Personal Correspondence Research Articles

Sex between Body and Mind: Psychoanalysis and Sexology in the German-Speaking World, 1890s–1930s by Katie Sutton

Reviewed by: Sex between Body and Mind: Psychoanalysis and Sexology in the German-Speaking World, 1890s–1930s by Katie Sutton Amy Lynne Hill Katie Sutton. Sex between Body and Mind: Psychoanalysis and Sexology in the German-Speaking World, 1890s–1930s. U of Michigan P, 2019. 364 pp. Cloth, $90.00. Audio download, $9.99. In Sex between Body and Mind, Katie Sutton identifies a critical gap in the historiography of human sexuality: in the study of sexology and psychoanalysis in modern Germany, attention is paid almost exclusively to moments of divergence as each became a professional and institutionalized field of knowledge in the forty years leading to the rise of National Socialism. Sutton argues instead that we turn to moments of encounter between sexologists and psychoanalysis, because of the "crucial impact [they had] not only on modern understandings of human sexuality, but on modern understandings of the self" (2). As she writes in her introduction, Sutton emphasizes the productive and emancipatory potential of Foucauldian thought and, as a result, recuperates the dynamic interdisciplinary history of human sexuality and brings to the fore vital encounters among doctors, scientists, theorists, therapists, and their patients. [End Page 129] Sutton frames her study as a comparative cultural history, and her central premise revolves around debates on nature versus nurture and the core tenet that "matters were always more complex than sexologists coming down on the side of biology and psychoanalysts focusing purely on the workings of the mind" (9). Rather, she emphasizes the importance of "interpenetration," meaning a newly created "knowledge product" previously inaccessible to either discipline, in the production of new sexual knowledge (21). She thus meticulously traces the interpersonal relationships of the most notable representatives from each field—namely, Magnus Hirschfeld on the side of sexology, and Sigmund Freud for psychoanalysis—while richly illustrating how they and their adherents reacted to and critiqued each other in personal correspondence and published scholarship alike. The result is a lively account of how both disciplines vied for credibility and respectability as they reacted to the cultural rupture of the Great War as well as innovative research into the endocrine system. After a thorough yet accessible survey of existing scholarship, Sutton begins by examining the impact of research on early childhood sexuality on modern ideas of the so-called normal subject. She assigns this as the first "trading zone" or "moment of reciprocal dialogue" between sexology and psychoanalysis, as well as a major paradigm shift that acknowledged sexuality before puberty (21); however, it also marked the first significant tension between the two fields in response to Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex. She then traces the increasingly important binary of normal versus perverse that developed during World War I with the case of homosexuality, wherein sexology and psychoanalysis took differing stances on whether sexuality was congenital or acquired. In another paradigm shift, while earlier psychiatric thought believed homosexuality to be a degenerative condition, now psychoanalysis largely conceived of same-sex attraction to be a pathological variation of the norm and therefore capable of being cured in therapy. This positioned psychoanalysis to gain cultural and professional standing in the treatment of so-called war neurotics, and Sutton argues that while this fact is widely acknowledged, the overly simplified narrative of the state of sexology during this time is that it was suffering a setback. She posits that this was a pivotal point of interpenetration as sexologists revised their own beliefs to include more psychoanalytic approaches in response to the trauma of war. Moreover, this marks the beginning of the hormone research that would prove to be a boon to sexologists, as it not [End Page 130] only supported their understanding of congenital factors in human sexuality, but the physiological nature of this research granted sexology new levels of professional and public credibility. This, writes Sutton, was a key moment in reconciling the connection between body and mind when it came to sex, but it ultimately proved to be anything but harmonizing for these two new disciplines. In the final third of her monograph, Sutton highlights the contributions of female theorists and therapists, as well as of members of what would today be considered the trans community...

Offprinting Bibliotherapy: Sadie P. Delaney's Interventions in Media Infrastructures

"Offprinting Bibliotherapy: Sadie P. Delaney's Interventions in Media Infrastructures" investigates how librarian and bibliotherapist Sadie Peterson Delaney's circulation of offprinted journal articles enclosed in personal correspondence intervened in mid-twentieth-century infrastructures of knowledge. Halfway between the private letter and the published journal article, enclosed offprints turn up everywhere in Delaney's archive. Focusing on the material transmission of the discourse of bibliotherapy in the letters Delaney (1889–1958) sent across the United States from the Tuskegee Veterans Administration Medical Center, this article looks to the bibliographic object of the offprint in order to reconstruct the print mechanisms and maneuvers for sharing information that Delaney deployed to establish bibliotherapy as a viable discursive object. Bibliotherapy stood in for the set of wide-ranging book-centered activities Delaney developed for the veterans in her charge at Tuskegee, and in turn confirmed her position as a crucial but stressed figure in the rise of therapy culture in the United States. Through her use of the offprint, Delaney, a Black woman and leading thinker in her field, was able to meaningfully engage in the media infrastructures of her time from a geographic, institutional, and subject position peripheral to contemporary sites of intellectual production and distribution.

Borrowed Books and Scholarly Interventions in Sarah Josepha Hale’s Genius of Oblivion (1823)

ABSTRACT Historical society archives and libraries in the early United States often appear as strictly masculine spaces in which few, if any, women had access and influence. Although scholarship tends to depict these archives and the historical narratives that they promoted in this light, women found a range of ways to engage with these institutions between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Sarah Josepha Hale (1788–1879), prior to her emergence as the most influential magazine editor in the antebellum United States, demonstrates this in her mostly neglected early poem, “Genius of Oblivion” (1823). Through the analysis of her unexamined personal correspondence with New Hampshire librarian Jacob Bailey Moore and a closer reading of her poetry, this article illuminates Hale’s use of her social network to access library materials and engage through poetry with the scholarship of contemporary male authors.

Ethical Issues in the US 1956 National Academy of Sciences BEAR I Genetics Panel Report to the Public.

This paper presents newly discovered evidence from the personal correspondence of four US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation (BEAR) Genetics Panelists that their 1956 report to the public was written by a third party and was neither reviewed nor approved by the Panel prior to its publication and release to the public. The letters revealed that the 1956 Report contained serious errors and did not represent the views of the Panel. The failure of the US NAS to notify the public that the Report had not been reviewed and approved by the Panel represents a serious breach of ethics. Further ethical issues relate to the failure of the NAS to (1) correct the errors in the Report within an appropriately timely manner and (2) reveal the lack of approval by the Panel even after the Report's release. In light of these discoveries and the profound historical-and continuing-significance of the 1956 Report to all conventional cancer-related risk assessment processes, we opine that this ethical improbity must be acknowledged and that this document must be retracted by the NAS.

Papists and Pluralists: The Founding of America’s First Grassroots School Choice Organization

ABSTRACT Critics of school choice claim support for educational options was an outgrowth of racist, segregationist views following the U.S. Supreme Court’s Ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. In this paper, I examine these claims by analyzing the development of the public school system in the United States and the historical records from Citizens for Educational Freedom. Founded in 1959 in St. Louis, Missouri by Martin and Mae Duggan, CEF was a grassroots school choice organization. The records contain newsletters, text from speeches and national conventions, and personal correspondence, among other relevant materials. The records help us understand the motives and mind-set of the early school choice movement.

Not Taken Out of Context … Digitization of the ‘Goethe/Incoming Correspondence’ Collection in the Goethe and Schiller Archive: Preparation for Conservation and Restoration

ABSTRACT Preparation of the ‘Goethe/Incoming Correspondence’ collection for digitization presented unique challenges to the Goethe and Schiller Archive’s conservation workshop: in addition to coping with previously unexamined holdings under a tight deadline, a conservation concept also had to be developed quickly. This concept had to be tailored to the complex damage that the collection had sustained, but above all, it had to factor in its special historical significance and how it had been handed down. A concept was developed and implemented in close cooperation between the conservators and the Regestausgabe der Briefe an Goethe staff. (The Regestausgabe makes the entirety of the letters addressed to Goethe accessible in chronological order, provides information on their content, and places them in the context of Goethe's personal correspondence relations.) For letters hand-sewn into file folders, the current condition of the sewing was preserved for posterity, and loose letters were secured through conservation, whereby a colour code indicates the condition in which these letters were found.

The Light Bulb Went on: A Historiography-Based Approach to Disentangling Audio Description’s Influential U.S. Roots From Its Common Practices

Introduction: American media-accessibility pioneers in the 1970s and 1980s not only sparked interest in the academic study of audio description, they also originated many practical techniques, protocols, theoretical perspectives, guidelines, and standards that persist in the fabric of this type of work decades later. In this study, we located and analyzed source documents for two oft-mentioned innovators—Gregory Frazier and Margaret Pfanstiehl—to shine light on their individual perspectives through a historiography of their foundational writings and associated media. Method: This analysis was conducted on publicly available source documents, such as Frazier’s landmark thesis and also included a trove of Pfanstiehl’s personal correspondence, as a way to establish particular points of theoretical and historical interest. Results: We found that despite the prominent place of Frazier and Pfanstiehl in audio description lore, neither actually published much writing about what they did and why they did it. Some of what they wrote has been selectively repeated, but other parts have been forgotten. In that respect, this research method could be used to more precisely trace and identify where particular practices emerged, under which theoretical perspectives, and complications. It also can help to show how these ideas were documented and tested during their emergence and domestication, as a way to gauge procedural rigor as well as validity of related findings. Discussion: Audio description scholarship needs theoretical anchors, but it also needs systematic testing of assumptions inherent in those theoretics, which this study helps to identify. Implications for Practitioners: Audio describers invariably will encounter the moment when an assertion of “this is the way we do it” collides with the curiosity of “why?” To promote best practices, the field has to understand where practices came from, how they developed, and as Frazier recommended, put those ideas to “objective” tests.

Биография Кузыева Рамазана Усмановича (1906–1981) в контексте культурного строительства советского Башкортостана

The article presents the life path and legacy of a typical native of peasants, a representative of the first generation of the Soviet intelligentsia, a specialist in the history of Bashkortostan and a participant in the Great Patriotic War R.U. Kuzyev. It demonstrates his contribution to the development of culture, education and historical science; gives a brief overview of his scientific and social activities. The study uses materials from the National Archives of the Republic of Bashkortostan (official documents and personal correspondence). His biography is closely connected to the Soviet period of Russian history and the development of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (BASSR) (social, cultural, and educational) in the 1920–1970. The materials introduced into scientific circulation are sources of factual information, complementing the picture of the formation of a Soviet intellectual of peasant origin and joining the Komsomol, the first publications in the periodical press of Soviet Bashkortostan and ending with activities as a senior research fellow. The results show that, despite the career growth during the period of repression and persecution of writers and playwrights, the deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the BASSR and the head of the Arts Department defended the honor of the illegally convicted, urged officials not to impose the organization of socially significant voluntary work on the shoulders of individuals and international organizations, and participated in the development of his native village

Ravenna letters of Fedir Schmit from the collection of manuscripts of the Central Library of the V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University

Purpose of the article. The article represents an analysis and publication of the letters of Kharkiv University professor Fedir Shmit (1877–1937?) held in the manuscript collection of the Central Academic Library of V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. Methodologically, the study is based on the principles of historicism and objectivity and employs a variety of special historical methods, including chronological, comparative, and the method of internal and external source criticism. Academic originality. Fedir Shmit’s letters to his fiancée Pavla Shper from the library of V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, dating to March 1904, are published for the first time. The author analyzes the contents of the scholar’s personal correspondence and the importance of his study of Byzantine artifacts and monuments in Ravenna, undertaken in March 1904, for his subsequent work. Conclusions. The article outlines the significance of Fedir Shmit’s letters from the CAL collection both for reconstructing the scholar’s biography and for assessing his contribution to Byzantinology. Personal correspondence throws light on Shmit’s study of Byzantine remains in Ravenna, the results of which are presented in the works of his Kharkiv period. The author deciphers the letters and provides commentary on individual fragments. The article represents the first publication of Fedor Shmidt’s manuscript legacy preserved in Kharkiv’s libraries and archives.

OVERCOMING THE CRISIS IN THE TRIANGLE (CSR-KSCS-SOC) AND THE APPOINTMENT OF A DELEGATE TO SUBCARPATHIAN RUS' IN DECEMBER 1926

This article examines the problem of institutional development of the Orthodox Church in Subcarpathian Rus' in the second half of 1926. The author examines the diplomatic negotiations between the governments of Czechoslovakia (hereinafter - CSR) and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (hereinafter - KSCS), with the leadership of the Serbian Orthodox Church (hereinafter - SOC) and representatives of the Orthodox communities in Subcarpathian Rus'. Particular attention is paid to the persistent demands of the SOC to preserve its rights to elect and appoint bishops. Based on a study of archival documents, the author established that the government in Prague, following the Austro-Hungarian policy, sought to take control of the selection of candidates and the approval of bishops. The article summarizes new material on the research topic and introduces many documents from the Serbian and Czech archives into scientific circulation. Among them are decisions of the Synod of the SOC, internal correspondence of the Synod with the Council of the SOC, personal correspondence of bishops with the patriarch and leaders of the Orthodox movement in Subcarpathian Rus', diplomatic correspondence between Czechoslovakia and KSCS, secret correspondence sent in Belgrade with the Prague Ministry. The article also examines the critical stages of agreeing on the candidacy of the SOC delegate for Orthodox communities of Serbian jurisdiction in the province, who was instructed to complete the development of the diocesan statute and achieve official recognition of Orthodox in the country. The opinion that the most acceptable candidate for Prague was the sinkel Damaskin (Grdanichka), the ordination of which was postponed by the dignitaries of the SOC, is substantiated. Instead, Bishop Irenaeus (Chirich) of Novosad-Bachka was delegated to Subcarpathian Rus', an experienced church figure who managed to prepare the ground for the institutional completion of the Orthodox Church in the autonomy.

The Siberian Experiment in the History of the Soviet Academic Community: Everyday and Gender Aspects

This article studies a unique page in the history of Soviet academic life, the attempt to create especially favourable living conditions for scientific work in the Novosibirsk Akademgorodok (literally, Academic Town) as reflected in the memory of its first settlers in the 1950s‑1960s. The details of their everyday life, such as living in panel barracks, family self-organisation for supplying and providing food, caring for and educating children, and organising cultural life receive new meanings within the framework of “everyday life studies” and gender anthropology. Having processed memories, personal correspondence kept in the Open Archive of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, video materials, and press data, the authors try to prove that the creators of Akademgorodok did their best to avoid formal restrictions imposed on women’s professional self-realisation. Also, the authors seek to answer whether a scientific career was an end in itself for women, to what extent it was possible to go through the “glass ceiling” (which was stronger at higher levels of the career ladder and much easier to break at the beginning), and how desirable the prospect of professional growth was for women in an exceptional domestic environment. On the basis of oral and written testimonies left by the women scientists who lived and worked in the Akademgorodok, the article recreates the picture of changes in everyday life, their impact on scientific work or the formal presence of women in the Novosibirsk academic community, and on leisure and recreation for their families. It also analyses the social infrastructure and the colour of cultural life that contributed to (and sometimes opposed) women’s professional growth. The multiple differences in the living conditions of women scientists in the early history of Akademgorodok appear to have caused differences in the life and professional strategies of those from those in the capital: their desire to save their marriages, play the role of housewives, and, in the families of famous and high-status scientists, to perform representative functions. The authors believe that the above patterns impeded the development of women’s scientific careers for reasons no other than a special spirit of collectivism and quasi-family mutual support in an atmosphere where there was no need to think about personal academic ambitions. Most of the scientists’ wives and the scientists themselves worked without setting ambitious goals of conquering the academic Olympus, nor they did admit to dreams of moving to the capitals or research centres abroad. Having lived all their lives in the Akademgorodok, they turned out to be the main keepers of the historical memory of the everyday changes in the scientific city, the creation of which could not be repeated either in Troitsk near Moscow or much later in Skolkovo.

Others of My Kind: Transatlantic Transgender Histories

Others of My Kind: Transatlantic Transgender Histories

The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship by Deborah Willis

Reviewed by: The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship by Deborah Willis Holly A. Pinheiro Jr. (bio) The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship. By Deborah Willis. (New York: New York University Press, 2021. Pp. 243. Cloth, $35.00.) Modern Civil War–era scholarship on United States Colored Troops (USCT) soldiering has greatly benefited from academics across various disciplines, who have examined the profound and expansive impacts of African American military service on American history. Deborah Willis, a scholar of photography and imaging, provides a new and refreshing contribution to investigating African Americans’ complex lives in connection with military service. The Black Civil War Soldier is one of the most unique studies on the USCT in years. Willis’s research focuses on visual imagery to uncover the lives of historically marginalized people, who were critical to the Civil War in a multitude of ways. As the subtitle denotes, Willis acknowledges that citizenship was (for African Americans) never statically defined or limited to suffrage rights or aspirations for holding political office. Instead, she shows that every time Black soldiers or veterans—especially those in uniform—and their kin were photographed, they were forcefully demanding the recognition of their cultural citizenship. As a result, each image provides evidence of African [End Page 292] Americans—freeborn and freed, men and women—methodically fighting for inclusion within the United States’ national identity by controlling and displaying their images. Willis applies an intersectional approach of race, gender, and class to understand African Americans’ personal and public images’ actions. In doing so, he furthers ongoing academic and public conversations about memory and the Civil War in meaningful ways that a text-based study cannot always do effectively. Willis’s study seeks to empower African Americans by using their photographs and personal correspondences to speak for themselves while interweaving historical analysis throughout the project to give more context to each document. Taking this approach is a masterful way to give agency to the historical figures over 150 years removed from the Civil War. Moreover, their stances, clothes, facial expressions, and accessories collectively illustrate a carefully crafted image, highlighting that these African Americans saw military service as an avenue to reframe how the United States visualized and remembered them. Since racial discrimination and slavery negatively limited educational opportunities for many African Americans to document their lives, some people claim that it is difficult, if not impossible, to examine those lives. However, Willis urges people to reconsider analyzing photographs as an ideal source to investigate the USCT, as any African American, with the financial resources, could get their picture taken (even those who were illiterate). For African Americans, having a photograph taken was an expensive endeavor. The cost ranged from $0.25 to $2.50. This meant that wartime photographs potentially took 2.5 to 25 percent of a Black soldier’s monthly salary (before the 1864 pay equalization bill to rectify pay inequality among U.S. army soldiers). Therefore, while undeniably empowering, the pictures had the potential to have a direct and noticeable impact on the soldier’s wages (which often went to his kin). While the central focus of the book is on the USCT, they are not the entire story. By including the women’s voices and images—usually wives and mothers—connected to Black soldiers, Willis demonstrates how these women actively participated in and discussed the war. Each carefully posed picture of an African American woman is an example of her demand to have white society and the nation recognize African American womanhood on similar terms with white womanhood. Thus it is critical to recognize how African American women used their connections to military service and photographs to display, literally and figuratively, their agency to a broad audience. The book’s structure follows a chronological order. Each chapter focuses on a crucial moment of the war and its impact on African Americans, either [End Page 293] in the United States or the Confederacy. The images and letters that Willis uses for each chapter reveal that many African Americans were well aware of the war’s significance and their place within it. As a result, it...

The Selected Literary Letters of Paul Laurence Dunbar ed. by Cynthia C. Murillo and Jennifer M. Nader

Reviewed by: The Selected Literary Letters of Paul Laurence Dunbar ed. by Cynthia C. Murillo and Jennifer M. Nader John Dudley (bio) The Selected Literary Letters of Paul Laurence Dunbar, edited by Cynthia C. Murillo and Jennifer M. Nader. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2021. x + 305 pp. Cloth, $59.95; Ebook, $59.95. Already acknowledged as an important figure in the rise of African American literature and culture at the turn of the twentieth century, Paul Laurence Dunbar nonetheless remains a somewhat elusive and underexamined presence who made significant contributions to nearly every published genre during his brief career. Although long familiar as a poet who divided his efforts between dialect and conventional verse, his novel The Sport of the Gods has been increasingly recognized as a canonical work of literary naturalism on par with Stephen Crane’s Maggie and Frank Norris’s McTeague for its unvarnished portrait of urban America during the tumultuous Progressive era. Much of his other work, including three additional novels, numerous short stories, plays, song lyrics and librettos, and published and unpublished essays on literature, politics, and culture, remains rare in print anthologies or the classroom. In this context, Cynthia C. Murillo and Jennifer M. Nader have produced a valuable edition of Dunbar’s correspondence, the first focused on his role as a writer, and an accessible volume that promises to stimulate further scholarship on the author’s diverse and compelling body of work. As Murillo and Nader note, several biographers have cited Dunbar’s letters from archival sources, beginning with Benjamin G. Brawley’s Paul Laurence Dunbar: Poet of His People (University of North Carolina Press, 1936) and Virginia Cunningham’s Paul Dunbar and His Song (Dodd, Mead, 1947). In recent decades, critics have largely relied on Jay Martin’s A Singer in the Dawn: Reinterpretations of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Dodd, Mead, 1975) and Peter Revell’s Paul Laurence Dunbar (Twayne, 1979) for references to Dunbar’s correspondence with such major figures as William [End Page 85] Dean Howells, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, and Theodore Roosevelt. Notably, the very recently published biography by Gene Andrew Jarrett, Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird (Princeton University Press, 2022), also extensively cites archival sources for Dunbar’s literary correspondence in painting perhaps the fullest portrait of Dunbar’s eventful life. An important precursor to this volume, Eleanor Alexander’s Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow: The Tragic Courtship and Marriage of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore (New York University Press, 2001), draws upon correspondence from the turbulent relationship between Dunbar and his wife, whose own literary career, as Alice Dunbar-Nelson, has gained significant attention in recent scholarship. In a textual note, Murillo and Nader explain their decision to avoid reprinting the mostly frequently cited correspondence, familiar to many Dunbar scholars from the above sources, including much of the personal correspondence that documents disturbing details of Dunbar’s abusive behavior toward Alice, his close but difficult relationship with his mother, and his struggle with alcoholism and tuberculosis, which would claim his life at the age of 33, after a brief but prolific literary career. Indeed, it is the literary career that Murillo and Nader’s selections and annotations emphasize, and this approach offers a fascinating portrait of an author struggling to establish a creative career under extraordinary circumstances. Generally recognized as the first African American to make a living as a professional literary author, Dunbar’s accomplishments resulted from talent, ambition, and fearlessness, along with his canny willingness to capitalize on personal relationships and fortuitous opportunities. The son of parents emancipated from slavery, Dunbar was raised in Dayton, Ohio, where his first publications appeared alongside his high-school classmate and friend Orville Wright. Denied the opportunity to attend college, Dunbar sought every opportunity to publish while working often menial jobs through most of the 1890s, until the momentum achieved following Howells’s enthusiastic support of Dunbar’s second volume of poetry allowed him to leave his job as a reading room assistant at the Library of Congress in 1898 and pursue writing as his primary source of income until his death in 1906. Along the way, Dunbar...

Legal Interpreting and Translanguaging: Contested Spaces in the Centre-Periphery Dynamic

Community or public-service interpreting is often institutionally perceived by service providers as being based on an ideological framing of languages as monolingual bounded resources, and the interpreting act as a bridge between two centric and separate linguistic regimes (LB – LA). However, this monolingualism is an ideological construct rather than a linguistic reality, the product of an historic, one nation one language myth, that is increasingly challenged by post-modern, superdiverse societies and their consequent multilingual realities on the ground. In particular, in today’s world the superdiversity of people within nation states, with multiple linguistic resources, has given rise to the increasingly visible phenomenon of ‘translanguaging’, a creative, dynamic and fluid sourcing of diverse linguistic repertoires in synchronic discourse. What was once only considered to be at the periphery has begun to challenge monolingual hegemony and establish its own centrality in public and private speech.
 Translanguaging is ‘multilingualism from below’ (Pennycook & Otsuji 2015), coming as it almost inevitably always does from the peripheral end of the spectrum, typically in urban spaces where language practices are part and parcel of getting things done. But when this emerges in a legal context, in a court of law, how should legal interpreters respond? Drawing on preliminary research involving a cohort of court /legal interpreters in the UK[1], this article explores the problems this presents to monolingual bridging approaches and proposes potential future developments for the interpreting profession. A cohort of 6 professional public-service interpreters in the UK. The research drew on questionnaires and personal correspondence over a 6-month period.

Dancing out of Time

I first met Sally Gross (1953–2014) after her death in 2015 at the Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action archives (GALA) in my place of birth, Johannesburg, South Africa. At the time I was doing dissertation research on the broader subject of misuses of Christianity as a supposed cure for sexuality. My travel companion, Jennifer Emiko Higa Corey, read Sally's letters aloud to me as I scanned other documents. We were overwhelmed with compassion as we learned more about Sally's traumatic break with the church when she learned of her intersexuality. As religious folks, Emiko and I are all too familiar with painful socialities among persons of faith.Since then I have traveled to three continents interviewing Sally's friends, family, former brethren, and activist communities in order to write her biography. Additionally, I've collected archival materials in the United Kingdom and South Africa. For six years Sally has stretched me into places and subjects previously mysterious to me, but she also had access to communities from which I am barred on the basis of gender. Sally has been a welcome companion as I have pored over her legal complaints, personal correspondence, and academic writing. Two large prints of Gabrielle Le Roux's portraits of Sally look over me as I research and write. My sense of embodiment, time, and space are continual negotiations among the living and the dead.Theology tends to be a text-focused discipline, and so I welcome a visual mode of collaboration with a subject. In college I painted a portrait of the biblical figures Lot and his daughters before crafting a theological paper on sexuality. Often, the story of Lot having sheltered angels in his home from the city of Sodom's lascivious mobs is leveraged to endorse homophobia without commentary on sexual violence or lack of consent between Lot who offered his daughters to the mob, or when the daughters later intoxicated him in order to become impregnated by him. The process of painting their portraits transformed my relationship to the characters and in turn how the text might concern the present day.The process of illustrating a portrait of Sally is, for me, an experience of time together. I want to get her eyes just right, I think to myself, while also mulling over how to best represent her complex personality and subsequent conflicts among religious, activist, and national communities. For this reason, writing her biography has been a dance among many figures, in a variety of spaces, at times marked by exclusion and harm. But there are also glimpses of hope and joy during the reconfiguration of social, religious, and political technologies that evade capture.

“Mujeres ricas y libres”: Mujer y poder; Inés Muñoz y las encomenderas en el Perú (s. XVI)

This study addresses the role of women in shaping Spanish rule and society in Peru during the first decades of colonial dominance. Liliana Pérez Miguel, while focusing on the specific historical character Inés Muñoz, examines the extensive and diverse groups of women who benefited from the encomienda. This institution, transplanted from the Iberian Peninsula to the New World, entrusted to its beneficiaries, known as encomenderos, the Catholic evangelization and protection of specific Indigenous communities. These encomendados in return paid a tribute, in metals and goods, to their encomenderos. This access to tribute and labor force made encomiendas one of the royal rewards most desired by those who participated in the discovery, conquest, and colonization of the New World. This book shows that several women were active participants in early Spanish colonization, an enterprise that according to the traditional historiography was dominated by male actors.Pérez Miguel specifies that her book fits with an increasing production of gender studies on Latin America and colonial Peru specifically. Her work highlights the diverse social and ethnic backgrounds of those women who obtained an encomienda and their challenges and actions in the face of changing legislation and political interests that shaped their tenures. While the book focuses mainly on Inés Muñoz's life and contribution to Peru's colonization and early society, Pérez Miguel constantly draws comparisons with other contemporaneous encomenderas in colonial Peru, which allows her to reveal the wide range of these women's experiences during the convulsive decades of Spain's colonization of Peru. Through various waves of political unrest, many of these encomenderas had to overcome the loss of partners, children, and even the benefits granted them by the crown. Contradicting the passive role that traditional scholarship has asserted for female actors in early modern societies, many of these encomenderas actively assumed the leadership of their households and estates, and they even initiated legal battles to defend their benefits or seek alternative ones. Thus, beyond a clear focus on gender and biography, this work significantly contributes to social and legal history scholarship.The book provides a lively illustration of the early decades of Spanish rule in Peru, exploring the personal and intimate experiences of famous historical characters such as Francisco Pizarro and Hernando Pizarro, along with many other Spanish conquerors. However, Pérez Miguel highlights as protagonists their female companions and offspring, who on various occasions became the beneficiaries of encomiendas. Their access to economic resources, political influence, and local support networks permitted these women to make profound and lasting contributions to early colonial Peru's politics, economy, society, and culture. Muñoz was related to Francisco Pizarro through her marriage to Francisco Martín de Alcántara, half brother of the famous conqueror. Her close relationship with the first governor of Peru led Muñoz to become the caretaker of his mestizo children and brought her political and economic benefits, including multiple encomiendas. However, she was also affected negatively by the political instability of the early colonial period. After the governor and her husband died at the hands of political enemies, Muñoz became vulnerable, facing the loss of some of her political and economic benefits. By recounting the various setbacks suffered by Muñoz and many other women, some of whom had received encomiendas, the book re-creates the changing political environment faced by these women.Pérez Miguel approaches the experiences of encomenderas with a sharp analysis that employs diverse historical methodologies. She offers an extensive historiographical discussion on her use of gender as a category of analysis that brings together scholarship produced in Latin America, Europe, and North America, a historical dialogue that nurtures this book's outstanding contributions. The author's analysis is also grounded on copious archival research, including probanzas, personal correspondence, notarial records, legal proceedings, and many other records. In approaching these materials, she reminds the readers about their potential biases in relation to women's actions. She also recognizes the danger of generalizing from encomenderas' particular experiences, some of which escaped the written registers. Aware of these limitations, Pérez Miguel critically examines these resources, providing elaborate tables and charts to complement her argument. This book is enjoyable reading for both expert and general audiences, with lively stories and exciting data. Overall, Pérez Miguel's work provides a significant contribution to the scholarship on early colonial Peru.

Margaret Murray Washington: The Life and Times of a Career Clubwoman by Sheena Harris

Reviewed by: Margaret Murray Washington: The Life and Times of a Career Clubwoman by Sheena Harris Leigh Soares Margaret Murray Washington: The Life and Times of a Career Clubwoman. By Sheena Harris. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 210. $55.00, ISBN 978-1-62190-619-3.) Building on literature that has shed new light on the lives and leadership of Black women traditionally overshadowed by the renowned "race men" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Sheena Harris has written the first scholarly biography of Margaret Murray Washington. Born enslaved in Macon, Mississippi, Washington is known most for her marriage to Booker T. Washington as he arrived at the height of his power, but here readers see how she became a prominent educator and race leader in her own right. She developed a robust curriculum for Black girls at Tuskegee Institute, promoted Black history education in Black schools across the South, and organized Black women to lead racial uplift movements in their own communities. With this biography of Margaret Washington, Harris "not only restores her to the history of HBCU administrators and club women, but also illuminates the interconnections among movements that stood against racial and gender oppression" (p. 10). [End Page 403] Drawing on a wide range of personal correspondence, public writings, and institutional records, Harris traces the life and career of Washington from her birth in 1861 to her death in 1925. The first three chapters recount Washington's childhood, her education at Fisk University, her marriage to Booker, and her pedagogical commitments as Lady Principal of Tuskegee Institute. Harris emphasizes how Washington's early experiences in the rural, impoverished South helped shape the vision of Black education she brought with her to Tuskegee—one that emphasized respectability, the professionalization of domestic labor, and the uplift of the home. Washington's commitment to industrial education, Harris explains, "was not an accommodationist view, as many critics of her husband asserted, but rather a survivalist strategy" (p. 55). The last three chapters follow Washington's club work on three scales: local (the Tuskegee Women's Club), national (including the National Association of Colored Women and the Southern Federation of Women's Clubs), and international (the International Council of Women of the Darker Races of the World). Washington certainly benefited from her husband's fame and influence, but she carved out a respected leadership role for herself through increasingly ambitious organizing, all in service of advancing the study of Black life, uplifting Black women and children, and fighting the spread of white supremacy. Although Harris clearly admires Washington, she does not pull punches when examining the leader's emergent elitism. "While [Washington] espoused views of cohesive [cross-class] collaborations, she herself remained exclusively separate," and most of the Black women Washington sought to uplift were excluded from membership in the numerous organizations she led (p. 144). One of the benefits of biography is the way individual experiences can provide insight into the people behind movements. In several effective passages, Harris explores the physical and emotional toll on Washington as she struggled to find a balance among her work commitments, her responsibilities as a wife and mother, and her personal well-being, highlighting the unique challenges Black women faced as they pursued public leadership. Although the narrative is at times ambivalent about the relationship between her work and the so-called Tuskegee Machine, it is clearer about Washington's connection to a wide network of Black race women rooted in the South. Harris shows Washington collaborating with other understudied reformers in the region, including Josephine Bruce, Lugenia Burns Hope, and Cornelia Bowen. Readers interested in Black women's history and educational history will appreciate this recovery of the life and career of Margaret Murray Washington. Leigh Soares Mississippi State University Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

Talking to God: Religion, Para-Science and Disciplinary Practices as Consolidation Tools

The article examines social instruments used to consolidate small religious groups in modern society. Such groups are viewed as a variation of the development of a local Orthodox parish founded as a community of like-minded people. The research subject is closed religious community that has existed in the Perm region (Russia) for over thirty years. The community has evolved from a typical Orthodox parish to a modern-type spiritual group that used non-Orthodox sources of information and devotion, and was led by a woman. The study identifies most effective social instruments for the consolidation of those type of religious community. The research includes reconstruction of the history of the community and the analysis of the materials of spiritual seminars held there, reflecting gradual transformation of the teachings and change of the leader’s status. The research data were acquired from several sources: interviews and personal correspondence of the author with former members of the community, materials of journalistic investigations, etc.

Punks in Peoria: Making a Scene in the American Heartland

Punks in Peoria: Making a Scene in the American Heartland is a written history of a people that normally do not have histories written about them: small-town teenage and twenty-something misfits forging a musical and cultural scene despite the societal forces that would rather they did not exist. It is the kind of history that is archived in bedroom closets and passed down in conversation and local lore.This book is as close to a primary document as a book of its type could be. Most of its twenty-four pages of references are personal correspondence and conversations with the people who lived the scene between the late 1970s and the early 2000s. One of its authors is a figure in the book, and the pictures that accompany its pages were dug up from the personal collections of those involved. The authors do a good job, however, of positioning the happenings in Peoria within the broader political and musical culture of the time. Punks in Peoria is written from the inside, by those who were part of it, so the voice is sincere, sympathetic, and positive with enough retrospective clarity to be critical and honest when necessary. The authors are aware of the dynamics of race and gender within the culture and acknowledge those realities while taking a clear feminist, anti-racist, and gender-affirming stance.While few of the bands or figures in the book could be described as central to anything outside of central Illinois, some did go on to storied musical careers rooted in the quirky Peoria scene. But more importantly, this book, through a deeply detailed case study, tells the story of the musical culture that most amateur musicians lived in the punk rock scene across the country and has captured this moment in American history in a heartfelt snapshot.It often felt like reading the story of any American city. The specifics are less important than the process, the culture, the piece of life they represent and encapsulate. It is an important account of the mechanisms of countercultural movement in music and in general in the years preceding widespread access to the Internet: like the origins and transmission of local slang, and how social cliques and personal identity interacted with music before social media, which makes this work so timely.Significantly, this book is a monument to how youth can come together through punk music to create a world that they want to belong to from scratch. Most readers will come away reminded of someone they knew in high school or shows they attended in college; and, for anyone that had a band of friends that booked DIY shows in ill-suited community spaces to create music of questionable sound quality while also making great memories, moments of this book will read like a personal memoir.For those who did not live this time in Peoria, it can be hard to grasp the long lists of band names and subgenres of punk rock. Such unfamiliarity is significantly ameliorated by the online resources created by the authors and others. Jonathan Wright has a YouTube channel that includes video of the Jesus Lizard's concert detailed in chapter 12. Punks in Peoria has a YouTube channel of its own that includes several recording compilations of hard-to-find material. There are also two extensive compilations of Peoria punk music on the MixCloud station Cities and Signs Radio, and an accompanying record available from Alona's Dream Records. Punks in Peoria has a Linktree page that can direct you to many of these and other resources.For Peoria locals who grew up in this period, this must be a remarkable narrative that both rekindles old memories and helps clarify them in context. If only every city could have an account like this of the growth of its musical cultures. Until then, we will have to live vicariously through the contributions of Wright and Barrett in Punks in Peoria.