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In This Issue
| This issue contains three articles and an AHR Forum Essay. The articles assess the role of individuals in international philanthropy, the place of second cities in urban development, and the development of modern European welfare policies. The Forum Essay raises questions about the role of historians in the development of policies for teaching history in the schools. In addition, the issue contains our usual array of book and film reviews. |
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Articles | |
| Abigail Green explains that Sir Moses Montefiore was a towering presence in the history of nineteenth-century Jewry, but that his wider historical significance has yet to be explored. She argues that this neglect reflects the segregation of religious and national historiographies but does not do justice to the breadth of Montefiore's philanthropic activities, or the way in which his appeal bridged confessional and national divides. Focusing on a figure such as Montefiore, Green contends, provides a useful corrective to the simplistic categories and oppositions too readily applied to the period, particularly by modernization theory. The rediscovery of Montefiore's popularity in the non-Jewish world complicates our understanding of the growth of European antisemitism in the 1870s—particularly in the British context, where Montefiore emerges as an unlikely imperial hero and bearer of European civilization to the East. Green's exploration of the man behind this myth prompts a reconsideration of the distinction between "traditional" and "modern" philanthropy in this period, questioning the functionalist approach to this problem. More generally, she locates Montefiore's Jewish activism within the wider context of transnational and transdenominational philanthropy, drawing links with the antislavery movement and with worldwide appeals on behalf of the victims of famine and ethnic violence. Green's findings thus highlight the religious origins of the international human rights movement. |
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| Maiken Umbach examines the role of second cities in challenging the spatial politics of the nation-state during the final decades before World War I. Focusing on Hamburg, Germany, and Barcelona, Spain, she uses a political interpretation of landmark buildings and urban development projects of this period to develop the identity of noncapital cities. She argues that in these cities, political decision makers and architects collaborated in devising strategies for inscribing urban particularism into the built environment. Umbach explains that emblematic town halls and historical restoration projects that harked back to the Middle Ages as a golden age of civic liberty were the usual vehicles for such claims. She maintains, however, that an equally important yet much-neglected dimension of devolution—alongside the political and economic—was the law. Against the background of heated debates over national codification, Umbach chronicles the construction of the Forum of Justice in Hamburg and the Palau de Justícia in Barcelona as testaments to a new synthesis of local and national motifs in the symbolic arsenal of second cities. |
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| James Vernon traces the history of the school lunch program to probe the questions of governmentality and statecraft in modern Britain. He shows how the school meal helped to assemble a universalist vision of the good and well-nourished society that was sharply at odds with the view of the hungry as a particular social problem, which had first energized the provision of school meals. He chronicles this process in three movements: a brief sketch of the ethical shift that allowed hunger to be seen as a social problem rather than as providential or a sign of moral failure; a focus on the technical mechanisms by which social and nutritional scientists sought to identify objectively which children were in need of school meals, as well as what and how they should be fed; and, finally, an account of the proliferating range of experts charged with engineering lessons in the civility and solidarity of society through the everyday practices and material infrastructures of the school meal. Vernon's story of the experimental and compromised endeavors of social experts who developed the school lunch program challenges more deterministic theories of governmentality and accounts of the emergence of the welfare state. |
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AHR Forum Essay | |
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Robert Orrill and Linn Shapiro ask two interlocking questions:
What importance should historians assign to school history? Should
it be at the forefront of their professional commitments? They explain
that although historians have often asked these questions since
school reform became a prominent policy issue in the 1980s, they
have never given a strong, decisive answer. Nor have they taken
any definite action. Meanwhile, Orrill and Shapiro maintain, other
institutional actors—notably in government and business—moved
to put their stamp on policies that determine the history taught
in American schools. In challenging the current reluctance of historians
to participate in the debate over teaching history in the schools,
Orrill and Shapiro argue that historians should remember the leading
role that the profession played in the making of school history.
They describe how the American Historical Association (AHA) invented
school history in the early twentieth century and remained at the
forefront of K–12 policymaking until just prior to World War
II. They then explain how the AHA abandoned its long-standing activist
stance and allowed school history to be submerged within the ill-defined,
antidisciplinary domain of the "social studies." In recovering this
professional past, Orrill and Shapiro insist that educational activism
for the profession should be understood not as a new departure but
instead as "a return to a task left unfinished." They then challenge
the profession to engage in a full discussion of this task and to
decide what part it should have in the organizational structure
of the AHA and the actions of its members. Their essay is intended
to spark a discussion about the role of historians in school policy
making. AHR readers who want to engage in this debate can
do so in an online discussion of the article during the first two
weeks of September 2005. Details can be found in the introduction
to the Forum Essay.
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