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In This Issue
| This issue opens with a provocative article on historians' traditional understanding of time, followed by essays on German-American colonial collaboration in Africa, battlefield tourism during the Spanish Civil War, the Stalinist Terror, and nationalism in late colonial India. In addition, the issue includes our usual array of book and film reviews. |
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Dan Smail's article, "In the Grip of Sacred History," argues that historians have long failed to acknowledge a revolution in our understanding of time that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was then that the bottom dropped out of historical time, as the accumulating geological and biological evidence for the old age of the earth and the evolution of species gradually persuaded the scientific community to accept a long chronology. In the wake of this time revolution, historians abandoned sacred history as a factual account of human history and began to offer suitably secularized alternatives. Yet the standard narrative found in textbooks and other general histories in the early to mid-twentieth century never fully abandoned the geographical and chronological grip of sacred history, for history still "begins" in these texts around six thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, the secular equivalent of the Garden of Eden. Reluctant to accept the implications of the long chronology, historians instead developed narrative devices and factual justifications for retaining a Near Eastern origin for history in the relatively recent past. History, Smail argues, has never fully escaped the grip of sacred history. By exploring the ways in which the short chronology continues to frame our general histories and textbooks, his article seeks to create a space for writing a deep history of humankind that incorporates the Paleolithic into the general framework of historical understanding.
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In "A German Alabama in Africa: The Tuskegee Expedition to German Togo and the Transnational Origins of West African Cotton Growers," Andrew Zimmerman provides an account of an expedition sent by Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute to German Togo in the first decade of the twentieth century. The expedition introduced American cotton varieties, which were in high demand in Europe, to Togo. But it also had an ideological mission: to impose the American New South image of the "Negro" on the Togolese. German colonial policymakers and social scientists, including Max Weber, Gustav Schmoller, and Georg Friedrich Knapp, found this ideology recognizable because they saw in the New South an analogue for the ethnic and class relations in Germany's own eastern territories, where the bound labor of serfs had been replaced by the free labor of migrant Poles. The resulting synthesis of German and American programs for regulating race and class ultimately failed to transform Togolese identity or Togo's political economy, but Togo succeeded in producing large quantities of industrial-grade cotton nevertheless. To compensate for the failure of Togolese to become "Negroes" on the model of the New South ideology, German and Tuskegee officials turned to violent methods that forced the Togolese to produce the cotton that it was imagined they produced freely. Combining psychoanalytic and Marxist approaches to transnational history, Zimmerman studies the production of commodities, identities, and social scientific knowledge in terms of practice and class conflict, rather than culture and agency. He highlights the interplay of intention, misunderstanding, bungled policies, and violence that has long been part of the history of imperialism.
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Sandi Holguífin explores a little-known chapter in the history of the Spanish Civil War in "`National Spain Invites You': Battlefield Tourism during the Spanish Civil War." Known as the Rutas Nacionales de Guerra, these tours differed from other examples of battlefield tourism in other countries, for they were conducted by the Francoists when their claim to legitimacy remained very much contested and while the civil war was still raging. Holguín argues that by sponsoring tours during wartime, the Nationalists gained a crucial sense of legitimacy from the international community. These tours also were instrumental in creating and consecrating a series of narratives that the Franco regime would evoke repeatedly until its demise in 1975, helping to fashion a Francoist national identity that, so claimed the Nationalists, had been usurped by the architects of the Second Republic. The Franco regime's experiment with battlefield tourism provides a case study for how tourism that takes human suffering as its focus can be used to redefine national identity. It also has broad implications for the study of memory and for scholars analyzing the consolidation of regimes after wars, during wartime occupation, or even during transitions to democratic government.
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In "Stalinist Terror and Democracy: The 1937 Union Campaign," Wendy Goldman explores the question of mass participation in the "Great Terror" in the Soviet Union. By tracing Party directives from the Central Committee down to union members, she analyzes the spread of repressive measures both in and through unions, a hierarchical network almost 22 million strong. She argues that repression was a mass phenomenon, not only in the number of victims it claimed but also in the extent of perpetrators it entailed. In the unions, repression was closely linked in 1937 with a campaign for union democracy, a mass movement for secret ballots, multi-candidate elections, official accountability, and worker participation. Subsequent elections opened a Pandora's box of charges and grievances, as Party leaders, union officials, and workers all sought to use the campaign to pursue their own interests. In the end, the campaign for union democracy not only paralleled the mass repression of 1937–1938, it became the very means by which various groups were transformed into willing proponents of purge and repression. Goldman's article sheds light on several subjects: Stalinism, social movements, and comparative genocide. More particularly, it suggests the historical complexity of the Soviet Terror, which entailed mass participation as well as the brutal exercise of state power.
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| Kumkum Chatterjee uses a public controversy among intellectuals in colonial India to draw out the important role of historical understanding in nationalist discourses. In "The King of Controversy: History and Nation-Making in Late Colonial India," she challenges the idea that modern history writing was essentially state-centered and grounded in rational-positivistic methodology, demonstrating rather the continuing power of romantic, nativist, and ethnographic accounts. The discussion extends to an examination of the relationship of rational-positivist history with romantic, popular history and suggests that the commemoration of the past should be more appropriately conceptualized as including all of these. Chatterjee's article integrates intellectual history with the history of nationalism and its culture, paying particular attention to colonial and emergent nations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. |
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