The American Historical Review October 2007 [antikvár]

In This Issue This issue contains three articles and two review essays. The articles take us from the early Islamic world, then to seventeenth-century England, and finally to Africa and the U.S. South in the nineteenth century. The review essays examine recent military history and the League of Nations. Along with six featured reviews, there is also our usual extensive book review section. The October issue is the first to be published in conjunction with the University of Chicago Press. Articles " 'Do Prophets Come with a Sword?' Conquest, Empire, and Historical Narrative in the Early Islamic World," by Thomas Sizgorich, delves into the conflict between Imperial Rome and emergent Islam. It offers us a rare look at both how Islam defined itself as an uncompromising, highly principled faith and how Christians misinterpreted this attitude for mere militancy. In order to establish this contrast, Sizgorich first reconstructs the patterns of interaction, especially of a military sort, that governed relations between both Roman and Persian imperial forces and Arab peoples before Muhammad. In this pre-Islamic period, Arab warriors typically participated in the centuries-old patterns of negotiation and trade-off—allowing for military skirmishes on imperial frontiers to conclude in exchanges of tokens and tributes. With the advent of Islam, however, such exchanges came to an end. Now imbued with the rectitude of their faith, pious Muslim warriors refused to participate in the ancient economy of imperial power, a refusal that formed the basis of early Christianity's interpretation of this new faith. In "Public Discourse, Corporate Citizenship, and State Formation in Early Modern England," Phil Withington engages with Jürgen Habermas's influential thesis on the emergence of the public sphere during the Enlightenment, but he does so from the perspective of sbiteenth- and seventeenth-century England. His central contention is that the corporate associations of traditional urban life actually fostered notions of publicness, thus suggesting greater lines of continuity than Habermas's narrative allows. Withington argues, indeed, that medieval corporatism, civic humanism, and the public sphere were more related than we might expect. It was in their increasing participation in the corporate urban life that England's middling sorts became discursively skillful citizens, ultimately leading to the emergence of national public