The Journal of Interdisciplinary History Audio Articles

The Recognition of War Refugees: Lapland, Love, and Care

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2022) 53 (1): 89–115.
Outi Autti and Saara Intonen

According to Honneth, the mutual recognition essential for individual autonomy and a just society divides into three forms—love in primary relationships, rights in legal relationships, and solidarity in the community of value. Such recognition has three corresponding forms of disrespect—abuse, exclusion, and denigration, all of which can raise struggles for recognition. An analysis of empirical data—in this case, oral-history reports from Finnish evacuees to Sweden during the Lapland War (1944–1945)—within this framework of recognition reveals detailed information about the refugees’ wartime experiences, particularly those that they deemed significant enough to be remembered decades after the event.

Download Audio Article
Read Article

Networking in the Republic of Letters: Magliabechi and the Dutch Republic

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2022) 53 (1): 117–141.
Ingeborg van Vugt

The brokers who forge networks have exclusive access to diverse and innovative information. Hence, many histories of the Republic of Letters (1500–1800) stress the importance of brokers for the circulation and development of new ideas. But most such studies fail to note that network brokerage in the Republic of Letters was a dynamic, continually evolving process. Early modern brokers, like the Florentine librarian Antonio Magliabechi (1633–1714), could not have maintained their positions of power in densely connected networks without the ability to safeguard confidences and secrets. Qualitative analysis of archival sources, combined with the quantitative methods of network analysis, uncovers the circumstances in which Magliabechi constructed his network, providing a glimpse into his struggles to make it secure and to solidify it with valuable bridge relations.

Download Audio Article
Read Article

On Writing the History of Human Infectious Disease

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2022) 53 (2): 319–327.
James L. A. Webb, Jr.

Until recently, no historian had taken up the challenge of synthesizing the burgeoning literature on the genomics of pathogenic agents, situating the major human infectious diseases in the context of human history and attempting to evaluate their impacts. For this reason, the publication of Harper’s accomplished survey of the effects of infectious diseases on human history, Plagues Upon the Earth, is timely, needed, and most welcome.

Download Audio Article
Read Article

Power, Ideology, and Economics during the Cold War

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2022) 53 (2): 329–336.
Volker R. Berghahn

Ostermann’s Between Containment and Rollback is much more than a monograph; it is his long-awaited, comprehensive analysis of both U.S. and Soviet policies between 1945 and 1953. Drawing on available primary materials from American and former East German archives, as well as secondary literature in English, German, and Russian, the book focuses not only on American and Soviet decision makers; it also takes into account the British, French, and West Germans. It tells the story of the enormous costs of Soviet-American rollback policies during the early years of the Cold War.

Download Audio Article
Read Article

Droughts, Famines, and Chronicles: The 1780s Global Climatic Anomalies in Highland Ethiopia

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2023) 53 (3): 387–405.
Philip Gooding

Climatological data suggest that the key driver of drought in Highland Ethiopia, and in the wider Indian Ocean World, during the early 1780s was an El Niño Southern Oscillation anomaly. Ethiopia during this period—an early decade in the zemene mesafint (1769–1855)—endured considerable political instability. The lack of documentary evidence and an over-reliance on the Ethiopian Royal Chronicles has led historians to view reports of “famine” during the early zemene mesafint as indicative of severe environmental stress. A more critical reading of the Chronicles, by contrast, suggests that integrating its reports of warfare with the climatological record presents a more accurate chronology of drought severity and possible occurrences of famine.

Download Audio Article
Read Article

“The Best Country in the World”: The Surprising Social Mobility of New York’s Irish-Famine Immigrants

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2023) 53 (3): 407–438.
Tyler Anbinder, Cormac Ó Gráda, and Simone A. Wegge

Historians generally portray the Irish immigrants who came to the United States, fleeing the Great Famine of the mid-nineteenth century, as hopelessly mired in poverty and hardship due to discrimination, a lack of occupational training, and oversaturated job markets in the East Coast cities where most of them settled. Although the digitization of census data and other records now enables the tracking of nineteenth-century Americans far more accurately than in the past, scholars have not utilized such data to determine whether the Famine Irish were, in fact, trapped on the bottom rungs of the American socioeconomic ladder. The use of a longitudinal database of Famine immigrants who initially settled in New York and Brooklyn indicates that the Famine Irish had far more occupational mobility than previously recognized. Only 25 percent of men ended their working careers in low-wage, unskilled labor; 44 percent ended up in white-collar occupations of one kind or another—primarily running saloons, groceries, and other small businesses.

Download Audio Article
Read Article

Political Science, History, and Dictatorships: Linz’ Limited Pluralism Theory and the Late Francoist Regime in Spain

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2023) 53 (4): 599–623.
Carlos Domper Lasús and Julio Ponce Alberca

Although Linz was right in contradicting previous assumptions that the Francoist political community was homogeneous, a truth evidenced in political archival records relating to the 1967 elections of procuradores familiares and reports complied by the Delegación Nacional de Provincias about political hierarchies in preparation for elections in 1975, his concept of limited pluralism is flawed. Traditional historical methods verify the degree of correlation between the analytical description of the Francoist political sphere that Linz’ theory suggests and the actuality represented in the archival sources. The records do not indicate the existence of the politico-ideological or interest groups organized as a semi-opposition to which Linz referred in support of his thesis. Though political leaders were aligned with various ideological affiliations, loyalty to the Caudillo was the basic affinity that united all.

Download Audio Article
Read Article

Did the CIA Kill Lumumba?

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2023) 53 (4): 625–633.
Robert I. Rotberg

Williams’ White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa is a crusading examination of what the CIA did in Africa in the 1960s, and it suggests that the CIA, working closely with Congo army chief Joseph Mobutu and coordinating with secessionist leaders in Katanga, was responsible for Patrice Lumumba’s assassination. Recently uncovered hard evidence from CIA files reveals the Agency’s connivings in, with, and against Africa and Africans during the first years of independence, involving CIA station heads, accomplices, the many shady characters tasked with nasty deeds against African leaders, and those many miscreants who supplied information and surveillance about African political and industrial personalities. The book is a reminder of our misconceptions, our failures to read Africa well, our willingness to let ends dictate means, and a testament to blinkered policy making.

Download Audio Article
Read Article

Preserving Trust: Strength of Contracts and Abuses of the Spanish Inquisition

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2023) 54 (1): 67–81.
Riccardo Rosolino

The impacts of the Spanish Inquisition in Sicily were manifold, affecting politics, business, and society. Those closely associated with the Inquisition could exercise the privilegium fori by having legal issues settled in the tribunal’s court by inquisitorial judges. Waiving this privilege could guarantee to other parties to a contract that their agreement could not be overruled by the tribunal. Waiving the right to the privilegium fori was institutionalized as such a guarantee to individuals contracting business in a society disciplined by different types of justice based on multiple legal systems.

Download Audio Article
Read Article

A Medieval Climate Anomaly: The Qarakhanid Adaptation

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2023) 54 (1): 43–65.
Henry Misa

A synthesis of paleoclimatic, archaeological, and literary evidence from Central Asia (Transoxiana and the Tarim Basin) during the tenth through twelfth centuries suggests that the Qarakhanid state adapted its hybrid economy to a unique climate regime characterized by drought created by the Medieval Climate Anomaly. To adapt, the Qarakhanids expanded the agricultural and pastoral sections of their economy into foothill and highland ecologies and used diplomacy to support a transregional trade network that helped to stimulate drought-stressed oasis economies on both sides of the Tian Shan. New methodological conclusions relevant for the study of interdisciplinary environmental history in general and for the historiography of premodern mobile pastoralist states in particular provide frameworks for future study.

Download Audio Article
Read Article

Questions or feedback? Feel free to contact the Direct Service Desk with any questions or suggestions for MIT Press audio articles.