As a companion to our list of books published by non-tenure-track historians in 2023, 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.
Chance E. Bonar and Slavomír Čéplö, “Dialogue between Jesus and the Devil” in New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, Vol. 3, ed. Tony Burke (Eerdmans), 36–64.
Chance Bonar, “Reading Slavery in the Epistle of Jude,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 142, no. 2 (2023): 325–342.
The Epistle of Jude has been examined by biblical scholars for a variety of reasons in recent decades, but one still underexplored interpretative avenue is Jude’s treatment of enslavement. In this article, I argue that Jude pulls from the same conceptual toolbox as many other texts of the Roman republican and imperial eras in its depiction of believers as enslaved people (δοῦλοι) and Jesus as an enslaver (κύριος; δɛσπότης). After placing these three terms in the context of ancient enslavement, I offer three examples of Jude’s participation in a broader discourse of enslavement: (1) the importance of loyalty and disloyalty to Jesus the κύριος; (2) the capability of the enslaver to harm and control the bodies of the enslaved, and (3) the presumption of the benevolence of the κύριος in offering mercy. This reading of Jude highlights how deeply embedded even a short New Testament text can be in the vocabulary, stereotypes, and normalization of violence of Roman enslavement.
Chance Bonar, “John Chrysostom’s Homily against the Jews 8 as a Response to Antiochene Jewish Healthcare,” Journal of Late Antiquity 16, no 2 (2023): 378–406.
This article argues that John Chrysostom’s Homily against the Jews (Adv. Iud. 8), preached at Antioch in 387 ce, is produced as a response to the popularity of Antiochene Jewish healers among John’s congregants. As a solution to the perceived problem of Christians seeking out Jewish healing, John develops a model of anti-medicinal martyrdom by which he calls congregants to seek out death by fever. The article is split into three sections. The first section situates the argument amidst recent scholarship on Antiochene space, religious affiliation and ambiguity, and John’s rhetorical strategies. The second situates John’s anxiety regarding the religious ambiguity of amulets and other medicinal practices alongside late ancient Antiochene material culture. The final section provides a close reading of Adv. Iud. 8 that underscores how John uses biblical exempla to produce his model of anti-medicinal martyrdom.
Andrew Bull, “The British Empire in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Scottish Music: Early Observations,” Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies 11, no. 1 (2023): 7. OA
To date, the colonial links between Scottish music from the long eighteenth century and the burgeoning British Empire have not been analysed. Colonial elements and links have occasionally been noted, but their impact and implications have not been examined in detail. This article seeks to open this topic up to further investigation. The evidence presented here is only the beginnings of a detailed survey of this issue, and so does not focus on any one source type. Instead, it takes a variety of sources from the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to piece together a suggestive picture that requires further work, in order to fully understand this issue.
Animesh Chatterjee, “Manual and Electrical Energies in the Visualisation of ‘Electrical Calcutta’, c. 1890-1925,” Journal of Energy History/Revue d’Histoire de l’Énergie [online], no. 8 (2023) OA
Through examinations of domestic servants in electrical advertisements and writings this article looks at the imaginations and realities of visions of an “Electrical Calcutta” at the turn of the twentieth century. It argues that the diverse conceptions of an “Electrical Calcutta” were intimately linked to not just the technological and mechanical benefits of electrical technologies, but also the centrality of servants to societal notions of morality, class and social hierarchy, and cultures and discourses of human bodies, labour and energy within the domestic sphere.
Kristin M. Franseen, “‘Legendary In-Reading’: Musical Meaning, Analysis, and Biography in Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Music Criticism and Sexology” in Queer Ear: Remaking Music Theory, ed. Gavin S.K. Lee (Oxford University Press), 266-293.
Mark Geldof, “Cut and Paste: Re-Arranging British Library MS Additional 39564,” Acta Periodica Duellatorum 10, no. 1 (May 2023): 97-105. OA
London, British Library Additional MS 39564 is an anonymous collection of English lessons for the two-hand sword, tentatively dated to the first quarter of the sixteenth century. This manuscript is peculiar in several ways, aside from it being one of only three such texts known to scholars. This paper discusses two aspects of this manuscript that speak to its origins and its survival in its present form. The lessons appear to be out of order and while there is no challenge in rearranging them in a logical fashion, this paper explains why that disorder tells us that Add. MS 39564 is a copy made from loose bi-folds from a now lost exemplar. This also explains the placement of the ‘Amen Quod J Ledall’ formula between lessons, rather than at the end of the text (where such an attribution is traditionally placed). Finally, this paper explains the significance of that attribution, suggesting it does not identify an original composer or user of the text, only the name of the scribe who produced the unbound sheets that acted as the exemplar for our surviving text. Both of these points remind us that these texts were part of a complicated community of composers, scribes, and readers and that the path of survival is often indirect and meandering.
Morgan Golf-French, “Teaching Race in the German Enlightenment: Christoph Meiners’ History of Humanity in Institutional Context,” History of Universities XXXVI, no. 2 (2023): 243-260.
This chapter traces the development of racial thought in the German Enlightenment, looking at Christoph Meiners’s Outline of the History of Humanity, a work primarily concerned with his profoundly hierarchical theory of human racial difference. First presented in the Outline, Meiners claimed that humanity is divided into various races, each unequal in moral, physical, and intellectual characteristics. He defended racial slavery, opposed Jewish civic emancipation, and advocated unrestricted European world domination. Investigating Meiners’s position as professor at the Georgia Augusta University of Göttingen sheds important light on the complex relationships between texts, ideas, and institutions in the German Enlightenment. The chapter then draws inferences about Meiners’s expectations for the impact of his racial theory, the empirical limitations to understanding his work as a whole, and the discursive development of racial thought across the period.
Morgan Golf-French, “Inventing (British) Empiricism: Christoph Meiners and the Atheismusstreit,” in Christoph Meiners (1747-1810): Anthropologie und Geschichtsphilosophie in der Spätaufklärung, Stefan Klingner and Gideon Stiening, eds., (De Gruyter, 2023), 295-319.
Mia Martin Hobbs, “Healing Journeys: Veterans, Trauma, and the Return to Vietnam,” Journal of American History 110, no. 1 (June 2023): 82-107. OA
James Keating, “‘We seem to shake hands across the seas’: Dora Meeson Coates and the Lost World of Australasian Suffrage Activism,” in The Making and Remaking of ‘Australasia’: Mobility, Texts, and ‘Southern Circulations’, ed. Tony Ballantyne (Bloomsbury), 115–32.
James Keating, “’Trust the Women’: Dora Meeson Coates’s Suffrage Banner and the Popular Construction of Australia’s Feminist Past in the Late Twentieth Century” Histoire sociale / Social History (2023)
In 1988, the Australian federal government purchased Anglo-Australian artist Dora Meeson Coates’s “Trust the Women” banner as part of the country’s belated efforts to memorialize the suffrage victories that once made its White citizens the most enfranchised people on earth. However, between the fin de siècle and the 1970s, which witnessed the concurrent rise of women’s history and state feminism, feminists had been ambivalent about commemorating the suffrage campaigns, especially at the national level. Since the late 1980s, the banner has experienced a transformation from an artefact few Australians had known about, much less forgotten, into the most familiar symbol of the country’s suffrage movements. Brought about by memory agents—activists, bureaucrats, historians, and politicians—this shift reveals the public appeal of British suffrage iconography over the material record of Australian activists’ “quiet” toil, a sentiment which has increasingly shaped the memorialization of local suffrage stories.
Brooks Marmon, “Transnational Revolutionary: Noel Mukono’s Navigation of Zimbabwe’s Fractious Liberation Struggle, 1957–77,” International History Review 45, no. 5 (2023): 768-786. OA
This article recovers the role of Noel Mukono in Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle. The defence chief of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) from 1964 to 1973, his pioneering role in instigating the armed struggle against the white settler government in Rhodesia is largely overlooked today. Mukono is a leading casualty of ‘patriotic history’, the contemporary Zimbabwean state’s manipulation of the independence struggle narrative. A journalist, Mukono left behind an unfinished memoir and personal papers which facilitate a deep examination of his political engagements. This material highlights Mukono’s status as a transnational revolutionary, instrumental in the internationalisation of Zimbabwe’s independence struggle. Through Mukono’s personal journey, this account explores transnational networks linking Zimbabwean nationalism with Zambia, the United Kingdom, Malawi, and Ghana. It provides new information regarding the extent of ZANU’s collaboration with the Mozambican nationalist movement, Frelimo. Finally, Mukono’s case illuminates an enigmatic period of ZANU infighting in exile which saw the Nhari Mutiny and assassination of Herbert Chitepo, the party’s National Chair. During this time, his globetrotting lifestyle was strategically used against him.
Sara Mohr and Sam Butler, “The Agamemnon Problem: The Fluidity of History-Making and Myth-Making in the Dune Universe,” New Classicists 8 (July 2023): 2-31. OA
G. Patrick O’Brien, “Duty and Love: Flora Lee’s Resistance to Slavery in Revolutionary Marblehead,” The New England Quarterly 96, no. 2 (June 2023): 96–120. OA
This study explores the life of Flora Lee, an enslaved Massachusetts woman, who had her daughter spirited away from her during the Revolution. Lee’s efforts to be reunited with her daughter in Nova Scotia, and to protect other vulnerable Black children, highlight enslaved women’s resistance to their family’s enslavement during the Revolutionary Era.
Kelly O’Donnell, “Tech-ing the Trade: Notes on Reformulating Abortion and Its History,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 97, no. 1 (Spring 2023): 57-66. OA
Kelly O’Donnell and Naomi Rogers, “Introduction: Revisiting the History of Abortion in the Wake of the Dobbs Decision,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 97, no. 1 (Spring 2023): 1-10. OA
Alexander I. Parry, “Delivering Bacteriology to the American Homemaker: Correspondence Education, Kitchen Experiments, and Public Health, 1890–1930,” Isis 114, no. 2 (2023): 317-340.
Over the course of the Progressive Era, revised scientific accounts of the connections between dust, germs, and disease recast debates over public health. The American School of Home Economics and other institutions affiliated with the emerging subfield of household bacteriology regarded detecting and eliminating pathogens as necessary means to achieve safer homes and communities. Although several historians have attributed the rise of early twentieth-century technocracy and the decline of grassroots health activism to germ theory, household bacteriology complicates this standard narrative. Educators like Sophronia Maria Elliott (1854–1942) rejected the command-and-control tactics of the “new” public health and instead instructed women how to culture microorganisms and to measure the risks of infection within their surrounding environments using kitchen experiments. Household bacteriologists aspired to train “sanitary citizens” with the right and the duty to test for germs with everyday equipment, to prevent disease with effective housekeeping, and to advocate for policies and infrastructure to keep society well.
Naomi Rendina, “Controlling the Uterus: A History of Labor Augmentation Drugs in Childbirth, 1900–1970,” History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals 64, no. 2 (February 2023): 133-153.
Eliminating and easing pain in childbirth has long been considered a major obstetric achievement. But what about the ability to control the uterus and when childbirth happens? Why have augmentation and induction drugs not been central to historical analysis of medicalization of childbirth in the United States? Our understanding of how birth became medicalized is complicated when augmentation drugs are the central analytical lens. At the turn of the twentieth century, the emerging field of endocrinology and hormone-based therapies influenced the growing authority and professionalization of medicine and introduced the chemical manipulation of childbirth. This article explores two main points: first, the development of chemical interventions, like ergot and oxytocin, used to start and hasten labor; and second, how different drug categories pushed the boundaries of what was and was not “natural.” These drugs were valuable tools that helped solve public health concerns of maternal and fetal health outcomes, further entrenched women’s reliance on male physicians, and illustrate the complexities of how childbirth became a medical event in the United States.
Mikko Toivanen, “A Nordic colonial career across borders: Hjalmar Björling (1848–1885) in the Dutch East Indies and China,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 51, no. 3 (2023): 421–441. OA
Building on the latest literature on transimperial mobilities, this article analyses the career of the Finland-Swedish Hjalmar Björling, a merchant and colonial careerist who moved out to the Dutch East Indies around 1870, later also working in assorted roles on the coast of China and in Sumatra’s then-developing plantation economy. He was also an active writer, relaying colonial news and market intelligence as well as accounts of his personal experiences in various Finnish newspapers. This article examines the global, cross-border structures that facilitated Björling’s migration to Southeast Asia and his integration there, arguing that his colonial career sketched out the contours of a pre-existing transnational and specifically Nordic subcircuit of Western imperialism that straddled the boundaries of the Dutch and British empires. Moreover, through his correspondences and ventures, Björling sought to establish himself as an active node in that network connecting northern Europe and maritime Asia. The article argues that a careful consideration of ‘outsider’ experiences like Björling’s challenges conventional, nation-centric understandings of nineteenth-century European empires and helps to uncover the multi-layered systems of mobilities that underpinned their expansion around the world.
Edward Valentin, “Off Duty: Black Soldiers and Mobility in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1866-1890,” Western Historical Quarterly 54, no. 2 (Summer 2023): 103-116.
Throughout the post-Civil War era, Black soldiers in the U.S. Army were at the vanguard of U.S. expansion in the U.S. West. Rather than focusing solely on their official military duties however, this article examines Black troops’ off-duty activities, specifically the complex economic and social ties they developed with civilians who resided near the posts they garrisoned in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In many cases, these connections transcended the very geographic, racial, and ethnic boundaries that Black soldiers were charged with policing, illustrating that relationships between local people and agents of the U.S. government in the region were more complex than scholars have previously acknowledged. Relying on transcripts from U.S. Army general courts-martial proceedings, this article demonstrates how these interactions shaped Black enlisted men’s perceptions of themselves, army life, and the locales they policed and inhabited. These interactions between Black soldiers and local people often undermined the Army’s official missions, but they allowed Black troops to improve the quality of their lives and demonstrate the persistent fluidity and porousness of the southwest borderlands.
Imogen Wegman, “Meehan’s Mapping of the Derwent River in Van Diemen’s Land, 1803–04,” Australian Historical Studies 54, no. 4 (2023): 772-793. OA
In 1804, the Irish convict-turned-surveyor James Meehan drafted a map (Monmouth 0) of the area around Britain’s new settlement in the colony of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania, Australia). This map describes the terrain and vegetation and guided decision-making by the colonial government for the first few years of the colony’s existence. Despite its importance, it was neither copied nor distributed further than the immediate land it described. For the first time, it has been fully transcribed so that we might examine the fine details. This article argues that despite remaining as a manuscript map, Monmouth 0 is a perfect demonstration of British colonial land management policy as it directed the colonial effort to make their presence permanent on the island of Van Diemen’s Land.