Illuminated addresses,national identity and Irish sport, 1880–1901

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the cultural significance of illuminated sporting addresses in Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century. Illuminated addresses were used in civic society as a means of commemoration, celebrating retirement and relocation for instance, and they were also physical expressions of public sporting events in Ireland. Illuminated addressees are documents which provide an insight into the cultural histories of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Irish sport. This essay pays particular attention to illuminated addresses sponsored by members of the Gaelic Athletic Association and also considers the significance of a late 1890s example which was funded by supporters of the Irish horse-racing which sheds light on the sub-culture of the Irish turf. Illuminated addresses are meaningful documents and this essay recovers, for the first time, some of their hidden history.     

Out of the Ivy and into the Arctic: Imitation Coral Reconstruction in Cross-Cultural Contexts

This essay discusses imitation coral reconstruction workshops based on a recipe from a sixteenth-century “book of secrets” that took place in three different educational contexts: Columbia University, Nunavut Arctic College, and Universität Hamburg. It reflects on the utility of reconstruction and material literacy as present-day history of science methodologies in which scholarly textual interpretation meets physical research. It also considers the nature of cultural heritage in shaping material practice through an Inuit cultural context, in which the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge is not rooted in textual traditions, but bodily embedded in oral histories, craft technology, and land stewardship. The essay also presents suggestions for new collaborative practices between humanists, artisans, and scientists that can be facilitated by reconstruction methodology.     

Design als ‘mediating interface’ Zur Zeugen‐ und Zeichenhaftigkeit des Radioapparates

Design as Mediating Interface: Historical Evidence and Symbolic Enunciation of the Radio Set. – Based on a case study on the invention of the radio station scale in the late 1920's and early 1930's, this article pleads for an interdisciplinary look at the importance of design as a mediating interface in the production‐consumption junction. In this cultural history perspective on technology, the material artifact matters both as a witness of and a sign for the symbolic meaning and appropriation of the technical object, which transgresses the functional logic of instrumental rationality. In presenting five different perspectives on design offering some alternative looks for a cultural history of technology, this theoretically inspired essay wants to sound the critical potential of a multilayered semantic approach to the radio apparatus as a prominent representation of a radical innovation in media technology.     

HOW NINETEENTH‐CENTURY GERMAN CLASSICISTS WROTE THE JEWS OUT OF ANCIENT HISTORY

This essay considers why Jewish antiquity largely fell outside the purview of ancient historians in the Germanies for over half a century, between 1820 and 1880, and examines the nature of those portraits that did, in fact, arise. To do so, it interrogates discussions of Jewish antiquity in this half‐century against the background of those political and national values that were consolidating across the German states. Ultimately, the article claims that ancient Jewish history did not provide a compelling model for the dominant (Protestant) German scholars of the age, which then prompted the decline of antique Judaism as a field of interest. This investigation into the political and national dimensions of ancient history both supplements previous lines of inquiry and complicates accounts that assign too much explanatory power to a regnant anti‐Judaism or anti‐Semitism in the period and place. First, the analysis considers why so little attention was granted to Jewish history by ancient historians in the first place, as opposed to its relative prominence before ca. 1820. Second, the essay examines representations of ancient Judaism as fashioned by those historians who did consider the subject in this period. Surveying works composed not only for the upper echelons of scholarship but also for adolescents, women, and the laity, it scrutinizes a series of arguments advanced and assumptions embedded in universal histories, histories of the ancient world, textbooks of history, and histories dedicated to either Greece or Rome. Finally, the article asserts the Jewish past did not conform to the values of cultural ascendancy, political autonomy, national identity, and religious liberty increasingly hallowed across the Germanies of the nineteenth century, on the one hand, and inscribed into the very enterprise of historiography, on the other. The perceived national and political failures of ancient Jews—alongside the ethnic or religious ones discerned by others—thus made antique Judaism an unattractive object of study in this period.     

National stereotypes and music

Music became a marker of national identity in nineteenth‐century Europe. Western art music consists of tonal systems that are universally intelligible, but certain rhythms and musical idioms have been associated with national styles. How, when, and why does a musical phrase or piece become national? What political and cultural circumstances contributed to the development of national styles and facilitated the emergence of resonant topographies? What was the relationship between music as cultural practice and nineteenth‐century national thought as discursive space? These questions are addressed with a particular focus on verbunkos, which came to be characteristic of Hungarian national style, and on the Rákóczy March which became famous thanks to Berlioz's Faust. This essay traces the complex process of cultural transfer through which these martial tunes of mixed ethnic origins have become emblematic of Hungarian music.     

1. DECENTERING HISTORY: LOCAL STORIES AND CULTURAL CROSSINGS IN A GLOBAL WORLD

This essay was first presented at the 2010 Ludwig Holberg Prize Symposium in Bergen, Norway, where I, as the prize recipient, was asked to describe my work and its import for our period of globalization. The essay first traces the interconnected processes of “decentering” history in Western historiography in the half century after World War II: the move to working people and “subaltern classes”; to women and gender; to communities defined by ethnicity and race; to the study of non‐Western histories and world or global history, in which the European trajectory is only one of several models. Can the historian hold onto the subjects of “decentered” social and cultural history, often local and full of concrete detail, and still address the perspectives of global history? To suggest an answer to this question, I describe my own decentering path from work on sixteenth‐century artisans in the 1950s to recent research on non‐European figures such as the Muslim “Leo Africanus” (Hasan al‐Wazzan). I then offer two examples in which concrete cases can serve a global perspective. One is a comparison of the literary careers of Ibn Khaldun and Christine de Pizan in the scribal cultures on either side of the Mediterranean in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The other is the transmission and transformation of practices of divination, healing, and detection from Africa to the slave communities of Suriname in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.     

Kelp Highways,Siberian Girls in Maui,and Nuclear Walruses: The North Pacific in a Sea of Islands

ABSTRACT

Epeli Hau‘ofa's definition of the Pacific as a ‘sea of islands' should be extended to the Indigenous history of the North Pacific Ocean. Several themes prominent in the history of Oceania – such as humans' orientation towards the ocean, the complex ways in which European and Indigenous histories mixed in the colonial era, and the notion of vast, interconnected spaces – apply to North Pacific history as well. This essay looks at the ways in which the history of the Russian Far East and Alaska could be written as Pacific history and integrated into histories of Oceania. Such an integration would provide numerous benefits for historians and activists in the North Pacific. Some important topics in the history of these northern regions, such as the interdependence of human and natural systems, could also enrich historiography in Oceania.     

DEEP GENETICS: UNIVERSAL HISTORY AND THE SPECIES

The popularity of books such as Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind suggests that universal history‐writing has a continuous not a broken past. Rather than “returning,” it is perhaps the most enduring genre of all. This review essay explores the deep‐history element of universal histories and the ongoing purchase of the stadial tradition for a new history of the species. Why are deep histories of the species so reliably appealing, and what do they mean in the twenty‐first century? Although the Anthropocene would seem to be the pertinent context for this ongoing historiography, this essay suggests that the new domain of genetic genealogy powerfully individualizes and commercializes deep history for neoliberal times.     

Endangered musical heritage as a wicked problem

The issue of the widespread decline and loss of musical heritage has recently found increasing prominence in ethnomusicological discourse, and many applied projects from grassroots to international levels strive to support genres perceived to be under threat. Much recent literature on the subject features rhetoric that draws on metaphors from ecology, including, for example, the ideas of music ‘ecosystems’, ‘endangerment’ and ‘sustainability’. Offering an alternative (though not contradictory) perspective, I here characterise the widespread loss of musical heritage as a ‘wicked problem’– one with complex interdependencies, uncertainties and conflicting stakeholder perspectives, which defies resolution more than some of the ecological metaphors arguably imply. By drawing on theoretical notions of ‘wickedness’ from social policy planning and other areas, I aim to bring interdisciplinary insights to the discussion of strategies to mitigate the global threat to music as intangible cultural heritage. Offering three ‘stories’ about the problem of music genres ‘at risk’ and critiquing each of these stories against the theory of wicked problems, I explore the implications of this conceptualisation for heritage scholars, music researchers, policy-makers and other cultural stakeholders, in terms of moving us closer to realising effective, resilient and innovative approaches to the problem at hand.     

‘She-who-must-be-obeyed’: Anthropology and Matriarchy in H. Rider Haggard's She

This essay examines the nineteenth-century debate about an imagined matriarchal past, arguing that it raised significant questions about gender and history. It scrutinizes the interdisciplinary nature of the debate, demonstrating that anthropology and literature intersected in a fraught investigation of ‘mother-rule’. The essay contends that H. Rider Haggard's novel She (1887) engages in complex ways with anthropological visions of a matriarchal past. The work of the major matriarchal theorists, J. J. Bachofen, J. F. McLennan, John Lubbock, and L. H. Morgan, often seen as triumphalist accounts of the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy, was beset by tensions about gender, power, and temporality, caught between evolutionary meliorism and nostalgia, between a defence of patriarchy and recognition of cultural variability. Haggard's She, the essay argues, exposes and deepens the tensions at the heart of the anthropological narrative. Critics have conventionally read She as a matriarchal dystopia, yet the novel offers an ambivalent dramatization of matriarchy, and is attracted as well as repelled by the matriarchal past embodied in the white African queen Ayesha and her people, the Amahagger. More than a femme fatale, Ayesha is sorceress and scientist, harbinger of life and of death; even her violence unsettles assumptions about gender and power. Haggard's evocation of the Amahaggers’ marriage practices works to question the anthropologists’ hierarchical cultural evolutionism, moving towards an appreciation of plural cultures. The narrative's insistence on cyclical temporalities also disrupts a linear narrative of progress from matriarchy to patriarchy, conveying the potent attractions of a resurgent female past.     

The global history of rabies and the historian's gaze: an essay review

In reviewing three recent books on the history of rabies (hydrophobia), this essay explores ways in which historians can frame, or figure, global histories of this ancient and still-dreaded disease, focusing especially on problems of place, time, and agency.     

Change and the Corporeal in Seventeenth‐ and Eighteenth‐Century Gender History: Or,Can Cultural History Be Rigorous?

This essay is a methodological evaluation of the procedures and presuppositions informing the social and cultural history of gender, as exemplified in recent scholarship about the transformations of sex and gender in Britain from the early modern period through the long eighteenth century. It suggests answers to two questions: how can we write the cultural history of gender while maintaining both rigour in the enterprise and an awareness of its limits? And where might we go when these limits suddenly appear to undermine the very foundational presuppositions on which the whole cultural‐historical project is built?     

The Danzón,North American Racial Discourses,and Reflections on Early Jazz

This essay proposes a way of understanding the formation of jazz as part of a broader transnational exchange of culture. It argues that the processes by which jazz came into being closely resemble others taking place in Cuba and elsewhere, and thus calls for analysis that positions jazz as part of a hemispheric exchange of cultural influences that extend beyond the United States. Second, it reviews and critiques existing scholarship on New Orleans jazz from a transnationalist perspective. It suggests that such literature presents turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans culture as insular, with little or no recognition of the international movement of artists and musical forms. Finally, it suggests that the cultural projects associated with jazz in the United States have necessitated a strong emphasis on the contributions of black US artists to the exclusion of Hispanics.     

《西京杂记》中的汉代科技史料

《西京杂记》是一部杂史类著作,对于汉代的科学技术有许多记述,有些材料曾被科技史研究者引用。本文将《西京杂记》中科技史的全部内容按照科技史的观点进行了分类,并进一步对有关机械、物理的部分内容进行了分析、探讨。     

NEW HISTORIES OF EMOTION

At the beginning of the twenty‐first century, there was a growing sense that historians had neglected the emotions and failed to think seriously about them. Since then, there has been explosive interest in the history of emotions. What precipitated this development? What has this focus on emotion added to our historical understanding, and what does a historical perspective contribute to research on emotion? Two recent books help us think about these questions. In The History of Emotions, Jan Plamper offers the first book‐length introduction to this field available in English; in Emotional Lexicons, Ute Frevert and a group of fellow historians trace continuities and change in the vocabulary of feeling from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the end of the millennium. At stake, in both books, is the idea that emotions are historically contingent—that history has the ability to shape and transform even the most basic features of human experience. This review essay engages with the central arguments of these books, and offers a somewhat different interpretation of the history of emotions. What is called for, the essay suggests, is not first and foremost a separate history of emotions nor the adding of emotion to existing histories, but new histories that systematically incorporate emotions into their analyses. Historians should seek to demonstrate how emotions are an integral part of history and historiography in a more general sense. Systematic attention to emotions not only adds nuance to a historical narrative, the essay concludes, but also fundamentally affects our ideas about how history actually happens.     

当代中国史视角下的社会史研究

新时期以来当代中国史研究日益受到学界重视,取得了引人瞩目的研究成果。近几年来,当代中国史研究出现了新的发展态势,越来越多的学者提出了要加强与政治史、经济史、文化史并列的社会史研究,强调以整体视角来拓展与深化当代中国史研究,这既蕴涵着学术演进的内在逻辑支配,又有着与外在的社会现实相契合的时代机遇。在此发展背景下,一些国史学者从宏大叙事转向微观实证,致力于地方、社会层面的微观研究,重视地方史料的发掘与整理,取径民间,以区域或地方为个案进行实证研究,力求在地方史或区域史研究的基础上把握总体史的样态。因此,很有必要从方法论的角度,以社会史为视角检讨当代中国史研究的开拓与进展,从而推动社会史这一新的学科的建设与发展。     

6. WHAT'S IN A CONCEPT? THE KINETIC EMPIRE OF THE COMANCHES

This essay revisits the main themes and arguments put forward in The Comanche Empire: indigenous agency; spatial reorientation in the writing of colonial histories; the composition of the Comanche empire and its impact on the history of North America. It also responds to a number of specific issues raised by the roundtable participants: differences and similarities between indigenous and Euro‐colonial power regimes; balancing of culture‐specific frameworks with broad‐gauge political economic analysis; linkages between indigenous agency and indigenous sovereignty in colonial encounters; the question of periodization in writing Native American and colonial histories. Finally, the essay points to new ways of understanding, conceptualizing, and comparing nonterritorial nomadic empires by introducing the concept of “kinetic empire,” which refers to a flexible imperial organization that revolves around a set of mobile activities and relies on selective nodal control of key resources.     

Early African America: Archaeological Studies of Significance and Diversity

This article examines archaeological studies of the cultural heritage and social dynamics of African descendant populations in the United States and Canada from AD 1400 through 1865. European colonial enterprises expanded in Africa and the Americas during that time span, effecting an accompanying movement of free and captive Africans into North America. Archaeological investigations of early African America are remarkable for the diversity of analytic scales and research questions pursued. This diversity of research efforts has yielded a highly productive, interdisciplinary expansion of knowledge concerning African diaspora histories.