An Earwitness to History: Street Hawkers and Their Calls in Early 20th-Century Egypt

2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ziad Fahmy

Historians have recently started listening to the past, contributing to what David Howes has described as a “sensorial revolution in the humanities and social sciences.” In the same way that all five senses are relevant to our daily understanding of the world around us, they should be vital to our understanding of historical events. Interpreting how peoples of the past sensorially experienced their world makes possible a richer, more comprehensive grasp of historical events. A sensorially grounded historical narrative is an embodied history that is connected to everyday people and lives. Historians of the Middle East, however, with few exceptions, are still largely producing soundproof, devocalized narratives of the past.

Prospects ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 169-192
Author(s):  
Kathleen Brogan

Part German-American and part Chippewa, Louise Erdrich has described the “mixed blood's” quest as a search for parentage, an attempt to understand self by interrogating genealogy. In the opening paragraphs of Tracks, a novel set on a North Dakota Chippewa reservation in the early 20th century, Erdrich reveals that the investigation of background necessarily entails an entrance into the world of ghosts. When the narrator Nanapush addresses the young woman listening to his unfolding account of her familial and tribal past as a “child of the invisible, the ones who disappeared,” he simultaneously connects an awareness of the ghostly presence of the dead with the discovery of identity and the creation of history. The narrator's conjuring of “invisible ancestors and “ghosts” (2) who inhabit tribal woods introduces haunting as Erdrich's central metaphor for the way the past shapes and is shaped by the present.


Author(s):  
Malik Daham Mata’ab

Oil has formed since its discovery so far one of the main causes of global conflict, has occupied this energy map a large area of conflict the world over the past century, and certainly this matter will continue for the next period in our century..


Author(s):  
Farhad Khosrokhavar

The creation of the Islamic State in Iraq and Sham (ISIS) changed the nature of jihadism worldwide. For a few years (2014–2017) it exemplified the destructive capacity of jihadism and created a new utopia aimed at restoring the past greatness and glory of the former caliphate. It also attracted tens of thousands of young wannabe combatants of faith (mujahids, those who make jihad) toward Syria and Iraq from more than 100 countries. Its utopia was dual: not only re-creating the caliphate that would spread Islam all over the world but also creating a cohesive, imagined community (the neo-umma) that would restore patriarchal family and put an end to the crisis of modern society through an inflexible interpretation of shari‘a (Islamic laws and commandments). To achieve these goals, ISIS diversified its approach. It focused, in the West, on the rancor of the Muslim migrants’ sons and daughters, on exoticism, and on an imaginary dream world and, in the Middle East, on tribes and the Sunni/Shi‘a divide, particularly in the Iraqi and Syrian societies.


1979 ◽  
Vol 3 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 242-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Kuklick

Despite differences in coloration Miller and Benson are birds of a feather. Although he is no Pollyanna, Miller believes that there has been a modest and decent series of advances in the social sciences and that the most conscientious, diligent, and intelligent researchers will continue to add to this stock of knowledge. Benson is much more pessimistic about the achievements of yesterday and today but, in turn, offers us the hope of a far brighter tomorrow. Miller explains Benson’s hyperbolic views about the past and future by distinguishing between pure and applied science and by pointing out Benson’s naivete about politics: the itch to understand the world is different from the one to make it better; and, Miller says, because Benson sees that we have not made things better, he should not assume we do not know more about them; Benson ought to realize, Miller adds, that the way politicians translate basic social knowledge into social policy need not bring about rational or desirable results. On the other side, Benson sees more clearly than Miller that the development of science has always been intimately intertwined with the control of the environment and the amelioration of the human estate.


2015 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gubara Hassan

The Western originators of the multi-disciplinary social sciences and their successors, including most major Western social intellectuals, excluded religion as an explanation for the world and its affairs. They held that religion had no role to play in modern society or in rational elucidations for the way world politics or/and relations work. Expectedly, they also focused most of their studies on the West, where religion’s effect was least apparent and argued that its influence in the non-West was a primitive residue that would vanish with its modernization, the Muslim world in particular. Paradoxically, modernity has caused a resurgence or a revival of religion, including Islam. As an alternative approach to this Western-centric stance and while focusing on Islam, the paper argues that religion is not a thing of the past and that Islam has its visions of international relations between Muslim and non-Muslim states or abodes: peace, war, truce or treaty, and preaching (da’wah).


Author(s):  
Elena V. Gordienko ◽  

This article analyzes the Story of a fisherman Yết Kiêu (歇驕) who is worshiped as a tutelary spirit in villages of Northern Vietnam. Yết Kiêu is a semi-mythical character and he is widely credited with supernatural abilities and merits in war against the Mongols (1288). I investigate the text that belongs to thần tích genre (神). It is a manuscript written in Vietnamese at Yết Kiêu’s birthplace, which is the central place of his worship (on the basis of previous texts of the 16th–19th centuries). The Story of Yết Kiêu has a complex structure reflecting the history of the development of this particular text and the whole genre as well. The story can be divided in four parts differing in form and content: the folk layer (the oldest part), the historical narrative (likely compiled by court historiographers in the 15th–17th centuries), the legend of Yết Kiêu’s Mongolian bride (emerged evidently in a temple community during later centuries) and the description of Yết Kiêu’s cult (which appeared under the influence of the European research methods in the early 20th century). The article contains a fragment of the story translated into Russian.


2012 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 1169-1175 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Liu ◽  
M. Song ◽  
Y. Hu ◽  
X. Ren

Abstract. Recent studies demonstrate that the Hadley Circulation has intensified and expanded for the past three decades, which has important implications for subtropical societies and may lead to profound changes in global climate. However, the robustness of this intensification and expansion that should be considered when interpreting long-term changes of the Hadley Circulation is still a matter of debate. It also remains largely unknown how the Hadley Circulation has evolved over longer periods. Here, we present long-term variability of the Hadley Circulation using the 20th Century Reanalysis. It shows a slight strengthening and widening of the Hadley Circulation since the late 1970s, which is not inconsistent with recent assessments. However, over centennial timescales (1871–2008), the Hadley Circulation shows a tendency towards a more intense and narrower state. More importantly, the width of the Hadley Circulation might have not yet completed a life-cycle since 1871. The strength and width of the Hadley Circulation during the late 19th to early 20th century show strong natural variability, exceeding variability that coincides with global warming in recent decades. These findings raise the question of whether the recent change in the Hadley Circulation is primarily attributed to greenhouse warming or to a long-period oscillation of the Hadley Circulation – substantially longer than that observed in previous studies.


2021 ◽  
Vol 201 (3) ◽  
pp. 534-545
Author(s):  
Janusz Zuziak

Lviv occupies a special place in the history of Poland. With its heroic history, it has earned the exceptionally honorable name of a city that has always been faithful to the homeland. SEMPER FIDELIS – always faithful. Marshal Józef Piłsudski sealed that title while decorating the city with the Order of Virtuti Militari in 1920. The past of Lviv, the always smoldering and uncompromising Polish revolutionist spirit, the climate, and the atmosphere that prevailed in it created the right conditions for making it the center of thought and independence movement in the early 20th century. In the early twentieth century, Polish independence organizations of various political orientations were established, from the ranks of which came legions of prominent Polish politicians and military and social activists.


1997 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
N. N. Ambraseys

All of our 20th-century information for the Levant Fracture and Dead Sea transform fault systems is for a qui- escent period in the seismicity. This is apparent when we consider earlier events which show that infi.equent earthquakes have occurred in the past along this system, an important consideration for the assessment of haz- ard and tectonics of the Middle East. One of these events was the earthquake of 1837 which caused heavy damage in Northem Israel and Southem Lebanon. This earthquake was a much larger event than earthquake catalogues indicate. We reckon it was a shallow, probably multiple event of magnitude greater than 7.0.


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