New Issue of AHR

The December 2006 issue of The American Historical Review is now available online at http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/111.5

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.

Keep in mind that the articles are now open access, but the book reviews are restricted to subscribers. As an aside: I received a print copy of the journal with parts of the fourth article and most of the transnational history conversation inserted upside down.

Leo Baeck Fellowship Programme

From H-Net Announcements:

Leo Baeck Fellowship Programme
Fellowship programme for research on the history and culture of German-speaking jewry in Central Europe and in exile

This fellowship programme intents to foster research on the history and culture of German-speaking jewry in Central Europe and in exile. There are a maximum of 12 PhD scholarships and 2 post-doctoral scholarships available for the academic year 2007/8 (October 2007 to September 2008). The scholarships shall enable the fellows to do their research both at home and at chosen research institutes and archives. As part of the programme, regular exchange with other scholars in the field is encouraged through seminars.

For more information, visit the fellowship website (in German): http://www.studienstiftung.de/leo-baeck-programm.html 

New Issue of Diplomatic History

The January 2007 issue of Diplomatic History features a forum on relations between the U.S. and Japan in the 20th Century.  There’s also the SHAFR Presidential Address – “The Politics of Idealism: Lyndon Johnson, Civil Rights, and Vietnam” – and a number of interesting reviews.  I just read Thomas Alan Schwartz’s review of Hogan and Paterson, eds., Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations.  Knowing very little about the field, I’m interested in the effect that the so-called “cultural turn” is having on diplomatic history (for another take on this, see Michael Hogan’s “The ‘Next Big Thing’: . The Future of Diplomatic History in a Global Age,” Diplomatic History 28:1 (January 2004): 1-21).

Isis Focus: Carolyn Merchant’s “Death of Nature”

The September 2006 issue of Isis features a section revisiting Carolyn Merchant’s 1980 book The Death of Nature (WorldCat link).  The articles are (links are to the abstracts):

• Joan Cadden, “Introduction“
• Katharine Park, “Women, Gender, and Utopia: The Death of Nature and the Historiography of Early Modern Science“
• Gregg Mitman, “Where Ecology, Nature, and Politics Meet: Reclaiming The Death of Nature“
• Charis Thompson, “Back to Nature? Resurrecting Ecofeminism after Poststructuralist and Third-Wave Feminisms“
• Carolyn Merchant, “The Scientific Revolution and the Death of Nature“

H-Net Review of Bunzl, “Symptoms of Modernity”

Matti Bunzl. Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2004. xii + 292 pp. Notes, bibliography. $24.95 (paper), ISBN 0-520-23843-5.  Find it at your library (WorldCat link)

Reviewed by: Clayton Whisnant, Department of History, Wofford College.
Published by: H-German (August, 2006)

“Postmodernity” has a staggering number of definitions, but most would include some notion that contemporary society is more openly pluralist than it was a half-century ago. Matti Bunzl makes his own contribution to this literature by bringing this take on postmodernity together with those of several authors who connect the “normalizing” process of modernity with the rise of the modern nation state.[1] The heart of modernity, Bunzl proposes, is the fiction of the coherent nation-state, imagined as an “ethnically homogenous and inherently masculinist” entity (p. 13). The demise of this “nationalizing project” can consequently be traced by examining the social and state treatment of two key groups, Jews and homosexuals. Bunzl argues that their integration into the symbolic space of the nation, along with the radical reassessment of their importance for the life of the nation, serves as a chief gauge for the emergence of postmodernity.

Read the rest of the review at H-Net Reviews.

“Historian in the Cellar”

In the latest issue of the Stanford Law Review, George Fisher pays homage to The Roots of Justice by Lawrence Friedman and Robert Percival:

“A quarter-century ago Lawrence Friedman and his student Robert Percival followed those tracks to the basements of Oakland. In that grubby port town, squatting across the Bay from its shimmering big sister, they started to dig. From precinct to courthouse to prison to press, they unearthed the shards of a whole system of criminal justice. Then they rebuilt it in living detail—the entire anatomy of crime detection and punishment in Alameda County between 1870 and 1910. They called their work The Roots of Justice, for it was in every sense a history from the bottom.”

Fisher’s article is titled “Historian in the Cellar” and his tribute involves more than laudatory commentary on Roots of Justice:

“In honor of the book’s twenty-fifth anniversary, this essay follows a short distance in its trail. It reopens the murder trial of Hugh Cull, mentioned by Friedman and Percival in a brief footnote. Cull killed his wife in front of their seven-year-old daughter, but won acquittal when the trial judge deemed the girl incompetent to testify.

“The case turns out to be much more than another acquittal staked on a legal technicality. Unraveling its elaborate plot requires close attention to Lawrence Friedman’s writings—not only Roots of Justice, but also his later studies of marriage and divorce in this era.”

[links from Legal History Blog]

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I’m hoping that history students, faculty, or other history-addled folks will view this site as a useful place to find resources or just keep up with scholarship. In general, I see this blog as an extension of my work as a history librarian: alerting people to interesting books, articles, websites, or whatever; it also is a continuation of the blog I ran at GSU while a librarian there (GSU Library History News). This site is still in formation, so bear with me for a while.