7 research outputs found
How size matters: the question of scale in history
In the last few years, the AHR has published six âConversations,â each on a subject of interest to a wide range of historians: âOn Transnational Historyâ (2006), âReligious Identities and Violenceâ (2007), âEnvironmental Historians and Environmental Crisisâ (2008), âHistorians and the Study of Material Cultureâ (2009), âHistorical Perspectives on the Circulation of Informationâ (2011), and âThe Historical Study of Emotionsâ (2012). For each the process has been the same: the Editor convenes a group of scholars with an interest in the topic who, via e-mail over the course of several months, conduct a conversation, which is then lightly edited and footnoted, finally appearing in the December issue. The goal has been to provide readers with a wide-ranging consideration of a topic at a high level of expertise, in which the participants are recruited across several fields and periods. It is the sort of publishing project that this journal is uniquely positioned to undertake. This year's topic is âHow Size Matters: The Question of Scale in History.â Many working historiansâperhaps more those of past generations than todayâmight regard this question as irrelevant if not downright strange. Most traditional history, after all, is spatially defined by categories such as the nation-state, or chronologically constrained by the temporal boundaries of an event or era, or otherwise contextualized in terms of time and space by implicit âgivens.â At least since the rise of the Annales school of history in the 1970s, however, these assumed categories have been challenged by such concepts as the Braudelian âworldâ and the longue durĂ©e, and subsequently by the vogue of âmicrohistory.â In more recent years there has been the rise of global or world history, as well as, even more recently, âdeepâ history, which challenges historians to think not only in years or centuries but across the vast spaces of evolutionary and even planetary time. The conversation that follows touches on all of these topics. Joining the Editor here are Sebouh David Aslanian, a scholar of early modern Armenian and world history at UCLA; Joyce E. Chaplin, a historian of the environment and of science from Harvard University; Kristin Mann, an African historian at Emory University; and Ann McGrath, a scholar of colonialism and Indigenous history at the Australian National University. In addition, all of these scholars have an active interest in global and world history, which largely provided the theme of the conversation
Repertoires of family life and the anchoring of Afghan trading networks in Ukraine
This article examines the ârepertoriesâ of family life of men of Afghan background in Odessa, Ukraine. It focuses on these men's intimate relationships with âlocal womenâ and challenges the notion that such unions merely offer a form of emotional escape for migrants or refugees far from home. Instead, we advance two arguments: first, that Afghan men in Ukraine form part of a complex transnational trading network, rather than a bounded group of refugees or migrants; second, that the cross-community relationships between Afghan men and âlocal womenâ play a significant role in the spatial anchoring and commercial fortunes of transnational Afghan traders in Ukraine. In the analysis of our ethnographic data, we consider the importance of the aftermath of the Cold War in shaping the diverse forms of family life within these trading networks