The American Historical Review December 2005 [antikvár]

In This IssueThis issue opens with a provocative article on historians' traditional understanding of time, followed by essays on German-American colonial collaboration in Africa, battlefield tourism during the Spanish Civil War, the Stalinist Terror, and nationalism in late colonial India. In addition, the issue includes our usual array of book and film reviews.ArticlesDan Smail's article, "In the Grip of Sacred History," argues that historians have long failed to acknowledge a revolution in our understanding of time that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was then that the bottom dropped out of historical time, as the accumulating geological and biological evidence for the old age of the earth and the evolution of species gradually persuaded the scientific community to accept a long chronology. In the wake of this time revolution, historians abandoned sacred history as a factual account of human history and began to offer suitably secularized alternatives. Yet the standard narrative found in textbooks and other general histories in the early to mid-twentieth century never fully abandoned the geographical and chronological grip of sacred history, for history still "begins" in these texts around six thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, the secular equivalent of the Garden of Eden. Reluctant to accept the implications of the long chronology, historians instead developed narrative devices and factual justifications for retaining a Near Eastern origin for history in the relatively recent past. History, Smail argues, has never fully escaped the grip of sacred history. By exploring the ways in which the short chronology continues to frame our general histories and textbooks, his article seeks to create a space for writing a deep history of humankind that incorporates the Paleolithic into the general framework of historical understanding.In "A German Alabama in Africa: The Tuskegee Expedition to German Togo and the Transnational Origins of West African Cotton Growers," Andrew Zimmerman provides an account of an expedition sent by Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute to German Togo in the first decade of the twentieth century. The expedition introduced American cotton varieties, which were in high demand in Europe, to Togo. But it also had an ideological mission: to impose the American New South image of the "Negro" on the Togolese. German colonial policymakers and social