History Compass最新文献

Art embodies material and symbolic value; it is a source of intellectual and cultural nourishment, a marker of social status, a symbol of national dignity, private or public property. Yet, art is also a commodity—one that has shaped and been shaped by a long and complex history: that of the art market. This article examines the twentieth-century art trade as a crucial area for historical inquiry, offers a review of existing scholarship in the field, and addresses the issue of its historicisation. It engages with contributions from external disciplines (economics, sociology, anthropology, art history) and various sub-fields within history (political, cultural, and social histories) that have contributed to the study of commercial and cultural dynamics and the evolution of art markets. To make sense of this interdisciplinary field, this paper proposes a framework based on the notion that art is the crucible of property and capital. This lens provides a valuable perspective to contextualise the trade in the history of twentieth-century Europe and to use the market as a source to understand developments in European cultural, social, and economic history.

The growth of the field of ethnohistory on Argentina's southern frontier has revolutionized Argentine historiography, challenging historians to rethink time-worn subjects as they considered Indigenous peoples' experiences. This article contends that historians should prioritize decolonizing the field through putting Indigenous peoples' experiences and ways of thinking at the center of their analyses rather than the government and settler frameworks that are most available in source material. Expanding the range of geographic and temporal frameworks that are deployed in historical studies will also help refocus attention on the events that were most important for these people. “Indigenizing” the study of Argentina's Indigenous people is a worthy goal and a necessary step toward understanding the Indigenous world of tierra adentro on its own terms.

Every year, millions of Australians choose to read popular history and watch historical documentaries. Despite the apparent political, social, economic and personal significance of history, we have very little reliable information about what Australians think and believe about history. What do Australians think that history is? What do they think it is for? How have they learnt about the past and how do they decide what historical knowledge is trustworthy? What role do they believe history should play in the life of the nation? In this article, we present the findings from the Deakin Contemporary History Survey (DCHS), a large-scale, nationally representative programme. This survey, with repeated cross-sectional waves conducted in 2021, 2023 and 2024, aimed to explore Australians' perceptions of history, its role in national life and their beliefs about historical knowledge and its credibility. We begin by placing these surveys within the context of similar research undertaken in Australia and elsewhere, outlining the methodology and scope of our approach. The three surveys reveal some widely shared attitudes towards history among Australians as well as areas of significant disagreement. They point particularly to generational shifts in understanding the nature of history and its relationship to national identity. Based on these results, we also identify some directions that will be fruitful for further and more in-depth investigation.

Islamic legal studies generally classify the administration of criminal justice during the formative and classical periods as a departure from traditional Islamic law. During this time, rulers, military-judicial authorities, and other officials largely oversaw the criminal courts, rather than the judges and jurists, who were considered the paramount actors of Islamic law. A primary challenge confronting any study of this topic is the scarcity of surviving criminal records, coupled with embellished narratives and concerns regarding the historical relevance of the jurisprudential material. Consequently, recent research, in the last few decades, has begun to investigate alternative sources on this administration of criminal justice: Egyptian papyri, administrative manuals and investiture diplomas, nawāzil (legal responses and rulings for new cases), Cairo Geniza, and criminal reports found in historical chronicles. This essay explores this rich historiography, focusing on these novel approaches to these texts, and aims to propose new methodological pathways for future research in this field.

This article addresses the photograph as a historical source to explore unmapped territories in the histories of medicine and photography in 19th- and early twentieth-century Egypt. It examines the criteria that govern the selection of photographs in scientific and medical publications. Specifically, it asks: what functions did photographs serve in medical publications? Through a juxtaposition of colonial doctors' selection of photographs with that of Arabic scientific periodicals, this article examines some similarities and distinctions between the local and colonial use of medical photographs. On the one hand, similarities show that medical photography in Egypt developed along broader global practices in photography and modern medicine. On the other hand, distinctions offer new insights into the practice of modern medicine in a colonial context. While colonial doctors used these photographs as images of pathology, not only of a disease but also of a people, some local medical practitioners used them as pictures of health and competence.