AHR Interview

In this episode, AHR editor Alex Lichtenstein speaks with filmmaker Robert Greene about his 2018 film “Bisbee ’17.” In it Greene examines the complex and troubled history of Bisbee, Arizona, a mining town located near the state’s southern border. The film’s central focus is the 1917 illegal removal of more than a thousand striking mine works, and many of their local supporters, by the mining company Phelps Dodge—a scarring event now known simply as the “Bisbee Deportation.” Greene went about the examination, in part, by involving present-day residents of the town in reenacting key aspects of the deportation event, an innovation that effectively transforms the film from a straightforward historical documentary into a far more complex examination of history, memory, and memorialization. Greene’s other critically-acclaimed films include the Gotham Awards-nominated “Actress” (2014), “Fake It So Real” (2011), and “Kati With An I” (2010). He currently serves as Filmmaker-in-Chief at the Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the University of Missouri. “Bisbee ’17” is the subject of an AHR roundtable titled “Re-creating the ‘Bisbee Deportation’ on Film,” which appears in the June 2019 issue.

In the fall of 2018, Wheaton College historian Kathryn Tomasek made a visit to Indiana University, Bloomington, as a guest of IU’s Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities. AHR Interview producer Daniel Story sat down with her in front of a live audience to discuss historians and digital scholarship. Kathryn Tomasek is Professor of History at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, where she teaches nineteenth-century U.S. history, women’s history, and digital history, and is a founding director of the Wheaton College Digital History Project. She has written extensively on both women’s history and digital history and methodology and served as a member of the American Historical Association’s ad hoc Committee on the Professional Evaluation of Digital Publications by Historians. Her current focus includes an ongoing collaborative project to TEI encode historical financial records.

In this episode, editor Alex Lichtenstein speaks with Kathryn Olivarius, whose article, “Immunity, Capital, and Power in Antebellum New Orleans,” appears in the April 2019 issue of the AHR. Olivarius is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University where she focuses on the antebellum South, Greater Caribbean, slavery, and disease. Her book, Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press.

In this episode we speak with Brandon R. Byrd about his work in African American and African Diaspora intellectual history. His first book, forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press, is titled The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti. Byrd is Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. He also currently serves as vice president of the African American Intellectual History Society and is a contributor to that organization’s online publication Black Perspectives. The African American Intellectual History Society is a scholarly organization dedicated to the research, writing, and teaching of Black thought and culture. Founded in 2014 by Christopher Cameron, it has quickly become a hub of cutting edge, cross-disciplinary public scholarship. In addition to publishing Black Perspectives, it offers a range of fellowships, awards, and prizes, and hosts an annual conference, which in March 2019 will be held at the University of Michigan.

One of the late-breaking sessions at this year’s AHA Annual Meeting dealt with the devasting fire that engulfed Brazil’s Museu Nacional in September 2018. The session was titled “Archives Burning: The Fire at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro and Beyond.” We spoke with three of the participants just after the panel concluded: Natalia Sobrevilla Perea, Seth Garfield, and Mariza de Carvalho Soares. Natalia Sobrevilla Perea is Professor of Latin American History at University of Kent. She is the author of the book The Caudillo of the Andes: Andrés de Santa Cruz, which was published in English by Cambridge University Press in 2011 and in Spanish by the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos in 2015. Seth Garfield is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of the 2001 book Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil: State Policy, Frontier Expansion, and the Xavante Indians, 1937–1988, and the 2013 In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States, and the Nature of a Region, both published Duke University Press. Mariza de Carvalho Soares recently retired from her position as Associate Professor of History at the Universidade Federal Fluminense in Rio de Janeiro and has more recently served as the curator of the African collection at the Museu Nacional. She is the author of People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro, published in English in 2011 by Duke University Press. The panel also included Kirsten Weld from Harvard University and the session chair, Bianca Premo from Florida International University.

In this episode we speak with Bianca Premo and Yanna Yannakakis about their article “A Court of Sticks and Branches: Indian Jurisdiction in Colonial Mexico and Beyond,” which appears in the February 2019 issue of the AHR as part of a forum titled “Indigenous Agency and Colonial Law.” The forum also features an article by Miranda Johnson from the University of Sydney titled “The Case of the Million-Dollar Duck: A Hunter, His Treaty, and the Bending of the Settler Contract” and an introductory essay by University of Washington historian Joshua L. Reid. Bianca Premo is Professor of History at Florida International University. Her most recent book is The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire (Oxford University Press, 2017). She is also the author of Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority, and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Yanna Yannakakis is Associate Professor of History and currently the Winship Distinguished Research Associate Professor of History at Emory University. She is the author of The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca (Duke University Press, 2008). Her current book project is titled “Mexico’s Babel: Native Justice in Oaxaca from Colony to Republic.”

Over the past few issues, the AHR has begun broadening what it selects for review beyond the confines of the scholarly monograph. In the April 2018 issue, the journal featured a set of film reviews, in June documentary history, in October museums and public history sites—and in the December issue the graphic history, or history in comic book form. In this episode, we speak with the guest editor for that set of graphic history reviews, San Francisco State historian Trevor Getz. Getz is a historian of gender and slavery in West Africa. His recent work includes the books A Primer for Teaching African History (2018), published by Duke University Press, and, with illustrator Liz Clarke, Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History (2011), which is now in its second edition with Oxford University Press.

In this episode we speak with historian Regina Kunzel, whose review essay titled “The Power of Queer History” appears in the December 2018 issue of the AHR. Kunzel is the Doris Stevens Chair and Professor of History and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of the book Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality, published in 2008 by the University of Chicago Press, and Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890–1945, published in 1993 by Yale University Press. Interviewing Kunzel is a past interviewee on this podcast, Durham University historian David Minto. His article “Perversion by Penumbras: Wolfenden, Griswold, and the Transatlantic Trajectory of Sexual Privacy” appears in the journal’s October 2018 issue.

In this episode we look back at one of our most read articles from the past few years—Lara Putnam’s “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast,” which appears in the April 2016 issue of the AHR. In it, Putnam explores some of the unintended, as well as largely unexamined, consequences of the mass digitization of historical sources, what she calls the digitized turn, and how this development has linked in both positive and potentially problematic ways to the rise of transnational history. Read the article here: https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.2.377. Lara Putnam is a historian of race, gender, migration, and politics in the twentieth-century Americas. Her recent publications have pursued two tracks: exploring theoretical and methodological dimensions of the historical discipline’s “transnational turn” from the basis of her deep training within the area studies paradigm; and continuing her empirical archival research into the history of the Greater Caribbean, including not only anglophone, hispanophone, and francophone islands but the interlinked borderlands that stretch from Venezuela to Central America and indeed on to New Orleans and Harlem. Most recently, she was the lead author of a successful Mellow Sawyer Seminar proposal entitled “Information Ecosystems: Creating Data (and Absence) from the Quantitative to the Digital Age,” a process that brought together a multidisciplinary team from across the humanities and social sciences. This national grant will bring a series of leading international scholars together over the course of AY 2019-20, foregrounding both the importance of cutting-edge computational methods in the social sciences and humanities, and the need for critical thinking about data infrastructure and information ecosystems as we engage those methods. Putnam is also engaged in a parallel line of research and writing about face-to-face political organizing and its role in a fraught age of political change, with articles in Democracy, The New Republic, The American Prospect, and beyond. With Theda Skocpol. “Middle America Reboots Democracy.” Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Summer 2018 print issue. https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/middle-america-reboots-democracy/ With Theda Skocpol. “Accentuate the Activists.” The New Republic, September 2018 print issue. https://newrepublic.com/article/150462/women-rebuilding-democratic-party-ground “Digital Fixes Won’t Solve the Democrats’ Problems.” American Prospect, April 2018. http://prospect.org/article/digital-fixes-wont-solve-democrats-problems

In this episode of AHR Interview, David Minto discusses his article “Perversion by Penumbras: Wolfenden, Griswold, and the Transatlantic Trajectory of Sexual Privacy,” which appears in the journal’s October 2018 issue. The article examines the role of the 1957 British Wolfenden Report on homosexual offenses and prostitution in the creation of the legal atmosphere in which the U.S. Supreme Court, in its 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, recognized a constitutional right to marital privacy. Minto is Assistant Professor of History at Durham University. His research deals with twentieth-century British and U.S. history in domestic and transnational perspective, with a particular focus on gender and sexuality. He is currently working on his first book project, which is titled “An Intimate Atlantic: The Special Relationships of Transnational Homophile Activism.” Interviewing Minto is historian Julio Capó Jr. Capó is Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and researches transnational and queer history with an emphasis on the U.S., the Caribbean, and Latin America. His book Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 was published in 2017 by the University of North Carolina Press.

The runaway success of the Broadway musical Hamilton has thrilled and challenged American audiences with a racially diverse reimagining of the nation’s founding. The highly acclaimed show has had children and adults alike talking about, and singing about, historical figures such as Alexander Hamilton and documents like the Federalist Papers. But how have historians reacted to this interpretation and popularizing of America’s past? In this episode we speak with some of the contributors to the volume Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past, which was published in May 2018 by Rutgers University Press. Our guests are the book’s editors, Claire Bond Potter of the New School and Renee Romano of Oberlin College. They are joined by three additional contributors: Leslie Harris of Northwestern University, Elizabeth Wollman of Baruch College and The Graduate Center at the City University of New York, and Patricia Herrera of the University of Richmond. They spoke with AHR editor Alex Lichtenstein.

AHR Interview is excited to present a new four-part series on the recent blockbuster film Black Panther. In these episodes, AHR editorial assistant Charlene Fletcher speaks with four different scholars about their reactions to the film and what it evokes about the culture and politics of African and African diasporic history. The first episode features a fuller introduction to the series as a whole. This episode features Sean Jacobs, Associate Professor of International Affairs at the New School, the author and coeditor of numerous books on South African politics and culture, and the founder of the innovative website Africa Is a Country.

AHR Interview is excited to present a new four-part series on the recent blockbuster film Black Panther. In these episodes, AHR editorial assistant Charlene Fletcher speaks with four different scholars about their reactions to the film and what it evokes about the culture and politics of African and African diasporic history. The first episode features a fuller introduction to the series as a whole. Nwando Achebe is the Jack and Margaret Sweet Endowed Professor of History at Michigan State University, the founding editor of the Journal of West African History, and the author of numerous works, including the award-winning 2011 book The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe.

AHR Interview is excited to present a new four-part series on the recent blockbuster film Black Panther. In these episodes, AHR editorial assistant Charlene Fletcher speaks with four different scholars about their reactions to the film and what it evokes about the culture and politics of African and African diasporic history. The first episode features a fuller introduction to the series as a whole. Tanisha Ford is Associate Professor of Africana Studies and History at the University of Delaware and author of the 2015 book Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul.

The June issue of the AHR features a series of short essays commemorating the 50th anniversary of 1968. In this episode our guest is one of the contributors to this series, Donna Murch. Her piece is titled “Black Liberation and 1968.” She spoke about it with AHR editor Alex Lichtenstein. Murch is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University and author of the 2010 book Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California.

In this episode of AHR Interview, consulting editor Kate Brown speaks with historian Taymiya Zaman about her essay “Cities, Time, and the Backward Glance,” which appears in the June 2018 issue. Zaman’s piece is the first contribution to a new section of the journal called “History Unclassified,” which will explore things that would not normally be found in our articles category—stories from the archives, unexpected connections between fields, discussions of new methods, or trials of new forms of writing and presentation. For more on “History Unclassified,” including how to submit, see https://academic.oup.com/ahr/pages/history_unclassified. Taymiya Zaman is a historian of Mughal India and South Asia. She is Associate Professor of History at the University of San Francisco as well as a writer of both narrative non-fiction and fiction.

In this episode AHR associate editor Konstantin Dierks speaks with historian Paul Kramer whose article “The Geopolitics of Mobility: Immigration Policy and American Global Power in the Long Twentieth Century” appears in the April 2018 issue of the American Historical Review. Kramer is Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University and researches the transnational, imperial, and global aspects of modern U.S. history. He is the author of the 2006 book The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines. The article is available online: https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.2.393

In this episode of AHR Interview, journal editor Alex Lichtenstein speaks with Max Bergholz, the author of a reappraisal article on Benedict Anderson’s 1983 book Imagined Communities that appears in the April 2018 issue of the AHR. Bergholz is Associate Professor of History and holds the James M. Stanford Professorship in Genocide and Human Rights Studies at Concordia University. His 2016 book Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community received numerous prizes, including the 2017 Herbert Baxter Adams Prize from the American Historical Association. Reappraisals are a new category of AHR article that revisit, going back twenty-five years or more, important historical works that have had notable influence on historians and historiography. The first of these was written by Cambridge medieval historian John Arnold and revisits the 1987 book Formation of a Persecuting Society by R. I. Moore. It appeared in the February 2018 issue of the journal.

In this episode of AHR Interview, we speak with Kellen Funk and Lincoln Mullen, the coauthors of an article that appears in the February 2018 issue of the AHR titled, “The Spine of American Law: Digital Text Analysis and U.S. Legal Practice.” Using archival research and extensive digital text analysis, the authors track the influence of the Field Code, an important New York code of civil procedure enacted in 1848, on the development of 19-century US state law. Kellen Funk has a degree from Yale Law School and is currently a PhD candidate in history at Princeton University. Lincoln Mullen is Assistant Professor of History at George Mason University and researches primarily American religious history but also works extensively on digital historical projects. They spoke with AHR associate editor Konstantin Dierks at this year’s AHA national conference in Washington, DC, about how they came to collaborate on this piece and how both the legal and the digital aspects of the topic speak to a historical audience.

Our guest in this episode is Vanessa Ogle. Ogle is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of the 2015 book The Global Transformation of Time: 1870–1950. She is currently researching the topic of tax havens and offshore finance, and a portion of that research appears as an article in the December 2017 issue of the AHR. Its title is “Archipelago Capitalism: Tax Havens, Offshore Money, and the State, 1950s–1970s.” She speaks with AHR associate editor Konstantin Dierks. You can find Ogle’s article at https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1431.

In this episode we speak with Sunil Amrith, Mehra Family Professor of South Asian Studies and Professor of History at Harvard University. He is the author of the 2006 book Decolonizing International Health: South and Southeast Asia, 1930-1965 and the 2011 book Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia. His most recent book, published in 2013, is Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants. Amrith speaks with Pedro Machado who is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University and whose own work focuses on the history of social and commercial connections between western India and southeastern Africa. Their conversation explores Amrith’s most recent book as well as what his recent award might mean for his future research. They begin by discussing Amrith’s AHR article, “Tamil Diasporas across the Bay of Bengal,” which appeared in the June 2009 issue. Read Amrith's article in the AHR: https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.114.3.547 Listeners may also be interested in the December 2016 AHR forum on Amitav Ghosh's "Ibis Trilogy": https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.5.1521

In this AHR Interview, we speak with Elizabeth Hinton, Assistant Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, about the broad field of carceral studies and the role of activism for scholars of carceral history. Hinton's 2016 book, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, has been reviewed widely, including in the June 2017 issue of the AHR, and was placed on the list of 100 notable books of 2016 by the New York Times. Hinton speaks with AHR editorial assistant Charlene Fletcher, who is herself completing a dissertation that addresses carceral questions. Before commencing her doctoral studies in history, Fletcher taught criminal justice at the City University of New York and worked on prisoner reentry initiatives for the New York Prison System. The AHR review of Hinton's book, "From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America," is available here: https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/122/3/795/3862795/Elizabeth-Hinton-From-the-War-on-Poverty-to-the?redirectedFrom=fulltext

In this pilot episode of AHR Interview, a production of the American Historical Review, intern Clay Catlin speaks with Sven Beckert about his article “American Danger: United States Empire, Eurafrica, and the Territorialization of Industrial Capitalism, 1870–1950,” which appears in the journal’s October 2017 issue. Beckert is Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University. He is the author of the 2001 book The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie and the 2014 book Empire of Cotton: A Global History, which won the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Most recently he served as coeditor for the 2016 volume Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. Read the article at https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/122/4/1137/4320241/American-Danger-United-States-Empire-Eurafrica-and?redirectedFrom=fulltext