History Compass最新文献

This article argues that Environmental History and History of Medicine are disciplines that are natural allies and productive partners; successfully working across the sub-disciplines will be essential to understanding current and future crises, including climate change and pandemics. While it is relatively easy to find acknowledged intersections between histories of science and/or technology and of the environment, so far these are less systematic and substantial in the history of medicine. Partly this is because there are points of serious methodological and theoretical tension, but I argue that these can function as moments of contact and provocation. Most obviously Environmental History poses challenges to historians of medicine in terms of the scale of our work in both its chronological and conceptual reach, and how we incorporate the non-human, and even the non-biotic as historical actors. History of Medicine offers approaches to help environmental historians negotiate their relationships with science, in particular the balance between science as a subject of study or as a source of data. Both disciplines share the struggle of combining focused, heavily contextualised local histories with the pressing need for globalised and ‘big picture’ historical explanations. In this review I will outline the main historiographical challenges to working across these subdisciplines—particularly in terms of scale and focus—and then consider the most productive intersections of these fields before making recommendations for future collaborative work.

In this paper, we argue that archaeology plays a significant role in promoting history, and the two disciplines complement each other. The study uses archaeological monuments and sites to assess how these can be used to effectively enhance the transmission of history to the public. This paper demonstrates the tremendous value of historical archaeology beyond colonial records as a source of data for the voiceless. Our study concludes that well-researched and packaged historical and archaeological information is essential to the promotion of the heritage tourism industry as part of the knowledge-based economy.

Late medieval slavery was profoundly entangled in urban life in particular. Cities all around the Mediterranean coast were implicated in the trade—although this article focuses on the Christian Mediterranean which was bound together by a general reliance on Roman law (alongside local customary laws and the canon law of the Church). Recently, scholarship on late medieval slavery has proliferated, offering a range of detailed studies primarily based on legal records. Late medieval slaves were predominantly women, and mostly worked in domestic settings. Scholars have addressed questions such as legal regulation; the ways in which racialized thinking emerged; the economics of slavery; the implications of slavery for Christian socio-religious frameworks; the extent to which slaves were integrated into the societies in which they were trafficked; and the role of slavery in geopolitics. This article flips all these questions to explore the experiences of slaves themselves. Surviving legal records allow us to see how slaves could articulate and even, to a limited extent, shape their own experiences through law; what race meant to slaves; how they experienced labour; how they articulated their religious identities; what social integration meant to individuals; and the ways in which slaves understood the geopolitics of their situations. All slave experiences were shaped by gender.

As a rich field of scholarship now demonstrates, from at least the early modern period, women have consistently contributed to natural philosophy, science, and medicine in Europe and the Anglo-American world. Their participation in these fields, like men's, has been shaped by gendered social and cultural expectations. It has risen and fallen on cyclical waves of effort to exclude them or minimize their contributions. In historical accounts, until recently, women's roles have been neglected or forgotten. Even today, in both scholarly and popular histories, women in science are often presented as surprising rediscoveries. Women are persistently perceived as newcomers in the sciences. Unless women's contributions are consistently integrated into mainstream narratives in the history of science, women could easily become invisible again. To counter this possibility, I first examine the structural factors shaping women's participation in the sciences and their historical visibility from the early modern period through the 19th century. I then suggest ways to include women in undergraduate surveys in the history of European and Anglo-American science that encourage students to engage with women's ideas and with women as complex, multi-valent historical actors. I show how we can situate women's contributions in a narrative that invites students to examine the history of science as a history of ideas, people, and practices and to explore history as a resource for understanding the role of scientific knowledge and authority in the present. Though my own examples are limited to the history of science in Europe and the Anglo-American world from the early modern period, I argue that a similar thematic approach could be explored and implemented in other historical contexts, given appropriate secondary and primary sources.

This article explores the way in which the history of Victorian popular culture has been rethought by historians since 2000. In the mid to late 20th century, the social history of leisure was often shaped by Marxist assumptions and devoted to emphasising the role of social class in determining forms of pleasure. In the 21st century historiography, class still matters but so do issues around race, gender and space.

This article uses the renaissance culture of horse racing as a window into the practices and language of breeding, artifice, and race. The popular palio racing circuit brought local and foreign horses into Italian city centers to test their speed. Racing culture, and other formal and informal competitions related to animals incentivized the development of specialized horse breeds called razze in Italian; this term is a precursor of the modern English “race.” To make these animals, renaissance patrons and animal experts engaged in unnatural selection. Their selective breeding efforts committed more to growing than weeding, aimed to create horses as works of art, branded animals so that they would be recognizable and cemented a discourse of race that emphasized the reproductive and training work of sponsored experts. This synthetic overview meditates on the transhistorical language of breeding and the consequences of excluding animals from our historical understanding of the making of the idea of race.

The “plant turn” of recent years has surfaced as an interdisciplinary position that sees plants as more than inert, passive objects subject to the whims of humans and of more charismatic animal life. Recent research in STEM, the social sciences, and the humanities, alongside scholarly publishing pursuits, have opened a field in which a small yet expanding community of scholars are proposing the worldmaking and agential capacities of plants. While the field of environmental history has already spent decades centering vegetal life and its profound impact on human societies, this essay considers what the plant turn might look like for the history of science and more specifically, the history of botany. What might it mean for plants to transform from objects of study to worldmaking beings in histories of the science? Drawing on two brief historical case studies from the Philippines, the essay invites consideration of plant worldmaking, understood in tandem with alternative ontologies, and of theorizing with plants. Though it may be much too soon to draw conclusions about what the plant turn may portend for the history of science (and the writing that may come from it), historians may have something to offer the plant turn—in discipline and method—in order to make this promising bed of scholarship rigorous and accessible.

This essay provides an overview of recent histories of medicine and global health from a socialist perspective, and maps out possible new directions of research. It focuses on key themes in the history of medicine in Eastern Europe, its global connections and Latin American, East Asian and African contexts. Through a discussion of international professional and diplomatic networks, health systems, medical technologies and aid and technical assistance, the essay argues that integrating missing actors, ideas and practices is crucial for a complete understanding of global health history.

Ideas of freedom, liberty, and social justice are germane to most societies, including African societies. The quest for these values also often involves contentions, dialog, and compromise. Sadly, the often-told stories of political and social change in Africa are brush-stroked with bloodshed, tears, and anguish. This Africa of pessimism, unfulfilled dreams, state-sponsored violence, and civil wars is a familiar headline in the global North. This work, however, proposes that African countries such as Ghana have been resolving their disagreements and contentions through other means. These range from subtle, subversive, noncompliant and complex responses to the less preferred direct and open confrontation with authority. Secondly, the historiography of protest movements in Ghana reveals a lingering preference for twentieth century social movements, neglecting nineteenth century forms of protest and social movement bases, which employed subtlety, noncompliance, and sometimes, direct confrontation. Lastly, initial social movement literature showed a preponderance of male-dominated narratives, which eventually led to the creation of female-inspired alternate narratives. Using selected works in social movement theory, general surveys on the history of Ghana, monographs, journal articles, book chapters and unpublished theses, this article seeks to offer a panoramic view of the history-writing of social movements and its prospects in Ghana.

In her 2014 History Compass article, Margrit Pernau issued a call for scholars to consider entanglements between history of emotion methodologies and space. She argued that ‘bodies are necessarily situated in space, and they bear the imprint of the spaces they are moving through and have moved through.’ Nine years after the publication of Pernau's article, this study engages with developments in the field of history of emotions to posit that emotional methodologies provide important opportunities for scholars of the urban built environment, adding additional lenses that can help to push the boundaries of urban history. Extending Pernau's thesis by borrowing theoretical and methodological muscle from affect theory and the combined field of slavery and gender studies, via the concepts of atmospheres, reconstruction, and critical fabulation, this article explores new avenues for research that aims to understand and analyse marginalised groups in urban history. The explorative analysis is tested on a macroanalysis of social processes among the Irish diaspora in nineteenth century Melbourne and Chicago and a microhistorical study of a Pietist orphanage in nineteenth century Stockholm and thus showcases the possibility of the approach to go beyond spatial-emotional management and reach contradictory and alternative strategies and experiences.