History Workshop Journal - current issue

Who Killed Meyer Hasenfus? Organized Crime, Policing and Informing on the Witwatersrand, 1902-8

Onselen, C. v. — 2009-03-30

For three decades, dating back to 1886, the gold mining industry at the heart of South Africa’s industrial revolution underwrote a social structure in which men outnumbered women to an alarming degree. This imbalance spawned a trade in commercial sex which for many years was dominated by Russo-Polish gangsters. The prevalence of ‘organized vice’ posed a dilemma for successive governments, which sought to retain the appeal of prostitutes in labour markets characterized by shortages of male workers while simultaneously seeking to eliminate the worst excesses of organized crime. This already delicate balance was upset after the South African War (1899-1902) when London Irish and Cockney Jews arrived to contest the hegemony of East European underworld elements. As part of an effort to infiltrate ‘foreign’ Russo-Polish gangs, the Milner administration resorted to the use of informers, thereby further inflaming conflict between East European and ‘English’ gangsters. The economic downturn of 1906-8 set the stage for a tragedy culminating in the death of an informer, Meyer Hasenfus. But amidst all the complexities it became exceedingly difficult to determine culpability and several independent-minded prostitutes, led by a woman centrally involved in the Hasenfus case, used the moment to stage a revolt and cast off the yokes of their pimps. The death of Hasenfus marked a turning point in the history of local crime.

Laughter and War in Berlin

Ruger, J. — 2009-03-30

Could there be laughter and amusement in the city while there was death and suffering at the front? What aspects of humour were legitimate in times of war? What should be the meaning of laughter in ‘serious times’? The essay approaches these questions through the intriguing case of Carl Braun, otherwise known as Carl Höbner, who in October 1914 ran into trouble with the Berlin police for mimicking German generals and dignitaries. Braun’s case leads, in the second part of the essay, to an investigation of the wider debate about laughter and seriousness that unfolded during the war. While the Kaiser and the military pronounced a taboo on urban laughter, radical conservatives propagated what they called ‘German humour’. Yet much of the city’s entertainment industry argued for precisely the kind of laughter that the Wilhelmine elite found so unappealing. The third part of the essay asks what the outcome of this debate meant politically, suggesting that the way in which laughter and war were negotiated reflected wider questions about power and sovereignty in Imperial Germany. Yet reconstructing the politics of wartime laughter not only prompts us to question well-established assumptions about the cultural history of war, it also sheds new light on wider issues concerning the relationship between laughter and power.

Towards a Data Base of Dreams: Assembling an Archive of Elusive Materials, c. 1947-61

Lemov, R. — 2009-03-30

Whereas social science surveyors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries concentrated on gathering records of the material aspects of culture and society (tools, ritual objects, rites of passage, decorative items), mid-century moderns turned their efforts to the fleeting and insubstantial: people’s dreams, hopes, fears, evanescent desires, states of madness, and inchoate beliefs. Researchers aimed to collect the stuff of subjectivity, as manifested or materialized in psychological test results, life histories, and records of jokes, invective, and strong sentiments. Techniques proliferated, from the Thematic Apperception Test to the Rorschach to the Draw-A-Person. Taken around the world to provide ‘X-ray pictures’ of the inner life, such tests were said to render subjective materials in usable form. Collectors gathered the resulting sets of ‘human data’ on a scale and scope never before encountered.

Among various efforts in the 1940s and 1950s to collect, catalogue and store – in short, to file – these new masses of data on the most human parts of being human, none was more ambitious than the ‘Database of Dreams’ assembled in 1956. Funded by the National Research Council, run by a cadre of psychologists and anthropologists and accessing decades of ethnographic and documentary research, ‘Primary Records in Culture and Personality’ attempted to map the scope of all such collections and to write a strategy for preserving and circulating them. This pre-digital, Microform-based encyclopaedic device – a database of databases – played a part in the movement to found a post-war. American science of subjectivity, pursued through objectivist methods. The aim of this paper is to reassess the early Cold War targeting of ‘innerness’ within a larger quest to assemble the complete range of possible knowledge.

Historians for the Right to Work: We Demand a Continuing Supply of History

Levene, M. — 2009-03-30

Nearly thirty years on from the second heightened phase of the nuclear arms race, science is informing of us of a new self-induced threat to our very existence on this planet, this time through anthropogenic climate change. This article seeks to make a link between the two threats and the way they have been presented to a wider public by elite policy makers and opinion formers. Back in 1980 Sir Michael Howard, a leading war historian, proposed that if the nuclear (weapons) ante was to be upped, greater civil defence was its necessary corollary. In our present moment Sir David King, formerly chief scientific adviser to Her Majesty’s Government, has proposed a ‘solution’ to the upping of carbon emissions, through more ‘big’ technology, especially in the form of ‘nuclear’ power. In both instances it is significant that alternative ways of thinking – and with them lines of action – have been implicitly marginalized or ruled out of the equation, King going so far as to attack opponents to his position as Luddites. Deferring to ‘those who know best’ is the default position of modern society as it attempts to grapple with complex as well as frightening problems. But could looking at history, not least the history we associate with ‘Luddism’, offer us the basis for a lateral consideration of ‘the mess we are in’, indeed a critical and purposeful unravelling of how we arrived here? We propose our guide in this quest to be the late Edward (E. P.) Thompson, who would, we venture, were he today alive, have taken up the cudgels on behalf of grass-roots empowerment in the face of global warming, just as he did in his 1980 Protest and Survive riposte to Howard’s essential acceptance of the nuclear arms race. Underlying this argument are some basic questions which are fundamental to the future of home sapiens as we peer into a perilous future. Who decides how society should respond to crisis? Must we always defer to the scientific keepers of the keys to the kingdom or might we be better served by looking back into a recent and indeed deeper history to find autonomous ways of living which can genuinely create the basis for a long-term, less violent survivability and resilient sustainability of the human Oikumene? Fundamental to this argument is the premise that the post-Enlightenment mantras of those who remain wedded to a political economy of ‘business as usual’ can no longer suffice and that historians, and other students of the past, could have a significant role to play in offering alternatives from outside the conventional box. Whether this can be of benefit to policy makers needs discussion, always with a view to the needs of the commonweal. It is this which has motivated the creation of Rescue!History: http://rescue-history-from-climate-change.org/indexClassic.php

Announcements

2009-03-30

Introduction

Amrith, S. — 2009-03-30

The History Debate and School Textbooks in India: a Personal Memoir

Thapar, R. — 2009-03-30

The article is a brief overview of a project initiated by the Government of India in the early 1960s to draw on the expertise of professional historians and involve them in writing textbooks for Middle and High School, in an effort to improve the quality of textbooks. The attempt to distance the books from religious and nationalist biases did not however protect the project from interference by political parties and the governments these formed. Historiographical approaches came under discussion as also the questioning of the kind of historical interpretation that went into the making of national identities. The enterprise has come up against two problems, one relating to the teaching of history and the other to the control over the contents of history textbooks by successive governments supporting variant political ideologies. Textbooks have to reflect the changes in historical interpretation which means in turn that those teaching history in schools have to be made familiar with these changes and why they have occurred. Textbooks used in state schools and published and subsidized by the state, even if they form a small fraction of the pedagogy involved, will inevitably be mauled each time that drastic changes in political ideology result from a change of government. Institutions established for the preparation of textbooks have to be autonomous and free from governmental interference.

Teaching History in Schools: the Politics of Textbooks in India

Bhattacharya, N. — 2009-03-30

Within a decade after Independence, some of the finest historians in India got involved in writing new history textbooks for school children. As a new India began to dust off its colonial legacy, many historians felt the need to critique colonial perceptions of the past, rethink existing narratives of history, and develop a secular national imagination. Horrified by the violence of Partition, when thousands of Hindus and Muslims killed each other and many more left their homes in search of new places to live, historians turned to the past to build the premises of a humane and secular society. They questioned communal assumptions, critiqued sectarian stereotypes, and wrote secular histories for the children of the new independent nation.

The secular-nationalist textbooks that were produced in the 1960s and 1970s were immediately attacked by the Hindu right, and for the subsequent three decades history textbooks became the site for a larger battle between secularism and communalism in India. The defence of these textbooks was seen as synonymous with the fight against anti-secular forces, and suggestions for any form of change inevitably provoked suspicion.

Yet over these years, historians in India, as elsewhere, were opening their minds to new ideas, and posing issues in new ways. Gender histories made historians aware that all narratives need to be gendered; ecological histories made them see that that social lives are shaped by environment just as much as nature is transformed through human activity; cultural histories emphasized the importance of cultures in shaping people’s beliefs, perceptions and visions, even as people sought to make their own world of meanings. Histories from below and subaltern studies urged everyone to relocate the subjects of their enquiry, and see how subordinate groups make sense of their experience and constitute their lives. Critical theories stressed the need to rethink the words and terms through which the past was grasped and the tropes within which historical narratives were cast. Yet, till recently, none of these shifts in thinking about history was reflected in the textbooks that children read.

This essay emphasizes that school textbooks need not be insulated from the critical traditions of our times. When conceptions of history change, when the past is looked at in new ways, should these ideas remain the preserve of academics alone? Focusing on the new set of history textbooks recently produced in India, the essay discusses what these new books seek to do, what pedagogic ideas underline their production, and how they differ from earlier textbooks.

The Return of the Canon: Transforming Dutch History Teaching

Vos, M. d. — 2009-03-30

In the academic year 2007-8 two new teaching programmes were introduced into Dutch history education: all children between eight and fourteen were to be instructed in the official Canon of Dutch History, comprising fifty items on a timeline reaching from the Stone Age to the introduction of the Euro. Students from fifteen to eighteen who took history as an examination subject were to study the canon of European history, with special attention to Dutch history. This new curriculum was set up to strengthen national identity and to further the integration of minorities by creating a shared knowledge of Dutch history and culture.

Critics of these programmes point to their old-fashioned representation of history and the neglect of new fields of research such as gender history and post-colonial critique. Some critics think the emphasis on Dutch history will alienate students whose backgrounds are not Dutch.

However, a survey of the new textbooks is reassuring. The textbooks turn Dutch history into an instrument for critical discussion of the past, for instance by including source material from different cultures and perspectives, by devising assignments on the history of women and slavery, and by inviting students to reflect on the ways historical canons are constructed.

Moreover teachers have considerable leeway to add topics and perspectives to the curriculum and to create their own instruction material. In this way teachers can provide balanced and stimulating instruction for students of diverging interests and backgrounds.

History Textbooks and Historical Scholarship in Germany

Lassig, S., Pohl, K. H. — 2009-03-30

Academic approaches to history have been subject to change as a result of current social challenges such as immigration and multiethnic societies. This article asks whether such developments have also influenced concepts and portrayals within German history textbooks. How are recent trends in historical scholarship transposed into the condensed and highly politicized space of school textbooks? This question is examined through an analysis of a sample of recent history textbooks and curricula from different German federal states, focusing on topics such as transnational perspectives, gender history, postcolonial studies, and the representation of minorities.

History and Policy

Thane, P. — 2009-03-30

History plays many roles in British culture. One role, which is insufficiently developed, is of informing public discourse and public policy about urgent contemporary issues. It is important that we try to develop this contribution because the historical dimension is essential to understanding how important issues, such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the current financial crisis or patterns of crime, have come about and to developing possible options for resolving them. Arguably, this is less recognized by policymakers than in the past. History and Policy ( www.historyandpolicy.org) has been established as a network of historians dedicated to making our work accessible to politicians, the media and any interested people. The article explores some areas of domestic policy as examples of the value of history in contemporary politics.

Announcements

2009-03-30

Introduction

Anderson, C. — 2009-03-30

Oscar Mallitte's Andaman Photographs, 1857-8

Anderson, C. — 2009-03-30

This article examines the first Andaman Islands photographs, which were taken by the photographer Oscar Jean-Baptiste Mallitte during a Government of India survey whose brief was to find a site for a penal colony for mutineers and rebels sentenced to transportation after the Great Revolt of 1857. The Mallitte prints were long assumed to be lost or destroyed, but recently they have been discovered in the Queen's Collection at Windsor Castle. The article looks at the photographs as representations of the Andamans landscape and peoples just before permanent colonization, and focuses on a deeply affecting set of images of an Islander kidnapped by the survey party and taken back to Calcutta. As the photographic process was described in some detail in various contemporary publications, and because the photographs were widely copied and published as engravings, the images can be used to interrogate some of the textual and visual interconnections and slippages that were implied during the Islands' written and visual production and transformation. The article suggests that the photographs and their connected texts – visual and discursive – are of huge importance as signifiers of the violence of colonization, as evidence of some of the ambivalences that characterized the use of convict forced labour in colonization, and as a ‘missing link’ that enables us to examine some of the ways in which the Islands and its peoples were constructed and represented through the trope of colonial ‘tropicality’.

Through Lens and Text: Constructions of a 'Stone Age' Tribe in the Andaman Islands

Pandya, V. — 2009-03-30

The inhabitants of the North Sentinel Islands in the Bay of Bengal have for long been described as one of the last surviving Stone Age tribes of the world. The ‘truth value’ of this assertion has been reinforced over time through a complex and often collusive representational order sustained by for instance the institutions of the Indian state, the global media, travel writers, anthropologists and the non-tribal communities of the Andaman Islands. This paper examines the visual and textual practices that constitute this representational order and pits against it the historical and ethnographic realities that render it vulnerable to radical inquiry. With its critical focus on the truth-bearing propensities of photographic images and their accompanying texts, this paper seeks to interrogate received ethnographic certitudes about an imputed Stone Age people and ponders the possibilities of acknowledging them as historical actors.

Model Subjects: Representations of the Andaman Islands at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, 1886

Wintle, C. — 2009-03-30

This essay provides an analysis of the Andaman Islands exhibit at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886 in London. It explores the ways in which a display of near-life-size clay models, complete with indigenous-made manufactures, presented a specific vision of the region to a popular British audience. Using visual evidence, archival material and contemporary commentary on the exhibition, the essay investigates the mechanics of the exhibition paradigm, documenting its impact upon audiences’ perceptions of the Andamanese peoples. It argues that the models were intended and were successfully received as tools with which to popularize scholarly judgements of the region’s peoples at the lowest point of a perceived sociocultural-evolutionary hierarchy, and demonstrates how this specific exhibit was employed as dynamic, decorative visual entertainment for a metropolitan audience. The implications of the substitution of clay figures for real human bodies are examined: it is argued that this medium functioned as an absorbent surface upon which British audiences could safely posit perceived ‘truths’ about their distant subjects. Whereas ‘living exhibits’ might challenge the terms of their representation, the static models were seen to verify colonial concerns regarding the violent depravity, overt sexuality and corporeal availability of the non-Western ‘other’.

Announcements

2009-03-30

Who, Me?

Hindle, S. — 2009-03-30

New Directions in Partition Studies

Chatterji, J. — 2009-03-30

Class, Community and Popular Rebellion in the Making of Modern England

Rollison, D. — 2009-03-30

Gender at Work

Boris, E. — 2009-03-30

Cosmopolitanism and Difference

Rose, S. O. — 2009-03-30

Migrant Myths and Memories

Chamberlain, M. — 2009-03-30

A Judicious Dose of Hemp: the Long Shadow of the Haymarket Bombing

Guttenplan, D. D. — 2009-03-30

Fulfilling the Prophecy

Stargardt, N. — 2009-03-30

Death Becomes Her

Kassell, L. — 2009-03-30

What Shall we Do about the Servants?

Erickson, A. L. — 2009-03-30

Ruth Frow (1922-2008)

Lesley, , Fowler, A. — 2009-03-30

Greg Dening (1931-2008)

Griffiths, T. — 2009-03-30

Norman Cohn (1915-2007)

Lamont, W. — 2009-03-30

Faruk Tabak (1954-2008)

Palat, R. A. — 2009-03-30