Beautiful Geography: The Pictorial Maps of Ruth Taylor White

This paper explores the career of Ruth Taylor White, an American cartographic illustrator who published a significant number of pictorial maps from the 1920s into the 1940s. Taylor White’s ‘cartographs’ (as she called them) were characterized by her signature bobble-headed cartoon characters who romped through colourful, attractive landscapes. These visually rich and highly narrative maps simultaneously strove for accuracy and engaged in profound stereotyping with regard to culture, race, gender and class. They reveal not only the aesthetic and conceptual preferences of their maker but also the cultural biases of their middle-class, white American audience.     

UNDISCIPLINED AND PUNISHED

The title of Robert Doran's collection of essays on Hayden White proves provocative and evocative. Provocative because it claims to mark a move within philosophy that pivots on the work of Hayden White, and this despite the fact that White himself explicitly resists inclusion within such a classification, that is, as a philosopher of history. Indeed, another contributor, Arthur Danto, had as of 1995 declared passé the whole subfield of philosophy of history. Doran situates White, then, in a niche White rejects and in any case one largely abandoned by those who do academic philosophy. Thus a question that this title evokes concerns why—whatever philosophy of history happens to be before Hayden White—after him it becomes a topic of philosophical lack of interest, one pursued almost exclusively by those not associated with departments of philosophy. Given White's professional travails, his acquaintance with another undisciplined academic, Richard Rorty, and his long‐standing friendship with preeminent philosophers of history such as Louis Mink, one might well assume that White eschews Doran's disciplinary labeling for a reason. In this regard, reframing him as this book's title does invites a worry that, if only unwittingly, the book elides discussion of why certain positions excite not merely disagreement but prompt rather a type of professional shunning. In failing to confront White's reception (or rather lack thereof) by historians and his position (or rather lack thereof) within philosophy, Doran passes over in silence a highly salient aspect of White's work.     

Rethinking music geography through the mainstream: a geographical analysis of Frank Sinatra,music and travel

This paper brings a new perspective to music geography by focusing on how a particular mainstream musician helped to construct, subvert, and circulate meanings associated with travel. It asserts that Frank Sinatra, via his music and actions, engaged with travel in ways that frequently ran counter to how it has commonly been enacted in American music and popular culture. Particular attention is paid to the singer’s travel-themed album, Come Fly With Me. By the time of its release in 1958, Sinatra, via a public persona that encompassed performer, ‘playboy’ and businessman, was a central figure in promoting an alignment of leisured mobility with postwar economic success. The paper interrogates how Sinatra’s celebrity allowed him to embody travel in certain real and imagined ways. It also examines what the resulting representations revealed about performances of gender, ethnicity, and status, and the expected modes of behavior that were associated with them, in America’s postwar consumer-driven society.     

Arbeit und Zeit,Körper und Uhr: Die Konstruktion von ‚effektiver’︁ Arbeit im ‚Scientific Management’︁ des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts

The concept ‚Scientific Management’︁ was invented in 1910 for what was then called the ‚Taylor‐system’︁ of shop management. Frederick W. Taylor had developed his system to eliminate the “waste of human effort” mainly by “time study”, the analysis of the work of “first‐class workman” with a stop‐watch and the synthesis of standard times for given tasks which make the “waste” of effort visible and measurable. A reading of Karl Marx's work shows the “paradigm of productivity” governing mid‐century discussion of the value of labor. Time is a central element in the valuation of industrial labour, but only with Taylor the precision of the stop‐watch is introduced to observe and control the productivity of the body of the worker. As disciples of Taylor Frank and Lillian Gilbreth introduced motion studies and micromotion studies into Scientific Management. Their analysis of the motion of workers, technically assisted by high‐speed watches and cameras, goes beyond the surface‐observation of the first‐class workman to enable the design of efficient motion. The body of the worker is represented in lines of light and tables of data. The objects of desire are the time‐lines of efficiency and productivity. In both cases, Taylor and the Gilbreths, various observations further lead to the conclusion that science and schooling are an important historical background to the rise of Scientific Management that deserves closer inspection.     

A RETRIEVAL OF HISTORICISM: FRANK ANKERSMIT'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY AND POLITICS

Frank Ankersmit is often perceived as a postmodern thinker, as a European Hayden White, or as an author whose work in political philosophy can safely be ignored by those interested only in his philosophy of history. Although none of these perceptions is entirely wrong, they are of little help in understanding the nature of Ankersmit's work and the sources on which it draws. Specifically, they do not elucidate the extent to which Ankersmit raises questions different from White's, finds himself inspired by continental European traditions, responds to specifically Dutch concerns, and is as active as a public intellectual as he has been prolific in philosophy of history. In order to propose a more comprehensive and balanced interpretation of Ankersmit's work, this article offers a contextual reading based largely on Dutch‐language sources, some of which are unknown even in the Netherlands. The thesis advanced is that Ankersmit draws consistently on nineteenth‐century German historicism as interpreted by Friedrich Meinecke and advocated by his Groningen teacher, Ernst Kossmann. Without forcing each and every element of Ankersmit's oeuvre into a historicist mold, the article demonstrates that some of its most salient aspects can profitably be read as attempts at translating and modifying historicist key notions into late twentieth‐century categories. Also, without creating a father myth of the sort that White helped create around his teacher William Bossenbrook, the article argues that Ankersmit at crucial moments in his intellectual trajectory draws on texts and authors central to Kossmann's research interests.     

弗兰克思想的转航与悖论--兼评《白银资本》及其在中国引发的争议

《白银资本》标志着弗兰克新的世界体系论的初步确立。在这本书中,弗兰克把中国看做世界经济体的中心,重塑了1400—1800年的世界历史。他的观点在中国学界引起了广泛的争议。的确,弗兰克的理论具有自身难以克服的悖论,但我们不应忽视《白银资本》在方法论上的启示意义。     

DURABLE GOODS

In his thoughtful discussion of what makes some historical texts durable, lasting through time, Jaume Aurell arrives at the conclusion that these works show a balance between antiquarianism and presentism, and that this balance gives them a certain longevity of repute. Because, however, durability is a characteristic of the work, it seems to me problematic. Survival, rather than durability, appears to be the rubric we are discussing. It is not a characteristic of the work, any more than of a historical individual who survives a critical event like the French Revolution or the Holocaust. We identify survivors only retrospectively. A myriad of contingencies—time and chance—will obtain for any text to survive. Historiographical competition is ferocious, and worthy of study. Like Tolstoy's unhappy families, each historical text that fails to survive will have its own history. Why Gibbon and not Volney? We can adduce reasons, of course, but they are looks backward; in the late eighteenth century, no predictions were certain. Both Hayden White and Frank Ankersmit have, each in his own way, suggested the characteristics of the best histories. I believe they are mistaken, if best is to be taken to mean: most likely to survive. This is a characteristic of the ongoing reception of the work. As in an ongoing conversation, the historical work may advance the discourse, or contradict it, or change the subject. Whether it will have influence after the speaker has departed is up to those who remain and are added to the group. This rhetorical survival in the conversation is what is in question here. As such, it is profoundly historical, and not “beyond time.”     

Blue planet,Black lives: Matter,memory, and the temporalities of political geography

This article considers how the ontological challenges posed by the ocean's materiality and the porous boundaries of marine ecologies and economies aligns with scholarship emanating from Black and Caribbean thought to rethink the linear histories and unitary identities that underpin modernist narratives. Focusing on the debate in Bristol, England in 2020 and 2021 concerning the disposition of the toppled statue of slave trader Edward Colston, the article engages postcolonial Caribbean theory and art to problematise the linear temporalities associated with solid land and the singular histories that are narrated through fixed memorialisations. As an alternative, the temporality of the ocean is called upon, because of its specific role in the histories of Colston, Bristol, and British imperialism, but also because of the ways in which oceanic ontologies complicate accepted divisions between past, present, and future, between scales of experience and explanation, between rootedness and connection, and between life and death.     

Of a bread-loaf missile: the shaming of Brooklyn’s 13th Regiment of the National Guard during the Spanish–American War

The Spanish–American War constituted a pressure point in American military history. The citizen-soldier tradition in the United States—a tradition based on a reliance on state militias rather than a large standing army—was tested as the country scrambled to provide a fighting force to support its growing imperial ambition. When Brooklyn’s 13th Regiment of the National Guard was ordered to camp at the beginning of May 1898, roughly half the men answered the call. Most of the guardsmen did not object to serving but only wished to do so within their regiment. As a result, the regiment was subjected to rough music, pelted by half a loaf of bread, and disbanded. Over time, however, the tables turned, with the regiment ultimately being resurrected and redeemed and the governor and the adjutant general who had disbanded the regiment being ridiculed and discarded. The case of Brooklyn’s 13th Regiment reveals that the alignment of national and state allegiances was neither straightforward nor without casualty as the country entered the age of imperialism.