CAS: History: Scholarly Papers

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    Review of: Hass, Jeffrey K. Wartime suffering and survival: the human condition under siege in the blockade of Leningrad 1941-1944
    (University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 2023-01-31) Peri, Alexis
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    Spreading intimacy and influence: women’s correspondence across the Iron Curtain
    (Oxford University Press (OUP), 2022) Peri, Alexis
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    Review of: Pomnit’ po-nashemu: sotsrealisticheskii istorizm i blokada Leningrada
    (University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 2020-10-01) Peri, Alexis
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    Fifty years of friendship
    (2021-11-01) Peri, Alexis
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    “Kans is king and the cultivator is his subject”: environmental history and agrarian development in modern India
    (University of Chicago Press, 2021-01-01) Siegel, Benjamin
    Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cultivators and administrators in India contended with the ravages of kans grass (Saccharum spontaneum), a deeply-rooted wild sugarcane that rendered productive land wholly barren. Difficult to eliminate and endemic throughout India, kans proved particularly destructive in north and central India, particularly in the regions of Jhansi, Bundelkhand, and the Himalayan Terai. Yet the fight against this ecological antagonist was bound up in broader political transformations. As India’s colonial agriculture grew increasingly tied to global markets in the late nineteenth century, and these dry regions offered new possible spaces for settled agriculture, imperial administrators grew increasingly certain that mechanical tractors held the solution to its eradication. And as postcolonial Indian nationalists cast the production of abundant food as central to their political legitimacy, they held out the eradication of kans as a national aim, enlisting the World Bank as a partner. Yet by the 1960s, kans grass “disappeared” as an environmental foe, as faith in the promises of large-scale postcolonial planning were eclipsed by alternate visions of agricultural productivity. Pushing beyond the forests and waterways that have overwhelmingly characterized environmental history in South Asia, this article demonstrates how the ostensibly natural world could confound plans for agricultural development and the notions of state power which underwrote them. By taking up the region’s agroecosystems, this essay underscores the inexorability of ecological concerns to settled agriculture, and offers a reminder that weeds open windows into the intertwined histories of political and environmental change.
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    The kibbutz and the Ashram: Sarvodaya agriculture, Israeli aid, and the global imaginaries of Indian development
    (Oxford University Press (OUP), 2020-10-21) Siegel, Benjamin
    In the first two decades of Indian independence, members of the Sarvodaya movement—India’s popular, non-state program for Gandhian social uplift—sought to partner with representatives of Israel’s developmental apparatus to build a communal agricultural settlement at Gandhi’s former ashram. Working against the lure of large-scale, Nehruvian development, Cold War politics, and cool formal diplomatic relations between the two countries, Indian votaries of small-scale rural uplift saw in Israeli collective agriculture the chance to give Gandhian “constructive work” a practical program rooted in voluntary, village-based socialism—a goal that eluded Gandhi himself. Israeli planners saw their work with Indian civil society as a means of securing the formal diplomatic sanction largely stymied by India’s relationship with the broader Muslim world. Gandhi’s vision of the Indian “village Republic” and the Israeli model of agrarian collectivism both owed their origins to nineteenth-century utopian thought, and both projects felt anachronistic by the time of their decade-long joint effort, whose initial promise succumbed to realpolitik and the hegemony of the developmental state. Yet their work foregrounds the enduring international stake that Indian civil society maintained in development and nation-building, long presumed to have withered with the arrival of the nation-state.
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    Soviet diaries of the Great Patriotic War
    (Fondation universitaire, 2021) Peri, Alexis
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    Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America. By J. L. Anderson
    (Oxford University Press, 2019-07-31) Robichaud, Andrew
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    In search of the 1619 African arrivals
    (The Virginia Historical Society, 2019) Heywood, Linda M.; Thornton, John
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    Seeing and not seeing populism in Latin America
    (North Carolina State University, 2019-10-26) Rubin, Jeffrey
    I suggest a different, if complementary approach to understanding populism by turning to the specificity and complexity of Latin American politics in the 20th and 21st century histories. First, I view populism in the context of Latin American nations’ failures to achieve equality and inclusion as they modernized. In so doing, I consider together what I call “the first coming of the people on the scene,” between the Mexican Revolution and the military governments of the 1960s and 70s, and the “second coming of the people on the scene,” between the 1980s and the present. I suggest that we are seeing today a repetition of mid-20th century experiences and that the present should be seen as a replay, with key differences, of the 1960s and 1970s.
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    Lessons of the Leningrad blockade: schoolchildren’s diaries as sites of learning, 1941-1943
    (Nestor-Istoriia, Moscow, 2019-12-15) Peri, Alexis
    This essay examines the importance of education and the idiom of learning in diaries of the Leningrad Blockade. Using the diaries of schoolchildren, as well as of some teachers, this essay argues that learning and studying continued to play a central role in the lives young blokadniki even though the conditions of the Blockade greatly disrupted classroom lessons. Nevertheless, determined to maintain their studies and fulfill the Soviet regime’s didactic mission, some Leningrad schoolchildren used their diaries to design and carry out their own independent programs of study. In the process of undertaking these self-directed studies, the diarists critically engaged with Soviet textbooks and theories of pedagogy as well as with the particular circumstances created by the siege to draw some unique insights and unorthodox conclusions about familiar subjects like mathematics, history, composition, and political education.
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    "Civil War Cinema in New Deal America"
    (2019-09) Silber, Nina
    During the early decades of the 20th century, Hollywood filmmakers both shaped and reflected the popular understanding of the Confederacy, slavery, and Abraham Lincoln.
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    'Self-help which ennobles a nation': development, citizenship, and the obligations of eating in India's austerity years
    (Cambridge University Press, 2016-05-01) Siegel, Benjamin
    In the years immediately following independence, India's political leadership, assisted by a network of civic organizations, sought to transform what, how, and how much Indians ate. These campaigns, this article argues, embodied a broader post-colonial project to reimagine the terms of citizenship and development in a new nation facing enduring scarcity. Drawing upon wartime antecedent, global ideologies of population and land management, and an ethos of austerity imbued with the power to actualize economic self-reliance, the new state urged its citizens to give up rice and wheat, whose imports sapped the nation of the foreign currency needed for industrial development. In place of these staples, India's new citizens were asked to adopt ‘substitute’ and ‘subsidiary’ foods—including bananas, groundnuts, tapioca, yams, beets, and carrots—and give up a meal or more each week to conserve India's scant grain reserves. And as Indian planners awaited the possibility of fundamental agricultural advance and agrarian reform, they looked to food technology and the promise of ‘artificial rice’ as a means of making up for India's perennial food deficit. India's women, as anchors of the household—and therefore, the nation—were tasked with facilitating these dietary transformations, and were saddled with the blame when these modernist projects failed. Unable to marshal the resources needed to undertake fundamental agricultural reform, India's planners placed greater faith in their ability to exercise authority over certain aspects of Indian citizenship itself, tying the remaking of practices and sentiments to the reconstruction of a self-reliant national economy.
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    'The claims of Asia and the Far East’: India and the FAO in the age of ambivalent internationalism
    (Routledge, 2019) Siegel, Benjamin
    If any nation were poised to actualize the developmental promises that the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) extended to the international community, it was India. India's independence came in the wake of devastating famine in Bengal and the fears of its recurrence, and the nationalists who had midwifed India's freedom staked their legitimacy to the promise of food for all. Yet from independence, the FAO played only a marginal role in India's agricultural development, its projects reflecting a winnowing scale of ambition. From early investigations into the improved cultivation of basic food grains, the FAO's projects grew increasingly modest by the time of the Green Revolution, revolving around modest improvements to capitalist agriculture, from wool shearing to timber and fishery development. Instead, India drew more substantively upon resources made available by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the United States Technical Cooperation Mission and occasional Soviet largesse. Meanwhile, the Indian most associated with the FAO, B.R. Sen (Director-General, 1956–1967), struggled to align the Organization's capacities with India's scarcity crises, even as his own understanding of famine drew upon his experience as India's Director of Food during the Bengal Famine.
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    Modernizing peasants and 'master farmers': all-India crop competitions and the politics of progressive agriculture in early independent India
    (Duke University Press, 2017-05) Siegel, Benjamin
    In the years following independence, looking toward agricultural self-sufficiency, India's national leadership sought to identify cultivators endowed with the daring, grit, and experimental character needed to actualize the promise of plenty. Drawing on Western modernization theory and the idioms of colonial and nationalist economics, India's bureaucrats and politicians contrasted the nation's “progressive farmers” with the passivity and superstition alleged to be characteristic of the majority of peasants, establishing crop competitions and the title of Krishi Pandit—“master farmer”—to reward and trumpet these qualities. Yet the progressive farmers winning these titles were not the agrarian poor, but rather an ascendant, self-cultivating peasantry armed with the capital and connections needed to raise their yields. In a subsequent era of egalitarian reform, exemplified in the Community Development Program, these same progressive farmers continued to bag awards but bucked planners' expectations that they would serve as natural leaders in villages. As these producers mobilized politically, and India's bureaucrats and politicians moved toward the Green Revolution consensus that agricultural productivity would require an inequitable concentration of inputs, progressive farmers emerged as “bullock capitalists,” a demand group that would transform national politics but do little for the aims of equity and rural development.
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    What sort of question was Kant answering when he answered the question ‘What Is Enlightenment?’?
    (Lexington Books, 2018) Schmidt, James; Boucher, Geoff; Lloyd, Henry Martin
    The collection bridges the disciplinary divides between the Enlightenment as understood in history, philosophy, and politics and moves towards a critical self-understanding of the present.