ARTICLES

How to See Corruption: Networks and the Construction of Corruption in Spanish Italy

Raphael Murillo

Pages 565–585

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab026

This article examines the practices and structures of corruption in Spanish Italy and demonstrates how the forms of official conduct that would later be categorized as corrupt in eighteenth-century political and legal discourses were already understood and prosecuted as corruption in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through the intervention at the local level of the visita, an institution employed by the Spanish Crown to inspect officials. The notion of corruption that was useful to the state amalgamated forms of conduct corresponding to distinctive configurations of social structures that functioned like networks. This article examines for the first time the rich collection of depositions assembled by the visitas in Naples and Sicily in 1559, 1581, and 1606, and reproduces four networks of corruption. Through the use of network analysis, these networks point to two foundational structural models of early modern corruption in which officials participated at the local level: a corrupt clientelism typified by relationships of exchange and favor organized by officials and a corruption of partiality and abuse of discretion embedded within institutional work and processes. Although distinct, these models were conceptually linked through the perception that these networks benefitted particular interests and were critically drawn together through the surveillance and discipline provided by the visita in anticipation of anti-corruption ideology and modern bureaucratic norms. What the state saw through the visita and prosecuted as corrupt reflected how that corruption was reported, how it occurred, and how it was structured.

"To Abjure Popish Heresys": Crafting a Borderlands Gospel during Queen Anne's War at St. James Parish, South Carolina, 1701–20

Timothy David Fritz

Pages 586–614

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac001

In 1706, local authorities institutionalized the Church of England in South Carolina hoping to bring Carolinian social practice into conformity with that of the metropole. Anglican missionaries worked to install religious instruction as a pillar of community identity in this contested space. Employing the specter of war and popery—and the associated fear of slave rebellion—helped ministers Samuel Thomas and Francis LeJau articulate a borderland-specific conception of race, place, and paternal responsibility in an aggressively expanding colony from 1701 to 1720. Utilizing correspondence surrounding the activities of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), this article asserts that rather than serving as a link to English society, the Anglican missions of the SPG functioned as an ideological space for creating a distinct regional identity. Thomas and LeJau crafted a community-specific application of Anglican beliefs, working out their conceptions of religious practice concerning the threats presented by Spanish attempts to secure the loyalty of Yamasees Indians and enslaved Africans. Understanding how fear operated in the southeastern borderlands provides a nuanced understanding of how colonialism operated in the southern colonies.

Experiencing Enumeration: Local Reactions and Resistance to Censuses in Imperial Russia, 1863–81

Catherine Gibson

Pages 615–646

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab020

During the second half of the nineteenth century, statistics attracted significant attention from government officials and educated elites as a method of quantifying socioeconomic change and rendering human and natural resources visible through data. However, we still know little about how local communities responded to changing methods of gathering statistical data during the gradual shift away from forms of enumeration based on legal estates and households toward modern methods of individual enumeration by census. Rarely do we approach the history of censuses from the perspective of the census subjects to consider the experiences of those being counted. This article analyzes interactions between census organizers and local populations in the three Russian imperial Baltic provinces (Estland, Livland, and Kurland) in the second half of the nineteenth century. As a form of administrative intervention, censuses opened up a space for local populations to articulate opinions and question the overlapping layers of authority within the empire between local elites, the provincial administration, and tsarist government. Examining the history of censuses from the perspective of local communities in the Russian Empire demonstrates how attitudes and resistance to censuses were closely tied to particular local issues and concerns. The Baltic case study adds nuance to existing discussions on forms of census resistance by broadening the focus beyond identity politics and conflict over forms of confessional, linguistic, and national classification. Instead, census subjects in the Baltic voiced concerns about how the local authorities might use individual enumeration as a form of administrative surveillance and social control.

Dangers that Lurk in a Kiss: Quarantining the American Mouth, 1890–1920

Peter C Baldwin

Pages 647–667

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab014

Affluent women, with the inconsistent support of some medical experts, led an early twentieth-century push to stop the practice of kissing. Imogene Rechtin of Cincinnati and likeminded activists argued that all forms of kissing spread harmful bacteria. The anti-kissing campaign was part of a larger effort to impose stricter discipline over the mouth, which thanks to recent advances in bacteriology had been identified as a dangerous vector of disease. Shaped by the Progressive Era inclination to solve problems through strategies of spatial separation, the effort to “quarantine” the American mouth involved disrupting social practices such as sharing the communion chalice and using a common cup at drinking fountains. The anti-kissing movement also attempted to protect women from unsolicited social kisses from other women and uninvited erotic kisses by men. Though public health officials strongly supported other mouth reforms, they opposed the anti-kissing campaign, largely on the nonmedical grounds that it was an impossible rejection of human sexuality. Then as now, public health arguments over mouth practices have been shaped by deeper battles over individual autonomy and the obligations of the individual to society.

Capitalism as Death: Loss of Life and the Finnish Migrant Left in the Early Twentieth Century

Samira Saramo

Pages 668–694

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab039

In early twentieth-century Canada and the United States, Finnish migrants faced dangerous working conditions and regularly lost lives on the job. To counter government and company inaction, migrant workers supported each other through grassroots community systems of reciprocity and participation in unionism and socialism. This article pairs migrant labor history with the history of death and mourning to explore how the relationship between the two may mutually develop our understandings of everyday life. Three case studies are at the center of analysis: the Italian Hall Tragedy of 1913 (Calumet, Michigan), the Hollinger Gold Mine Disaster of 1928 (Timmins, Ontario), and the deaths of lumber union organizers Viljo Rosvall and Janne Voutilainen in 1929 (Thunder Bay District, Ontario). By focusing on the death, grief, and mourning at the core of these events and on the days immediately following the tragedies, I demonstrate that death and loss were central to Finnish migrant workers’ everyday encounters with community and class-consciousness. I analyze newspaper coverage of these deaths in order to investigate the strategies of the Finnish language socialist press and leadership to emphasize the deadly power of the capitalist socioeconomic structure, but also seek the everyday spaces, feelings, and relationships caught among labor tensions. In analyzing the cases, I aim to highlight opportunities for new types of dialogue on migrant social history that come from bringing together death, the everyday, and the political.

The Varsity Drag: Gender, Sexuality, and Cross-Dressing at the University of Cambridge, 1850–1950

Dominic Janes

Pages 695–723

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab069

The records of student societies show that cross-dressing was a very popular practice at Cambridge University from the second half of the nineteenth century not only in drama but at a wide range of social events. Male and female students were segregated from one another in single-sex colleges because of the perceived moral dangers of co-education. One result of this was that plays were acted entirely by men or by women. Men’s performances of female glamour were sexualized in ways that appeared to confirm cross-sex desire but also contained the potential for flirtation with same-sex eroticism. Some student male actors began to accentuate knowingly queer elements of cross-dressing during the 1920s at a time when homosexuality was becoming more widely discussed in association with gender inversion. The authorities, meanwhile, had become less worried about preventing romantic liaisons between members of the opposite sex than they were about the possibility of same-sex scandals. Drama societies that recruited from across the University began to debate the admission of women members as a way of preventing the student stage from becoming associated with homosexuality and effeminacy. Productions in which men and women only performed as their own sex restored an appearance of heterosexual normality. Cross-dressing had a long afterlife in burlesque reviews in which the audience could be led to understand that it was camp homosexuality that was being parodied.

Birth, Life, and Afterlife of An Indonesian Graveyard: Environmental Rule and Its Discontents

Faizah Zakaria

Pages 724–743

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab031

The social history of graveyards in Asian cities is understudied but provides a uniquely apt ground from which to view socio-environmental concerns in an urban setting. Legally established in 1926, the Mandailing burial ground in the Indonesian city of Medan was produced through a set of legal and racial discourses introduced during the period of high colonialism. As this article demonstrates, these discourses were activated by large-scale land conversions that brought upland migrants down to coastal port cities and provoked them to question their identity. Placing the Mandailing graveyard within the context of “middle landscapes” that balance nature and culture illuminates how landscapes for the dead continue to manifest environmental change, including upland deforestation, flooding, and a rising tide of waste, in and beyond the city among the living. This article posits that such environmental anxieties were accompanied by social renovation from below, with the graveyard lending itself to a quest to enact a better future. The concentration of multiple issues within a single site makes the graveyard a singularly rich entry point for discussing how environmental rule and its discontents promote social change.

Beauty and Power: Beauticians, the Highlander Folk School, and Women's Professional Networks in the Civil Rights Movement

Nico Slate

Pages 744–768

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab055

In January 1961, fifty-two African American beauticians gathered at the Highlander Folk School, a tiny bastion of racial integration perched in the mountains of Tennessee. They had come to discuss their role in the struggle against American racism. While historians have long acknowledged the importance of gendered networks and women’s organizing within the African American freedom struggle, the history of the beauticians who gathered at Highlander demonstrates the importance of professional networks as a bridge between different local struggles. In their skill at building networks, and their attention to the patient labor required of such building, beauticians were emblematic of the organizing prowess demonstrated by women throughout the civil rights movement. But unlike most African American women, beauticians had the economic independence and social prominence to gain positions of power usually reserved for men. The intersection of their class status and their gendered identity magnified the liminal status of beauticians—and gave that status special power. As they debated their role in the movement, the beauticians who gathered at Highlander struggled to navigate between autonomy and connection, and between participatory democracy and institutional hierarchy. Their struggles reveal the inevitable tension that marked social networks within a movement that challenged not only the forces of white supremacy, but also the inequalities of status and economic power that transcended the color line.

"I am not a religious crackpot":School Prayer, the Becker Amendment, and Grassroots Mobilization in 1960s America

Timothy Verhoeven

Pages 769–791

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab024

This article investigates grassroots mobilization around the 1964 Becker Amendment, which aimed to guarantee the constitutionality of religious exercises in American public schools. The proposed amendment was at the heart of a bitter public debate that followed two landmark Supreme Court rulings banning mandated prayer and Bible-reading. Yet in line with church/state scholarship more broadly, scholars of the Becker Amendment have privileged the voices of the elite, from church leaders to journalists and politicians. This article focuses instead on an extraordinary archive of some 13,000 letters for and against the amendment that were written by ordinary Americans. These letters, which have been overlooked by historians, offer a revealing window into popular opinion concerning religion in schools and the relationship between faith and government. Focusing on the letters shifts our understanding of the school prayer controversy in several ways. It brings to light the central role of women as activists. It shows the kinds of issues that resonated at the community level. The letters also demonstrate the complex role of emotion in driving and shaping the public debate. Finally, close scrutiny of the letters offers a grassroots view of the shifting alliances within the American religious landscape that would help power the rise of the Religious Right.

REVIEWS

Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System. By Christopher Chitty

Samuel Clowes Huneke

Pages 792–794

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab003

In Sexual Hegemony, Christopher Chitty attempts to do to Michel Foucault what Karl Marx did to Hegel. In so doing, he takes aim at much of contemporary queer scholarship, for The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, which Foucault published in 1976, is responsible—more than virtually any other text—for establishing both the history of sexuality and queer theory as sites of humanistic inquiry. It did so by positing the homosexual as a recent construct of European culture, the result of increasingly invasive inquiries into human sexuality and efforts to regulate it on behalf of the state. Key to Foucault’s understanding of homosexuality’s birth was the appearance of modern power, that is, the normative, discursive relations that exercise subtle control over individuals and which set modern societies apart from the hierarchical domination of pre-modern ones.

Chitty, a graduate student in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz who committed suicide in 2015, contends that if homosexuality is a historical construct, then so is the history of homosexuality. And if sexuality’s privileged site of reproduction is discourse, then it makes sense to interrogate the discipline as a partisan, not merely an observer, in sexuality’s evolution. Thus turning constructivism against itself, Chitty contends that the vast scholarship, which The History of Sexuality inspired, is ultimately guilty of the same kinds of normative reification of sexual identity that Foucault’s work first diagnosed. Chitty thus asks, “If sex talk is how we are dominated, why continue to engage it at all? [..] What makes all those apparently sophisticated studies of the social construction of sexuality any different from the tomes whose titles wink and leer from the shelves behind them?” (154). The answer, according to him, is that they are not. Moreover, Chitty suggests queer scholarship is ultimately invested in the very bourgeois hegemony that it professes to interrogate. Because it takes the modern homosexual as its telos, Chitty contends, Foucault’s framework “proves to be a conceptual model of history with weak explanatory power” (157). That is, it lacks any sense of either agency or reason in its description of how sexuality changes over time.

A History of Solitude. By David Vincent

Tom Crook

Pages 795–797

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab017

David Vincent has written a remarkable book: a social history of the anti-social condition of solitude. Reviewers in the national press have noted the timeliness of A History of Solitude, whose appearance in early 2020 coincided with the first Covid-related national “lockdown” in Britain. In doing so, however, they have misrepresented the subject of Vincent’s study. Lockdown certainly entailed isolation and loneliness for many, especially those already living alone. Yet, as Vincent’s book demonstrates so comprehensively, solitude is an altogether richer, more complex, expansive form of human experience. In most circumstances, albeit for various reasons, it is actively sought out, rather than imposed (as in lockdown); and it brims with all sorts of possibilities in a way that the unloved quiet and stillness endured by the lonely does not. The best definition of loneliness, he suggests, in one of the book’s many elegant formulations, is “failed solitude” (29).

The book begins in the late eighteenth century with an extended introductory discussion of the appearance of Johann Georg Zimmermann’s widely read Solitude Considered (1784–5). As Vincent argues, Zimmermann’s treatise was the first to explore solitude in something like modern terms, focusing on its psychological dynamics—its restorative and pathological possibilities—and how it might be managed in relation to that quintessential Enlightenment preoccupation: the sociability of man. At this stage, however, solitude, of the deliberate and contemplative sort anxiously analysed by Zimmermann, was largely restricted to the elites. The six substantive chapters that follow track how solitude became a mass pursuit in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the context of Britain. Modernity is a multifaceted condition, and not the least achievement of this book is to restore the importance of those quiet, often silent, practices that proliferated amid the clamour and noise of an increasingly urban-industrial society.

The Birth of Modern Political Satire: Romeyn de Hooghe (1645-1708) and the Glorious Revolution. By McNeill Hale Meredith

Helen Pierce

Pages 798–800

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab023

Meredith McNeill Hale’s study of the Dutch political printmaker Romeyn de Hooghe and his role as a propagandist for William III during the Glorious Revolution is a welcome addition to the scholarship of seventeenth-century graphic satire. It focuses upon De Hooghe’s work of the period 1688-90, when William and his wife Mary assumed and consolidated their positions as rulers of England, Scotland and Ireland, usurping Mary’s father James. With existing monographs on De Hooghe primarily written in Dutch, this work joins the recent Life of Romeyn de Hooghe (2019) by Henk van Nierop in opening up both the range and depth of De Hooghe’s ambitious oeuvre to the English-speaking world.

An introductory chapter sets out the interconnecting qualities of political pictorial satire: as an unmasker of truths, a challenger of pictorial conventions, and a visual format reaching beyond its pictorial “frame” to portray contemporary political events through an established visual language. De Hooghe’s background is also sketched; born in Amsterdam in 1645, little is known of his education or training but by the late 1660 s he was established as the master of a successful print studio in that city, working across a number of genres. However, it wasn’t until the events of 1688-90 that De Hooghe’s work as a political satirist and Williamite most fully emerged, and it is this period which Hale brings into sharpest focus.

Blurring the Lines of Race & Freedom: Mulattoes & Mixed Bloods in English Colonial America. By A.B. Wilkinson

Max Speare

Pages 801–803

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab004

In Blurring the Lines of Race & Freedom, A.B. Wilkinson adds to a growing field of scholarship questioning the genesis of ideas and production of race and social differences in the trans-Atlantic world. Wilkinson’s detailed examination looks at the ways mixed-heritage people—or individuals with at least two ancestors from predominantly African, European, and Indigenous backgrounds—shaped legal and cultural understandings of interracial mixture in British North America. He focuses on the meeting of communities around the Tidewater Chesapeake, the Carolina Lowcountry, and the English sugar and coffee plantations in the Caribbean. Despite legislators in these regions governing monoracial categories of colonial subjects as “white,” “Indian,” or “Negro,” Wilkinson convincingly argues that people from these blended ancestries and their families complicated racially bound labor systems of enslavement and indentured servitude. In so doing, they slowed down elites’ establishment of a solid racial hierarchy from the seventeenth century until the eve of the American Revolution.

The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire. By Brandon Mills

Jay Sexton

Pages 804–805

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab012

Historians traditionally have interpreted the nineteenth century colonization movement, which sought to geographically separate peoples of African descent from the white populations of the United States, in national terms. In this telling, colonization was an outgrowth of the domestic political conflicts concerning slavery and the future position of African Americans in the United States. Brendon Mills’ new study of the colonization movement, in contrast, situates the story in an imperial context. Throughout this clearly structured and written book, Mills argues that colonization was inextricably entwined with the imperial formation and expansion of the United States. “The colonization movement gained so much traction, in part, because it spoke to American aspiration toward empire and connected this vision of expansion abroad with ideas about race at home” (2).

This study covers much ground, both chronological and geographic. The story begins at the end of the eighteenth century, which witnessed the bloody revolution in Haiti and the creation of Britain’s colony for former slaves in Sierra Leone. The U.S. colonization movement, Mills shows, was born out of this international and imperial context, which generated fear among U.S. enslavers. Early colonization schemes were fused with early U.S. empire, focused as they were on the western territories, including those from the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. One particularly illuminating argumentative strand of the book probes the connections between colonization plans and the removal of Native American populations. Though whites most often conceived of black colonization as voluntary (hence contrasting to forcible removal of indigenous populations—a difference that Mills might have more fully emphasized), both concerned imperial projects that aimed to consolidate racial hierarchy through colonial structuring of space within Jefferson’s putative “empire of liberty.” Furthermore, both movements sought to cloak their naked imperialism with the patina of republicanism: “Both Indian and African colonizationists sanitized the violence behind empire building by claiming nominal commitment to the ideals of political independence and self-governance” (66).

Maddalena Marinari, Unwanted: Italian and Jewish Mobilization against Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1882–1965

Libby Garland

Pages 806–808

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab021

Unwanted chronicles nearly a century’s worth of battles that Jewish and Italian American groups waged against the daunting forces of immigration restrictionism. Marinari’s history of the many twists and turns in these fights—the bills that never became law, the fractured coalitions, the bitter compromises, the partial victories—conveys the long-haul, heavily constrained nature of struggle for meaningful legislative change. It also shows the difficulty in building a cohesive coalition working toward such change. Jews and Italians together represented the nation’s largest immigrant groups in the early twentieth century, but they were not always in sync.

Marinari shows that the periodization of US immigration history deserves rethinking. In her narrative, with its attention to the larger climate in which fights over legislation unfolded, wars—World Wars I and II, and the Cold War—rather than the laws themselves emerge as the key pivot points, as US foreign policy concerns reshaped debates over admitting foreigners, and thus set the stage for significant legislative shifts. Marinari also demonstrates that immigration legislation, as the product of complex political wrangling, reflected both the efforts of restrictionists and immigration advocates alike. Indeed, immigration law has often, Marinari argues, been more of a gray zone—containing “both exclusionary and inclusive elements”—than scholars have imagined (15). That even the harsh regime of broad-based immigration restriction established in the 1920s made exceptions, for example, in cases of family reunion was thanks to the tireless efforts of advocates who pushed at the state to do so. By the same token, however, Italian and Jewish immigration reform advocates’ strategic acceptance of some underlying principles of migration control at the heart of the nation’s immigration system proved a kind of Faustian bargain. By adopting pragmatic compromise positions, these advocates could win some legislative concessions around the laws’ edges. But such compromises also helped entrench the larger system more firmly in place.

Bootlegged Aliens: Immigration Politics on America's Northern Border. By Ashley Johnson Bavery

Hidetaka Hirota

Pages 809–811

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab022

Policing against unlawful border crossing, prejudiced association between foreigners and crime, and the stigmatization of immigrants as welfare cheaters—these are familiar subjects for historians of U.S. immigration, especially those specializing in immigration law and policy. Ashley Johnson Bavery’s Bootlegged Aliens, however, provides novel perspectives on these topics by analyzing the public perceptions of European immigrants and their relations with immigration laws, labor practices, and welfare policies in the Detroit-Windsor borderland between the 1920s and the 1930s. By so doing the book makes vital contributions not only to U.S. immigration historiography but also to the public debate over immigration in the United States today.

This book’s major contribution lies in integrating the U.S. North and European immigrants into the history of American border control. While historians often focus on the Southwest as the main site of American border control, Bavery examines the development of discourse on immigrants, policing and raids, and immigration law enforcement in U.S.-Canada borderlands. Challenging the field’s predominant attention to the southern borders and Mexican migrants, some historians such as Kornel Chang and Beth Lew-Williams have examined border control and private violence against Asian migrants in the Pacific Northwest. Bavery’s book enriches our understanding of northern border control by demonstrating that the Great Lakes region was an equally important ground of law enforcement and that Europeans were the main targets of policing and incarceration, deportation, and stigmatization as criminals in the region during the interwar period. Bavery also reveals that the labor exploitation and marginalization in Detroit of certain European immigrants deemed undesirable and suspicious, especially those from southern and eastern Europe, set precedents for later federal policies for noncitizens and undocumented immigrants. Furthermore, by uncovering how those Europeans suffered exclusion from New Deal welfare programs, Bavery revises the conventional understanding that the New Deal accelerated the integration of European immigrants into American society. Without overlooking their racial privileges over African Americans and immigrants of color in the social and economic milieu of Detroit, Bavery illuminates parallels in the experience of European and non-European immigrants in the history of nativist rhetoric and policy in the United States.

Communists and Community: Activism in Detroit's Labor Movement, 1941-1956. By Ryan S. Pettengill

Matthew Pehl

Pages 812–813

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab002

In Communists and Community, Ryan Pettengill seeks to complicate our thinking about American communism in two important ways. First, he challenges the typical chronology that sees “Popular Front”-style communist activism destroyed by the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. Instead, Pettengill argues that American communists remained actively involved in social protest movements “throughout the war years and into the postwar period,” a persistence that renders them among “the most effective advocates for…a multiracial workforce throughout the mid-twentieth century” (3). Second, Pettengill shifts attention away from the political, geopolitical, or intellectual aspects of communism and onto the social worlds and institutions that communists created in specific places. The Communist Party (CP), Pettengill contends, created a “social space where a variety of individuals came together to air a collection of grievances” (3)—not only workplace struggles, but community issues such as housing, city services, and access to leisure. Pettengill makes the sensible choice to focus on Detroit, a multiracial industrial metropolis with a vigorous labor movement and strong left-wing lineage.

Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi Arabia. By Rosie Bsheer

Jörg Matthias Determann

Pages 814–815

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab001

Saudi Arabia has long had the reputation of a stable, albeit repressive, monarchy. This has made it an attractive and reliable partner for the United States as well as other countries. For decades, American officials have known who to call when seeking to discuss oil production or arms deals. The kingdom has, indeed, been spared from the civil wars, rebellions and foreign interventions that have divided other countries in the Middle East, including neighboring Yemen and Iraq. Unlike Sanaa and Baghdad (or Damascus or Tripoli), Riyadh has extended and retained control over its current territory since the 1930s. However, the historian Rosie Bsheer argues that the Saudi kings’ centralization of power has been far from peaceful.

The murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 brought some of the brutality of the Saudi state to global attention. However, the silencing of dissident voices has also occurred with less bloodshed. In Archive Wars, Bsheer documents Riyadh’s domination of the historical record, whether written on paper or set in stone. In Mecca, many monuments of the House of Saud’s former dynastic rivals, the Ottomans and the Hashemites, have been destroyed. In the traditional heartland of the royal family, the region of Najd, on the other hand, palaces and fortresses have been restored and turned into tourist sites. Cultural institutions under the command of senior princes have also tried to get hold of as many historical documents as possible—whether through purchase or theft. Those papers that speak positively about Saudi kings have been made publicly accessible, whereas most others have not. The need for such historical legitimation became especially urgent in the wake of crises, the most consequential being the Gulf War that lasted from 1990 to 1991. The reliance on US forces to defend its borders against Iraq exposed the state’s weakness and forced it to produce new narratives and related physical infrastructure, like the King Abdulaziz Historical Center.

The CIA in Ecuador. By Marc Becker

Alan McPherson

Pages 816–817

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab018

Readers of The CIA in Ecuador could be forgiven for expecting an exposé of malignant operations illegally undermining social reform or propping up a dictatorship in the Andean country. Such is what CIA defector Philip Agee infamously produced in his 1975 Inside the Company, naming names of CIA officers and revealing the schemes of the agency in 1960s Ecuador.

In contrast, Becker uses a newly declassified body of CIA intelligence documents—not “ops” reports—to delve into the history of the Communist Party of Ecuador, or PCE, from the late 1940s to the late 1950s. In 2000, the CIA Records Search Tool (CREST) database released some documents. In 2017, records went online in the CIA’s Electronic Reading Room.

Agee chronicled a more tumultuous decade, when the Cuban Revolution raised the levels of left-wing ambition and right-wing paranoia throughout Latin America. Becker, a social historian, is more interested in social movements than in Cold War security issues, and the relatively placid 1950s in Ecuador provide an apt canvas on which to imagine the antecedents of the 1960s. During the 1950s, Ecuador’s governments, such as those of José María Velasco Ibarra and Galo Plaza Lasso, were populist and repressive but also democratically elected.

German Angst: Fear and Democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany. By Frank Biess

Karrin Hanshew

Pages 818–820

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shab019

In this impressive work, Frank Biess not only places the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) on the proverbial psychiatrist’s couch to analyze its fears; he offers up a history of West Germany as a history of fear rather than one of certain success. The work brings together his previous interest in psychology and commemorative culture with the history of emotions, an approach that he has helped bring to bear on the larger field of modern German history. In nine chapters, Biess introduces us to a series of fears that rise and fall in roughly chronological order, taking us from 1945 to the present. Biess demonstrates how “recurring episodes of fear” arose during moments of historical change. And he gives us structural explanations for fear’s demise—the stabilization of international politics, for example, or the de-escalation that occurs when a fear goes unrealized. In each example, Biess shows how fear, as “a future-oriented emotion,” linked past, present, and future by projecting negative memories onto an uncertain future. Which past was mobilized when and for the prevention of what imagined future changed over time. But even when a certain fear transcended national borders, Germans’ catastrophic past informed their particular predictions of the future. It is this, Biess argues, that gives the history of West German fear its particular national character and makes it as much a history of German commemorative culture as of fear.