Microhistorical Study Research Articles

The City of Brass and Alexander’s Narrow Grave: Translation and Commentary of Kafas added to Manuscript M7709 (Part 1)

The 17th-century manuscript M7709 (held in the Matenadaran, Yerevan, Armenia) includes an Armenian copy of the History of the City of Brass, to which an unknown scribe has added short poems about Alexander the Great. The first of three articles that together present the Alexander poems of M7709 in full, with English translation, for the first time, this article introduces the manuscript and considers the first six poems: the seduction of Olympias, and Alexander’s encounter with plant-men at the edge of the world. It adds commentary on the poems’ relationship to the corresponding part of the History of the City of Brass on each page, proposing textual reasons why the scribe added the poems where he did. Across the three articles, this commentary delves into textual relationships beyond the pages of M7709, linking the Armenian History of the City of Brass, Alexander Romance and other texts and traditions, to show how this manuscript is situated amid wider networks of circulating literature. As a microhistorical study, it seeks to provide illumination into the macrohistory of medieval and early modern literature in and beyond the Caucasus.

Wind power and rural modernization: wind-powered water supply systems in northern Germany and southern France, 1880–1950

ABSTRACT The article analyzes mechanical wind-powered water supply systems situated in southern France and northern Germany in the time period between 1880 and 1950, when wind energy was not yet framed as a renewable, but as a rural, decentralized, and manageable solution to generate energy. Using a local approach, I highlight wind energy use in rural areas of Western societies as part of the non-synchronical process of technological modernization that unfolded at the same time as electrification, industrialization, and the implementation of large technological systems. I develop my argument in two steps. First, I provide the micro-historical case studies to examine socio-technological contexts that motivated people to advocate for the use of wind energy in times of electrification and industrialization. Second, I show the connection to general and specific contemporary discourses about wind energy and energy futures in order to provide evidence that the wind projects were part of rural modernization processes.

Contesting Imperial Feminisms: The Life of an Early Twentieth Century Egyptian Activist

In “Contesting Imperial Feminisms: The Life of an Early Twentieth Century Egyptian Activist,” I make the argument that first-wave Egyptian feminism was inextricably bound to nationalist discourses, and was both produced whole-cloth and adapted from European models by Egyptian activists in response to changing economic and political conditions. Using the life and political work of Huda Sha'arawi, a women’s rights activist and nationalist who lived during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I complicate the euro-centric view that feminism in Egypt was the result of western intervention and was uncritically adopted by colonized women. Instead I try to draw attention to the ways in which Sha'arawi and her comrades formulated a feminism predicated on decolonial liberation and indigenous values, while navigating the political realities of British colonialism and industrialized modernity. A microhistorical study with far-reaching implications, this article analyzes Sha'arawi’s rhetoric and actions, including her performative political unveiling, to gain a deeper understanding of the political contributions of early twentieth century Egyptian feminism. My objective is to return some agency to intersectional actors whose politics have been unjustly framed within the historiography as derivative of (white, European) feminist and (patriarchal) nationalist frameworks.

Artistic households: the economics of creative work in seventeenth-century London

Abstract This article offers new insights into women’s occupational identities and the production of art in seventeenth-century London. The identification of a previously overlooked portraitist named Anne Wemyss (1633–98) shows that she was part of a much wider circle of artists and elite patrons active during this period. An exploration of the training afforded to a number of female Painter-Stainers’ Company apprentices that were connected to artistic households, followed by a micro-historical study of the gender division of labour in Mary Beale’s household studio, further credits women’s creative work in the wider economy.

Darlaston: Growth of A Staffordshire Industrial Town During the Nineteenth Century

Darlaston, in the part of the English midlands known as the Black Country, grew from a small village prior to the Industrial Revolution to a town of over 15,000 inhabitants by the beginning of the twentieth century. It played an important role in the area’s coal and iron extraction, and manufacture of gun parts, screws and bolts. Hitherto little has been written about the social history of this significant industrial urban location but by using a range of sources including the national censuses, maps and newspaper reports, the nature of Darlaston’s changing built environment and the experiences of its residents is investigated in a close focus, microhistorical study.

Sovereignty in the global south: monarchy between ornamentalism and royal cosmopolitanism

Via an examination of recent work on the history of monarchy and sovereignty in the age of empire, this article examines concepts such as David Cannadine’s ‘ornamentalism’ and Johannes Paulmann’s ‘royal cosmopolitanism’ to posit the necessity of viewing royalty as a global and not just European development. It argues that the study of empires requires close attention to frontier entanglements that are best viewed through microhistorical case studies as well as to structural tendencies that offer an overarching sense of the trajectory of power at the macro level. Required at both levels of analysis is attention to the expression of agency and sovereignty, including the scope for the exercise of the monarchical sovereign prerogative.

Утвердження більшовицького тоталітарного режиму в подільському селі наприкінці 1920-х – початку 1930-х рр.: причини, технології та наслідки (на прикладі села Мельниківець на Вінниччині)

Метою статті є, на основі джерел, з урахуванням мікроісторичного підходу, простежити процес остаточного утвердження більшовицького тоталітарного режиму в подільському селі наприкінці 1920-х – початку 1930-х рр. через аналіз причин, технологій та наслідків. Методологія дослідження базується на поєднанні загальнонаукових, спеціально-історичних та міждисциплінарних методів мікроісторичного дослідження з урахуванням принципів історизму, системності, науковості та верифікації. Наукова новизна полягає у спробі автора, на основі аналізу широкої репрезентативної джерельної бази, з позицій конкретного мікроісторичного дослідження, проаналізувати процес насадження більшовицького тоталітарного режиму на Поділлі в умовах другого військово-комуністичного штурму. Висновки. Аналіз різнопланових джерел, що відображають процес насадження більшовицького тоталітарного режиму в селі Мельниківцях на Вінниччині, дає змогу стверджувати, що активізація діяльності місцевих органів щодо усуспільнення селянських господарств на Поділлі розпочалася ще з весни 1928 р. Якщо на початку об’єднання селян у колективи відбувалося здебільш добровільно, то із взяттям партією курсу на суцільну колективізацію, у листопаді 1929 р., переважають силові методи залучення до колективів. Придушення опору заможних селян пропонувалося здійснювати через експропріацію їх власності та висилки за межі постійного проживання. Відповіддю подільського селянства на безчинства влади стала активізація відкритого опору, унаслідок чого на весну 1930 р. в частині населених пунктів Поділля на короткий час навіть було повалено радянську владу. Появу статті Й. Сталіна «Запаморочення від успіхів» частина селянства сприйняла як відверту критику вождем насильницьких методів органів влади на місцях, тому, в результаті так званих «волинок», до травня 1930 р. із колективів вийшли майже 1/3 усіх членів колективних господарств. Під час другого етапу суцільної колективізації, що розпочався у вересні 1930 р., основним «аргументом», який мав переконати селян вступати до колективів, був податковий тиск. Вплив на селянство здійснювався і через систему хлібозаготівель. Встановлюючи непосильні норми здачі хліба для одноосібних господарств, влада таким чином змушувала їх вступати до колгоспів. Насильницька колективізація, що супроводжувалася експропріацією власності заможних селян, непосильні плани хлібозаготівель та примусове вилучення продовольчих запасів призвели до масового голодування частини подільського селянства вже навесні 1932 р. Унаслідок штучно спланованого Голодомору 1932–1933 рр., за підрахунками істориків, кількість населення тогочасної Вінницької області зменшилася більш як на 1 млн осіб. За задумом влади, геноцид голодом мав остаточно упокорити українське селянство. Знищуючи селян-власників, більшовицька влада свідомо та цілеспрямовано знищувала також соціальну базу українського націоналізму.

Зензелинское собрание: попытка реформирования обычного права по пути интеграции в общероссийское правовое пространство

The article is devoted to the imperial policy of integrating non-Russian suburbs into the legal space of the Russian state on the example of the Kalmyk nobility meeting held in 1822 in p. Zenzeli of the Astrakhan province. On the basis of documentary sources identified in the funds of the National Archive of the Republic of Kalmykia, an analysis was made of the process of preparation and holding of the congress of Kalmyk nobility and clergy, who sought to preserve the privileges granted by the imperial persons earlier. The microhistorical study allowed to review in detail the measures proposed by local officials to reform the judicial system in Kalmykia, which served as a kind of legislative initiative. A distinctive feature of the imperial policy in the field of judicial organization and legal proceedings in relation to nomadic aliens was its dualism: on the one hand, the desire to eliminate the independence of the judiciary, on the other — the sanctioning of customary law and the preservation of national institutions. An attempt by representatives of the privileged strata of the Kalmyk people to preserve their independence in the sphere of the judicial system and legal proceedings failed. In conclusion, the author concludes that the judicial system and legal proceedings of foreigners, based on customary law norms, did not correspond to the aspirations of the central authorities aimed at unifying the legal system.

Forced settlement of Vlach Roma in Žatec and Louny in the late 1950s

Abstract The author of the study presents a micro-historical study of a family of Vlach Roma (Lovára) of western Slovakian origin, who were one of the few Romani groups still on the move in the mid-1950s and who in the late 1950s were forced to settle in the towns of Louny and Žatec in north-western Bohemia. Against this background the author focuses on some aspects of the Czechoslovak assimilation policy of the 1950s regarding ‘itinerant Gypsies’, designed to limit their mobility, which is represented mainly by the implementation of the Law on the Permanent Settlement of Itinerant Persons (No. 74/1958 Coll.). Using a combination of oral history methods involving Vlach Romani narrators and of archival research, the author clarifies some aspects of the local process of the implementation of the above-mentioned law and of selected impacts of the registration of travelling and semi-travelling people in February 1959. The forced sedentarization which occurred in the two localities under study is presented in the context of the regime of state socialism and the policies of central as well as local authorities towards so-called ‘travelling Gypsies’ in the late 1950s.

The Urban/Rural Divide in the Early Modern Period

Abstract The major developments of the early modern period had an uneven impact on urban and rural dwellers, leading to divergences in worldview and mentality between the two demographics. This article reflects upon these differences through a microhistorical study of an episode in Joseph Emin’s Life and Adventures, where Emin, an eighteenth-century “port Armenian” encounters Armenian villagers in the Ottoman town of Jinis. My reading of this episode provides a focus for broader reflections on the growing divergences between the viewpoints of a port Armenian like Emin, who was connected to the developments taking place in the early modern world, and that of rural dwellers like the local villagers and priest of Jinis, who were largely disconnected from the same developments.

Shared Intimacies: Women’s Sexuality in Foreign Workers’ Camps, 1940–1945

Abstract By examining judicial records as well as corporate archives, this article argues that the camp played an important role in the management of foreign workers’ sexuality in Nazi Germany. A means of housing foreigners or controlling the workforce, the segregation of workers along racial and gendered lines in barracks also ensured their reproducing bodies could be controlled to avoid their ‘settling down’ on Reich territory. This microhistorical study of French women living in Berlin between 1940 and 1945 argues that although camp housing was primarily intended to control heterosexuality, it also had profound consequences for queer relationships. In illuminating this previously unacknowledged aspect of biopolitics in Nazi Germany, the article addresses issues of spatial domination and agency in romantic and sexual encounters.

Ciutat i poder en el feudalisme declinant a la Catalunya baixmedieval (Diferenciació social i distribució social de l'espai urbà a Cervera, 1340-1382)

A partir de l'étude micro-historique d’une ville moyenne à l'intérieur de la Catalogne, il s'agit de Cervera, et en se basant sur l'analyse d’une source fiscale (Manifest), l'article prétend étudier le caractère et le rôle joué par une ville a l' époque féodale et, plus spécialement, pendant sa première crise générale, c'est-a-dire, pendant la deuxième moitié du XIVeme siècle. Mise à part l'application des exposés théoriques d'Hilton ainsi que de l'hypothèse de travail de Nell, le travail se base principalement sur l'étude de la structure socio-économique et professionnelle, plus spécialement celle du patriciat urbain, pour démontrer comment la ville a été la prolongation sociale et économique de la féodalité avoisinante et, au moins au niveau fonctionnel, a joué le role de centre de gestion et de commerce des environs ruraux. Au niveau socio-économique et professionnel et tout au long de la période examinée, on peut apprécier une tendance au changement. L'élite urbaine composée principalement par des commerçants évolue vers une composition plus hétérogène, dominée par un mélange de professions libérales juridiques et artisanales. Sur le plan urbanistique, on peut remarquer la formation, à partir de schémas de conception de ce que représente le prestige social, d'un centre ville où vont vivre tous les gens fortunés et qui deviendra, ainsi, la zone résidentielle de cette élite urbaine.

The defence of cosmopolitan capitalism by Sir Charles Addis, 1914-1919: A microhistorical study of a classical liberal banker in wartime

This study focuses on the efforts of Sir Charles Addis to defend the pre-1914 system of cosmopolitan capitalism. Our central research question is to understand why this merchant banker fought in preserve cosmopolitan capitalism when so many of his peers acquiesced in and even championed its demise. Addis’s moral ideal was an international economic order in which the nationality of firms was irrelevant to the strategies of managers. The First World War dramatically increased the salience of firm nationality in international business. Addis, who was a committed classical liberal, fought against this trend to a degree that is hard to explain with reference to economic self-interest alone. The article, which is based on a range of sources including Addis’s diary, explores Addis’s connections to, and views of, ‘German’ bankers, his relations with the British government, and the political economy of the reparations imposed on Germany by the Versailles Peace settlement.

Worlds Within Worlds: The Institutional Locations of Global Connections in Early-Modern Seville

This article examines the institutional locations of global connections in Seville as the city became an important hub of Europe’s first global empire in the sixteenth century. It combines a micro-historical approach to institutions with the history of religious orders to explore the places and processes through which global connections were localized and mediated in sixteenth-century Seville. While the role of economic institutions, such as the Casa de Contratacion (House of Trade), in processing long-range connections is well known, the role of religious institutions has often been overlooked. This article uses original archival research for the regional headquarters of the Franciscan Order, the Casa Grande, and its affiliated confraternity, the cofradia de la Vera Cruz, to examine the roles played by religious institution in the business of negotiating connections across the Mediterranean and Atlantic and within the city of Seville. This micro-historical study reveals these institutions as microcosms of the newly emerging global society of the Iberian world. This approach highlights the entanglement of religion and economics in the business of negotiating global connections and draws attention to the lives of people often left out of global histories.

The Alienated Russian Nobility?

The Alienated Russian Nobility? Alexander M. Martin (bio) Rodolphe Baudin and Wladimir Berelowitch, eds., Histoire de Russie avec sa partie politique, par Mr. Koch, Professeur à Strasbourg, suivie de la Constitution de l'empire de Russie (History of Russia with Its Political Part, by Mr. Koch, Professor at Strasbourg, Followed by the Constitution of the Empire of Russia). 322 pp. Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2018. ISBN-13 978-2868205391. €22.00. Bella Grigoryan, Noble Subjects: The Russian Novel and the Gentry, 1762–1861. 189 pp. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2018. ISBN-13 978-0875807744. $39.00. Elena Marasinova, "Zakon" i "grazhdanin" v Rossii vtoroi poloviny XVIII veka: Ocherki istorii obshchestvennogo soznaniia ("Law" and "Citizen" in Russia in the Second Half of the 18th Century: Essays in the History of Public Consciousness). 508 pp. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2017. ISBN-13 978-5444806968. Derek Offord, Vladislav Rjéoutski, and Gesine Argent, The French Language in Russia: A Social, Political, Cultural, and Literary History. 699 pp. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. ISBN-13 978-9462982727. €45.00. Much writing about the pre-reform nobility is a search for solid ground. Russian nobles, it seems, somehow lacked substance. As Petr Chaadaev put it in 1829–30, they were "nomads" in their own country.1 To generations [End Page 861] of Russians and Westerners in the 18th and 19th centuries, they were lackeys of despotism and imitators of foreign cultures.2 This conception shaped much of the scholarship of the second half of the 20th century. Marc Raeff wrote of the Westernized nobility's "rootlessness" and "lack of contact with both the Russian tradition and the Russian people."3 Iurii Lotman argued that "the Russian nobleman was like a foreigner in his own country": "To behave properly," he explained, "was to behave like a foreigner," hence "playacting at everyday life, the feeling of being forever on the stage, is extremely characteristic of Russian gentry life."4 The past three decades have seen a reaction against this gloomy assessment. Microhistorical studies have concluded that nobles were not culturally rootless or psychologically alienated.5 Historians have found, somewhat like the revisionists in Soviet historiography, that the autocratic regime did not unilaterally dictate its will but instead sought consensus with wider elite strata.6 Cultural approaches have relativized the nobility's lack of a formal political role by highlighting culture and sociability as arenas where power was negotiated.7 [End Page 862] The four books under review here make significant contributions to this debate. Written by specialists in history, literature, and sociolinguistics, they also convey its disciplinary breadth. Rulers and Subjects Elena Marasinova's "Zakon" i "grazhdanin" v Rossii is a study of the 18thcentury elite's ideas of rulership and subjecthood. This is basically a Begriff-sgeschichte, a history of political concepts (law, citizen, subject, and others) that were new in the 18th century and whose meaning was in flux, but it is Begriffsgeschichte bolstered by political and social history. In almost Annales School fashion, Marasinova shows how the evolution of concepts was governed at once by their own logic, by the choices of concrete historical actors, and by the longue durée of a vast, poor agrarian country where serfdom and autocracy were immutable facts of life. In keeping with the complexity of her subject matter, her sources and topics are eclectic. She draws on legal texts, political treatises, private letters, memoirs, dictionaries, and belles-lettres. She gives us intellectual portraits of monarchs, etymologies of words, and histories of church rituals, criminal cases, and penal colonies. The book is a wide-ranging exploration of Russian life under Elizabeth and Catherine II. By its end, we see the emergence of the familiar constellation of Russia in the early 19th century: an autocratic state; a population excluded from political life; and an elite that desired legal rights and the ability to participate in government, but mostly sought autonomy and fulfillment in nonpolitical spaces beyond the state's reach. The book is constructed as an exploration of three themes. The first is the relationship between God and the state as sources of law. Marasinova opens with Empress Elizabeth's moratorium on the death penalty. Elizabeth was pious...

The daily life of the collective farm of Podillya in the postwar period (1944-1953) (on the materials of the collective farm «Red ray» of Melnykivtsi)

The purpose of the article is to cover the financial situation, social and living conditions, meet the cultural and educational needs of the Podilsky collective farm peasantry in the postwar period on the basis of the analysis of the archival documents of the collective farm «Red ray» p. Millers. The methodology of the research is based on the combination of general-scientific, special-historical and interdisciplinary methods of microhistorical research, taking into account the principles of historicism, systematicity, scientificity and verification. The scientific novelty lies in the author's attempt to characterize the daily life of the Podilsky collective farm peasantry during the post-war period by selecting one of the collective farms of the Podilskyi region from the standpoint of a specific microhistorical study. Conclusions. The daily life of the Podilsky collective farm peasantry during the period of post-war reconstruction was largely determined by the strategic plans of the Soviet authorities and the tasks for their realization. Immediately after the liberation of the territory from the Nazis, all the efforts of the peasantry were directed to rebuilding the war-ravaged economy and conducting a sowing campaign that coincided in time. The lack of material incentives for work was one of the most important reasons for the peasants' unfair attitude to collective labor, favoring work in their own peasant economy. To enforce discipline, the authorities practiced various measures of administrative coercion. In addition to forced labor in the state-owned collective farms, peasants were subjected to high monetary and natural taxes. They were forced to sell cattle to the state at fixed prices, required to finance local costs through additional differentiated self-taxation and the imposition of additional property responsibilities. The social sphere of the postwar village was not a priority. Extremely difficult were the social and living conditions of peasants. Despite the fact that the war was long over, some peasant families continued to live in dilapidated houses, barracks, dugouts. The quality of medical care was poor. Schools continued to operate in non-adapted premises without receiving public funding. A large proportion of rural children did not attend school because they were busy with chores. Collective houses did not fulfill their cultural leisure functions. The exceptions were the organization of celebrations of national holidays and mass sporting events.

Pontremoli’s cry: Personhood, scale, and history in the Eastern Mediterranean

ABSTRACTThis article explores the relationship between personhood and participation in wider political worlds that encompass (and dismantle) national, transnational and regional scales. It does so through a microhistorical study of Moise Pontremoli, an Italian Sephardic Jew displaced from Izmir to Alexandria and finally to Rome between the 1920s and the 1960s. After having returned to Egypt from the First World War as a ‘wounded Italian veteran’, Pontremoli purchased a plot of desert land from local Bedouin. This land became home to his experimental farm. He wrote expressively on his greening of the desert landscape during the interwar years, until he was cut off from it by the Second World War. Between 1952 and 1956 local authorities destroyed his crops and sequestered his land. He petitioned the Egyptian Sequestrate and received minor compensation; then, in a much longer and unanswered battle, he pursued Italian diplomatic authorities for what he saw as their abandon in favour of state interests and a diplomacy of political ‘friendship’ with Egypt’s emergent nationalist regime. He wrote obsessively to journalists, politicians, lawyers, human rights activists, and to anyone who might listen to his case. With great frustration, Pontremoli repatriated in 1963 and settled in Rome to continue his campaign. His letters gained attention only in the turbulent years of late-1960s Italy, just before his death in 1968. This article argues that Pontremoli’s articulation of personhood through his wounded body and lost land knotted histories of migration, empire, war, and decolonization into one tale of twentieth-century Mediterranean discontent.

Executive remuneration and the limits of disclosure as an instrument of corporate governance

Why does disclosure continue to be seen as a panacea for failings in corporate governance, despite mounting evidence that it is a weak instrument of control? Through a micro-historical study of the constitution and deliberations of the Greenbury committee, which placed executive remuneration disclosure at the heart of UK corporate governance, we demonstrate how disclosure was discursively constructed by elite business leaders as a primary requirement of accountability of agents to owners. Our research, conducted twenty years after the publication of the Greenbury recommendations in 1995, is based on oral history interviews with surviving members of the committee and its professional advisers, who came to lament that their efforts perversely had helped escalate rather than moderate top executive pay. We argue that disclosure is a poor surrogate for real engagement by owners in corporate governance, and propose four general conditions that, if satisfied, might lead to increased accountability.

Of Subjects and "Savages"

Of Subjects and "Savages" Angela Pulley Hudson (bio) Jenny Hale Pulsipher, Swindler Sachem: The American Indian Who Sold His Birthright, Dropped Out of Harvard, and Conned the King of England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. 384 pp. 16 b/w illustrations, appendices, notes, and index. $35.00. Quite a few books have appeared over the past two decades dealing with enterprising-but-often-marginal individuals who used performances of identity and authority to access power, privilege, or wealth in the American past. Many of these people attained some level of fame or have received sustained attention from subsequent generations of scholars, despite their frequently obscure and underprivileged origins. The newest entry in this catalog of "slippery characters," as literary scholar Laura Browder termed them, is Jenny Hale Pulsipher's Swindler Sachem: The American Indian Who Sold His Birthright, Dropped out of Harvard, and Conned the King of England. Taking as her subject the little-known figure of John Wompas (alias White), a 17th-century Nipmuc man, Pulsipher has produced an elegant and revealing microhistorical study that tells us as much or more about the English empire in Native North America as it does about the crafty individual at its center. While we might quibble with the author about whether Wompas was, in fact, an "ordinary Indian" (p. 7), given his central role in a startling number of land transactions and legal maneuvers in New England and Old England, we can certainly appreciate that his life and legacies have been largely ignored or misunderstood. And through her careful analysis, Pulsipher offers a clear and compelling portrait of a man who was "at the heart" of Indian land sales but simultaneously appears to have played a key role in "preserving his homeland" (p. 6). She argues that although his strategic use of both "Native and English political and legal structures" benefitted him personally, he also deftly maneuvered to preserve Native lands in Native hands. Through Pulsipher's detailed reconstruction, based on what must have been maddeningly fragmentary records, we learn that John Wompas was born around 1637 to Nipmuc parents from the town of Hassanamesit. His mother and father were early converts to Christianity and took pains to ensure that their children would receive religious and educational instruction from area [End Page 179] missionaries. Despite the paucity of sources on Wompas's early life, Pulsipher has managed to present a robust picture of the place and time by focusing on parallel experiences among "praying Indians" in the region. Though both his parents died during his childhood, Pulsipher shows that their choice to position Wompas nearer to English missionaries and colonial officials would have an outsized impact on his later life. Beyond her thoughtful signposting, the author also foreshadows a pattern of behavior that features prominently in Wompas's subsequent land-dealing strategies. Pulsipher describes his mother's deathbed prophesying as a deployment of "a Native pattern" for a "Christian purpose" (p. 27). This sort of deliberately cross-cultural strategy of communication would come to define John Wompas's approach to legal status and land claims. After taking up residence with a white family in Roxbury, Massachusetts following his parents' death, Wompas had what appears to have been both an ordinary and an extraordinary adolescence and young adulthood. On the one hand, in comparison to other Indigenous youth who were not so centrally situated within the world of English Christianity, Wompas's immersion in the colonial communities of Roxbury and then Cambridge was quite outside the norm. On the other hand, as a Native servant in an English household, viewed as an object of pity and charity who lacked power and status, Wompas was not unlike the hundreds, if not thousands, of Indigenous people who lived in some form of bondage within English colonial society. One of his peers lived just across the Roxbury town green. She was a Mahican-speaking war captive named Ann Prask and in time she became his wife and an important source of land. Pulsipher works hard to situate the two in space, time, and society, demonstrating the stark differences in how they came to Roxbury while also revealing how similarly they were regarded by the...

The politics of the unknown: Uncertainty and the nuclear threat in Britain, 1979–1985

AbstractThis article seeks to map out possibilities for conducting a microhistorical study of the socio‐political and cultural roles that uncertainty, as a consequence of a lack of verifiable knowledge, played in political debates over the nuclear threat in Britain in the Second Cold War. Focusing on this politics of the unknown in the period from 1979 to 1985 when Britain witnessed resurging fears of nuclear war, this exploratory essay sets out to make three main interventions: First, it conceptualizes “uncertainty” as a subjective social and cultural construct with fluid meanings that does not necessarily have to hold exclusively negative connotations but might offer opportunities for historical actors. Second, this essay proposes an examination of the politics of the unknown about the anticipated effects of a nuclear war within a wider synchronic economy of non‐nuclear‐weapons‐related concerns such as de‐industrialization or unemployment. Finally, the article introduces the periodization of “Britain's long nuclear 1980s” to allow for a consideration of relevant diachronic aspects of this politics of the unknown, thereby adding further depth to the microhistory. Throughout, this exploratory study draws on historical examples to illustrate its key theoretical points.