AHA Topics
AHA Initiatives & Projects, Publishing, Research & Publications
Thematic
African American, Economic, Labor, Slavery, Social, Visual Culture, Women, Gender, & Sexuality
Geographic
World
Episode Description
AHR editor Mark Bradley talks with historian Diana Paton about her article “Gender History, Global History, and Atlantic Slavery: On Racial Capitalism and Social Reproduction.” Then, a conversation with Pure+Applied designers Paul Carlos and Urshula Barbour about the AHR’s first major redesign in over 50 years.
Daniel Story
Welcome to History in Focus, a podcast by the American Historical Review. Like many of our episodes, this one comes to you in two parts. The first takes us into the content of the June 2022 issue with an exploration of the history of gender and Atlantic slavery at global scale. The second highlights the form of the new AHR, as we discuss with designers from the firm, Pure + Applied, the deep thinking that went into the journal’s first major redesign in more than 50 years. In both parts, AHR editor Mark Bradley leads the discussion. I’m Daniel Story, your host and the producer of History in Focus. This is episode five.
Diana Paton at the University of Edinburgh has spent her career studying the history of the greater Caribbean. In particular, highlighting issues of gender, slavery, law, and religious cultures. In more recent years, that work has turned increasingly to broader questions around gender and slavery in a global context. That’s the focus of Paton’s June AHR article, “Gender History, Global History, and Atlantic Slavery: On Racial Capitalism and Social Reproduction.” Diana spoke with Mark about how this research and analytical framing came together, and where for her it might be going next.
Mark Bradley
Diana, thanks so much for taking the time to be with us and to talk about this important article that we’ll be featuring in the June issue of the American Historical Review. And I wondered if we could start by maybe stepping back a little bit from the article itself and to just have you walk us through a bit about the motivations for you in thinking about taking on the piece to begin with. What was the intervention that you wanted to make? And what kinds of issues, conceptually, were you trying to work out for yourself in terms of, you know, your larger scholarship?
Diana Paton
Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, I’ve been working on this article for a really long time. I think the first time I gave a paper that was part of the germ of the article was probably at least five years ago, maybe even more. And it really ended up being kind of two different articles that flowed together that I realized were really part of the same thing. And with both of them, I was trying to think broadly about how we analyze gender in relation to the history of Atlantic slavery, of anti-racial slavery, specifically. It seemed to me that there was this huge abundance of really rich work on the gendered history of slavery that was only being very partially taken into account in the way in which scholars were writing about Atlantic slavery on a kind of global scale or a broad Atlantic scale. And I really wanted to think through how we could put those two conversations more substantially in dialogue with one another and think about how using gender as an analytic tool helps us understand the place of racial slavery in global capitalism, and—and the—the way in which capitalism is, in fact, always racialized and also always gendered. So I started to think about that. I mean, from my own specific research background, which is in Caribbean history and specifically the history of the British colonies in the Caribbean, so I did—was doing empirical work for other pieces on things like the way in which childcare was organized in plantation slave societies. And thinking about that, and thinking also about childlessness under slavery, and what the experience of childlessness, of not reproducing, was like and how that was structured, how that, I think, has been—not sufficient attention been paid to it. But I wanted to put that in a bigger frame. So this piece involved me doing a lot of reading and thinking in a whole bunch of other historiographies that are not my, kind of, original primary research field, to find comparisons, to find similarities and differences. And I end up making two big arguments about how gender history and global history need to be connected through the history of Atlantic slavery. One is about inheritance and legitimacy. And I argue that Atlantic slavery expanded so rapidly, partly through building on European patriarchal principles that divided women into virtuous women who could marry, and thus were a conduit for the transmission of property. So that’s how whiteness is established, really, and it works so differently in different European colonial contexts, but there’s a broad similarity. And meanwhile, enslaved women are excluded from the possibility of transferring property, excluded from the possibility of being virtuous women, being conceived of as virtuous women, and in fact, are themselves property. So that’s a—that’s one of the, kind of, big arguments. And then the other one is about social reproduction, reproductive labor, or what a lot of people are referring to as care, caring labor, or the work of life-making. And that’s something that’s been examined by a lot of scholars who’ve thought about it internally within slave societies. And I’m including that, but I’m also arguing that we need to think about the importance of reproductive labor of women in Africa, who bear and raise the children that grow up to be stolen from Africa, and taken into the Middle Passage and to the Americas. So there’s a sort of spatial separation of the exploitation of women’s labor that’s, that’s going on in this system. And I think because of that spatial separation, because women’s reproductive labor in Africa was spatially separated from the plantation zones, it’s become kind of invisible to discussions of slavery at that time of slavery, and also in a lot of analysis of it since then.
Mark Bradley
Yeah. Well, you know, I want to take you kind of backwards through this, in a way. So that’s the conceptual payoff, in a sense of where you got, right? And the essay opens with two observations. I mean, one is that, and these are your words, “global historians more generally have been slow to take gender history seriously.” Simultaneously, you say, “most historians of gender and slavery have found it easier to see gender at the scale of the plantation, the region, the colony, or the nation.” And so the global or transnational frame was hidden and those sort of frame, in a sense, the problematic, right? And then you work through those toward some of the arguments that you’re, that you’re making. And I, I guess I’d like to talk a little bit about the kind of connective tissue between the framing and getting to the arguments themselves. And you’re working with a whole interesting group of thinkers. Some of whom are going to be more familiar, and some of whom are going to be less familiar to readers. One, Angela Davis, whose work I think will be known, but nonetheless, having you talk a little bit about why Davis’s work was important for you intellectually and thinking the project forward. But you’re also working with materials by a group of Caribbean feminist thinkers who may be less familiar to listeners and readers and who should be more familiar. So again, just thinking a little bit in both of those spaces about how that work was generative for you in moving to the larger claims that you make.
Diana Paton
Yeah so I’m going back to quite a long-standing debate here, really. So Angela Davis wrote this amazing article, “Reflections on the Women’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” which I think came out originally in the early 1970s, possibly even the late 1960s. It’s a broad ranging essay, but she talks about women’s productive and also reproductive labor, focusing on the United States largely. And she has this amazing sentence in there where she talks about domestic labor of women within the enslaved community—was “the only labor of the slave community which could not be directly and immediately claimed by the oppressor.” So she, she thinks of that work as really, really important as a form of exploitation, but also a complex site of exploitation, because it’s also meaningful labor. It’s not the alienated work of picking cotton or cutting sugar cane. And I think that’s an incredibly insightful point that she makes. And, in a way, I’m sort of trying to build on that and think about that work not just as something that’s happening in a plantation setting, but happening in various different African societies and is articulated to the global system of Atlantic slavery, and its invocation with capitalist development. And there’s a sort of similar kind of work there. There’s also that spatial separation is happening within the Americas too, through the various intraregional, interregional slave trades. So from Virginia and Maryland down to the Deep South—the areas that are being opened up through settler colonial expansion in the 19th century, Louisiana, Texas and so on. Or in Brazil in a kind of parallel development, and the movement from the Brazilian northeast to the Paraíba Valley at the moment of coffee expansion. So there’s a spatial separation in there as well where women’s reproductive work is exploited in one zone and then it’s transferred to the other. So Angela Davis is one sort of person who’s drawing attention to that work of reproduction. There’s another group of Caribbean feminists, as you mentioned, who write amazing, important work around the same time, some of them that I think have been not so much taken into account. So one is the Jamaican historian Lucille Mathurin Mair, who wrote a fantastic PhD dissertation in the 1970s on women’s history in Jamaica which was later published, but only quite recently published, edited by Verene Shepherd and Hilary Beckles. And that has, in its section on black women, a lot of insightful points about the reproductive labor on the plantation in Jamaica. And then a bit later, writing from Trinidad, Rhoda Reddock really brings in these debates about social reproduction. And she’s a very interesting scholar, she’s still a very active scholar, because she kind of is a link between Caribbean feminism and the European Marxist feminists who were developing ideas about her work, particularly people like Silvia Federici and Maria Mies. I believe Reddock was a student of Mies in the early 1980s and Mies’ Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, it actually includes quite a lot of citations to, to Reddock’s work. So that group of thinkers is also really important for putting these questions of social reproduction under slavery into a broader geographic and analytic frame. But Federici and Mies’s work is, you know, it’s, it’s historical, it draws on historical analysis, but it’s not by historians. Reddock’s work is fully historical. So kind of taking some of their ideas, but really making sure they’re robust historically and evidenced historically has also been unimportant to me.
Mark Bradley
Yeah, no, that’s just fascinating. I mean, I hope one thing that the article may help in terms of readers is just being introduced to a set of theoretical constructs that, that may not be as familiar to them as they should be. And it’s, it’s the—you’re talking about some of these influential figures here, I would just say to listeners that in the essay itself, there are an even larger group of people that you’re deploying who are doing all kinds of interesting interdisciplinary work that seemed to have been important for you in getting where you’ve gotten to, and really invite readers to engage with that, as they’re—as they’re reading your piece. The other piece I wanted to go to was, it’s something that you say—I mean, it’s in other parts of the article, but you say it toward the end. And it’s about the place of sexual violence in the ways in which family systems worked. And I wondered if you could say a bit about how for you the intersection of thinking in different sorts of ways about gender and global history let you see that in new ways.
Diana Paton
Yeah, so I connect sexual violence to the systems of family formation among the elites, or among the slave-owning classes. And I tried to see how sexual violence was a really fundamental structural element of these systems of slavery. Enslaved women were rendered supremely vulnerable to sexual violence through the structures of racialized patriarchal power that these systems of slavery worked through. Enslaved women have no access to the partial protections that free women in most societies get through marriage. Of course, I don’t want to make it seem that marriage is a—has traditionally, has historically been a fight of liberation. That’s not at all what I’m saying. But I think that exclusion from marriage, or the exclusion from the full rights of marriage, was fundamental to rendering enslaved women especially vulnerable to sexual violence. And that that’s a kind of deep part of the regimes of power that we see across Atlantic slave systems.
Mark Bradley
It seems like one of the one of the strengths of the analysis here is that it captures the global scale and it captures a more localized or national scale simultaneously, so that you get the sense about this as a phenomena that crosses and yet a sense also of particularities. And I think, often that’s difficult in people’s work, you know, they can go in one direction, or they can go in the other direction. And, you know, certainly there’s value in both of those, but to be able to pull them together in the ways in which you do and the piece, I think is, is really unusual, and extremely helpful analytically for people in thinking through these kinds of questions.
Diana Paton
I tried really hard to make sure I was getting these details right. And the more I was writing, the more complexity I was finding. And there’s subtle differences in different societies, that different points of law are distinct, different kinds of demographic patterns, or different ways in which inheritance works. And I really did want to make sure I was getting those nuances and those details. And lots of people read this for me, including through the very extensive review process of the American Historical Review, but also other friends and colleagues. And, you know, without them picking me up on some, at some points some really basic things, that pushed me to read a lot more, I wouldn’t have been able to capture that, that nuance, or at least I hope I’ve captured it.
Mark Bradley
Yeah. Well, you know, the, the thing about the review process a little bit, one of the raps, I guess, against the American Historical Review, it has an upside and a downside, but it’s the process can be a long one, right? So I don’t think it’s quite as bad as people think, but it can be a while. So time has marched on, since that article came in to kind of formulation for you. What are you working on now?
Diana Paton
I’m working on ways of taking this forward to a more kind of book length project, which would kind of reach out from the kind of microhistory of the caring work, if you like, done on plantation societies in the British context, the British Caribbean context that I know best, but can reach kind of out from there and back towards African societies, probably focusing on the Gold Coast in Ghana. So that’s one thing I’m doing. And I’m also doing some other stuff around working with school teachers about how they teach slavery, teach the history of slavery in the Scottish context. So I work at the University of Edinburgh; there’s a huge amount of debate in Scotland at the moment about the history of slavery and Scotland’s relationship to the history of slavery. And a lot of school teachers are really grappling with how to teach this effectively. It’s a very challenging thing to do well. So at the moment, I’m working with some colleagues at the University of Glasgow, University of Stirling, and some school teachers and anti-racist educators on a project with the number of school teachers from across Scotland, where we are working to help them create better resources and to work on their teaching. And we’re only really at the beginning of this, but it’s very exciting. I’ve just been reviewing the applications we’ve had from people who want to be part of this. And there’s a lot of school teachers who are doing really amazing things in their classrooms. So that’s an exciting thing to do.
Mark Bradley
Thanks so much for coming and talking to us about the work. It’s, it’s going to make, I think, a big impact on readers when it’s published. And it’s nice to be able to just get a sense about how it came together for you, and the ways in which you’re taking it forward in your own work. So thank you.
Diana Paton
Well, thank you for inviting me to talk about it. I really appreciated the opportunity.
Daniel Story
That was Diana Paton in conversation with AHR editor Mark Bradley, on her June issue article, “Gender History, Global History, and Atlantic Slavery: On Racial Capitalism and Social Reproduction.”
When Mark Bradley first took on the editorship of the AHR in 2021, one of the more fundamental changes he immediately tackled was a redesign of the look of the journal itself. The first such major redesign in more than 50 years, and I would venture to say the most thorough and thoughtful rethinking of the journal’s form and function in the entirety of its long history. To accomplish this complex task, the AHR engaged the firm, Pure + Applied, to work through the conceptual and practical elements of rethinking the journal’s design to better fit its vision for a more capacious and engaged approach to history. And if you imagine this all boiled down to little more than a template reshuffle or a few new boilerplate fonts, think again. Here’s Mark’s conversation about the process with Pure + Applied designers Paul Carlos and Urshula Barbour.
Mark Bradley
For the AHR project, in what it seemed like the central challenges to you going into that, and you know, is there a manifestation in design form, that a solution to one of those challenges took?
Paul Carlos
Every project is different in what solutions you come up with or are, sort of, bespoke to that project. For AHR, at least the goal was like, how can we make this more contemporary or relevant?
Urshula Barbour
Or appear that—to send that signal.
Paul Carlos
Yeah, mhm.
Urshula Barbour
It doesn’t mean that it’s not, right? But a lot is in appearances, right? So—
Paul Carlos
Right, yeah. And then so you know, and one of the things that attracted us was, you know, the History Lab, right, like your invention, I don’t know what to—how else to call it.
Paul and Mark chuckle.
You know, and that’s what made this version of AHR different. And using that as the sort of impetus for, “Alright let’s rethink the cover, because of the History Lab. Let’s make the History Lab look different from the rest of the journal and have that be a key content and visual element within the, within the publication.” And so, in thinking about the design, obviously, it still has to be the same page count, the same size, then that—then where is the space where we—where you can do something different or have it be considered differently. And so it’s the cover, and then how we design the History Lab, and then, but obviously, you know, through typography, and just cleaning up the design of the publication.
Urshula Barbour
You know, what our process often is, and it was with AHR, is that Paul would select a number of typefaces to choose from set pages, and then we would review them and say, “Okay, so what’s easier on the eye? What makes me want to linger on the words longer? And then when you sort of back it off slightly, does it look like it fits into the category of scholarship and serious and all of those things?” So first, does it work? And then does it feel like it’s the right kind of look to the, to the characters and the type themselves, right? Because a lot of things will work, that doesn’t necessarily mean it, it’s telegraphing or signaling an appropriateness for the type of content that it’s conveying.
Mark Bradley
I mean, one of the things that was kind of most fun in the process, I think, on our side was earlier on when you were showing us, I’m thinking about the articles more, you know, it could look like this, it could look like this, it can look like that. And what I remember was, you know, it was often the same type, but it just—the spacing was different, or the weight of it was different. And it was just for me to realize, like the intricacy of it at that level. You know, whereas I think the outside person like me, who doesn’t know that much about it thinks, “well, it could be Helvetica, or it could be Bakersfield.” But then you come to realize, like, no, that’s not actually at all what the choices are when you’re kind of down to it. And I—for me, I just really enjoyed that part of it a lot.
Urshula Barbour
Mark, I think you pick up on something important, which is the—I mean, it could be the typeface choice or it could be the space between lines, the leading, or it could be how tightly something’s tracked in. Again, I don’t know if the average reader picks up on this. But for us when we’re looking at something and it’s been, the types being tracked in too tightly or the leading is insufficient, it either looks rushed or it looks harried or it, or it telegraph’s that maybe somebody wasn’t able to take time with it, that it’s disposable, that it’s not as serious. Again, we may read into a lot more—kind of put values on things that other folks don’t. But regardless of that, you know, there are still rules that make setting type easier for people to read, easier for them to linger on and hopefully retain the information, and arrangements of pages, where you’re always more likely to maybe move to, right? And so you’re less likely to miss something or more likely to understand that it’s important to look at and read. That, that all go into it and figure into it, whether or not readers are necessarily all that aware of it.
Paul Carlos
I think it’s also back to empathy. Like, there’s just ways of spacing type that is easier to read for the reader. And obviously, the review is, you know, 300 pages of a lot of reading, if you were to read it from cover to cover.
Urshula Barbour
Yes, right.
Paul Carlos
And you really want the text to be inviting to read and not just there because it has to be there.
Urshula Barbour
Right.
Paul Carlos
Actually, one thing I forgot to mention, and I don’t think we’ve ever brought it up in the meetings was that the choice of the typefaces were also, for me, like a, sort of a fun thing that I like to inject into, into designs. The headline type, or the logo, American Historical Review, is set in the typeface Canela, which is designed by a Mexican designer. The text space, the body copy, is designed by a New Zealand designer. And the san serif, which is called Freight, is designed by an African American designer. And so this idea that, well what is American, you know?
Mark Bradley
Yeah.
Paul Carlos
And this idea that typography is, you know, a European or, you know, strictly Western thing is, you know, it’s sort of imbued in the the typefaces that leave—
Urshula Barbour
Laced, laced throughout. Yeah.
Paul Carlos
Yeah, yes.
Mark Bradley
I think that’s really fascinating: who it is behind it. Because that’s another thing people just don’t think about. And, and again, the fact that our typeface is global, you know, that, that speaks in important ways to what we’re trying to do, but unless we tell people, they don’t know, you know?
Paul Carlos
Yeah, definitely.
Mark Bradley
Well, you know, with what you were doing for us, the lab is the space that didn’t exist before, right? So you know, in a sense that’s where you have the most freedom, because we had no idea, like, how that space would work. And there’s a very definite sensibility about how you, kind of carried that through. So how did you get—you know, it’s a three quarter column, and then there’s a quarter column. And like, that’s the really simple way of saying it. But like, how did you get there? And what, what was the sort of intentionality there? And what influences were you borrowing from, to think about that?
Paul Carlos
Well, I think we wanted that space still to be part of the review, and not just like, a completely different space altogether, you know, so it’s, it’s still using the same typefaces. But, you know, much like, you know, as a metaphor, it’s like, it’s like a different cut of a suit, so to speak. You know, instead of like it being this buttoned up suit, it’s a little bit more contemporary, and obviously less symmetrical, obviously, compared to the rest of the, of the review. And then, you know, adding the footnotes to the margins, as opposed to, you know, having at the bottom. You know, we sort of played with this idea of like, the margins are just as important as, you know, the, the main text itself, and obviously, you know, the idea that it would have more pictures or can contain more pictures also helps with the thinking behind it.
Urshula Barbour
And I think some of these things, and it touches on the cover design. So, one of the parameters or one of the challenges is, at least once you’ve done film or video or some kind of design with motion or that for whatever reason is not static, you perhaps look with different eyes upon revisiting design or, or a journal or book that is static. Thinking about ways you can suggest to readers or users that there is motion or there is activity. For instance, with the approach to the cover. This journal is a manifestation of a kind of interaction, right? And while it might seem static and it might seem kind of fixed, in many ways it’s not. Like, obviously if somebody’s reading or thinking about it or revisiting it or referring to it, that whole swirl of sort of mental space or blobs or activities around it are all—is all sort of like living, moving life to, to what we think of as a fixed object. So where one can suggest in this case, like with the cover that we were thinking that the dialogue or the interplay or the vibrancy of the imagery on the cover and whether it overlaps or how it overlaps with the title will all signal each time the reader receives it, that there was activity and there was action. That it’s not fixed. It’s not slotting something into a rectangle because it fit. But there’s a, there’s kind of a give and take. And again, it is fixed, of course, it’s not moving. But, but there are indications of work and activity that happened and thought, and how those—that interplay works, right?
Paul Carlos
Yeah, I mean, for instance, on the “Smells in History,” you know, how do we make it apparent with the heart, that candle shaped like a heart, you know, that’s the sort of, like, object or the transmitter of the smell. And so that’s why we wanted to make sure that that was foregrounded, and not just something that’s in the background behind the title of the, of the review, like, we want to make sure that that gets pulled out. And that’s why we play with trompe-l’œil space of the candle or the object being in front of the, the type. You know, we always wanted to do that with, you know, some of the, I think, earlier versions that we showed on the cover. So it becomes more of like a visual challenge now, like, can we actually keep doing this for the other covers? You know, how can we play with space? How can we make sure that the work or the image is always foregrounded? And that—you know, it’s always going to be American Historical Review, that’s a given. But we also want to make sure that the cover and the image stands out.
Urshula Barbour
Right, that that kind of lockup or technique can, can work going forward. So there’s always some kind of dialogue. Like the, if you thought about it literally, the text is getting inserted into the image, right? Or the image is wrapping around the text if you took it the other way. So it is sort of AHR getting into the imagery, as captured on the cover.
Mark Bradley
Yeah, that helps me understand—I get it’s like, sometimes you see things, but you don’t really have the words to say what’s going on. But they do feel like they’re moving.
Paul Carlos
Well, it feels like something has been considered.
Urshula Barbour
Yes.
Paul Carlos
You know, and I think that’s an important thing to convey to a reader.
Mark Bradley
Do you think, retrospectively, that that’s what you did? Or before the very first one was designed, did you think to yourself, “that’s what I want to try to do. And so that’s what I’m playing around with.” Or is it not like that, it’s just kind of like, a tug back and forth, and all of a sudden, this emerges, so you can turn it around, and that emerges, or…?
Paul Carlos
I think, I think the thinking evolves, you know, obviously, a back and forth with the client and the reactions that you might get. I remember the first set, like we wanted to just say AHR, because that’s how everyone says it, right?
Mark Bradley
Yeah.
Paul Carlos
It’s, we hardly say, you know, “the American Historical Review.” And that’s how we even got to, like, getting rid of the “the” on the title.
Mark Bradley
Right.
You know, this, this idea that, one is, what is appropriate for the publication, and then, two, what can we do with the text or the type that can signal something that there’s a new thinking behind this review. It’s great to have these discussions with clients. And I think it brought us back to like, how we worked in magazines and just this, this idea that, you know, you can—
Urshula Barbour
It’s a collaborative team.
Paul Carlos
Yeah, it is, it’s really not just us the designers giving the design. It’s, it’s really us thinking through the different issues and different pros and cons of certain designs together.
Urshula Barbour
And I think also nice that it’s serious scholarship that, that we were able to engage with, with this, and figure out how to work with it, in it, around it. And as Paul says, this sort of months-long process of working through it, I think that’s something that we really relish.
Paul Carlos
Yeah, and we also didn’t want this to be like this thing that just landed.
Paul chuckles.
You know, I think it has to, like, evolve from the people who actually work on it, and, like, you know, rethink the publication as opposed to, you know, “Here’s the thing and it’s done. It’s new, you have to accept it.” You know?
Urshula Barbour
Yes. Yeah. Because you’re ultimately the one that’s living with it, breathing life into it, and keeping it alive.
Mark Bradley
I mean, we were fortunate in two ways, I think. I mean, one is, generally, with scholarly journals do not hire designers to rethink them.
Urshula Barbour
Right.
Mark Bradley
That, the, you know, the OUP has four templates and you pick one or you know that—and we had some resources that allowed us to be able to do that. And I think that was just fortunate for us. And I can’t really be critical that other journals don’t do it because you know, there is money, right? And money matters in these kinds of things. But you could still have the money to spend, and not necessarily be in a relationship with a designer that necessarily was working, and certainly one that didn’t work, you know? I mean, this one worked just so well. Right? And I think the fact that there were younger people on your team, who sometimes you know, you were saying, “Yeah, they really liked that, everybody just liked this.” Like, that was really helpful for us. Because I mean, part of this is that for the journal to keep working in the space that it’s working, it’s early-career and mid-career people who have to keep moving with it, or it won’t have a life. And there’s a larger danger about scholarly journals in this regard, you know, period. Right? It’s just, this one’s looked, you know, they all have looked a lot the same for a long time. And they can’t keep doing that, I don’t think. It’s still kind of nerve-wracking to like, say, “Well, okay, we’re gonna make a bet on trying this thing.” And, you know, some of these things we may be right about, some of them we might not be right about. Some people are gonna be happy, some aren’t gonna be. Like, there’s gonna be all of that, right? But you got to give it a shot, right? And it’s just, it felt like, you know, working with you all, we just had a really great partner in trying to like, give it the best shot that we could give it, you know. That has like, way more to do with it than the money. The money enabled us to be in a space where we could do it, but it was really all about working with you all that let it go in the way in which it did.
Urshula Barbour
Thank you again, for the privilege of being able to work on it.
Paul Carlos
Yeah, thank you.
Daniel Story
That was AHR editor Mark Bradley, in conversation with Pure + Applied founding designers Paul Carlos and Urshula Barbour. They discussed their collaboration with the AHR to conceptualize and implement the journal’s first major redesign in over 50 years. You can peruse the new design for yourself, starting with the March 2022 issue. Earlier you heard from Diana Paton on her article, “Gender History, Global History, and Atlantic Slavery: On Racial Capitalism and Social Reproduction,” which you will find in the June 2022 issue. History in Focus is a production of the American Historical Review, in partnership with the American Historical Association, and the University Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Episode five was produced by me, Daniel Story, with engineering assistance from Myles Ryder-Alexis. Transcription support was by Syrus Jin.
You can learn more about this and other episodes at americanhistoricalreview.org. That’s it for now. Stay safe, and see you next time.
Show Notes
In this Episode
Diana Paton (William Robertson Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh)
Paul Carlos (Pure+Applied)
Urshula Barbour (Pure+Applied)
Mark Bradley (AHR editor and Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor of International History and the College at the University of Chicago)
Daniel Story (host and producer, digital scholarship librarian at University of California, Santa Cruz)
Music
By Blue Dot Sessions
Production
Produced by Daniel Story
Audio engineering assistance by Myles Rider-Alexis
Transcription support by Syrus Jin