In this issue, Mats Fridlund and Lissa Roberts, in their respective articles, take up a central problem in recent historiography and discussions of historical explanation: the interplay of materiality, the articulation of social and political space, and the constitution of individual experience. Each article seeks to make strong historical and methodological claims. In Fridlund’s narrative, it is to bring forward ‘subjectivity’ as a problem, using the history of terrorism as his interpretive lens. The sociocultural effects are his focus; he considers historical actors in the everyday world and their encounter with terrorism-related objects and discourse about these objects in particular places and times – early nineteenth century Copenhagen, London in the interwar years, and the United States after World War II, and, respectively, to each case, associated objects such as buckets; warning sirens and gas masks; and, then, bomb shelters and bollards. Roberts, covering a related set of historiographic issues, highlights the notion of ‘geographies’ in understanding the movement of steam technologies and entrepreneurs in France, and within a broader European context, during the second half of the eighteenth century. The use of the plural ‘geographies’ is to suggest a process of contestation between established and emerging social orders and of the varying scale of such contestation that shifts along local, regional, and transnational trajectories. Space, thus, she argues is not passive but an organizing constituent of historical experience.
Readers of this journal will recall that the themes of materiality and spatiality engaged by Fridlund and Roberts have been the subject of two book forums: Christopher Otter’s The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (vol. 26, no. 2, 2010) and Chandra Mukerji’s Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi (vol. 27, no. 2, 2011). And Fridlund’s concern with subjectivity, technology, and everyday experience was, in a different context, the subject of the forum on Cotten Seiler’s Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (vol. 26, no. 4, 2010). These forums and this issue’s articles might usefully be read in conjunction.
The themes of materiality and technology also inform the essays in this issue’s ‘Images, Technology, and History’ feature. Laura Anne Kalba, in ‘How Media Were Made: Chromolithography in Belle Époque France’ focuses on the advent of machine techniques for producing color images and the resultant effusion of consumer-oriented, visually vibrant ephemera, arguing that this activity became a crucial site for negotiating among aesthetic values, commercial culture, and technical versus craft methods. In ‘Detachment, Death, and Destruction in Gerhard Richter’s Strontium (2004),’ Kristian H. Nielsen analyzes artist Richter’s attention to technology as a foundational element of the post-World War II experience.