A representative issue of The American Historical Review (December, 2023). There is another 300 pages of pedagogical essays, interviews, and roughly 3-page book reviews. I probably use the book reviews far more than anything else (though the author of that El Salvador article is a friend of mine and I'm familiar with the work there in a small way...I'd probably read that since I study the region--that said I wouldn't likely go looking for it). Latin America is my main focus so The Hispanic American Historical Review is my go-to but even there, my teaching, committee, and coordinating curriculum demands are such that these days I can only dream about research and writing. Needless to say, I'm not at an R-1 nor have I ever been. Teaching has always been the main criteria by which I am judged. In fact, that is why the book reviews are so important to someone like me...who has the time to read anything but bad student writing? (I know what somebody out there is thinking...well then why do you spend so much time on a message board? That's a good question for which I don't have a perfectly good justification) I leave this here to illustrate what is going on "in the field."
Debra Blumenthal
The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 4, December 2023, Pages 1558–1586,
https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad381
Expanding the discussion highlighting the role of slavery in the production of medical knowledge beyond the much more extensively studied Atlantic world and the nineteenth-century US South, this article explores the exploitation of enslaved women’s bodies as clinical subjects in fifteenth-century Iberia. Menstrual disorders figured prominently among “hidden defects” cited in slave warranty suits filed by disgruntled buyers across the late medieval Mediterranean world. Reflective of their heightened interest in female physiology during this period, university-trained male physicians were the expert witnesses most frequently called on to resolve disputes concerning what an enslaved woman’s lack of menses meant. Through a close analysis of “expert” testimony in seven lawsuits filed before the court of the Justicia Civil in Valencia in the 1440s, the slave market emerges as a site offering unparalleled opportunities for physicians to directly touch and probe female genitalia. Insofar as they could be poked and prodded with relative impunity, the bodies of enslaved women bought and sold in late medieval Mediterranean markets were instrumental to the expansion of learned gynecological knowledge.
Heather Vrana
The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 4, December 2023, Pages 1587–1617,
https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad377
One concern for Salvadoran and other Latin American public health researchers across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the purported link between goiter (
bocio) and cretinism (
cretinismo). Goiter is empirical medical condition that is inseparable from scenes of social and political inequality, neocolonialism, development, and war, however effectively the tools that measured it often obfuscated these factors. This article draws on more than a century of goiter research and representation in popular culture to argue that goiter research was part of broader health discourse that focused on poor and rural women and girls in an attempt to improve the productive and reproductive potential of El Salvador. It discusses how goiter research positioned El Salvador as a site of knowledge production for global health. It also proposes that goiter is best understood as a disability and uses insights from critical disability studies to understand how certain groups of people were constructed as problem populations. Over time, understandings of goiter shifted and new explanations came to the fore, but the lingering association of goiter with inheritable disability proved difficult to shake.
Beeta Baghoolizadeh
The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 4, December 2023, Pages 1618–1642,
https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad383
From the 1960s onwards, many Iranians closely followed Black American protests during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the United States. This period proved pivotal for Iranian understandings of race, where intellectuals, revolutionaries, and those in media would use US-centric histories of enslavement, racism, and Black Americans to erase nineteenth-century histories of enslavement and racism in Iran, tacitly displacing the existence of Black Iranians across the national landscape. Black American Muslims, particularly Malcolm X, emerged as the ideal form of Blackness. After the 1979 revolution, non-Black Iranians and the Iranian government would continue this focus on US-based racism through an official narrative that repeatedly defined racism as a US-only problem, ultimately cementing the erasures around histories of enslavement and Black Iranians that began with abolition in 1929. Through an analysis of speeches, memoirs, poetry, newspaper articles, photography, and other illustrated media, this article weaves together vignettes to demonstrate how the pervasiveness of racial hierarchies fashioned around US histories came to shift an Iranian vocabulary and conceptualization of race. This article traces the changes in racial discourse during the 1960s and 1970s, the 1979 revolution, and the Iran-Iraq War from an Iranian perspective.
Destin Jenkins
The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 4, December 2023, Pages 1643–1669,
https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad480
This article uncovers the financial knowledge and bond market campaigns of the paradigmatic non-violent revolution of the twentieth century—the civil rights movement. It builds on an interpretation made by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) during the early 1960s: segregation was a national problem because it was financed through a network of bankers across the country who specialized in the business of debt; certified by prominent bond attorneys in New York City, Chicago, and elsewhere; and because investors from around the country collected tax-exempt interest payments from indebted southern segregated municipalities.
By weaving the internal memos, protest ephemera, and legal strategies of civil rights activists together with the credit assessments, scheduled bond offerings, and perspectives of financiers, this article reconstructs the attempts to politicize bond market transactions and efforts to place the economic certainty of segregation in doubt. In so doing, it offers a fresh perspective on the so-called classic phase of the civil rights movement (1954–1965). More generally, it raises powerful questions about the dilemmas of investment-focused campaigns, and how finance capital compounds the difficulties of organizing against authoritarian regimes.
Paul Bjerk
The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 4, December 2023, Pages 1670–1693,
https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad372
Development as Rebellion, the massive biographical study of Julius K. Nyerere, written by three leading Tanzanian scholars and published in 2020 by the august Dar es Salaam imprint Mkuki na Nyota, illustrates how authors and audience are entangled in discursive practice. Jacques Derrida’s postmodern concept of iterability suggests that any message, let alone a nationalist biography, never exists in a stable univocal state, but that its meaning takes form, continually mutating, in an interactive social context between author and audience. It is not merely that the authors address an audience imprinted with the intellectual traditions known as the “Dar es Salaam School” of the University of Dar es Salaam; they engage not just the concerns of that audience, of which they are themselves members, but their priorities and categories of thought. This essay offers a review of
Development as Rebellion as evidence for a theoretical argument about how an audience shapes the composition of a piece of writing, and how this helps us address the ongoing debate about the way scholarly authority in African studies tends to reside outside Africa. Addressing this circumstance must begin counterintuitively with questions about the audience of Africanist scholarship rather than its authors.
