bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Reframing Chicago's Memorial Day Massacre, May 30, 1937
Authors: Quirke Carol
Published: March 2008

This essay re-examines one of the twentieth century's most well-known instances of violence against labor. It focuses on the incident's iconic imagery, which showed Chicago police beating and shooting at protesters in the midst of the 1937 "Little Steel" strike. As this essay reveals, newsreel footage and news photographs long held to demonstrate police responsibility for the violence first appeared in metropolitan dailies and nationally circulating magazines in stories representing strikers as a mob that sought to storm the Republic Steel plant, leaving police no option but to shoot. This essay emphasizes the political influence of an increasingly national and photographic mass media. Sustaining earlier scholarship, this study identifies the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter, Paul Anderson, and the La Follette committee as central players in a campaign to reverse public understanding of events in Chicago. In its attention to the conflict over the use and meaning of newsreel footage and photographs, the essay documents how labor and its allies engineered a re-reading of news imagery first employed by Chicago officials and Republic Steel executives to condemn workers' activism. This re-reading took place at Chicago rallies, in Washington congressional rooms, and ultimately, within the newly nationalized, photographic media itself. Understanding how labor reversed the interpretation of these images before the American public suggests that labor's newfound political might included a sophisticated ability to renegotiate its visual representation, and to capitalize on the growing salience of news photography to restrict corporate and state violence against unions. The essay's experimental form stresses cultural history's power to re-animate the past, specifically in its meditation on the nature and limits of photographic evidence. Archival evidence for this essay comes from the Grinberg Film Libraries, the Congressional records at the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the United Steel Workers of America Papers, the George Patterson Papers, and the Lawrence Jacques Papers at the Chicago Historical Society.
Debt and the Transnationalization of Hawai'i
Authors: Rifkin Mark
Published: March 2008

The article argues that beginning in the 1820s, the U.S. engaged in a militarized diplomacy that ensured ongoing Hawaiian willingness to participate in international trade, managing the terms of Hawaiian sovereignty so as to promote the expansion of American capitalism. In this dynamic, a particular vision of Hawaiian identity is recognized that facilitates U.S. transpacific exchange, constructing and enforcing a version of independence that allows Hawai'i to serve as a placeholder in globalizing trade networks. In October 1826, Commander Thomas ap Catesby Jones arrived in Hawai'i, and by December, he had negotiated two agreements: one guaranteeing Americans' right to trade in Hawai'i and securing most favored nation status for the U.S.; and the other for Hawaiians to gather sandalwood and assorted other items to pay back debts Hawaiian chiefs supposedly owed to U.S. merchants. This mission comes to serve as precedent not only for later visits by U.S. war-ships, but also for threats of military intervention by both Great Britain and France. In this context, though, what precisely does "debt" mean? Looking carefully at the documents surrounding Jones's mission and situating them within an analysis of the dynamics of Hawaiian political-economy, the article examines the presuppositions about international trade and national sovereignty at work in the institutionalized American narration of Hawaiian "debt." As practiced in the late-twentieth-century, control exerted through apparently non-coercive relations of debt has been called "neocolonialism." While appearing as a self-evident empirical tabulation, debt functions as a mechanism for materially reconstituting the domestic policy of "debtor" nations in ways that increase foreign influence and investment, seeking to circumscribe radically the options available to such countries for autonomous policy-setting and to make their natural, human, and business resources available for expropriation. The kind of generic national subjectivity produced in this dialectic of formal independence and foreign economic manipulation usefully can be described as debt sovereignty. Such a dynamic is not merely a contemporary phenomenon, instead appearing in U.S-Hawaiian relations as early as the 1820s. U.S. articulations of debt redefine Hawaiian political identity in ways that stabilize its multidimensional role as a pivot in U.S. commercial geographies, particularly the China trade. The article further argues that more than merely being a prelude to conquest, this political and economic intervention is organized around markedly different ideological and institutional structures than the annexation at the end of the nineteenth century and needs to be treated as a distinct imperial project.
Citizen Restaurant: American Imaginaries, American Communities
Authors: Ruiz Vicki L.
Published: March 2008

Social justice imperatives animate American Studies in the twenty-first century. Zoë Strauss's evocate image that graces the cover of the 2007 ASA conference program seems an appropriate metaphor for the everyday intersections of race, memory, community, and class. From the Minutemen who patrol the desert to the mulit-generational demonstrations for immigrant rights, constructions of historical memory loom large with discordant interpretations of American identities. "Citizen Restaurant" encapsulates racial/ethnic food-scapes as markers of belonging and difference set within a larger frame of American inequality. The connections between the past and present require an interrogation beyond a comparative rhetorical analysis but one that recognizes the ways in which both historical memory and popular culture shape claims to public space and citizenship. Inspired by the works of Paula Moya, Hazel Markus, and Larry Bobo (to name only a few influences), this essay explores the ways in which race infuses ordinary acts of reaction, resistance, appropriation, and ambivalence as they have played out in selected service industries, including restaurants. But such recognition is not enough. In the words of Gloria Anzaldúa: "Enough shouting against the wind—all words are noise if not accompanied with action." As an indulgence in auto-ethnography, this essay interrogates the author's own intersections with K-16 collaborations and grassroots projects to offer a pragmatic (not romantic) glimpse into the challenges and possibilities germane to community engagement.
Ongoing Archaeological Research on Fais Island, Micronesia
Authors: Intō Michiko
Published: March 2008

The third season of archaeological research was carried out on Fais Island in the Caroline Islands at the end of 2005. A deep cultural deposit (more than 3.3 meters) was excavated along the southern coastal deposit from which a number of potsherds, shell artifacts, bone artifacts, and various kinds of natural remains were found. The constant recovery of artifactual remains supports the previous supposition that the island was continuously inhabited since the time of the first colonization. Pigs and dogs (and possibly chickens) have definitely existed on the island since about a.d. 400 afterward. Two charcoal samples obtained from the earliest cultural deposit were securely dated as a.d. 230–410 (Beta-21306) and a.d. 240–420 (Beta- 213061). These are the earliest dates obtained for the coral islands in the central Caroline Islands. The continuous appearance of potsherds and natural food remains throughout the culture sequence indicates that Fais was permanently settled for the last 1700 years and was not just occupied for a short period of time. On the basis of introduced pottery and domesticated animals, maintaining cultural contacts with high islands could have been a significant way to survive on such small coral islands with limited resources.
Edge-Ground and Waisted Axes in the Western Pacific Islands: Implications for an Example from the Yaeyama Islands, Southernmost Japan
Authors: Anderson Atholl , Summerhayes Glenn
Published: March 2008

A flaked, ground, and waisted axe, discovered on Iriomote Island in the Yaeyama group, southernmost Japan, appears to be a unique find in Japanese prehistory. Its resemblance to waisted, edge-ground axes which, in Australia, are of Pleistocene age, and to similar artifacts of early Holocene age in New Guinea, as well as potential antecedents in the Pleistocene edge-ground axes of Honshu, invites questions about its significance. This is especially so because the Yaeyama Islands are regarded currently as having been first occupied by people during the Shimotabaru phase of Neolithic culture, beginning about 3800 B.P. Comparison with similar western Pacific artifacts, and consideration of the eustatic history of the Yaeyamas, suggest that the Iriomote example might be of early Holocene age, although its origin within the late Holocene cannot be excluded. The find raises questions about the human history of the southern Ryukyu groups that demand further research.
Pacific Seascapes, Canoe Performance, and a Review of Lapita Voyaging with Regard to Theories of Migration
Authors: Irwin Geoffrey
Published: March 2008

The first part of this paper establishes in a general kind of way that the domain or seascape that Lapita sailors operated in was more demanding than that of Wallacea and Near Oceania, but markedly less so than that negotiated later by East Polynesians. The second part takes a look at the form and performance of canoes, the possible nature of Lapita craft, and suggests ways to improve modern estimates of prehistoric performance by mechanical and mathematical modeling. The third part considers the practicalities of sailing in the Lapita domain; it argues that the dispersal of Lapita was in a selected direction rather than a random one, and o¤ers a glimpse of how these ambitious but relatively cautious sailors learned to navigate. The final aim of the paper is to summarize three theories of migration, which support each other in some respects, but which di¤er in others—especially in their views of prehistoric canoe performance.
Northern Vanuatu as a Pacific Crossroads: The Archaeology of Discovery, Interaction, and the Emergence of the "Ethnographic Present"
Authors: Bedford Stuart , Spriggs Matthew
Published: March 2008

Northern Vanuatu is a significant crossroads region of the Southwest Pacific. This paper outlines current archaeological research being undertaken in the area, focusing on defining initial human settlement there some 3000 years ago and subsequent cultural transformations which led to the establishment of the ethnographic present. The study to date has contributed to a more detailed picture of inter- and intraarchipelago interaction, settlement pattern, subsistence, and cultural differentiation. The research contributes to regional debates on human colonization, patterns of social interaction, and the drivers of social change in island contexts.
Pacific Bananas: Complex Origins, Multiple Dispersals?
Authors: Kennedy Jean
Published: March 2008

This paper reviews recent genetic evidence for the origins of the traditional cultivated bananas of the Pacific, and shows that they are unexpectedly complex. Current assumption of their prevailing west-to-east spread from Southeast Asia into the Pacific thus needs modification. Although bananas are widely assumed to have been part of the set of crops transported to Polynesia at first settlement, the linguistic evidence on which this is based underestimates the diversity of bananas in the New Guinea region and is suspect. Archaeological evidence of bananas is so far very tenuous. Recent genetic evidence of the parentage of most groups of cultivated bananas shows that the primary step toward edibility occurred in the Philippines– New Guinea region. Early movements westward across Island Southeast Asia must have occurred, and the complexity of hybrids makes regionally dispersed development likely. There is no demonstrable link with Taiwan or the adjacent coast of China. There is no evidence that the genetically distinct lineages of bananas found in Polynesia were brought together in the putatively ancestral Lapita crop assemblage of the northern New Guinea region. The complex phylogeny of the cultivated Pacific bananas may thus suggest multiple prehistoric introductions of bananas to Polynesia. If bananas were part of the founding set of crops of Remote Oceania, the question ''which bananas?'' is currently unanswered.
Excavations in Peva Valley, Rurutu, Austral Islands (East Polynesia)
Authors: Bollt Robert
Published: March 2008

The Peva dune site on Rurutu, Austral Islands, excavated in 2003, has yielded a rich archaeological assemblage containing artifacts and both vertebrate and invertebrate fauna from two distinct stratigraphic layers. The lower layer dates from the East Polynesian Archaic period (c. A.D. 1000–1450), and the upper layer from the Classic period (c. eighteenth and nineteenth centuries A.D.), during which time the site was a ceremonial marae. The two layers are entirely distinct, separated by a thick deposit of sterile beach sand. This article analyzes the major temporal trends in Rurutu's artifact and faunal assemblages, and discusses them in terms of both the general efflorescence of East Polynesian culture, and the more specific emergence of a uniquely Austral culture, which impressed early European visitors as being quite unique.
Examining Prehistoric Migration Patterns in the Palauan Archipelago: A Computer Simulated Analysis of Drift Voyaging
Authors: Callaghan R. T. (Richard T.) , Fitzpatrick Scott M
Published: March 2008

A number of recent genetic, linguistic, and archaeological studies have attempted to ascertain the origin of settlers to the Palauan archipelago, but it remains a complex and debated issue. To provide additional insight into colonization strategies and settlement patterns, we conducted computer simulations of drift voyages to the Palauan archipelago based on historically recorded winds and currents. Drift voyages were considered here as drifting before the wind when lost, a strategy documented for Pacific Islanders. The simulations suggest that peoples drifting before the wind from the southern Philippines would have had the most success in landfall. This finding supports the current hypothesis of human colonization to the islands of Palau.
The Changing Role of Irrigated Colocasia esculenta (taro) on Nuku Hiva, Marquesas Islands: From an Essential Element of Colonization to an Important Risk-Reduction Strategy
Authors: Addison David J
Published: March 2008

This paper proposes that, on the Marquesan island of Nuku Hiva, wet cultivation of Colocasia taro was important in initial colonization because it was the most energyefficient and fastest-producing crop. In later periods its caloric contribution was eclipsed by breadfruit, but irrigated taro played an important risk-reduction role.
The Pigs of Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific: New Evidence for Taxonomic Status and Human-Mediated Dispersal
Authors: Dobney Keith , Cucchi Thomas , Larson Greger
Published: March 2008

This paper undertakes a major survey of the genus Sus from Island Southeast Asia and specifically attempts to re-examine the taxonomic status of the pigs of Wallacea, in order to re-evaluate the complex evidence for human mediated dispersal. This was undertaken using the combined approach of tooth outline and mitochondrial DNA analysis. The data provide clear evidence for three dispersal events: The first involved domesticated pigs, originating from wild Sus scrofa stock in mainland Southeast Asia, being introduced to the Greater and Lesser Sunda Islands, to the Mollucas, New Guinea, and Oceania. Archaeological specimens clearly link these pigs with the Lapita and subsequent Polynesian dispersals. Since the pigs on New Guinea are specifically linked with this dispersal, it follows that the current wild populations of the island must be the feral descendants of introduced domestic pigs from mainland Southeast Asia, which came into New Guinea via the Lesser Sunda Islands. A second dispersal event also involved domesticated pigs (this time from wild Sus scrofa populations from mainland East Asia), introduced to the Philippines and Micronesia, while a third involved the endemic warty pig of Sulawesi (Sus celebensis), which data from Liang Bua cave shows was introduced to Flores perhaps as early as 7000 B.C.
Indo-Pacific Migration and Colonization—Introduction
Authors: Anderson Atholl , O'Connor Sue
Published: March 2008

In this Introduction we comment on issues raised by the present collection of papers as they appear relevant in thinking about the settlement of the Indo-Pacific from the Pleistocene to the late Holocene. Successful maritime migration across this vast region was obviously related to voyaging technology and colonizing behaviors. Here we critique earlier models that indicate simple unidirectional expansion and posit farming, or indeed any other single driver, for maritime expansion in the mid–late Holocene. It now appears that the development of interaction spheres in Wallacea, and perhaps connections with New Guinea, have contributed significantly to late Holocene societies in ISEA and Island Melanesia. Even in Remote Oceania where long-term colonizing success was dependent on a transported tropical horticultural complex, initial settlement strategies are likely to have been highly varied and to have had variable success. Nor is migration restricted to the founding events of island settlement; rather, it continued as a significant component of the formation and re-formation of island cultures up to the historical era and, of course, within the present day. Like the authors represented here we suggest that if we wish to make progress in understanding the motives, sources, mechanisms and results of colonizing migration, there will be greatest reward in exploring the complexity and variability that lie behind it.
Gender and Juvenile Charity, Tradition and Reform: Assistance for Young People in Eighteenth-Century Seville
Authors: Tikoff Valentina K.
Published: March 2008

The orphanages of eighteenth-century Seville accommodated more boys than girls. This article explores reasons for the discrepancy, arguing that charity dowries were an alternative to institutionalization for young females. Findings are based on analysis of charitable organizations (both orphanages and dowry funds) and contemporary discussions of charity reform, particularly debates over a proposed poorhouse. Beyond explaining the gender disparity at Seville's orphanages, this study challenges common views of gender, confinement, children, and poor relief in Catholic, Mediterranean Europe at the end of the old regime. It also highlights the important role of local players in implementing "enlightened" social welfare reforms.
The Legislative Body: Print Portraits of the National Assembly, 1789–1791
Authors: Freund Amy
Published: March 2008

This essay explores the problem of political representation during the early years of the French Revolution through the lens of a series of portraits of the deputies to the National Assembly, the Collection Générale des Portraits de MM. les Députés à l'Assemblée Nationale , published by Nicolas-François Levachez. As the first visual depiction of the deputies, the prints manipulate the language of portraiture to strike a balance between representing a series of individual men and a collective body politic, and to invite political participation and judgment from viewers.
Wit and Politics in Revolutionary British America: The Case of Samuel Seabury and Alexander Hamilton
Authors: Gould Philip
Published: March 2008

This essay reads the famous exchange of anonymously written pamphlets between the American loyalist Samuel Seabury and the patriot Alexander Hamilton as an episode in transatlantic literary history. Reading the political pamphlet as a genre in which literary and cultural debates over taste and style simultaneously were taking place, this essay argues that for both patriot and loyalist writers, demonstrating British cultural literacy was crucial to establishing political authorship in America. The subsequent debates between Seabury and Hamilton over such subjects as wit and classical expression testify to the ongoing importance of this literacy as well as the larger dissonance between the political and cultural dimensions of the American Revolution.
Fishy Business: Richard Wright's The Fishery (1764), Marine Painting, and the Limits of Refinement in Eighteenth-Century London
Authors: Monks Sarah
Published: March 2008

Ordinarily marginalized for their commercially-driven subject-matter and artisanal practices, British marine painters were presented with a new opportunity in the 1760s: a public competition encouraging them to produce aesthetically-refined "works of art" commensurate with Britain's new identity as maritime and cultural world power. Through a close analysis of the first prize-winning painting (Richard Wright's The Fishery ), its problematic subject-matter (the Society of Arts' "Land-Carriage Fish Scheme"), and the competition's scandalous disintegration, this article describes the anxieties, failures, and conflicts generated by such attempts to forge a culture of refinement within a society increasingly set against itself by commercialism and competitiveness.
Dead Pets: Satire and Sentiment in British Elegies and Epitaphs for Animals
Authors: Tague Ingrid H.
Published: March 2008

With the rise of modern pet keeping in the eighteenth century came many published epitaphs and elegies honoring dead pets. Some of these works were simply literary games or satires; others served more serious agendas, allowing writers to speculate about the relationship between humans, God, and the natural world. Often the animal that was ostensibly the subject of an elegy or epitaph was incidental to the writer's purpose. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, such works were increasingly focused on an individual pet and a special emotional bond between human and animal. Changing attitudes toward nature, sensibility, and characteristics traditionally associated with femininity both encouraged and were encouraged by changing attitudes toward pets and pet keeping.
Strangeness, Violence, and the Establishment of Nationhood in Rousseau
Authors: Morgenstern Mira
Published: March 2008

This article examines Rousseau's Le Lévite d'Ephraïm as it relates to his understanding of the role of violence in nation-building. The apparent justification of violence in Rousseau's reading of this biblical tale points up the obvious contradictions to Rousseau's notion of the morally-justified polity in the Social Contract . In refracting this work through the rubric of strangeness, Rousseau reveals a nuanced approach to the relationship of the stranger to the polis, with multiple implications for our own comprehension of the place of "otherness" in modern democratic theory.
Oicoe-gatou: l'altérite linguistique chez Breydenbach et Léry
Authors: Usher Phillip John
Published: March 2008

Quelles traces écrites la parole de l'Autre laisse-t-elle dans les récits de voyage à l'époque pré-moderne? Peut-on prêter "ses" signes à une voix étrangère? Le présent article étudie comment Bernard von Breydenbach et Jean de Léry répondent à ces questions.
Loathsome Neighbors and Noble Savages: The monde inversé of Antoine de Montchrétien
Authors: Wells Charlotte Catherine
Published: March 2008

Antoine de Montchrétien" This essay examines how the French experience in Florida contributed to the monde inversé motif of Antoine de Montchrétien's Traicté de l'œconomie politique (1615). Montchrétien reversed expectations by treating American natives as neither barbarians nor innocents but as people with potential for greatness, suitable partners for the French in achieving a glorious future.
"Beaucoup plus barbares que les Sauvages mesmes": Cannibalism, Savagery, and Religious Alterity in Jean de Léry's Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil (1599-1600)
Authors: Juall Scott D
Published: March 2008

In the fourth edition of Histoire d'un voyage, Jean de Léry compares the extreme barbarity of a broad spectrum of peoples in America, Europe, and Asia Minor. He demonstrates that those in the Old World who wage war because of religious difference are more savage than even the New World's cannibals, who provide an exemplary approach to confronting alterity.
Nicolas de Nicolay's Navigations and the Domestic Politics of Travel Writing
Authors: Keller Marcus
Published: March 2008

In the Navigations, Nicolas de Nicolay deals as much with France after the outbreak of the civil war as with the Ottoman Empire. Through his portrayal of the Turks and other Mediterranean peoples, the traveler turned royal geographer advocates loyalty to the monarchy, religious moderation and tolerance, as well as national unity.
A Curious Case of Ethnographic Cleansing: The First French Interpretations of the Japanese, 1552-1555
Authors: Persels Jeff
Published: March 2008

This article compares the earliest "ethnographic" accounts of Japan printed in France: canon law professor Jean Macer's 1555 history of the Indies, which both replicates and expurgates Postel's heterodox 1552-1553 Merveilles du monde, which itself translates and interprets the first Jesuit reports sent to Rome by Francis Xavier.
An Uncommon Map for a Common World: Hajji Ahmed's Cordiform Map of 1559
Authors: Barthe Pascale
Published: March 2008

This article sheds light on Hajji Ahmed's cordiform map of 1559 by unveiling the literary, scientific, and artistic milieus, both Western and Eastern, in which it was created. It suggests a community of scholars who lived around the Mediterranean and exchanged ideas and knowledge while remaining aware of their own specificities, be they religious or cultural.
Monstrous Alterity in Early Modern Travel Accounts: Lessons from the Ambiguous Medieval Discourse on Humanness
Authors: Ramey Lynn Tarte
Published: March 2008

When early modern explorers encountered new peoples, medieval notions of difference, passed down through verbal and pictorial maps, shaped their perceptions. Pre-modern ideas of monstrous races and a vibrant medieval discourse on what constitutes a human paved the way for eventual questioning of the status of indigenous peoples.
God the Father or Mother Earth?: Nouvelle France in Two Quebec Novels of the 1980s
Authors: Rosenstreich Susan L
Published: March 2008

Jacques Poulin's Volkswagen Blues and Le Premier Jardin by Anne Hébert, two novels published in Quebec in the 1980s, assimilate the representation of Nouvelle France to the experience of family ties. The authors first focus attention on the matter of origins, then consider the issue of destiny, both of the individual and of Quebec.
Is Purgatory Burning?: Opposing Viewpoints on Travel to Purgatory in Pierre Viret's Alcumie du purgatoire
Authors: Hurtig Dolliann Margaret
Published: March 2008

The question of purgatory in Pierre Viret's Alcumie du purgatoire, with its terrestrial and otherworldly reference points and an itinerary followed while traveling to it, was hotly debated by Protestants and Catholics in sixteenth-century Vaud. Viret's dialogue highlights opposing perspectives on purgatory, resulting tensions between the reformers' hope for converts, and an abiding Catholic resistance to conversion.
Challenges in the History of Childhood
Authors: Stearns Peter N.
Published: March 2008

The distinguished pioneer of the history of childhood and emotions, Peter Stearns, outlines a number of tasks and problems that await ambitious historians of children. One is familiar to practitioners in the field: creatively devising ways into the experience and imaginations of children who notoriously do not speak for themselves or leave records. This lack has left important gaps particularly in our understanding of young children, who have remained comparatively obscure to historians, while adolescents do, sometimes, leave traces of themselves, and parents and experts have traditionally left observations of the very young. Other significant tasks for historians include paying attention to class differences in analyses and making "a real commitment to comparison" as a historical method frequently lacking so far in much of the history of childhood.-M.S.
Age as a Category of Historical Analysis: History, Agency, and Narratives of Childhood
Authors: Maynes Mary Jo
Published: March 2008

Mary Jo Maynes's work asks us to reconceptualize and broaden our notion of children's agency. Maynes sees this problem as analogous to that of learning to recognize the agency of women which is disguised by the everydayness of their activities and by prevailing views that historical change is a result of the public actions of powerful individuals. She concludes, "The effort to assess the place of girls in history brings us to question the very notion of historical agency itself." She goes on to show how life stories, particularly retrospective accounts of childhood, can offer new insights into both the agency of the young and the historical significance of childhood.-M.S.
Hidden in Plain View: The History of Children (and Childhood) in the Twenty-First Century
Authors: Hawes Joseph M. , Hiner N. Ray
Published: March 2008

Joseph Hawes and Ray Hiner remind us that it is the unusual methodological difficulties of the field that have made it so hard to establish (and to initiate, for example, its own journal) while other historical areas of inquiry, born at more or less the same time, like African American history and women's history came into their own much earlier. The authors caution, however, that early flourishing can generate conservatism, and they challenge historians to keep their focus on children, not be led back to the study of adults, as some studying African Americans have moved to whiteness and the study of women has led some to study masculinity. Hawes and Hiner express optimism that the wide interdisciplinarity, global reach, and the diversity of those who study children and childhood will keep its focus on children, where it belongs.—M.S.
Reflections on Age as a Category of Historical Analysis
Authors: Mintz Steven
Published: March 2008

Steven Mintz lays out some of the complex ways age functions, both to describe expected processes of maturation and to allot legal statuses and categories of responsibility. Like other scholars, he likens the category of age to that of gender as a way to organize power, but points out that age has less definitional power than gender and has undergone more change over time as a prescriptive system. He sees age, paradoxically, as gaining power as a prescriptive system while gender loses it.-M.S.
Children's Involvement in War: Historical and Social Contexts
Authors: Honwana Alcinda
Published: March 2008

Alcinda Honwana, a scholar of international development, has just completed a book on the use of child soldiers in conflicts around the world. Her work focuses on Mozambique and Angola and points to aspects of neoliberalism and structural adjustment programs that have disrupted the abilities of families and communities to introduce children to and train them in the responsibilities of young adulthood. Societies with large numbers of children drawn into militias have the usual terrible post-conflict problems, but, in addition, have to reintegrate into useful life a potentially nihilistic generation of young people whose de facto rites of passage have been nothing short of diabolical.-M.S.
Through the Looking Glass: Age, Stages, and Historical Analysis
Authors: Paris Leslie
Published: March 2008

Leslie Paris's essay delineates the way the experience of age, particularly childhood and adolescence shifts shape, reaches forward into the future and dips back into time past. Even as experts slice age into smaller and smaller cohorts trying to establish minute verities, it eludes capture. Urging historians of childhood on, she argues that we will have achieved an important goal, "Once it is no longer possible to write history without greater awareness of age."-MS
Treading A Different Path?: Thoughts on Childhood Studies in Chinese History
Authors: Hsiung Ping-Chen
Published: March 2008

The author of A Tender Voyage , a study of childhood in Chinese history, Ping-chen Hsiung has surveyed the initial achievements of childhood studies in China and explains how a new emphasis on cultural history and the new importance of tracking human development has made childhood an inviting field for "creativity and ambition." In her provocative narrative of recent Chinese intellectual developments, she challenges scholars of childhood to "both enhance and shake up" history and childhood studies by questioning very basic assumptions such as human development being inevitably linear and social change as based in modern notions of time. Her profoundly destabilizing questions lay the groundwork for her own call for historians to shake up not only childhood studies but also, potentially, all studies.-M.S.
Seeking Asylum Alone: Unaccompanied and Separated Children and Refugee Protection in the U.S.
Authors: Bhabha Jacqueline , Schmidt Susan
Published: March 2008

Among the scholars working on problems of today's children is Jacqueline Bhabha, an expert in international law, migration, and children's rights, who, with Susan Schmidt, has just completed a study comparing the (often harrowing) experiences in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, of children who, increasingly, find themselves applying for asylum alone. This study has growing significance in the post 9/11 world as developed countries erect higher and higher barriers in the way of asylum seekers and as asylum seekers increasingly include children traveling on their own.-M.S.
How Latin America's History of Childhood Came of Age
Authors: Premo Bianca
Published: March 2008

Bianca Premo introduces readers in her complex, challenging essay to the field of childhood studies that emerged officially in Latin America in the 1990s. But, reiterating the theme of Joseph Hawes's "Hidden in Plain Sight," Premo lays out the substantially longer history of the field as scholars of family history, of slavery, of illegitimacy, and of gender have been actually tracking childhood and children for many decades. Premo delineates the interactions among these disciplines while also indicating some of the distinguishing characteristics of Latin American childhood. She introduces notions of "circulating" childhoods passed in a variety of institutions and contexts rather than within one family, and of children adjusting to the economic pressures of globalization by multiplying the meanings of family and in the process, gaining more mothers.-M.S.
Age And Authority: Adult-Child Relations During the Twentieth Century in the United States
Authors: Lassonde Stephen
Published: March 2008

Lassonde, using his own meticulous research on the twentieth century Catholic Church and the Little League, sketches the way changes in these institutions inform us about shifts in attitudes toward authority in the larger culture. In addition to the essay's particular insights, it also offers a model of how the study of youth can contribute to intellectual and social history altogether.-M.S.
On Leaving the Young Out of History
Authors: Reynolds Pamela
Published: March 2008

Pamela Reynolds contributes a cautionary tale in which, in the context of post-conflict South Africa, she echoes other historians in this issue on the consequences of the continuing blindness to recognizing age as a category that deserves special scrutiny. She points out the losses to scholars, historians, and to societies themselves, of the failure to single out children and youth in the larger effort peacefully to reintegrate a war torn country. This is particularly tragic in South Africa, where the greatest resistance to apartheid came from the young who, consequently, paid the greatest price, but whose sacrifices and suffering may never be adequately recognized, studied, or understood.—M.S.
National Citizenship and Early Policies Shaping 'The Century of the Child' in Sweden and the United States
Authors: Lindenmeyer Kriste , Sandin Bengt
Published: March 2008

Kriste Lindenmeyer and Bengt Sandin have employed fruitfully a comparative approach to examine Progressive era American and Swedish ideals for children. They found that while both began with similar enthusiasm for protecting childhood and providing all children with education and health care, the actual policies of neither country wound up delivering on the promise of "the century of the child." As they write, in both countries "adult priorities overwhelmed public policies." Like the recent UNICEF report on the conditions of global childhood, this essay reminds us that while the virtues of western-style childhood have been assumed and, indeed, have been the model against which historians traditionally have measured other childhoods, these assumptions need rethinking, both as to the relative value of other cultural constructions of childhood as well as to the belief that western childhood has actually delivered on its promises.-M.S.
Christian and Wendy
Authors: Ewald Wendy
Published: March 2008

Photographer Wendy Ewald made arresting photographs of child refugees who had arrived in the U.K. including this haunting boy fleeing violence from the Democratic Republic of Congo. She also interviewed them about their experiences and the precious objects they managed to bring with them. She called the exhibit "Towards the Promised Land." She writes of this project:
The World is at Our Door: Why Historians of Children and Childhood Should Open Up 1
Authors: Fass Paula
Published: March 2008

Paula Fass's inspiring opening essay, "The World Is at Our Door," invites readers to appreciate the rich array of new fields that an expanded vision of the history of childhood encompasses. Her comprehensive overview of scholars around the world includes disciplines that once seemed remote from the concerns of historians like neurobiology, anthropology, and economics. Fass challenges us look to phenomena like migration and its far-reaching consequences, globalized youth culture shaped by the electronic revolution and a world economy, and diverse models of modernization to grasp the possibilities of a truly global study of children and childhood.—M.S.
Choosing to Be a Subject: Loyalist Women in the Revolutionary Atlantic World
Authors: Chambers Sarah C. , Norling Lisa
Published: March 2008

Most scholarship on republican citizenship has emphasized the domestication of women and their exclusion from politics in the wake of the Atlantic revolutions, but attention to such loyalist women as Kezia Coffin in Massachusetts and María Antonia Bolívar in Venezuela reveals the ongoing viability of female agency in several arenas. This comparative study argues that, in choosing to retain their colonial identity within European empires, loyalist women in the Americas implicitly rejected the rising republican emphasis on the separation of public and private spheres. Coffin and Bolívar were motivated in defense of family position rather than individual political partisanship, but neither one would have identified herself primarily as wife or mother. Rather, they saw themselves as positioned in multiple ways within their kin networks and larger imperial communities, and this more supple and intersectional identity allowed their strategic deployment of power within overlapping economic and political fields.
"Researching Around Our Subjects": Excavating Radical Women
Authors: Katz Sherry J.
Published: March 2008

Excavating left-wing women is vital to our understanding of women's political diversity and the radicalism that has often been foundational to feminism. In Progressive Era California, socialist-feminists made important contributions to social reform, including women's enfranchisement, the construction of the early welfare state, and the gendered integration of partisan politics. But because few radical women left archival materials, researching them has proved difficult. This article details a method of "researching around our subjects" I developed in order to reconstruct and interpret their activism. This methodology is certainly not unique; in fact, it may characterize the process by which much of the research on little-known or "marginalized" women must, by necessity, proceed. For me, this process involved mining the small number of manuscript collections and oral histories of my subjects, and then working outward in concentric circles of related sources. Integrating these layers of materials enabled me to piece together the fabric of early-twentieth-century socialist-feminism. Yet these fragmented sources provided few clues regarding their personal lives (and the relationship between personal and political). Still, the "researching around" methodology is indispensable to the recovery of marginalized political voices.
Krishnobhabini Das's Englande Bangamohila : An Archive of Early Thoughts on Bengali Women's Nationalism and Feminism
Authors: Chaudhuri Nupur
Published: March 2008

In 1864, Krishnobhabini Das was born in a zamindar (landlord) family in a village of southern Bengal. She was a self-taught woman. In 1882, she went to London with her husband. In London, while her husband taught India-bound British civilians Indian history and culture, she spent most of her time in the British Library. In 1885, she published her travel narrative, Englande Bangamohila (A Bengali Lady in England) , in Bengali. While on the surface the book was a travel narrative, in reality this book emphasized a spirit of nationalism and feminism to middle-class Bengali female and male readers. In this article, I have analyzed Krishnobhabini Das's concept of nationalism and feminism based on the contents of her travel narrative, her sketchy biography, and some of her poems. These writings have collectively become a corpus to construct Krishnobhabini's home life, which sheds light on the condition of the majority of nineteenth-century Bengali women irrespective of their class backgrounds. Thus her biography and her writings, especially her travel narrative, serve as an archive for nineteenth-century Bengali women. Her experiences as a woman made her sensitive to the Indian societal restrictions as well as to the colonial support of the Indian patriarchy. Her home life as well as social customs made her aware of her double subjugation: oppressed as a woman and oppressed as a Bengali/Indian woman in a colonial context.
Engendering the Black Freedom Struggle: Revolutionary Black Womanhood and the Black Panther Party in the Bay Area, California
Authors: Spencer Robyn Ceanne
Published: March 2008

This article explores how black women who joined the Black Panther Party, one of the leading Black Power organizations in the 1960s and 70s, were empowered to challenge racism and sexism in society, in the Panthers, and in themselves. Using oral history and archival sources, it examines such issues as formal and informal leadership, state political repression, gendered guerilla imagery, and debates around child rearing and birth control to reveal how these women were able to shape the Panthers' organizational evolution, even as they struggled against misogyny. This article contributes to historical understanding of the Black Power movement from the bottom up.
Finding Fatima, a Slave Woman of Early Modern Spain
Authors: Perry Mary Elizabeth
Published: March 2008

The Inquisition case of a Muslim slave woman in sixteenth-century Spain who was named both "Fatima" and "Ana" challenges assumptions that historians must leave in silent obscurity disenfranchised people for whom we have very few and very problematic sources. This essay presents a three-part methodological strategy for analyzing the single document available about this woman: contextualizing it with secondary and primary sources specific to her life; reading the document "against the grain"; and analyzing it with insights from anthropology, politics, and cultural and literary criticism. Although a cleric reported that Fatima/Ana had converted to Christianity in a hospital while ill with the plague, she denied after her recovery that she had been baptized and insisted that she was and would continue to be a Muslim. If she had in fact converted while in the hospital, she argued, it could only have been because she was "crazy and without sanity and without judgment." Her case illustrates the complexities of identity and the vulnerabilities of minority slave women, yet it also demonstrates that disenfranchised people develop strategies to empower themselves and challenge official power.
Women in the Documents: Thoughts on Uncovering the Personal, Political, and Professional
Authors: Taylor Ula
Published: March 2008

African American women have been placed on the periphery of most historical documents. In fact, the material traces holding the clues to their experiences are limited, heavily tainted, or virtually nonexistent. Given these circumstances, locating African American women's individual and collective identities is difficult and thus requires intensive and critical work in archival sources. It is usually under the most challenging archival conditions, however, that one must call most creatively and rigorously upon historical methods and theoretical ideas. This essay details my personal archival encounters as well as efforts to follow a trail of documents. Evaluating the claims of an alleged experience as well as theorizing from these same documents is an effort not only to recover voices but also to disrupt those canonical discourses that have too often rendered African American women invisible.
"A Mob of Women" Confront Post-Colonial Republican Politics: How Class, Race, and Partisan Ideology Affected Gendered Political Space in Nineteenth-Century Southwestern Colombia
Authors: Sanders James E.
Published: March 2008

This essay explores why some groups of women in nineteenth-century Colombia were able to engage in public, political action but others were not. Elite conservative women (mostly white) and popular liberal women (mostly black and mulatta) found ways to participate publicly in republican politics, but elite liberal women (mostly white) and some popular conservative women (mostly Indian) were largely absent from the public sphere. I argue that colonial gender roles, elite and popular visions of citizenship, the contest between the Liberal and Conservative Parties, the structure of indigenous communities, and popular liberal women's access to independent economic resources all helped shape women's abilities to publicly practice republican politics. Instead of asserting that the rise of republicanism in nineteenth-century Latin America reduced women's political space, I propose that race, class, and partisan ideologies acted in complex and locally determined ways to both create male political subjects and open or close possibilities for women to forge political discourses and practices for themselves.