WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY最新文献

{"title":"Considering the Present in Writing about the Indigenous Past","authors":"Elizabeth N. Ellis","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.a910408","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.a910408","url":null,"abstract":"Considering the Present in Writing about the Indigenous Past Elizabeth N. Ellis (bio) IN the spring of 2018 the William and Mary Quarterly published a Forum titled \"Materials and Methods in Native American and Indigenous Studies.\" One year later, the journal published another Forum addressing the rise of the term settler colonialism in early American history.1 These essays marked a watershed moment in the field and are indicative of some of the theoretical and methodological shifts required for exploring Vast Early America. Taken together, these publications signal a growing acceptance of Indigenous studies approaches in early American studies scholarship. The Great Power of Small Nations builds on this turn, and I am deeply grateful to the WMQ and my colleagues for the opportunity to discuss my book within the larger Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) and early American historiographies, particularly because NAIS methods are far from broadly accepted by historians. In part, this is because NAIS demands that scholars engage with the communities that we study and consider the consequences of our work for modern tribal nations. So, as Emilie Connolly highlights in her opening comments, the field as a whole continues to wrestle with questions about whether and how to integrate NAIS approaches and theory into historical scholarship.2 When I finished writing The Great Power of Small Nations, I could not have foreseen that the book's publication would coincide with the [End Page 761] revival of long-standing, contentious debates over the perils of presentism in historical scholarship. In August 2022, the then-president of the American Historical Association, James H. Sweet, published a piece in Perspectives on History lamenting the prevalence of presentism and the infusion of \"identity politics\" into historical work. \"This new history often ignores the values and mores of people in their own times, as well as change over time, neutralizing the expertise that separates historians from those in other disciplines,\" he wrote. Many scholars have echoed that perspective to express their concerns about the rise of scholarship written by historians who foreground their own experiences or engage explicitly with the present. Other historians have pushed back forcefully against these criticisms of intersectional work.3 As Jessica Marie Johnson powerfully notes, we live in a moment of striking \"ideological warfare\" during which some seek to erase many of the histories of Black and Indigenous peoples, while others write about the Black or Indigenous past without acknowledging the ways that those communities continue to wrestle with the legacies of colonization.4 A year later, the issue remains a live topic in the field. Is it wrong to engage the present in early American historical studies? Such a query presumes that it is possible for historians to generate research questions and interpretations outside of the present. As Alejandra Dubcovsky highlights,","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136128468","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":"Historical Care and the (Re)Writing of Sexual Violence in the Colonial Americas","authors":"Marisa J. Fuentes","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.a910398","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.a910398","url":null,"abstract":"Historical Care and the (Re)Writing of Sexual Violence in the Colonial Americas Marisa J. Fuentes (bio) HISTORIAN Sharon Block revisits, revises, and rethinks the lasting impacts of sexual violence experienced by a young white woman named Rachel Davis in late eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. Returning to her first published book with meticulous research and the benefits of new digital technologies, Block reconsiders the nature and legality of sexual violence in colonial America and the ethical enterprise of writing on vulnerable historical subjects. Equally important, Block centers \"historical justice\" in this rewriting of Rachel's life and what that might mean to people in our present. New archival evidence that she culls through traditional, digital, and genealogical research enables Block to offer a deeper and more contextualized long view of Rachel's life beyond the singular court case that sent her attacker to prison. Block places Rachel in the context of her community and settler colonial violence against Indigenous people and follows her archival traces through family relationships, marriage, and contemporary descendants. This new work enables Block to rewrite Rachel's narrative of sexual violence as one incident in a long life and raises important questions about historical production. In the essay, Block recognizes that the recovery of Rachel's archive and detailed life circumstances exemplified Rachel's subject position in this colonial past. Her mother's death and her father's destitution left her contract-laboring for relatives. Her age and employment made her vulnerable to the power of white men in this context. Still, Block offers a critical clarification that makes plain the different archival, narrative, and methodological possibilities for specific early modern women: \"The archival traces left about Euro-colonial women such as [End Page 693] Rachel Davis are in no way comparable to the archival absences common to enslaved, Black, and Indigenous women.\"1 Here I want to think about how ethical and methodological stakes change depending on the historical subjects we research and engage. Block gestures toward this when briefly discussing the case of Phillis, an enslaved woman who \"was pregnant with her enslaver's child.\" Block explains how \"focusing on the production of history requires fuller and more just narratives that actively theorize the unrecoverable lived experiences of enslaved and Black women while attending to the violence too often inherent in the slim archival recordings of their existence.\"2 I am concerned about ethical historical writing and the troubling narrative practices that do not seriously contend with the methodological cautions Black feminist historians have made plain in their work on slavery. My essay cites work on both sides of the ethical divide to signal the epistemic consequences of writing without particular care for the historically subjugated. In this essay I will lean significantly on Saidiya Hartma","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136127192","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":"Seeking Circles of Dialogue and Accountability","authors":"Christine DeLucia","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.a910397","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.a910397","url":null,"abstract":"Seeking Circles of Dialogue and Accountability Christine DeLucia (bio) HISTORIANS' work is an \"ethical enterprise\" involving foundational considerations of justice and accountability to past and present communities. Sharon Block frames these stakes for \"doing history\" in this incisive reflection on the methods and goals of early Americanists.1 In revisiting Rachel Davis and her social worlds, Block models one approach to an ethical practice of engagement with the past and its ongoing meanings. Her piece exemplifies relational approaches to scholarship that extend beyond academic boundaries and calls for substantive commitments to these processes among practitioners of early American history. On one level, the resulting narrative recontextualizes Rachel's devastating experiences with sexual violence in light of newly accessible information and revised interpretive frames. On another, it excavates structures of power and caretaking inherent in knowledge production and the possibilities—and challenges—of seeking to interact more intentionally with multiple communities invested in these stories. This is a compelling inaugural entry in the \"Methods and Practices\" section of the William and Mary Quarterly. It takes on nothing less than the necessity of \"remaking [the historical profession's] methods and values.\"2 In articulating these issues through the microhistories of Rachel's networks, centuries ago and today, Block emphasizes that she walks richly cultivated fields. Always attentive to genealogies, she cites and enters into fruitful dialogue with hard-fought-for interventions by African American, Indigenous, feminist, LGBTQ2S, and other scholars and practitioners who [End Page 685] contend with the American historical profession's epistemologies and exercises of authority. Among the questions she surfaces (to paraphrase): What does it mean to approach historical study through restorative processes? What forms of greater justice are possible—but still unrealized—through recovery-oriented research and storytelling? Can people occupying academic roles develop accountable, reciprocal relations with communities that are grounded in respect and mutuality rather than hierarchy and extraction? One of the piece's essential contributions is a discussion of how to situate the interpersonal sexual violence that Rachel Davis experienced at the hands of a fellow colonizer. This intimate gendered harm affected Rachel in ways both knowable and not. It occurred in contexts of larger societal violences enacted by settler colonizers and enslavers upon Indigenous and African American people. As Block explains, \"My renewed and ongoing focus on Rachel has helped me think about the task of tracking Black and Indigenous victims of sexual violence who may have left far fewer, if any, archival traces beyond rarely recorded moments of sexual victimization.\"3 Whose experiences with harrowing or even fatal sexual violence attain attention, care, visibility, and calls for redr","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136128459","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":"Beyond Rise and Fall: Size, Power, and Survival in the Gulf South","authors":"Julia Lewandoski","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.a910406","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.a910406","url":null,"abstract":"Beyond Rise and Fall:Size, Power, and Survival in the Gulf South Julia Lewandoski (bio) DURING the long eighteenth century, the Petites Nations of the Lower Mississippi Valley practiced a political system that allowed them strength and flexibility—or, rather, strength through flexibility. Whether in times of crisis or alliance building, Petites Nations peoples often formed multinational settlements, and their shared customs of offering refuge to migrants enabled them to rebuild after epidemics or deadly violence. But just as fundamental to this system was the ability of nations or smaller groups within them to break away. These processes of disintegration and reconstitution made survival possible under successive colonial regimes and in the midst of an economy shaped by enslavement. And they enabled the Petites Nations to nimbly direct the wider political geography of the Gulf South for more than a century. Elizabeth N. Ellis's portrait of the eighteenth-century Petites Nations in The Great Power of Small Nations is carefully researched and richly rendered. She conveys the complexities of multinational diplomacy in part with a vivid description of the corn porridge, which was ground, boiled, and thickened with venison and bear fat, that Biloxi women offered in greeting to international visitors. She invokes the sounds of the French medals worn by Tunica leader Lattanash—clinking alongside his copper and shell bracelets and anklets—as he asserted his multiple alliances and displayed Tunica power. Vignettes such as these reveal the ways that Ellis skillfully and imaginatively interprets the colonial archives of Louisiana. The men, women, and nonbinary leaders and members of these small nations appear as complex humans, making difficult choices under changing circumstances. Ellis has not drawn an idealized or flattened portrait of noble Indigenous resistance based on unilateral cooperation. She describes a political system that enabled long-term opposition, renegotiation, and independence under colonialism. Ellis roots the power of the Petites Nations in a \"culturally institutionalized approach to negotiating refuge\" (29), facilitated through a common repertoire of ceremonies, gifts, speeches, and diplomacy. Nations with more land and resources offered refuge to migrants [End Page 751] fleeing violence or enslavement, as the Tensas welcomed the Mosopeleas in the 1670s, and as the Natchez folded in the Tioux and Grigras in the early eighteenth century. The specificity and equanimity of this portrait of Petites Nations geopolitics should provoke scholars to reimagine Indigenous power far beyond the Gulf South. Historians of Native North America often highlight the histories of large nations, confederacies that commanded European respect, and territorial empires as they expanded and contracted.1 The identification of these examples of early American Indigenous power has been a welcome corrective to prior narratives of victimhood and dependency. But tha","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136128464","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":"Many Small Nations: Black, Indigenous, Black/Indigenous Bvlbancha","authors":"Jessica Marie Johnson","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.a910405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.a910405","url":null,"abstract":"Many Small Nations:Black, Indigenous, Black/Indigenous Bvlbancha Jessica Marie Johnson (bio) I am thrilled and honored to be part of this conversation about Elizabeth N. Ellis's The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South. I come to this conversation as a queer Black-on-both-sides (U.S. South and Puerto Rico) historian of slavery with a focus on Africans and their forced migration throughout the Atlantic world. I also come to this conversation as a scholar with a deep investment in present-day Black life in Louisiana and beyond. From Atakapas to Natchez to Bvlbancha (the Choctaw name for the site of present-day New Orleans and a word that translates to \"many tongues\"), the sixty-four parishes of present-day Louisiana provide a complex historical milieu that extends beyond mainland North America. It is, I hope, common knowledge at this point that Black life in Louisiana is impossible to understand outside of African history. Thanks to the tremendous and groundbreaking work of scholars such as the late Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, author of Africans in Colonial Louisiana and the founder of the Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy database, the connections between this region and Senegambia, in particular, and West and West-Central Africa are a matter of historical fact. Scholars including Hall, Ibrahima Seck, Jennifer M. Spear, and Cécile Vidal have tracked Africans and people of African descent as they moved across the African diaspora and Caribbean archipelago. Some of the greatest writers of our time, from Édouard Glissant to Saidiya Hartman, Stephanie E. Smallwood, and Sowande' M. Mustakeem, have labored to describe the tremendous rupture and fierce creativity that enslavement generated in the lives of African women, children, and men who suffered those forced migrations.1 At the [End Page 745] mercy of trading companies, distant investors, absentee owners, and upstart entrepreneurs, Africans battled against would-be capitalists, imperialists, enslavers, and settlers seeking to transform them from people with diverse experiences, histories, and cosmologies into commodities, useful for advancing the fortunes of a select few. This is the world that made the Louisiana we know today. Rampant conquest, acquisition, terror, commodification, and forced dispersal of people of many nations for the gratification and enrichment of others drove the founding of French colonial society on the Gulf Coast. French imperial officials and Louisiana-born French and French-Canadian settlers played major roles in settler colonialism. Their quest for dominance led French settlers to withstand scarcity and a sometimes hardscrabble existence on the outer edge of the French Empire and to forge delicate alliances with Indigenous nations from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in the north to the Tunicas and Natchez in the south. Although conquest is a term most often used by historians of Latin America and the Caribbean writing about the predations by Sp","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136128465","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":"People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America by Robert Michael Morrissey (review)","authors":"Thomas M. Wickman","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.a910412","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.a910412","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America by Robert Michael Morrissey Thomas M. Wickman People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America. By Robert Michael Morrissey. Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022. 294 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. On the vast and flat stage of the eastern tallgrass prairies, \"people and bison herds made each other\" (59), as Robert Michael Morrissey's book, People of the Ecotone, argues. The ecotone in the book's title refers to a shifting ecological transition zone of continental importance, in this case the easternmost places where a protruding thumb of tallgrass prairies pushed outward against woodlands on three sides. Centering the Illinois nation among Native communities converging at the midcontinent, People of the Ecotone presents a more-than-human history of a contested region at a time of climate change. Morrissey's excellent book traces the deep history of the ecotone and asks profoundly interdisciplinary questions about the contingencies, choices, and interactions that shaped Indigenous worlds of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Interpreting the French colonial archive and synthesizing insights from the fields of geology, paleobotany, paleoclimatology, archaeology, ecology, and geography, Morrissey presents grounded and specific histories of Indigenous readaptation and realignment. Few scholars have addressed environmental history and Native American history so well in a single work. A number of moments in deep time sets the stage: sixty-six million years ago when the eventual Rocky Mountain range emerged—casting a rain shadow and creating a moisture gradient of relative rainfall from driest to less dry, moving from the western plains to the area where the tallgrass prairies pointed east; the evolution, by around twenty-three million years ago, of the C4 carbon pathway in plants, which refers specifically to an ability to create biomass from four carbon acids and broadly to emerging traits adapted to arid conditions and grazing animals, which later became important as resulting grasses outcompeted less drought-tolerant species across new temperate grasslands; the divergence of early bison from cow-like ancestors about one million years ago; and the speciation of Bison bison, with a tendency to take flight over fight, between five and ten thousand years ago, a genetic change likely shaped by human hunting. For a time, by around 750 C.E., some peoples of the Midwest forged new ways of life around maize and other plants, but in response to intense droughts of the twelfth century, most had dispersed and readjusted to life without agriculture. Simultaneously, pushed by drought, bison from the plains expanded their range eastward, becoming \"perhaps the first large herds of bison grazing [End Page 780] in these far eastern prairies during the whole Holocene Epoch\" ","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136128467","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":"Rethinking, Revising, Rewriting: An Appeal for Unfinished Scholarship","authors":"Martha Hodes","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.a910400","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.a910400","url":null,"abstract":"Rethinking, Revising, Rewriting:An Appeal for Unfinished Scholarship Martha Hodes (bio) IF you're someone who published a scholarly book or article a decade or two ago, when was the last time you reread it? Occasionally, turning the pages of my own long-ago published work, I've found myself wishing I'd selected a different adjective or deleted a repetitive sentence. As historians, our most fulfilling work will alter the historiography in ways small or large. In my \"Literature of the Field\" graduate seminar on the nineteenth-century United States, I take students through the generational shifts of the scholarship, puzzling out patterns: the questions that drove the field in the 1960s, key arguments historians formulated in the 1990s, or the ways in which scholars are reconsidering well-trodden primary sources in the twenty-first century. As the years elapse, our own work may well be superseded by previously unasked questions, innovative methods, newly unearthed evidence, or novel interpretations. When that happens, how many of us return to our research notes from the past to rethink our method and argument? As Sharon Block writes, \"The academic ecosystem is set up for scholarship to be reviewed and critiqued by others, not for self-revision of our own published work.\"1 Block's \"Rewriting the Rape of Rachel\" offers a model for reinvigorating [End Page 709] our own past work, research we might have assumed we had finished and were finished with. This endeavor has the potential to add an original dimension to the study and teaching of historiography, as \"Rewriting the Rape of Rachel\" shows us a senior scholar thinking back on her own pathbreaking contributions to the field of gender and sexuality, with insights gathered from more recent scholarship across a variety of fields. Looking back to her first article, published in 1999, and her first book, published in 2006, Block identifies her necessarily defensive drive to prove the legitimacy of the study of sexuality, and in this way, she inspired me to think about my own first book, published more than twenty-five years ago. I identified with Block's description of writing a monograph built from paragraphs of topic sentences, overflowing with examples and citations. \"I did that too!\" I murmured, thinking back to the book, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South. In one instance, I wrote about two sexual liaisons revealed in freedom lawsuits, backed up by an endnote that referenced six additional such suits. In another spot I listed thirteen \"other Maryland cases of fornication and bastardy between white women and black men,\" while elsewhere I cited twenty-one cases to back up the point that courts could reverse the rape convictions of Black men.2 Heading off critics who might have questioned the occurrence of sex between white women and Black men in the nineteenth-century South, I wrote (necessarily defensively), \"My concern is not to point out that sex between white women a","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136128453","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":"\"Rewriting the Rape of Rachel\" and How History Changes","authors":"Lara Putnam","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.a910399","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.a910399","url":null,"abstract":"\"Rewriting the Rape of Rachel\" and How History Changes Lara Putnam (bio) SHARON Block has written a brilliant reengagement with a historical actor she first wrote about a quarter century ago: Rachel Davis, who, as a teenage indentured servant at the turn of the nineteenth century, suffered repeated sexual assaults by her aunt's husband, spoke out, and ultimately saw him tried and convicted of rape. The subject matter is raw and painful, and Block never loses sight of its moral weight. Yet somehow, without treating Rachel's life as mere fodder for an intellectual excursion, Block manages to take the opportunity to walk us through a meticulously insightful account of how historical knowledge is made—and why, when it is remade at a new point in time, it looks different. Several recent controversies have pushed into the public eye one-dimensional portrayals of historical revision, with critics implying that if historians' narratives change, it can only be evidence of \"presentism\" driven by current values and political needs.1 Block does take values and politics seriously, but her painstaking account shows up one-dimensional caricatures of historical revision as the straw men they are. \"Rewriting the Rape of Rachel\" shines light on the multidimensional, interactive evolution through which changing research practice brings historians closer to thoroughly accurate understandings of the past, rather than further from them. E. H. Carr famously declared in 1961 that for historians, facts are like fish. In the commonsense view, he explained, \"The historian collects [facts], takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him.\" But on the contrary, according to Carr, \"The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger's slab. They are like fish [End Page 701] swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use—these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch.\"2 In this article Block again and again spells out the crucial contingencies undergirding her own fact-finding process: the way things that other people or institutions or businesses wrote or compiled or provided made it possible for her to conduct the research she did. In doing so, she makes visible by contrast the voluntarist paradigm limiting Carr's insights. Historians want to catch particular fish, so they choose how, Carr declared. But of course it is not that simple. What kinds of fishing tackle have been manufactured? Whose needs and goals—and whose assumptions about which fish are worth eating—shaped tackle design over time? What happens when climate change shifts ocean currents, altering which fish one might think about using in a recipe? Self-reflective tales that foreground the researcher's actions and choices are not so rare (indeed in some disciplines they are ro","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136128458","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":"Doing Justice with Rachel","authors":"Sharon Block","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.a910401","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.a910401","url":null,"abstract":"Doing Justice with Rachel Sharon Block (bio) I am honored that the scholars in this Forum took time away from other commitments to respond to my article. I am especially grateful for the ways their generative and generous responses have offered me the gift of further reconsideration. Credit also goes to William and Mary Quarterly editor Joshua Piker for putting together a wonderful group of multigenerational interlocutors—their Ph.D.s span almost three decades. Martha Hodes is able to reflect on the early development of the history of sexuality. Lara Putnam entered the profession around a decade later at the turn of the century and brings her expertise in microhistory and digital humanities methods. Midcareer scholars Marisa J. Fuentes and Christine DeLucia address the need to incorporate ethics into history-making grounded in Black feminist studies and Indigenous studies, respectively. Finally, SJ Zhang, an early career literary scholar, brings emotional resonance to her vibrant intellectual analysis of chronology and community. Hodes's reflections include a full-circle moment. My first publication appeared in the Sex, Love, Race volume that she edited.1 There I compared Rachel Davis and Harriet Jacobs to elucidate how slavery and race structured the possibilities of raped women's experiences of and responses to sexual violence. I struggled through scores of drafts of that essay while on a postdoctoral fellowship at the Omohundro Institute (OI), trying to compensate for the fact that my dissertation ended up focusing more on power and patriarchy than individual women's perspectives: their lives had been subsumed under the need to make rape a legitimate topic for historical study. Looking back, I suspect I had neither the skills nor the training to imagine methodological possibilities that seem obvious today. As a new Ph.D., I struggled to fit myself [End Page 715] into the constraints and commands of the historical profession. I wanted my work to be legible to those in positions of authority (especially those on hiring committees), and I was less sure that I should make myself fully legible. My commitment to confronting inequities, my personal pain for the people I studied, my fear that claims of meritocracy were not meant for me—all of these seemed far too personal to share with a profession that sometimes seemed less than welcoming. It felt far safer to be a historian of rape behind the privilege of an Ivy League Ph.D. and a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship. Several of the Forum writers picked up on my discussion of the contested role of advocacy in historical study in \"Rewriting the Rape of Rachel.\" As I noted, when I was first writing about rape, senior colleagues would publicly warn me about the dangers of what they labeled advocacy history, under the rationale that not-white-male historians were unable to write objectively about their group's history. Even today, when more professional historians embrace historical advocacy to bring the","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136127421","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":"\"To Share How We Know \": Mourning and Meaning-Making in \"Rewriting the Rape of Rachel\"","authors":"SJ Zhang","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.a910396","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.a910396","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This Article Forum extends and amplifies the conversation begun by Sharon Block's innovative article in this issue, \"Rewriting the Rape of Rachel: Historical Methods, Historical Justice.\" Block's article is the initial offering in the William and Mary Quarterly 's \"Methods and Practices\" section, and SJ Zhang, Christine DeLucia, Marisa J. Fuentes, Lara Putnam, and Martha Hodes engage with Block's work by reflecting on their own research and methods. Block provides a response for the Forum.","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136128462","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}