Régis Bertrand & Anne Carol (eds.), L’exécution capitale : une mort donnée en spectacle – XVIe-XXe siècles

In recent years, the death penalty has drawn increasing attention from historians. Capital punishment has been analysed not only as subject of legal history in the strict sense of the term, but from multiple historiographic perspectives with far-reaching implications. Inspired by the debates on the scope of social and cultural history, historians have scrutinized the death penalty as institution, incident, and ritual in the context of social systems, discourses, and symbolic practices in spec..

Gewalt: Kritische Überlegungen zur Historizität ihrer Formen, Funktionen und Legitimierungen

The article argues against quantifying approaches to the study of violence which assume a decline of violence throughout history and seem to have gained new momentum with Steven Pinker’s recently published important book. Instead, it explores the continuous and powerful impact of violence in modern history, even though “modern civilized” societies have been officially opposed to violence and its use for centuries. Analyzing particular configurations of violence and its different employments in both Europe and North America against different people and differently perceived bodies this article questions the paradigms of “civilization” and “modernity.” Violence is ren-dered compatible with “modern civilization” through the regularity of its use, through its concealment, and through its deployment against those people who are not perceived as “subjects” and whose lives and suffering are deemed less “grievable” (Judith Butler)

Introduction: Fat Agency

The introduction lays the ground for this issue’s critical inquiry into fat and agency. Agency is a crucial yet ambivalent tool for historical, cultural and social analysis. It denotes a combination of self-reliance, self-will and self-respect among historical actors. On the one hand, it is a symbol for the reappropriation of alienated and seemingly overpowering discourses, social relations, and institutions. On the other hand, it often serves as an idealized counterpoint to representations of fat bodies. Therefore, agency is not necessarily and exclusively tied to oppositional acts of resistance or withdrawal, but it is also a premise of the social and political organization of liberal societies: exerting agency performs our compliance with its demands

Shades of empire: police photography in German South-West Africa

This article looks at a photographic album produced by the German police in colonial Namibia just before World War I. Late 19th- and early 20th-century police photography has often been interpreted as a form of visual production that epitomized power and regimes of surveillance imposed by the state apparatuses on the poor, the criminal and the Other. On the other hand police and prison institutions became favored sites where photography could be put at the service of the emergent sciences of the human body—physiognomy, anthropometry and anthropology. While the conjuncture of institutionalized colonial state power and the production of scientific knowledge remain important for this Namibian case study, the article explores a slightly different set of questions. Echoing recent scholarship on visuality and materiality the photographic album is treated as an archival object and visual narrative that was at the same time constituted by and constitutive of material and discursive practices within early 20th-century police and prison institutions in the German colony. By shifting attention away from image content and visual codification alone toward the question of visual practice the article traces the ways in which the photo album, with its ambivalent, unstable and uncontained narrative, became historically active and meaningful. Therein the photographs were less informed by an abstract theory of anthropological and racial classification but rather entrenched with historically contingent processes of colonial state constitution, socioeconomic and racial stratification, and the institutional integration of photography as a medium and a technology into colonial policing. The photo album provides a textured sense of how fragmented and contested these processes remained throughout the German colonial period, but also how photography could offer a means of transcending the limits and frailties brought by the realities on the ground.International Bibliography of Social Science

History, power, and electricity: American popular magazine accounts of electroconvulsive therapy, 1940–2005

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is a psychiatric treatment that has been in use in the United States since the 1940s. During the whole of its existence, it has been extensively discussed and debated within American popular magazines. While initial reports of the treatment highlighted its benefits to patients, accounts by the 1970s and 1980s were increasingly polarized. This article analyzes the popular accounts over time, particularly the ways in which the debates over ECT have revolved around different interpretations of ECT's history and its power dynamics. © 2008Wiley Periodicals, Inc.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/57903/1/20283_ftp.pd

Feste Banden lose schnüren: "Gouvernementalität" als analytische Perspektive auf Geschichte

"History, in general, only informs us what bad Government is", schrieb Thomas Jefferson, der Verfasser der amerikanischen Unabhängigkeitserklärung und dritte Präsident der USA, im Juni 1807. Mit der rund drei Jahrzehnte zurückliegenden Loslösung vom britischen Mutterland, mit der Revolution und der Gründung der Republik hatte sich die Frage danach, was "gute" von "schlechter" Regierung unterscheide, in Nordamerika mit besonderer Dringlichkeit gestellt. Schließlich hatte man in den ehemaligen Kolonien bewusst den Despotismus verabschiedet und eine Gesellschaftsordnung auf den Weg gebracht, die das Glück des Einzelnen, Freiheit, Unabhängigkeit und Selbstbestimmung zu ihren Grundsätzen erhob. Damit wurden die leitenden Prinzipien der Aufklärung in der politischen und gesellschaftlichen Realität auf die Probe gestellt. John Adams, ein weiterer "Gründervater" und später zweiter Präsident der Republik, hatte schon einige Monate vor der Unabhängigkeitserklärung geschrieben, mit der Revolution lösten sich sämtliche autoritär strukturierten Herrschaftsverhältnisse, und zwar nicht nur diejenigen zwischen Mutterland und Kolonien, sondern auch die zwischen Herren und Sklaven, Lehrjungen und Meistern oder Eltern und Kindern. Angesichts solcher Veränderungen empfand Adams - wie viele andere auch - nicht nur Freude und Zuversicht, sondern zugleich ein gewisses Unbehagen. Man musste neue Formen der Regierung finden, die die Menschen ohne imperativen Zwang derart führten, dass sie in einer freiheitlichen Ordnung funktionierten