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In this article, the author asks: How has the legacy of E.P. Thompson helped shape the emergence of Social History in the United States? How have ideas about race, gender and empire, largely absent from Thompson's work, been incorporated in writing on labor, immigration, and American exceptionalism? Is it now possible to synthesize race, class, and gender? Or, have histories based on class analysis so elided race and gender that such grafting has been foreclosed? With a bit of gossip here, a gesture to historiography there, and as little charm as possible, the author wonders: Is there any justice for "the Subaltern" in this profession? Or, is it just another "Organization Man" gone West?

The sexual terrain of colonial and revolutionary Philadelphia -- A springboard to revolution : runaway wives and self-divorce -- The fruits of nonmarital unions : sex in the urban pleasure culture -- The pleasures and powers of reading : eroticization of popular print and discursive interpretations of sex -- Sex in the city in the age of democratic revolutions -- To be "free and independent" : sex among the revolutionary rabble -- Sex and the politics of gender in the age of revolution -- Normalizing sex in the nineteenth century : the assault on nonmarital sexuality -- Through our bodies : prostitution and the cultural reconstruction of nonmarital sexuality -- Through our souls : the benevolent reform of sexual transgressors -- Through our children : bastardy comes under attack

The article is devoted to the consideration of the role of women in the history of Buddhist culture in medieval Japan. The article examines the formation of the first female Buddhist monastic community in Japan. It is noted that the formation of the first Buddhist monastic community here was associated with women of Korean origin. A significant role in the institutionalization of Buddhism in Japan and its transformation into the dominant ideology was played by the Japanese empresses, who were impressed by the Buddhist approach to the religious status of women. The Japanese empresses actively supported the construction of Buddhist temples, donated land and significant funds to them. While pursuing a policy of strengthening the Buddhist church, they simultaneously contributed to its centralization and the establishment of strict control over the sangha by the state. The social and confessional status of women in the history of medieval Japan was constantly changing. If, until the end of the Nara period, nuns had the same social and confessional status as monks, then in the Heian era, nuns were removed from government positions and state ceremonies, and in religious treatises the opinion that women could not find salvation until will not be reborn as men. During the Kamakura and Muromachi eras, women again began to play an active role in society, including in religious institutions. During this period, new directions of Buddhism appeared (Amidaism, Soto-Zen, the Nichiren school), in whose doctrines the attitude towards women was more respectful. In the subsequent period, there was an increase in the influence of Confucianism and a weakening of the position of Buddhism in Japanese society, which negatively affected the social status of women and the state of the female monastic community.

THERE IS A GREAT DEBATE WHETHER HUMAN ACTIVITIES AND THE COURSE OF HUMAN HISTORY ARE SHAPED BY "DEEP" RULES WHICH REGULATE HUMAN ACTIVITY, EITHER THOSE OF THE HUMAN MIND OR THOSE GOVERNING SOCIAL RELATIONS AND THE MODES OF PRODUCTION. THIS ARTICLE QUERIES WHAT ABOUT HUMAN ACTIVITY? WHAT ABOUT THE INDIVIDUAL AS AN AUTONOMOUS AGENTS? IT STUDIES WHETHER LAWS OR PATTERNS OF CHANGE COMMON TO ALL HUMAN SOCIETIES EXIST, OR WHETHER DIFFERENT SOCIETIES OR CIVILIZATIONS DEVELOP IN THEIR OWN WAYS.

Arab nationalism has been one of the dominant ideologies in the Middle East and North Africa since the early twentieth century. However, a clear definition of Arab nationalism, even as a subject of scholarly inquiry, does not yet exist. 'Arab Nationalism' sheds light on cultural expressions of Arab Nationalism and the sometimes contradictory meanings attached to it in the process of identity formation in the modern world. It presents nationalism as an experiencable set of identity markers - in stories, visual culture, narratives of memory and struggles with ideology, sometimes in culturally sophisticated forms, sometimes in utterly vulgar forms of expression. Drawing upon various case studies, the book transcends a conventional history that reduces nationalism in the Arab lands to a pattern of political rise and decline. It offers a glimpse at ways in which Arabs have constructed an identifiable shared national culture, and it critically dissects conceptions about Arab nationalism as an easily graspable secular and authoritarian ideology modelled on Western ideas and visions of modernity. This book offers an entirely new portrayal of nationalism and a crucial update to the field, and as such, is indispensable reading for students, scholars and policymakers looking to gain a deeper understanding of nationalism in the Arab world.

Scholars tracing America's development into a powerful modern nation between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War One have traditionally considered popular culture, and especially popular culture's depictions of national history, as a vehicle for conveying ascendant socioeconomic ideals of "incorporation" or "Americanization." In this view, vernacular histories--histories rooted in local conceptions of self, community, and experience--provided a nostalgic reminder of a lost golden age, a diversion from the tasks of everyday life, or a quality to be appropriated and remade to fit prevailing narratives of economic and territorial consolidation and white racial superiority. This dissertation, by contrast, considers how popular representations of national history and citizenship were frequently framed by local conceptions of past and present. Specifically, I examine four performances where groups that were (or imagined themselves to be) regionally, ethnically, or racially marginalized by the nation's shift to modernity enacted their pasts for national audiences, and the ways in which these performances circulated vernacular versions of U.S. history and culture for a consuming public.Chapter one examines the Fisk Jubilee Singers in their first decade (1871-1881). The chapter discusses their performances of slave spirituals as cultural expression and as political practice in a decade spanning the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow. Spirituals embodied ideals of self-making, piety, communal solidarity, and liberation. The singers, like their slave forebears, used the spiritual to achieve a level of autonomy, cohesion, and pride as they negotiated the contours of citizenship. The performances examined in chapters two and three struggled with the question of the ideal of "progress" in late nineteenth century historical narration. Chapter two describes the emergence of a particular brand of rugged self-making, seen as central to American identity and threatened by the "settlement" of the West, which was enacted and perpetuated at Buffalo Bill's The Drama of Civilization (1886-1887). Buffalo Bill Cody astonished audiences with a spectacular pageant reenacting the "settlement" of the West, but his presentations also mourned the potential loss of "rugged individualism" with the closing of the frontier. Chapter three considers the ways in which the Hull-House Labor Museum (1900-1910) dramatized a history of immigrant craftspeople as integral to seeing America as a workingman's republic, the benefactor of a transnational, transhistorical process of self-, community-, and nation-making through indigenous craftsmanship. Chapter four reads The Birth of a Nation (1915) as a highly divisive neo-Confederate history that dramatized a discourse of northern conspiracy and southern patriotism. Ending with this popular film, the dissertation also highlights the dangers of vernacular history becoming normative. Reading these accented dramatizations of national history within and against key social and economic developments, the dissertation argues that popular culture provided a language for registering disillusionment with the shift to modernity, including links between whiteness and patriotism, territorial expansion and "settlement," and technological and social progress. For the performers and the impresarios of these performances, enacting a familiar past as foundationally "American" provided a framework for self-making, "authenticity," and ambition that shaped their conception of the meaning of modern citizenship and of their own place in the nation at large.