Duke University Press Log

Q&A with the editors of French Historical Studies

The incoming editors of French Historical Studies (FHS), Kay Edwards and Carol Harrison, discuss the future of the journal under their joint editorship, including information about forthcoming special issues and what topics they would like to see submitted to the journal. See the most recent issue here, and subscribe to the journal here.

How would you like to shape French Historical Studies in the future?

CAROL: In the future I think we’d like to continue some trends that we see in the field and that FHS is starting to reflect, publishing a lot about France and French history beyond the borders of metropolitan France. There will be more colonial material, which is where the field is going. We have exciting material on South East Asia and North Africa in the pipeline now that is being submitted.

KAY: We've also said that we've wanted to expand the chronological framework. FHS is open to anyone working in France or in these related fields over pretty much any chronology. But our submissions currently do tend to be much more modern. We want to get people who are doing medieval work or late antique work to think of us as well, since we definitely are a highly ranked scholarly publishing venue.

How do you see the journal developing over the next few years?

KAY: I would like to see us broadening the journal not just chronologically and in terms of international content, but also in terms of broadening it to more of an international academic audience. We currently are getting more and more submissions from German and Scandinavian lands, we've always gotten a few French, but we’d like to broaden our European, East Asian, African, Latin American base.

CAROL: I think we have a couple of ideas or projects on board now that are also about reminding the rest of the historical profession of how important French history is and how important French historians are to the rest of the profession. So I would say Michael Breen’s forum for instance. We have a group of articles by young French social historians that we’re arranging to translate into English to publish in the journal. I think this is important because social history is a much more lively tradition in France right now than it is in the Anglophone world. These are scholars who unless you work in French history and read French and keep up with things in France, you probably don’t know about. I think scholars outside of French history should read this forum to find out what’s going on in French history, and particularly in French social history. Similarly, we’ve got a special issue coming up in 2017 that we've just started planning on archives so we’re recruiting scholars who will be writing about archives not just as neutral repositories where the facts are, but as institutions that shape the way history is written, so as active participants in the writing of history. I think that’s the kind of special issue that will remind the rest of the profession that French historians are really crucial to shaping history.

Speaking of special issues, are there any other forthcoming special issues that you would like to talk about? How do you select special issues?

KAY: There is a French food special issue coming out that is primarily a project of the past editors. It is about food very broadly defined in French history. There is an article on coffee, another about WWII and food allocations and foraging, a wide variety of what defines food--not just a recipe book--particularly because France is so strongly associated with food culture.

CAROL: There will be articles on wonderful food, the introduction of coffee, there will be articles on lack of food, hunger, there’s an article on late 19th-century shop girls and their relationship to food, you know where they ate lunch and if they ate lunch. So that’s going to be a very exciting issue. And then further down the pipeline--this is more speculative--but 2018 is the 50th anniversary the events of May 1968. This is another one that I think will be important for FHS and I hope for non-French historians. Nineteen sixty-eight having obviously had a global reach, but the events in France were central. So that’s another one where we’d like to put together articles on France, on the Francophone world outside of France, and think about this anniversary. We would like FHS to lead the way a bit in talking about the German ‘68 and Mexico City ‘68 and Berkeley ‘68 and pull it together.

What would you like researchers to know about the submission process?

KAY: Don’t be afraid to send all different types of articles. Just because we’re FHS doesn't mean we only, as Carol said, do the metropol. There’s probably going to be a conception that we only do cultural stuff because that’s what France is. And the whole point is that we’re trying to get a wide variety of methodologies and subjects and approaches.

Who should be submitting to this journal that hasn't been?

KAY: A lot of early modernists and pre-modernists don’t think they should submit to FHS, in part because the name implies a very national framework that sometimes work and sometimes doesn't.

CAROL: They may be working on a territory that was not in fact called France. But if it’s Francophone, we’d like to see more early modern, medieval, and more French scholars! We do publish in French.

KAY: It does not have to be a translated work. In terms of material, I just want to see diversity. I really don’t want people to assume that because it’s French that it must be cultural or that it must have theoretical work. I have nothing against theoretical work, but I think there may potentially be stereotypes. I would like to see a reconstruction of environmental drainage, as long as this is something that hasn't been done.

CAROL: One thing our predecessors started that I think we want to continue is publishing more editorial pieces. Instead of very closely researched monographs, single author traditional research articles, FHS has been publishing these editorial pieces that are often reflections on the profession. We've published a recent one by David Bell that’s thinking about global history and reflections on the profession generally, on French history, and its role in the globalizing historical profession. I think there is room for developing that kind of editorial piece. We invite people to submit not just the research articles, but editorial articles that reflect the state of the field and the kind of the research that’s being done.

Volcanic Eruptions and Environmental Disasters in Literature and History

Cataclysmic events, such as the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which happened on this day, have fascinated people for thousands of years. Individuals have attempted to express this captivation in various ways from Pliny the Younger, who survived the Vesuvius eruption and subsequently wrote in detail about his experience, to the leaders of the French Revolution, who invoked the powerful symbolism of a natural, unstoppable force that volcanoes represent. Writing about natural disasters helps people move on, but not forget, these catastrophes. As these experiences are immortalized over time, they come to symbolize hope, survival, power and destruction. Poetics Today and French Historical Studies delve further into these instances of expression and demonstrate the link between why people write about natural disasters such as Mount Vesuvius’ eruption and how that calamity empowers and embodies events long after.

In Francoise Lavocat’s “Narratives of Catastrophe in the Early Modern Period: Awareness of Historicity and the Emergence of Interpretative Viewpoints,” he discusses the reasons and ways people write about natural disasters:

Braccini’s narrative of the Naples volcanic eruption illustrates the narrator-witness’s need to explain his personal, intellectual, and even emotional perception of a given event. The 1631 eruption of Mount Vesuvius gave rise to many narratives that emphasized the contrast between “the curiosity” of the witness-narrator and the credulity of Neapolitans nurtured by legends. This contrast was inspired by Pliny the Younger’s attitude toward the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. It is also by reference to Pliny that the taste for observation, even close to the eruption site, is asserted and staged, as can be seen in Braccini’s writing. Another priest, Angelo Eugenii da Perugia, compares his “experience” of the “natural effects” of the eruption to the “extravagant exaggerations” of his contemporaries, who interpret the phenomenon as the beginning of the Apocalypse. No one denies the existence of divine causes, but nor does this prevent the consideration of secondary causes. Braccini goes to a library in Naples and does a public reading of Pliny’s letter about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, declaring to his fellow citizens: “Here is a description,58 1550 years old, that corresponds exactly to what you have before your eyes today”. In the case of the eruption of Vesuvius, the repetition of this catastrophe and the comparison it invites between AD 79 and 1629 beg for demystification: at least, the repetition suggests that this eruption, similar to a previous one in antiquity, is not the last and so very unlikely to be the Apocalypse. Braccini’s rational point of view thus partly secularizes the interpretation. The historical dimension is fundamental to this new approach to catastrophe, expressed several times around 1630, regarding the eruption of Vesuvius and the plague in northern Italy. Most narratives include an appendix that lists previous catastrophes in chronological order,60 focusing on disasters that occurred in the recent past (especially the sixteenth century) while ignoring biblical and mythical accounts. Catastrophes are no longer prophetic of other catastrophes.

Read more from “Narratives of Catastrophe” here.

In “Mountain, Become a Volcano: The Image of the Volcano in the Rhetoric of the French Revolution,” Mary Ashburn Miller establishes a relationship between the language of natural history and the political rhetoric of the French Revolution by tracing the iconography of the volcano throughout the revolutionary period:

Le jugement dernier des rois, a play written by Sylvain Maréchal, opened to enthusiastic reviews at the Theater of the Republic in Vendémiaire of Year II. Maréchal subtitled his play ‘a prophecy in one act.’ The journalist Prudhomme also embraced the future foreseen by the playwright and hoped for by the supportive Committee of Public Safety. ‘The theatrical fiction will soon become historical fact,’ he wrote. The overthrow of Europe’s kings, their return to an ‘uncivilized’ state, and their ultimate destruction by natural forces was fiction presented to, and patronized by, a broad French public, playing in Beauvais, Compiègne, Grenoble, Le Mans, Lille, Metz, and Rouen. And the volcano, symbol of revolutionary fervor and destruction, became the ultimate demonstration of nature’s justice, annihilating the monarchs in a single, terrifying, and glorious moment described in the play’s liner notes: ‘The explosion takes place: the fire attacks the kings from all sides; they fall, consumed in the innards of the opened earth.’ The quite literal fall of the monarchs, although enabled by the French Revolution itself, was portrayed as the work of natural forces.

Read more from “Mountain, Become a Volcano” here.

The "Lost City" of Machu Picchu

On July 24th, 1911, American archaeologist Hiram Bingham and the Yale Peruvian Expedition team followed an eleven year old boy to the ruins of Machu Picchu. The expedition sensationalized the area and opened the floodgates of tourism in Peru. Today, tourists, adventurers, and academic enthusiasts from all over the world still flock to Machu Picchu. In honor of this wonder, sample several articles from two journals, Ethnohistory and Hispanic American History Review.

In “Collecting a ‘Lost City’ for Science: Huaquero Vision and the Yale Peruvian Expedition to Machu Picchu, 1911, 1912, and 1914–15,” Amy Cox Hall delves deeper into the rediscovery of Machu Picchu. She examines the practices and collecting technologies of the expedition to suggest that the objects accumulated as well as the practices used in accumulating helped fashion Machu Picchu into a “lost city” that was “scientifically discovered” by Bingham. Read an excerpt:

Although popular myth associates Hiram Bingham and his global unveiling of Machu Picchu in 1911 with archaeology, Bingham was trained as a historian and “had little interest in stratigraphy” or other methodologies associated with modern archaeological research. Instead, what was practiced on the three forays of the Yale Peruvian Expedition (YPE) to Machu Picchu is better characterized as a late antiquarianism-inspired collecting spree—or, less generously, strategic “grave robbing."

In this article I suggest that the expedition’s practices and technologies helped mythologize Machu Picchu into a “lost city.” ̈ It was initially imagined by Bingham as the lost Inca city of Vilcapampa, and the expedition team’s collecting practices and the frame of science, as well as the types of artifacts collected, helped materialize Machu Picchu as both a vestige of the Inca race and a “scientific discovery.” The collecting practices combined prospecting with the notion that science had a sovereign claim on those objects that might contribute to the accumulation of its knowledge. Rather than representing a nation’s or empire’s sovereign claim over a territory and its history, the expedition relied on the universal virtue and sovereignty of science to make its objects collectible.

Read more of “Collecting a ‘Lost City’ for Science” here.

In “Tourism, Environment, and Development on the Inca Trail,” Keely Maxwell explores how tourism has shaped Latin America by constructing touristic landscapes and impacting environmental problem solving. He utilizes written records and interviews to document the environmental history of the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. Read an excerpt:

Thousands of kilometers of former Inca roads span the Andes. One 40-kilometer section has become a new type of Andean pathway, a tourist trail hiked by 54,000 foreign visitors in 2008 alone. Tourism has emerged as a potent political economic force in twentieth-century Latin America, with concomitant environmental impacts. Yet despite the importance of tourism in the region, there are few scholarly investigations of its history, particularly its environmental history. Research has centered on how tourism developed as a leisure activity linked to modernity and capitalist industrialization, on the social construction of tourism destinations, and on social relations of hosts to guests. In Latin America, tourism histories have focused geographically on the Caribbean and Mexico and thematically on “sun and sand” or on cultural heritage tourism. The Inca Trail is part of the Machu Picchu Historic Sanctuary, created in 1981 and designated a World Heritage Site for natural and cultural heritage in 1983. It is a premiere tourist destination and the center of controversy over environmental impacts, and so it provides a critical case for examining the environmental history of Latin American tourism.

Read more of “Tourism, Environment, and Development on the Inca Trail” here.

Happy Birthday, Rachel Carson!

In celebration of what would have been Rachel Carson’s 107th birthday tomorrow, we are happy to honor her legacy with a post including several journal articles that relate to her life and work. Famous for Silent Spring (1962) among many other projects, Carson is credited with influencing the modern environmental movement and inspiring a change in national pesticide policy and a nationwide ban on DDT for agricultural uses.

 

In “Spinster Ecology,” Sarah Ensor investigates the role of futurity in queer ecocriticism how the figure of a spinster can help to resolve tensions between two schools of thought. Read an excerpt:

Attempting to discredit Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, former Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson wrote to Dwight D. Eisenhower and asked ‘why a spinster with no children was so concerned about genetics.’ Benson’s attack, its misogyny at best thinly veiled, makes legible one of the central challenges to developing a queer ecocritical practice: the status of futurity. Contemporary environmentalism, especially given the recent emphasis on sustainability, tends to be future-oriented, its rhetoric predicated on matters of inheritance and procreation alike…. Much recent queer theory, by contrast, insistently resists futurity, marked as it often is by heteronormative imperatives. What does it mean, then, to develop a queer ecocriticism?

To read more from “Spinster Ecology,” click here.

 

“The New York School of Urban Ecology” by Jamin Creed Rowan argues that Rachel Carson’s ecological voice helped change the tone of the New Yorker and “helped solidify a literary and intellectual tradition that infused the city’s social networks with social value.” Read an excerpt:

Although Rachel Carson is perhaps best remembered for dramatizing the environmental consequences of pesticide in Silent Spring (1962), many readers first discovered here in the New Yorker writing about the sea--not DDT. Edith Oliver, a staff editor at the New Yorker, recommended Carson’s manuscript for The Sea Around Us to editor-in-chief William Shawn in 1950. Shawn was even more enthusiastic about this relatively unknown naturalist and offered to buy nine of the book’s fourteen chapters. He then condensed these chapters and published them, rather unusually, as a three-part series in June 1951 under the magazine’s “Profiles” rubric. While recognizing the significance of Carson’s New Yorker publications for her subsequent career, critics have found it difficult to explain her appearance in a magazine targeted, according to founder Harold Ross, at ‘persons who have a metropolitan interest.’

To read more from “The New York School of Urban Ecology,” click here.

 

Articles:

“Spinster Ecology: Rachel Carson, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Nonreproductive Futurity,” by Sarah Ensor in a special issue of American Literature, “Ecocriticism,” volume 84 and issue 2 (June 2012).

“The New York School of Urban Ecology: The New Yorker, Rachel Carson, and Jane Jacobs,” by Jamin Creed Rowan in American Literature, volume 82 and issue 3 (September 2010)

 

Indigenous Rights and the Environment in Mexico's Colorado Delta

Today's New York Times science section covers the efforts of Mexico to relieve the parched Colorado River delta, deprived of water by dams upstream in the U.S. Sixty years ago, the river flowed freely into the Gulf of California, creating a rich estuary where shrimp, fish, and dolphins were abundant. But during the second half of the twentieth century, the U.S. damned the river and diverted it to supply water for agriculture and a growing population and the delta is now mostly a dry, cracked wasteland. An amendment to a treaty between the two countries should lead to more water sharing over the next five year. Perhaps hardest hit by the lack of water in the region has been the local Cucapá indigenous people, who had long survived by fishing in the Delta. In her new book Where the River Ends: Contested Indigeneity in the Mexican Colorado Delta, Shaylih Muehlmann talks about how the Mexican government has also diverted water away from the lands of the Cucapá, preventing them from earning a livelihood. When the Cucapá fish anyway, they are pressured by federal inspectors to stop, and are blamed for the ecological damage in the region. Muehlmann writes, "The Cucapá people have experienced the brunt of the environmental damage done to the delta, while simultaneously being targeted as objects of intervention because of their alleged blame in the crisis. As is always the case in narratives that blame the victim, this focus exonerates the more powerful political actors and institutions that have prevented the Colorado River from reaching the Sea of Cortez. This ethnographic case, therefore, illustrates how environmental conflicts are never just about 'the environment.'" (172) Where the River Ends is a moving look at how the Cucapá people have experienced and responded to the diversion of the Colorado River and the Mexican state's attempts to regulate the environmental crisis that followed. It's available for 50% off during our Spring Sale.

Authors at the Virginia Festival of the Book

We're excited that two of our authors will be participating in the Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville this weekend. 

On Friday, March 22 at 10 am, geologist Orrin Pilkey will speak about "The Rising Oceans: Where to Go from Here". Batiks by artist Mary Edna Fraser that appeared in their book Global Climate Change will be on display. 

Also on Friday, March 22, at 6 pm, Natalie Hopkinson, author of Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City, will appear on the panel "Shake, Rattle, and Roll: Popular Music in America."

 

If you're near Charlottesville this weekend, be sure to check out these great talks and many others at the Festival.

 

Duke Breaks Ground on New Marine Lab Honoring Orrin Pilkey

On July 30, Duke University broke ground on a new 20,000 square foot research facility at the Beaufort, NC campus. The facility will be named the Orrin Pilkey Marine Science & Conservation Genetics Center in honor of the retired geologist. Pilkey has taught at Duke since 1965. He is the author or editor of dozens of books, most recently Global Climate Change: A Primer, which he co-wrote with his son Keith Pilkey and artist Mary Edna Fraser. Pilkey's former editor at Duke Press, Reynolds Smith, attended the groundbreaking ceremony as did Duke University President Richard Brodhead. Pilkey told News 14 Carolina that is important the center be located in Beaufort: "Marine labs must be near the marine environment. You understand, you get an intuition for the environment. You watch the tides, you smell the smells, you see the waves, you see the storms."

Pilkey and Smith at the ceremony.

Bipartisan Policy Center Urges Research Into Geoengineering

Today the Bipartisan Policy Center's Task Force on Climate Remediation Research issued a report that urges the United States to step up research into geoengineering techniques that might help slow or stop the progress of global climate change. In interviews with the New York Times, "some of the panel members said they hoped that the mere discussion of such drastic steps would jolt the public and policy makers into meaningful action in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which they called the highest priority." Climate change expert Orrin H. Pilkey believes "the potential for adverse side effects" in any geoengineering project is "high and unpredictable." His new book, Global Climate Change: A Primer, written with his son Keith C. Pilkey, features a chapter on geoengineering that lays out some of the potential technologies, such as seeding the oceans to provide cloud cover, carbon sequestration machines, and the pumping of aerosols into the stratosphere. Pilkey ultimately comes down against geoengineering, writing: "that climate change is so dire a challenge as to propel some in the scientific community to seriously consider geoengineering should scare us all the more. The anthropogenic climate change criss that we face requires a political rather than a geoengineering solution."

"Our Expanding Oceans" Exhibit Premiere and Book Signing

On June 23rd, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences hosted the "Our Expanding Oceans" exhibit premiere with a reception and book signing. Scientist Orrin H. Pilkey and his son Keith C. Pilkey signed copies of their new book, Global Climate Change: A Primer (2011), with artist Mary Edna Fraser.

The exhibit will run from June 25th-November 6th and features more than 50 hand-dyed silk batiks by Mary Edna Fraser. The exhibit and accompanying book were developed by Mary Edna Fraser and Orrin H. Pilkey.

Here are a few photos from the book signing, lecture, and reception. To see more, please visit our Facebook Fan Page.

 

View of the outside of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

 

 

 

Artist Mary Edna Fraser and co-authors Orrin H. Pilkey and Keith C. Pilkey sign copies of their new book, Global Climate Change: A Primer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mary Edna Fraser and Orrin H. Pilkey's lecture. Mary Edna Fraser described the process by which she creates her colorful batiks, and Orrin H. Pilkey explained about global climate change.

 

 

The exhibit premiere and reception.

 

 

Time to Put an End to the Climate Change "Debate"

With the release of the Congressional report "America's Climate Choices," this week as well as the retraction of a much-cited scholarly critique of global warming, many environmentalists are hoping we can finally end the "debate" about climate change. The report, undertaken at Congress's behest by the National Research Council, begins by clearly stating what it sees as the facts:

"Climate change is occurring, is very likely caused primarily by the emission of greenhouse gases from human activities, and poses significant risks for a range of human and natural systems. Emissions continue to increase, which will result in further change and greater risks. Responding to these risks is a crucial challenge facing the United States and the world today and for many decades to come."

This is much the way that Orrin H. Pilkey and Keith C. Pilkey begin their important new book Global Climate Change: A Primer. They start with the premise that "global climate change is upon us. Of this there is no doubt among those who observe the Earth." Their book aims to give clear, straightforward information about climate change to students and general readers, so they can understand the challenges facing us and confront them appropriately. In response to the report Orrin H. Pilkey says, "Sea level rise can be seen as an opportunity and a challenge to redesign with nature. But if our society fails to accept the latest congressional report and other documents like it we will, instead of planning, respond to global changes as emergency disasters." We hope many will educate themselves and their leaders by reading this crucial new book.