AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
VOLUME 100, NO. 2, APRIL 1995
IN THIS ISSUE
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Karen Halttunen writes about the changes that humanitarianism and the
culture of sensibility produced in the meaning of pain. She argues
that once pain had been redefined as unacceptable in the eighteenth
century, it came to be understood as obscene. Subsequently, a variety
of literary forms, including sentimental and Gothic fiction, sexual
pornography, and murder literature, began to treat the now forbidden
topic of pain as prurient. Humanitarian reformers soon came to fear
that in using graphic illustrations of the infliction of pain to turn
people away from such practices, they were generating an illicit
excitement in the spectacle of suffering. Some reformers shifted
attention from the effort to eradicate pain-inflicting practices to
their privatization. But, according to Halttunen, privatization only
enhanced the pornographic appeal of pain by reinforcing the notion
that hidden pain was obscene and by contributing to the transformation
of the social theater of public punishment into the illicit interior
theater of sadomasochism, best exemplified by the clients and case
studies of turn-of-the-century psychopathology, who fantasized and
enacted the same pain scenarios condemned by humanitarians.
Pamela Scully analyzes the interplay of local Cape Colony and
metropolitan British ideas about race, class, sex, and honor as they
affected sentencing in rape cases. She begins with the story of a
black man condemned to death for the rape of a white woman, a sentence
later commuted when white men of the community informed the judge that
in their opinion the raped woman was not actually white. Previous
studies of rape in the period following slave emancipation in South
Africa have focused on fears about the rape of white women by black
men. The cases discussed by Scully suggest that colonialism and the
pliable categories of race and class that accompanied it encouraged
the rape of black women by white men.
John Markoff challenges the recent revisions of the history of the
French Revolution that argue for the anti-liberal, anti-democratic
outcomes produced by popular revolutionary violence. Markoff contends
that insurrectionary actions in the French countryside were essential
to ending the rights of the lords. Neither the nobles nor the Third
Estate were inclined to abolish these rights without indemnification
until faced with the militant refusal of the peasants to accept
anything less. Markoff finishes with a comparative analysis, showing
that where other Old Regime states had begun reform and were not
prodded by peasant violence (or a military threat from the French),
full defeudalization did not take place. While the memory of popular
violence may have nurtured anti-democratic movements in
nineteenth-century France, the insurrectionary events themselves
played a central part in creating a democratic society.
J. William Harris examines two instances of racial violence in
Vicksburg, Mississippi, at the end of World War I: the
tar-and-feathering of an African-American physician, John Miller, and
the lynching of another black man, Lloyd Clay. Harris sees these
events as ritual responses to the breakdown of racial boundaries
resulting from the war, the northern migration of the black labor
force, and the growth (typified by Dr. Miller) of an educated,
moneyed, and activist black elite. His stories suggest the importance
of cultural codes--etiquette backed up by the threat of violence--in
maintaining racial boundaries in contrast to theories of the material
foundations of American racism.
John A. Phillips and Charles Wetherell argue for the powerful impact
of England's Great Reform Act of 1832. In doing so, they seek to
revise four decades of historiography that has downplayed the
importance of the act. The authors advance a model of English
electoral politics during the century from the accession of George III
to 1880 and use it to demonstrate that the vigorous debate over the
Reform Bill in 1831 and its enactment the following year set off a
wave of political modernization to which the Whig and Tory parties
successfully adapted. The reform quickly destroyed the political
system that had prevailed during the reign of George III and replaced
it with a modern electoral system based on rigid partisanship and
clearly articulated political principle.
A review article by Russell A. Kazal traces the rise, decline, and
then recent reappearance of "assimilation" as the reigning concept in
American immigration studies. The centrality of assimilation first
emerged in the work of sociologists and historians in the second
decade of this century and remained prominent until the 1960s. During
the two succeeding decades, a number of scholars began to stress the
failure of assimilation and the persistence of ethnic group
identities. Since the early 1980s, however, assimilation has returned
to the works of three different groups of historians. Those who focus
primarily on ethnic groups now give increased weight in their analyses
to processes of assimilation that affect immigrants, while labor
historians observe assimilation in the rise of a common working-class
consciousness, and students of racial identity note that ethnic groups
of European origin have come closer to one another through a shared
sense of "whiteness." Although these analyses emphasize assimilation,
they do not resurrect the earlier notions of it as assimilation toward
a coherent and unchanging Anglo-American core culture. Kazal suggests
that it is now time for the practitioners of these subfields to work
together in defining a new concept of assimilation.