|
|
|
In This Issue
| This issue contains an American Historical Association presidential address, three articles, and a review essay. The presidential address analyzes the historical recreations of a Ming-dynasty Chinese intellectual. The articles examine the inquisition in medieval Europe, illustrations of crowds in the French Revolution, and truth commissions in Latin America. The review essay evaluates recent scholarship on the history of museums. In addition, the issue contains our usual array of book and film reviews. The issue, however, is unusual because the article on the French Revolution, "Imaging the French Revolution: Depictions of the French Revolutionary Crowd," is primarily a work of electronic scholarship. Consequently, the print version of the February 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 be sent to the American Historical Review, 914 E. Atwater Ave., Bloomington, IN 47401 or to our e-mail address: ahr@indiana.edu. |
|
| |
|
Presidential Address | |
| Jonathan Spence draws his presidential address mainly from the writings of the Ming-dynasty scholar, bon-vivant, and essayist Zhang Dai, who was born in Shaoxing in 1597. For forty-seven years he lived a sheltered, pleasant, and erudite life. But in 1644 the Ming dynasty was overthrown by a combination of peasant rebels and Manchu invaders from the north, and in the ensuing warfare Zhang lost his home and most of his library and other possessions. Thereafter, until his death in 1680 (or later) he concentrated on recreating by means of words and memory the many levels of the worlds that he had lost. Spence focuses on the varied ways that Zhang Dai chose to write about his own family. He did this in three blocks of short biographies, each devoted to different male relatives from within his immediate family, spanning four generations. Spence explains that Zhang wrote both literally and metaphorically about his family: much of what he wrote appears to be graphically presented social history at the micro level, concentrating on the achievements but also on the flaws and the obsessions of each of his subjects. At the same time, Spence notes, Zhang's various depictions of his family seem intended to be also read as metaphors, as a way of describing both how and why the dynasty under which the Zhangs had lived for so long came to such a catastrophic end. |
|
| |
|
Articles | |
| Christine Caldwell Ames uses the religious mentalities of two ostensibly disparate groups—ecclesiastics who conducted or supported heresy inquisitions in medieval Western Europe, and the laypeople who protested these interrogations into faith—as a means to consider broader questions about historians' constructions of their fields. She examines first the spiritual geography of medieval inquisitors, arguing that they understood and presented their work within a Christian framework of sin, penance, and divine governance and punishment. This work contributed to the Roman church's new and ambitious program of spiritual discipline that sought to reach beyond the body and into the soul. Ames then analyzes an important incident of violent anti-inquisitorial resistance. She asserts that such violence resulted from and exhibited its initiators' religious worldview, including a vision shared with inquisitors of God's justice. Through this juxtaposition of how inquisitors and laity reconciled sincere belief and violence, Ames questions the dominant reading in medieval historiography of "persecution." By explaining persecution in terms of power and political and social tensions, she argues, those explanations perpetuate a traditional reluctance to excavate the peculiar, historicized religious foundations of inquisition and its repression. Ames's larger goal is to suggest how revisions of medieval inquisition and persecution should compel us to ask how historians' constructions of, and suppositions about, "religion" drive their constructions of religious history. |
|
|
|
|
| Jack Censer and Lynn Hunt present an overview of an electronic article on depictions of crowd violence during the French Revolution. The article includes the perspectives of six different scholars, both historians and art historians. Censer and Hunt explain that crowd actions have long been a subject of contention in the historiography of the French Revolution, but they contend that text-based sources have dominated the historiography. In contrast, the essays in this article take as their point of departure a bank of forty-two images selected to represent the variety of ways that crowds could be depicted. Censer and Hunt argue that visual evidence is particularly important in the case of the French Revolution: not only did thousands of images proliferate in a remarkable diversity of formats, but also those images often spoke to issues, such as crowd violence, that proved difficult for supporters of the Revolution to discuss frankly in speeches or newspaper articles. The electronic presentation makes it possible to view the images separately as well as within the articles, to read the discussion that took place among the authors about their findings, and to directly compare different authors' interpretations of particular images. |
|
|
|
|
| Greg Grandin contends that discussions about the efficacy of truth commissions often confuse the task of commissions to document and interpret acts of political violence with their function in promoting nationalism and consolidating state legitimacy. He analyzes the evolution of the way Latin American truth commissions have used historical analysis to examine political repression to chart the limits of the assumptions that underwrote Latin America's turn toward constitutional rule and free-market policies. In Argentina and Chile, he explains, Latin America's first truth commissions used to history not as an analytical tool to examine the origins and consequences of political terror but rather to create a dark backdrop on which to contrast the light of liberal tolerance and self-restraint. In Guatemala, however, state terror was so brutal that it shattered the conceit that future social solidarity could be constructed from a description of past human rights transgressions and instead lead the commission to present violence not just in descriptive or moral terms but in historical and social science ones as well. This methodological innovation, Grandin argues, allowed the Guatemalan commission to rule that the military committed acts of genocide because by definition genocide is a collective crime and thus demands social and historical analysis. |
|
| |
|
Review Essay | |
| Randolph Starn offers historians a brief guide to a large, self-consciously "new," and mostly critical literature on the theory, practice, and history of museums that has appeared since the early 1980s in the United States, the United Kingdom and Commonwealth, and continental Europe. He provides a taxonomy and a running commentary on the major themes of this museum literature: the genealogy of museums; the shifting status of museum objects; the politics of museum culture from the ideal of universality to "museum wars" over cultural difference; the past and future of the "consuming experience" of the contemporary museum-theme park-shopping complex. Starn's primary aim is to encourage greater interaction between historians and museum professionals. He reminds us that both have claims on the past that challenge and complement one another, and he argues they need to be brought into closer dialogue with each other at a time when the future of the past is at risk. |
|
|
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|