Pub: HISTORY AND THEORY 48 (2009).

The October 2009 issue of History and Theory has recently been published. In it Andrew Curran, in “Rethinking Race History: The Role of the Albino in the French Enlightenment Life Sciences,” discerningly explores the way the concept of “race” evolved in the eighteenth century and beyond by exploring a category that called into question standard racial categories: the albino or the nègre blanc—quite literally a “white negro.” Curran’s essay deepens our understanding not only of a key concept in history-writing, but also of the way concepts change over time. Also in the issue, Branko Mitrovi?’s “Intentionalism, Intentionality, and Reporting Beliefs” provides an analytically rigorous exploration of the question: when historians report the beliefs of historical figures, do they report the sentences (which are obviously language-dependent) or the propositions (which are language-independent thought-contents) that these historical figures believed to be true or false? (Mitrovi? claims it is the latter.) This topic might seem somewhat far from the practice of history until one realizes that virtually all histories ascribe beliefs to agents in the past, and that what is involved in such ascription is absolutely central to the entire historical enterprise. The issue also contains an especially illuminating Forum that examines Saul Friedländer’s recent Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination. This book offers a brilliant new literary mode for the historical representation of extreme events such as the Holocaust. The forum explores the nature and significance of this new mode in three essays: Alon Confino, “Narrative Form and Historical Sensation: On Saul Friedländer’s The Years of Extermination;” Amos Goldberg, “The Victim’s Voice and Melodramatic Aesthetics in History;” and Christopher R. Browning, “Evocation, Analysis, and the ‘Crisis of Liberalism.’” The result is an exceptionally rich examination of a work that is already a classic of modern history, and a perceptive drawing out of the implications of this work for future historians not only of the Holocaust and other traumatic events, but for history more generally. The issue also includes these review essays: Mary R. Lefkowitz, “A Herodotus for Our Time,” a review of Robert Strassler, ed., The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories John E. Toews, “Manifesting, Producing, and Mobilizing Historical Consciousness in the ‘Postmodern Condition’,” a review of Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan, and Alun Munslow, eds., Manifestos for History Javed Majeed, “British Colonialism in India as a Pedagogical Enterprise,” a review of Sanjay Seth, Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India, and Michael S. Dodson, Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India 1770–1880 Mark S. Cladis, “The Discovery and Recovery of Time in History and Religion,” a review of William Gallois, Time, Religion and History. Click here to read abstracts of the articles in this issue: http://www.historyandtheory.org/archives/oct09.html To download a free copy of Alon Confino, “Narrative Form and Historical Sensation: On Saul Friedländer’s The Years of Extermination,” please click here: http://www.historyandtheory.org/freearticle.html