Pub Date : 2025-11-06DOI: 10.1016/j.jhg.2025.10.008
Salvatore Valenti
{"title":"Knowledge erosion: Floods and the regularisation of the river Tiber, 1870–1937","authors":"Salvatore Valenti","doi":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.10.008","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.10.008","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47094,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Geography","volume":"90 ","pages":"Pages 156-165"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145447284","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-11-06DOI: 10.1016/j.jhg.2025.09.006
Lucy Thompson
This paper investigates the life history and geography of William Henry Lane, more commonly known by his stage name ‘Master Juba’. As a once-renowned, mid-nineteenth-century African American performer, Lane's microhistory is central to tracing the wider cultural and historical geographies of tap dance across circum-Atlantic performance, appearing as one of the earliest named tap dancers in the historical record. While his biographical details remain ambiguous, Lane's unique rhythmic, percussive dance style heavily influenced nineteenth-century transatlantic performance. This paper traces and maps ‘Master Juba's’ footsteps across the Atlantic, first exploring the historical geographies of the Five Points District, Manhattan, which fostered tap dance's early development through competitive challenge dancing, and where Charles Dickens allegedly witnessed Lane's ‘inimitable’ dancing. It subsequently traces Lane's journey to Britain in 1848, mapping his performances across Victorian Britain through the geographies of nineteenth-century performance circuits. Lane's myriad performances are further investigated, working both within and beyond the constraints of minstrelsy, which fundamentally challenged race, gender, and class inequalities in Victorian Britain. The paper finally explores the archival silences surrounding Lane's life and early demise. This historical geography speaks more widely to circum-Atlantic mobilities, Black performers in nineteenth-century Britain, and advocates a more-than-representational historical geography of dance.
{"title":"Master Juba's Footsteps: Mapping the transatlantic geographies of tap dance through mid-nineteenth century performance circuits","authors":"Lucy Thompson","doi":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.09.006","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.09.006","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper investigates the life history and geography of William Henry Lane, more commonly known by his stage name ‘Master Juba’. As a once-renowned, mid-nineteenth-century African American performer, Lane's microhistory is central to tracing the wider cultural and historical geographies of tap dance across circum-Atlantic performance, appearing as one of the earliest named tap dancers in the historical record. While his biographical details remain ambiguous, Lane's unique rhythmic, percussive dance style heavily influenced nineteenth-century transatlantic performance. This paper traces and maps ‘Master Juba's’ footsteps across the Atlantic, first exploring the historical geographies of the Five Points District, Manhattan, which fostered tap dance's early development through competitive challenge dancing, and where Charles Dickens allegedly witnessed Lane's ‘inimitable’ dancing. It subsequently traces Lane's journey to Britain in 1848, mapping his performances across Victorian Britain through the geographies of nineteenth-century performance circuits. Lane's myriad performances are further investigated, working both within and beyond the constraints of minstrelsy, which fundamentally challenged race, gender, and class inequalities in Victorian Britain. The paper finally explores the archival silences surrounding Lane's life and early demise. This historical geography speaks more widely to circum-Atlantic mobilities, Black performers in nineteenth-century Britain, and advocates a more-than-representational historical geography of dance.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47094,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Geography","volume":"90 ","pages":"Pages 143-155"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145447285","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-10-25DOI: 10.1016/j.jhg.2025.10.003
Emily O'Gorman
The text of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, Especially as Waterfowl Habitat was finalised in 1971 at a conference in the Iranian city of Ramsar. The Convention was revolutionary at the time and remains a landmark of post-1945 international environmental conservation. This article focuses on the series of meetings at which an international wetlands convention became a sustained focus of scientific attention, from the Project MAR Conference in 1962, which initiated these efforts, to the Ramsar conference in 1971. It examines changes in the science of ecology and shifting socio-political contexts that shaped the development of a wetlands convention and the idea of wetlands as ‘internationally important’. In so doing it brings histories of the Ramsar Convention which have largely been written from within the sciences, and scholarship on international conventions and history of science within historical geography and environmental history, into closer conversation. It particularly focuses on the shifting relationship between two sets of ideas within the sciences that significantly shaped the development of a wetlands convention -- wetlands dynamics (including wetlands as ecosystems) and the routes of migratory waterbirds – and argues that despite a growing emphasis on the importance of wetland dynamics and ecosystems by scientists, discussion of an international wetlands convention came to focus on the older concerns of protecting migratory birds. A significant consequence was that the movement of birds began to shape the geographical scope of a wetland convention. The planned wetland convention initially focused on Europe and North Africa. Yet, countries like the USSR argued that the birds needed to be followed into other regions and the scope of an international convention needed to be much wider. Ultimately the Ramsar Convention brought together the two concerns of bird migration and wetlands dynamics, or movement and site specificity, which remains its defining feature and, arguably, its strength. Within these discussions of an international convention on wetlands questions of race, politics, shifting scientific concepts, and bird movements came into dynamic conversation to shape consequential histories.
{"title":"Protecting global wetlands: Ecosystems, migratory waterbirds, and the Ramsar Convention, 1962–1971","authors":"Emily O'Gorman","doi":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.10.003","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.10.003","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The text of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, Especially as Waterfowl Habitat was finalised in 1971 at a conference in the Iranian city of Ramsar. The Convention was revolutionary at the time and remains a landmark of post-1945 international environmental conservation. This article focuses on the series of meetings at which an international wetlands convention became a sustained focus of scientific attention, from the Project MAR Conference in 1962, which initiated these efforts, to the Ramsar conference in 1971. It examines changes in the science of ecology and shifting socio-political contexts that shaped the development of a wetlands convention and the idea of wetlands as ‘internationally important’. In so doing it brings histories of the Ramsar Convention which have largely been written from within the sciences, and scholarship on international conventions and history of science within historical geography and environmental history, into closer conversation. It particularly focuses on the shifting relationship between two sets of ideas within the sciences that significantly shaped the development of a wetlands convention -- wetlands dynamics (including wetlands as ecosystems) and the routes of migratory waterbirds – and argues that despite a growing emphasis on the importance of wetland dynamics and ecosystems by scientists, discussion of an international wetlands convention came to focus on the older concerns of protecting migratory birds. A significant consequence was that the movement of birds began to shape the geographical scope of a wetland convention. The planned wetland convention initially focused on Europe and North Africa. Yet, countries like the USSR argued that the birds needed to be followed into other regions and the scope of an international convention needed to be much wider. Ultimately the Ramsar Convention brought together the two concerns of bird migration and wetlands dynamics, or movement and site specificity, which remains its defining feature and, arguably, its strength. Within these discussions of an international convention on wetlands questions of race, politics, shifting scientific concepts, and bird movements came into dynamic conversation to shape consequential histories.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47094,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Geography","volume":"90 ","pages":"Pages 127-137"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145362413","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-10-22DOI: 10.1016/j.jhg.2025.09.009
Elizabeth Chatterjee, Marianna Dudley, Linda Ross, Hiroki Shin
Climate crisis has made the transition from carbon-rich to low-carbon energy systems an existential necessity for the future of our planet. This article sets out how greater attention to low-carbon energy history, currently a neglected component of modern energy development, should comprise an essential part of building a zero-carbon future. We argue for the usefulness of low-carbon as a capacious term that foregrounds the historic and ongoing relationality between low- and high-carbon energy, and set out the ways this has shaped energy infrastructures, practices, and imaginaries through the twentieth century to the present. We outline a range of analytics—materiality, scaling, community—around which critical understandings of low-carbon energy can be gained. And we show that decarbonization, while urgent, does not have to be speculative: the historical examples provided here offer valuable insights into the social and spatial impacts and temporal challenges of introducing new energy infrastructure and decommissioning old that can, and should, be paid more attention.
{"title":"Low-carbon histories for zero-carbon futures","authors":"Elizabeth Chatterjee, Marianna Dudley, Linda Ross, Hiroki Shin","doi":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.09.009","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.09.009","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Climate crisis has made the transition from carbon-rich to low-carbon energy systems an existential necessity for the future of our planet. This article sets out how greater attention to low-carbon energy history, currently a neglected component of modern energy development, should comprise an essential part of building a zero-carbon future. We argue for the usefulness of low-carbon as a capacious term that foregrounds the historic and ongoing relationality between low- and high-carbon energy, and set out the ways this has shaped energy infrastructures, practices, and imaginaries through the twentieth century to the present. We outline a range of analytics—materiality, scaling, community—around which critical understandings of low-carbon energy can be gained. And we show that decarbonization, while urgent, does not have to be speculative: the historical examples provided here offer valuable insights into the social and spatial impacts and temporal challenges of introducing new energy infrastructure and decommissioning old that can, and should, be paid more attention.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47094,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Geography","volume":"90 ","pages":"Pages 114-126"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145362412","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-10-08DOI: 10.1016/j.jhg.2025.09.002
Jacob Fairless Nicholson , Nathaniel Télémaque , Jasmine Roberts
Arguing for a 'public historical geography' and focusing on a collaborative research project conducted at Black Cultural Archives in London, England, this paper contributes to a body of geographical scholarship that has in recent years situated the archive as a subject of, rather than source for, geographical knowledge production. Past accounts have provided important evidence of the precarity and financial insecurity that Black archives face. In this paper we shift this focus on to the affordances and opportunities eked out by one Black archive as it negotiated struggles for survival creatively and sensitively, and challenged archiving's history as a Euro-American practice of violence. Providing insight on our participatory approach that involved producing research aids and organising a public event to engage public audiences with the Jacqueline Creft Memorial Collection pertaining to the Grenada Revolution 1979–1983, we situate archival research as a collaborative, affective, and exploratory practice that can impact public audiences in diverse ways.
{"title":"Practice, politics, and publics: Doing public historical geography in a black archive","authors":"Jacob Fairless Nicholson , Nathaniel Télémaque , Jasmine Roberts","doi":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.09.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.09.002","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Arguing for a 'public historical geography' and focusing on a collaborative research project conducted at Black Cultural Archives in London, England, this paper contributes to a body of geographical scholarship that has in recent years situated the archive as a subject of, rather than source for, geographical knowledge production. Past accounts have provided important evidence of the precarity and financial insecurity that Black archives face. In this paper we shift this focus on to the affordances and opportunities eked out by one Black archive as it negotiated struggles for survival creatively and sensitively, and challenged archiving's history as a Euro-American practice of violence. Providing insight on our participatory approach that involved producing research aids and organising a public event to engage public audiences with the Jacqueline Creft Memorial Collection pertaining to the Grenada Revolution 1979–1983, we situate archival research as a collaborative, affective, and exploratory practice that can impact public audiences in diverse ways.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47094,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Geography","volume":"90 ","pages":"Pages 103-113"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-10-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145267186","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-10-07DOI: 10.1016/j.jhg.2025.09.005
Orit Peleg-Barkat , Roy Marom , Gregg E. Gardner , Michael Chernin , Yoav Farhi , Saleh Kharanbeh
This study examines the transformation of rural settlement in the Shephelah region of Ottoman Palestine as a reflection of communal adaptation to changes in the political and security landscapes. Focusing on Khirbet Drūsye (Horvat Midras), we integrate archaeological evidence with Ottoman fiscal surveys and Sharia court registers to trace the site's transition from a prosperous Mamluk-era village to a seasonal habitation (ʿizbeh) by the 1550s. This spatial reconfiguration illustrates how rural communities modified their settlement patterns and economic strategies in response to the declining security environment during the Early Ottoman period. The study of Drūsye, alongside other cases in the southern Bilād al-Shām/Levant, highlights not only the diverse ways that settlement systems evolved in response to political and economic pressures but also reveals sophisticated settlement patterns that challenge our understanding of 'permanent' versus 'transient' occupation. More broadly, the case demonstrates the methodological value of combining archaeological and documentary sources to reconstruct historical geographies and understand local responses to imperial transition. Beyond its regional focus, the case of Drūsye demonstrates a more general lesson: rural communities under imperial regimes often developed flexible, hybrid strategies of land use that challenge simple distinctions between permanence and abandonment. Such adaptive patterns have relevance for comparative studies of frontier zones, resilience, and the archaeology of ‘decline’.
{"title":"Rural adaptation and settlement change in the late Islamic Jabal al-Khalīl (Judean Foothills)","authors":"Orit Peleg-Barkat , Roy Marom , Gregg E. Gardner , Michael Chernin , Yoav Farhi , Saleh Kharanbeh","doi":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.09.005","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.09.005","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study examines the transformation of rural settlement in the Shephelah region of Ottoman Palestine as a reflection of communal adaptation to changes in the political and security landscapes. Focusing on Khirbet Drūsye (Horvat Midras), we integrate archaeological evidence with Ottoman fiscal surveys and Sharia court registers to trace the site's transition from a prosperous Mamluk-era village to a seasonal habitation (<em>ʿizbeh</em>) by the 1550s. This spatial reconfiguration illustrates how rural communities modified their settlement patterns and economic strategies in response to the declining security environment during the Early Ottoman period. The study of Drūsye, alongside other cases in the southern Bilād al-Shām/Levant, highlights not only the diverse ways that settlement systems evolved in response to political and economic pressures but also reveals sophisticated settlement patterns that challenge our understanding of 'permanent' versus 'transient' occupation. More broadly, the case demonstrates the methodological value of combining archaeological and documentary sources to reconstruct historical geographies and understand local responses to imperial transition. Beyond its regional focus, the case of Drūsye demonstrates a more general lesson: rural communities under imperial regimes often developed flexible, hybrid strategies of land use that challenge simple distinctions between permanence and abandonment. Such adaptive patterns have relevance for comparative studies of frontier zones, resilience, and the archaeology of ‘decline’.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47094,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Geography","volume":"90 ","pages":"Pages 87-98"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-10-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145267187","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}