History Compass最新文献

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.

Despite its long and layered histories, critical analyses of photography in India began rather late and remain comparatively limited in number. However, the burgeoining scholarship in the field illuminates photography's role in conditioning modern South Asian experiences, while also highlighting the global character of the medium that complicate the unmarked history of photography. Three intertwined historiographical threads are influential in narrating the colonial Indian camera cultures. The first thread emphasized descriptive histories, the second thread debated cultural essentialism, while the third thread inquired into myriad photographic genres to rethink colonialism. An inquiry into these three threads helps reflect on the intellectual scope of photographs from colonial India, while also directing to future archival and analytical possibilities.

The science of talismans was cultivated in Arabic, Greek, and Latin in the first millennium AD and entered European vernaculars in the seventeenth century. Its primary concern is the ability of images to produce effects in the world, even at a distance. In the eighteenth century, European intellectual discourse rejected the talisman on physical, moral, and aesthetic grounds. Today, it has returned and forms the object of distinctive and mutually complementary programs of study in art history, anthropology, and media studies. Its primary interest lies in its account of visual form as an intelligible cause and thereby as a mediator between distinct domains of experience.

The objective of this article is to review the historiography of the relationship between migration and firearms technologies in the early modern Islamic World. By examining historiographical debates on the role of firearms in early modern Islamic societies, we will look at the place of migrants in the historical literature of firearms. During the colonial period, debates shifted from the alleged conservatism of Islamic societies regarding firearm technologies to their respective agencies in the diffusion of firearms in the early modern world. In this article, I will show that the historiography of firearm technologies in Islamdom exhibits a shift from essentialist arguments towards a history of technology transfers and the role of migrants in this process.

Until the late 20th century, few studies focused on the history of charity and philanthropy in the Middle East from the medieval to modern periods. The work that explored this subject largely concentrated on the ideals of charitable practices, such as the faith-based tenets of social welfare as an Islamic communal practice and the religiously mandated form of almsgiving (zakat). But during the late 1990s, a new generation of scholars challenged the assumption of charity across the region as only a pious act and sought to address the dearth of literature on the subject. They shifted critical focus onto the history of philanthropy to consider and account for the social, economic, and political structures that shaped a wide range of charitable practices, activities, institutions, benefactors, and recipients. They also interrogated how communities determined the parameters of need, developed notions of the “deserving poor,” and mediated the relationship between the ideals and practices of beneficence. Overlapping fields such as social history and women's studies as well as analytics of gender, class, and national identity informed and advanced historical studies of charity and philanthropy across the Middle East. The subfield continues to innovate with new work across academic disciplines and new publishing venues for further studies of charity in the region across time periods.