Contenu du sommaire : Histoire culturelle. Approches transatlantiques

Starting with a reference to Anne Ollivier-Mellios's work on magazines and intellectual networks, this article offers a review of modern/modernist periodical studies. Periodical studies have developed considerably in the US and Britain since the 1990s, mostly in relationship to the renewal of modernist studies—which moved from a study of modernism's big names to a reflection on how and where modernism began, with a focus on “little magazines.” This article shows how dynamic this field of study is today, mentioning its connections to broader fields of research (including the history of the book and print studies, the history of the media, and cultural history), unveiling its characteristics and methodologies (such as interdisciplinary work, the question of the materiality of the printed object, the notion of networks, and the impact of the digitization of archives), and looking at its resources in the US, Britain, and France (current digital projects, learned societies, and main publications in periodical studies). It addresses the question of digitization and its technical, methodological, economic and political challenges, the current interest in “big magazines” and newspapers (as opposed to “little magazines” and “high culture”), and the recent move towards more collective, interdisciplinary work on periodicals that focuses less on just modernism.

This study focuses on the intellectual process by which historian Howard Zinn conducted research about the bombings of Royan in 1945. It looks at the historian's published work on the topic in both English and French and considers the political motivations which prompted him to look into this particular event. The uniqueness of this investigation is due to the personal dimension of this military episode because Zinn served as a US Air Force bombardier during the war. Yet it is only in the specific context of the 1960s that he realized the historical value of his experience.

This paper places unmarried people into the mainstream of American history. It looks at the cultural construct of singlehood as a threat for the future of the American people during the Progressive Era. This fear of singlehood was based upon intellectual exchanges between Europe and the United States, and established a correlation between marital status and suicide. It is no coincidence that advocates of the « race suicide theory » targeted unmarried people, not only in their discourse, but also in the social practices they implemented.

When literary agents are viewed in terms of their transatlantic mediation between the United States and France, it becomes clear that they remain neglected figures not only in book history but also in cultural history more generally, in both national and transnational narratives. This essay proposes to contribute to the emerging historiography on agents and co-agents. It further suggests ways of articulating a historical perspective with economic and sociological approaches, drawing on the notions of sociabilité, lieux and milieux (places and milieus) as envisaged by French historians Michel Trebitsch and Christophe Prochasson, and engaging in the perspective of intellectual history, in which Anne Ollivier-Mellios's work was grounded.

In this extract from her 2012 unpublished manuscript, Les Intellectuels critiques aux États-Unis. 1913-1933. Chronique d'une génération oubliée, Anne Ollivier-Mellios offers insight into the rich transatlantic exchanges between American and French intellectuals in the immediate aftermath of the First World War and in the continuity of peace activism. Through personal letters and published editorials, she maps the attempts to set up international organizations, and she records how French and American radical or liberal intellectuals struggled to find a common definition of the commitment, role and means of political action of the artist or writer. Ultimately she suggests that these earlier transatlantic debates informed local achievements but also the rifts and failures in New York's intellectual circles in the 1930s.