Geographical testimony: a short history of a Yugoslav family

ABSTRACT

I attempt in this essay to travel outside of and beyond the more spectacular or established geopolitical discourses associated with research on post-conflict regions, and follow instead the trail of another more essential or everyday history and geography. Listening to and responding to the testimony of a single Yugoslav family, I draw from and write of memories of former places, initially returning to the traumatic moments of 1992, and a journey across Europe. In so doing, I reflect upon the use of testimony in geographical writing, positioning it as an inherently geographical psychoanalytic technique, which not only eases suffering in individuals and communities, but also offers new possibilities for societal change and transitional justice in post-conflict regions.     

Illegitimate fertility decline in England, 1851-1911

This study attempts to determine the extent to which several hypotheses are able to account for the illegitimate fertility decline in England in the second half of the nineteenth century. The results of a pooled time-series analysis are consistent with the hypothesis that a rise in working-class prosperity accounts for much of the decline. Additional reasons for the decline, which cannot be ruled out with the data used in the analysis, include the diffusion of knowledge and the acceptability of contraceptive methods and a decline in agricultural employment.     

The rise and decline of tonsillectomy in twentieth-century America

This article explores the rise and decline of tonsillectomy/adenoidectomy (T&A) in twentieth-century America. Between 1915 and the 1960s, T&A was the most frequently performed surgical procedure in the United States. Its rise was dependent on novel medical concepts, paradigms, and institutions that were in the process of reshaping the structure and practice of medicine. The driving force was the focal theory of infection, which assumed that circumscribed and confined infections could lead to systemic disease in any part of the body. The tonsils in particular were singled out as "portals of infection," and therefore their removal became a legitimate therapy. Nevertheless, what kinds of evidence could prove that tonsils were portals of infection? How could the effectiveness of tonsillectomy be determined? An inherent difficulty was the absence of any consensus on the criteria that would be employed to judge its efficacy. Yet tonsillectomy persisted despite ambiguous supportive evidence. Although criticisms of the procedure were common by the 1930s, its decline did not begin until well after 1945 and involved debates over the nature of evidence, the significance of clinical experience in the validation of a particular therapy, and the role of competing medical specialties.     

Confronting a history of war loss in a Spanish family archive

The article discusses how relatives of left-wing Republicans killed and buried in mass graves by Francoist groups during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) recompose the stories of violent death of their ancestors in connection to documentary evidence that emerges during the search for their human remains. Mass grave searches have taken place in the midst of a process of historical investigation that has brought families, historians, activists and archaeologists together in order to document and seek official recognition for these extrajudicial executions. In so doing, they have also prompted the circulation of personal papers and official Francoist files that bear poignant information about the victims. Both sets of documents converge in the family archive, eliciting different re-readings and acts of memory. The article considers how familial interactions with these material sources attempt to grasp and recreate a history of loss marked by rupture and filled with absences. It also explores how such historical and familial uncertainties marks the experience of disappearance in the Spanish context.