|
|
|
In This Issue
| This issue contains three articles and two review essays. The articles take us from the early Islamic world, then to seventeenth-century England, and finally to Africa and the U.S. South in the nineteenth century. The review essays examine recent military history and the League of Nations. Along with six featured reviews, there is also our usual extensive book review section. The October issue is the first to be published in conjunction with the University of Chicago Press. |
|
| |
|
Articles | |
"'Do Prophets Come with a Sword?' Conquest, Empire, and Historical Narrative in the Early Islamic World," by Thomas Sizgorich, delves into the conflict between Imperial Rome and emergent Islam. It offers us a rare look at both how Islam defined itself as an uncompromising, highly principled faith and how Christians misinterpreted this attitude for mere militancy. In order to establish this contrast, Sizgorich first reconstructs the patterns of interaction, especially of a military sort, that governed relations between both Roman and Persian imperial forces and Arab peoples before Muhammad. In this pre-Islamic period, Arab warriors typically participated in the centuries-old patterns of negotiation and trade-of „ allowing for military skirmishes on imperial frontiers to conclude in exchanges of tokens and tributes. With the advent of Islam, however, such exchanges came to an end. Now imbued with the rectitude of their faith, pious Muslim warriors refused to participate in the ancient economy of imperial power, a refusal that formed the basis of early Christianity's interpretation of this new faith.
|
|
In "Public Discourse, Corporate Citizenship, and State Formation in Early Modern England," Phil Withington engages with JÙrgen Habermas's influential thesis on the emergence of the public sphere during the Enlightenment, but he does so from the perspective of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. His central contention is that the corporate associations of traditional urban life actually fostered notions of publicness, thus suggesting greater lines of continuity than Habermas's narrative allows. Withington argues, indeed, that medieval corporatism, civic humanism, and the public sphere were more related than we might expect. It was in their increasing participation in the corporate urban life that England's middling sorts became discursively skillful citizens, ultimately leading to the emergence of national public spheres in the seventeenth century. His essay raises important questions about the relationship between early and later modernity and illuminates the underlying humanism of Habermas's Enlightenment project.
|
|
| In "The Claims of Slaves and Ex-Slaves to Family and Property: A Transatlantic Comparison," Dylan C. Penningroth offers a comparison between the U.S. South and the southern Gold Coast in the nineteenth century. His focus is on the claims to property and family by slaves and former slaves in these two societies. His study is intended to be suggestive rather than definitive, but he presents it as an experiment in comparative history, bringing together two regions and two slaveholding cultures that are rarely considered together. In significant ways, he finds, the histories of both regions were shaped by debates over claims made by slaves and their descendants to kinship and the products of their labor. Those debates drew upon and, in turn, influenced understandings of property, slavery, and social identity for all people, not only slaves, leaving a legacy for the twentieth century. |
|
| |
|
Review Essays | |
The first review essay, "Military Histories Old and New: A Reintroduction," by Robert M. Citino, reminds us of the burgeoning output of scholars in this field, a field that has long been considered of marginal interest by many historians. Citino sees this literature following three broad tracks. The first emphasizes the connections between armies, society, and war. Often referred to as the "new military history," it now dominates the field. Alongside this track is the older tradition of operational military history. Once an exclusive haunt of "drum and trumpet" battle histories, it now seeks to go beyond the personal and heroic to a more systematic analysis of the military and battlefield combat. Finally, there is the track that has emerged as part of a larger interest among contemporary historians in culture and, especially, memory. Citino surveys all three, offering an encouraging portrait of military history as a field open to the newest scholarly trends but still committed to its origins in the history of war and war-making.
|
|
"Back to the League of Nations," by Susan Pedersen, is the second review essay. Noting that the study of international networks and organizations has, with the rise of transnational and global history, experienced something of a renaissance, Pedersen explores how this scholarship has revised and expanded our appreciation of the significance of the League of Nations. Although founded as a security pact, the League was charged with many other tasks as well: to protect minority populations in many of the new or newly established states in 1919; to oversee the administration of conquered Ottoman and German territories granted to the Allies under mandate; and to craft international agreements to combat or manage disease, refugees, drugs, and other cross-border traffics or hazards. Pedersen surveys the extensive scholarly literature that deals with these varied efforts of the League, showing how they not only provided the foundation for later agreements but also inaugurated or strengthened many of the institutions and conventions that govern international society today. The international bureaucracies, transnational lobbies, petition processes, and publicity mechanisms operating in Geneva between the wars left a lasting imprint on future global institutions and practices.
|
|
| December's issue will include, along with several articles and the book review section, an AHR Conversation on "Religious Identities and Violence." |
|
|
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|