The State Legislature in American History: A Review Essay

Abstract

The author discusses a very rich resource for studying the Great Depression: the Censuses of Manufactures from 1929, 1931, 1933, and 1935. He highlights the strengths and weaknesses of this source in terms of the information available on the schedules and the quality of the data. In terms of information collected, these censuses compare favorably with the modern Census of Manufactures with some limitations. The author also draws on some published studies to argue that the records held at the National Archives are (in general) complete enumerations of the establishments existing at the time. He then conducts tests for the presence of measurement error and finds a limited role.     

Middle East History: a Review Essay

The Modern Middle East: a history; James L. Gelvin The Modern Middle East: a political history since the First World War; Mehren Kamrava     

Iraq and Hubris: Avoiding History a Review Essay

Book reviewed in this article: Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War: Michael Isiko. and David Corn Blind into Baghdad: America's War in Iraq: James Fallows Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq: Stephen Zinzer The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife;s CIA Identity: Joseph Wilson The Italian Letter: How the Bush Administration Used a Fake to Build the Case for War in Iraq: Peter Eisner and Knut Royce Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam: or, How Not to Learn From the Past: Lloyd C. Gardner, Marilyn B. Young, Eds.     

Navigating The Social Sciences: A Theory For The Meta–History Of Emotions

Books reviewed in this article:
William M. Reddy, The Navigation Of Feeling: A Framework For The History Of Emotions.     

Opening Our Eyes: History and the Social Sciences

Historians make practically no use of new intellectual tools from the social sciences that are revolutionizing fields such as law or political science, even though the tools lend themselves to the study of the past. True, they may not suit every historian, but why should we forsake methodological assistance that can broaden our perception of the past and help us decide what is important?     

When Natural met Social: A Review of Collaboration between the Natural and Social Sciences

Abstract

This paper investigates the opportunities for further collaboration between the natural and social sciences. From 81 systematically identified and reviewed papers published in scientific journals, it became clear that complex situations that depend on human behaviour as well as natural processes require natural–social science collaboration. The creation of a community of collaborative natural–social science research, that learns from and can contribute to best practice across the sciences, is advocated to support natural– social science collaboration. Across disciplines, it became clear that such a community should deal with (1) difference between paradigms in the current sciences; (2) creation of skills and competences of the involved scientists; (3) scarcity of institutions sympathetic to collaborative research; and (4) the internal organization of collaborative projects.     

Warfare,Imperialism, and the Making of Modern Chinese History: A Review Essay

This historiographic essay contends that warfare made and unmade the Qing dynasty between 1644 and 1911, and its study has helped to create the field of modern Chinese history during the past seventy years. It advances three principal claims. First, the literature on war, especially interstate conflict, can serve as a synecdoche for the development of the modern China field as a whole since the 1950s. The research interests of late Qing specialists have oscillated along an “external-internal-external” axis that corresponds with three distinct periods of intellectual inquiry, scholarly production, and generational dominance. Second, historians have reached inaccurate conclusions about the state capacity of the Qing Empire after 1840 through a crude analysis of the First Sino-Japanese War, a mistake they can rectify by adopting a longer-term perspective on the state-making process. Third, scholars have deftly traced the changing role of military power in modern Chinese politics but have also adopted the interpretive categories of wen and wu from literati discourse without sufficient critical reflection. In the future, researchers may seek to explore the intersection of warfare and the environment, technology, and ethnic identity, approaches that will continue to move the field in comparative, global, and Inner Asian directions.     

Religion and the Enlightenment: A Review Essay

Recent studies of the Enlightenment suggest that its relationto religion is far more complex than a simple process of increasingsecularization. The book by Sheehan shows, by examining translationsof the Bible into English and German in the Enlightenment, howreligion was reshaped, leading eventually to the dogma-freeChristianity proposed by Matthew Arnold. Israel's book arguesthat alongside the relatively cautious mainstream Enlightenmentthere was always a radical Enlightenment, heavily indebted toSpinoza, that was rationalist, atheist, and libertarian, andanticipated the dominant liberal values of the present day.Neither of these important studies, however, considers two areasthat remain under-researched: the popular Enlightenment (‘Volksaufklärung’),that is to say, the diffusion of Enlightenment thought amonguneducated people; and the Catholic Enlightenment which flourishedparticularly in Italy, Austria, and south Germany.     

American Historical Demography: A Review Essay

Abstract

American historians of modern art routinely assume that after World War II New York replaced Paris as the center of the western art world. An analysis of the illustrations in French textbooks shows that French art scholars disagree: they rate Jean Dubuffet as the most important painter of the era, ahead of Jackson Pollock, and they consider Yves Klein's anthropometries of 1960 as the greatest contribution of a single year, in front of Andy Warhol's innovations in Pop Art. Yet the French texts also show that the French artists' practices and conceptions of art paralleled those of the Americans. Thus, whereas French and American scholars disagree over the relative importance of their nations' artists, there is no disagreement that the most important art of the 1950s was produced by experimental seekers, and that of the 1960s by conceptual finders.     

Surveying Subjective Phenomena: A Review Essay

Abstract

The geographic perspective on human behavior emphasizes the notion of context. Context suggests that human behavior is partly determined by the place in which individuals and groups act, and in turn these actions re-create places. It follows that an element of history is the contextual setting of activity. Spatial statistics are introduced as a tool for modeling context in historical studies. Spatial dependence serves to operationalize the specificity of place and the diffusion of processes between places. Spatial heterogeneity serves to operationalize the idea that behavior is regionally specific rather than uniform across space. Both spatial dependence and spatial heterogeneity are included in spatial regression models. A spatial statistical analysis of the Nazi Party vote in Bavaria between 1928 and 1932 is adopted to illustrate the argument.