A New Era

Previous articleNext article FreeA New EraNancy Campbell, David Herzberg, and Lucas RichertNancy Campbell Search for more articles by this author , David Herzberg Search for more articles by this author , and Lucas Richert Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWelcome to the new(ish) SHAD, our first full issue as a trio of editors in chief and our first with the University of Chicago Press. The transition comes at a propitious moment. This is the 40th anniversary of our parent organization, the Alcohol and Drugs History Society. The ADHS was established in 1979 to promote scholarship and discussions about the history of alcohol and drug production, consumption, trade, and regulation across time and space. We feel that the University of Chicago Press is a superb venue to carry out this mission, and we anticipate future anniversaries with relish. This year the biennial meeting of ADHS will convene in Shanghai, China—the first time outside of the US, Canada, or Europe. The occasion will enable us to reflect on the 110th anniversary of the Shanghai Opium Commission, a historical moment that has shaped drug policy since 1909.The present moment is a thrilling time to be working on the history of alcohol and other drugs. Our field is flourishing like never before, expanding in fascinating and important directions with new voices and new topics. Of course, this is a delight for us as incoming editors. There is no need to “shake things up” with an editorial clarion call. In fact, we do not even see a need to flog a particular editorial agenda, because for almost any intellectual agenda there is already terrific new work being done. Topics and methodologies abound in an infinite and productive variety, and we could not be happier about it.Our editorial vision is to be receptive to—and to provide a space for—the many significant developments already underway, and the new or long-established ways of knowing alcohol and drug history that are contributing to the current moment. We seek to draw new connections where our ways of working converge with other fields such as decolonial and postcolonial studies, science and technology studies (STS), history of subjectivities, new Cold War historiography, or, as in this special issue, the new diplomatic history.Ours is a field in which some of most important areas of creativity are quite old-fashioned: the identification, development, and use of new primary sources. Some collections have lain fallow until freshly tilled as archival staff process them, produce finding aids, and so forth. Some lie in adjacent but fertile fields largely untouched by alcohol or drug historians—perhaps they were private collections of pharmaceutical companies or community activist organizations made recently public, or archives not always worked by alcohol and drug historians. New sources of funding and some companies’ willingness to be more transparent have led to the creation of new record collections. And finally, even the oldest collections have started to look new thanks to the growing numbers of historians digging more deeply into specific parts of them. In short, one lonely historian no longer has to write “The Book” on everything to be found in RG170 (the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics papers) or try to integrate the vast holdings of the Wellcome Library. Instead we can take the time to dive down rabbit holes, plumbing the depths to produce more fine-grained interpretations that ripple outward to bring significant historiographical revisions.We are particularly excited by renewed cultivation of one of the field’s long-standing staples: transnational approaches to the past. From very early on, alcohol and drug history was conceived as an international field, and many early and influential works focused on the way alcohol and drug policy intersected with international diplomacy, commerce, and the workings of empire. Commodity chains and other drug trajectories began not from the metropole but from agrarian producers. New political and industrial developments demand the footing of “history from below.” While this issue’s focus happens to rest in the nuances of US foreign policy, we do not mean by this to endorse any continued assumption that the histories of alcohol and drugs ought to be anchored in the US.Just as alcohol and drug history may (and should) now come from Latin Americanists, Islamic studies, and other political geographies, it may also come from other disciplines: from historically inclined anthropologists, geographers, political scientists, and sociologists. Likewise, new analytic histories issue from STS with its focus on remaking drugs as “technologies,” or situating science, policy, and politics within the specific social contexts that shape societal responses to alcohol and drugs. Ours is a broad, welcoming interest in all forces that shape and at times reshape our field. One thing many of these approaches must grapple with is the central question of biology, a particularly charged question for US historians working in the shadow of (or working athwart) the so-called NIDA brain-disease paradigm of addiction. Our own philosophy leans toward a feminist and disability studies approach that centers embodiment rather than biological determinism—we take the neurobiological seriously but start from the minds, brains, and bodies upon whom the forces of history exert their shaping influence.The life-giving and deathly things we study have social, cultural, and political implications that are deeply felt in every society. Our job as historians is to make these legible, to bring back in that which needs to be brought back in, and to invite the multiple literacies demanded for the continuing cultivation of new interpretations. There are endless ways to accomplish these goals. We might, for example, place substances in conversation with each other rather than exploring single discrete histories. Or challenge politically useful, but intellectually narrowing, narratives that pit “prohibition” against “consumption.” Our editorial aspiration is to crack open binaries to allow for exploration of the messy, chaotic, but not unknowable realities that they structure and obscure.This first issue with the University of Chicago Press also marks our new editorial team’s first outing. We are pleased that Ved Baruah (University of Shanghai) and Lisa Haushofer (University of Toronto) have signed on with us as book review editors. They join Holly Karibo (Oklahoma State University), and we’re thrilled at the prospect of expanding our coverage of emerging scholarship in the field. At the same time, we wish to extend our thanks to the outgoing editorial board, which served the Alcohol and Drugs History Society with distinction. A new editorial board has been constituted and, while not yet complete, it embodies the global view of drug and alcohol that we intend to pursue during our tenure as editors.Finally, we would like to close with that most prosaic of things: a call for papers. Scholars in our field rightly publish in a wide range of venues across a wide range of disciplines. We hope to build on SHAD’s traditional role as a central node in this diverse circulation of ideas, making it a place where emerging and established voices contribute the stories, interpretations, and arguments that give shape to the next generations of scholarship. Field stalwarts, graduate students, visitors from other fields and disciplines—welcome! Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs Volume 33, Number 1Spring 2019 A journal of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/702891HistoryPublished online March 11, 2019 © 2019 by The Alcohol and Drugs History Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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