Journal of Interdisciplinary History最新文献

{"title":"Victorians and Numbers: Statistics and Society in Nineteenth Century Britain by Lawrence Goldman","authors":"S. Stigler","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01966","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01966","url":null,"abstract":"teenth century, would five suffice? Would fifty? What about 5,000? In a refreshingly honest metacritical move, Alborn describes his work in the digital archive. When he claims that sermons across Christian denominations followed a formulaic script that portrayed misers as “caricatures” rather than “sympathetic portraits of human beings,” Alborn includes a footnote that outlines his analysis of 335 religious publications (18, 36, fn 13). The notion of objective proof of cultural movements may be a self-defeating endeavor, but Alborn’s dense work in the archive demands that we confront what the digital record makes possible. Most interestingly, Alborn deliberately eschews quantitative analysis to analyze his library. Instead, he uses these texts “to add no end of nuance to the stories” that he discovers (9). He creates this nuance with rapid flight across texts and genres—both a strength and a potential area for critique. The depth of his research creates powerful integrity for his narrative. Yet his readings hurry through these texts, often quoting at length with little to no explication or providing a lengthy plot summary of a play or novel, as though they speak for themselves (115–118, 84). But this critical observation leads to a methodological challenge: If texts need interpretation to fit a narrative, the narrative might have more to say about contemporary methods than about a historical moment. Misers presents an ambitious historiography that straddles the scientific aspirations of distant reading and the hermeneutic dreams of close reading. As is often the case with innovation, Alborn’s work demonstrates the strengths and exposes the shortcomings of both methodologies. The result is a vast, rich archive that builds a foundation for both deeper investigation into particular texts or genres, as well as for a broader discussion of capitalism and culture.","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"54 1","pages":"124-127"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42741612","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Modern Erasures: Revolution, the Civilizing Mission, and the Shaping of China’s Past by Pierre Fuller","authors":"M. Tsin","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01968","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01968","url":null,"abstract":"“intellectual historical,” he grounds this pursuit “in the context of quantifiable social change” (188). He is committed to the practice of intellectual and social history as a joint enterprise, while recognizing tension between them in explanations of the choices that historical actors make as between “the interests they pursue or the justifications they give for pursuing them” (227). As one reviewer of the first book in Bol’s trilogy pointed out, the explanation of how and why Daoxue succeeded in replacing earlier cultural values (literary, historical, and classical) requires not only knowing what people thought (or wrote) but also how they lived—the context of social experience, including kinship ties, social networks, and intellectual connections. Bol has aimed to do exactly that. One final point has to do with the “case study” paradigm, in which Wuzhou could be viewed as a microcosm of larger trends. Bol rejects this characterization, however, arguing that “case studies” are just local histories that may share some features with others, and may suggest ways of thinking about other places, but are not “representative.” He thus positions this work as a study of how the scholarly elite in one place developed its own distinctive cultural and geographical identity as they adapted to larger patterns of dynastic political change and intellectual transformation across four centuries. In doing so, he also makes an important contribution to current scholarship about evolving relations between literati elites, the state, and local societies in middle and later imperial China. Ways of being “local” were never simple; they were always embedded in a wider “national” context of intellectual and political life.","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"54 1","pages":"158-160"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46998499","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Unusual Story of the Pocket Veto Case, 1926–1929 by Jonathan Lurie","authors":"W. G. Ross","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01964","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01964","url":null,"abstract":"Peril discourse. More than merely revealing xenophobic rhetoric as dehumanizing, this work underscores the material and historical processes of Asian American racial formation as a political project contingent on U.S. nation-building—the consolidation of the U.S. empire through the degradation of Asian bodies at its borders. Within this genealogy of robust intellectual inquiry, Shinozuka reveals how the imaginaries of entomologists, botanists, and other scientists produced the social and political conditions for the Yellow Peril rhetoric, thus implicating scientific knowledge in the creation of racial meaning. Moving through different moments in entomological and botanical history that cast foreign plants and insects as racialized invaders threatening the biotic ecosystem of the United States, Biotic Borders insists that the regulation of plant and insect immigration was integral to the racial exclusion that contributed to building the U.S. empire. Science, as Bahng argues, is a cultural, not an objective, form of knowledge that “participate[s] in the construction of national and international ideas about modernity and futurity.” Shinozuka’s careful reading of immigration policy alongside intellectual exchanges between scientists aptly demonstrates the cultural and political force behind the intertwined formations of race and species as nodes of difference. By bringing these histories together, Biotic Borders is an important intervention into ideas about immigration and the function of race and species in nationbuilding. This book offers urgent contributions to Asian American studies, the history of science, environmental studies, and posthumanism. Its interdisciplinary engagement sheds new light on the histories of race, species, and immigration.","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"54 1","pages":"142-144"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46028753","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Divided by the Word: Colonial Encounters and the Remaking of Zulu and Xhosa Identities by Jochen S. Arndt","authors":"Liz Timbs","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01967","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01967","url":null,"abstract":"In Divided by the Word, Arndt sets out “to demonstrate when, how, and why language-based notions of Zuluness and Xhosaness first emerged and then entrenched themselves in the consciousness of the region’s population” (8). In addition to providing a rich history of the development of the two most common African languages in South Africa (isiZulu and isiXhosa), Arndt also provides a critical account of the flattening of South African language cultures as colonial interlocutors attempted to make sense of the kaleidoscope of sociolinguistic cultures in what we now know as the Republic of South Africa. Citing the devastating violence of transition-era South Africa, Arndt aims to find explanations for the crystallization of these once amorphous identities through historical interrogation into the divides between the Xhosa and Zulu that came to a head in the violence of the 1980s and 1990s: “To historicize the language-based Zulu–Xhosa divide properly, however, I refrain from imposing the divide on the past. Rather, I use the past to explain the emergence of the divide” (13). Drawing from a diverse documentary source base integrating collections held in the United States, South Africa, and Europe (as well as interviews with members of the AmaHlubi National Working Committee and IsiHlubi Language Board), Arndt’s study ably combines not only different types of historical evidence but also brings insights from other disciplines to shed new light on topics with which historians and scholars of South Africa have grappled in various ways for two centuries. For example, in Chapter 1, Arndt skillfully uses historical linguistics, archaeology, and history to highlight multiple perspectives on linguistic divisions prior to 1800. Instead of privileging the phenomena of encounter and interpretation between Europeans and Africans, this chapter highlights how interactions between different African groups in the region shifted both the linguistic and the socio-political dynamics within the region. Additionally, his use of American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions records in Chapters 5 and 6 adds significantly to preexisting studies of American–Zulu exchange by scholars like Vinson and Carton. Arndt contributes new insights into the role of missionary figures in the promotion of a “single literary language” of Zuluness over the multiple coastal languages that proliferated in the mid-nineteenth century by highlighting, through deep reading against the grain, how missionary figures saw utility in upholding certain linguistic traditions over others. Throughout these chapters, Arndt’s critical examination of the","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"54 1","pages":"152-153"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43629695","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Folds of Olympus: Mountains in Ancient Greek and Roman Culture by Jason König","authors":"D. Hooley","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01953","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01953","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"54 1","pages":"115-117"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41935986","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Medieval Climate Anomaly: The Qarakhanid Adaptation","authors":"Henry Misa","doi":"10.1162/jinh_a_01972","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_a_01972","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract A synthesis of paleoclimatic, archaeological, and literary evidence from Central Asia (Transoxiana and the Tarim Basin) during the tenth through twelfth centuries suggests that the Qarakhanid state adapted its hybrid economy to a unique climate regime characterized by drought created by the Medieval Climate Anomaly. To adapt, the Qarakhanids expanded the agricultural and pastoral sections of their economy into foothill and highland ecologies and used diplomacy to support a transregional trade network that helped to stimulate drought-stressed oasis economies on both sides of the Tian Shan. New methodological conclusions relevant for the study of interdisciplinary environmental history in general and for the historiography of premodern mobile pastoralist states in particular provide frameworks for future study.","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"54 1","pages":"43-65"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49666825","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Misers: British Responses to Extreme Saving, 1700–1860 by Timothy Ablorn","authors":"Peter J. Katz","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01955","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01955","url":null,"abstract":"The cultural representation of misers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may be a niche interest, but Alborn’s Misers: British Responses to Extreme Saving, 1700–1860 offers a valuable contribution to general historiography in the age of digital research. Alborn traces how the perception of misers shifted across his selected period: Sermons and poems decried misers’ moral failings; ethicists and economists gave ambivalent acceptance; plays, operas, and novels made them social pariahs and punchlines; and nineteenth-century biographies and novels considered their pecuniary acumen. This exploration marks an important case study in the intersection between capitalism and popular literature and culture. Alborn accurately notes, however, that it does not “address either the formation or distribution of capital” in an economic sense (11). Instead, the book explores how British culture represented misers to themselves. Although this intervention adds important layers to the already thick description of capitalism’s cultural influence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Alborn’s book deserves both accolades and scrutiny for a methodology based on both a distant reading of genres and a close reading of individual texts to prove its claims. The scope of Alborn’s archive is staggering. The first four chapters are organized around genre. Although the organization of the latter three is more scattershot, all the chapters range across genres with the same alacrity. The variance comes from Alborn’s interest in “boundarydrawing: when did someone qualify as a miser ...?” (11). Part of the cleverness of Alborn’s approach is that he allows the texts to create this boundary for him, rather than imposing a definition. But allowing a culture to unveil its structure is always a historiographically complex task. In a critique of her own book, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago, 1994), Poovey challenges textual analysis as a proper basis for cultural history: “No amount of evidence of the kind [textual criticism] supplies ... would be sufficient to prove” broad historical claims. In other words, if four sermons are inadequate to prove","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"54 1","pages":"123-124"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48292747","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On the Frontiers of the Indian Ocean World: A History of Lake Tanganyika, c. 1830–1890 by Philip Gooding","authors":"E. A. Alpers","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01941","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01941","url":null,"abstract":"Since the publication of Kirti N. Chaudhuri’s Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean (New York, 1985), historical studies of the Indian Ocean World (IOW) have grown exponentially. Coming to grips with this vast oceanic space has challenged subsequent generations of historians to think creatively about how best to address its great diversity in both time and space. An important feature of this recent scholarship is its interdisciplinarity. In the volume under review, Gooding takes an innovative approach to what, in some hands, might have been limited to a regional East African study of this historiographically neglected zone by locating Lake Tanganyika as a frontier of the IOW. By defining the Indian Ocean littoral as the core of this watery world, he boldly proposes that this great African lake lay at its frontier. Specifically, in this analysis, he depicts a dynamic interaction that links the Swahili coast and the lakeshore littoral through the integrating element of the ivory trade. As he writes, “This book is about how these physical lines of connection developed and the roles that littoral and inland populations around Lake Tanganyika had in shaping them” (3). The book opens with an introduction discussing “Lakes, Oceans and Littorals in History” in which Gooding makes his case. The body of the text is divided into two parts. The first, entitled “Demarcations of Space,” includes three chapters—“The Growth of Emporia,” “Changing Land Use in a Changing Climate,” and “Traversing the Lake.” Part II is divided into four chapters—“Competition and Conflict on the Western Frontier,” “Global Commodities in East African Societies,” Structures of Bondage,” and “An Islamic Sea.” In each of these chapters, Gooding strives to demonstrate the numerous ways in which the changes wrought by the expansion of the ivory trade worked to connect the Swahili coast to the lakeshore and to transform the lakeshore’s society and culture, especially after about 1860.","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"54 1","pages":"155-156"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49567985","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Engineering in the Confederate Heartland by Larry J. Daniel","authors":"Thomas F. Army","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01942","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01942","url":null,"abstract":"tailed its potential impact. The Civil War looked more like Napoleonic warfare than land combat in World War I. According to Hess, it was “mostly an old-fashioned war,” at least “as far as its artillery was concerned” (313). Hess extensively explores strategic effectiveness, the book’s other forest, but without reaching a conclusion. He addresses the matter repeatedly, at times equating effectiveness with efficiency, but he never actually defines the term. His exhaustive research yields only three instances in which medical personnel recorded wounds from artillery and infantry in the same engagement; artillery accounted for 8.8 percent, 26.7 percent, and 12.2 percent, respectively in those instances. The historical record addressed effectiveness often, though always subjectively. The most illuminating anecdote came from a Union captain who always wanted artillery support, regardless of whether it inflicted any casualties. A social-science or statistical methodology might have been able to wring more insights from the imperfect data.","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"54 1","pages":"139-141"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45937484","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer","authors":"Charles S. Maier","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01958","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01958","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"54 1","pages":"131-134"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42151928","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}