History Compass最新文献

In the context of extant efforts in the decolonisation of African Studies, transnationalisation of feminist theorising, and the rise of intersectionality as an analytical tool in gender studies, I argue for the adoption of an ‘African intersectionalities’ framework towards achieving the decolonisation of African women's and gender studies. The article engages a critical review of feminist intersectionality theory and its trajectory, executes a decolonial reading to propose an African intersectionality specifically, and explores the emancipatory potentials for harnessing the interconnections of both literatures in the field of African women's and gender studies.

Historical scholarship on the topics of food, cooking, and eating has flourished in recent years. Within this growing body of literature, chefs have recently been introduced as a legitimate subject of historical investigation. However, to date, no clear theoretical or methodological model has been developed to study this underutilised and under-theorised historical subject. Drawing upon anthropological readings of history, this article aims to provide a theoretical framework for the historical analysis of professional cooks. It suggests that, when examined from a cultural perspective, professional cooks are unique subjects of historical investigation that act as a window onto broader cultural and social transformations of the specific contexts in which they are embedded. The intention of this article is to bring thematic and methodological clarity to the category of professional cooks and reflect on the analytical utility that they can bring for cultural historians.

The question of religious toleration was crucial in the early modern era. Challenging simplistic views of toleration as mere peaceful coexistence, this essay explores its complexities from a historical perspective. It argues that toleration was a deliberate choice demanding effort and served as a flexible political tool in various contexts. Drawing on examples from Brandenburg-Prussia and Poland-Lithuania, it shows how toleration shaped political assets and public opinion. This essay introduces the concept of a “toleration landscape” to depict its multifaceted influence on society. Ultimately, it asserts Central Europe's pivotal role in early modern toleration, bridging historical divides between Eastern and Western Europe.

This article examines interconnected questions that are central to new scholarship on the history of technology in modern South Asia. Which communities, groups and individuals have formed and sustained relationships with knowledge and practices that are seen as representative of technological modernity? Why were some individuals and communities understood—by both the state and various South Asian publics—to be cultivators of technological knowledge, while others were not? And to what degree were claims on technical knowledge and practice made and sustained through South Asian “vernacular” languages, practices, and conceits? The article integrates Punjabi verses written by an early 20th-century railway carpenter with an analysis of current historiographical trends. In doing so, it explores both the opportunities and limitations of the new social historical turn in the history of technology in South Asia. I argue that recent efforts to expand the “who” of the South Asian history of technology must lead us to new approaches to the social role of technology itself, and to new considerations of technology's relationship with science, labor, the environment, and material culture.

This article explores contemporary and scholarly perspectives on coffee bars in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, with a particular focus on themes in the modern history of youth. In the immediate postwar decades, young people in Britain were described as simultaneously angry and apathetic, active troublemakers and passive consumers. Young people's use and abuse of leisure time often grounded these contradictory typologies, and coffee bars attracted particular concern. The consumption of coffee was not new in Britain, but this article focuses on heightened anxieties about the association of coffee bars with unsupervised teen sociability, foreign cultures, the ‘Americanization’ of British culture, and the erosion of ‘community’ after Second World War. A closer examination of coffee bars demonstrates both their significance in contemporary debates about young people and their many connections to recent historical analysis of youth in the postwar period.

Australia and New Zealand have deep historical connections—geological, environmental, cultural, political, and economic—with Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. Yet while Australasia and the Southern Ocean are historically entangled, their historiographies are largely estranged. This article provides a survey of Australian and New Zealand histories of Antarctica, the subantarctic, and the Southern Ocean. I argue that historians in and of Australasia have contributed significantly to understandings of the region's southern hinterland, including the histories and legacies of Antarctic whaling, sealing, science, exploration, politics, and culture. These same connections and entanglements have rarely been used to shed light on Australian and New Zealand histories, but can offer new perspectives on Australasian histories of intercultural contact and exchange, mobilities, the frontier, imperialism, and internationalism. I argue that conceptualising Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica as littorals of a ‘terraqueous’ Southern Ocean World provides a way to both generate new insights into this region's history and draw new connections with global, world, and oceanic histories.

The inevitability of death does not change its variability. In The Hour of Our Death (1981), Philippe Ariès positioned the sudden, unexpected, mass death of epidemics (especially from the Black Death) against the personalized, domesticated death for which one had time to prepare. The domesticated death, so he argued, appeared during a specific epoche of European history and was an historical inflection point, coinciding with the 18th century Enlightenment. Ariès looked unfavorably at this climax for what he saw as a process of de-spiritualization, waning of faith, and the beginnings of commercialization and medicalization of death. Since his publications, scholars from a range of fields—history, anthropology, literature, religion, and art—have sought to address the omissions, exaggerations, and misleading claims in Ariès' account and, in doing so, have developed a rich field studying the cultural history and significance of death. Now situated in a transdisciplinary space, studying the good death and the tradition of ars moriendi (the art of the dying well) offers new perspectives and answers new questions about death. Although there is much that could be discussed, the focus here will be on recent trends in scholarship on the tradition of ars moriendi and its relationship to the interrelated histories of burial, the role of clerical and lay comforters, and the role of physicians as well as the historical and religious-philosophical problems of the prolongation of life and sudden death.

By reviewing historiographical trends within existing scholarship on migration and movement, and knowledge and technological dialogue in early modern East Asia, this article demonstrates how these bodies of work have become increasingly interdisciplinary and inclusive, thereby challenging prior characterisations of the region. Recent trends within the field combined with considerations of embodiment are, however, laying the groundwork for more meaningful integration by examining how migrants actually transferred, adapted, and leveraged their knowledge and skills. This article concludes by pointing to the potential to fully bring to the fore the complex nature of both migrants and technological dialogue.