{"title":"Building Schools, Making Doctors: Architecture and the Modern American Physician. By Katherine L. Carroll","authors":"Julie Willis","doi":"10.1093/jsh/shae046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shae046","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47169,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141815007","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}
{"title":"Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race, and Rights in the Age of Abolition. By Kathleen Brown","authors":"Peter Wirzbicki","doi":"10.1093/jsh/shae037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shae037","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47169,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-05-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141110104","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}
{"title":"Yankees in the Indian Ocean: American Commerce and Whaling, 1786-1860. Jane Hooper","authors":"Heesoo Cho","doi":"10.1093/jsh/shae006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shae006","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47169,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-01-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139601708","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}
{"title":"Administering Freedom: The State of Emancipation after the Freedmen’s Bureau. Dale Kretz","authors":"Brandon T. Jett","doi":"10.1093/jsh/shae005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shae005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47169,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-01-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139600319","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}
{"title":"From The Holy Roman Empire to the Land of the Tsars. One Family's Odyssey, 1768-1870. Alexander M. Martin","authors":"Charlotte Henze","doi":"10.1093/jsh/shae002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shae002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47169,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-01-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139618273","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}
In his 2003 essay, “On Agency,” Walter Johnson faulted the way scholars’ focus on agency presumed a “unidirectional trade between past and present,” treating “history writing as a mode of redress.” It marginalized “human-ness lived outside the conventions” of a “liberal notion of selfhood.” Restoring agency to the enslaved made the scholar feel better about themselves without making the world any better: “therapy rather than politics.” Looking back on this pivotal assessment of social history from the vantage of twenty years, its criticisms seem relevant to the use of agency in its time (and ours) more than to the concept’s original invention in the era of decolonization after World War II. In that time, drawing on anticolonial thought, history-from-below emerged precisely to contest liberal notions of selfhood and reform the existing, whiggish two-way trade between past and present. Revisiting that turn reminds us that questions raised by the category of “agency” were present at its making and that it is unlikely that academic scholarship can fulfill more than a therapeutic function without affiliated struggles to remake the academy and popular politics. Reminding us of history-from-below's foundational commitment to building up “the present-life of the past” and challenging the individuated ideal of selfhood, this essay notes the continued urgency of recovering alternative subjectivities as we face the planetary crisis created by dominance of Enlightenment notions of history and selfhood. Though scholarship in the academy may not be capable of the political impact Johnson imagined, it nevertheless furthers history’s actual end of internal transformation.
{"title":"The Forgotten Dreams of History-from-Below","authors":"P. Satia","doi":"10.1093/jsh/shad056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shad056","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In his 2003 essay, “On Agency,” Walter Johnson faulted the way scholars’ focus on agency presumed a “unidirectional trade between past and present,” treating “history writing as a mode of redress.” It marginalized “human-ness lived outside the conventions” of a “liberal notion of selfhood.” Restoring agency to the enslaved made the scholar feel better about themselves without making the world any better: “therapy rather than politics.” Looking back on this pivotal assessment of social history from the vantage of twenty years, its criticisms seem relevant to the use of agency in its time (and ours) more than to the concept’s original invention in the era of decolonization after World War II. In that time, drawing on anticolonial thought, history-from-below emerged precisely to contest liberal notions of selfhood and reform the existing, whiggish two-way trade between past and present. Revisiting that turn reminds us that questions raised by the category of “agency” were present at its making and that it is unlikely that academic scholarship can fulfill more than a therapeutic function without affiliated struggles to remake the academy and popular politics. Reminding us of history-from-below's foundational commitment to building up “the present-life of the past” and challenging the individuated ideal of selfhood, this essay notes the continued urgency of recovering alternative subjectivities as we face the planetary crisis created by dominance of Enlightenment notions of history and selfhood. Though scholarship in the academy may not be capable of the political impact Johnson imagined, it nevertheless furthers history’s actual end of internal transformation.","PeriodicalId":47169,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138981166","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}
Agency belongs to a distinctly moral understanding of the cosmos, buttressed by faith in an ultimately just and knowable universe. On some deep level, historians believe that the good will out. But looking at those moments when the agency concept creates cognitive dissonance—when, for example, Holocaust perpetrators’ “agency” was placed in the service of evil—reveals things about the moral universe historians think we inhabit. Using the example of post-1945 West Germany, the essay asks whether a shift toward increasingly diffuse forms of agency across various fields may be part of a larger historical, and not merely historiographical, pattern. In the “post-truth” early twenty-first century, will historians’ accounts of the past continue to be shaped by the idea of a benevolent and graspable universe, or will chaos make agency seem like an unrecognizable relic from a lost world?
{"title":"Agency’s Moral Universe","authors":"Monica Black","doi":"10.1093/jsh/shad059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shad059","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Agency belongs to a distinctly moral understanding of the cosmos, buttressed by faith in an ultimately just and knowable universe. On some deep level, historians believe that the good will out. But looking at those moments when the agency concept creates cognitive dissonance—when, for example, Holocaust perpetrators’ “agency” was placed in the service of evil—reveals things about the moral universe historians think we inhabit. Using the example of post-1945 West Germany, the essay asks whether a shift toward increasingly diffuse forms of agency across various fields may be part of a larger historical, and not merely historiographical, pattern. In the “post-truth” early twenty-first century, will historians’ accounts of the past continue to be shaped by the idea of a benevolent and graspable universe, or will chaos make agency seem like an unrecognizable relic from a lost world?","PeriodicalId":47169,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138981012","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}
{"title":"Introduction to “On Agency” at Twenty","authors":"Sam Lebovic, Matthew B. Karush","doi":"10.1093/jsh/shad075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shad075","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47169,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138981610","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}
Twenty years ago, Walter Johnson warned historians not to rely on a concept that let both user and audience alike feel better without doing better. The concept in question was agency. Down the metaphorical hall and many a literal one, environmental historians were also talking about agency. The proximity is not surprising: the new social history Johnson addressed in 2003 came up alongside environmental history.
{"title":"On the Agency of Environmental History","authors":"Bathsheba Demuth","doi":"10.1093/jsh/shad057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shad057","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Twenty years ago, Walter Johnson warned historians not to rely on a concept that let both user and audience alike feel better without doing better. The concept in question was agency. Down the metaphorical hall and many a literal one, environmental historians were also talking about agency. The proximity is not surprising: the new social history Johnson addressed in 2003 came up alongside environmental history.","PeriodicalId":47169,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138980211","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}
Concerns about “agency” in history are generally misplaced. Agency is pervasive in human interaction, not, as is often assumed, a relatively rare or heroic achievement. We live within social structures that are reproduced by social practices—but that are also constantly bent or reinterpreted in action, sometimes in minor ways but sometimes transforming the animating structures. I illustrate how this conceptualization works by recounting how French workers, previously divided into rivalrous single-trade organizations, arrived at a form of proto-socialist class consciousness in the years after the Revolution of 1830—by adopting, adapting, and repurposing the new regime’s liberal language and organizational forms. But “agency,” I argue, was equally present in the daily efforts of the pre-1830 workers’ organizations, many of whose modes of action were officially illegal. Agency should be understood as a pervasive feature of human social life, not as a badge of heroism.
{"title":"Is Agency a Useful Historical Concept?","authors":"William H Sewell","doi":"10.1093/jsh/shad063","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shad063","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Concerns about “agency” in history are generally misplaced. Agency is pervasive in human interaction, not, as is often assumed, a relatively rare or heroic achievement. We live within social structures that are reproduced by social practices—but that are also constantly bent or reinterpreted in action, sometimes in minor ways but sometimes transforming the animating structures. I illustrate how this conceptualization works by recounting how French workers, previously divided into rivalrous single-trade organizations, arrived at a form of proto-socialist class consciousness in the years after the Revolution of 1830—by adopting, adapting, and repurposing the new regime’s liberal language and organizational forms. But “agency,” I argue, was equally present in the daily efforts of the pre-1830 workers’ organizations, many of whose modes of action were officially illegal. Agency should be understood as a pervasive feature of human social life, not as a badge of heroism.","PeriodicalId":47169,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138980971","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}
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