On Monday I asked if there was any interest in an AskHistorians book club in which we all get together to read an academic journal article or book chapter from an edited volume and then discussed it. To my great surprise there was an overwhelming positive feedback to this idea. I hope the interest is still high as we take the next step forward by starting a trial run on our book club. As part of this trial we will be going with a two week format to start with (1st Sunday, submissions; 1st Wednesday, announcement; 2nd Wednesday, discussion; 2nd Sunday, submissions)
This topic is to ask for submissions for journal articles or book chapters from our community. Anyone can submit, you do not need to have a flair. Please limit one submission per person. And please refrain from submitting entire books as our time frame does not allow it.
Topic
Any submission must be related to history. We have a wide variety of flaired users from fields such as archaeology to linguistics to medicine to music. Let's use it to our advantage. As long as the submission pertains to understanding the past, it is open for the book club. We are trying to broaden our horizons and understanding of the past and that must include seeing the past through a different lens. So do not frett if your submission comes from a medical journal, a music theory journal, or an edited volume by Mesoamerican archaeologists, it's all welcome. If it isn't, someone will kindly let you know. So if you want to submit something on Stonehenge, or changes in letter choice for recording indigenous languages during the colonial period, or advancements in medicine in the late 1700s, or experimental recreation of ancient music, go for it.
Article information
Included in your submission must be the author or authors, the title of the work, the journal/book, year, etc. If using Google Scholar, there is an easy and handy Cite tool which gives a variety of options for citations. You can easily copy/paste that for your submission. My preference is MLA, but it will not be strictly enforced.
Accessible
Any journal article or book chapter must be accessible to the community, preferably through a link. The easiest way that I’ve found to do this is to use Google Scholar. As I’ve shown in this example, when searching for articles there is sometimes a link off to the right in which you can access the article or chapter for free. This is the link you must include in your submission, not a link to the journal page. I will be monitoring submissions to let anyone know if their links fail, but since I am based in the US my access could be biased. If anyone finds a broken link, please let me or the submitter know so that it can be fixed.
Abstract/Summary
Along with the link please include the abstract from the journal article or a written summary for the article/book chapter. This is to give us all an idea of what the article/chapter is about so that we can make a semi-informed vote.
Voting
Voting will run from now until Wednesday morning around 7am EST. Whichever submission has the most votes by that time will be chosen for us to read over the course of the following week.
Using the article from my Scholar example for our format example, the format should be as follows
- Headrick, Annabeth. "The Street of the Dead… It Really Was." Ancient Mesoamerica 10.01 (1999): 69-85.
- The name “Street of the Dead” used to designate Teotihuacan’s main avenue originates from a Nahuatl notation on a sixteenth-century map. Though this “story” is often deemed apocryphal, I argue in this paper that oral tradition preserved conceptual information that may not be archaeologically recoverable. Support for this position comes from comparative cultural analysis of Mesoamerican mortuary bundles as they are expressed in ritual and iconography. Crucial to this argument are the well-known stone masks of Teotihuacan. A case is made that the masks originally served as the faces of oracular mortuary bundles. The likely existence of mortuary bundles at Teotihuacan generates organizational models for the city in which lineage emerges as a fundamental element and suggests new insight into status differentiation and the iconography of power at Teotihuacan.
I’m not sure how mods want to handle comments, but let’s treat this as we would any AskHistorians topic with comments focused on the topic and not making jokes or insulting anyone. Please be kind and be courteous. And let’s take our first steps to a hopefully fruitful and informative new feature.
Great to see that this is going ahead, really looking forward to it! I'm gonna suggest a classic:
Brown, Elizabeth A.R., 'The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe', The American Historical Review, vol. 79, no. 4 (Oct. 1974), pp. 1063-88.
Peggy Brown's attack on the idea of feudalism is, as I said, a classic of medieval history, and remains important and controversial to this day. In this article, she tries to pull apart what historians mean by the world feudalism and how the concept has influenced how they interpret their sources. The end result is that she argues that feudalism is ultimately not a useful concept, that it confuses and obscures much more than it clarifies. Beyond the specific issue of feudalism, it raises lots of interesting issues about the uses of abstract concepts and models for the work of historians. Brown's work has been discussed before on AH, but I think this gives a unique chance for reader to engage with these kinds of big historiographical ideas and arguments first-hand.
Brown, Peter, 'The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity', The Journal of Roman Studies, 61 (1971), pp. 80-101.
Brown's article is a seminal one for the study of late antiquity. He argued the holy men of the eastern Mediterranean arose not because of their role in fighting injustice and oppression, but because they were outsiders, strangers in any given community who could provide neutral arbitration at a time of change. By living and acting differently from conventional society, such as the stylites who lived on pillars for decades at a time, these holy men acquired social capital through their seemingly quite obvious connection to God, one that would have profound consequences for the rest of history. As Brown put it:
Seen in this way, the victory of Christianity in Late Roman society was not the victory of the One God over the many: it was the victory of men over the institutions of their past. The medieval papacy, the Byzantine lavra, the Russian starec, the Muslim Caliphate: these are all, in their various ways, direct results of attempts of men to rule men under a distant high God.
It's therefore not a coincidence that the Muslim profession of faith ends not with 'there is no god but God', but instead with 'Muhammad is the messenger of God'. This argument is very influential and has done much to reshape our image of this period, to see the 'fall' of Rome not as a time of 'decline and fall', but of transformations, allowing us to see how cultural vitality remained a constant despite the political turmoil of this period. Brown's thesis has of course been refined and argued with, but it is still an important article, one that is both readable and impactful on the reader :)
Khazanov, Anatoly M. "Muhammad and Jenghiz Khan Compared: The Religious Factor in World Empire Building." Comp. Stud. Soc. Hist. Comparative Studies in Society and History 35.03 (1993): 461. Web.
Nomadic conquests of large portions of the world are not historically unusual. But there are open questions about why some conquests (like the Arab Islamic conquests of the 7th century) result in a permanent cultural transformation while others, like that of the mongols, seem to barely leave any mark at all. Here Khazanov seeks to compare the careers and conquests of the prophet Muhammad and Jenghiz (Genghis) Khan and looks at, as the title suggests, religious factors in world empire building.
Heggarty, Paul. "Linguistics for archaeologists: principles, methods and the case of the Incas." Cambridge Archaeological Journal 17.03 (2007): 311-340.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/30929558/Heggarty_2007_-Linguistics_for_Archaeologists_1-_Principles__Methods__and_the_Case_of_the_Incas.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJ56TQJRTWSMTNPEA&Expires=1466340154&Signature=I4KcxRCF5H9gG18vbF%2FDM9mfI%2Bw%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DLinguistics_for_archaeologists_1_princip.pdf
or
Like archaeologists, linguists and geneticists too use the data and methods of their dis‑ ciplines to open up their own windows onto our past. These disparate visions of human prehistory cry out to be reconciled into a coherent holistic scenario, yet progress has long been frustrated by interdisciplinary disputes and misunderstandings (not least about Indo‑European). In this article, a comparative‑historical linguist sets out, to his intended audience of archaeologists, the core principles and methods of his discipline that are of relevance to theirs. They are first exemplified for the better‑known languages of Europe, before being put into practice in a lesser‑known case‑study. This turns to the New World, setting its greatest indigenous ‘Empire’, that of the Incas, alongside its greatest surviving language family today, Quechua. Most Andean archaeologists assume a straightforward association between these two. The linguistic evidence, however, exposes this as nothing but a popular myth, and writes instead a wholly new script for the prehistory of the Andes — which now awaits an archaeological story to match.
Liebmann, M et al., "Native American depopulation, reforestation, and fire regimes in the Southwest United States, 1492-1900 CE. PNAS (2015)
PDF is open access Thanks PNAS!
There is tremendous debate surrounding the demographic repercussions of contact. Did high mortality strike early and catastrophically, sparking an irrecoverable decline? Did high mortality events strike in waves, with periods of stasis/recovery between? This paper uses a multidisciplinary approach, combining history, archaeology, dendrochronology, and ecology to examine how contact influenced human populations in the Jemez Pueblos of New Mexico. The authors find evidence of population stasis from 1492-1620, with drastic decline at Jemez in the following six decades, coinciding with the establishment of the New Mexico missions. As population changed so did the environment, with evidence of reforestation as the people living around Jemez constricted in the wake of disease, warfare, and famine. This paper provides a great opportunity to explore the many ways of investigating the past (anthropology, archaeology, history, ecology, etc.), as well as a great insight to the shocks of contact in one specific area.
Sivilich, Daniel M. "Analyzing musket balls to interpret a Revolutionary War site." Historical Archaeology (1996): 101-109.
http://sha.org/wp-content/uploads/files/sha/files_2014/22454.pdf
During a Sunday outing in 1992, the Deep Search Metal Detecting Club collected a small number of Revolutionary War musket balls at a county park in New Jersey. Two areas of artifact concentration were generally recorded and park officials were notified. In 1993 the Monmouth County Park System had the same areas plowed to remove vegetation and a limited Phase I archaeological survey was conducted. Additional musket balls were excavated under more controlled conditions. New Jersey is known as the “Crossroads of the Revolution,” and finds of this type are not unusual. A detailed analysis of the ordnance shows the vast majority of balls are 0.68-0.70 in. in diameter and exhibited no evidence of being fired. The size and surface characteristics indicate the musket balls were probably military and possibly British. The interpreted data indicate that this site was a resting place and only used for a very short period of time, possibly only overnight.
This one is interesting to me since I'm a layman like the majority of this sub's users. It's pretty clear to me that this is not a groundbreaking find. Nonetheless, it gave me a much better understanding of some of the methodology of digging at a historic site. I was also surprised at just how much information can be gleaned from a handful of musketballs when coupled with things as mundane as inventory lists.
Disclaimer, the article that I wanted to submit apparently is only available on JSTOR which I don't have access to, however when I first looked this particular article up I could've sworn it was hosted (via PDF) somewhere else that was more accessible. So I'm going to put that down as well as my second choice, but whichever article is more accessible please take that as my sole submission (or neither)
Lynn-Jones. S. M. (1986), 'Detente and deterrence: Anglo-German relations, 1911-1914' International Security, Vol. 11(No. 2), 121-150.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2538960?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
This article proposes an additional interpretation, suggesting that the war arose in part from the Anglo-German detente of 1911-1914. [Lynn-Jones] will argue that the relations between Great Britain & Germany improved between 1911 & 1914 and that this improvement contributed to the outbreak of war.
In Britain, the detente produced the false belief that the July 1914 crisis could be resolved through Anglo-German cooperation. British leaders did not want to to appear to provoke Germany and thus failed to take the first steps to deter German moves that led to war. The detente also fostered false German hopes that Britain would remain neutral in a continental war, thereby encouraging Germany to adopt policies fraught with the risk of such a conflict.
Rintala, M. (1988). 'Made in Birmingham: Lloyd George, Chamberlain, and the Boer War'. Biography, Vol.11(No. 2), 124-139.
In illustration of the politics of conscience, David Lloyd George risked power, prestige, and wealth by opposing the Boer War. By speaking against the war in Birmingham, political home of Joseph Chamberlain—whose war it was—Lloyd George also risked his life. It was his courage in Birmingham that made Lloyd George's political career.
I don't have access to american academic authorities (JSTOR, Project Muse etc) so sorry if these aren't accessible but they were the only links I could find. If anyone has an alternative link feel free to use that.
How about Butterfield's 'The Whig Interpretation of History'? It's old, but I feel like it's a good way to meditate on why we do history and how we approach the past.
Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931)
http://seas3.elte.hu/coursematerial/LojkoMiklos/Butterfield,_The_Whig_Interpretation_of_History.pdf
From the preface: "The following study deals with "the whig interpretation of history" in what I conceive to be the accepted meaning of the phrase. At least it covers all that is ordinarily understood by the words, though possibly it gives them also an extended sense. What is discussed is the tendency in many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasize certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present. This whig version of the course of history is associated with certain methods of historical organization and inference – certain fallacies to which all history is liable, unless it be historical research. The examination of these raises problems concerning the relations between historical research and what is known as general history; concerning the nature of a historical transition and of what might be called the historical process; and also concerning the limits of history as a study, and particularly the attempt of the whig writers to gain from it a finality that it cannot give. The subject is treated not as a problem in the philosophy of history, but rather as an aspect of the psychology of historians. Use has been made of words like conjuncture and contingency to describe what appear as such to the observer and to the historian. The present study does not concern itself with the philosophical description or analysis of these. And its theses would be unaffected by anything the philosopher could state to explain them or to explain them away. H. B. September 1931"
Büntgen, U. and Di Cosmo, N. Climatic and environmental aspects of the Mongol withdrawal from Hungary in 1242 CE. Sci. Rep. 6, 25606; doi: 10.1038/srep25606 (2016).
The Mongol invasion of Eastern Europe, and especially its sudden withdrawal from Hungary in 1242 CE, has generated much speculation and an array of controversial theories. None of them, however, considered multifaceted environmental drivers and the coupled analysis of historical reports and natural archives. Here we investigate annually resolved, absolutely dated and spatially explicit paleoclimatic evidence between 1230 and 1250 CE. Documentary sources and tree-ring chronologies reveal warm and dry summers from 1238–1241, followed by cold and wet conditions in early-1242. Marshy terrain across the Hungarian plain most likely reduced pastureland and decreased mobility, as well as the military effectiveness of the Mongol cavalry, while despoliation and depopulation ostensibly contributed to widespread famine. These circumstances arguably contributed to the determination of the Mongols to abandon Hungary and return to Russia. While overcoming deterministic and reductionist arguments, our ‘environmental hypothesis’ demonstrates the importance of minor climatic fluctuations on major historical events.
The obligatory military history suggestion comes from yours truly.
