Colton’s Cuba, Jamaica and Porto Rico, 1885. Map by Colton, G.W., J. De Cordova, C. Wise, F.A. Chapman. Courtesy of David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries. Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.
Dr. Adriana Chira, Assistant Professor of Atlantic World History, recently published a piece in Southern Spaces. The piece comes from Chira’s 2022 monograph Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba’s Plantations (Cambridge UP), which offers a new history of Black rural geography and popular legalism in nineteenth-century Cuba. Find out more about Patchwork Freedoms on Cambridge UP’s site and read the full Southern Spaces article: “Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba’s Plantations.”
Dr. Polly J. Price, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law, Professor of Global Health, and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently appeared on MSNBC’s The Mehdi Hasan Show to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic in historical context. Price is the author of Plagues in the Nation: How Epidemics Shaped America, just published in May of 2022 by Beacon Press. Watch the clip of Price in the embedded video below or on YouTube at “Why Wasn’t America More Prepared For Covid-19?“
Polly J. Price on the Mehdi Hasan Show, July 27, 2022.
“Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, across Latin America, expansive rural communities of African descent forged freedom from below in the shadows of highly exploitative extractive economies. Their efforts push us to reconsider established genealogies of the age of emancipation. Freedom through conditional manumission and enslaved people’s reliance on social networks to obtain it opened the door to custom inside first-instance district courts in such areas. Judges turned to vernacular understandings of rights and obligations as they clarified the ambiguous statuses of the conditionally freed for which written law offered few provisions. Through manumission and legal actions to defend freedom, peasants of African descent on the margins of the global economic system grounded their rights in state structures as local custom. Black freedom within such territories represents a mode of community governance that remains invisible if studied by focusing on mobility or nation building. Seen from a place such as Santiago de Cuba, the nineteenth century was not just a time when Africans and Afro-descendants pursued social inclusion through ideologies of national citizenship and diasporic connections. It was also a time of freedom through membership in local communities, which women and families were especially instrumental in forging.“
Emory History alum Dr. Claudia Kreklau published an article in the April issue of the journal German History. Titled “The Gender Anxiety of Otto von Bismarck, 1866–1898,” the piece is Kreklau’s fourth published article. Kreklau completed under Ph.D. in 2018 under the advisement of Dr. Brian Vick. She is Associate Lecturer at the University of St. Andrews. Read the abstract of the article below along with the full piece here.
“Building on critical re-examinations of the ‘Bismarck myth’ and scholarship on the fin de siècle crisis of identity in Europe, this article examines key vignettes in the political career of Otto von Bismarck during Prussia’s era of expansion and consolidation, c.1866–1898, through the lens of gender. It finds the legendary ‘Iron Chancellor’ experienced extreme gender-anxiety to the point of social dysphoria until the 1870s. Assigned feminine roles and lacking political decision-making power, Bismarck resorted to tantrums, tears, threats of self-harm and suicide, suffered mental breakdowns and enacted the kinds of ‘feminine’ intrigue of which he accused Europe’s royal women throughout his life. To stabilize their own identity in the early 1870s, he and his contemporaries weaponized misogyny to deflect accusations of femininity away from themselves and onto women at court. Bismarck claimed to have led negotiations in a masculine manner in the era of Europe’s colonial cabinet diplomacy. After his death, contemporaries studied the shape and measurements of Bismarck’s head to find an explanation for his alleged genius and marketed the statesman as an example of potent masculinity. Early hagiographic instrumentalizations of Bismarck should be read as part of a wider attempt to legitimize forms of white masculine rule and justify limited political participation in this period.”
Dr. Daniel LaChance, Associate Professor of History and Winship Distinguished Research Professor in History, recently published a new book with co-author Dr. Paul Kaplan, Professor of Criminal Justice in the School of Public Affairs at San Diego State University. Titled Crimesploitation: Crime, Punishment, and Pleasure on Reality Television and published by Stanford University Press, the monograph investigates the enduring appeal of ‘true crime’ media in American popular culture. Dr. Michelle Brown, Professor at the University of Tennessee, offered the following appraisal of Crimesploitation: “Kaplan and LaChance move us toward a critical reckoning with the exploitative forms of (un)freedom that media’s spectacle of crime and punishment have conjured. A powerful dose of thoughtful accountability, this volume points the way to getting truly ‘real’ about—and intervening in—the suffering that a culture of punishment has produced.” Read more about the monograph below as well as on the Stanford UP website.
“‘Due to the graphic nature of this program, viewer discretion is advised.’ Most of us have encountered this warning while watching television at some point. It is typically attached to a brand of reality crime TV that Paul Kaplan and Daniel LaChance call “crimesploitation”: spectacles designed to entertain mass audiences by exhibiting “real” criminal behavior and its consequences. This book examines their enduring popularity in American culture. Analyzing the structure and content of several popular crimesploitation shows, including Cops, Dog: The Bounty Hunter, and To Catch a Predator, as well as newer examples like Making a Murderer and Don’t F**K with Cats, Kaplan and LaChance highlight the troubling nature of the genre: though it presents itself as ethical and righteous, its entertainment value hinges upon suffering. Viewers can imagine themselves as deviant and ungovernable like the criminals in the show, thereby escaping a law-abiding lifestyle. Alternatively, they can identify with law enforcement officials, exercising violence, control, and “justice” on criminal others. Crimesploitation offers a sobering look at the depictions of criminals, policing, and punishment in modern America.”
Dr. Jia-Chen Fu, Associate Professor of Chinese and Affiliated Faculty in the History Department, recently published an article in Atlas Obscura. Titled “The Secret Maoist Chinese Operation to Conquer Malaria,” the piece recounts the discovery of the most powerful antimalarial drug available today by a young Chinese medical researcher named Tu Youyou in the 1960s-’70s. The breakthrough came during the Cultural Revolution in China and the Vietnam War, context within which Fu situates Youyou’s signal achievement. Read the full story here.
Dr. Carol Anderson recently contributed to a New York Times panel focused on the theme “Where Does American Democracy Go From Here?” The six panelists offer historical and contemporary perspectives on the state of democracy in the U.S., which has fallen in recent rankings that measure the vitality of democracies across the globe. Anderson is Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department. She is the author, most recently, of The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America(Bloomsbury Press, 2021). Read one of Anderson’s contributions to the panel below and find the full piece here.
“Anderson: What we’re seeing, I liken it to a land, sea and air attack. The land attack is on voting rights. That is one of the ways that you begin to undermine democracy. The sea attack are these attacks against teaching critical race theory and “divisive” topics, so you can erase people from American history and erase the role of various people in American history. And the air attack is the loosening of Texas and Tennessee both passed laws allowing for permitless carrying of firearms in 2021; the Georgia State Legislature passed a similar bill this year. This is a full-blown assault on American democracy that’s going after voting rights, that’s going after education and that is reinforcing political violence as an acceptable method of bringing about your political aims. That’s where we are, and that’s why this moment is so dangerous.“
Alumnus Dr. Julia López Fuentes has published an article in the Journal of Modern History, vol 94 Nr. 1 (March 2022), titled “‘A Forgetting for Everyone, by Everyone’? Spain’s Memory Laws and the Rise of the European Community of Memory, 1977–2007.” López Fuentes completed her PhD in 2020 under the advisement of Drs. Walter L. Adamson and Astrid M. Eckert and with a dissertation titled “Thinking Europe, Thinking Democracy: The Struggle for European Democracy in Spain, 1949-1986.” Read the Journal of Modern History article abstract below and find the full piece (limited access) here.
Historians and other scholars of memory have worked extensively on European memory politics, especially around transnational issues such as the Holocaust, as well as on Spanish memory politics, most recently in light of the exhumation of former dictator Francisco Franco. Yet there has been little scholarship to date on how nationally specific incidents, such as the Spanish Civil War and Franco regime, fit into wider trans-European narratives. This article reveals the entanglements between these local and supranational developments by examining the evolution of Spain’s memory laws and discourse, from the 1977 Amnesty Law that followed the end of the Franco regime to the 2007 Law of Historical Memory, in relation to contemporaneous European memorialization patterns. It argues that the shift from a discourse of forgetting in the Amnesty Law to one of commemoration in the Law of Historical Memory is a response to the rise of a European culture of memorialization rather than reflecting an evolution in Spain’s memory regime. By analyzing the development, text, and application of these laws, along with the political and cultural debates surrounding them in Spain and throughout Europe, this article reveals how the 2007 Spanish Law of Historical Memory, despite appearing to espouse European discourses of memorialization and amends-making, perpetuates a system of disremembering that predates most contemporary European memory politics. Ultimately, the article argues that the Law of Historical Memory suppresses the voices of victims of the Franco regime in order to bolster a narrative of Spanish national unity and European belonging.
My eternal thanks again to the amazing @Astrid_M_Eckert, who helped usher this piece from a passing thought during a discussion on the Historikerstreit in my first semester of grad school into an actual, published article! https://t.co/YEFFdCSHqq
Dr. Sharon T. Strocchia, Professor of History and Department Chair and her former honors student Ryan Kelly published a co-authored article titled “Picturing the Pox in Italian Popular Prints, 1550-1650” in the flagship British journal Renaissance Studies in March. The article drew on material from Kelly’s honors thesis, which received highest honors in May 2021. Read the article abstract below along with the full piece here.
“The disease commonly known as the ‘pox’ or the ‘French Disease’ ravaged the European continent following its initial appearance circa 1495. Its devastating physical effects and sensory assaults, ranging from stinking sores to baldness and collapsed noses, invited both a social and medical evaluation of what was quickly recognized to be a sexually transmitted disease. Despite the prevalence and visibility of the pox in sixteenth-century Europe, its visual language has not been studied in much depth. This essay examines how cheap narrative prints issued between 1550 and 1650 helped construct the iconography of pox and disseminate medical information about it in late Renaissance Italy. Focusing on a group of best-selling Venetian and Roman prints, the essay argues that multimedial picture stories combining text and image provided one of the many sources of vernacular information by which Italians learned to read the body. In recounting stories of diseased prostitutes and their clients in vivid detail, these prints expanded vernacular health literacy and provided a ready-made language of disease. The prints analysed here enjoyed enormous social reach as components of a new health-promoting, communicative object – the hand-held paper fan – whose popularity cemented visual and epistemic connections between pox and prostitution.“
