The June issue of the American Historical Review contains two articles and an AHR Forum. One article offers an argument for an expansive understanding of the history of sensibilities, while the other takes us to Berlin, circa 1800, for an analysis of the impact of public clocks on emerging notions of time discipline. The Forum provides three perspectives on the Atlantic world in the 18th and early 19th century, focusing on imperial presence of Britain, Spain, and France.
Articles
- What Is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New – Daniel Wickberg queries the centrality of cultural representations in the field of cultural studies and seeks to map out an alternative way of thinking about cultural history that draws on a blend of older traditions and newer approaches.
- Clockwatchers and Stargazers: Time Discipline in Early Modern Berlin – Michael J. Sauter argues that modern time discipline emerged during the 18th century with the rise of a more public and publicly discussed understanding of time.
AHR Forum: Entangled Empires in the Atlantic World
- Introduction
- Politics of Colonial Sensation: The Trial of Thomas Picton and the Cause of Louisa Calderon – James Epsteinrevisits the brief sensation caused by the trial of the first British governor of Trinidad for ordering the torture of a free woman of color.
- The Western Question: The Geopolitics of Latin American Independence – Rafe Blaufarb argues that the collapse of Spanish rule in the Americas produced a revolution in Atlantic power relations by sparking international competition over the fruits of imperial implosion.
- Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery – Eliga H. Gould interrogates the use of comparative methods in Atlantic history, proposing “entangled history” as an alternate model for histories that examine more than one national community.
- Entangled Histories: Borderland Historiographies in New Clothes? – Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra offers a comment on the three articles and suggests other ways in which we might understand the complex relationships between imperial powers in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World.
Also, a large part of the issue is devoted to an extensive book review section, including four featured reviews. Read it all in the June issue of the AHR.
This post first appeared on AHA Today.
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