Journal of Historical Geography最新文献

Despite human geography's sophisticated analyses and overwhelming focus on space, time in its various guises has certainly not been absent in the literature. The same cannot be said for historical geography, which is particularly interesting as its main concern is purportedly with space and place in and across other times. In response, this paper examines the ontology and epistemology of time in “modern” historical geography since the early 2000s and does so in discussion with recent developments in theory and philosophy of history, specifically the notion of ‘new presentism’. An idea which broadly posits that the past and the future do not exist as separate categories but are always projections of specific presents, they exist as the present's own immanent modes. This is achieved by adopting Robert Dodgshon's concept of the ‘specious present’ in order to (1) affirm, albeit on different epistemological grounds, the partiality, situatedness and contingency of historical geographies as well as the embodied and performative nature of archival labour; (2) offer an accessible conceptual tool in thinking about the role of time in the practice of future historical geography research; and finally (3) suggest that thinking historical geography as a practice in and through the ‘specious present’ makes questions of ethics, accountability, and politics of knowledge production both central and inevitable, as opposed to just being examples of “good practice” or worse still, being completely sidestepped by virtue of an imagined spatio-temporal distance between the bygone past and the present moment of research.

Historical land use reconstructions help to assess climate change, interactions between ecosystems and human and strengthen the knowledge about these interactions. They are conducted on the basis of historical maps that only cover certain areas. Hence, there is a need to seek other maps enabling historical land use to be reconstructed. The aim of study is to assess the suitability of contemporary maps for reconstructing a historical non-forest area range in the Western Carpathians. The content of contemporary maps was compared with that of historical maps, including the number of glades, their area and the length of their boundaries. Over 60% of glades were reconstructed, which is 90% of the glade area inventoried based on historical maps. Over 50% glades with an area of less than 1ha were not reconstructed. However, the area they occupy does not account for 2% of the total glade area. Thus, it has no significant impact on the total area of the reconstructed glades. As much as 90% of the boundaries' length was reconstructed. The study shows that contemporary maps may be useful in reconstructing the forest and glades range and may be an additional source of information to verify the content of historical maps.

This paper examines the Linguistic Survey of India (LSI), a monumental exercise supervised by George Grierson to survey and classify the languages of colonial India. It considers why the LSI developed into an atypical scheme that corresponded with a multiethnic and multinational network of officials and scholars to survey India's languages. It makes the case that the networked practice of surveying was reciprocated at different scales, from localised linguistic surveys in districts and princely states to gather information and specimens, to a loosely governed transnational exercise involving Indians and Europeans to edit, review and publish results. The paper argues that the LSI's scalar geographies were negotiated by Grierson and, more importantly, his assistant Gauri Kant Roy and demonstrates that scale, as an analytic or process, was not an abstraction or predetermined for those entangled in the LSI's survey of India's languages.

This article examines public attitudes towards communist monuments as part of the contentious heritage of totalitarianism in post-communist Bulgaria from the 1990s to the present. Its main goals are, first, to analyse the place of political monuments as political subjects of social change during the Bulgarian transition from a totalitarian to a democratic society; second, to study the monuments as ‘realms of memory’ within the changes of collective memory in the post-communist period. The research combines the approaches of political (social) anthropology, cultural anthropology and historical geography. Exploring political subcultures, it investigates ex-communist and anti-communist activities regarding the future of totalitarian monuments. The research is focused on two urban landmarks in Sofia: the Mausoleum of the communist leader Georgi Dimitrov, and the Monument to the Soviet Army.

A detailed study of the ancient caravan routes connecting Mongolia and Tibet has yet to be established. This paper describes the results of initial investigations on the identification of caravan traces through Mongolia from historical sources, fieldwork, and remote sensing reconnaissance. Recreating the Roerich Central Asian Expedition of 1927, we identify several artifacts and locations that support our belief that these routes contributed to the movement and exchange of people, ideas, and commerce across the desert landscapes of Inner Asia and helped shape cultural and religious identities that still exist to this day. Moreover, we argue the Mongolia to Tibet caravan routes were part of the greater network of ancient Silk Roads and should be considered as such: an important, intangible cultural heritage worthy of further exploration, preservation, and scholarly study.

This paper examines the socio-ecological implications of reindeer-caribou hybridization during the rise and collapse of the reindeer industry in Alaska. Following their introduction in the late nineteenth century, reindeer populations increased dramatically as herds spread throughout the territory. As populations increased, domesticated reindeer often escaped from their herds and ran off with migratory caribou. By the 1920s, Alaskan wildlife managers and scientists came to view feral reindeer as a form of biological pollution and a threat to the health and purity of the region's wild caribou. Despite divergent evolutionary histories, reindeer and caribou are related at the subspecies level and can interbreed to produce hybridized offspring. I argue that managerial anxieties about reindeer-caribou hybridization were bound up with broader concerns regarding race and related efforts to protect ostensibly pure spaces of wilderness and nature. Throughout the paper, I consider managerial attempts to mitigate reindeer-caribou hybridization in northern Alaska, which included the demarcation and reinforcement of conceptual and spatial boundaries between wild and domesticated forms of life. However, between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, feral reindeer and hybridized caribou repeatedly demonstrated the violability of the biological categories and conceptual boundaries that wildlife managers employed as they sought to order life on the northern tundra.

In recent decades, a spectral turn has animated geography and related fields like archaeology, memory studies, and landscape studies, examining how places can be haunted by the ghosts of the past, with heavy emphasis on metaphorical specters and spirits. The geography of spirits and other unseen forces presented here takes a less metaphorical approach to haunted landscapes. This paper examines how spirits have traditionally dwelt within everyday places and objects like trees and stones in Palestine, and how people have sought to cohabitate with or settle such spirits. Attending to the physical geography of the spirit world can shed light on how spaces become sacred through belief and practice, and how sacred spaces are continuously remade within changing social, cultural, and political contexts. Drawing together historical observations by European and Palestinian ethnographers and interweaving the voices of Palestinian elders in the form of recorded oral history testimonies, this paper examines the typologies and environments of spirits and jinn in Palestine, with particular attention to water demons and haunted trees. The paper reflects on how these unseen forces play a role in establishing moral, gendered, and sacred boundaries, while at the same time blurring boundaries between popular religion and religious orthodoxy.

Since 1965, New York City's Landmark Preservation Commission (LPC) has listed over 37,900 buildings and sites, overwhelmingly located in 156 historic districts. While official landmark criteria have not changed, designation reports reveal shifting narratives of place and race. I examine historic placemaking in Black-identified districts, focusing on how designation rationales have evolved. Evidence comes from four predominantly Black historic districts, contextualized by comparison with similar cases. In 1967, the designation of St. Nicholas or ‘Striver's Row’ stressed notable architectural histories while regarding race as a secondary issue. After memorializing the African Burial Ground in 1993, Black district reports increasingly included cultural histories of racial justice. In 2011, Addisleigh Park illustrated the broadened approach, featuring the distinctive single-family homes and the Black celebrities who challenged restrictive racial covenants to live there. In 2018, another shift began with Central Harlem's extensive report and online story map, juxtaposing the built heritage with the Harlem Renaissance and Civil Rights movements. This designation foreshadowed the LPC's ‘equity framework’ of 2021, prioritizing racial inclusion and civil rights. Thus, I argue that antiracist activism has repeatedly driven LPC policy shifts toward greater social diversity in the historic places of New York City.