History News

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.

Eugenics and Public History

John Russell — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 19:23:03 +0000

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.

Review of Rediker’s “Slave Ship”

John Russell — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 16:45:53 +0000

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.

Symposium on the History of the Book

John Russell — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 18:43:22 +0000

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