SPECIAL SECTION: INTERPRETATIVE CHALLENGES IN THE ARCHIVE: RUMOR, FORGERY, AND DENUNCIATION IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN, GUEST EDITORS: SARAH FOSS, VANESSA FREIJE, AND RACHEL NOLAN

Interpretative Challenges in the Archive: An Introduction

Vanessa Freije and Rachel Nolan

Pages 1–6

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab027

The twenty-first century has already seen extensive handwringing over how disinformation, “fake news,” and conspiracy theories shape contemporary politics. While social media and new technologies have undoubtedly accelerated the dissemination of such information, the problem of how unauthorized, dubious, or discredited claims shape political subjectivities and historical events is not new. In Latin America and the Caribbean, as elsewhere, conflicts over credibility and truth abound in the historical archive, leaving traces of rumor, denunciation, and even outright forgery that pose interpretative challenges for historians. We argue that dubious or challenged claims, instead of unreliable narratives to be separated out and discarded, are an important constitutive part of the historical record and often altered material realities. Introducing readers to select historical cases from Latin America and the Caribbean, we argue that some especially resonant denunciations, forgeries, rumors, and counter-narratives behave less like plot than like event.

Transitory Trust: Falsified Passports, Circulars, and Other Speculations in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

David Sartorius

Pages 7–26

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab028

In nineteenth-century Cuba, the increasing and uneven use of passports for maritime travel generated confusion about their authority and encouraged their falsification. This essay explores the forgery and misuse of travel papers alongside the fabrications of an official colonial record that concealed the illegal transatlantic slave trade as it implemented documentary procedures for legal travel. Cuban officials pursued individuals who traveled without passports, with other people’s passports, or lacked other papers, with a disproportionate focus on the circulation of free people of African descent. At the same time, the limited reach of government decrees and policies complicated strict determinations of transgression. Rather than taking this as evidence of a broken system, recognizing how various actors created the conditions for a collective susceptibility both to the authority conferred by passports and to plausible falsehoods lets us view borders, individual identity, and Caribbean mobility in new light. The essay calls on historians to approach the archival record of passports and mobility by balancing our retrospective recognition of falsifications with an awareness of fluctuating estimations of documentary veracity in the past.

Internal Passports, Counterfeiting, and Subversive Practices in Early Postcolonial Peru

José Ragas

Pages 27–45

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab044

Counterfeit identity papers have accompanied many Peruvians over the past two centuries as they moved within their own country. Through these documents, they have embraced numerous personalities and eluded strict controls to the dismay of policymakers and experts who envisioned building a robust surveillance system based on identity cards. This article analyzes counterfeiting as a set of objects, practices, and knowledge that emerged in the aftermath of the Wars of Independence during the transition to an autonomous Republic. Committed to establishing social and political order in this chaotic scenario, Peruvian authorities relied on low-tech devices known as internal passports to regulate mobility within the convoluted territory. Nonetheless, internal passports proved more fragile and less effective than expected. Peruvians rapidly learned to produce their own internal passports or to adulterate their information, developing a particular expertise that enabled them to navigate the nascent biometric system. Forged internal passports thus illustrate the enduring tensions between governments, citizens, and technology, as well as early efforts of individuals to regain control of their personal data.

Sex, Money, and Murder on the Isthmus: Rumor, Disinformation, and the Politics of Denunciation in Revolutionary Mexico

Colby Ristow

Pages 46–64

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab029

In 1915, the Constitutionalist faction of Venustiano Carranza moved into southern Mexico, promising revolutionary justice and retribution against The Reaction. Unfamiliar with the social topography of the region, Carranza’s men depended on information gleaned from dubious sources to make key political decisions. Groups competing for the Constitutionalists’ patronage flooded Carranza’s correspondence, accentuating their own revolutionary bona fides while exposing their enemies. The result was a political milieu of denunciation, and nowhere was this milieu more acrimonious than in Juchitán, a coveted transportation hub in the isthmus region of Oaxaca. Using the Carranza archive in Mexico City, this essay examines denunciations sent from Juchitán in early 1915. These letters reveal an unmediated “popular voice,” unbound from the public sphere, its code of honor, and its recognition of the realm of privacy. The shift of public politics into the private sphere had two important consequences. First, unsubstantiated information—rumors, gossip—gained a prominent position in local politics. Second, it opened the door to political participation to marginalized groups, particularly the working classes and women. This essay examines two letters in detail, one from an “honorable worker” and the other from a prominent woman, both dealing in rumor, gossip, and conspiracy. Despite their inherent unreliability, these letters give us a window into the construction of the camarilla, prevailing perceptions about politics and the accumulation of wealth, and the possibilities and limits of women’s participation in high politics.

Rumors, Pescado Podrido and Disinformation in Interwar Argentina

Jonathan D Ablard and Ernesto Bohoslavsky

Pages 65–84

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab043

This article identifies how and why Argentine political rumors were created, spread, and legitimized by government officials, military officers and the press in the interwar years. In that period, the practice of what we now call “fake news”—known as pescado podrido (rotten fish) in Argentina for it poisons the one who hears or repeats it—became more common and took on international proportions. In Argentina, a variety of forces drove the increase in disinformation, including political instability, the rising (and later the banning) of the majoritarian Radical Party, elite anxiety about the threat of communism, and a long-lasting nationalist fear about the integrity of borders. Authorities and right-wing politicians were inclined to see any anti-government actions as linked to international communism and, in some cases, imaginary Jewish conspiracies. The article offers two case studies: One refers to the anti-Radical Party rumors, especially those spread in the days immediately before and after the coup d’état in 1930; and the other to a more generalized atmosphere of anti-communist inspired rumors and fake news in the interwar period. This article is based on research in government archives and newspaper collections in Patagonian cities, Buenos Aires, and Washington, D.C. Argentine official sources included records from the Ministry of the Interior, the Gobernación del Neuquén, President Agustín P. Justo’s papers and recently declassified army and navy documents.

Deadly Rumors: Lynching, Hearsay, and Hierarchies of Credibility in Mexico: Special Section: Interpretative Challenges in the Archive: Rumor, Forgery, and Denunciation in Latin America and the Caribbean

Gema Kloppe-SantamarÍa

Pages 85–104

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab037

This article examines the role of rumors in the collectivization of violence in twentieth-century Mexico. By focusing on a series of cases of lynching driven by rumors of child theft and the stealing of children’s bodily fluids and organs, the article reveals the hierarchies of credibility that make rumors an effective tool to trigger and escalate violence. The article’s main argument is that rumors become deadly or “weaponized” in the form of lynchings in contexts where anxieties and fears regarding processes of modernization and economic exploitation intersect with citizens’ perception of the state as unable or unwilling to provide security and justice. In twentieth-century Mexico, what made rumors vectors of lethal violence was not only a context of collective fear and economic uncertainty, but also their credibility vis-à-vis other forms of knowledge. Such credibility was grounded on citizens’ keen sense of distrust in state authorities and on people’s belief that without recourse to lynching, crimes would go unpunished. Adding to the credibility of these rumors was also the lynched victim’s actual or perceived condition as foreign or external to the community where the lynching took place, a condition that made them more likely to be the subject of rumors involving the extraction and exploitation of local resources. Child-theft rumors occupy a central place in Mexico’s contemporary context of insecurity. This article provides a historical reflection on the connections between hearsay, mob violence, and citizens’ long-term experiences of exploitation, state neglect, and impunity.

Rumors of Insurgency and Assassination in the Ixcán, Guatemala: Special Section: Interpretative Challenges in the Archive: Rumor, Forgery, and Denunciation in Latin America and the Caribbean

Sarah Foss

Pages 105–126

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab038

In the late 1960s, landless campesinos partnered with the Maryknoll Catholic order to form a colony and cooperative in the lowland jungles of northern Guatemala. The Ixcán Grande colony became profitable and fell in line with state development and agrarian policies. Yet by the mid-1970s, this dramatically changed when the colony began experiencing increased government repression as Guatemala’s ongoing civil war escalated. After Father William Woods, the colony’s priest, died in a mysterious plane crash in 1976, multiple accounts of that fateful day circulated: the official version recorded it as an accident while unofficial versions maintained that the military-state had assassinated him. This event shaped the relationship between Ixcán residents and the state from that moment on and continues to influence historical memory in the present. This article first explores the circulation of rumors of insurgency, leading to the Ixcán Grande project’s reputation as an unstable, dangerous space. Then, it examines the competing historical narratives surrounding Father Woods’s death. Finally, it links rumor creation and utilization with historical memory, ending with a brief conclusion about the utility—and the necessity—of giving proper attention to rumors as archival traces.

ARTICLES

“It Will Take a Man Person with you to … Keep the Place Up”: Family, Gender, and Power in Confederate Common White Households

Patrick J Doyle

Pages 127–148

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa047

This article provides fresh insight on the ways in which the American Civil War challenged and destabilized understandings of familial and gendered power within the Confederate States. It is well established that the impressive extent of the Confederacy’s military mobilization significantly altered the gendered demographics and dynamics of the home front. While not rejecting this orthodox view, this article does challenge its tendency to overemphasize the extent to which the rural South was sapped of men. In doing so, it not only underscores the important roles some men, most notably those too old for military service, continued to play in ordinary households but also how this pattern unsettled familial power in terms of generation and age as well as gender. Finally, this article endeavors to excavate the more quotidian experience of Confederate common white families and, in order to do so, utilizes three microbiographies of specific households from the state of South Carolina.

Samurai and Southern Belles: Interracial Romance, Southern Morality, and the 1860 Japanese Embassy

Natalia Doan

Pages 149–179

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa049

The 1860 Japanese Embassy to the United States was the first diplomatic encounter between Japanese and American people on American soil, and sparked a whirlwind of national optimism and cultural fantasy that challenged the linked conceptions of race, masculinity, and power. In a time when interracial relationships were prohibited in much of the United States, seventeen-year-old samurai Tateishi Onojirō, nicknamed “Tommy,” and his rising count of love letters made headlines across America. This article argues that, in 1860, representations of the 1860 Japanese Embassy and Tateishi in daily Southern newspapers were used to further complicate the concept of Japanese masculinity and dramatize the differences between the American North and South. The perceived desirability of American women became a source of pride at the same time interracial encounters between American women and the Japanese embassy threatened American racial hierarchies. Examining how interactions between samurai diplomats and transnational actors challenged antebellum hierarchies of race, masculinity, and power expands the significance of the 1860 embassy to the study of gender and interracial romantic relations, the production of regional identity, and the influence of Tokugawa Japan on antebellum American identity formation.

Educating the China-Born: Colonial Cosmopolitanism in Shanghai’s Schools for Settler Children, 1870–1943

Catherine Ladds

Pages 180–206

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa061

By the 1920s, the schools of the Shanghai Municipal Council aimed to teach “China-born” children, whose upbringing in the International Settlement’s littoral milieu meant they were in danger of becoming deracinated and déclassé, how to be both productive Shanghailanders and imperial Britons. Whereas the history of colonial education is often considered in national, imperial, or exclusionary terms, Shanghai’s schools for foreign children instead shaped and responded to understandings of education that were multinational, local, and reluctantly inclusionary. Through an exploration of the council’s education policies, the ideologies of childhood that governed admissions decisions, and the ways in which graduates of these schools employed their education professionally and politically, this article contends that the political and demographic features of the colonial periphery shaped alternative visions of imperial Britishness that went beyond nation and empire. As this case study makes clear, discussion of these British spaces overseas should be anchored in specific social, spatial, and political conditions rather than analysis of “sentiment” alone. Colonial ideologies of childhood and the ways in which it was produced by the educational experience were central to these articulations of a cosmopolitan Britishness that could be sustained beyond the boundaries of British territory by social and cultural institutions such as schools. In Shanghai, young settlers, and especially mixed-race “Eurasian” children, who together embodied both elite fears about racial and cultural degeneration and also their hopes of cultivating a firmly rooted settler society, were at the center of debates about community identity, status, and cohesion.

Rites, Rights, Rastafari! Statehood and Statecraft in Jamaica, c. 1930–1961

Myles Osborne

Pages 207–225

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa057

This article focuses on the ways Rastafari in Jamaica practiced statehood and statecraft between the 1930s and early 1960s. At times, as is well known, Rastafari rejected the authority and institutions of the colonial state in Jamaica. But archival documents also reveal the ways they came to battle against colonialism and white supremacy on their own terms. Rastas built their own versions of state institutions to recreate an alternate world beyond “Babylon.” They learned to manipulate and “work” the institutions of Babylon from law courts to the political machine in order to survive. They followed national and international news—often from Africa—and absorbed knowledge about the United Nations they could use to fight legal cases and write petitions protesting the conditions of their existence. All this suggests a novel stream of Rastafari intellectual thought and action that we must add to our understandings of the movement. Studying Rastafari in this manner—possible because of extensive research in its rich history—provides an opportunity to understand the actions of marginalized groups acting beyond the traditional nation state in the moment of decolonization.

Emotional Echoes: Young People, Divorce, and the Public Media, 1960–2000

Karen Vallgårda and Katrine Rønsig Larsen

Pages 226–253

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa030

The article introduces the methodological concept of emotional echoing to analyze the cultural formation of individual emotions and demonstrates its utility in an analysis of young people’s emotional experience of parental divorce in Denmark between 1960 and 2000. Drawing on recent theorizations within the history of emotions, we posit that emotional echoing is a key element in the historical processes through which emotions are configured. Individuals more or less consciously employ collective templates of emotionality to interpret and convey their own feelings, giving shape to experience and subjectivity in the process. We then present a study of a variety of Danish public media to examine how young people interpreted and described the experience of parental divorce. We argue that a new public emotionality emerged at this time and that this impacted young people’s experiences. Growing divorce rates, the breakdown of patriarchal family structures, the rising status of children and youth, and the blooming media market all helped spur this change. Echoing each other’s tropes, practices, and images, young people emphasized the difficult and painful aspects of the emotional experience of divorce. During the last decades of the century, they increasingly articulated anger toward their parents, but they also more often emphasized “bad conscience” and signaled the importance of regulating one’s own emotions to protect one’s parents. Through nonmechanical and creative echoing, young people processed their emotions by digesting and contributing anonymously to the public media.

REVIEWS

Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America. By Jeffrey Alan Erbig, Jr

Leonardo Barleta

Pages 254–256

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa044

Following the signing of the treaties of Madrid (1750) and Santo Ildefonso (1777), the Spanish and Portuguese crowns formed collaborative boundary commissions to travel and map the borderline separating the possessions they claimed in South America. In the Rio de La Plata region, on the border of modern-day Uruguay, Argentina, and southern Brazil, territorial disputes arose after the Portuguese founding of Colônia do Sacramento, an outpost in Spanish-claimed territory, in 1680. After decades of military conflicts and diplomatic negotiations, the treaties aimed to settle the disputes by defining a precise borderline and creating areas of exclusive imperial sovereignty.

When the commission arrived in the region, however, the reality proved to be more complex. As Erbig Jr.'s excellent study shows, Rio de La Plata's countryside, where most of the demarcation efforts happened, was Native territory and controlled by tolderías – small kin-based communities of autonomous Indigenous people. Tolderías were mobile encampments ranging from 30 and 100 dwellers living under the leadership of a chief (cacique.) Colonial writers ascribed a series of ethnonyms (Charruas, Minuanes, Guenoas, Yanos, and Bohanes), but these bands lacked ethnic uniformity. They were characterized by a mobile lifestyle that allowed them to control large portions of the territory and arbitrate access to the countryside and its resources, such as feral livestock.

In The Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History. By Christopher Tomlins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. ix plus 352 pp. $26.92)

Vanessa M Holden

Pages 257–259

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab010

Nat Turner launched the Southampton Rebellion in late summer 1831 or, as antebellum Southerners would have known it, in revival season. As the Holy Ghost moved through camp and tent meetings, Turner worked with his coconspirators in the swamps and fields of Southampton County, planning and executing America's most famous slave rebellion. Nat Turner remains significant in the history of American slave revolt and resistance. His character, religious conviction, and the death toll of nearly sixty white men, women, and children in Southampton County, Virginia, elevated him to a national archetype (the ever-menacing rebellious slave) and Black folk hero (the cunning freedom fighter). Of course, almost immediately, whites met Turner's claim that he was called by God to lead his coconspirators on their bloody campaign through their neighborhood with pejorative assessments that Turner was at once “crazy” and too smart for his own good.

Christopher Tomlins takes Nat Turner’s call from God seriously. He presents both a religious and intellectual history of the famous rebel leader in In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History. Rather than engaging with the many afterlives of Turner in American historical memory and Black folk traditions, Tomlins attempts to excavate the religiosity of the historical Nat Turner. Tomlins also serves up a reading of the white religious beliefs and practices with which Turner waged war.

Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century

Anya Jabour

Pages 260–262

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa042

Between 1830 and 1880, a diverse group of freethinkers—radicals and reformers, feminists and free-lovers, social purity advocates and spiritualists, abolitionists and communitarians, evangelicals and secularists—used the metaphor of adultery to critique the strictures of marriage. Arguing that an unhappy marriage was an illegitimate union, and thus that a loveless marriage was “legalized adultery”, they sought to reform—and, in some cases, reject—the marital relationship (1). Carol Faulkner argues that while both contemporaries and scholars often have dismissed these marriage critics as nothing more than marginal cranks, they profoundly changed the meaning of marriage. While some of their most radical demands—such as an insistence on women’s control over their own bodies—fell by the wayside, their core principle that “only love makes marriage” entered the American mainstream (2).

Faulkner centers her study on New York—somewhat ironically, given that New York had among the most restrictive divorce laws in the nation, permitting divorce only in the case of (literal and legal) adultery until 1966. Her colorful cast of characters includes names familiar to most historians of nineteenth-century America, such as John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, framer of the Declaration of Sentiments, and Victoria Woodhull, a notorious free-love advocate. Faulkner goes beyond these public figures, however, to explore the private lives of lesser-known radicals and reformers, including Mary Cross Booth, who divorced her husband Sherman Booth for adultery (although his behavior might better be defined as child molestation; he raped a fourteen-year-old) and formed an intimate relationship with German feminist Mathilde Anneke. The chapter about the Booth marriage is a geographical outlier in this volume, as the couple lived in Wisconsin, but Unfaithful is replete with other insightful case studies, revealing that even the most outspoken critics of marriage as legalized adultery found their beliefs challenged when their own mates engaged in literal adultery.

Duty Beyond the Battlefield: African American Soldiers Fight For Racial Uplift, Citizenship, and Manhood, 1870–1920

David P Kilroy

Pages 263–264

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa040

In Duty Beyond the Battlefield, Le’Trice Donaldson, an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin Stout, sets out to reframe the story of African American soldiers serving in the U.S. Army in the period between 1870 and 1920. This critical period in black history is bookended by Reconstruction, which ultimately failed to deliver on its initial promise of desegregation and equality, and the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, who famously screened the virulently racist Birth of Nation in the White House and instituted wholesale segregation across federal government agencies. The years in between witnessed the establishment of Jim Crow apartheid across the South and the advent of a systemic national racism that pervaded all aspects of American culture and society. The history of African Americans in the military in this period followed a similar trajectory. The Reconstruction Era was marked by the creation of four (initially six) black regiments in the U.S. Army and the admission of the first black cadets into the Military Academy at West Point, several of whom went on to earn commissions as officers of the line. By the time Woodrow Wilson led the United States into World War I, however, the sole remaining black commissioned officer in the army, Colonel Charles Young, was forcibly retired in order to prevent his achieving command of white regiments in the field. Meanwhile, black troops were largely confined to stevedore duty during the Great War, denying what for many was the honor of serving their country in combat. In this book, Professor Donaldson addresses how African American men in uniform, from the rank file to the commissioned officers, navigated the ebbs and flows of this turbulent era, all the while seeking to leverage their service in the cause of “racial uplift,” political equality, and respect for their manhood.

Out of Stock: The Warehouse in the History of Capitalism. By Dara Orenstein

Paul Seltzer

Pages 265–267

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa037

This book could not have been timelier. In a moment when the restricted mobility of much of the world’s population has meant the inverse for the logistics industry, Dara Orenstein has given us a deeply impressive genealogy of the warehouse as spatial form. In this case, to be more abstract is to get at the heart of the argument: Out of Stock investigates the evolution of economic zones “where the line between circulation and production has been drawn and redrawn—consciously and literally” (18). These zones temporarily halt the circulation of commodities to ensure that capital keeps flowing, extracting value from the work in and around warehouses. Orenstein investigates the evolution of these spaces from the warehouse, to the bonded warehouse, to the foreign-trade zone, to the contemporary subzone.

The first chapter historicizes the warehouse as modern reservoirs that modulate the flow of commodities. Modern warehouses appeared after the Civil War, though the warehousemen who ran them portrayed themselves as heirs to an ancient history of storage. Warehousemen distinguished themselves from merchants by commodifying space generally rather than storing one kind of commodity; they extracted profit through efficiency (i.e. reducing “nonproductive” handling work through mechanization and surveillance of workers). By the early 20th century the American Warehousemen’s Association was strong enough to successfully lobby Congress to pass the Warehouse Act of 1916, giving the federal government the authority to license warehouses. The act created an opening for businesses during the Depression and World War II to use warehousing as an opportunity to get credit quickly. The warehouse became not only infrastructural to the landscape of the U.S., but to its financializing national economy.

Tropical Dream Palaces. Cinema in Colonial West Africa. By Odile Goerg

Glenn Reynolds

Pages 268–270

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa039

The emerging field of colonial film studies has become a crowded one the last few years. Yet Odile Goerg’s Tropical Dream Palaces: Cinema in Colonial West Africa stands out as a meticulously researched monograph—one that fills in many of the previously blank spaces in our understanding of Africa’s complex cinematic landscape. As Professor of Modern African History at CESSMA, Université Paris Diderot, Goerg set ambitious goals for a manuscript over a decade in the making. Whereas the existing literature was littered with studies examining mining recruitment films, colonial propaganda campaigns, and missionary-led projects, Goerg “was struck by the lack of research” into film as an African leisure activity (4). In fact, prominent studies exploring the extraordinary attraction of popular cinema have emerged over the last few years, including Birgit Meyer’s Sensational Movies (2015) and Laura Fair’s Reel Pleasures (2018), but these perceptive studies each limit their focus to one colony/country (Ghana and Tanzania, respectively). In contrast, Goerg has tackled virtually the entirety of West Africa, dominated at the time by British and French colonial administrations. Her research is informed by the latest developments in Film Studies, which has evolved from its earlier emphasis on film history and textual analysis to include as well the study of film-going as a social ritual.

Local Lives, Parallel Histories: Villagers and Everyday Life in Divided Germany. By Marcel Thomas

Jason Johnson

Pages 271–273

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa045

This innovative book is the first in-depth comparative study of the transformation of rural villages in Cold War divided Germany. The analysis centers on the communities of Neukirch in Saxony and Ebersbach in Baden-Württemberg, two localities with much in common even though they were separated by hundreds of miles. In 1945 they were large industrial villages of around 6,000 residents that were comparable both in their outward appearances and social structures. Both were situated about 40 miles from large cities (Dresden and Stuttgart respectively). In 1949, Neukirch came to be in the German Democratic Republic (GDR or East Germany) and Ebersbach in the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). In the book’s introduction, Thomas offers the central questions that guide his analysis of Neukirch and Ebersbach: “How did villagers experience the transformation of their rural localities? How did they respond to the implementation of two different social and political systems in the specific local settings of their village? And to what extent can we identify similarities as well as differences between their responses in East and West?” (7). Thomas convincingly argues that despite the different courses of the two Cold War Germanies, Ebersbach and Neukirch had “parallel histories” as “villagers in East and West experienced and responded to the transformations in their localities in remarkably similar ways” (7). In particular, Thomas carried out comprehensive oral histories in both villages and employs that source material brilliantly to complement archival sources.

Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City. By Eileen Ford

Nichole Sanders

Pages 274–275

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa038

Eileen Ford has given us a wonderfully-written and rigorously-researched look at childhood in mid-century Mexico City. The book looks at both the experiences of children in the city itself as well as adult conceptions of what childhood meant during the period 1934-1968. Ford convincingly argues that the study of childhood during these years is significant because of the demographic explosion that dramatically increased the number of children in the city. Ford argues that children thus became a target for both secular and religious reforms, as well as an audience for popular culture and market for consumer goods. The increased number of children, according to Ford, also created anxiety about certain social ills, such as the negative effects of child labor and the perceived increase in child delinquency. Many Mexicans also became more concerned over a lack of quality schools and public play spaces. Ford argues that studying children and childhood offers insights into Mexican society’s priorities during a period of rapid change and growth, when children and childhood became a central focus.

Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas. By Amy C. Offner

Andra B Chastain

Pages 276–278

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa043

What is the proper role of state action versus private initiative? How did policies such as privatization, fiscal austerity, and the extension of market logic into education and social services come about? In this striking transnational history, Amy Offner takes aim at narratives of rupture that emphasize a stark divide between mid-century developmental states and the era of austerity and structural adjustment of the late twentieth century. On the contrary, she shows that mid-century states contained the seeds of the policies that would unmake them in later decades. Such crucial phenomena as for-profit educational contracting in the United States, public-private partnerships and the devolution of responsibility to states and municipalities in Latin America, and the use of private companies to fulfill public services came not from the margins of developmental states but from within them.

Offner traces the itineraries of key figures, primarily businessmen and economists, as they moved between the United States and Colombia. New Deal advisors such as David Lilienthal and Lauchlin Currie, as well as Colombian businessmen and economists such as Bernardo Garcés Córdoba, Reinaldo Scarpetta, and Eduardo Wiesner, feature prominently. Case studies examine the formation of the Cauca Valley Corporation (CVC) and its efforts to displace small landholders in the name of productivity and efficiency, aided self-help housing in Colombia and the United States, the tangled relationship between economics and management as rival disciplines, the rise of for-profit contracting for social services in the Great Society, and the competing uses of decentralization in Colombia. Despite the subtitle, the book focuses squarely on the United States and Colombia. It is densely researched, drawing on the publications and papers of the individuals studied as well as institutional archives in both countries, particularly the archives of the Rockefeller Foundation, the CVC, the Universidad de los Andes, and the Universidad del Valle.

The Insubordination of Photography: Documentary Practices Under Chile’s Dictatorship. By Ángeles Donoso Macaya

Debbie Sharnak

Pages 279–281

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa036

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in the United States, scholar Deborah Willis observed that “photographers witnessing both brutal and social assaults created a new visual consciousness for the American public, establishing a visual language of ‘testifying’ about their individual and collective experience.”1 Willis’ words speak to the objectives of Ángeles Donoso Macaya’s The Insubordination of Photography: Documentary Practices Under Chile’s Dictatorship, which argues that photography became a “paramount documentary tool to denounce, protest, and challenge the dictatorship” of Augusto Pinochet (4). Photos did not just provide evidence of the horror of his regime, but through various modes, photographers defied official narratives, fostered solidarity and collaboration, and, indeed, testified about the various individual and collective experiences in Pinochet’s Chile to open up political spaces of resistance. Donoso Macaya argues that these acts also expanded the way photography could be conceptualized as a field of study. Through a series of emblematic case studies, the book makes a powerful argument about the multi-faceted visual and social impact of photography under repressive rule.

Crossing Empires: Taking U.S. History into Transimperial Terrain

Alvita Akiboh

Pages 282–284

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa041

In Crossing Empires, Kristin Hoganson and Jay Sexton present an edited collection highlighting recent scholarship on U.S. transimperial history. The emphasis on the “transimperial,” Hoganson and Sexton explain in the introduction, is a corrective to the scholarly tendency to use “transnational” as a catch-all term for people, goods, or ideas that transcend borders. Much of the time, they point out, those borders were imperial, not national. But beyond simply correcting inaccurate terminology, they want this collection to show that recognizing these connections as transimperial can enhance and deepen our understanding of pressing questions in the field about power, connection, and the making of the modern world.

The collection is organized in five parts: part 1 follows pursuits of profit (seal trading and bridge-building) across imperial boundaries, part 2 discusses politics (liberal imperialism, the secret ballot, and opium prohibition) that crossed imperial borders, part 3 looks more closely at governance (the U.S. Consular Service, free trade anti-imperialism, and governance in the Islamic Philippines), part 4 focuses on the lives of people who crossed imperial borders or had imperial borders cross them (African American colonists in Canada, Afro-Caribbean laborers on the Panama Canal, and Filipinos under Japanese occupation), and part 5 focuses on transimperial resistance (South Asian activists in the United States fighting against the British Empire and Indigenous activists in Australia, Canada, and the United States fighting against child removal). All of the chapters are accessible, engaging, and succinct, making them ideal for undergraduate courses.

Childhood in Modern Europe. By Colin Heywood (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 296 pp. $29.99)

Michal Shapira

Pages 285–287

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shaa046

Childhood in Modern Europe by Colin Heywood is an excellent and accessible survey of the history of childhood, which expertly provides an immensely readable, compelling, and effective introduction to this expanding, innovative field. The book is published as part of the fine, informative series “New Approaches to European History” by Cambridge University Press, an important textbook series which offers concise yet definitive surveys of major issues throughout European history since the Renaissance. Colin Heywood is a known authority in the history of childhood, a Professor Emeritus of Modern French History at the University of Nottingham, and Honorary President of the Children’s History Society. His previous books focused on childhood in France from the Ancien Régime to the Third Republic. In Childhood in Modern Europe he sets out to familiarize readers with the study of childhood and to survey its changing history from the eighteenth to the end of the twentieth century, and into the present.