History

Ecosystems Under Sail: Specimen Transport in the Eighteenth-Century French and British Atlantics

Christopher M. Parsons et al. — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 14:13:16 PDT

The ocean was frequently as hostile an environment for plants and animals as it was for humankind in the eighteenth century. Existing methods of preserving the plants, fish, birds, and land animals that provided the raw materials for European science increasingly proved insufficient for the often long voyages that brought them from colonial and indigenous collectors; specimens arrived dead when they were needed alive, rotten and damaged when they were needed whole, and they frequently suffered as they encountered negligent and uninterested sailors, and rats and other shipboard pests that showed too much interest. This paper examines strategies of specimen transport adopted by French and British naturalists in the Atlantic world during the first half of the eighteenth century, arguing for the importance of maritime spaces that have often been overlooked in histories of the expanding reach of European science. Atlantic networks of specimen transport were simultaneously distinctly national and endlessly entangled. Efforts to discipline maritime social environments diverged along distinctly national lines, influenced by larger patterns of scientific sociability in both Britain and France. At the same time, however, naturalists drew on a cadre of common practices when they packed and preserved specimens for transport. The study of specimen transport demonstrates the geographic expanse of the centripetal and centrifugal tendencies at work more generally in eighteenth-century science; these forces simultaneously strengthened national scientific cultures and supported a cosmopolitan network of naturalists who communicated specimens and the methods for making them throughout Europe and the wider world.

Review of Kathryn E. Holland Braund and Charlotte M. Porter, Fields of Vision: Essays on the Travels of WIlliam Bartram

Kate S. Murphy — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 14:45:40 PST

Imperialism and the Dilemma of Slavery in Eastern Arabia and the Gulf, 1873-1939

Matthew S. Hopper — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:44:31 PST

Parler en son nom? Comprendre les témoignages d'esclaves africains originaires de l'océan Indien (1850-1930)

Edward A. Alpers et al. — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:44:25 PST

Prodigies and Portents: Providentialism in the Eighteenth- Century Chesapeake

Kathleen S. Murphy — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 10:48:15 PDT

Câu chuyện trẻ lai ở Đông Duong thuộc địa

Christina Firpo — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 14:39:10 PDT

Judge, Jury, Magistrate and Soldier: Rethinking Law and Authority in Late Eighteenth-Century Ireland

Kathleen S. Murphy — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 11:39:30 PDT

NOTE: At the time of publication, the author Kathleen S. Murphy was not yet affiliated with Cal Poly.

In Steele's Footsteps: Review of Nancy L. Rhoden, ed. English Atlantics Revisited

Kate S. Murphy — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 11:39:26 PDT

The history of Atlantic science: Collective reflections from the 2009 Harvard seminar on Atlantic history

Marcelo Aranda et al. — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 11:39:23 PDT

Translating the vernacular: Indigenous and African knowledge in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic

Kathleen S. Murphy — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 11:39:19 PDT

Encounters between diverse peoples and knowledges were one of the defining features of the early modern Atlantic world. This article examines some of the implications of these encounters by focusing on the place of indigenous and African knowledge in eighteenth-century natural histories of British plantation societies (from the Chesapeake to the Caribbean). It builds on recent scholarship to argue that while colonials acknowledged the authority of their black and indigenous informants as experts about American nature, they represented such expertise as merely the raw materials out of which they fashioned new natural knowledge. Naturalists credited their informants not as individual authors, but as members of groups whose collective experiences and observations gave them unique understanding of New World nature. Colonial naturalists appropriated such expertise while simultaneously asserting that it represented mere know-how, rather than genuine knowledge. Colonials suggested that their own ways of knowing were necessary in order to turn the collective know-how of enslaved and free Africans and Amerindians into stable, universal knowledge suitable for enlightened European audiences. By translating vernacular knowledge into a universal key, colonials suggested that they became authors of new matters of fact about American nature.

"Hyping the Text": Hypertext, Postmodernism, and the Historian

George Cotkin — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 13:41:03 PDT

Structures of desire: Postanarchist kink in the speculative fiction of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany

Lewis Call — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 12:32:24 PDT

"Sounds Like Kinky Business to Me": Subtextual and Textual Representations of Erotic Power in the Buffyverse

Lewis Call — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 13:05:12 PDT

President Ho Speaks to the Children: Thieu Sinh Magazine and the New Child in 1945 Revolutionary Vietnam

Christina Elizabeth Firpo — Fri, 27 May 2011 14:08:31 PDT

The history of the immediate aftermath of the declaration of independence in Vietnam on September 2, 1945 awaits a socio-cultural analysis. Historiography of this period is saturated with military and political analyses. But how much do we really know about its social programs and cultural history? This paper examines the socio-cultural history of the child during the revolution. In the midst of forming a new government, unifying the anti-colonial movement, and fighting the return of the French colonial government, President Hồ Chí Minh called on the youth to liberate southern Vietnam.¹ How did the government prepare the children for wartime and what was the child’s place in revolutionary society?

I will use the Thiếu Sinh children’s magazine, which was state-sponsored, to explore the revolutionary’s government cultural imaginings of the child’s place in society. From its perspective, the child was neither wholly passive nor a subordinate child solider. The child was expected to be an active member of society, functioning as a kind of social reserve for the future of independent Vietnam. Children were expected to devote their physical and intellectual education to the betterment of revolutionary Vietnam. In essence, from the point of view of the magazine, children did not exist so much as present members of society as prospective contributors to the collective future of revolutionary society.

Hierarchies of Race and Gender in the French Colonial Empire, 1914–1946

Jennifer Anne Boittin et al. — Fri, 27 May 2011 14:08:29 PDT

This article looks at French Indochina, metropolitan France, and French West Africa from 1914 through 1946 to illustrate specific ways in which French colonial authority operated across the French empire. We look at how colonized people challenged the complex formal and informal hierarchies of race, class, and gender that French administrators and colonizers sought to impose upon them. We argue that both the French imperial prerogatives and colonized peoples' responses to them are revealed through directly comparing and contrasting various locales across the empire. Our case studies explore interracial families and single white women seeking compensation from the French in Indochina, black men de ning their masculinity, and Africans debating women's suffrage rights.

Shades of Whiteness: Petits-Blancs and the Politics of Military Allocations Distribution in World War I Colonial Cochinchina

Christina Firpo — Fri, 27 May 2011 14:08:27 PDT

During World War I male French citizens in Cochinchina whom the colonial government had drafted to fight in Europe left their families behind in the colony. Through a complicated subsidies process, the government offered financial assistance to families impoverished by the draftee’s departure and the concomitant loss of income. Far from being a monolithic category, the colony’s poor white applicants, also known as petits-blancs, received varying government subsidies, depending on their family configurations. This article argues that the military allocations council’s judgments correlate with the petits-blancs applicants’ relationships to indigenous people and their adherence to traditional gender roles. To guard white prestige, the colonial government effectively penalized petits-blancs applicants who deviated from behavior associated with whiteness.

The Photographer in the Beat-Hipster Idiom: Robert Frank's the Americans

George Cotkin — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 12:20:13 PDT

Respectful Appropriation

George Cotkin — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 15:07:27 PDT

No Exit?: Review of Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity and Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool

George Cotkin — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 15:07:23 PDT

Strikebreakers, Evictions and Violence: Industrial Conflict in the Hocking Valley, 1884-1885

George B. Cotkin — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 15:07:19 PDT