Rethinking Twentieth‐Century Guadalajara

This paper discusses the impact of the conference ‘Las Olvidadas: Gender and Women's History in Post‐Revolutionary Mexico’ that took place at Yale University in May 2001, into my own work on women's political mobilisations. It points out from where I departed and how it changed my perspective from women's history to gender history by focusing on women workers in the tortilla industry, a union cacicazgo (political bossism), civic culture, narratives, cultural memory and female political trajectories after the granting of women's suffrage in 1953 in Jalisco.     

Beyond the Washington Consensus? Asia and Latin America in search of more autonomous development

International economic power (the ability to shape rules of global economic conduct) needs to be understood in terms of the interactions between rule‐makers and rule‐takers in the global economy. Attempts to reshape development paradigms through interventions during financial crisis have been highly significant for the domestic political economy of the developing world. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the primary question was how much countries would liberalize in response to financial crisis. Reactions to the crises of the late 1990s in Asia and Latin America were more varied. This article explores domestic political responses to crises in both regions in the 1980s and late 1990s. It argues that countries are finding it increasingly difficult to trump domestic political pressure for change with arguments about technocratic necessity. Popular pressure is pushing governments into new experiments in economic nationalism, not a radical rejection of global economic integration, but a reshaping of relationships in an attempt to secure national interests and, in some cases, to devote more resources to welfare. Experiments to date are modest, but could presage more significant change in the future.     

EXCEPTIONAL HISTORY? THE ORIGINS OF HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE UNITED STATES1

This essay examines how and why historiography—defined to mean the study of the history of historical writing—first emerged as a legitimate subject of historical inquiry in the United States during the period from 1890 to the 1930s by focusing on the practice of historiography by three of the most influential American historiographers whose work spans this period: J. Franklin Jameson, John Spencer Bassett, and Harry Elmer Barnes. Whereas the development of historiography as a field of study signified a recognition that historians and historical writing are themselves products of the historical process, American historiographers in this period at the same time used historiography to further a scientific ideal of objectivity that was premised on the belief in the ability of historians to separate themselves from that process. Modern scholars (notably, Peter Novick) have attributed to scientific historians like Jameson and Bassett a simplistic and naive positivism; but the ability of these historiographers to recognize the subjective character of historical writing and yet affirm a belief in objectivity reveals that their understanding of historical truth was more complex than modern scholars have acknowledged. In turn, by questioning the belief that the historical profession was originally founded on a naïve faith in the ideal of objective truth, I demonstrate that New Historians like Barnes were more similar to their predecessors, the scientific historians, than they (or later scholars) acknowledged. Thus, rather than portraying the shift from scientific history to the New History as a linear trajectory of development from objectivity to a more relativist viewpoint, I argue that New Historians like Barnes at once expressed a greater recognition than his scientific predecessors of how historical writing was the product of its context, while still insisting on his commitment to an ideal of objectivity that divorced the historian from that context.     

Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) applied to ancient pottery

A comparative study of ancient pottery has been carried out, which utilized X‐ray diffraction, optics and scanning and transmission electron microscopy (SEM and TEM). Samples came from three prehistoric sites in northern Spain (La Rioja). Transmission electron microscope techniques, which use intact ion‐milled samples, allow minerals and glass to be imaged in situ, providing data on textures, crystal structures and composition. TEM provided detailed characterization of both source‐characteristic raw materials and products of the firing process, and revealed the range of intermediate phases, most of which had sizes beyond that of resolution by SEM. More importantly, TEM provided definition of the reaction processes, from starting materials through glass and new crystalline phases, providing data on both temperature and duration of firing.