The American Historical Review December 2006 [antikvár]

In This IssueThe December issue contains articles on the impact of Woodrow Wilson's vision in Asia, smoking in the Ottoman Empire, child welfare in early-twentieth-century Bohemia, and public healing in modern Africa. It should be noted that all four articles are transnational in scope, and thus serve as a fitting prelude to a new feature of the journal: an AHR Conversation on transnational history (about which, more below). The issue also includes our usual extensive book review section.ArticlesIn "Imagining Woodrow Wilson: Dreams of East-West Harmony and the Revolt against Empire in 1919," Erez Manela examines how intellectual elites in China and India regarded this U.S. president as he emerged as a figure of global significance in the immediate aftermath of World War I. The article focuses on their conception of Wilson as a potential bridge between "East" and "West." For them he raised expectations of a statesman who could transform international relations that had previously been based on imperialism and domination into patterns of comity and equality, largely through the League of Nations, in which Asian nations would be members on an equal footing with those of the West. Despite Wilson's well-known racist background and support for imperialist policies, this hopeful view of his impact was sustained for a brief but crucial time, even in the face of the contemporary challenge of Lenin's own brand of internationalism, which also had broad appeal in Asia. Manela's article expands our view of the international history of 1919 beyond the usual concern with the deliberations and decisions of the Paris Peace Conference. It suggests a path for integrating the transformative developments that took place in Asian societies into the wider international and transnational contexts of the period. Although historians have noted how the horrors of the Great War provided support for a broad Asian critique of the West, this essay argues that it was the disappointments of the peace, rather than the devastation of the war, that sealed Asian intellectuals' postwar indictment of the West.Historians have recently begun to wonder whether they can talk about "early modern" history on a worldwide scale. For some, support for this sort of global peri-odization is to be found in parallel developments across Eurasia in the realm of political economy. In "Smoking and 'Early Modern' Sociability: The Great Tobacco