Visit the April issue of the American Historical Review online.

This issue contains three articles and two review essays. The articles range in subject matter from U.S. food policy in the 20th century and African Americans in Southern courts in the 19th century to the impact of American “talkies” on Australian culture. The review essays survey the recent literature on masculinity and on family history from a Latin American perspective. Along with our usual extensive book review section, readers will note a new, or revived, section of “Featured Reviews.” See more about this issue below.

Articles

• The Foreign Policy of the Calorie – Nick Cullather argues that the scientists who ”invented” the calorie intended to bring food into the international discourse of measurable units.
• Status without Rights: African Americans and the Tangled History of Law and Governance in the Nineteenth-Century U.S. South – Laura F. Edwards explores freedpeople’s use of the legal system during the Civil War and Reconstruction to the legal culture of the antebellum South, focusing specifically on the aspect of the law dealing with matters of public or communal concern.
• ’The Filthy American Twang’: Elocution, the Advent of the American ‘Talkies,’ and Australian Cultural Identity – Joy Damousi explores how the negative response to American talkies in some Australian quarters fixed on the accent, pronunciation, and expression of American voices.

Reviews

• Western Masculinities in War and Peace – Robert A. Nye’s review essay surveys the recent literature on Western military masculinities since the late 18th century, as reflected in the gender ideals and practices of the citizen-soldier.
• Whither Family History? A Road Map from Latin America – Nara Milanich reviews the three-volume work The History of the Family (edited by David Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli), and uses it as a springboard for a broad assessment of the field of family history.

Featured Reviews
With this issue we reintroduce “Featured Reviews,” a section that last appeared in 1996. Our intention in this section is to highlight books that, in the estimation of the editors, ought to be called to the attention of a wide range of readers.

This post first appeared on AHA Today.