Communication

A letter to the editor will be considered only if it relates to an article or review published in this journal; publication is solely at the editors' discretion. The AHA disclaims responsibility for statements, of either fact or opinion, made by the writers. Letters should not exceed one thousand words for articles and seven hundred words for reviews. They can be submitted by e-mail to ahr@indiana.edu, or by postal service to Editor, American Historical Review, 914 E. Atwater Ave, Bloomington, IN 47401. For detailed information on the policies for this section, see http://www.historycooperative.org/ahr/communpo.html.

ARTICLES

To the Editor:
Professional historians, especially those with tenure, would do well to insist that college mission statements be readily available and written in standard grammatical English. Only after addressing that issue will the profession be successful addressing the ancillary issue of what historians actually do during classroom teaching, as David Pace, "The Amateur in the Operating Room" (AHR, October 2004), proposes.
Raymond J. Jirran Thomas Nelson Community College

David Pace did not wish to respond. The Editors

To the Editor:
Patrick Manning's review of the Gutenberg-e project (AHR, December 2004) was thorough and useful, but as an assessment of the state of the historical profession, it was also disconcerting. I have in mind the increasing narrowness of the younger scholars, which was noted in the Gutenberg-e competition winners. This result implies that an innovation in book format, however interesting, cannot of itself be expected to change the dynamics of the profession. The review asks, "How will historians handle the interdisciplinary and transregional developments in inquiry?" To make a solution more evident, I would rephrase it this way: How can the young be exposed to, and draw sustenance from, work outside the range of their inevitable initial specialization? I think it might help if the general and comparative aspects of specialized work, as presently published, were not lost to readers in other specialties. To achieve this in a useful degree, perhaps no new publishing venture is required. It might suffice to have one person, by preference a senior scholar with the requisite experience and job security, perform an overview function: surveying publications, identifying work of special comparative or general interest, and making the resulting list available as a feature of the AHR, or online, or both. The stipend of such a position, being in addition to a senior salary or pension, could be modest, and thus easily endowed by corporate or private generosity. An AHA commitment to such a function might enhance the breadth which the field desires, but which, in the nature of things, is going to be less and less evident in even the best new scholars' first books.
E Bruce Brooks University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Patrick Manning responds:
E Bruce Brooks suggests that a senior scholar might accept the task of surveying scholarship crossing the boundaries of historical subfields, and that the AHR or online resources could convey this information for the general interest of historians and especially for younger scholars. As a result, "the general and comparative aspects of specialized work, as presently published," might not be "lost to readers in other specialties."
I think this is a helpful and economical suggestion. It can help resolve the contradiction between localized historical discourses and the interdisciplinary, transregional aspects of historical studies. But dissertation research too might be broadened, so that the "inevitable initial specialization" of doctoral students could nevertheless be in a field of considerable breadth. Further, between senior and dissertation levels, one might imagine programs of postdoctoral study that would add disciplines and historical fields to the specializations of historians. The Gutenberg-e project is itself part of the solution, both because it draws attention to dissertation research and because it provokes discussion on broader needs for generational succession in history.
More generally, I think historians need a concerted effort at all levels to link the growing range of historical studies to the inherited strength of specificity in historical analysis.
Patrick Manning Northeastern University

REVIEWS

To the Editor:
In his review of my book Wandering Paysanos (AHR, December 2004), Ariel de la Fuente offers an assessment that I consider misleading. To begin with, my book does not claim that Rosas established and supported "the rule of law." I am aware that a dictatorial regime, however popular, does not qualify for upholding the rule of law in the juridical-constitutional sense. My book presents the "law" as an important dimension of Federalist ideology and shows how state functionaries tried to disseminate the idea that in a republic, the law is the main regulator of social interactions. In spite of the regression of elite political and civil rights, peasants and peons experienced some progress in terms of greater equality before the law and increased accessibility to the justice system. As state authorities became more systematic about enforcing existing decrees and circulars, the subaltern classes learned to respect these "laws." Folks in rural towns who provided evidence to help solve a murder case present a good example of this interaction. Of course, there were others who defied the authority of judges and people who asserted older notions of "justice" based on "privilege" and paternalism. De la Fuente picked up one of these cases (a peon who claimed to have been pardoned by Rosas's daughter) to reject my whole argument.
De la Fuente also dismisses my proposition about the predictability of Rosas's penal policies, presenting Rosas's confiscation of unitario properties as a counterexample. This is a misleading criticism, for my argument relates only to penal policies concerning common delinquents. Rosas's penal policies were "predictable"—not proportional, adequate, or just, but merely predictable. He gave similar sentences for various types of felonies (desertion, theft, murder) and was systematic about their implementation. With regard to political crimes, Rosas was also inflexible. When confronted with an infrequent political crime (the Southern Rebellion of 1839), he responded with a severe and unusual punishment.
My argument about deserters' views of the "fatherland" is also misconstrued in this review. My argument relates to republican values, as understood by the subalterns, not to notions of territorial patriotism. Deserters complained about the unfair punishments and the privations imposed by the army as unfitting for free men and citizens. Their "reasons" articulated a form of republican discourse about rights. They felt themselves to be members of a new imagined community—the "Federation," a land with shifting borders. To dismiss my argument by stating that two of the voices were not really "Argentine" reveals little understanding of the nature of the argument.
De la Fuente is not persuaded by my suggestion about the effacement of the Independence Epic in popular memory. My evidence tells me that soldiers who showed a remarkable memory of civil war events were unable to remember the great battles and generals of the Independence period. Rosista official rhetoric and representations only deepened this ongoing process of "forgetting." De la Fuente wonders whether the filiaciones are good sources for assessing the collective memory about past wars. My answer is yes. These documents provide multiple fragments of evidence that point in this direction.
The reviewer states that I never discuss the methodological problems associated with voices and stories recuperated in the context of an interrogation. This is simply not true. In different parts of the book, I discuss how the state used these interrogations to classify and control the population; how the voices of subalterns were "prefaced" by ritualized legal discourse; and how they strategically used an apparent conformity to be able to articulate protests about the system of recruitment and about particular authorities. And here is the novelty of my work: the subaltern was able to and did speak to power, sometimes with a defiant voice.
Historians of oral cultures have found that acts of remembering and telling stories are assisted by the use of "signposts," dramatic moments or crucial historical events around which the narrative is organized. After reading more than five hundred stories told by ex-soldiers, I am convinced that (a) most of them were quite aware of the Federalist great moments or gestas, and (b) they ordered their stories (and hence their memory) in relation to these signposts. For some reason, de la Fuente found this argument unconvincing.
Ricardo D. Salvatore Universidad Torcuato Di Tella Buenos Aires, Argentina

Ariel de la Fuente responds:
Ricardo Salvatore says that my review was "misleading" or that I "misconstrued" his argument, which I cannot accept. Actually, I do think that part of his work makes a contribution to the field (which he does not mention in his letter). In other instances, as he himself accepts, I was simply "not persuaded" by certain aspects of his argument or simply "found it unconvincing." I also understand that in some cases his work is just wrong, as I made clear in the review. Authors should know that readers do not read their works exactly and exclusively as they wish.
Ariel de la Fuente Purdue University

ERRATA

The illustration on p. 1422 of the December 2004 issue was mistakenly accompanied by the wrong caption. The caption should have read "Transporting cotton to market, India, 1870. Reproduced with kind permission of Volkart Stiftung, Winterthur, Switzerland." The editors regret the error.
The illustration on p. 378 of the April 2005 issue should have appeared on p. 364, above the caption for Figure 1. The illustration that should have been accompanied by the caption for Figure 2 was inadvertently omitted. The illustration on p. 364 was included in error. Its correct caption would have read "The signature of one of Cuzco's earliest known indigenous scribes, Pedro Quispe (see right side of photo), with a flourish next to it and the word escrivano, 'notary,' underneath. ARC/PN, Pedro de la Carrera Ron, protocolo 4 (1586–1596). Reproduction with kind permission of the Archivo Regional de Cusco." The editors regret the errors.

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