Histories of Resilience

Daniel Story
Welcome to History in Focus, a podcast by the American Historical Review. I’m Daniel Story. What does it meant to be resilient? Is it simply bouncing back after some kind of challenge? Or is it something more—evolving through a challenge, adapting to a new reality, or even a proactive strategy in anticipation of future upheavals? These are the kinds of questions explored in the December 2024 issue of the AHR. It’s a special issue—the journal’s first ever special issue. And it includes contributions from nearly two dozen scholars representing a wide range of historical times, places, themes, and methodologies. In this episode I speak with AHR board of editors members Josh Reid and Cymone Fourshey, both of whom were part of the editorial team that developed this issue. They give us a sense of why resilience was chosen for this first AHR special issue as well as survey several of the contributions. And along the way, we hear from a few of those contributors—Kate Whiteley on the Wiyot Tribe of Northern California, Thaís R. S. de Sant’Ana on migrant workers in Brazil, Tammy Wilks on Kenyan Nubians, and Bob Reinhardt on US communities submerged as part of big dam projects. You’ll find these articles and many more in the full December 2024 issue.

Cymone, Josh, thank you very much for joining me to talk about this exciting special issue. We’re going to dig into the issue itself, but I thought maybe we could start with the fact that the AHR is even doing a special issue. Unlike many other journals, AHR has to date never done one. What kind of insight can you give us on how the journal got to this point of deciding to dive into special issues?

Josh Reid
So Daniel, as you pointed out, this is the first special issue for the AHR. And so as we were conceiving of beginning to do this several years ago, it was pretty early on when Cymone and I joined the board of editors that Mark pitched this idea of doing special issues. We thought that we would do like a proof of concept, that we really wanted to showcase what a special issue could do. And then that really got us thinking about, why do special issues? What is it that we hope people are going to come to us with special issues that they would like to pitch? And so we really took an approach of trying to diversify the type of scholarship that is typically found in the American Historical Review. And we have pieces like that. We’ve got some pieces with community engagement or public history angles that oftentimes aren’t profiled commonly in the AHR. We specifically encouraged pieces that covered some of the regions that are rarely covered in the AHR, like the Pacific or Africa or East Asia. We have a number of pieces that include environmental history as kind of a central component of the work that they’re trying to do. Cymone, what other things came to the fore as we were kicking around this idea?

Cymone Fourshey
Yeah, I mean, originally when Mark came up with the idea, we were thinking about it as an entirely digital or online special issue in terms of production, that it would allow the production team to do an additional volume each year, but without having to do the print. That has been rethought a little bit, but it would also allow us to include some digital components—so imagery, video, sound. And so I think that we thought that in terms of new directions for AHR, as well as you know, the American Historical Association itself, and ways that historians are doing things in different ways. There was also conversation about museum work, how that might be included. So I think it was really thinking, not only topically, but also in terms of presentation and who might be included, and whose voices, both in terms of historical voices, but in terms of scholars who may or may not always be represented in the American Historical Review could be included if we did a special issue, and that if we did it as a model that we as the editorial board would model what that might look like.

Daniel Story
That’s great. So maybe, speaking of topic, why don’t we dive into this first special issue? Tell me about the topic that you tackled—resilience. What was it about resilience that struck you as a compelling analytical lens?

Cymone Fourshey
I think our first task was really to think about how we would invite people in, meaning not literally going out and inviting people, but choosing a topic that would invite people who don’t always submit to AHR. Because people have developed these ideas about how exclusive it is, or it’s only for, you know, Americanists or Europeanists, that if we chose a subject matter that might speak to other fields in a particular way, that we would probably get a more diverse array of people submitting just because the topic itself maybe spoke to these other sub fields of history. We spoke about it for a couple months, and we went back and forth. Was it trauma? Was it resilience? Was it something else? And I’ll let Josh maybe fill in some of the gaps.

Josh Reid
Sure, one of the things that quickly became evident as we were kicking around some different ideas is that we were thinking about what is it that makes the AHR unique, different from other journals, say, the Western History Quarterly, or Native American and Indigenous Studies. And in a lot of ways, we kind of approach this like we do with the AHA annual meeting. And both Cymone and I have served on program committees, so we already had a background in thinking this way. And what is it that makes the AHA, the annual meeting, unique and different from these other kinds of more specialized fields, and what we really kind of gravitated toward is trying to find a concept that would bring together scholars from across our discipline. What kind of topic can we have where we can bring together a diverse array of scholars who normally wouldn’t be in conversation with each other, either because of the time period they study, or the region that they focus on, or even the type of history that they do. And so we gravitated toward resilience, because we sought a theme that would resonate kind of across the spectrum with a lot of different types of historians, but also open the door for non-historians or other types of scholars who think about the past and can engage critically with it. How could we invite them to be part of this conversation? And so as we were thinking about these big themes or concepts, we were looking for something that we felt also had kind of intellectual legs that would allow different kinds of historians and scholars to approach it with new and provocative methods. And we wanted also a concept where they could get messy with this big idea, with whatever the concept was. We wanted people who could maybe disagree on resilience, or would show us different types of resilience in different communities or regions or eras, so that we could really kick open this big concept. You know so, resilience we kept circling around to as a concept that would make for an interesting organizing theme for this special issue,

Daniel Story
That makes a lot of sense. And so I guess my next question is, how does the special issue tackle defining resilience, whether in framing essays or in the individual contributions? What are some of the angles and inroads that readers will encounter in understanding what this special issue means by resilience?

Cymone Fourshey
I mean, I do think that we left it, as Josh said, a bit open for people to interpret it in a variety of ways based on methodology as well as topic, time period. I think that we came to like maybe two positions, but with a lot of positions in between, where, on the one side, there’s been a lot of talk about resilience as the notion of bouncing back. There’s some other examples though, that, and through our conversations and thinking about context, in which resilience might actually be a strategy that is built into people’s institutions that they’re already thinking about, whether consciously or subconsciously, about the ways in which you have to be able to absorb challenges. So it’s not merely that it’s a bouncing back after the fact of a trauma, a challenge, a catastrophe, but also that you’re moving towards something, knowing that those pitfalls, those events, those unfoldings, will inevitably be along the way. And so I think that in some cases, it’s defined that way. There’s also some examples, and there was a struggle at moments, people it sounded more like they might be thinking of things like resistance. But there were, you know, ways in which fugitivity and evasion of the state did become a sense of resilience for people to preserve something for themselves, to withhold, whether labor or their time, from what the state was imposing upon them. But I do think that the notion of resilience was that idea of durability, whether of their ideas of their life and their practices. I think that I personally struggled with the idea of just bounce back, because I’ve seen so many cases in the African context, and then also reading some of the work on Latin America and hearing a bit about some of the Native American work. So I think perhaps in some of the European American, Anglo American contexts, that is how people are particularly thinking about it, as the bounce back, but when you start to expand it beyond to Indigenous communities or broader history that it does become something else as well.

Josh Reid
Yeah, I guess one of the things that I really noticed in just co-editing this entire special issue, I learned a lot about resilience. Initially, when I approached the topic, I was really gung ho and supportive of, hey, let’s focus it this way, because resilience is something that Native nations and Indigenous communities talk about. It’s literally the language and rhetoric that they use, and it’s begun to show up in a lot of kind of scholarship across Indigenous Studies. But then as we started to dig into the concept, as the authors began really grappling with the term and coming to us with examples of resilience and strategies of resilience, this popular definition of bounce back, we began to see that that very quotidian understanding of resilience is way too simplistic, you know? And then we started thinking about, okay, where does the idea come from? And it’s been around for a while, and this is one of our co-editors gives us a nice overview of kind of the intellectual concept itself. But where it really enters our use, where we think of it more commonly, is through ecology, specifically from the 1960s where ecologists are talking about resilience, around the capacity of an ecological system to maintain or restore an equilibrium. But for those of us who know anything about the natural world or science, it’s like the one constant is change, and so it’s a mistake to define restoring an equilibrium to restoring an old equilibrium, like going back to some static ecological system in ecology, the equilibrium that emerges from a resilient system is something new. Unfortunately, social scientists and psychologists who in the 70s and 80s began using resilience, they oftentimes defined it around this very narrow sense of bouncing back to a static something that didn’t make a lot of sense, especially if we’re thinking of, you know, Indigenous peoples or communities that you know are facing the horrible traumas of settler colonialism or the catastrophic violence of genocide. How do you just bounce back from that? You don’t. The equilibrium that emerges, that is restored, is something new under new historically specific contexts. That’s what we see a lot of the essays and articles really dealing with. And that was particularly interesting for me, personally, to learn a lot more about resilience in that sense.

Cymone Fourshey
And I think that that is also that notion of you know that if societies are already thinking ahead towards resilience and building that into their institutions, it’s also about one agency, but the fact that it’s not a bounce back to the past or to something that pre existed, but that You are constantly innovating and rethinking in order to meet that moment and the times. So you’re still bringing your epistemology forward with you and your thinking about the world, and yet you’re recognizing that the world is also changing at the same time.

Daniel Story
Maybe could you take me through some of the specific contributions that came to the special issue that readers will encounter. Take us through a few of those and maybe pull out some of the angles and insights that these contributions are adding.

Josh Reid
Sure, I’ll go ahead and dive into this one here. Each article gives us a different kind of resilience, different based on history or historically contingent strategies for restoring that equilibrium. And so there are a few of the pieces that really speak to me and embody this approach to understanding resilience. Kat Whiteley’s article about the Wiyot Nation of Northern California, it highlights the ways that Wiyot women survived a massacre in 1860. And they rebuilt their society through healing and community building. And it’s their continued survivance that was like an embodied self determination, an embodied resilience, that led to a remarkable moment of actual land back for their tribal nation in 2019. And so there’s many dimensions of resilience and strategies toward building these resilient communities that Whiteley addresses in her article.

Kat Whiteley
My name is Kat Whiteley. I’m an assistant professor at UC Davis in the department of Native American Studies. My article is called “History on the Lost Coast: Locating Wiyot Stories of Resilience in Nancy and Matilda Spear.” This article sheds new light on how the Wiyot peoples of coastal California survived and revived their community. Nancy and Matilda Spear were two young women who survived the massacre on Tuluwat in Eureka, California, in 1860. The stories of resilience told by Nancy and Matilda’s fellow survivors and descendants illuminate how the community processed the horrors of mass violence and healed the wounds left by genocide. The article is based on two women, Nancy and Matilda Spear, who I am a descendant of. Nancy and Matilda Spear were two Wiyot mothers in coastal California, sometimes referred to as the quote “Lost Coast.” This is the very northern part of California, Humboldt County, right on the coast. It’s a place rich with Native people today. Humboldt County has the highest percentage of native peoples in the entire state. In 1860 in February during the early morning hours, while women of the Wiyot tribe and children were sleeping, settlers took boats over to the island known as Tuluwat, and mass murdered everyone. So at the end of one week, you have over 300 Wiyot people that were just murdered. All the surviving people, which is around 400 Wiyot people were rounded up and forcibly sent up north to a reservation. Nancy and Matilda were two young mothers. They had three mixed race kids with them at this time, and they were staying on the west side of the island, and they escaped. They went across the bay and walked to Matilda’s homestead in Freshwater, California. The stories of survival that have been told by Nancy and Matilda and their descendants really shaped this area called Freshwater. So if we look at the story of Nancy and Matilda and their descendants, they will be completely flattened. They’re seen only through these settler colonial forces of violence, trauma, and assimilation. You just had this horrendous massacre that made national news. And what did the community do? This article was seeking to look at one specific story, one specific family, to move that history beyond the history of American genocide. The choices of this next generation illuminate a meaningful desire to reclaim and celebrate their culture and participate in community together. Importantly, their lives took many shapes and took them in many directions, but they stayed in community with one another, and they continued to tell their stories and the story of Wiyots in the context of Nancy and Matilda and other kin and community members who survived a brutal attack on Tuluwat. It is so terrible to see what happened at this time period to Wiyot people. But then once you start looking at some of these actors and think what they did next, it’s just unimaginable how resilient they are. They are working within the system to get land put into trust or to add to their land base. They are going to go and buy land back 20 years after this massacre happens. They’re going to repurchase their own land from settlers that just got it 20 years prior. That’s unimaginable. That is just a sign of a resilient people. As Native people struggling for their own future, they are active agents. Things aren’t just happening to them. They are making choices within the context of very little to no choices. The history doesn’t stop in 1860 and also doesn’t have to be just a recounting of genocide and the horrible things that happened, but deciding what happened next,

Josh Reid
We’ve got, actually, a few articles that deal with kind of Indigenous resilience. There’s another California Indian case study that Megan Renoir and Shelly Covert talk about, relative to the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe. And this is a tribal nation that lacks federal recognition. And this community has pursued various strategies to craft their own historical narratives of survivance and resilience to show how they survived the near erasure of their tribal nation amid a system of recognition that does not even acknowledge their existence, you know. And so again, we’re getting a different approach to resilience, like real on the ground. How do these communities practice resilience?

Cymone Fourshey
The Wilkes piece on the Kenyan Nubians, in a sense, it takes the idea of resilience as a myth, but then reclaims it. So she speaks about Nubians of Kenya, who basically have no nationality. They’re on the in between, going back to the 1850s and how basically there’s this group of soldiers, a “martial race,” in quotes, they’re being used by various state entities. And so the soldiers basically deploy this myth of the Nubian sense of resilience, really, to, going back to an earlier point, preserve their autonomy or evade the state in a way. So they, they mobilize that notion, reclaim it. And to me, I was thinking about it in terms of like resiliency of the powerful, meaning the state itself has all this power to be resilient, and that those voices end up in the archive, and the ways in which the Nubians are erased from the archive or just depicted as militaristic, and that’s it, that’s all that you know of them. There’s no dimension. And it’s almost like they’ve reclaimed this resiliency to show like their own authority and the insights that they have and the contributions that they’ve made through the early 20th century.

Tammy Wilks
My name is Tammy Wilkes. I am a lecturer at the University of Cape Town, and what I mostly study is the coexistence, the conflict, the collaboration between different religions in urban African cities. The paper is called “Kenyan Nubians and the Myth of Nubian Resilience.” It presents a what if. What if we study resilience as a story and not a human trait? Is resilience a narrative, and what does that narrative do? Why is it remembered this way? Who remembers it, and at what point is it called forward to action what? And that’s what the paper takes on. Kenan Nubians are a minority community who trace their lineage to askari, which is an Arabic Swahili word for soldiers from present day Aswan, which is in Sudan. So invariably, but also with a little bit of change, what the myth of Nubian resilience is based on is the military powers of the Askari, of the Nubian Askari, of the Nubian soldier. And the extent to which that myth is animated and enacted depends on the circumstances of the day. So it gets invoked during political moments, such as the First World War, the Second World War, the making of the Kenya colony. And it also gets invoked and memorialized at moments for Kenyan Nubians when their land is under siege or captured by the state of the day. And using this myth to certain political ends helps us understand how discourse, a narrative, becomes as much of an infrastructure of building a colonial state as do military power and land annexation. A story can also help people make sense of themselves and their community outside of that occupation as a soldier. I set out in the paper to show that there’s an illusion, or a trap waiting for most scholars of African studies when we speak about resilience in Africa, because it almost assumes that Africans have this innate disposition to be resilient, or it assumes that Africans have to be taught how to be resilient. But on the other hand, if we’re going to take it as a mode of mobilizing people toward a political end, then that’s exactly how I explain what resilience is. It is an opportunity space. It enables people to shape themselves around a particular political end. And sometimes those political ends shift, and so they don’t know where they stand. In any case, what it allows you to do is examine the extent to which a story can be used to soften or shape some of the political decisions that you want to make for nation building, for state building, and for colonial state building project,

Cymone Fourshey
There’s that piece. And then the de Sant’Ana piece on Brazil, where migrants, actually, in the city of the forest, Manaus, sort of the interwar period leading up to World War II, are able to evade the state as well. So here they are laborers and under government pressures. They’re being demanded to provide labor for the state, and yet they find ways to basically sit out. Like the state sees it as, like they’re giving up an income, however, they find other ways of doing piecemeal labor outside the confines of what the state is asking for in order to save a piece for themselves and have this resilience to move forward once these moments of intensive labor in the forest and for the state sort of pass over.

Thaís R. S. de Sant’Ana
My name is Thaís R. S. de Sant’Ana, and I currently live in Houston, Texas, where I have been working as Assistant Professor of History at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. My current research examines the role of migration and settlement in development processes in Amazonia, particularly in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. I am the granddaughter of an Afro-Brazilian cowboy. He married the daughter of one of the rich farmers who employed him, but this farmer opposed their marriage. As a result, my grandmother was disinherited, and my grandparents spent their lives as low income autonomous migrants. Therefore, my interest in the experiences of Brazilian migrants hits close to home for me. My article examines the role resilience plays in the experiences of migrants in Manaus. Manaus is the capital of the Brazilian state of Amazonas. It is the city of the forest, and it is the largest city in Amazonia. Manaus went from being a hub where Indigenous peoples in the Amazon used to gather and trade, to becoming a place where internal migrants would come and also create their own opportunities. My article’s narrative covers the interwar period, also characterized by the rubber crisis. My piece shows how state-led development schemes that aim at repositioning Amazonia within the global market in the first half of the 20th century ultimately reinforced the traditional culture of resilience. Development in Amazonia goes beyond the boom and bust of the rubber economy. I wanted to see what else is happening when the rubber is no longer profitable. How come Manaus didn’t become a ghost town? The article highlights instances in which state-led schemes actually failed to ensure the long term engagement of workers with regional programs. We see both new and established migrants showcasing resilience and determination to find alternatives to government solutions. By studying internal migrants, you can see experiences and opportunities that the city offers, and they are many times largely detached from what the state is doing. It’s based on the creativity of people on the move. One key factor in the resilience of migrants was their involvement with existing local internal migrant structures, which offered both formal and informal opportunities and helped foster skills for survival and even prosperity. They enabled migrants to maintain a degree of control over their labor, over their resources, and build support systems that helped them navigate transitions between formal and informal employment. I frame migration within the context of resilience, because I believe that in Manaus, resilience is not just about survival. It’s an ongoing struggle. It’s also a catalyst for change. Adaptation is a continuous process. It’s not just a transitional one.

Cymone Fourshey
I like those two pieces together. Even though they’re totally different parts of the world, it seems like a similar kind of strategy of evasion in order to have the resilience to continue after the oppression.

Josh Reid
There are a couple other pieces that also really stick out to me as great examples of kind of bringing these new concepts of resilience, or new strategies of resilience, to our understanding of the past. And these bring us more into kind of, like the environmental history realm. One is a co-authored piece by Greg Cushman, Johannes Feddema, and Trisha Jackson, their article about Rapa Nui. In this sweeping piece, they uncover the Indigenous longue durée of Rapanrui resilience from the original settling of the island through subsequent colonial intrusions. And keep in mind that Rapa Nui, you know, what some people might normally think of or know as Easter Island, is often seen as the poster child of ecological collapse, thanks to Jared Diamond. But Cushman, Jackson, and Feddema, they draw on dendrochronology, archaeoastronomy, the Rongorongo script of Rapa Nui, to literally turn that on its head, to flip this problematic assumption of ecological collapse, to turn it around. And they show how Rapanui peoples encoded historical and ecological knowledge in many of the facets of their culture to build resilience across centuries. And so we get a profoundly different take on a Pacific society that many people think they understand. And so this is where applying that lens of resilience gives us an entirely new take on a particular historical example. Then the other one that I also really like here in this journal is Bob Reinhardt’s piece about The Atlas of Drowned Towns that he’s been working on for the last several years. And this is one of those that really speaks to the digital piece that we were specifically hoping that some authors would include. It’s got some strong public history components to it, because Reinhardt is examining the resilience of communities that are submerged by dam projects in the North American West, and his research reveals that these communities did not disappear as the waters arose. Their towns may have, were literally, flooded and drowned, but they took with them the survivors. The people from those towns took with them their material items from their homes, their memories and their stories, as they rebuilt these new, resilient communities in other parts of the West.

Bob Reinhardt
My name is Bob Reinhardt. I’m an associate professor of history at Boise State University, and I am the director of The Atlas of Drowned Towns. I am an environmental historian. I focus on the history of the American West in the 20th and 21st centuries, but my even more specific area of interest is river development in the American West, even more specifically, communities that were displaced or eliminated to make way for the reservoirs, for large dams. And for me, especially, the thing I’m interested in is how the people in these places responded to the elimination of their home. That question of how did people respond is at the core of the article, and thinking about, how do we characterize these myriad forms of reaction to the loss of people’s homes, to their forced displacement. And the spectrum runs anywhere from enthusiastic embrace of what some people saw as opportunities to make a new life to some pretty vocal reactions against having to lose their homes. I was really dissatisfied with the idea, which I myself in many ways perpetuated in an early article about this topic, of only looking for forms of resistance and only characterizing those things that people did as some form of resistance. And resilience offered a conceptual opportunity to find ways of making more comprehensive sense of the full spectrum of responses. That spectrum not only deals with how people responded at that particular moment but responses over time and efforts into the present for these communities and descendants of these communities to be able to say my grandparents home or my parents home is underwater, but this place is still important to me. I think about resilience in terms of resisting, insisting, and persisting. The idea is to try to use resilience as a way of exploring those three modes in which people have asserted themselves and asserted their communities, both in the past as well as in the present. The reasons that I think a digital space helps with this project is because of the layers of experience that we can literally overlay on this. We not only have dots on the map for where communities were and the dams that inundated them, but also geolocated artifacts that pop up depending on what moment in time you’ve selected on the slider to give some sense of the depth of these communities, what it was like to live in these communities. A digital space also provides opportunities for the public to engage in the project, not just in terms of the interactive elements of the website, but also, following the path of many other institutions that have done this, community archiving, providing opportunities for people to upload pictures that they’ve taken, artifacts that they have at their home, or their own stories. If we have a platform where people can make those kinds of contributions, I think it will enrich not only other people’s understanding of those places, but also perhaps provide these people with an opportunity for them to better understand these places in their own memories and their own stories of their families. I hope that people when they read the article, I hope they will go to the website. I hope they’ll take those surveys that are part of the article to help me better understand how we can improve this project. But I hope that people think about ways that historians can open up spaces for historical actors or people in the present to reveal their resilience.

Josh Reid
Reinhardt’s piece really gives us a fine-grained look at how resilience can operate on the ground, and I think readers will be very interested to kind of see some of the digital components that are connected to his piece.

Cymone Fourshey
I think that each of these pieces will speak across continents and across subfields of history and get people really thinking. I was thinking about the Bob Reinhardt piece and how the idea of exploring submerged towns made me think about ancient Egyptian history and how we are continually hearing about these found pyramids, right, or towns like Petra where they’re rediscovered. And so in terms of the environment, we often think of the environment as being more powerful than humans. But on the other hand, these human architectural and engineering feats seem to have some kind of resilience, also, in that they reappear centuries, millennia later. On the one hand, those towns are being submerged for new purposes, and it does make us think about power and who has resources—we can think of Katrina or Hurricane Maria—but we can also think about it in terms of as new needs arise. So it might get us asking different kinds of questions about why these events take place. Is it specifically to erase a community, or is it specifically to make sure that communities, more broadly, are able to survive over time? I think that the Reinhardt piece is one particular example that will speak across many different fields, but there are others like that.

Daniel Story
So taking a step back, what do you hope readers will take away from this special issue. What are your hopes and dreams?

Cymone Fourshey
I hope that people will take away that resilience is not just something that people are doing for survivance, and it’s not an unthought through concept. People are actually pre thinking and building it into their institutions and recognizing that they’re going to face challenges. I think that’s a little bit where agency comes in as an Africanist or as people who don’t do Western European history or the short term of United States history. Those are the histories that are often pushed to the side or marginalized, Nobody’s paying attention to them. And in fact, there’s so much rich material there of how communities are actually grappling with or thinking about. It Brings me to the idea of we often focus today on neoliberalism. When you look at what the Kenyan Nubians were doing, or what the people in Manaus were doing to evade Vargas’ dictatorship, they’re actually using these strategies of, I don’t actually want to participate in that kind of a system, or that kind of capitalism, or I want to have control over my labor, and that is a piece of what is resilience, that if I’m exhausting myself with this labor, or I’m I’m not preserving the resources that we need for the environment to actually be resilient as well, that we’re not really living life. So I hope that people take away that idea of there are people really deeply thinking and actually philosophizing about trade offs. Would they rather have excessive resources, or do they want to have a quality of life? And that’s what I think some of these stories are showing us, is that people are, whether through the environment, through the forest, whether it’s because they’re creating these forest environments with Fengshui, or they’re, you know, in the forest trying to make a livelihood out of the labor that they can on their own without the state controlling them, or as soldiers who are sort of moving in between these liminal spaces. And I’m part of what I want to be, but not what I don’t want to be. That’s what I think that people should take away, is that there’s so much rich material out there that we can actually have new ways of conceptualizing if we read across subfields, and not only within our field all the time.

Josh Reid
What I hope readers see is that resilience is a powerful concept. Back to this point that communities are using it, people are using it. They’re talking about and describing themselves as being resilient, as pursuing strategies of resilience, and building resilient communities, all that kind of stuff. We see an uptick of this, you know, especially when we talk about climate change and building resilient communities, or climate change, or the fact that, you know, many of the people who are going to suffer some of the worst effects of climate change are Indigenous communities who have been displaced from their homelands and are relegated to tiny reservations or pieces of land. They’re on the coast that is now being inundated with rising seas. But I guess one of the things that I really want readers to take away from this is to understand that we shouldn’t just use resilience as a sound bite because it’s popular, because we see it in the media or popular literature. So don’t deploy it sloppily. And I think that’s what you see from all the pieces in this special issue, is that these authors, they’re giving us examples of resilience and ways that resilience reveals new findings, and they’re doing this with historical specificity. And maybe this will inspire readers to apply the term in new, provocative, and critical ways themselves. I guess that’s what my hope is for readers of this special issue.

Daniel Story
Well, Josh, Cymone, thank you very much.

Josh Reid
Sure.

Cymone Fourshey
Thank you, Daniel.

Daniel Story
That was my conversation with Josh Reid and Cymone Fourshey about the AHR’s first ever special issue, “Histories of Resilience.” We also heard from issue contributors Kat Whiteley, Thaís R. S. de Sant’Ana, Tammy Wilks, and Bob Reinhardt. “Histories of Resilience” is the AHR’s December 2024 issue. In addition to the folks we’ve heard from today, you’ll also find contributions from John Haldon and Lee Mordechai, Ian Miller and Chris Coggins, Alex Jania; Greg Cushman, Johannes Feddema, and Trisha Jackson; Megan Renoir and Shelly Covert, Rachel Anderson, Jessie Ramey and Amelia Golcheski , and Daniel McDonald, as well as board of editors members Shelly Chan, Yoav Di-Capua, and Wendy Warren.

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. This episode was produced by Syrus Jin and me, Daniel Story. You can find out more about this and other episodes at historians.org/ahr. That’s it for now. See you next time.