AHR Interview

In this episode we look back at one of our most read articles from the past few years—Lara Putnam's "The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast," which appears in the April 2016 issue of the AHR. In it, Putnam explores some of the unintended, as well as largely unexamined, consequences of the mass digitization of historical sources, what she calls the digitized turn, and how this development has linked in both positive and potentially problematic ways to the rise of transnational history. Read the article here: https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.2.377. Lara Putnam is a historian of race, gender, migration, and politics in the twentieth-century Americas. Her recent publications have pursued two tracks: exploring theoretical and methodological dimensions of the historical discipline's "transnational turn" from the basis of her deep training within the area studies paradigm; and continuing her empirical archival research into the history of the Greater Caribbean, including not only anglophone, hispanophone, and francophone islands but the interlinked borderlands that stretch from Venezuela to Central America and indeed on to New Orleans and Harlem. Most recently, she was the lead author of a successful Mellow Sawyer Seminar proposal entitled "Information Ecosystems: Creating Data (and Absence) from the Quantitative to the Digital Age," a process that brought together a multidisciplinary team from across the humanities and social sciences. This national grant will bring a series of leading international scholars together over the course of AY 2019-20, foregrounding both the importance of cutting-edge computational methods in the social sciences and humanities, and the need for critical thinking about data infrastructure and information ecosystems as we engage those methods. Putnam is also engaged in a parallel line of research and writing about face-to-face political organizing and its role in a fraught age of political change, with articles in Democracy, The New Republic, The American Prospect, and beyond. With Theda Skocpol. "Middle America Reboots Democracy." Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Summer 2018 print issue. https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/middle-america-reboots-democracy/ With Theda Skocpol. "Accentuate the Activists." The New Republic, September 2018 print issue. https://newrepublic.com/article/150462/women-rebuilding-democratic-party-ground "Digital Fixes Won't Solve the Democrats' Problems." American Prospect, April 2018. http://prospect.org/article/digital-fixes-wont-solve-democrats-problems

In this episode of AHR Interview, David Minto discusses his article "Perversion by Penumbras: Wolfenden, Griswold, and the Transatlantic Trajectory of Sexual Privacy," which appears in the journal's October 2018 issue. The article examines the role of the 1957 British Wolfenden Report on homosexual offenses and prostitution in the creation of the legal atmosphere in which the U.S. Supreme Court, in its 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, recognized a constitutional right to marital privacy. Minto is Assistant Professor of History at Durham University. His research deals with twentieth-century British and U.S. history in domestic and transnational perspective, with a particular focus on gender and sexuality. He is currently working on his first book project, which is titled "An Intimate Atlantic: The Special Relationships of Transnational Homophile Activism." Interviewing Minto is historian Julio Capó Jr. Capó is Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and researches transnational and queer history with an emphasis on the U.S., the Caribbean, and Latin America. His book Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 was published in 2017 by the University of North Carolina Press.

The runaway success of the Broadway musical Hamilton has thrilled and challenged American audiences with a racially diverse reimagining of the nation's founding. The highly acclaimed show has had children and adults alike talking about, and singing about, historical figures such as Alexander Hamilton and documents like the Federalist Papers. But how have historians reacted to this interpretation and popularizing of America's past? In this episode we speak with some of the contributors to the volume Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America's Past, which was published in May 2018 by Rutgers University Press. Our guests are the book's editors, Claire Bond Potter of the New School and Renee Romano of Oberlin College. They are joined by three additional contributors: Leslie Harris of Northwestern University, Elizabeth Wollman of Baruch College and The Graduate Center at the City University of New York, and Patricia Herrera of the University of Richmond. They spoke with AHR editor Alex Lichtenstein.

AHR Interview is excited to present a new four-part series on the recent blockbuster film Black Panther. In these episodes, AHR editorial assistant Charlene Fletcher speaks with four different scholars about their reactions to the film and what it evokes about the culture and politics of African and African diasporic history. The first episode features a fuller introduction to the series as a whole. This episode features Sean Jacobs, Associate Professor of International Affairs at the New School, the author and coeditor of numerous books on South African politics and culture, and the founder of the innovative website Africa Is a Country.

AHR Interview is excited to present a new four-part series on the recent blockbuster film Black Panther. In these episodes, AHR editorial assistant Charlene Fletcher speaks with four different scholars about their reactions to the film and what it evokes about the culture and politics of African and African diasporic history. The first episode features a fuller introduction to the series as a whole. Nwando Achebe is the Jack and Margaret Sweet Endowed Professor of History at Michigan State University, the founding editor of the Journal of West African History, and the author of numerous works, including the award-winning 2011 book The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe.

AHR Interview is excited to present a new four-part series on the recent blockbuster film Black Panther. In these episodes, AHR editorial assistant Charlene Fletcher speaks with four different scholars about their reactions to the film and what it evokes about the culture and politics of African and African diasporic history. The first episode features a fuller introduction to the series as a whole. Tanisha Ford is Associate Professor of Africana Studies and History at the University of Delaware and author of the 2015 book Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul.

The June issue of the AHR features a series of short essays commemorating the 50th anniversary of 1968. In this episode our guest is one of the contributors to this series, Donna Murch. Her piece is titled "Black Liberation and 1968." She spoke about it with AHR editor Alex Lichtenstein. Murch is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University and author of the 2010 book Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California.

In this episode of AHR Interview, consulting editor Kate Brown speaks with historian Taymiya Zaman about her essay "Cities, Time, and the Backward Glance," which appears in the June 2018 issue. Zaman's piece is the first contribution to a new section of the journal called "History Unclassified," which will explore things that would not normally be found in our articles category—stories from the archives, unexpected connections between fields, discussions of new methods, or trials of new forms of writing and presentation. For more on "History Unclassified," including how to submit, see https://academic.oup.com/ahr/pages/history_unclassified. Taymiya Zaman is a historian of Mughal India and South Asia. She is Associate Professor of History at the University of San Francisco as well as a writer of both narrative non-fiction and fiction.

In this episode AHR associate editor Konstantin Dierks speaks with historian Paul Kramer whose article "The Geopolitics of Mobility: Immigration Policy and American Global Power in the Long Twentieth Century" appears in the April 2018 issue of the American Historical Review. Kramer is Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University and researches the transnational, imperial, and global aspects of modern U.S. history. He is the author of the 2006 book The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines. The article is available online: https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.2.393