October 2008 issue of History and Theory

Hello from History and Theory:
The October 2008 issue of History and Theory contains four really interesting articles and eight review essays. Consider Susan Crane's "Choosing Not to Look: Representation, Repatriation, and Holocaust Atrocity Photography": Crane asks, "have Holocaust atrocity photographs reached the limits of their usefulness as testimony?" and she answers-against conventional wisdom and practice-that not only have they done so, but that as a result they should be removed from public view or be what she calls "repatriated." The essay is so cogently argued and gracefully written that it will at least stimulate ideas that you may well not have thought of before, or it may actually convince you and lead you to act quite differently. In either case, it is very much worth reading (indeed, we've chosen it to be available at no cost for all those receiving this email. To download a free copy of it, click here: http://www.historyandtheory.org/freearticle.html)

But Crane's is not the only revelatory article in this issue. Anita Kasabova, in "Memory, Memorials, and Commemoration," presents what she calls a semantic account of the relation between the past and the present, and in the process shows the ways memory, memorials, and commemorations function in light of this relation. In this she offers an account at odds with the presentism of Eelco Runia and others who have presented their views on these subjects in our pages. The article is remarkably rich in the way it brings so many topics into focus and shows how they relate to one another.

Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen's "Making Sense of Conceptual Change" addresses a fundamental question in intellectual history: what is it about? Some historians, such as Arthur Lovejoy of the great chain of being fame, have claimed that intellectual history is about unit-ideas, but critics have countered that there are no such units that cut across historical epochs; they propose, instead, that it is linguistic entities that are the object of study, or they wonder whether the whole notion of intellectual history isn't a non-starter because there is nothing stable enough to count as the object of such a history. To these critics Kuukkanen responds that we should accept ideas and concepts as the basis for an intelligible history of thought-so his is a return in a way to Lovejoy-but that we have to be more sophisticated than Lovejoy about what this means. He proposes that concepts and ideas are comprised of a core and a margin, and that conceiving of them in this way solves a number of !
problems that Lovejoy's original formulation could not.

I bet most of you don't know what "Froude's disease" is. I didn't before I read Ian Hesketh's "Diagnosing Froude's Disease: Boundary Work and the Discipline of History in Late-Victorian Britain." Froude was one of the most popular historians in late nineteenth-century Britain, but he denied that history was a science, and claimed that it has more to do with art and drama. Needless to say, professional historians at the time didn't like this approach; indeed, E. A. Freeman warned the historical community that they "cannot welcome [Froude] as a partner in their labors, as a fellow-worker in the cause of historic truth," and diagnosed him as suffering from "an inborn and incurable twist" that resulted in "Froude's disease"-the inability to "make an accurate statement about any matter." Hesketh unpacks the construction of "Froude's disease," and exposes the disciplinary techniques at work in the professionalization of history, techniques that sought to exclude non-scientific mod!
es of thought such as that offered by Froude. The result is not just an elegant revisiting of an earlier time, but a clarifying reminder of the ways disciplinary boundaries are established and enforced.

Click here to read abstracts of the four articles I have just discussed:
http://www.historyandtheory.org/archives/oct08.html

The issue also includes these review essays:

Christopher Lloyd on William H. Sewell Jr., The Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation

Michael S. Roth on Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Volume 4

Jürgen Kocka on Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society

Richard H. King on Jerrold Siegel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century

William H. Krieger on Peter Kosso, Knowing the Past: Philosophical Issues of History and Archaeology

José Carlos Bermejo-Barrera on Karl Ameriks, Kant and the Historical Turn: Philosophy as Critical Interpretation

Lionel Gossman on Anthony Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe

Abdelmajid Hannoum on François Hartog, Régimes d'historicité: présentisme et expériences du temps

One would have to go some distance to find a list of more distinguished and insightful authors and reviewers than this!

You can, of course, read these reviews by going to our website and clicking on the appropriate links. Note that we are now including links from book review listings in the table of contents on our web pages directly to Amazon.com so that you can easily search inside the book under review and buy it if you wish.

To subscribe to the journal (which you can do entirely over the web with your credit card via Blackwell's secure server), click here:
http://www.historyandtheory.org/subscribe.html
(As a subscriber you also get access to the electronic version of the journal).

I hope you find this issue as thought-provoking as I do. I welcome any comments you have about it or other topics that are germane to the journal. You can contact me at: bfay@wesleyan.edu

Brian Fay
Executive Editor