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In This Issue
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The December issue contains articles on the impact of Woodrow Wilson's
vision in Asia, smoking in the Ottoman Empire, child welfare in
early-twentieth-century Bohemia, and public healing in modern Africa.
It should be noted that all four articles are transnational in scope,
and thus serve as a fitting prelude to a new feature of the journal:
an AHR Conversation on transnational history (about which,
more below). The issue also includes our usual extensive book review
section.
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Articles
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In "Imagining Woodrow Wilson: Dreams of East-West Harmony and the
Revolt against Empire in 1919," Erez Manela examines how
intellectual elites in China and India regarded this U.S. president
as he emerged as a figure of global significance in the immediate
aftermath of World War I. The article focuses on their conception
of Wilson as a potential bridge between "East" and "West." For them
he raised expectations of a statesman who could transform international
relations that had previously been based on imperialism and domination
into patterns of comity and equality, largely through the League
of Nations, in which Asian nations would be members on an equal
footing with those of the West. Despite Wilson's well-known racist
background and support for imperialist policies, this hopeful view
of his impact was sustained for a brief but crucial time, even in
the face of the contemporary challenge of Lenin's own brand of internationalism,
which also had broad appeal in Asia. Manela's article expands our
view of the international history of 1919 beyond the usual concern
with the deliberations and decisions of the Paris Peace Conference.
It suggests a path for integrating the transformative developments
that took place in Asian societies into the wider international
and transnational contexts of the period. Although historians have
noted how the horrors of the Great War provided support for a broad
Asian critique of the West, this essay argues that it was the disappointments
of the peace, rather than the devastation of the war, that sealed
Asian intellectuals' postwar indictment of the West.
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Historians have recently begun to wonder whether they can talk about
"early modern" history on a worldwide scale. For some, support for
this sort of global periodization is to be found in parallel developments
across Eurasia in the realm of political economy. In "Smoking and
`Early Modern' Sociability: The Great Tobacco Debate in the Ottoman
Middle East," James Grehan takes a different course and searches
for common themes in cultural history. One theme he identifies is
the growth of a public culture of entertainment, sustained by a
diffusion of new consumer goods—mainly coffee, tea, and tobacco.
The last was the most ubiquitous, helping to foster, in the Middle
East and elsewhere, more relaxed attitudes toward pleasure and more
open and routine forms of entertainment. The status of tobacco and
the sociability that grew up around it is particularly important
for our understanding of the Middle East, a region that is often
mistakenly and simplistically depicted as essentially "Islamic."
It offers a corrective insight into a culture that was hardly as
static, rigid, and under the thrall of religious authorities as
the label implies. The article shows that ordinary people, as much
as religious scholars, played an active role in shaping and redefining
cultural norms and religious expectations. Indeed, in the Middle
East, the debate over tobacco led, by 1700, to a consensus of tolerance
based more on the public acceptance of smoking than on the maneuvers
of religious and legal authorities.
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In "'Each nation only cares for its own': Empire, Nation, and Child
Welfare Activism in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1900," Tara
Zahra tells the story of how child welfare activists in the
Bohemian lands built a nationally segregated welfare system in the
context of a multinational empire. As German and Czech nationalist
activists in this region competed for the loyalties of a bilingual
and nationally mixed population, they lured children and parents
into their respective schools with clothing, school lunches, and
Christmas gifts; they colonized bilingual borderlands with their
own orphanages; and they built a vast network of nationally segregated
daycare centers, kindergartens, summer camps, and infant welfare
clinics. During the social crisis of the First World War, Austrian
government officials, in the hope of buttressing the state's own
flagging legitimacy, turned to these same nationalist welfare activists
to build and manage an ambitious new Ministry for Social Welfare.
But far from being disaffected, Czech and German nationalists in
the late Austrian Empire willingly served as the state's own trusted
agents. This article not only offers a new perspective on the relationship
of nation, empire, and state in Central and Eastern Europe, it also
challenges established narratives of welfare-state formation during
World War I as a top-down process of state initiative and intervention
into the private realm of the family. In the Bohemian lands, children
had long been considered the property of the nation. The wartime
welfare state was built from the bottom up, out of local and private
organizations and in response to popular demands.
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"Conjuring the Modern in Africa: Durability and Rupture in Histories
of Public Healing between the Great Lakes of East Africa," by David
L. Schoenbrun, argues that colonial and postcolonial studies
of modernity tend to sever precolonial history from what comes after
it. This separation is especially regrettable when it promotes an
understanding of moral community and collective well-being as largely
grounded in the European experience. Schoenbrun confronts this historiographical
divide by presenting a long-term history of persistent clusters
of meanings and practices relating to public healing in the African
region of the Great Lakes. In the last millennium and beyond, the
practice of public healing, and the ideas of health and power it
repeatedly enacts, have worked against other forms of authority
rooted in intensive agricultural systems, centralized and expansionist
monarchies, commodified economies, colonial states, and professional
medicine. By analyzing a single field of historical experience,
public healing, this article cuts across the tight spaces of ethnicity
and deepens otherwise shallow chronologies to reveal a hetero-temporal
modern Africa that contrasts with the hybrid or alternative modernity
so prevalent in the literature. By relying on narratives from overlooked
historical actors and unconventional sources, Schoenbrun raises
new questions about the basis of moral community and the sources
of collective well-being in Africa today.
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Finally, a new feature makes its appearance in this issue, which
we are calling an AHR Conversation. Titled "On Transnational
History," our first such conversation is the transcription of an
online discussion among six scholars, moderated by the AHR
Editor, on an approach to history that has become something of a
buzzword in the writing and teaching of history. The conversation,
which began in May and ended in October, offers a wide range of
perspectives and insights that should allow readers to reflect on
the possibilities and challenges of doing history in a global age.
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Readers should note that this issue no longer lists Maria Bucur
as Associate Editor. Indeed, Maria left that position, after three
years of brilliant and energetic service, this last August. The
AHA has had a tradition of extraordinary and extraordinarily
active Associate Editors, and Maria set a new standard in this respect.
Her worthy successor is Sarah Knott, a historian of colonial and
early national America and the Atlantic world. Sarah has already
begun applying her critical skills to the editorial process, and
the pages of the journal will soon yield evidence of her own brilliance,
wide historical knowledge, and acumen.
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