Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques

This first issue of the second decade of the twenty-first century launches a new occasional series for Historical Refl ections/Réfl exions Historiques: “Historians Reflecting on History and Historical Writing.” The mission of the journal makes this topic particularly appropriate.

Scholars with an interest in politics have long searched for meaningful ways to conceptualize power relationships, notably turning in recent years to the notion of "political culture." By recounting this concept's historiographical trajectory vis-à-vis the early medieval practice of exile and by highlighting subtle arguments in Einhard's Vita Karoli Magni regarding the proper application of banishment in Carolingian Europe, the present essay not only offers a new perspective on the elusive date of that seminal biography's composition, but also suggests that historians of any era may profitably apply Keith Michael Baker's definition of political culture to their own fields of inquiry by evaluating how dispute resolution practices either resonated or struck discord among a polity's chief stakeholders.

This article concerns "revision in history," which refers to the process by which existing conceptions about what constitutes good history are challenged and replaced by different approaches. Between roughly 1920 and 1975 there were several periods of historical revision in Great Britain and the United States. My article argues that each was brought about by a combination of dissatisfaction on the part of historians with existing approaches, the influence of ideas from other disciplines, and changes going on in the world at the time.

This essay examines the origins and development of American environmental history. Emerging from the political contests of the 1960s, environmental history attempts to add a natural dimension to more traditional social and political histories. For many observers, nature remains the picturesque backdrop to human a airs, yet environmental historians endeavor to show how the non-human world influences American life. With special attention paid to the question of natural agency, this essay investigates how debates over the ability of nature to "act" impacts both the direction and acceptance of their field.

This article attempts to explain the appeal of "terror" in the French Revolution by examining the history of the concept of terror. It focuses on historiographical representations of sovereign powers, whether monarchs or nations, as "terrors" of their enemies. It argues that the term typically connoted majesty, glory, justice and hence legitimacy. Moreover, historiographical depictions of past rulers and nations frequently emphasized the transiency of terror as an attribute of power; they dramatized decline in formulations such as "once terrible." For the revolutionaries, terror therefore provided a means of legitimation, but one that always had to be guarded and reinforced.

Walter Benjamin, a Jewish German literary critic of modest reputation during the interwar years, has become an intellectual celebrity in our times. In flight from Nazi Germany, he took refuge in Paris during the 1930s before dying in 1940 in a vain effort to escape to America. In this essay, I analyze his ideas as conceived in his Paris exile, with particular attention to his turn to the topics of memory and of history and of the relationship between them. I close with some thoughts on how his ideas about memory's redeeming power played into the humanist Marxism of the intellectuals of the 1960s and subsequently the preoccupation with memory in late twentieth-century scholarship.

Perhaps no other French historian led such a sordid academic career as that of Bernard Faÿ, who held the first European chair in American history at the Collège de France from 1932 to his removal in 1944. Celebrated as the leading interwar specialist on America, Faÿ was a steadfast ally of the Catholic political Right. His conservatism, however, never threatened his international stature or his domestic academic standing until 1940, after which he led the Vichy regime's assault on Freemasonry. He succeeded as a historian by employing research on the United States to reject traditions of popular sovereignty, while also embracing new methodological trends that critiqued scientific positivism, often as an attack on the intellectual foundation of the Third Republic. His legacy suggests how the conceptual legitimacy of secular, egalitarian society could be contested through the very ideas that "cosmopolitan modernity" had sought to support.