market regulation vary depending on particular goods and services. More generally, Horowitz, Pilcher, and Watts argue for the centrality of food as an important and revealing subject of historical inquiry. Their study demonstrates the insights that can come from subjecting longstanding issues like economic regulation to comparative analysis. |
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| Sumit Guha examines the distinctions between "folklore" or "native traditions" and "scientific history" and how they have emerged historically. His analysis is drawn from a study of the changing character and social meaning of historical narratives in western India from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. Guha uses material from these narratives to trace the ways in which the interaction of kingly power with resilient local societies generated a distinct narrative genre from the sixteenth century onward. He also shows how that genre changed over time: first in the eighteenth century with the rise to all-India prominence of a regional Marathi-speaking elite, and again with the establishment of British colonial rule a century later. His fundamental goal is this analysis is to provide a new perspective on an issue of perennial importance to our discipline: the generative relations between structures of power, on the one hand, and historical traditions and practices, on the other. Guha's essay thus helps us understand historical thinking as a cultural construct. |
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| Gunja SenGupta analyzes the interplay of identity, power, and everyday politics with the assumptions of American exceptionalism in Progressive-era New York. The dynamics of this interplay emerge in her case study of the Howard Orphanage and Industrial School (HOIS), an African-American benevolent association originally founded in Brooklyn to shelter the children of southern migrant women employed in domestic service. The records of the HOIS offer a rich set of sources to study the formation of identity by assessing the organization's benefactors, staff, and clients as men and women, as workers and consumers, as surrogate parents, children, and lovers, and as black and white Americans. SenGupta develops this analysis by examining the dialectical relationship between elite white and black interpretations of American identity embedded in the welfare visions and management styles of the HOIS's mostly white managers and its black staff. She also shows how these clashes in turn helped shape the rhetorical, symbolic, and material strategies of the institution's inmates. Applying the conceptual insights of subaltern scholarship on Africa, Latin America, and Asia to the United States, SenGupta's essay demonstrates how local studies can engage larger historiographical issues. |
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| Selçuk Esenbel explores the role of Islam in Japan's global claim to Asia in an effort to connect Japanese history to the history of Islam. She argues that despite the major role Islam came to play in Japan's Pan-Asianist international policy, the topic has not been studied extensively because of the intellectual boundaries of area studies. She crosses those boundaries by focusing on the relationship between Japanese nationalism and political Islam through the activities of Pan-Islamist and Japanese Pan-Asianist actors between 1900 and 1945. In the process, Esenbel challenges the simple applications of ideological explanations such as Occidentalism or Orientalism as explanations of the emergence of anti-Western movements highlighting instead how the transnational character of Pan-Islam was connected to the policies and behavior of world powers in the twentieth century. In place of the familiar Japan/West binary, she asserts the need to understand an alternative arena of international relations between so-called "Non-Western" regions in modern history. |
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Review Essay | |
| David Pace charts the rise of interest in the scholarship of teaching and learning throughout the English-speaking world and the work it has produced on the teaching of history. The emergence of this new body of scholarship, he argues, has made visible the longstanding contrast between the rigor with which historians create knowledge about the past and the amateurishness that has traditionally marked the generation and transmission of knowledge about teaching history. Those in the new field have begun to explore questions such as how the conceptions of history students bring to the classroom affect their learning and what kinds of mental operations students must master to succeed in history courses. However, Pace concludes that the potential of such research will not be realized until professional historians join in the effort to create rigorous knowledge about what occurs in the college history classroom. |
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