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In This Issue
| This issue contains three articles and two review essays. The articles range in subject matter from U.S. food policy in the twentieth century and African Americans in Southern courts in the nineteenth century to the impact of American "talkies" on Australian culture. The review essays survey the recent literature on masculinity and on family history from a Latin American perspective. Along with our usual extensive book review section, readers will note a new, or revived, section of "Featured Reviews." See more about this below. |
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Articles | |
It might be said that in politics, progress is what can be measured, and much public policy is certainly a matter of meeting numerical benchmarks—growth targets, casualty figures, test scores, prescription drug prices, inflation rates, and the like. In "The Foreign Policy of the Calorie," Nick Cullather argues that scientists who invented the calorie in the late nineteenth century intended to bring food into this international discourse of measurable units. The calorie was indeed a unit for comparing national diets and measuring social efficiency. It was a standardizing measurement tool, allowing scientists and policy makers to look at all food as the same, reducing the variety of foodstuffs across the world to their energy-producing capacity. In these terms, the most efficient food was cheap and dense in calories. And the food that best fit that definition was wheat. The calorie proponents, particularly Herbert Hoover, believed that states had an obligation to ensure an internal balance of calories; if they failed, international wheat transfers could not only fill the gap but also shore up political stability. In this article, which is truly transnational in scope, Cullather offers an analysis of the central role of food policy in international affairs throughout the first part of the twentieth century.
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During the Civil War and Reconstruction, former slaves in the South regularly submitted claims through formal legal channels. In general, historians have placed African Americans' initiatives in the courts against the backdrop of the era's dramatic legal changes, without considering why they so readily resorted to legal means in the first place. In "Status without Rights: African Americans and the Tangled History of Law and Governance in the Nineteenth-Century U.S. South," Laura F. Edwards explores this question by linking freedpeople's use of the legal system to the legal culture of the antebellum South, focusing specifically on the aspect of the law dealing with matters of public or communal concern. These matters related not to the protection of individual rights, but to the maintenance of public peace. And the highly localized nature of the process meant that such matters involved people—slaves, free blacks, and other subordinates—who lacked the right to participate in other legal matters and in other aspects of the legal system. Consequently, not only were many southerners familiar with the legal process, but they also viewed the legal system primarily as a means for keeping the peace, not for the protection of individual rights. These expectations are crucial for understanding why former slaves made use of the legal system after the Civil War even though they could not claim the individual rights that historians now identify as its foundation. Edwards's article serves as a further lesson in how subordinate people could turn institutions to their own purposes and in the importance of understanding the value system that determines the primary purpose of these institutions as well.
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| In "'The Filthy American Twang': Elocution, the Advent of American 'Talkies,' and Australian Cultural Identity," Joy Damousi explores how the negative response to American talkies in some Australian quarters fixed on the accent, pronunciation, and expression of American voices. She argues for the need to historicize this response by considering the importance of accent and correct pronunciation to notions of individual and national identity in the period before the 1920s. She highlights the important place of elocution in defining Australian culture, and in Australians' sense of themselves, from the 1870s to the interwar period. Her article makes a distinctive contribution in claiming a place for elocution in the cultural history of sound and speech and as part of the auditory experience in cultural life. It also suggests ways in which ideas about character and the self were closely connected with the voice. The importance invested in correct elocution was part of a belief in the role of voice in defining class standing for both men and women. In appreciating these values, we can understand the intensity of the response to American talkies and the impact of the American sound for moviegoers across the globe. Damousi's article is an example of the emerging field of the history of the senses. |
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Review Essays | |
Robert A. Nye's review essay, "Western Masculinities in War and Peace," surveys the recent literature on Western military masculinities since the late eighteenth century, as reflected in the gender ideals and practices of the citizen-soldier. In general, this history reveals a clear pattern: men could qualify as citizens by participating in national war, while women's exclusion from fighting largely confined them to domestic roles. Nye points out, however, that new work has complicated the gendering of war and peace, battlefront and home, as respectively male and female. Recent historians stress the continuity and permeability of these domains while still acknowledging the tensions that remain within and between them. Modern societies have imagined and successfully nourished a warrior masculinity in male civilians, but they have also tolerated feminine qualities in fighting men that linked them materially and psychologically to the home front. The decline of conscription armies since World War II and the entrance of women into military life, he concludes, promise important changes in the historic ideal of the citizen soldier.
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In "Whither Family History? A Road Map from Latin America," Nara Milanich reviews the three-volume work The History of the Family (edited by David Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli) and uses it as a springboard for a broad assessment of the field of family history. While the project shows what European family historians have accomplished, she notes, it offers few clues about where the field is going. She further suggests that family history in general suffers from a dearth of interpretive paradigms and consequently has become a ghettoized field disengaged from the broader terrain of historical inquiry. Milanich points to colonial and postcolonial societies, heretofore marginal to family history, as offering new directions for scholarship. Drawing on the historiography of Latin America, a region characterized by some of the most persistent and yawning divisions based on color, caste, and class in the world, she concludes that a new agenda for family historians might be found in examining the role of family, kinship, and household in the production and reproduction of social hierarchies.
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| With this issue we reintroduce "Featured Reviews," a section of the AHR that last appeared in 1996. Our intention is to highlight books that, in the estimation of the editors, ought to be called to the attention of a wide range of readers. It is no secret that the book review section is the most widely consulted feature of the journal. It provides an essential service to the profession. But it is also the case that readers often restrict their attention to books in their particular field. As a journal that strives to speak to historians across the discipline, we believe that the AHR should make more of an effort to encourage historians to notice books that, while not in their particular field, still have something important to say to them, in terms of either substance or methodology. This is the purpose of the featured reviews. The books reviewed in this section have been selected by the editors, in consultation with others, especially members of the Board of Editors. They are books that strive to speak to a range of historians, or that offer findings or interpretations with large implications, or that represent a major synthetic achievement of undisputed scholarly worth, or perhaps that represent significant yet neglected scholarly fields. Given considerations of space, we will not be able to treat all deserving books in this fashion. And, in all candor, we will undoubtedly choose books that in hindsight are less significant than we thought. To be sure, not everyone will agree with our choices. But readers should be assured that we will make a good faith effort to select worthy, important books. As always, we would welcome readers' comments on our choices and advice for future selections. |
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