Twentieth-century History Research Articles

William J. Novak’s The People’s Welfare and the New Historiography of the Early Federal State

It is a true honor to be able to contribute to these proceedings, which seek to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of, and take stock of the impact of William Novak’s The People’s Welfare: Law & Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America. In this short essay, I try to explain how Novak’s work identified a robust early American state at work through state and municipal courts and legislatures by purposefully turning his attention away from the activity of the federal government. Yet as I argue, The People’s Welfare has nonetheless fueled a historical and historiographical reassessment of the United States federal government. How and why this historiographic turn occurred suggests the great importance of The People’s Welfare as both a substantive study of statecraft and a how-to manual of legal and policy history. My sustained encounter with The People’s Welfare dates back to Novak’s seminar on the American state during my first year as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago in 2001-02. One chief task of the seminar was to demolish the “myth of American statelessness,” which Novak describes as the belief that “the essence of nineteenth-century government was its absence.”1 Thus seminarians read The People’s Welfare alongside recent works that become a new canon of nineteenth and twentieth-century histories of statecraft: works by Richard John, Theda Skocpol, Richard Bensel, Stephen Skowronek, Thomas Sugrue, and Michael Katz.2 But a recurring theme of the seminar was that a quiet but significant critique of the “myth of American statelessness” had also taken shape in preceding decades: Willard Hurst’s opus shaped generations of legal historians study of legal institutions and the Commonwealth School produced vigorous examinations of political economy and the role of government in the marketplace. The American state had always been there, hiding in plain sight.3

Ramble Bahamas: Pioneering Bahamian History & Culture in the Digital Age

The digital humanities offer a unique vehicle for bridging the past and present. Interactive media formats encourage user engagement while maintaining the integrity of historical methodologies. Digital platforms enable audiences located far and wide to access information that is not easily available in print format. All these advantages carry special value for students, educators, and scholars who are investigating twentieth-century Bahamian history. Such audiences are met with a grave shortage of resources, whether in physical format or web-based format, which illuminate the Bahamian experience. The challenge of accessing resources confronts, in particular, audiences which are located within the Bahamian archipelago yet outside the central island of New Providence as well audiences that are located abroad. Ramble Bahamas seeks to remedy this deficit by providing a curated collection of easily accessible place-based exhibits in an innovative medium. Each geo-tagged exhibit includes a cohesive narrative which centers on the story of an historically significant site or object. Additional context is built through the inclusion of historical images, newspapers, other documents, and contemporary photographs. Select audio clips taken from oral history interviews with authoritative narrators are also featured within each exhibit to deepen the sense of place, further stimulate the sensory experience of the visitor, and extend each visitor's knowledge about events associated with the location and about circumstances prevailing during the era. Techniques for constructing the product include carrying out oral history interviews, conducting documentary and archival research, and performing audio-visual digitization and editing, as well as deploying and customizing the Omeka content management system powered by Curatescape.

Modern Puerto Rico

In “Modern Puerto Rico,” historian Solsiree del Moral recommends five foundational readings on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of Puerto Rico. The selected readings introduce nonspecialists to the history of class, race, and gender relations on the island, with a special focus on colonialism and workers. In addition, the readings explore the twentieth-century history of migration, diaspora, and national identities. Del Moral also recommends two textbooks as a resource for new readers to Puerto Rican history. The five foundational readings Del Moral recommends include: Findlay, Imposing Decency; Rodríguez-Silva, Silencing Race; Mintz, Worker in the Cane; Flores, Divided Borders; and Duany, Puerto Rican Nation on the Move.

The tribal partners of empire in Arabia: the Ottomans and the Rashidis of Najd, 1880–1918

AbstractThis article is about an aspect of the Ottoman-Rashidi partnership in the late Ottoman Empire that deeply influenced the order of things in Arabia and resulted in both the Ottomans and the Rashidis becoming more significant actors in regional politics. The main argument is that this partnership made a great contribution to the visibly increasing Ottoman influence in Najd (i.e., central Arabia) and the Persian Gulf in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the same time, the Rashidi family’s alliance with the Ottoman Empire paved the way for their emergence as a regional power. Since scholarship on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history of Najd and the Arab lands has tended to neglect the importance of this collaboration, the article sets out to analyze it from its inception until its end, drawing on documents from Ottoman, British, German, and Austrian archives.

Mrs Malaprop Goes to Hastings: History, Parody, and Language in 1066 and All That (1930)

This essay discusses the manifold ways in which malapropisms, among other strategies, contribute to the comic effects achieved in 1066 and All That, a book meant to satirize early twentieth-century history manuals. After an overview of the book’s structure and contents, I will highlight examples in which linguistic choices cause semantic shifts resulting in humorous remarks. These typically sound like misremembered facts or mispronounced names, in a flurry of statements evoking the idiosyncratic usage of Mrs Malaprop, Richard Sheridan’s famous character. Throughout the text it is however difficult to draw a line between mere spoof and thinly-veiled ideological criticism: in carnivalesque uses, the maxims that underpin the Cooperative Principle can hardly apply, and reading between the lines, or indeed among semantic clusters, is indispensable.

Peter Middleton. Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After. ix + 318 pp., index. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2015. $45 (cloth).

Peter Middleton. <i>Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After</i>. ix + 318 pp., index. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2015. $45 (cloth).

Ángeles Mastretta: mujeres, revolución y melodrama

En este artículo se analiza la obra ficcional de la escritora Ángeles Mastretta. Y nos detenemos en tres de sus aspectos más destacados y polémicos: su relación con el feminismo, su manera de revisitar la historia mexicana del siglo XX y su inclinación hacia el melodrama. Iniciamos recogiendo las principales descalificaciones que la crítica literaria ha realizado contra esta autora y contra su narrativa. Sin embargo, leemos tales reprobaciones en el contexto general de los debates surgidos a propósito del “post-boom” latinoamericano. Esto significa considerarlas a la luz de las transformaciones que se presentaron ―durante las postrimerías de nuestro siglo XX― respecto de los paradigmas literarios aportados y legitimados desde el llamado Boom. En relación con el primer aspecto, hacemos notar cómo ―al carecer de una concepción orgánica o programática― el punto de vista de esta narradora es más bien femenino que feminista. A propósito de su mirada sobre el México revolucionario y post-revolucionario, destacamos su visión crítica e iconoclasta, así como su valioso énfasis en el ámbito de la vida privada de aquellos que ejercen el poder. Finalmente, nos detenemos a revisar el mayor reparo a partir del cual los críticos de Mastretta se niegan a reconocerle algún valor literario a su trabajo; esto es: su filiación con un insumo representacional tan denostado como el melodrama. En nuestro examen, no obstante, operamos de un modo menos prejuiciado. De allí que escudriñemos el proceder heterodoxo de Mastretta frente a este género; es decir, la manera en que lo parodia, lo ensancha, lo enriquece.

Disruptive Silences: The AME Church and Dominican-Haitian Relations

Abstract Often recognized for its advocacy on behalf of African descendants, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church has been silent on issues regarding anti-Haitian sentiment in the Dominican Republic. By tracing the historical connection between Black America and Haiti in the nineteenth century and recounting the twentieth-century history of the AME Church in the Dominican Republic, this article explains how an institution created in defense of racial equality could inadvertently facilitate its own silencing. Using archival research, ethnography, and interviews, this article critically analyzes narratives that distance Dominican African Methodists from African Americans and Haitians. It argues that such silences in the AME Church are the result of the church's social marginalization in the Dominican Republic, African American leaders' habitual neglect of the AME Church's Dominican branches, and the assimilation of Black Anglophone migrants into Dominican culture.

Did Ottoman Sultans Ban Print?

This paper argues that the study of Ottoman printing developed from the European experience of print, and that this history continues to impact contemporary scholarship on the topic unduly. To illustrate this point, the paper provides a factual overview for incidents of printing among Ottomans and compares them to their historiographical portrayal. It then goes on to chart the life-cycle of the rumor that two Ottoman sultans banned print as it originated in early modern Europe, was adopted by nineteenth century Ottomans, and stabilized through twentieth century historians. The primary sources are texts of early modern European and Ottoman origin, and contemporary western and Middle Eastern origin.

Revisiting the nuclear age. State of the art research in nuclear history

This article provides an overview of recent research developments in the field of nuclear history, focusing on Western European and Northern American research perspectives and topics. The analysis of these developments reveals under-researched areas which merit more focus from humanities and social sciences scholars in order to better understand the role of nuclear matters in twentieth century history and their implications for the twenty-first century. The areas which require more intensive research include: nuclear waste, the role of social scientists in constructing the nuclear age and the shifting narratives of nuclear vices and virtues.

A Vanished Ideology: Essays on the Jewish Communist Movement in the English-Speaking World in the Twentieth Century ed. by Matthew B. Hoffman and Henry F. Srebrnik

Reviewed by: A Vanished Ideology: Essays on the Jewish Communist Movement in the English-Speaking World in the Twentieth Century ed. by Matthew B. Hoffman and Henry F. Srebrnik Christine Elie Matthew B. Hoffman and Henry F. Srebrnik, eds., A Vanished Ideology: Essays on the Jewish Communist Movement in the English-Speaking World in the Twentieth Century (Albany: State University of New York Press 2016) Histories of the Communist Party lend themselves well to collected works. While these histories are transnational, the nature of organizing – often under circumstances of repression – make them deeply local. Following directives from [End Page 358] the USSR, Communist Parties around the world shared common ideology, but no two shared the same experiences. A Vanished Ideology is located along this intersection of local and global. Focusing specifically on Jewish Communist Party members adds fascinating complexity to the already gripping historiography of transnational leftism. In A Vanished Ideology, Matthew B. Hoffman and Henry F. Srebrnik thoughtfully curate a collection of essays on the local experiences of Jewish Communists in the English-speaking world. Central to this work are the competing identity politics that often challenged the allegiance of Jewish Communist Party members. Connecting these pieces is the pervasive issue of the primary affiliation of such Party members – often posed is the question: were they Communist Jews or were they Jewish Communists? This distinction was even more pronounced when local party members faced international schisms and debates – among the most ravenous to the Party were the rise (and subsequent Soviet criticism) of Zionism, the escalation of fascism in Europe, and ultimately the revelations of Khrushchev's secret speech in 1956. Hoffman opens the collection with his piece on the place of Yiddish-speaking Communists in the Communist Party of the United States (cpusa). He examines the role of both Jewish particularism and the forging of a distinct Jewish communist culture. Jennifer Young similarly addresses the cpusa, doing so through an analysis of the allegiance of the Jewish Peoples' Fraternal Order (jppo) and its role in forging the Jewish Communist movement. Young argues that the jppo contributed to the creation of a community that lasted far beyond its affiliation with the Communist Party. Gennady Estraikh explores Jewish Communism in the United States through the lens of Paul Novick – editor of the daily Frayhayt. Estraikh follows Novick's career and dedication to the daily from its inception in 1922 until its final edition in 1988 during which time it weathered myriad international scandals. Henry Srebrnik introduces the Communist Party of Canada (cpc) and the role of the Jewish community in fostering Jewish identity while both reacting to and resisting burgeoning Zionism. Srebrnik contends that following the 1956 Khrushchev revelations, Jewish Party members had to confront the reality that the USSR and its promised Birobidzhan region had not offered a viable safe heaven from anti-Semitism. Ester Reiter also addresses the cpc, exploring the internationalism that marked eastern European Jewish migrants as secular socialists inclined towards working-class movements. Reiter zeroes in on women's activism and confronts several challenges to Canada's left – notably the Padlock law and 1951 expulsion of the United Jewish People's Order from the Canadian Jewish Congress. Stephen M. Cullen takes us out of North America with his piece on the Communist Party of Great Britain (cpgb). Cullen argues that Jewish Party members are inaccurately painted out of the picture in Great Britain in part due to the reliance on class as the primary unit of analysis in Communist historiography. In addition, Cullen contends, there has been intentional negligence by Stalinist historiography to acknowledge the presence and contributions of Jewish Party members. Basing his work on sound recordings, Cullen "tests" his theories on Jewish presence by relying on interviews with notable Jewish members of the cpgb. Philip Mendes examines the small yet present group of Jewish Communists in Australia. Mendes argues that while they were by no means a mass, Jewish Communists (and their allies) were active participants in the Jewish community. [End Page 359] Concluding the volume, David Yoram Saks delves into the fascinating world of the Communist Party of South Africa. Saks follows the trajectory of several Jewish Communists as they achieved...

These United States: A Nation in the Making, 1890 to the Present by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore and Thomas J. Sugrue

Reviewed by: These United States: A Nation in the Making, 1890 to the Present by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore and Thomas J. Sugrue Patricia A. Schechter These United States: A Nation in the Making, 1890 to the Present. by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore and Thomas J. Sugrue. ( New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2015. Pp. xxiv, 712. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-393-23952-2.) These United States: A Nation in the Making, 1890 to the Present is a lively, readable, and up-to-date narrative history of the United States from 1890 through the election of Barack Obama. The book's title and framing device come from a remark by Franklin Delano Roosevelt made during a 1936 fireside chat: that "these United States" comprised a people and a nation "still in the making" (p. xv). The reader is thus primed for a story about process, contingency, and, in the authors' words, "individual lives … who join together to make history" (p. xxii). Award-winning scholars of African American history, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore and Thomas J. Sugrue would be well prepared to recast textbook nation-state history with the black experience at its center. Such is not the book they wrote, however, and in 625 pages of relatively familiar events, the authors instead try to chip away at the triumphalist construction of "the American century," which posits the United States as the synecdoche of twentieth-century history. Chapter 1 crystallizes their effort. It is titled "Origins of the American Century" and purports to root Time magazine editor Henry Luce's 1941 statement in an earlier generation's assumptions and ambitions. Rather than parse the numerous debates about proliferating empire at the turn of the twentieth century, however, the authors mostly report on the rather shrugging consensus about the industrial power and abundance on display at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. They make some acute observations along the way, namely that "empire became a fact before most Americans had time to reckon with its implications," and that the entrenchment of and protests against Jim Crow segregation at the fair were harbingers of the era's discontents (p. 49). At this and other key junctures, however, the individuals whom Gilmore and Sugrue bring on stage mostly accommodated the overwhelming reality around them while attempting to turn it to their advantage. At the Chicago fair, for example, a young man named Friend Pitts Williams of New York remained hopeful that "industrial might" and "global greatness" could redound to individuals' benefit despite severe violence and social exclusion facing his fellow African Americans at the event and beyond (p. 7). During World War II, Stan Igawa enlisted in the military, nobly enthusiastic in his faith in the United States' ideal of democracy, even as protest quietly but firmly rolled out in the camps and in the courts against Japanese internment. With these voices the authors capture the steadfastness and commitment of everyday citizens as they weighed choices in daunting and often violent circumstances. While imperialism was mortally wounded by Wilsonianism and killed off during World War II, this book offers no obituary. Some of imperialism's offspring, ideas like missionary capitalism (later called free enterprise), rarely made the newspapers per se or filtered into the reform and protest activities that did show up in the headlines. The authors flag telling ideas like "international humanitarianism" that were the postwar spawn of earlier imperialism, but it is [End Page 722] the story of "militant anti-Communism" that gripped the nation's political parties and takes hold of Gilmore and Sugrue's narrative as the authors relate the Cold War maneuverings of the John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon administrations (p. 289). The word imperialism does not appear in the book's index, and like most U.S. history textbooks, These United States traces the republican-flavored individualism by which most modern citizens locate and orient themselves but which consistently benefits the wealthy few. The text's chapter on the 1950s invokes the implicit bargain, tying the political structure of representative democracy to a highly unequal private economy. Paradigmatic among social movements are suffrage and school equality, stories well told by the authors through...

The Southwest: A Fire Survey by Stephen J. Pyne

Reviewed by: The Southwest: A Fire Survey by Stephen J. Pyne Jeannette Vaught The Southwest: A Fire Survey. By Stephen J. Pyne. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016. Pp. 208. Photographs, notes, index.) This slim volume of essays forms one part of a collection of books that examine the twentieth-century history of large-scale firefighting in various regions of the United States. Stephen Pyne, a well-known historian of American wildland fire cultures, has here presented an accessible entry point into the kaleidoscopic set of shifting interests that characterize the [End Page 120] relationships of fire to the Southwest. Pyne confines this regional examination to the fire histories of Arizona and New Mexico. The book cuts a strange shape both in relation to its content and to the larger whole of which it is part: as a collection of stand-alone essays and also as a stand-alone book in a regionally organized series, it is a prickly text for a novice to enter. The book and series are aimed at “fire folks,” who, either as practitioners or enthusiasts, have a ready grasp of topographical, geological, and meteorological characteristics of the region and of fire management terms and techniques (x). But the volume rewards a reader who stays the course. Its thematic connections resonate through various essays; Pyne’s singular perspective emerges as the histories he tells accumulate; and by the end of the volume, a reader familiar with western American history will feel as if his or her own perspective on the region has shifted to accommodate the questions raised by fire. The essays are grouped into three sections, loosely defined by topographies. Each essay within these sections is concerned with a specific mountain range, peak, canyon, or rim. Then, Pyne adds fire. From this starting point of place plus pyrography, Pyne explores a range of intersecting themes until a coherent picture of the region’s fire history and its myriad current challenges emerges. Pyne’s signal concerns are the interlocking obstacles faced by fire professionals in restoring southwestern public lands to a sustainable pattern of burning. Over several essays, he explains how the region’s current susceptibility to wildly destructive fires is rooted as much in the lasting consequences of wrongheaded early twentieth-century attitudes towards fire management as it is in climate change or nineteenth-century overgrazing and timbering. Essays develop this underlying theme by placing it in the context of predator eradication, public land management, and suburban development. Fires—and people, and plant and animal species—that cut through borders bring thorny jurisdiction contests between federal, state, private, and indigenous land claims into sharp relief. Pyne layers fire culture into energy cultures, examining it in relation to the nuclear landscapes of Los Alamos and highlighting the double damage done to southwestern ecologies by the fires constantly burning in our combustion engines combined with the fifty-year suppression of wildland fires. He grapples especially convincingly with the conflicts arising between scientists and environmentalists, both of whom have, at times, acted to the great detriment of the overall ecological health of a fire region. What surfaces through Pyne’s essays is a sense of how many stakeholders—from invasive species to retirees to bureaucrats—have a direct impact on the fire culture of the southwest, and how difficult it has been for fire professionals to implement sound fire policy within that matrix. What he calls the fire revolution of the 1960s and 1970s has not had a chance, given all of these intersecting interests and histories, to truly restore a [End Page 121] safe fire culture of constant, productive burning that regenerates complex biomes and mitigates big blowups. For Texans who remember the Bastrop Complex Fire of 2011, this book offers valuable perspective and fair warning. Fire, as Pyne’s volume attests, illuminates not just past problems, but those that loom in the region’s future. [End Page 122] Jeannette Vaught University of Texas at Austin Copyright © 2017 The Texas State Historical Association

The Stories of AIDS

The Stories of AIDS Elizabeth Alice Clement (bio) After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion. By Anthony Petro. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 312pages. $29.95 (cloth). The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS. By Dagmawi Woubshet. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. 192pages. $38.95 (cloth). Hold Tight Gently: Michael Callen, Essex Hemphill, and the Battlefield of AIDS. By Martin Duberman. New York: New Press, 2016. 368pages. $27.95 (cloth). $19.95 (paper). Mobilizing New York: AIDS, Antipoverty, and Feminist Activism. By Tamar Carroll. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. 304pages. $37.50 (paper). North Carolina and the Problem of AIDS: Advocacy, Politics, and Race in the South. By Stephen J. Inrig. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 224pages. $29.95 (paper). Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants. By Phil Tiemeyer. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. 302pages. $70.00 (cloth). $29.95 (paper). The earliest stories about AIDS labeled it a gay disease. Conservative Christians inside and outside government argued that AIDS represented “God’s wrath” on sinful homosexuals. This logic and the more widely shared homophobia it drew on allowed much of US society to ignore AIDS. The perceived queerness of the victims delayed both research and prevention efforts, putting hundreds of thousands of Americans at unnecessary risk. As genetic research on the virus now suggests, the gay epidemic and the epidemic in communities of color developed simultaneously in America’s big cities in the 1970s and, of course, [End Page 917] overlapped. However, the historical association of gay identity with whiteness inaccurately raced the epidemic, implying that only white gay identified men would be at risk. The stories told about HIV/AIDS and gayness when it first emerged in 1981 convinced scientists, journalists, politicians, and ordinary citizens that people of color need not worry about AIDS. Pouring gasoline on a raging fire, the federal government’s war on drugs, and the mass incarceration of Black and Latino men it produced, accelerated the epidemic. Now an epidemic of poverty and race as well as sexuality, AIDS has become an intractable problem in poor communities of color, particularly in the South. Fifty percent of Black men who have sex with men and 25 percent of Latino men who have sex with men will contract HIV in their lifetimes. The risk for the nation as a whole hovers at one percent.1 Despite the fact that African Americans make up only twelve percent of the population, in 2015 African Americans accounted for 61 percent of HIV/AIDS diagnoses among women.2 Eight out of the ten states that share the dubious distinction of having the highest rates of new infections are in the South.3 Had we seen the cause of AIDS as a virus and not debased queerness, this might not have happened. The story of AIDS as a gay disease changed the course of the epidemic, shaping it to run in the channels carved by racism, sexism, and the inequities of poverty that form the central core American history. This review evaluates the contributions of six new books on the history of AIDS in the United States. Tackling the epidemic through different lenses, they provide important new analyses of the epidemic and its trajectory as they trace the place of HIV/AIDS in late twentieth-century histories of religion, labor, activism, race, and sexuality. I begin by discussing Anthony Petro’s After the Wrath of God, which details the reactions of conservative Christians to the epidemic. Of these new texts, Petro’s work provides the clearest sketch of the story of AIDS as a gay disease and ways that association shaped public reactions and policy. I then turn to two monographs that deal with AIDS in the course of their discussions of labor and activism. Phil Tiemeyer’s Plane Queer provides a history of the queering of male flight attendants in the twentieth century. In Mobilizing New York Tamar Carroll analyzes community activism in New York City from the early 1960s through the late 1990s. The remaining books address the complex interactions between race...

Obchody 1000-lecia chrztu Polski na Warmii i Mazurach

The celebrations of the millennium of Christianity and the beginnings of the Polish state, as a result of deep political conflict, could not be organized jointly by the State and Church. Centuries of belonging to the Christian community were opposed to the twentieth-century history of socialist Poland, acknowledged in propaganda material as “the crowning of all the nation’s historical development.” It was no different in Warmia and Masuria, where the presentation and interpretation of Polish heritage (concerning the Polishness of these lands and their general development after 1945), aimed to distance society from the Church, including participation in the millennium celebrations, in the case of Olsztyn province, organised in Frombork, with the participation of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński. The aim was to counter attacks on the Church and the clergy, and especially the propaganda campaign related to the post-war period. The competing, secular celebration of the Millennium of Poland was organized in Lidzbark Warmiński, with the participation of the highest, partyadministrative provincial authorities.

After Nikolai Bukharin

This article addresses the ideological context of twentieth-century history of science as it emerged and was discussed at the threshold of the Cold War. It is claimed that the bifurcation of the discipline into a socio-economic strand and a technical-intellectual one (the divide between ‘externalism’ and ‘internalism’) should be traced back to the 1930s. In fact, the proposal of a Marxist-oriented historiography by the Soviet delegates at the International Congress of History of Science and Technology (London, 1931) led by Nikolai Bukharin, set off the ideological and methodological opposition that characterised the later years. Bukharin’s views on science are closely considered, as well as those of his Marxist critics, György Lukács and Antonio Gramsci. It is argued that, despite the fluidity of the positions of the 1920s and 1930s, these theories soon crystallized as demonstrated by the leftist reception of Bukharin’s and his associates’ perspective in the history of science, especially in Great Britain, as well as by the anti-communist reactions. Intellectualist approaches renouncing socio-economic factors, typically those by Alexandre Koyré and Thomas Kuhn, are reconsidered in the light of the ideological confrontation of the Cold War era. Reflection on the political-cultural embedding of the history of science has often been overshadowed by claims about the objectivity and neutrality of science and its historiography. Thus, the seminal discussion of the 1930s remains one of the most lucid moments of reflection about the role of science and history of science as cultural phenomena shaped by political struggles.

Shocking Histories and Missing Memories: Trauma in Viktor Pelevin's Čapaev i Pustota

The article draws on recent developments in trauma studies to analyze the complex “re-organization” of Russian history in Viktor Pelevin's celebrated novel Chapaev i Pustota (1996; translated as Buddha's Little Finger). Pelevin employs the narrator's individual shock, amnesia and trauma – and the confused historical plot ensuing from it – for a reflection on the possibilities of collective remembrance and mourning in post-Soviet Russia. The article briefly positions its approach among other recent efforts in Russian studies to apply notions of “trauma”. Subsequently, it analyzes Pelevin's intricate reflections on the confusing traumatic legacies of twentieth-century history in this novel.

Medievalism and Portuguese modernity in Lídia Jorge’sO dia dos prodígios

This paper examines the ways in which Portuguese writer Lídia Jorge recovers a medieval discourse to comment on Portugal’s twentieth-century history in her debut novel O dia dos prodígios (1980). It focuses not on the Middle Ages as a distinct period of European history but on the representations of the Middle Ages in post-medieval worlds, positing medievalism as an instance of Saidian orientalism. Although Jorge’s medievalizing (and orientalizing) gesture towards Portuguese modernity expresses a critical stance towards both the Salazar/Caetano regime and post-dictatorial revolutionary propaganda, this paper argues that Jorge makes a complex and multilayered use of medievalism/orientalism which contains both hegemonic and non-hegemonic, conservative and emancipatory aspects.

Better a Warm Hug than a Cold Bath: Nationalist Memory and the Failures of Iranian Historiography

This paper assesses the extent to which the modern historiography of Iran is indebted to a nationalist construction of Iran’s past, rather than proceeding from impartial and critical historical research. The paper pursues this aim by applying the distinction between history (as a scholarly discipline) and memory (as a nationalist construct) to one of the central tropes of the country’s historiography. According to that trope, Iranian history can be summarized as a succession of violent invasions by foreign “races,” which never stamped out Iran’s separate ethnic identity. This resilience is attributed to Iranian civilization’s inherent superiority, which Iranianized the invaders and thus ensured Iran’s survival as a primordial nation. The analysis shows that—counter-intuitively—twentieth-century Iranian historians, instead of subjecting this narrative to critical assessment, have in fact played a central role in developing it into a self-serving historiography. Special attention is given to Zarrinkub’s seminal Two Centuries of Silence.

Democracy Wall, Foreign Correspondents, and Deng Xiaoping

This article identifies and explains the role of the Western media in Chinese politics between November 1978 and April 1979, when the rise of Deng Xiaoping within the Communist Party coincided with the emergence of the Democracy Wall free speech movement on China's streets, and the normalization of Sino-American relations. At this critical juncture in twentieth-century history, foreign journalists in Beijing were much more than simply gatekeepers of a conduit to the outside world. Chinese activists believed that, through the Western media, they could reach domestic audiences in China, and potentially even the Party leadership. Indeed, foreign reporting contributed to the movement's spread to other parts of the country, while strengthening and accentuating its most aspects. However, the main beneficiary of these interactions was Deng, who enlisted Democracy Wall and the foreign media, at times in conjunction, to advance his domestic and international objectives. Once he had secured control of the Party's political direction, and the normalization of Sino-American relations, the foreign press provided the rationale, if not the impetus, for the movement's suppression. Drawing on participant interviews, new Chinese sources, and analysis of press archives, this article brings important new insights into the momentous political events that set in motion the ongoing transformation of China and the region. It also illuminates the little-studied role of international media in producing radical flank effects that can help or hinder both social movements and state authorities. The case stands as a cautionary example for social activists attempting to harness the power of international media today.