A Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century
by John Brewer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 330 pp., $25.00
The Return of Martin Guerre
by Natalie Zemon Davis
Harvard University Press, 176 pp., $16.95 (paper)
The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II
by Iris Chang
Penguin, 336 pp., $14.95 (paper)
The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan’s National Shame
by Katsuichi Honda, edited by Frank Gibney
M.E. Sharpe, 400 pp., $28.95 (paper)
Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity
by Masahiro Yamamoto
Praeger, 368 pp., $68.95
The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography
edited by Joshua A. Fogel
University of California Press, 264 pp., $18.95 (paper)
Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane
by Sarah Farmer
University of California Press, 300 pp., $19.95 (paper)
The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brassillach
by Alice Kaplan
University of Chicago Press, 320 pp., $15.00 (paper)
Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union: Novocherkassk, 1962
by Samuel H. Baron
Stanford University Press, 256 pp., $49.50
An Absolute Massacre: The New Orleans Race Riot of July 30, 1866
by James G. Hollandsworth Jr
Louisiana State University Press, 216 pp., $28.95
An Ordinary Atrocity: Sharpeville and Its Massacre
by Philip Frankel
Yale University Press, 288 pp., $40.00
Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland
by Jan T. Gross
Penguin, 240 pp., $14.00
Testing the New Deal: The General Textile Strike of 1934in the American South
by Janet Irons
University of Illinois Press, 312 pp., $18.95 (paper)
Contesting the New South Order: The 1914–1915 Strike at Atlanta’s Fulton Mills
by Clifford M. Kuhn
University of North Carolina Press, 320 pp., $19.95 (paper)
The Meetinghouse Tragedy: An Episode in the Life of a New England Town
by Charles E. Clark
University Press of New England, 170 pp., $14.95 (paper)
The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction
by Linda Gordon
Harvard University Press, 456 pp., $16.95 (paper)
A Poisoned Chalice
by Jeffrey Freedman
Princeton University Press, 256 pp., $26.95
The Rule of Justice: The People of Chicago versus Zephyr Davis
by Elizabeth Dale
Ohio State University Press, 192 pp., $23.95 (paper)
The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News, Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660
by Alastair Bellany
Cambridge University Press, 336 pp., $70.00
The Perreaus and Mrs. Rudd: Forgery and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century London
by Donna T. Andrew and Randall McGowen
University of California Press, 390 pp., $35.00
Walk Towards the Gallows: The Tragedy of Hilda Blake, Hanged 1899
by Reinhold Kramer and Tom Mitchell
Oxford University Press, 318 pp., $24.95 (paper)
Trials of Intimacy: Love and Loss in the Beecher-Tilton Scandal
by Richard Wightman Fox
University of Chicago Press, 419 pp., $30.00
Un incident, une bêtise,La mort de votre jument grise
—Paul Misraki, “Tout va très bien Madame la marquise”
The historical landscape is undergoing a curious change. Amid the profusion of books about the usual subjects—founding fathers, gay culture, the public sphere, memory, the Holocaust, ecology, globalization, slavery, war and peace, sex and women—a new genre has sprouted. It is scattered across so many subfields that it has hardly been noticed, but it can be found everywhere, even on the front tables of bookshops and the “required” sector of reading lists for college courses. The genre takes the form of short books on dramatic events—murders, scandals, riots, catastrophes, the kind of thing that used to be the specialty of tabloids and penny dreadfuls but now comes out in hardcovers bearing the stamp of university presses.
Despite their sensational subject matter, these books represent a serious approach to history. They deserve recognition, perhaps even an appellation contrôlée. The best name I can come up with is “incident analysis,” because for all their variety, the books share one common characteristic: they focus on an incident, relate it as a story, and then follow its repercussions through the social order and even, in some cases, across successive periods of time. They pose dizzying questions: How can we know what actually happened? What delineates fact from fiction? Where is truth to be found among competing interpretations? And they leave their readers with a Rashomon effect: the past, when seen up close, looks more inscrutable than ever.
The best-known work in this genre and the one that has served as a model for many others is The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon Davis (1983). It takes a dramatic incident—the trial of a peasant woman accused of cohabiting with a man who had passed himself off as her long-departed husband—and peels away segments of the narrative in order to uncover aspects of gender relations and peasant life in sixteenth-century France. It also explicates successive accounts of the affair, from the original court records right up to a current movie version. Natalie Zemon Davis served as a consultant for the film and even appeared in a bit part. But after collaborating in this reenactment of the event, she warned her readers that she could not solve the riddle at the heart of it—the inside story of the Guerre ménage—and she turned her book into a reflective essay on how an incident can be known and how it is refracted over time through successive modes of communication.
Two decades later, historians are still playing with the problems of getting to the bottom of their stories. But the game is now more serious. Many of the incidents concern the blackest aspects of the twentieth century, and the scholarly difficulties are compounded by a hunger for historical knowledge that is being felt with increasing urgency throughout entire societies. While survivors sort through their memories, new generations want to know the …
