When is a Nation not a Nation? The Crisis of American Nationality in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Abstract. The United States of America is conspicuous by its absence from most studies of nations and nationalism. The reasons for this omission are essentially twofold: America is a ‘nation of immigrants’, and therefore clearly lacks the ethnic homogeneity that sustains many modern European nations; more importantly, the focus, the core of the American nation has, since the late-nineteenth century, become obscured as American society has continued to diversify and expand. In those studies which do examine the American case, an over-concentration on the colonial and revolutionary periods has led both scholars of nationalism and historians of the United States to miss the most crucial period in the development of the American nation, the early to mid-nineteenth century. Evidence is offered here that this period witnessed an identifiable process of ‘nation building’. In order to demonstrate this, the period 1854 through 1856 has been isolated for particular attention, since those years witnessed the emergence of a new political party, the Republicans, whose ideology and rhetoric were aggressively national, yet whose appeal was essentially sectional.     

Review article: San Vincenzo al Volturno. History rewritten?

Books reviewed in this article:
Richard Hodges, Light in the Dark Ages. The Rise and Fall of San Vincenzo al Volturno.
Richard Hodges (ed), San Vincenzo al Volturno 2: the 1980–1986 Excavations. Part 2.     

Genetic testing: When is information too much?

In this guest editorial, the author addresses some of the challenges DNA self‐analysis poses in anthropology.     

Review article: What’s new in early medieval burial archaeology?

Books reviewed in this article:
John Hines, Karen Høilund Nielsen and Frank Siegmund (eds), The Pace of Change. Studies in Early–Medieval Chronology.
Catherine E. Karkov, Kelley M. Wickham–Crowley and Bailey K. Young (eds), Spaces of the Living and the Dead: An Archaeological Dialogue.
Sam Lucy, The Early Anglo–Saxon Cemeteries of East Yorkshire. An Analysis and Reinterpretation.
Elizabeth O'Brien, Post–Roman Britain to Anglo–Saxon England: Burial Practices Reviewed.
Nick Stoodley, The Spindle and the Spear. A Critical Enquiry into the Construction and Meaning of Gender in the Early Anglo–Saxon Burial Rite.     

A shop is not a home: Nineteenth‐century American sweatshop discourse

The sweated labor, or sweating, system of clothing manufacturers, contractors, and subcontractors who exploited ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ workers was a lamentable fixture of antebellum America. A wide range of reformers called for abolition of the system. Yet it was not until the ‘discovery of poverty’ in the 1890s with its attendant campaigns for public hygiene and tenement house reform that the term ‘sweatshop’ arose to christen the oppressive labor site. This essay traces the ideological reasons for the shift in naming. It correlates the term's adoption with the East European and Italian ethnics who replaced earlier native‐born workers and in so doing analyzes the ideologies embedded in antebellum, Gilded Age, and Progressive‐era discursive practices.     

When is a museum a public museum? Considerations from the point of view of public finance

This article considers the scope and types of support given through the system of museum public finance in the USA as well as the attitudes to support this system reflects. This examination provides a deepened understanding of the significance of ties between museums and government that are mediated by dollars. The degree of directness through which government dollars are delivered to a museum tells us something important about the museum’s public status. But several other contextual factors also influence this status; money has dimensions of significance that can only be understood by looking at characteristics of the institutions, mechanisms, and systems through which it moves. In other words, money, in a policy system, does not express strictly numerate relations. The article concludes by pointing up ways that an acknowledgement of this multivalence of money can be valuable for developing nuanced theory about the relationships between cultural economics and cultural policy.     

Review article: The dangers of polemic: Is ritual still an interesting topic of historical study?

Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory.
Gerd Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter: Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde.
Frans Theuws and Janet L. Nelson (eds). Rituals of Power from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages.
Joëlle Rollo-Koster (ed), Medieval and Early Modern Rituals: Formalized Behavior in Europe, China and Japan.     

What is a Salafi Reformist?

Abstract

Tariq Ramadan is one of the most prominent and controversial Western Muslim political thinkers today. He has been called everything from a moderate liberal Muslim thinker to a radical Islamist in disguise. He calls himself a Salafi reformist. According to him, Salafi reformists read the sacred texts of Islam dynamically, using reason, and reject literalist readings. Yet Ramadan also calls Sayyid Qutb a Salafi reformist. The problem is that, by most accounts, Qutb is the quintessential radical Islamist. This raises the question of what Ramadan thinks actually makes someone a Salafi reformist, and what this can tell us about his political teaching. To answer this question, I put Ramadan and Qutb into conversation. I argue that, while Ramadan meets his own criteria for being a Salafi reformist, Qutb does not. I suggest some reasons why Ramadan may not share this view; his political theology tells a different story.     

What is a Territorial-Production Complex?

A territorial-production complex must satisfy three criteria: diversification of the economy, interrelations between its components, and territorial unity. The term should not be applied to industrial nodes or industrial centers because they do not satisfy all three conditions. Industrial nodes lack the necessary diversification and industrial centers are distinguished only by territorial unity.     

Review Article: Is there a French way of Explaining African Politics?

This article seeks to uncover the extent to which our ways of understanding contemporary Africa are influenced by our national (historical, cultural, political, intellectual) traditions through an examination of the influential French journal Politique Africaine , whose twentieth anniversary falls this year. In a wide-ranging review article that discusses in detail the 1999 issues of Politique Africaine but is informed by a consideration of the 'deep history' of that journal, the author argues that the French Africanist political scientists whose views appear in the journal are somewhat reluctant to open up to some of the new analysis of Africa available today.     

Descartes' visit to the town library, or how Augustinian is Descartes' neurophysiology?

Rene Descartes was early accused of taking his central philosophical proposition from St Augustine. Did he also take his central neurophysiological concept from the same source? This is the question which this paper sets out to answer. It is concluded that the foundational neurophysiology propounded in L'Homme does indeed show strong and interesting resemblences to Augustine's largely Erasistratean version. Descartes, however, working within the new paradigm of seventeenth-century physical science, introduced a new principle: whereas Augustine's neurophysiology is pervaded throughout by a vital factor, the pneuma, Descartes' theory involved only inanimate material forces. It is concluded, further, that in spite of the interesting similarities between Augustinian and Cartesian neurophysiology there is no evidence for any direct plagiarism. It seems more likely that Augustine's influence was filtered through the Galenical physiologists of Descartes' own time and of the preceding century.