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In This Issue
| This issue contains four articles and a review essay. The articles examine the creation of sensationalist crime reporting, the impact of the United States Civil War on the global cotton industry, the role of public ceremonies in modern European culture, and the significance of the auditory history of the Soviet Union. The review essay assesses the scholarly and professional significance of the Gutenberg-e project that has led to the publication of a series of electronic history monographs. In addition, the issue contains our usual array of book and film reviews. Sadly, this issue also marks the end of Assistant Editor Allyn Faye Roberts's eighteen-year tenure at the AHR. She died in October 2004 as a result of complications from cancer surgery. Allyn edited articles for the AHR with verve, skill, and insight. Her impact on the journal was profound; she will missed by colleagues, authors, and readers. |
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Articles | |
| Joy Wiltenburg explores historical meanings of the often-derided phenomenon of sensationalist crime reporting. Tracing the genre to its beginnings in sixteenth-century Germany, she argues that modern scholarly distaste has hampered understanding of its cultural significance. Although the term sensationalism has traditionally been associated with low-class commercialism, early forms addressed a respectable audience and a range of social, religious, and political agendas. Authors of early sensationalism used purposeful techniques to heighten the emotional impact of their works, including graphic descriptions of violence, direct dialogue, and a primary focus on the shattering of familial bonds. This emotional resonance, Wiltenburg argues, creates a distinctive rhetorical mode that constructs its own messages as natural, akin to the visceral horror aroused by bloody crimes. In early modern Germany, the genre was used to promote governmental authority, confessional allegiance, and familial hierarchy. In other times and places, from seventeenth-century England to the modern United States, it has operated in the same way to both reflect and affect issues of cultural and political contestation. |
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| Sven Beckert examines the reshaping of the global cotton industry in the wake of the American Civil War. Cotton was central to the first industrial revolution, and between 1780 and 1861, most of this cotton was grown and harvested by slaves in the southern United States and worked up in Great Britain. The American Civil War destroyed this nexus and with it one of the central pillars of nineteenth-century capitalism. Beckert investigates how powerful capitalists and state bureaucrats responded to what was in effect the world's first sustained raw materials crisis. In constant negotiation with rural cultivators all over the world, merchants and manufacturers built a new global "empire of cotton." This worldwide web of cotton production was characterized by the incorporation of new territories into the global economy, by the emergence of new systems of labor replacing slavery, and by an increasing reliance of capitalists on ever more powerful states. By adopting a transnational approach, the article opens fresh vistas on the American Civil War. More generally, by investigating the politics of securing a core raw material for the industrialized world, Beckert helps to further our understanding of the dramatic changes that occurred within the global political economy during the nineteenth century. |
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| David Pomfret argues that through the "festival of the people's muse," the republican government of France produced a new national icon around the turn of the twentieth century. He explains that perceptions of national crisis encouraged the state to stage mass spectacles of young women as paragons of beauty and health designed to overcome damaging class divisions and to win the support of the working class. Pomfret highlights the importance of age in the representation of the nation at these festivals. Political elites used the iconic power of "young womanhood" or female "adolescence" to undermine feminist challenges to male authority, and to defuse male resistance to the state's encroachment upon a man's role as paterfamilias. The festivals demonstrate, he contends, the analytical importance of understanding the intersection of age with other key social variables such as gender, class, and race. Pomfret concludes by arguing that although male anxieties impelled the sponsorship of this icon, the festival of the people's muse opened up opportunities for young women to appropriate new subjectivities and to overcome, albeit in a limited way, their social marginality. |
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| Richard L. Hernandez analyzes the auditory components of the Bolshevik Great Turn of 1928–1932, during which a comprehensive revolution of the senses transpired in Soviet Russia. Like conflicts elsewhere between traditional societies and modernizing regimes, political struggles between Russian villagers and Bolshevik agents during these crucial years coalesced around religious beliefs and practices. He contends that while other, more obvious religious institutions or symbols were drawn into these conflicts, church bells had a distinctive role to play because they were physical and aural linchpins in the cultural sensibilities that the Bolsheviks wanted desperately to reconfigure. Hernandez focuses on the bells as both weapons of resistance and targets of destruction. He demonstrates that the regime produced sights and sounds more in tune with modern sensibilities, thereby supplanting the social authority of bells in the new Soviet society. While expanding our understanding of the Bolshevik Revolution's consolidation under Stalin, he also presents a case study of the vicissitudes of religious beliefs and practices in modern society by complicating the typical story of "secularization" in two ways. First, he shows that, instead of serving merely as an irrational foil to modern life, religious tradition helped believers form sophisticated views of the world and equipped them to respond to dramatic social upheavals. Second, and conversely, he explains that atheistic regimes like the Bolsheviks fostered cultures rooted in peculiarly "modern" sacred texts, symbols, and ritual practices. |
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Review Essay | |
| Patrick Manning reviews the first eleven electronic books published by the Gutenberg-e project, in which Columbia University Press and the American Historical Association have combined to select and publish monographs based on award-winning dissertations in several fields of history. He explains the genesis and development of the program, which began as an attempt to protect the historical monograph in the electronic age; and he also identifies the distinctive place of Gutenberg-e in the context of other campaigns of electronic publication in history, because of its emphasis on the first book. Manning places the books in three categories: social histories linked with cultural analysis, studies of state policy and community response, and institutional histories. He notes that the books cover a wide enough range of regions, times, and topics that a narrative of modern history can be read through them. The books are well produced and the online format is easily navigable, but he argues they remain firmly within the established limits of their fields: in sum, Manning argues, these electronic books appear as very strong monographs, but not as breakthroughs in either format or interpretation. The Gutenberg-e books reveal, he contends, that graduate study continues to be narrowly focused in preparation of historical monographs, and they confirm the argument of the AHA's recent report on graduate education that the needs of "generational succession" in the discipline of history are not being met. While the Gutenberg-e initiative is a valuable step, Manning concludes that historians need to make further changes to address critical issues such the synthesis of research results, interdisciplinary communication, defining research agendas, competing for research funding, and developing the next generation of leadership for the discipline. |
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