The World’s Fair has a 3-part interview with Aaron Sachs, author of The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism. The interview starts with The Humboldt Current : Science, Adventure, and Environmentalism with author Aaron Sachs. Sachs’ book was recently reviewed (not very positively) in The Journal of American History.
[link from Environmental History News]
The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography From the Revolution to the First World War gets a positive review in today’s New York Times; other reviews online include The New York Sun, The Guardian, and The Independent.
The November 2007 issue of Pacific Historical Review features a forum on Asian-American History. The articles (links to abstracts):
Mae M. Ngai, Asian American History Forum:Introduction
Erika Lee, The “Yellow Peril” and Asian Exclusion in the Americas
Dorothy Fujita-Rony, Water and Land: Asian Americans and the U.S. West
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Journeys for Peace and Liberation: Third World Internationalism and Radical Orientalism during the U.S. War in Vietnam
Paul Spickard, Whither the Asian American Coalition
Thomas Bender, Commentary: Widening the Lens and Rethinking Asian American History
David Igler, Commentary: Re-Orienting Asian American History through Transnational and International Scales
The current issue of Isis has a focus on science and modern China (links are to the abstracts):
BENJAMIN A. ELMAN: New Directions in the History of Modern Science in China: Global Science and Comparative History
FA-TI FAN: Redrawing the Map: Science in Twentieth-Century China
DANIAN HU: The Reception of Relativity in China
ZUOYUE WANG: Science and the State in Modern China
SIGRID SCHMALZER: On the Appropriate Use of Rose-Colored Glasses: Reflections on Science in Socialist China
GRACE SHEN: Murky Waters: Thoughts on Desire, Utility, and the “Sea of Modern Science”
Also in this issue:
DARYN LEHOUX: Observers, Objects, and the Embedded Eye; or, Seeing and Knowing in Ptolemy and Galen
SHARON E. KINGSLAND: Maintaining Continuity through a Scientific Revolution: A Rereading of E. B. Wilson and T. H. Morgan on Sex Determination and Mendelism
JOHN V. PICKSTONE: Working Knowledges Before and After circa 1800: Practices and Disciplines in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
The latest issue of Contemporary European History has for its theme population displacements caused by the two world wars. There are too many articles to mention here, but do be sure to look at the Introduction by Peter Gatrell as it nicely sets the issue within a broader historiographic context.
Also in this issue is a review article by Mark Gilbert on new perspectives on the history of the European Community.
The current issue of The Public Historian is devoted to eugenics. There’s a wealth of material: the issue covers the creation of exhibits, case studies of the public history of eugenics, and archives and media.
The Christian Science Monitor has a review of Marcus Rediker’s latest work The Slave Ship: A Human History:
The story is largely told through a tapestry of firsthand accounts from slave merchants, ship captains, sailors, abolitionists, and the enslaved themselves, who are tracked from their initial capture in interior African villages (typically by rival tribes) to their ultimate sale in the Americas. The result is akin to a good documentary film in which greater truths unfold from a sequence of personal stories.
This method also allows readers to slowly absorb and process the full range of horrors, which a more conventional approach might have allowed them to become numb to: people chained in hot, densely packed, poorly ventilated quarters covered in the bile, blood, and excrement of the sick and dying; the routine rape of enslaved women and girls; the ghastly reprisals against those unwilling or unable to follow the officer’s commands; the packs of hungry sharks that followed slave ships, waiting to consume the bodies of the dead, dying, or suicidal.
The current issue of Modern Intellectual History features a symposium titled “What Was the History of the Book?” From the introduction:
In July 2005 a symposium took place under the auspices of the Centre for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh, the aim of which was to bring together three of today’s most influential practitioners of “book history” in order to take stock of how the field had developed over this prolific period. While we had initially intended to ask our speakers to speculate on that disciplinary history, as well as its potential future, the great danger of such exercises is that they can drift off into abstract speculation. In the end, we asked them to reflect on specific texts that they had written, to speculate on the kinds of influence that had informed them and to tell us how they would do things differently today. Thereby not only did we hope to get a more intimate sense of the moment of these influential texts, texts that have become absolutely central to the subject as it has developed in recent years, but more generally it was hoped that we would achieve a clearer sense of what it is that we do as historians of the book, why we do it and what its scholarly implications can or should be today.
The articles (links are to the Cambridge UP abstracts):
Bill Bell, What was the History of the Book? Introduction
Robert Darnton, “What is the History of Books?” Revisited
Roger Chartier, The Order of Books Revisited
Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge Revisited
David D. Hall, What was the History of the Book? A Response
The latest issue of The Journal of American History features the following articles (links to History Cooperative articles):
Allen C. Guelzo, Houses Divided: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Political Landscape of 1858
Thomas A. Stapleford, Market Visions: Expenditure Surveys, Market Research, and Economic Planning in the New Deal
Andrea Friedman, The Strange Career of Annie Lee Moss: Rethinking Race, Gender, and McCarthyism
Susan J. Matt, You Can’t Go Home Again: Homesickness and Nostalgia in U.S. History
And three review essays:
Jan Shipps, Richard Lyman Bushman, the Story of Joseph Smith and Mormonism, and the New Mormon History
Richard Lyman Bushman, What’s New In Mormon History: A Response to Jan Shipps
Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Putting Religion on the Map
The New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor both have recent reviews of David Halberstam’s final book The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War.
