This edited volume spotlights innovative new scholarship on a range of topics in modern Argentine political, intellectual, and social history. It is organized around the theme of citizenship, but the editors define that project broadly, so that it includes questions about the relationship between individuals and the state as well as cultural issues such as identity and ethnicity. In addition to an introduction and epilogue, the book contains eight chapters that cover the period from the 1880s to the 1980s.

Three chapters focus on under-studied aspects of Argentine intellectual and scientific history. Carolyne Larson explores the popular following enjoyed by paleontologist Florentino Ameghino, who claimed that humans originally evolved in Argentina. She shows that Ameghino's celebrity soared in the decades following his death in 1911, fostered by rising nativism and anti-European sentiment. Similarly, Eduardo Elena analyzes the anti-imperialist Latin Americanism forged by Manuel Ugarte. Out of step with the major intellectual currents of early twentieth-century Argentina, Ugarte's alternative nationalism would later resonate with Peronists and with certain sectors of the left in the 1960s. To these histories of Argentine iconoclasm, Andrés Reggiani adds a discussion of the hygienists and eugenicists who sought to control and discipline women's physical activities during the 1930s.

Benjamin Bryce and Raanan Rein explore specific aspects of Argentina's history of immigration. While Bryce examines the extensive social welfare projects of the country's German ethnic associations during the period from 1880 to 1930, Rein uncovers the complex relationship between Argentine Jews and the Perón regime. Rein demonstrates that Perón's alliance with one sector of that community challenged Argentina's melting-pot ideology by suggesting that one could be a good Argentine citizen without relinquishing one's ethnic identity. Finally, three chapters reconceptualize key transitions in Argentine political history. Jorge Nállim sets the development and splintering of anti-Peronism in a transnational context. Focusing on the Argentine Association for Cultural Freedom, a Cold War organization backed by the United States, Nállim's account sheds some much needed light on the intersection of anticommunism and anti-Peronism and on the rising polarization that characterized Argentine politics in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

David Sheinin and Jennifer Adair offer new interpretations of Argentina's democratic transition of the early 1980s. Focusing primarily on a series of key legal cases, Sheinin argues that the administration of Raúl Alfonsín accepted many legal principles elaborated by the military dictatorship and that as a result, the “legal heritage of authoritarian rule” (160) survived the transition intact. More optimistically, Adair reconstructs the grassroots activism of local priests and poor residents of the Buenos Aires suburb of Quilmes. Her geographic and thematic focus is extremely welcome, given that the historiography of this period is dominated by studies of the Buenos Aires middle class. Adair's argument about the centrality of social protest to the democratization of Argentine society and her suggestions about how the Peronist language of social citizenship intersected with a new language of human rights suggest the contours of an exciting new interpretation.

The editors of this volume are to be commended for gathering together such a stimulating collection. However, the book as a whole suffers from a lack of coherence. Though all of the authors connect their arguments to the concept of citizenship, their level of engagement varies quite a bit. Moreover, the introduction does very little to specify the historiographic contribution that a focus on citizenship offers. It is true that the book demonstrates “the evolving and contested meaning of citizenship” (17), but that is not a particularly surprising conclusion. In the epilogue, Jeremy Adelman offers a masterful summary of the historiography of the last three decades, revealing the impact of the democratic transition as well as the influence of scholarly trends outside Argentina. His call “to rebuild the connections between the objective and the subjective” (195), the structural and the cultural, is compelling, but it is not specific to the study of citizenship.