Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2020.1829862
Ryan Donovan Purcell
ABSTRACT Comic books are deceivingly complex cultural artifacts. The artform combines narrative and visual art to construct vivid – though often fantastical – realms. At worst, they offer readers a whimsical escape from reality; at best, they reflect that reality. This essay contextualizes the publication of one comic in particular, to demonstrate the utility of comics as historical sources and as vehicles to broaden social justice discourse. Days of Future Past, published in 1981 as a double issue in Marvel Comic’s Uncanny X-Men, attempts to make sense of the American social landscape at the dawn of the Reagan era. This dystopian narrative uses historical analysis (in the form of time travel) to explore the roots of oppressive structures that mirror concurrent real-world developments, such as the rise of the carceral state. In historical context, the comic reads as an allegory of social transformation in New York City under the Reagan Administration as well as a commentary on the role of radicalism in the pursuit of justice.
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2021.1872224
Laura Troiano
ABSTRACT Twenty-four cartographers. Twenty-four theme park landscape designers. Twenty-four theoreticians-in-training. Twenty-four dragon chasers. Twenty-four undergraduate students ready to slay. Not the dragons – theory. This is an article about my attempt at constructing an interdisciplinary theory and methods course. It is a course about theme parks. These theme parks are situated on a map. This map will show you where some dragons are. Curious? Sceptical? Confused? None of these, but reading this article fits into your schedule? Then, come on … a quest awaits us!
{"title":"Let’s find dragons: a quest to create a theoretical theory themed theme park","authors":"Laura Troiano","doi":"10.1080/13642529.2021.1872224","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2021.1872224","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Twenty-four cartographers. Twenty-four theme park landscape designers. Twenty-four theoreticians-in-training. Twenty-four dragon chasers. Twenty-four undergraduate students ready to slay. Not the dragons – theory. This is an article about my attempt at constructing an interdisciplinary theory and methods course. It is a course about theme parks. These theme parks are situated on a map. This map will show you where some dragons are. Curious? Sceptical? Confused? None of these, but reading this article fits into your schedule? Then, come on … a quest awaits us!","PeriodicalId":46004,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking History","volume":"25 1","pages":"51 - 76"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13642529.2021.1872224","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43299072","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2020.1834739
Robert A. Rosenstone
ABSTRACT This is the text of a talk I was scheduled to deliver at a Wesleyan University conference in April 2020 (canceled due to Covid-19) devoted to the memory and work of Hayden White. Based on issues surrounding the relationship of an innovative historical narrative to the work of theorists, and White, in particular, it argues that innovation arises from a nontheoretical mindset, but needs interaction with theorists as a commentary on the new forms of history innovation proposes.
{"title":"What’s a nice narrative historian like me doing at a conference like this?","authors":"Robert A. Rosenstone","doi":"10.1080/13642529.2020.1834739","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2020.1834739","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This is the text of a talk I was scheduled to deliver at a Wesleyan University conference in April 2020 (canceled due to Covid-19) devoted to the memory and work of Hayden White. Based on issues surrounding the relationship of an innovative historical narrative to the work of theorists, and White, in particular, it argues that innovation arises from a nontheoretical mindset, but needs interaction with theorists as a commentary on the new forms of history innovation proposes.","PeriodicalId":46004,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking History","volume":"25 1","pages":"31 - 36"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13642529.2020.1834739","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42969116","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-10-21DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2020.1829863
W. Okie
ABSTRACT This essay examines the abbreviated fiction-writing career of an unlikely author, Central of Georgia Railway agricultural agent Jesse Frisbie Jackson. In the process, the essay explores the centrality of storytelling to the early twentieth-century United States, to farming and agricultural reform, and to the historical profession.
{"title":"The parable of the railway agent: stories of progress and winter legumes in the twentieth-century South","authors":"W. Okie","doi":"10.1080/13642529.2020.1829863","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2020.1829863","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay examines the abbreviated fiction-writing career of an unlikely author, Central of Georgia Railway agricultural agent Jesse Frisbie Jackson. In the process, the essay explores the centrality of storytelling to the early twentieth-century United States, to farming and agricultural reform, and to the historical profession.","PeriodicalId":46004,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking History","volume":"25 1","pages":"37 - 50"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13642529.2020.1829863","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44400681","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2020.1847897
Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, C. Kevin
ABSTRACT Pinker’s 2018 work Enlightenment Now maintains his earlier commitment to Norbert Elias’ sanguine reading of post-Enlightenment human history. It replicates the problems that historians identified with his 2011 work, The Better Angels of Our Nature. Moving past Pinker’s theory does not, however, necessitate a rejection of theoretical or meta-historical approaches to the history of violence. Other recent works concerned with the history of violence offer rival theoretical positions and insights that are central to their success as works of history. Pushing past Pinker’s claim that Elias’ work is ‘the only theory left standing’ for historians of violence, this article demonstrates how theory has been used successfully by other historians. It interrogates the characteristic theoretical claims and concerns of four major approaches: new imperial history, comparative genocide studies, histories of war and society, and the history of gendered violence, and negates Pinker’s claim that no other theoretical tradition is appropriate for the study of the history of violence.
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Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2020.1724434
{"title":"History during the Anthropocene","authors":"","doi":"10.1080/13642529.2020.1724434","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2020.1724434","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46004,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking History","volume":"24 1","pages":"565 - 566"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13642529.2020.1724434","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46824312","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2020.1846968
Mari N. Crabtree
ABSTRACT ‘The Ethics of Writing History in the Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching’ raises questions about the ethical obligations of historians who write about historical traumas like lynching, in particular when the subjects of their histories cannot give consent for their violent and deeply personal stories to be published in books and articles. This essay argues that, though historians are charged with unearthing the ‘truth’ of the past without whitewashing or tempering violence, bigotry, and the like, we also have an obligation to preserve the dignity and privacy of the victims and survivors of historical trauma. Some stories (or certain parts of stories), like those of Black women who were raped as part of a lynching ritual, may be legitimately unspeakable, especially given the real potential to veer into the gratuitous and threaten to re-objectify victims and retraumatize survivors. Expanding upon an essay by Teju Cole, ‘Death in the Browser Tab,’ that critiques the ease with which anyone can access videos of police shootings, this essay proposes strategies for forging ethical relationships with these historical subjects and navigating these difficult writing choices.
摘要“私刑创伤后的历史书写伦理”提出了历史学家在私刑等历史创伤中的道德义务问题，尤其是当他们的历史主题无法同意将他们的暴力和深刻的个人故事发表在书籍和文章中时。这篇文章认为，尽管历史学家被指控在不粉饰或缓和暴力、偏执等的情况下挖掘过去的“真相”，但我们也有义务维护历史创伤受害者和幸存者的尊严和隐私。有些故事（或故事的某些部分），比如黑人女性在私刑仪式中被强奸的故事，可能是无法言说的，尤其是考虑到真正有可能转向无端的，并威胁要重新客观化受害者和重新伤害幸存者。特朱·科尔（Teju Cole）的一篇文章《浏览器标签中的死亡》（Death in the Browser Tab）批评了任何人都可以轻松访问警察枪击案的视频，这篇文章在这篇文章的基础上提出了与这些历史主题建立道德关系并驾驭这些艰难写作选择的策略。
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Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2020.1822662
Ryan Walter
ABSTRACT This essay locates Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) in the historiography of his time. It does so by clarifying the manner in which Malthus used his account of population-food dynamics to retell the grand narrative of Roman decline leading to barbarism, feudalism, and then commerce. The result of Malthus’s intervention was to demote in importance both the actions of the usual historical actors – legislators, princes, and parties – and the historical contexts in which they were portrayed as acting. Such contexts were typically rendered in terms of laws, customs, and political interests, but, on Malthus’s account, these are merely contingent factors compared with the eternal laws that underlie human history. Malthus’s Essay thus represents an example of a more general phenomenon detectable in the late eighteenth century: the demotion of erudition and source criticism by those pursuing theological and philosophical understanding.
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Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2020.1835126
Conor Heffernan
ABSTRACT As perhaps the most ephemeral historical object, studying the physical body in history is a challenging and complex affair. It is for this reason that many scholars have lamented the ‘invisible body’ in historical research, that is to say the lived, healthy, body which is often discussed but never truly examined. Using the example of physical culture in Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, this article explores the idea of ‘body projects’ as a historical tool. Understood as the interplay between physical form, discourse and technology, the ‘body project’ represented an explicit and repeated effort to demonstrate one’s commitment to exercise. Performed as a means of excavating, at least somewhat, the physical body in history, the article provides a new method of studying the historical body. In the case of physical culture, training texts impacted the body which, in turn, was recreated through photography, measurements and text. This was the ‘body project’ at play. Studying the men involved, and the discourses they used, the article examines ‘body projects’ as a tool of analysis, one which encompasses body, image and text.
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