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In “The Significance of the Trans‐Appalachian Frontier in Atlantic History,” François Furstenberg contends that historians have largely failed to insert the trans‐Appalachian West—the region between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River—into a larger American and Atlantic context. He argues that from 1754 to 1815, the major Native American and imperial players—Britain, Spain, France, and the United States—fought what can be called a “Long War for the West” over control of the region. This Long War continued with only brief interruptions from the outbreak of the Seven Years' War to the end of the War of 1812, as the geopolitical action shifted among various “hot spots” across the trans‐Appalachian West. Notwithstanding the treaty of 1783, the United States' hold on the region remained highly contingent, and the ultimate fate of the trans‐Appalachian West remained obscure. Would it become a permanent Native American country? Would it fall to some distant European power? Or, perhaps the most unlikely scenario of all, would it join with the United States? Only in the wake of the British defeat in the War of 1812 was the region's fate as part of the expanding United States settled once and for all.

In “Trouble with Numbers: Statistics, Politics, and History in the Construction of Weimar's Trade Balance, 1918–1924,” Adam Tooze begins with the observation that given the quantifying habits of modernity, statistical sources are ubiquitous in modern history. And, as William Sewell has recently argued, this makes it important for historians to integrate quantitative source material and quantitative methods into their historical practice. Tooze notes, however, that achieving this integration in fact poses considerable challenges. Using three histories of the early Weimar Republic as an example, he shows how his own early work on the history of statistics and the rival narratives provided by Gerald Feldman and Niall Ferguson all exhibit characteristic blind spots in their use of historical data. Drawing on insights from the study of science, he further argues that these blind spots can be seen as symptomatic of what Bruno Latour calls the Janus‐faced quality of modern fact‐making. Through interweaving stories about the production of Weimar's trade statistics with the story of their use by both contemporaries and historians, Tooze seeks to respond to this challenge and to demonstrate the fruitfulness of an approach that we might, following Sewell, call hermeneutical quantification.

In “The Soviets at Nuremberg: International Law, Propaganda, and the Making of the Postwar Order,” Francine Hirsch investigates the role of the Soviet Union in the Nuremberg Trials of 1945–1946. She argues that Nuremberg is still seen through the distorting lens of the Cold War, suggesting that it is high time for a new narrative of the trials that gives a full accounting of the role of the Soviet Union. Hirsch evaluates the contributions that the USSR and its legal experts made to the jurisprudence of the trials. She also looks at the efforts of the Soviet Union's secret Commission for Directing the Nuremberg Trials to influence the course and outcome of the trials—and to affect the postwar moment in general. She argues that Nuremberg became one of the first fronts of postwar competition between the USSR and its former wartime allies—a competition in which the USSR did not fare well. The United States proved far more adept at shaping the trials and using them to advance a postwar agenda. It seized control of Nuremberg and made “the Nuremberg narrative” its own. In the end, Hirsch suggests that although Nuremberg was a failure for the USSR, it taught the Soviets important lessons that shaped their development as an international power.

In “Globalizing Hanjian: The Suzhou Trials and the Post–World War II Discourse on Collaboration,” Margherita Zanasi explores the transmission of the notion of “collaboration” across the globe immediately after the Second World War. In particular, she focuses on the Chinese Nationalists' appropriation of the résistance discourse surrounding the trial of Philippe Pétain (the leader of the French collaborationist government in Vichy). In this trial, Pétain became the central figure in a black‐and‐white narrative of patriotism versus treason, a narrative that came to represent a monolithic, potentially global phenomenon with no local variations. As such, this narrative served as a source of legitimacy for condemning China's collaborators. By comparing the Pétain and the Suzhou trials, this article illustrates the globalizing effects of the discourse on modern nationhood, which determined how the experiences of World War II and foreign occupation were understood in both France and China. In each country, however, there were differences in the circumstances of collaboration, leading to differences in the nature of postwar punishment, highlighting the limits and complexity of the globalizing effects of the shared experience of World War II.

In “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” William J. Novak attempts to explain, critique, and ultimately displace the long‐standing historiographical and theoretical tendency to view the American state as somehow “weak.” He reviews the histories that have constructed and reinforced the myth of American statelessness and introduces the key texts in an emerging historical revision. Given present‐day realities as well as a new generation of work on American state power, nationally as well as internationally, the article argues for a new historical appreciation of the rise of a global hegemon. This, it asserts, is what needs more explanation in modern American history. In the second half of the article, Novak suggests that early American pragmatism and social science offers up some useful alternative models for evaluating the history of the American state. In contrast to the European models of classic social theory, the critical and realistic approach to state power allows more room for the examination of such things as the rule of law, the distribution of power, and the public‐private distinction in the creation and perpetuation of powerful techniques of American governance. This article will be the subject of a future AHRExchange.

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The cartoon on the cover was drawn by Boris Efimov, a Russian political cartoonist and propaganda artist who attended the Nuremberg Trials to sketch caricatures of the Nazi defendants. Born in 1900, he is still working today, drawing cartoons and writing his memoirs. When asked by contributor Francine Hirsch for permission to use some of his cartoons in her article in this issue, he seemed puzzled why anyone would want to remember what he himself would prefer to forget—“but which even 107 years has failed to erase.”

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