Previews

The anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler examines the relevance of postcolonial studies to American history by exploring how matters of the intimate—sex, sentiment, domestic arrangements, and child rearing—figured in the making of racial categories and the management of empires. She identifies convergences in the regulation of the intimate by European colonizers and Americans—at home and abroad—and circuits of shared knowledge that created transnational links among imperial regimes. Treating comparison, not as benign methodology, but as itself a tool of colonial projects, she asks why historians of North America celebrate some comparisons and avoid others. The politics of intimacy, Stoler argues, is a key site for understanding how colonial regimes of truth were imposed, worked around, and worked out.

Five historians—Ramón A. Gutiérrez, Lori D. Ginzberg, Dirk Hoerder, Mary A. Renda, and Robert J. McMahon—respond to Stoler, welcoming cross-disciplinary and transnational perspectives but warning against a temptation to privilege the politics of intimacy, neglect human agency, and ignore subaltern resistance.

Government statistics seem worthy if dull indicators of the nation's economic health. Yet when federal bureaucrats first sought to quantify inflation during the Progressive Era, the state's presumption in tracking economic life threatened such a variety of constituencies that the modest effort was soon thwarted. The concept of the high cost of living soon moved from the writings of reformers and experts to the movies and musical comedy. Rather than rationalizing economic thought, . . .