As a companion to our list of books published by non-tenure-track historians in 2021, here is a list of journal articles (and a few book chapters) published by the same sorts of scholars. Unlike the book list, however, this is not a list you should use to go purchase access to these articles. If you click on a link below, encounter a charge for access, and pay it, none of that money will go to the author. Scholars are not paid for journal articles, nor do they earn royalties. Some of the pieces are freely accessible, however, so click through to check. You can also contact the author directly; they may have a copy of their piece they are allowed to share.
Alex Aylward, “RA Fisher, eugenics, and the campaign for family allowances in interwar Britain.” The British Journal for the History of Science (2021): 1-21. Published online, ‘”First view”.
Ronald Aylmer Fisher (1890–1962) is today remembered as a giant of twentieth-century statistics, genetics and evolutionary theory. Alongside his influential scientific contributions, he was also, throughout the interwar years, a prominent figure within Britain’s eugenics movement. This essay provides a close examination of his eugenical ideas and activities, focusing particularly upon his energetic advocacy of family allowances, which he hoped would boost eugenic births within the more ‘desirable’ middle and upper classes. Fisher’s proposals, which were grounded in his distinctive explanation for the decay of civilizations throughout human history, enjoyed support from some influential figures in Britain’s Eugenics Society and beyond. The ultimate failure of his campaign, though, highlights tensions both between the eugenics and family allowances movements, and within the eugenics movement itself. I show how these social and political movements represented a crucial but heretofore overlooked context for the reception of Fisher’s evolutionary masterwork of 1930, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, with its notorious closing chapters on the causes and cures of national and racial decline.
Martino Dibeltulo Concu, “Tantrism, Modernity, History: On Lü Cheng’s Philological Method,” in Sino-Tibetan Buddhism across the Ages, ed. Ester Bianchi and Weirong Shen (Brill, 2021), 170–221.
Mandy L. Cooper, “Too Big to Fail? Families, Internal Improvement, and State Government in Antebellum North Carolina.” Journal of the Early Republic 41, no. 3 (Fall 2021): 349-372.
This article uses the development of the Raleigh and Gaston Rail Road in North Carolina as a case study to examine the relationship between elite family networks and the developing institutions of state government in the antebellum United States. The Cameron family of North Carolina and their involvement with the Raleigh and Gaston Rail Road offers a particularly dramatic example of the relationship between government and elites’ familial business and political networks. The men in the Cameron family network were all advocates in state government for internal improvements to advance the state’s economic prospects. Their advocacy, however, leveraged the states’ considerable economic resources to stabilize their own familial networks, which could not manage individual members’ problems with debt. In the process, these men implicated state government in the vagaries of their family’s economic fortunes. Because of these dynamics, corporations like the Raleigh and Gaston became, in essence, too big to fail. Moreover, like the Camerons, some elite families made government part of their family networks, just as blood relatives were. This move allowed them to see the interests of their vast family networks as something more than self-interested and self-serving: their families’ interests became the public good. Throughout the antebellum period, these practices became entrenched in the developing institutions of federal and state government, where they gained institutional purchase and legitimacy. This article argues that it was familial networks, not just individual men, who used and, ultimately, shaped government authority.
Paula R. Curtis, “An Entrepreneurial Aristocrat: Matsugi Hisanao and the Forging of Imperial Service in Late Medieval Japan,” Monumenta Nipponica 75, no. 2 (2020): 241-279.
This article examines how Matsugi Hisanao, a low-ranking courtier, reestablished imperial service relationships with artisanal metal caster organizations in the second half of the sixteenth century. Although the lives of lower nobility are seldom glimpsed in prevailing elite sources, reconstructing Hisanao’s activities through diaristic and documentary evidence uncovers a narrative of entrepreneurial savvy and expert knowledge of the inner workings of the imperial bureaucracy on the part of some of its least visible figures. Matsugi Hisanao took advantage of his access to court circles: he cultivated imperial privileges, invoked the support of high-ranking allies, and forged official records, ultimately launching a transregional network exchanging goods, funds, and counterfeit documents among courtiers, warriors, and metal casters. This article traces these strategic engagements to uncover a nuanced view of operations within the court and argues for the significance of the court’s lower strata for the subsistence of the imperial bureaucracy during the late medieval period.
Chris Dingwall, “The Political Economy of AfriCOBRA,” Archives of American Art 60, no. 2 (Fall 2021): 26-45.
Formed in Chicago in 1968, AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists) dedicated itself to producing art for Black people independent of white-controlled museums and markets. Examining business records from the Archives of American Art’s Jeff Donaldson Papers, this essay contributes to recent conversations about Black collectivity by exploring how AfriCOBRA navigated capitalism to sustain its revolutionary art practice. In doing so, I argue for the significance of AfriCOBRA as a political economy: a system for producing and distributing Black culture.
Donna Drucker, “Shaping the Erotic Body: Technology and Women’s Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century American Medicine,” in Histories of Sexology: Between Science and Politics, ed. Alain Giami and Sharman Levinson (Palgrave)
Bennett Gilbert and Natan Elgabsi, “An Existential Philosophy of History,” Revista de Teoria da História / Journal of Theory of History 24, no. 1 (2021): 40–57. (OA)
In this paper we delineate the conditions and features of what we call an existential philosophy of history in relation to customary trends in the field of the philosophy of history. We do this by circumscribing what a transgenerational temporality and what our entanglement in ethical relations with temporal others ask of us as existential and responsive selves and by explicating what attitude we need to have when trying to responsibly respond to other vulnerable beings in our historical world of life.
Sara Goek, “‘An Ireland over There’? Dance Halls and Traditional Music in the Irish Diaspora, 1945-1970,” in Scattered Musics, ed. David Henderson & Martha Chew Sánchez (University Press of Mississippi)
Mia Martin Hobbs, “(Un)Naming: Ethics, Agency, and Anonymity in Oral Histories with Veteran-Narrators,” The Oral History Review 48, no. 1, (2021): 59-82.
This article examines the ethics of anonymizing interviewees who asked to be named in oral history research. Drawing on my experiences administering a large oral history project with Vietnam veterans, I examine four stages of oral history practice—recruitment, the interview, analysis and interpretation, and publication—and argue that (un)naming interviewees fundamentally changes the terms of their consent. (Un)naming reopens ethical dilemmas at the core of oral history practice: the incongruent goals of the interviewer and interviewees; empowering interviewees and contesting experience; misaligned understandings of sensitivity and taboo; observation and defining off-the-record, interpretive conflict; and unconscious advocacy. However, the digital era creates new and unforeseen consequences of naming interviewees in our research, and our responsibility to protect interviewees from potential ramifications outweighs the ethical dilemmas that (un)naming pose. (Un)naming also reveals complex power dynamics between the interviewer and different interviewees, indicating that interviewers should be more attentive to power differences within the interview group. The most ethical framework for naming may be an individualized approach, led by careful negotiations with each interviewee about the meaning and consequences of their participation in our research.
Alex Hofmann, “The Kinetic South,” Southern Cultures 27, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 62-83
Outside Waco, Texas, a staged train collision from 1896 known as the “Crash at Crush” illuminates how movement and speed formed an organizing principle and perceptual framework for everyday life in the modern New South. After the Civil War, Waco remained unscarred by battles and unphased by Reconstruction. On the promise of starting anew on antebellum terms, white southerners moved to Central Texas in mass migrations that set off a boom in the region’s physical and economic development. Looking at directories, city guides, and newspapers, this article traces how white southerners sacralized movement as a racialized privilege that structured their perceptions of their natural, built, and social geographies.
Cornelia Lambert, “Barefoot Children in a ‘Fine Room’: Robert Owen, Adam Smith, and Social Regeneration in Scotland” in Routledge History of Poverty, 1500-1800, ed. David Hitchcock and Julia McClure (Routledge)
Vanessa Mongey, “Protecting Foreigners: The Refugee Crisis on the Belize-Yucatán Border, 1841-1871,” Law and History Review 39, no. 1 (February 2021): 69-95.
Taking mid-nineteenth century Belize as a case study, this article considers the role of migration in forming political, legal, and spatial geographies in a region with weak state institutions and disputed borders. The Caste War—a series of conflicts starting in 1847 in the southeastern Mexican state of Yucatán— resulted in the movement of thousands of people into the neighboring British settlement of Belize. This population movement reshaped the interface between the metropole and the settlement. This was a colony-defining moment in the development of Belize, leading to an extension of imperial control that eventually culminated in the transition to Crown colony in 1871. The refugee crisis was tied to broader Atlantic questions around asylum, law and empire. The benevolent treatment of refugees became the gauge of a “civilized” colony until the refugee crisis turned into a race crisis. This article examines how local administrators used a humanitarian discourse to enshrine white settler colonialism in a territory suddenly inhabited by a foreign-born multi-ethnic majority. The refugee label became a way to secure British sovereignty over the territory and its inhabitants, including non-British subjects, while extracting resources from the newcomers.
Kelly O’Donnell, “The Activist Archive: Feminism, Personal-Political Papers, and Recent Women’s History,” Journal of Women’s History vol. 32, no. 4 (Winter 2020): 88-109.
Throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, journalist and women’s health activist Barbara Seaman, like many of her feminist contemporaries, donated her extensive collection of personal papers to Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. Unlike most of her peers, Seaman also left corrective notes, messages to future researchers, and critiques of historians’ handling of her and her friends’ pasts. This article examines Barbara Seaman’s curated archive as a means to discuss feminists’ historical consciousness-raising in the late twentieth century, and its consequences for researchers. By showing how archival collections are both personal and political, this discussion advocates for the proper understanding of archives as historical acts in themselves. The archive of women’s experience has changed significantly since the 1970s as individuals have come to routinely advocate for themselves as historical subjects worthy of study.
Alexander I. Parry, “Catharine Beecher and the Mechanical Body: Physiology, Evangelism, and American Social Reform from the Antebellum Period to the Gilded Age,” Journal of the History of Biology 54, no. 4 (2021)
From the mid-nineteenth century to the Gilded Age, Catharine Beecher and other American social reformers combined natural theology and evangelism to instruct their audiences how to lead healthy, virtuous, and happy lives. Worried about the consequences of urbanization, industrialization, unstable sexual and gender roles, and immigration, these “Christian physiologists” provided prescriptive scientific advice for hygiene and personal conduct based on the traditional norms of white, middle-class, Protestant domesticity. According to Beecher and her counterparts, the biosocial reproduction of ideal American households promised to reverse the degeneration of men and women across the country and to ensure the long-term vitality of their children. Using evidence from Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and other nineteenth-century writers, I investigate the methods and aims of Christian physiology along with its relationships to natural theology, Darwinian feminism, and other reform movements. I also analyze how Beecher and her successors employed concepts including the machine, the tissue, the cell, and the germ to justify their conclusions about the optimal structure and functions of American society. Overall, I demonstrate how these actors leveraged the body and the family as mechanisms to produce healthy parents, children, and communities for an ailing nation.
Emrah Sahlin, “Myth of the Eternal State: Armenian Outlaws, American Outsiders, and the Ottoman Search for Order” Journal of Historical Sociology, 34( 3): 491– 503.
Focusing on violent Ottoman contexts, this study explores state behavior, charts criminal taxonomy, and contributes to the state-outlaw paradigm an analytical conduit through which to explain state responses to the outlaws on discursive and institutional levels. At the center of this study are several cases that demonstrate the engagement of local outlaws with evangelical outsiders named George Knapp, George White, and Ellen Stone. It is my contention that, while mitigating specific activities involving these outlaws and outsiders, the state under study invents new traditions, empowers security networks, claims unaccountability, and executes double standards in pursuit of social order within its borders.
Christine Slobogin, “Collecting affect: emotion and empathy in World War II photographs and drawings of plastic surgery,” Medical Humanities, Published Online First: 20 August 2021.
This article compares drawings by Diana ‘Dickie’ Orpen (1914–2008) with photographs by Percy Hennell (1911–1987); both of their oeuvres depict plastic reconstructive surgeries from World War II in Britain. Through visual analysis, personal experience and interviews with archivists who have worked with the collections, this article aims to determine the affective effects of these drawings and photographs. I argue that Hennell’s images are the more affective and subjective objects, even though their original purpose was objective and scientific. This article asks why Hennell’s photographs of plastic surgery produce such a vehement emotive response.
Investigating Hennell’s use of colour, his compositional choices and the unexpected visual particulars of the operating theatre that he captures—all of which ‘collect affect’ within the photo-archival object—this analysis uses a phenomenological framework to determine the limitations and strengths of two very different styles and mediums of World War II surgical imagery.
Beyond establishing which group of images is more affecting, this article also shows why it is empathy that is the most fitting emotional description of the typical responses to Hennell’s photographs. This type of visual analysis of empathic images can be applied to objects-based medical humanities pedagogy that encourages empathy—historical empathy as well as empathy in the present day—for surgical practitioners and trainees.
Troy A. Smith, “Not Just the Raising of Money: Hampton Institute and Relationship Fundraising, 1893–1917,” History of Education Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2021): 63–93.
This article examines the workings of Hampton Institute’s external relations program to show how the school developed loyal supporters and donors. By 1900, Hampton was the wealthiest school for African Americans, and its philosophy—stressing vocational education and forsaking political equality—was at its most influential during this time, attracting numerous followers as well detractors. Little has been written about how Hampton actually raised money and few have explored in any detail why it was so successful in fundraising. Hampton’s leaders developed a comprehensive, state-of-the-art external relations program that forged meaningful connections with its supporters. Hampton’s coordinated outreach efforts were highly effective at getting its message to its target audience—wealthy White Northerners—making them feel closely connected to Hampton and its students, as well as making them feel, through their support of Hampton, that they were part of solving the so-called race problem.
Britt Tevis, “‘Jews Not Admitted’: Anti-Semitism, Civil Rights, and Public Accommodation Laws,” Journal of American History 107, no. 4 (2021): 847-870.
Britt Tevis,“Trends in the Study of Antisemitism in United States History,” American Jewish History 105, no. 1/2 (2021): 255-284.
Identifying trends in the study of antisemitism in American history is a complicated task because historians have mostly focused their attention on other aspects of the American Jewish experience. Further, by and large, those works that examine antisemitism in the United States posit that anti-Jewish animus has been relatively fleeting and generally marginal to United States history and the American Jewish experience. Indeed, antisemitism in the United States has most often been framed as an outlier and premodern relic . . . Simply stated, to the extent that American Jewish historians have examined antisemitism, it has been largely to dismiss it as a serious, lasting problem woven into the fabric of US history. The tendency to present antisemitism in the United States as atypical, momentary, and confined to private realms is especially noteworthy in several important surveys of American Jewish history. Trends in scholarship on antisemitism in the United States must be understood in the context of how American Jewish historians have promoted the idea that antisemitism in the United States has been a relatively insignificant aberration.
Brad H. Wright, “Puras mujeres: Women’s Leadership in Santa Cecilia Base Communities, Guadalajara, Mexico, 1968-1985,” in Liberation Theology and the Others: Contextualizing Catholic Activism in 20th Century Latin America, ed. Christian Büschges, Andrea Müller, and Noah Oehri (Lexington Books)
Ben Zdencanovic, “‘Based upon New Principles’: Abraham Epstein, the Soviet Union, and the Idea of Social Security in the United States, 1920–1942,” Radical History Review 2021 (139): 103–122.
This essay examines the early life and work of the Russian American social reformer Abraham Epstein, an advocate for old-age pensions and compulsory social insurance whose work as head of the American Association for Social Security helped lead to the passage of the 1935 Social Security Act. The essay traces a young Epstein’s 1921–22 journey to Russia to study the Soviet government’s radical experiments in social welfare policy. Although Epstein was disillusioned with the Soviet system on the whole, his experiences in Soviet Russia informed his later idea of “social security”: a unified system of social insurance and social assistance to protect the entire population from social risk while functioning as a powerful tool of income redistribution. Epstein’s early interest in Soviet social welfarism adds new insight into the development of the broader concept of “social security,” an important but understudied link between Progressive Era “workingmen’s insurance” and the postwar welfare state.