Generation Of Historians Research Articles

From those Wonderful People Who Killed Socrates

48 Historically Speaking · September 2003 From those Wonderful People Who Killed Socrates Barry Strauss Those ofus lucky enough to teach in a university today know that holding a professorshipis notmerelya privilege but a pubUc trust. VirtuaUy every university in the United States, including private universities , depends upon some degree ofpubUc funding. Widiout taxes paid bypeople who do not enjoy the good Ufe ofthe university, few ofus could be professors. Without the tax-free status ofaU universities, few professorial jobs would exist. The pubUc has given us a great gift; the minimum thatwe owe the pubUcin return is to debate die greatissuesin our disciplines. For historians, that means three things. First, itmeans discussingeverythingfrom politics , economics, and diplomacy, to war, revolution , and class struggles, and from ideas, work, and sex, to die family, slavery, and reUgion : inshort, the full spectrumofsubjects that make up die historical experience, ofwhich these arejustasample. Second, itmeansspeaking and writing in a language that educated laypeople might understand. Third, it means presentinganddiscussingeverypoUticalopinion . In short, historians must be universaUsts. Unfortunately, these three great professional desiderata are increasingly absent in today's American university, especially ifit is an elite university. Academic historians breathe ever more rarified air; they pay ever less attention to ideas that are not on the Left or on the so-caUed Left (it not being clear whatis left-wingabouttoday's academic eUtism ); they write in ever more opaque prose; and they pay ever less attention to what an educatedlaypersonmightreasonablyconsider to be the stuffofhistory. (History is the subject of this essay, but other academic disciplines are equaUy ifnot more at fault) I could go on and on aboutmybeefswith current historiographical dogma, but many other people have beat me to the punch. Besides, that'snotmypointThe problemwith academic historyis notthatitis dominated by one set ofideas instead ofanother, die problemis thatitis dominated. Ourjob ashistoriansinuniversitiesisless tojudgewhether, say, socialism is better than classical UberaUsm, than to create an environment in which our students and colleagues can make such ajudgment . As historians, we need to follow the lodestarnotofdogma butofdebate. Weneed, in short, to create a university. But don't we already have universities? Not in the sense that we should. At the eUte level, academic history in America is becoming a place inwhich notmerelyare there few conservatives or RepubUcans, but there are few people who happen not to be persuaded by the trend of the moment. Some history departments are in danger of becoming all but one-party states. Theuniversityis also endangeringitsvery mission. The search for truth requires subjecting ideas to vigorous criticism. Indeed, widiouttestinganidea bymeans ofdie toughestcritique , itis impossible to be surewhether ornotitis true. As a practical matter, an intellectual institution needs to represent a wide varietyofschools ofthought, methodologies, and poUtical opinions in orderto ensure that everytheorybe putto a hard-hittingtest But this cannothappenwhen mostpeople march to the same ideological drumbeat. Itwill donogood toideaUze diepastThe old universitywas far from perfect. EUte history faculties ofold had precious Uttle room for women, Jews, blacks, Latinos, Asians, or openly gaypeople. No one would want to go back to that world. The present generation ofhistorians should be proud ofits achievementswith regard to equaUty. Butweneed to maintain—and expand—the equaUty ofthe newuniversitywithout gettingstuckin an ideological lockstep. How did it happen? There is no need to point a finger, because it didn't happen overnight or through maUce aforethought. There was no conspiracy. Rather, the narrowingofhistorians ' mindshappened through a combination of circumstances. Historians did notlose theirwaybecause theywere bad; they simply forgot to be good. We gave into die'understandable but not admirable desire to hire Uke-minded colleagues; we put the founding of schools of thought ahead of exposing our students and ourselves to the universe ofideas; we forgot the impossibiUty ofknowingthatwe are rightwithoutlistening to those whom we think are wrong. What is to be done? Throw the rascals out? Thatwould onlyreplace one hegemonic discourse—isn'tdiatdie rightphrase?—with another. Rather, we need to bring the rascals back in. Does every eUte history department have a gender theorist? Fine, letit also have a poUtical historian. Does a state-of-the-artprogramstudyracism ? Excellent; letitstudyeconomics as well. Do we teach peace? That is admirable, butwe must also studywar. Whatwe need, in short, is diversity: intellectual diversity as weU as racial...

In Retrospect: Lawrence Henry Gipson's The British Empire before the American Revolution

Lawrence Henry Gipson was one those tragic figures who lived far too long or died far too early. In 1970, the year Gipson completed his magisterial 15-volume study The British Empire before the American Revolution and the year before he died at the age of 90, the history profession was caught in the throes of a profound transformation. 1 While Gipson wrote of sweeping themes and the inexorable power of broad forces, a new generation of historians was coming of age, preaching the virtues of demographic studies of small communities. By the time Gipson had finished his task of chronicling the rise and fall of empire in North America on the eve of revolution, his methods and interpretations appeared wildly out of step with a profession that increasingly sought to uncover the experience of those "from below." Yet in our day, when it looks like the "new" social history may have reached its interpretive limits, scholars in Britain and the United States are revisiting nearly all the themes that Gipson examined. Exploring the great transition from British empire to American nation, as he claimed a generation ago and as we do today, requires an understanding of the Atlantic context as well as an appreciation of the ways in which disparate regions ranging from London and Dublin to Philadelphia and the Ohio Valley were linked together.

Leisure, consumption and the European city

Producing and consuming studies of consumption has become a minor industry in its own right amongst the current generation of historians and it has moved significantly beyond the pioneering histories of shopping which we associate with Alison Adburgham and others. Instead, it has moved into the broader realms of cultural formation, both in wider terms of social change and in the context of regional and local identities, as well as international comparisons. So it comes as little surprise to find a batch of current studies which deal with the present complexities of scholarly approaches in distinctive but overlapping ways. In this development British historians have made significant pioneering contributions but it becomes apparent from some of the present offerings that initiatives may have moved elsewhere. That is hardly a cause for national mourning but at least some parts of the works reviewed here, written abroad, show an awareness of British developments which is too rarely reciprocated in studies originating on this side of the Channel and North Sea (or ‘German Ocean’ as more appropriate in view of the insularity which produces them). Perhaps the appalling inability to read European languages now so common amongst both under- and postgraduate students is also more widespread amongst academic historians than we have realized or are prepared to admit. It is also very likely that the situation is being exacerbated by the short termism of the Research Assessment Exercise's demands for a frequency of output which militates against the extended period necessary for sophisticated comparisons – so much of its classification of ‘international excellence’ seems more to do with single-focused rather than real international studies. Yet there is much on offer in Europe in particular which cries out for more systematic comparative analysis and some of the work reviewed here offers a good starting point.

'Hitler's First Victim'? — Memory and Representation in Post-War Austria: Introduction

'Hitler's FirstVictim5? ? Memory and Representation in Post-War Austria Introduction JUDITH BENISTON 24 February 2003 saw the publication of the final report of theHistoriker kommission [Historical Commission], an independent body established by the Austrian government in autumn 1998 to carry out a scholarly investigation of6Verm?gensentzug auf dem Gebiet der Republik Osterreich w?hrend der NS-Zeit sowie R?ckstellungen und Entsch?digungen (sowie wirtschaftliche und soziale Leistungen) seit 1945 in?sterreich' [the seizure of property on Austrian territory during the period ofNazi rule, as well as restitution and compensation (and related economic and welfare issues) in Austria since 1945].1 The appointment of the Commission, chaired by eminent lawyer Clemens Jabloner, professor at the University of Vienna and President of the Verwaltungsgerichtshof [Administrative Court], can be seen as a response both to sustained domestic pressure ? from an increasingly assertive Jewish community, from politicians (especially in the ?VP [Austrian People's Party] and Green Party), and from a new generation of historians ? and to developments in the international arena, where since the mid-1990s attention has increasingly focused on the economics of persecution, on bringing to account companies, institutions and individuals who benefited materially from the Nazi policies of confiscation and exploitation.2 In Austria as elsewhere, awkward questions have been asked ofmajor corporations, of banks and insurance companies, several ofwhich have set up their own investigative commissions; protracted disputes over 1 Clemens Jabloner, Brigitte Bailer-Galanda, Eva Blimlinger, Georg Graf, Robert Knight, Lorenz Mikoletzky, Bertrand Perz, Roman Sandgruber, Karl Stuhlpfarrer and Alice Teichova, Schlussbericht derHistorikerkommission derRepublik Osterreich. Verm?gensentzug w?hrend der JVS-^eit sowie R?ckstellungen und Entsch?digungen seit ig4j in ?sterreich. Zusammenfassungen und Einsch?tzungen (Vienna and Munich, 2003). The text was immediately made available online at http:// www.historikerkommission.gv.at. All page references are to the printed version; here p. 15. 2 See Richard Mitten, 'The Price of Historical Responsibility: "Wiedergutmachung" and the Austrian Historians' Commission', Antisemitism Research, 3/1 (1999), 9-15? Recent scholarly interest in the economics of persecution is exemplified by the following: Die politische ?konomie des Holocaust. Zur wirtschaftlichen Logik von Verfolgung und 'Wiedergutmachung', ed. by Dieter Stiefel (Vienna, 2001). 2 Introduction the ownership of looted artworks (for example, paintings by Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt) alerted a broad public to the restitution issue. A further catalyst was the threat of legal action in theUnited States ? the so-called 'class actions' demanding compensation for holders of looted bank accounts and for individuals, including civilians from occupied countries and former concentration camp inmates, who had been used during the period ofNazi rule as forced or slave labourers. The report of theHistorical Commission, which focuses attention squarely on how the victims ofNational Socialism inAustria have been treated, both in the period 1938-45 and subsequently, may also be said to constitute a quasi-official reckoning (and not only in the monetary sense of the word) with the thesis of Austria as 'Hitler's first victim' that, until the 1980s, remained the barely questioned master-narrative of the Second Republic.3 As such, it forms an important backdrop to the articles assembled in the present volume, all of which explore representations and memories of the rise ofNazism and ofNazi rule inAustria that stand in complex and often critical relation to the notion of collective and institutional victimhood. As iswell known, the 'victim thesis' originates in theMoscow Declaration of November 1943, inwhich thewartime Allies identified Austria as 'das erste freie Land, das der typischen Angriffspolitik Hitlers zum Opfer fallen sollte' [the first free country to fall a victim to Hitlerite aggression].4 Declaring the annexation of the country by Nazi Germany on 15March 1938 to be null and void, the signatories announced their intention to reverse it. In the following paragraph, however, theDeclaration warned thatAustria must take responsibility for her subsequent participation in the war on the side of Nazi Germany and that account would be taken of how far the Austrian people liberated themselves. Less than two years later, the Declaration of Austrian Independence (27 April 1945) incorporated the complete text of theMoscow Declaration with only minor changes in wording; but the sense of ambivalence was weakened by detaching the caveats from...

Engagement with the Past: The Lives and Works of the World War II Generation of Historians

Engagement with the Past: The Lives and Works of the World War II Generation of Historians

The History Of Applied Mathematics And The History Of Society

Choosing the history of statistics and operations research as a casestudy, several ways of setting the development of 20th century appliedmathematics into a social context are discussed. It is shown that there isample common ground between these contextualizations and several recent research programs in general contemporary history. It is argued that a closer cooperation between general historians and historians ofmathematics might further the integration of the internalist andexternalist approaches within the historiography of mathematics.

Scottish historical landscapes

The intentional exploitation of gardens or landscapes to project or v1ew history and ideologies was for many centuries a specific feature of creativity by and for the rich or powerful in Scotland. This paper focuses upon the phenom.enon between the time of James IV (1488–1513) until that of Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), though later examples are noted. Because history was often employed in the interests of politics – typically, the ideologies of ruling élites – we will encounter forces that demanded or justified particular portrayals. We will encounter too the creation of history; for political commemoration (e.g. by monuments) meant to record, and therefore to document; and so to engage the historian. The historian investigated and documented history; politicians or the politically motivated selected episodes of that history for documentation on the landscape; now investigated, in turn, by our generation of historians.1

Engagement with the Past: The Lives and Works of the World War II Generation of Historians

Engagement with the Past: The Lives and Works of the World War II Generation of Historians

Engagement with the past: the lives and works of the World War II generation of historians

Engagement with the past: the lives and works of the World War II generation of historians

From the Editors

213 Ab Imperio, 3/2002           Forum AI: The analysis of subjectivization practices in the early Stalinist society FROM THE EDITORS Debates on Communist totalitarian regimes in the 20th century have received a new impulse as a result of the collapse of Communist regimes in Central Europe and the USSR.The historiography of Communism underwent an intricate evolution in terms of perspectives, approaches and areas selected for research. Its intellectual legacy is not reducible to what came to be called “Sovietology” or works written in a Totalitarian paradigm as often assumed by some of the scholars in post Soviet Russia. The dominant paradigm of the incipient phase of historiography that of history of the political regime and its ideology “viewed from without” was supplemented (and some would argue surpassed) by the history written “from within” that of people who built these regimes, struggled with them, accommodated to these regimes and renegotiated the external frameworks to their own ends. This transformation of approaches to the Soviet history was initially linked to the impact of social sciences and theory of modernization and. New trends in Soviet studies acquired the name of “revisionism” (the term understood differently by those who use it to label the adversaries and those who appropriate it to underscore the positive potential of practiced history). Later a new focus emerged, which shifted the attention of historians to the cultural mechanisms, language and semantics at work in soviet society. This “cultural turn” in soviet studies is not only homage to the intellectual vogue of history writing in the last third of the 20th century. The optics of cultural history brings about a “humanizing effect” by way of depicting how people lived and what they felt through the hard years of 214 From the Editors           the soviet regime. Thus it eschews the danger of reducing the vicissitudes of actually lived lives to the function and teleology of the modernizing process. Culture centered approach is also indispensable for studies of transitional periods (like those between pre and post 1917 and 1991) for changes of social and cultural practices lag behind those introduced by momentous political revolutions.At the same time cultural approach does not predispose scholars to a particular meta-interpretation of soviet history . Culture-centered analysis may lead to a reproduction of image of the unique mental universe and historically determined socio-political order. But it is equally capable of radical “normalization” of a given historical case by virtue of its interpretation of disciplinary and subjectivizing practices as generic for modern societies. It may “homogenize” the subjective experience of a given society as well as emphasize complex and invariably incomplete process of internalization, accommodation and subversion of the hegemonic socio-political order on the level of particular groups or individuals. The late 1990s brought works by a new generation of historians (foremost by Jochen Hellbeck and Igal Halfin) which interpret the subjective world of the soviet citizens on the basis of autobiographic sources. They signal the coming of a new and promising turn in soviet studies, which however cannot be understood outside of the context of western debates on the nature of the Soviet Union. It is legitimate to view this trend as “the newest revisionism ,” which aptly reflects some of the aspects of post-communist intellectual mindscape. This trend takes on methodology of cultural history and textual analysis as well as of the western conception of the modern subject, elaborated under the influence of M. Foucault’s writings. This subject is not a Cartesian holistic “ego” established in the process of self-denial and selfreflection . Neither it is a Kantian subject with the holistic self-consciousness and cognition of the world. Rather it is a product of the impact of discursive practices, a textual and dynamic structure. Working in what seems to be the most radical version of the linguistic turn, students of “Soviet subjectivity” rely on a selection of particular sources – autobiographic writings, questionnaires , diaries, in some cases, records of interrogation – which are read as a contiguous text, as a dialogue between two subjects. Viewing the history of soviet society from the vantage point of proposed methodology, Hellbeck and Halfin pose new questions and rethink established interpretations of the Soviet...

Southern History across the Color Line

The color line, once all too solid in southern public life, still exists in the study of southern history. As distinguished historian Nell Irvin Painter notes, historians often still write about the South as though people of different races occupied entirely different spheres. In truth, although blacks and whites were expected to remain in their assigned places in the southern social hierarchy throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, their lives were thoroughly entangled. In this powerful collection, Painter reaches across the color line to examine how race, gender, class, and individual subjectivity shaped the lives of black and white women and men in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century South. Through six essays, she explores such themes as interracial sex, white supremacy, and the physical and psychological violence of slavery, using insights gleaned from psychology and feminist social science as well as social, cultural, and intellectual history. At once pioneering and reflective, the book illustrates both the breadth of Painter's interests and the originality of her intellectual contributions. It will inspire and guide a new generation of historians who take her goal of transcending the color bar as their own.

Postpositivist Interpretations of the Chemical Revolution

Expressing the growing interest of historians of science in “the history of science as history,” this study offers a critical account of recent developments in the historiography of the Chemical Revolution. It explores the philosophical and historiographical dimensions of the “postpositivist” (or “theoreticist”) interpretations of the Chemical Revolution, which displaced the positivist-whig historiographical hegemony in the 1960s and 1970s, only to be challenged by the sociology of knowledge in the 1980s and 1990s. Despite its brief ascendancy in the pantheon of interpretive styles, postpositivism had a profound influence on the historiography of the Chemical Revolution, and this study will enable us to better appreciate its complex, variegated, and important results. Besides providing future specialists in the field with useful information, this study is designed to solicit the interest and input of more general historians in the history of science.

Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy

Through the life of Benjamin Ryan Tillman (1847-1918), South Carolina's self-styled agrarian rebel, this book traces the history of white male supremacy and its discontents from the era of plantation slavery to the age of Jim Crow. As an anti-Reconstruction guerrilla, Democratic activist, South Carolina governor, and U.S. senator, Tillman offered a vision of reform that was proudly white supremacist. In the name of white male militance, productivity, and solidarity, he justified lynching and disfranchised most of his state's black voters. His arguments and accomplishments rested on the premise that only productive and virtuous white men should govern and that federal power could never be trusted. Over the course of his career, Tillman faced down opponents ranging from agrarian radicals to aristocratic conservatives, from woman suffragists to black Republicans. His vision and his voice shaped the understandings of millions and helped create the violent, repressive world of the Jim Crow South. Friend and foe alike--and generations of historians--interpreted Tillman's physical and rhetorical violence in defense of white supremacy as a matter of racial and gender instinct. This book instead reveals that Tillman's white supremacy was a political program and social argument whose legacies continue to shape American life. |Through the life of Benjamin R.Tillman (1847-1918), South Carolina's notorious agrarian rebel, this book traces white male supremacy from plantation slavery to the age of Jim Crow. As an anti-Reconstruction guerrilla, governor, and U.S. senator, he offered a vision of reform that was proudly white supremacist. This book argues that Tillman's white supremacy was a political program and social argument whose legacies continue to shape American life.

Women, Gender and Industrialisation in England, 1700–1870. By Katrina Honeyman. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000, Pp. viii, 204. $59.95.

The process of industrial change energized generations of historians to explain the transformations that reformed the modern world. Over much of the twentieth century, historians of Marxist and liberal persuasions staged mighty contests to define most persuasively the effects of factory production, work discipline, class, and capital formation. The sometimes triumphalist chronicle of factory reform, capital accumulation, and trade-union growth were painted across the nineteenth century; more detailed studies of communities, corporations, and institutions had to fit in as best they could. Until the 1970s, as graduate students signed up for one or the other of these interpretative camps, few authors, liberal or Marxist, considered the experience of women. Adding women's history and gender analysis to the study of industrialization has brought about one of the most significant transformations of this chronicle. Katrina Honeyman's most recent contribution stands as an essential text for those teaching and working in this field.

Records Management and Archives in Korea : Its Development and Prospects

After almost one century of discontinuity in the archival tradition of Chosun dynasty, Korea entered the new age of records and archival management by legislating and executing the basic laws (The Records and Archives Management of Public Agencies Ad of 1999). Annals of Chosun dynasty recorded major historical facts of the five hundred years of national affairs. The Annals are major accomplishment in human history and rare in the world. It was possible because the Annals were composed of collected, selected and complied records of primary sources written and compiled by generations of historians, As important public records are needed to be preserved in original forms in modern archives, we had to develop and establish a modern archival system to appraise and select important national records for archival preservation. However, the colonialization of Korea deprived us of the opportunity to do the task, and our fine archival tradition was not succeeded. A centralized archival system began to develop since the establishment of GARS under the Ministry of Government Administration in 1969. GARS built a modem repository in Pusan in 1984 succeeding to the tradition of History Archives of Chosun dynasty. In 1998, GARS moved its headquarter to Taejon Government Complex and acquired state-of-the-art audio visual archives preservation facilities. From 1996, GARS introduced an automated archival management system to remedy the manual registration and management system complementing the preservation microfilming. Digitization of the holdings was the key project to provided the digital images of archives to users. To do this, the GARS purchased new computer/server systems and developed application softwares. Parallel to this direction, GARS drastically renovated its manpower composition toward a high level of professionalization by recruiting more archivists with historical and library science backgrounds. Conservators and computer system operators were also recruited. The new archival laws has been in effect from January 1, 2000. The new laws made following new changes in the field of records and archival administration in Korea. First, the laws regulate the records and archives of all public agencies including the Legislature, the Judiciary, the Administration, the constitutional institutions, Army, Navy, Air Force, and National Intelligence Service. A nation-wide unified records and archives management system became available. Second, public archives and records centers are to be established according to the level of the agency; a central archives at national level, special archives for the National Assembly and the Judiciary, local government archives for metropolitan cities and provinces, records center or special records center for administrative agencies. A records manager will be responsible for the records management of each administrative divisions. Third, the records in the public agencies are registered in the computer system as they are produced. Therefore, the records are traceable and will be searched or retrieved easily through internet or computer network. Fourth, qualified records managers and archivists who are professionally trained in the field of records management and archival science will be assigned mandatorily to guarantee the professional management of records and archives. Fifth, the illegal treatment of public records and archives constitutes a punishable crime. In the future, the public records find archival management will develop along with Korean government's 'Electronic Government Project.' Following changes are in prospect. First, public agencies will digitize paper records, audio-visual records, and publications as well as electronic documents, thus promoting administrative efficiency and productivity. Second, the National Assembly already established its Special Archives. The judiciary and the National Intelligence Service will follow it. More archives will be established at city and provincial levels. Third, the more our society develop into a knowledge-based information society, the more the records management function will become one of the important national government functions. As more universities, academic associations, and civil societies participate in promoting archival awareness and in establishing archival science, and more people realize the importance of the records and archives management up to the level of national public campaign, the records and archival management in Korea will develop significantly distinguishable from present practice.

Scrutinizing Men: Current Trends in the History of British Masculinity, 1600-1800

A little over a decade ago Michael Roper, writing in History Workshop Journal, surveyed 'Recent Books on Masculinity' in response to a 'recent flurry' of academic interest he had observed at that time. 'While we now have a substantial body of literature analysing what masculinity is', he wrote, 'we still know precious little about its history.'1 Eleven years on, arguably, we know a little more. It is now a widely-accepted notion that the male gender is a historically-constructed phenomenon as much as the female, and that the project of unravelling its time-specific historical manifestations is worthwhile and important. Moreover, this is still a highly political and contentious issue. The anxiety that was stirring in the early nineties about the place of men in society shows no sign of abating. For my generation of historians, born in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the processes that set in motion the study of masculinity have themselves become historicized. Some of us, unlike the vast majority of our students, cling to the notion that feminism might not be a dirty word, but among the prevailing images of men's magazines such as FHM and Loaded and the retro-romanticism of Bridget Jones, the very idea of a 'men's movement' seems absurd, as irrelevant and embarrassing as flared trousers and flower-power T-shirts. However, the problems of gender, and of masculinity in particular, have not been eradicated, but have simply mutated into different cultural forms. Since Roper's HWJ article in 1990, we have (allegedly) been through an anti-feminist backlash, and witnessed the rise of 'new laddism'.2 It seems as though western society is as deeply embroiled as ever in debates about masculinity as a putative social problem, from the 'underperformance' of boys in schools, to the alarming rise in suicide rates among young men. While it would be mistaken to project such concerns back in time, these contemporary issues continue to lend political urgency to the study of the gendered male that challenges and historicizes dominant cultural images. One recent example of a book that would have been unthinkable twenty or even ten years ago is Philip Carter's Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain, 1660-1800 (2000). Carter has been a significant voice on masculinity in recent collected essays on gender in the early modern period, and (it is pertinent to observe) one of the few male historians to have pursued the subject.3 His work marks the maturation of the study of masculinity, and an interesting departure into the complexities of social interaction, self-construction and gender performance by men in eighteenth-century England. Carter achieves this by challenging one of the problematic assumptions that have tended to characterize histories of masculinity in the last ten years: that the study of manliness must necessarily hinge upon the study of sexuality. In particular, his work presents a welcome challenge to the oft-cited yet

Sound, Image, Action

This article begins with discontinuity. Its review of Web-based historical information discards traditional taxonomies and builds instead on the new capabilities that separate digital publishing from its paper-based predecessor. The article emphasizes dynamic, transformative, and multimedia sources that specialize in images, sound, search-ability, and the conversion of data into visually digestible tabular and spatial forms. The goal is not to make a one-to-one comparison with print resources, or in any way to denigrate them, but to highlight the kind of sources which a generation of historians brought up on Alistair Cooke's Americaand Ken Burns's Civil Warare learning to exploit.

Standard Bearers: Material Culture and Middle-Class Communities at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

A generation of historians, working at the intersection of business history and cultural history, has examined the consumer culture that flourished in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In studies of advertising, marketing, department stores, credit systems, and other aspects of selling and buying, these scholars have shown that American businesses not only produced consumer goods but also created consumer desire.

Accounting History in Australia: A Survey of Published Works, 1975–99

Research in accounting history has expanded significantly in recent years. This paper reviews the recent development of accounting history in Australia through an examination of the relevant literature while recognizing the wider influence of Australian scholars in the international community of accounting historians. The survey is confined to works on Australian accounting history published in the period of 25 years between 1975 and 1999. These works are discussed using the literature classification framework provided by Carnegie and Napier (1996). Reviewing the literature in this way is expected to be of benefit to historians in general, particularly economic and business historians, and also accounting historians, while future directions for accounting history research in Australia are outlined following a brief critique of the literature examined.

Thinking Unfashionable Thoughts, Asking Unfashionable Questions

FOR MY GENERATION OF HISTORIANS, who went to graduate school from roughly 1962 to 1975 (and hence now for many of the graduate students we have trained), the big questions in Western or world history became strangely unfashionable. None is bigger than the question of what were the factors that made Western hegemony possible. Indeed, the very notion of Western hegemony, of the domination of much of the world by Western political or economic power from roughly 1800 to 1970, may be said to be so fraught with anger or guilt as to be almost untouchable. In the present climate, even posing the question Why the West? conjures up more embarrassment or hostility than awed curiosity. Just asking it suggests the possibility that the questioner approves of the course that human history took from roughly 1500 to 1900. Admitting that the West did achieve hegemony seems almost tantamount to endorsing the means and methods used to achieve it. Suspicious critics might even presume that a Eurocentric questioner would dwell on Western strengths while ignoring the injustices associated with conquest or imperialism. In addition, seldom do specialists in non-Western histories-the great Joseph Needham, as always, an exception-dwell on the question. Indeed, as the work of Roy Bin Wong shows, specialists in Chinese or African history delight in raising the stakes by showing the relative insignificance of differences between their area and period and a comparable time in the West.1 As a result of an embarrassment sprung from a multitude of sources-not least the rise of women's history-most historians with credentials in European or American history, or even the history of science and technology, have little to say about what is, arguably, the single most extraordinary phenomenon in global history. The silence in the history of science is particularly striking. Everyone who has thought about the question Why the West? acknowledges the singular importance of mechanical science, both as a mindset and in its application to manufacturing technology. Inventions from larger ships to the steam engine figure prominently in the histories of the Atlantic trade or the rise of Birmingham and Manchester. But most histories of technology now stop at that point and do not ask why those inventions occurred where and when they did. In addition, the history of science has been preoccupied with recovering the social, with situating science, and