Nostalgia and the City: Urdushahr āshobpoetry in the aftermath of 1857

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 559-573 ◽  
Author(s):  
EVE TIGNOL

AbstractAfter the Uprising of 1857, many poets from north Indian cities resorted to the Urdu nostalgic genre ofshahr āshobto recall mournfully pre-colonial urban landscapes and articulate emotional and poetic narratives of loss. This article proposes to open new perspectives for the historical study of collective memory and trauma among Urdu-speakingashrāfin the nineteenth century by looking at one collection of such poems entitled ‘The Lament for Delhi (Fuġhān-e Dehlī)’ (1863), which has recently started to attract the attention of historians. Although scholarship has generally emphasised the continuity of these poems with theshahr āshobtradition, this article re-assesses this body of texts through a careful analysis of their main literary motifs and highlights their originality and divergence from previousshahr āshobs. Beyond the stereotypical, the poems of ‘The Lament for Delhi’ both construct 1857 as cultural trauma through the use of powerful literary devices and the performance of collective grief as well as re-channel memory and melancholy into the urban landscape by emphasising its materiality and reinvesting it with new meanings and stakes. This paper more broadly underlines the importance of this under-studied source to understand the impact of 1857 on the imaginary of Urdu-speakingashrāfand on the cultural and social history of colonial India.

Author(s):  
Bryan D. Palmer

This article is part of a special Left History series reflecting upon changing currents and boundaries in the practice of left history, and outlining the challenges historians of the left must face in the current tumultuous political climate. This series extends a conversation first convened in a 2006 special edition of Left History (11.1), which asked the question, “what is left history?” In the updated series, contributors were asked a slightly modified question, “what does it mean to write ‘left’ history?” The article charts the impact of major political developments on the field of left history in the last decade, contending that a rising neoliberal and right-wing climate has constructed an environment inhospitable to the discipline’s survival. To remain relevant, Palmer calls for historians of the left to develop a more “open-ended and inclusive” understanding of the left and to push the boundaries of inclusion for a meaningful historical study of the left. To illustrate, Palmer provides a brief materialist history of liquorice to demonstrate the mutability of left history as a historical approach, rather than a set of traditional political concerns.


Author(s):  
David Priestland

This article provides a new interpretation of Europe’s revolutionary era between 1917 and 1923, exploring the origins of the revolutionary wave and its diverse impact across Europe, focusing on the role of the Left. It seeks to revive the insights of social history and historical sociology, which have been neglected by a recent historiography, that stress the role of contingency, the impact of war, and the influence of militaristic cultures. Yet unlike older social history approaches which emphasised domestic social conflict at the expense of ethnic politics and empire, it argues that the revolutions were the result of a crisis of old geopolitical and ethnic hierarchies, as well as social ones. It develops a comparative approach, presenting a new way of incorporating the experience of eastern Europe and the Caucasus into the history of Europe’s revolutions, and a new analysis of why Russia provided such fertile ground for revolutionary politics.


2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-358
Author(s):  
Andrew Scull

Michel Foucault remains one of the most influential intellectuals in the early twenty-first century world. This paper examines the origins and impact of his first major work, Folie et déraison, on the history of psychiatry, particularly though not exclusively in the world of Anglo-American scholarship. The impact and limits of Foucault’s work on the author’s own contributions to the history of psychiatry are examined, as is the larger influence of Madness and Civilization (as it is known to most Anglophones) on the nascent social history of psychiatry. The paper concludes with an assessment of the sources of the appeal of Foucault’s work among some scholars, and notes his declining influence on contemporary scholars working on the history of psychiatry.


2010 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER MARSHALL

Despite a recent expansion of interest in the social history of death, there has been little scholarly examination of the impact of the Protestant Reformation on perceptions of and discourses about hell. Scholars who have addressed the issue tend to conclude that Protestant and Catholic hells differed little from each other in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. This article undertakes a comparative analysis of printed English-language sources, and finds significant disparities on questions such as the location of hell and the nature of hell-fire. It argues that such divergences were polemically driven, but none the less contributed to the so-called ‘decline of hell’.


Author(s):  
Sabine Schmidtke

This book explores the history of Islamic theology, with particular emphasis on the doctrinal thought of all the various intellectual strands of Islam that were concerned with theological issues—including groups such as the Ismāʿīlīs and philosophers. It also discusses the inter-communal exchanges between Muslim, Christian, and Jewish thinkers over the course of the centuries to show how the theological thought of Jews and Christians intertwined with that of Muslims, and how Muslim theological thinking was influenced by Christian methodologies of speculative reasoning and doctrinal concepts. The rest of the book considers the impact of political and social history on Islamic theology. This introduction provides an overview of the foundations of Islamic theology and the advances that have been made in the scholarly study of Islamic theology.


Author(s):  
O. B. Leontieva ◽  

The article is devoted to the problem of the impact of the “historiographic revolution” occurred at the turn of the XX–XXI centuries to the dissertation culture of contemporary Russian historians. The study is based on the full-text collection “Electronic library of dissertations of the Russian State Library”, an online resource. On the example of doctoral dissertations on Russian history defended in 2015–2019, the author examines the priorities of Russian historians in choosing problematics and chronological framework of scholarly works, analyzes theoretical and methodological foundations of their studies as well as their ideas about the social mission of history. She proves that most authors of doctoral dissertations choose the post-reform or Soviet period of Russian history for study, and highlights two blocks of priority topics: the history of state policy and governance, and social history. An analysis of the methodology of dissertations (scientific and qualification works) led to the conclusion that the nature of Russian historical science has changed as a result of an anthropological turn, which allows us to take a fresh look at the problems of political, economic and social history. Historians are increasingly setting the task of understanding people of the past in the whole variety of their mental structures, social connections, strategies and practices, both in everyday situations and in extreme conditions. But in practice, writing a dissertation requires not only a high degree of professional reflection, but also the ability to fulfil the formal requirements for scientific and qualification work: original ideas are sometimes difficult to fit into template, clichéd formulations that have become generally accepted in the scholarly community


2021 ◽  
Vol 1203 (2) ◽  
pp. 022061
Author(s):  
Iga Grześkow

Abstract According to Alexander Wallis, the city's cultural values relate to its historic and architectural, symbolic and religious, artistic and prestigious values. They are represented by individual buildings, monuments, sculptures, street furniture and entire urban complexes - streets, squares, parks, engineering works, and finally entire districts and urban landscapes. [1] In Bydgoszcz these values are represented by the Mill Island. After years of neglect, together with its immediate surroundings it has been re-incorporated into the city's structure, becoming a full-fledged, attractive and highly prestigious social area. The article presents a history of creation, functions and mutual relations of revitalized historic Rother’s Mills complex and Nordic Haven - a modern residential and commercial development and also aims to analyze the impact these buildings had on the space and surroundings of the Mill Island. The two architectural ensembles, arranged in mutual spatial relations, shape the landscape of the downtown, river bank part of Bydgoszcz on different principles. These buildings, as part of a historical urban layout of the city, represent extremely different methods of developing its areas requiring special protection and attention.


Author(s):  
Robert Anderson

Abstract: This article surveys the writing of university history in Great Britain since the 1960s, when its modern foundations were laid through the impact of the new social history. Specific features of the British case include the separate university histories of England and Scotland, which have conditioned the kind of history that can be written; the duopoly of Oxford and Cambridge before the nineteenth century; and the growth of a national system by the accretion of new strata, with their own distinct histories. The 1980s and 1990s were marked by large collective projects, at Oxford, Cambridge and Aberdeen. The tradition of writing histories of individual institutions (including Oxford and Cambridge colleges) has continued, though today on a more scholarly basis than in the past. Among the general themes investigated in recent years have been relations between universities and industry, the growth of state intervention and finance, universities and elites, links with the British empire, the development of disciplines and curricula, student life, the growth of women’s higher education, and university architecture. University historians have been influenced by the historiographical turn from social to cultural history. But while individual research flourishes, the history of universities has not become a formal subdiscipline in Britain, and the article considers why this is so.Resumen: Este artículo examina los trabajos sobre la historia universitaria en Gran Bretaña desde la década de 1960, cuando sus fundamentos modernos fueron despedidos por el impacto de la nueva historia social. Las características específicas del caso británico incluyen las historias separadas de las universidades de Inglaterra y Escocia, que han condicionado el tipo de historia que se puede escribir; el duopolio de Oxford y Cambridge antes del siglo XIX; y el crecimiento de un sistema nacional mediante la adición de los nuevos estratos, con sus propias historias diferenciadas. Los años 1980 y 1990 se caracterizaron por grandes proyectos colectivos, Oxford, Cambridge y Aberdeen. La tradición de escribir historias de las instituciones individuales (incluyendo las universidades de Oxford y Cambridge) ha continuado, aunque hoy en día de forma más académica que en el pasado. Entre los temas generales investigados en los últimos años han sido las relaciones entre las universidades y la industria, el crecimiento de la intervención del Estado y las finanzas, las universidades y las élites, los nexos con el imperio británico, el desarrollo de disciplinas y programas de estudio, la vida de los estudiantes, el crecimiento de la educación superior de las mujeres y la arquitectura de la universidad. Los historiadores de la universidad se han visto influenciados por el giro historiográfico de lo social a la historia cultural. Sin embargo, aunque la investigación individual florece, la historia de las universidades no se ha convertido en una subdisciplina formal en Gran Bretaña, y el artículo analiza por qué esto es así.Keywords: Great Britain, Scotland, universities, history of universities, social history.Palabras clave: Gran Bretaña, Escocia, universidades, historia de las universidades, historia social.


Author(s):  
Susan Miller

The history of childhood and youth is a relatively new field in American history that has grown exponentially in size and sophistication over the past twenty years. Befitting a burgeoning field, historians are currently engaged in all areas of scholarship—compiling anthologies, creating reference works, and crafting both monographs and comprehensive synthetic overviews. Located within the larger interdisciplinary arena of childhood studies, as well as alongside complementary subfields of American social history, the history of youth attracts a range of scholars with training in a diversity of disciplines, including (but certainly not limited to) the history of education and the family, folklore, American studies, and children’s literature. Both the emerging nature of the field and the genre-challenging creative scholarship of its creators have guaranteed that key historiographical questions and assumptions about periodization are very much open to debate. Scholars grapple with how concerns familiar to social historians—race, ethnicity, religion, social class, gender, and sexuality—differently affect the lives of young people, even as they consider issues particular to youth, such as the coherence of an age cohort, the effects of generational influence, and the impact of accepted norms of child rearing and scientific “truths” on the realities of children’s lives. As historians write the experiences of youth into the narratives of American history, they have also identified some important methodological challenges. How to uncover children’s voices, while remaining critical of the presumed authenticity of such sources? What are the benefits and limitations of memoirs in reconstructing the experience of youth? How to balance the realities of a category of historical inquiry defined by certain biological and development distinctions with an understanding of the historical construction of childhood? How to locate the historical child within complex and evolving ideologies of childhood?


2006 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 447-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W. Wertheimer

One of the most vexing challenges accompanying any attempt to reconstruct the legal history of the family is deciding how much interpretive weight to assign to social factors as opposed to legal factors. “Gloria's Story” is loaded with social history, in part because it focuses on a small group of decidedly non-elite characters. It discusses non-legal matters as big as the impact of wealth concentration on the Guatemalan family and as small as the social significance of home births, as opposed to hospital births, in Quetzaltenango during the 1960s. Nonetheless, the most important factors driving the analysis are legal, not social. The article's central argument—that “modernizing” legal reforms adopted in Guatemala since the mid-nineteenth century have fortified, not weakened, adulterous concubinage—emphasizes the effects of legal change.


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