The Last Ottoman Generation and the Making of the Modern Middle East

Immigrant Positioning in Twentieth-Century Mexico: Middle Easterners, Foreign Citizens, and Multiculturalism

The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History

“A Revolution in Labor”: African Americans and Hybrid Labor Activism in Illinois during the Early Jim Crow Era

Thinking with the Nation"National" Literatures at the Cusp Sukanya Banerjee (bio) Critical discussions of the nineteenth-century nation tend to be anachronistic inasmuch as we retrofit contemporary notions of the nation into nineteenth-century politico-cultural formations. One can be forgiven for this anachronistic move because nineteenth-century literary and cultural history bears ample evidence of the singularity with which the spirit of nationalism imbued itself in and through aesthetic and cultural practices, be it in Romantic imaginings or the literary artifact of the Victorian novel. However, it is worth noting that the object of nationalism—the nation—remained considerably opaque throughout the century. Incidentally, while the French Revolution is widely understood to mark the point at which state power begins to affix itself to national sentiment, the sovereign nation-state was hardly a ubiquitous phenomenon until about the mid-twentieth century.1 But it is also the case that the nation itself was quite amorphous over the course of the nineteenth century. Even as Walter Bagehot authored a definitive treatise on what is a key instrument of nationhood, the constitution (in this case, the English constitution), he also mused: "But what are nations?"2 The opacity of the nation arose not so much from its mutability (changing borders) but from the uncertainty regarding its organizing logic. What was the coherent element around which a community imagined itself? Was it language? Was it race? How much could one put store in territoriality, which, after all, could shift? As twenty-first century readers and scholars, we are all too familiar with the artifice of the nation, the fact of its constructedness. But so were thinkers in the nineteenth [End Page 84] century. What does it mean, then, to read this contingency back into the nineteenth century, when nations were are at various stages of making, nonmaking, and unmaking? How does such a chronologically apposite view impinge upon our otherwise unitary understanding of "national literature" or "national tradition" that a post–Second World War critical and political legacy has bequeathed us? How might revisiting the nation in the late nineteenth century, at the cusp, in fact, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reorient our thinking about the nation and the critical frameworks that it might generate? In addressing these questions, I want to consider analytical frameworks that might be apropos to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries given that this was a period that came in the wake of the Italian Risorgimento and German unification but also witnessed an upsurge in anticolonial agitation as well as colonial nationalisms that understood sovereignty and affiliation as nested, layered, and dispersed.3 The idea of the nation was very much in the air in Britain, too, where national sovereignty had been continually negotiated through franchise reform (the latest installment in 1882) and national identity found expression in patriotic jingoism attending the Boer wars. But the British nation was also inextricable from its empire, and if, as Hedinger and Hee point out, the tendency of "transnational history" is to "nationalize empires," such that "imperial history is read as the history of a nation-state beyond its borders,"4 then it is worth noting the inadequacy of the transnational as an analytical template in this context, not least because of the impossibility of reading the British nation as a discrete formation. In trying to read the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nation and the literatures and traditions that gathered under its rubric, it might be productive, instead, to consider theories of nation extant in the nineteenth century, which is to say, to read through the nineteenth century and with the Victorians—widely understood—rather than retrospectively superimpose our late twentieth- and twenty-first-century critical frameworks upon them. At one level, then, I am making a temporal argument about our reading of the nation, suggesting that while we tend to read back into the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nation and its literatures and cultures, we should focus instead on the nineteenth century and use that as a basis for reading [End Page 85] forward. Evidently, the famed temporal paradoxes of the nation inflect our reading habits, as well. But why focus on the...

Sámi Literature in Norwegian Language Arts Textbooks

A Land of Aching Hearts: The Middle East in the Great War

A Land of Aching Hearts: The Middle East in the Great War

The first work of Jewish art to attract scholarly attention toward the end of the nineteenth century was the “Sarajevo Haggadah,” a medieval illuminated manuscript from Iberia. It was eventually published in Vienna in 1898. A few years earlier, one of the few surviving synagogues in Spain, a building commissioned by Samuel Halevi Abulafia in Toledo (1356), had been declared a national monument, and since 1910 the site has functioned as a museum. A dramatic turning point in the historiography of Jewish art occurred in 1932, with the discovery of the 3rd-century synagogue at Dura Europos in modern Syria. In the years to follow, numerous other synagogues and illuminated manuscripts were first documented and were later analyzed and contextualized. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also saw the establishment of several collections of Jewish ritual objects. Whereas medieval finds in this field are extremely rare, such collections are relatively rich in early modern objects. Illuminated manuscripts began to appear in Jewish societies in the tenth century in the Middle East and around the 1230s in Iberia, France, the German lands, and Italy. Although numerous ancient synagogues have been unearthed by modern archaeologists, architectural remains from the Middle Ages are extremely sparse. The earliest structure that was still standing in 1938 was a Romanesque synagogue in Worms. Having been destroyed in November 1938 by the Nazis, it was reconstructed by the German authorities in 1961. Other structures were to follow, and the oldest continuously functioning synagogue (from c. 1280) is found in Prague. By the late nineteenth century, few medieval synagogues in Iberia that had passed into Christian hands in the course of the fifteenth century and after the expulsions of the Jews from Iberia in the 1490s were still standing. Several archaeological campaigns since the late twentieth century have revealed further remains. Significantly, more structures survive at various locations in Europe from the Early Modern period. What is described here as works of Jewish art were not always produced by Jews. Hence, the definition of “Jewish art” in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period does not necessarily or solely depend on any artists’ identities. For the purpose of this survey, Jewish art will thus not be defined by means of its makers, but rather by means of its users. It refers to art not necessarily made by but for Jews, art that thus functioned as a fermenter in the formation of Jewish cultures. In many fields of Jewish art, the role played by preferences of Jewish patrons is still in need of serious attention in modern scholarship.

The Women's Ordination Movement in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints: Historical and Sociological Perspectives

The RLDS Church, Global Denominations, and Globalization: Why the Study of Denominations Still Matters

vol. 6, 2014 Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA The year 2013 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/ Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. The book was immediately, and wildly, influential among American cultural historians and students of American literature. I remember attending a national meeting shortly after it came out where participants reverentially invoked Levine’s key terms and assumptions, as if they had discovered in the book’s pages an explanation, deeply satisfying both ideologically and emotionally, for a phenomenon that had long been troubling them. In the years since 1988, Highbrow/Lowbrow has exhibited the staying power of a classic, a status certified by the book’s appearance on countless syllabi and oral exam lists. Today it remains available in paperback and in a Kindle version, and I am told that a French edition was just recently published. Many of us have profited a great deal from Levine’s study, and we lament his untimely death in 2006. Yet those of us who have been working in the history of the book and related areas have arrived at a point where we might profitably reassess the arguments of Highbrow/Lowbrow, instead of merely appropriating its framework. What have we learned over the last twentyfive years about cultural hierarchy in America? What Rethinking the Creation of Cultural Hierarchy in America

Capitalism, Protectionism, and Beer Wars in Rock Island, 1880–1900

Revolutionary Violence and the Rise of the Art Novel

Reviewed by: Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries John Limon Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Laura Otis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Pp. 297. $37.50. “Organic memory” is a tidy phrase for a messy confusion of what can be inherited and what can be remembered. Especially in the last third of the last century, according to Laura Otis’s [End Page 164] compendious study, scientists and litterateurs alike were preoccupied with bad analogies of genetic inheritance, cultural heritage, and memory. Lump them sufficiently, and peoples (defined by geography and /or culture and /or race and /or language) may be conceived as corporate people; just as human individuals are integrated by personal memories, nations may be united by racial ones. Not for nothing would the portentous muddles of organic memory seduce German polymaths. But wherever national identity was at issue in the late nineteenth century into the twentieth, as for example in Spain after 1898, the organic memory idea was a temptation. Otis’s study is largely a history of that idea, born out of Lamarckian biology and Haeckel’s law that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny; refined at the border of experiment and prophecy by such thinkers as Ewald Hering and Théodule Ribot; adapted for fictional purposes by Emile Zola and ironized by Thomas Mann and Thomas Hardy; translated into twentieth-century intellectual culture by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. (I have named only a few of the major players in Organic Memory. Otis’s book is nothing if not populated.) The book crosses several frontiers (national, epochal, disciplinary) with nonchalant courage. And Otis’s scholarship excavates a deep source of material on questions of transcendent modern importance. What is the relationship of individuals and nations? Can memory be located in a place? Can spatialized memories find their way to the genetic blueprint of bodies? All literary criticism must now, by a universally observed rule, pass as metacriticism; my only basic reservation about Otis’s book is that on that level, I am not sure what she has shown. Otis opens Organic Memory quoting an incredulous challenge from a graduate student in neuroscience: “Why would anyone want to study the literature from past times?” (vii) Metacriticism, apparently, is the first order of business; the working hypotheses of Organic Memory are that we study literature because it foregrounds metaphors that inform all thinking, even scientific thinking, and that we study “literature from past times” because the past hardly ever does us the favor of dying. Of course, some ideas do fade away, scientific ones, preëminently—for example, organic memory. But they fade away only as science. Done in as science by their essential metaphoricity, they may linger elsewhere precisely by virtue of metaphoric power. The study of literature brings that hidden source of power to light, where it can do us less damage. At the beginning and end of her book, Otis is explicit about what damage organic memory has already done: Nazis and Serbs are much on her mind. The unexamined assumption (barely qualified on a couple of occasions) is that bad ideas have bad consequences. But implicit throughout the book is a lesson murkier than the one Otis herself infers from it. Part of the problem is that “organic memory” conflates, I think, two ideas: first that genetic inheritance should be conceived as a kind of memory; second, that actual memories are transmitted genetically. The former is probably more conducive to racist appropriation: racial similarity would seem, in its terms, to imply national identity. The latter, Lamarckian conception could be essentially inclusive, since hundreds of years of shared memories (as by Germans and Jews) would begin to produce genetic overlap. No wonder that two German Jews, Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal, are near the center of Otis’s story. And the presence of Freud (with Jung—but not as distinct from Jung as one had thought) at the culmination of the narrative makes it clear that exclusive conceptions of race did not have to be, by any logical entailment, essential to conceptions of organic memory. Racial memories might be shared...

Reviewed by: Imperial Germany, 1871 - 1918: Short Oxford History of Germany William Mulligan (bio) James Retallack , editor. Imperial Germany, 1871 - 1918: Short Oxford History of Germany. Oxford University Press. xvi, 328. US$100.00 The study of imperial Germany remains vibrant, as the essays in this volume of the Short Oxford History of Germany demonstrate. A combination of well-established historians and the leading scholars of a new generation have written a series of lively contributions, each of which is opened by a [End Page 377] short anecdote illustrating some of the central issues identified in the excellent introduction by James Retallack. Alongside two chapters examining the politics of Bismarckian and Wilhelmine Germany, there are thematic essays on the economy, society, religion, culture, gender, bourgeois reform, political culture, militarism, and Germany in the world, before a concluding chapter on the First World War. Four themes form the 'interpretative arc' of the volume: social and economic change, the relationship of the middle classes to the state, conflict, and the relationship between authoritarian and modern features of imperial Germany. These issues have been at the heart of research since the 1960s, but in this volume they are reworked in important ways. In particular, Retallack notes that historians have developed different geographical frames in which to locate modern German history. The attention to the local and, at the other end of the scale, the global framework of German history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has opened new perspectives. For example, national identity and the process of state formation were heavily influenced by responses to such diverse issues as the increasingly interdependent world economy and the emergence of new elites in towns and villages around the country. For example, Christopher Clark's chapter on religion begins with a story about a conflict over the commemoration of the Lutheran Reformation in Affaltrach in Württemberg and concludes with a comment on the Continent-wide dimension of church-state conflict in the late nineteenth century. A second important development is that the history of imperial Germany is no longer read as the precursor to the Third Reich. The debate about Germany's special path, or Sonderweg, gave a particular intensity to the historiographical debates between the 1960s and 1980s. The relationship between imperial and Nazi Germany remains on the research agenda, as recent debates about military culture and colonial warfare have demonstrated. In this volume, however, the editor and the contributors have generally resisted drawing a line between Bismarck and Hitler. Retallack concludes that the subjects of imperial Germany would have been astonished by the idea that the Third Reich would constitute their nation's future. Instead the half-century dividing the founding of the Kaiserreich and its downfall was a period of transition, in which contemporaries struggled, but often succeeded, in coming to terms with change. It was a period with many possible outcomes, 'an object worthy of study in its own right.' By releasing imperial Germany from the teleological straitjacket of 1933, it encourages historians to explore a much wider range of themes and issues than had been the case in the heyday of the Sonderweg debate. Topics such as reform-minded bourgeois groups and the rich texture of civil society become more interesting if they are not written off as the dead ends of German history. [End Page 378] If the volume is a marker for the state of the current debates on imperial Germany, Retallack also offers some sage advice about future research directions. Given the renewed interest in military history, in the broadest sense of the term, it is no surprise to see the First World War highlighted as an important area of research, though he suggests that the experience of the war years needs to be integrated into general histories of imperial Germany. Pushing the study of the emergence of mass politics in the 1870s and 1880s might give a more rounded view of the Bismarckian era, which is dominated by the character of the Iron Chancellor. By summarizing the complexities of the current debate and setting out fresh research agendas, Retallack's volume will offer an invaluable guide to both experts and students. William Mulligan William...