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The article presents information on lesson planning and teaching methods to teach students about the history of abortion in Texas. The methods discussed include the use of podcasts as a genre to teach about the experiences of a single abortion clinic in Texas and its providers during the twentieth century.

An introduction is presented to a section of the periodical that reimagines contemporary historical practice, with this issue's theme on nationalism.

Tracking and analyzing connection and mobility are now conventional in oceanic and world historiography and in many Indigenous historiographies. This article offers a counterargument and counterinstance. On both sides of the Tasman Sea lie human histories of almost incommensurably different temporal orders, separate for several centuries and suddenly connected in 1770, when Polynesians and Aboriginal people met. The Tasman Sea turns out to be one of the more fascinating fault lines for world historians who seek to fold ancient and modern, so-called prehistory and history, together into new periodizations of deep time and shallow time. It suggests the need seriously to consider a Tasman Divide as much as a connected Tasman World. This article recasts James Cook's crossing of the Tasman Sea in 1770 less as a significant first contact between Englishmen and Indigenous Australians on that coast and more as a meeting of three peoples who occupied radically different temporalities: (1) the Polynesian Tupaia, (2) the Englishman James Cook, and (3) Aboriginal people whose names we do not know. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How will climate change affect place-based historical research? In this personal essay, author Catherine Dunlop reflects on her experience of researching historical attitudes toward France's mistral wind while simultaneously feeling the wind's powerful gusts firsthand. Unsatisfied with the French state's indoor weather archives, Dunlop develops her research project around the outdoor archives that she encounters on a daily basis. Through her sensory experiences of the mistral, both at sea and on land, Dunlop hones her research questions and ultimately deepens her understanding of the mistral's role in modern French history. Even as she acknowledges the benefits that came from her firsthand encounters with the mistral, Dunlop recognizes the fragile and tenuous aspects of place-based historical research. Places like Provence, and their distinctive winds, are changing. The Anthropocene, she argues, will alter historians' ability to connect with and learn from the landscape heritage of the places that they visit. Losing our outdoor archives to climate change will impact historical research in ways that we are just beginning to realize. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An index for the March 2021 edition of the scholarly periodical "American Historical Review" is presented.

A review is offered of the podcast "The Last Archive," by Jill Lepore.

Indigenous people are often seen as static recipients of transatlantic encounter, influencing the Atlantic world only in their parochial interactions with Europeans, but the reality is that thousands of Native Americans crossed the ocean during the sixteenth century, many unwillingly, but some by choice. As diplomats, entertainers, traders, travelers, and, sadly, most often when enslaved, Indigenous people operated consciously within structures that spanned the ocean and created a worldview that was framed in transatlantic terms. Focusing on purposeful travelers of "Aztec" (Central Mexican) origin, this article uses the distinctive context of the 1500s to rewrite our understandings of the Atlantic world. In the turbulent waters of early empire, we can more easily see Native people as purposeful global actors who created and transformed social, economic, political, and intellectual networks, forging not one but many "Indigenous Atlantics." This is about more than "looking east from Indian country," or recovering the transatlantic journeys of Native people, important though both those things are. To find a truly "Indigenous Atlantic," we must reimagine the history of the ocean itself: as a place of Indigenous activity, imagination, and power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author responds to the roundtable collection of reviews for Julius S. Scott's "The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution," found within this issue. Topics explored include Haiti and the Haitian Revolution, the Age of Revolution, Atlantic Studies, international recognition of Haiti after its revolution, slavery and the slave trade, and racism.

Age is an essential category of analysis for African history. For over a century, social scientists have emphasized the central role of age-grading in African cultures. Whereas most people in precolonial African societies assessed age in relative terms (juniors vs. seniors), European colonialism expanded the legal importance of chronological age. Gender mattered to both definitions of age. Faced with two incommensurable systems for understanding life stages—one based on relational (male) seniority and the other on chronological age—African women growing up during the colonial period found new ways to assert a sense of belonging among generations of women. I argue in favor of a feminist methodology that recognizes the broader trend among a generation of young women in Africa who employed conflicts over age to assert their maturity, and in doing so located themselves in their own histories. Identifying female age sets and generations thus offers new perspectives on how African girls and women make and remake history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the ongoing revolutions in historical research is the flood of new information about the past that comes not from written documents but from the natural sciences and archaeology. What might this mean for the profession of history, and for our training and institutional practices? How might it affect our research and interpretations of the past? Which fields of history will be most and least affected? I argue for a cautious embrace of the new data about the past coming from the paleosciences, offering a few examples of the promise and perils presented by the work of our natural science and archaeology colleagues. With each passing year, the proportion of our knowledge of the past that derives from the kinds of documents we have learned to read and interpret will shrink, and the proportion that derives from what to most of us are unfamiliar sciences will mount. This has implications. First, the deeper past might make a comeback. The last century or two are the best documented and will likely be least affected by the flood. The intellectual excitement may tip toward the study of earlier centuries where relative significance of information in other formats is greater. Second, the ways in which we train historians may need to change. A possible partial guide to our future as historians is the experience of precolonial Africanists, who are accustomed to research without written documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An index to the February 2020 edition of the scholarly periodical "American Historical Review" is presented.

At the height of the "Second Cold War" of the early 1980s, Britons from all walks of life engaged in a wide-ranging public discussion about the likelihood of nuclear Armageddon. Historians have generally understood this cultural conversation as having been motivated by deeply seated fears of nuclear war. This article, however, shifts the focus from fear to risk. It traces the precise ways that British men, women, and children conceptualized the nature of nuclear warfare and debated how its associated risks could be managed. While left-wing activists espoused unilateral disarmament as the best way to alleviate the nuclear threat, a wide swath of the British public turned instead to "self-help" strategies that aligned with the neoliberal ideals of personal autonomy, self-reliance, and individualism. The nuclear risk debate thus reveals the contours of an emerging "neoliberal sensibility" of the period. It also illuminates how the prospect of nuclear war offered Britons a means to articulate and define their expectations of the state amidst Thatcher's broader prioritization of individual accountability over governmental responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The placement of Indigenous girls and young women in white homes to work as servants was a key strategy of official policy and practice in both the United States and Australia. Between the 1880s and the Second World War, under the outing programs in the U.S. and various apprenticeship and indenturing schemes in Australia, the state regulated and constructed relations between Indigenous and white women in the home. Such state intervention not only helped to define domesticity in a modern world, but was integral to the formation of the modern settler colonial nation in its claims to civilizing authority in the United States and Australia. In the context of settler colonialism, domesticity was not hegemonic in this period, but rather was precarious and uncertain. By prescribing and demanding from employers demonstrations of domesticity, the state was engaged in perfecting white women as well as Indigenous women, the latter as the colonized, to be domesticated, and the former as the colonizer, to domesticate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fractured nature of emergent domesticity in its first phase in the 1760s was inextricably tied to the perils as well as promises of commerce for individual households in an unpredictable global economy, although historians have focused on the metropolitan roots of domesticity. A microhistorical exploration of the world of a single household in the French city of Lyon brings the fault lines of a globalizing economy, consumption, and domesticity into sharp focus as lived experience. It suggests the uneven terrain of domesticity, in terms of gender, household, and family, as well as for producers and consumers. In the experiences of household members and in the classified advertisements in the local newspaper, fractured domesticity was manifest, the conjugal labor—reproductive and productive—that made global domesticity local was evident, and the centrality of commercial risk as a fault line in domesticity was clarified. The power and limits of "domesticity" as an emotional, cultural, and economic as well as political project were located in familial practice. The potency and limits of domesticity functioned as a system of power that was contingent, layered, and fragmented and that highlighted and elided emotional, reproductive, and productive costs in particular ways at particular times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technological and economic forces are radically restructuring our ecosystem of knowledge, and opening our information space increasingly to forms of digital disruption and manipulation that are scalable, difficult to detect, and corrosive of the trust upon which vigorous scholarship and liberal democratic practice depend. Using an illustrative case from China, this article shows how a determined actor can exploit those vulnerabilities to tamper dynamically with the historical record. Briefly, Chinese knowledge platforms comparable to JSTOR are stealthily redacting their holdings, and globalizing historical narratives that have been sanitized to serve present political purposes. Using qualitative and computational methods, this article documents a sample of that censorship, reverse-engineers the logic behind it, and analyzes its discursive impact. Finally, the article demonstrates that machine learning models can now accurately reproduce the choices made by human censors, and warns that we are on the cusp of a new, algorithmic paradigm of information control and censorship that poses an existential threat to the foundations of all empirically grounded disciplines. At a time of ascendant illiberalism around the world, robust, collective safeguards are urgently required to defend the integrity of our source base, and the knowledge we derive from it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces how ecological context shaped the actions and ambitions of the United States and the Soviet Union, through a comparison of their use of the Pacific walrus. Based in the shared environmental context of the Bering Strait, it examines how the two countries implemented opposing ideological projects in the Arctic, expecting to increase production and by doing so make Indigenous peoples into capitalist or socialist citizens. In an environment impossible for agriculture and difficult for industry, walrus-harvesting became one of the few productive options for these ambitions. Between the 1870s and the 1950s, both the U.S. and the USSR experimented with massive harvests of blubber and ivory to feed ideas of economic growth, before adopting mirrored conservation policies. This article argues that the reason stems from the inherently metabolic nature of modern states, which function by ensuring flows of energy through their economies and citizens. In the Bering Strait, that energy came in part from walrus, making environmental management and the economic practices it supported dependent on the species' biological capacities. Not only do modern, growth-oriented states change nature; they function ecologically, emerging from and thus governed by the distributed agency of ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on the rising use of concepts, theories, and methodologies taken from social network analysis in early modern history, along with the opportunities and challenges it presents. Scholars have been quick to attribute the growing interest in historical social networks to movements for interdisciplinary research, new possibilities presented by digital technologies, and the prominence of the term "social network" in present-day culture. In contrast, this article reconnects recent trends to longstanding attention to the nature of early modern social relations, which has its roots in the foundations of modern social thought laid in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and developed through the postwar decades in both history and sociology. In doing so, the article shows the extent to which social network analysis shares antecedents, interests, and goals with more traditional historical methods. It argues that, when sensitively applied, network approaches present many opportunities for historians engaging with enduring questions about the nature of social relations in the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On September 2, 2018, a fire destroyed the 200-year-old National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, along with the vast majority of the nearly 20 million items it housed. Located in the historic São Cristóvão Palace, the museum originated as a colonial institution, and its history was intertwined with that of the Brazilian nation. Among the millions of items consumed in the flames were more than 40,000 indigenous artifacts, as well as a rich Africana collection reflecting the relationships developed between Brazil and the African continent during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. This article summarizes the history of the National Museum and its holdings, details Brazil's long-term neglect of its tangible heritage, and highlights the magnitude of the museum's loss—a loss not just for the national and international scholars who researched its collections, but also for the low-income residents in the neighboring areas for whom it was the only accessible institution of its kind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his introduction, Jonathan Judaken surveys theories and debates about anti-Semitism. He makes three salient observations about what hampers the field. First, it lacks agreed-upon definitions of its central concepts and terms. Second, how anti-Semitism compares to Islamophobia, anti-black racism, and other forms of oppression is unresolved. Third, periodization of anti-Semitism remains vague. In particular, he underscores and counters eternalist and teleological narratives, claims about uniqueness, and apologetics. He argues that these impediments are in part a product of the shadow of the Holocaust and the continuing conflict over Israel/Palestine. To move out of these theoretical impasses, Judaken makes two recommendations. First, he suggests replacing the term "anti-Semitism." He argues that as a term for the fear and fascination about Jews and Judaism, "Judeophobia" better lends itself to conceptual clarity, periodization, and comparability. Second, he calls for more meta-level considerations, drawing from work in critical social and literary theory, postcolonialism, and studies of racism and gender. Congruent with this conceptual groundwork, Judaken suggests that Judeophobic discourses and practices encompass five modes—stereotypes, prejudice, discrimination, racialization, and murder—and five periods—ancient, early Christian, high medieval, modern, and post-Holocaust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A topic index for the February 2020 edition of the scholarly periodical "American Historical Review" is presented.

An introduction to a series of articles in the journal about the topic of domesticity and households in history is presented.

An introduction is presented to a forum section on the role of language in historiography, noting articles on historical linguistics, on Indian Ocean travelogues, and on vernacular sources.

The article critiques the book "Europe and the People without History" by Eric R. Wolf which was originally published in 1982, and it mentions Wolf's views about the indigenous, non-European peoples. European colonialism and imperialism are addressed, along with examinations of European societies and cultures. Determination and Wolf's assessment of world history in his book are mentioned, along with wolf's contribution to the history of capitalism.

The article discusses the author's views about Poland in 1968, and it mentions an uprising involving Polish students, interrogations in Warsaw, Poland's prisons, and the treatment of young protesters in the U.S. and Western Europe. Authoritarian rule under the First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party Władysław Gomułka is examined, along with Poland's industrial-agricultural economy, activist Lech Wałęsa, and an insurgency in Poland.

The article discusses the significance of global 1968 protest movements in Canadian politics. Topics include the impact of social movements on Canadian historiography, the role of indigenous history and historiography within Canadian history, and political responses to 1960s protest movements in Canada in relation to austerity and neoliberalism.

The article discusses the relation of gender to the 1968 student protests in Europe. Topics include the significance of public speech in the protests, rallies by women in relation to abortion laws and social critiques in Eastern Europe, and the role of women in strikes in Poland in relation to working class struggles.

The article discusses the author's views about 1968 and the history of a black liberation movement in America, and it mentions Black Power Olympic Games protests, a black radical movement in the Berkeley, California area, and the founding of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in Oakland, California in 1966. America's Republican Party and the nation's Voting Rights Act are addressed, along with the social and political conditions in the San Francisco Bay area in the 20th century.

The Central Asian city of Shahrisabz has long been a historical footnote, widely regarded as an unruly “province in rebellion” plaguing its more powerful overlords in Bukhara during the seventeenth through late nineteenth centuries. In fact, it was an autonomous city-state in its own right, and the mechanisms through which it has been written into submission in the historiography reveal much about historical methodology and premodern logics of sovereignty. To recover Shahrisabz’s story, this article pursues a non-hegemonic reading of hegemonic Persian writing (a strategy more frequently applied to colonial sources) and pieces together scattered textual fragments composed in the city itself. In doing so, it illustrates the ways in which variegated forms of symbolic submission and coercive power intersected to create complexes not easily mappable to modern binaries. Seemingly contradictory forms of sovereignty routinely coexisted within a single polity, and greater specificity is necessary to capture a kaleidoscope of permutations. Thus source methodology and sovereignty stand as two conceptual domains intrinsically intertwined, with insights into the latter possible only with careful attention to the former. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to recent discussions of the possibility of writing global intellectual histories, this essay asks what that might involve for world regions beyond the West, particularly for ethnically and linguistically diverse areas that make up the necessarily complex units of analysis with which global historians must reckon. This methodological task is undertaken here by way of a case study of the Indian Ocean during the high tide of European colonization. Two dominant historiographical tropes are challenged to clear sufficient interpretive room for the variety of intellectual transactions across so heterogeneous a space. The first is the routine characterization of the Indian Ocean as an arena of “cosmopolitanism.” The second is the premise that oceanic actors operated under the intellectual hegemony of a “colonial episteme.” To test these claims, and widen the remit of what global intellectual history might mean, the focus here turns to the vernacular spheres of writing that rapidly widened in the era of print. Overall, the essay argues for understanding the Indian Ocean through an alternative conceptual framework of “vernacularism” and “heterotopia” that allows for the multiple intellectual trajectories of such world historical contact zones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the author's views about a utopian rationalism concept in relation to the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia (Prague Spring of 1968), and it mentions other world events in 1968 such as a war in Vietnam and racial discrimination against African Americans. The idea of a world revolution in 1968 is addressed, along with Communist utopias and reforms in Czechoslovakia in the 20th century.

“Bereft, Selfish, and Hungry” is a history of “the poor” as a concept in East Africa in the Common Era. It shows how people speaking Greater Luhyia languages reconceptualized poverty as they settled new lands, interacted with other communities, and dealt with social and political change. Their notions of the poor ranged from connecting them with bereavement to associating them with selfishness; from an early emphasis on want to later ideas of deceit. Paying attention to these changes in different, yet related, historical speaker communities allows us to see the dynamism in Greater Luhyian economic thought. This article thus makes the case for writing longue durée histories of vernacular ways of knowing in oral societies. Doing so requires drawing on methods from other disciplines. In this case, comparative historical linguistics allows for the reconstruction of words and their meanings to different proto-languages, whether proto-Greater Luhyia or its descendant languages. Those words and meanings can then be contextualized with evidence from archaeology, climate science, oral traditions, and ethnographic descriptions. Through this approach, we learn a great deal about how people in eastern Uganda and western Kenya historically conceived of the poor and how those ideas changed over time, well before the advent of colonialism, Christianity, and capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the significance of the political and social movements in the U.S. associated with the year 1968, particularly concerning the concepts of liberalism, feminism, and what is called Third-Worldism, or Third World identification. She discusses the impact of the Vietnam War on U.S. politics, the connection between race and resistance, and decolonization.

The article discusses the author's views about the political and social conditions in Italy during 1968, and it mentions student protests, the involvement of young people in social movements, and various protests involving secondary school students in Italian cities in 2017. Political participation and direct action events such as sit-ins and marches in Italy are assessed, along with graffiti slogans and a feminist movement in Italy in the 1970s.

The article discusses what the author refers to as a slow revolution in the Arab World in May 1968, and it mentions then-Lebanese political science professor Hassan Sa'b's call for students to revolt in October 1968. The need for students to look inside and challenge their own governments, social structures, and values is examined, along with demonstrations by Arab youth in places such as Tunisia, Egypt, and Lebanon. The 1967 Six-Day War is assessed.

The article discusses various opinions about the political and social conditions in Northern Ireland in 1968, and it mentions a peace process, issues involving discrimination and inequality in the region, and student demonstrations in places such as Belfast, Northern Ireland. The People's Democracy (PD) student-based group and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) are assessed, along with the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and then-Prime Minister of Northern Ireland Terence O'Neill.

While the history of U.S. immigration policy has traditionally been directed "inward," toward questions of American law, institutions, policy regimes, and modes of national belonging, an emerging historical scholarship is asking how U.S. immigration policy has been shaped by U.S. foreign relations. This essay draws together, builds on, and transforms this literature by foregrounding new questions of transnational, imperial, and global inequality in the making of U.S. immigration politics and policy, and by problematizing not only closures and exclusions, but selective openings in the U.S. immigration regime. Despite conventional claims that immigration is and has been a matter of "domestic" politics, in fact, U.S. immigration policy has long been self-consciously engaged with transnational realities. Indeed, as the essay argues, while serving as a way that Americans could define the nation against an "outside," U.S. immigration policy has simultaneously been instrumentalized to project U.S. national-imperial power out into the world. This geopolitics of mobility has taken wide-ranging, overlapping, and often contradictory forms: the pursuit of labor power, the management of overseas colonies, the diffusion of U.S. goods, practices, and values, the building of legitimacy, the containment of enemies, and the rescue of friends. An imperial history of U.S. immigration control has the capacity both to frame new historical inquiries and to draw attention to the crucial ways that many migrants to the United States have already been enmeshed in U.S.-centered fields of power long before they approach the recognized boundaries of the U.S. state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Making a Living" moves the gendered analysis of sex work in an economic direction. Using examples from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Venice, the analysis focuses on the ground-up economics that provided women as well as men with disposable income, economic value, and agency. Based on the firsthand testimonies of ordinary women from throughout Europe summoned before Venice's moral tribunal of the Executors against Blasphemy, the research illuminates the larger story in world history about the economic potential of the sex trade for household and family and how market demands undermined gender norms and religious traditions. The Bestemmia's microstories refine our picture of the trade in relation to household composition and alternatives to patriarchal rule. Both individual and corporate behavior on the part of Venice's sex workers lend themselves to a different interpretive paradigm for prostitution, one that departs from conceptualizations that view the trade in primarily moralistic terms as external to or even opposed to the family unit. In Venice, sex work did not necessarily separate women from the rest of the population. On the contrary, they remained deeply embedded in the city's social and financial networks as well as family life. This is evidenced by various constituencies within the city responding to plausible economic incentives and thus approaching the sale of sex differently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]