scholarly journals Newspapers as Sources for African History

Author(s):  
Emma Hunter

Newspapers have become increasingly important as a source for African history, and the range of historical questions newspapers have been employed to address has expanded dramatically. Newspapers are not only sources for political history, they also have much to teach us about the social, cultural, and intellectual history of Africa. They were spaces of literary and textual experimentation. They also played an important role in the creation of new identities. It is essential, however, that we approach newspapers critically as sources and think carefully about their limitations, as well as the opportunities they present to the historian.

2011 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 1089-1095
Author(s):  
Walter Johnson

Each of these four lapidary papers scratches a stylus across fixed categories and settled understandings: embedding the legal history of the Americas in the African history of crime and punishment; uncovering the intellectual history of the metropole in the social history of the colonies; using the restless contingency of biography to trouble the most durable of historiographical boundaries, that between slavery and freedom. Taken together, they dismantle and then suggestively refit the history of slavery and law in the time of revolution and emancipation.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Alexis D. Litvine

Abstract This article is a reminder that the concept of ‘annihilation of space’ or ‘spatial compression’, often used as a shorthand for referring to the cultural or economic consequences of industrial mobility, has a long intellectual history. The concept thus comes loaded with a specific outlook on the experience of modernity, which is – I argue – unsuitable for any cultural or social history of space. This article outlines the etymology of the concept and shows: first, that the historical phenomena it pretends to describe are too complex for such a simplistic signpost; and, second, that the term is never a neutral descriptor but always an engagement with a form of historical and cultural mediation on the nature of modernity in relation to space. In both cases this term obfuscates more than it reveals. As a counter-example, I look at the effect of the railways on popular representations of space and conclude that postmodern geography is a relative dead end for historians interested in the social and cultural history of space.


Transfers ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Paul G. Keil

Humans and elephants have historically shared the forested mountain ranges of Zomia, a geography defined by the regular movement of people and an ecology shaped by the movement of its elephant population. This article will examine how free-roaming elephant pathways facilitated human mobility in the highlands defining the Indo-Myanmar border. It will analyze the more-than-human agency that emerges when following elephant trails and the varying role this forest infrastructure might have played in the social and political history of the region. The article will explore two historical examples. First, the migration of a Lisu community in Upper Myanmar who utilized elephant paths to navigate their passage. Second, how the British Empire exploited a network of elephant-human tracks to subjugate the peoples living in Mizoram, northeast India. In these regions the patterns of migration, history of colonization, and identities and practices of communities must be understood in relation to wild elephants.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 33-68
Author(s):  
Lan A. Li

AbstractThis essay explores the ways in which Lu Gwei-djen (1904–91) served as a gatekeeper for interpreting medicine in China in the second half of the twentieth century. After retiring from science in 1956, Lu set out to write one of the first comprehensive English-language histories of medicine in China. Through a close study of Lu’s work notes and marginalia from later in her life, this essay examines how she carefully articulated the material characteristics of a “Chinese” medicine that gave rise to jingluo, or therapeutic paths often known as “meridians.” I argue that at the heart of this uneasy comparison was the difficult process of translating across multiple expressions of physiology. By placing Lu Gwei-djen at the center of a feminist intellectual history of medicine, this essay further shows how Lu’s translations were influenced by the social hierarchies in which she was embedded, including cultural, gender, and temporal dualities.


2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-210
Author(s):  
Dimitri Ginev

The problem of how to access and estimate the proliferation of receptions of Ludwik Fleck’s work in domains as diverse as social geography, history of clinical medicine, and cognitive sociology has long remained vexing. The approach suggested in this paper combines the hermeneutics of effective-historical reception with a version of epistemic reconstruction of intellectual history. Special emphasis is placed upon the forms of political contextualization of Fleck’s comparative sociology of thought styles. The author argues that the heterogeneity of receptions is essentially informed by the specificity of the ‘implicit reader’ Fleck assigned to his work. Interestingly enough, it is a ‘reader’ congruent with the post-metaphysical turns in the social sciences. This claim is defended by analyzing particular trajectories of reception of Fleck’s work.


2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-82
Author(s):  
Tatiana Melnichenko ◽  

This article is devoted to one of the most tragic topics in the history of this party and the history of the Spanish Republic as a whole, namely, the trial of the leaders of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification. The following unpublished documents stored in the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History were used for the analysis (F. 495. Op. 183): letters, personal files, protocols of interrogations after May Days, lists and reports on the “connection” between Trotskyi and the POUM, reports on the preparation and course of the trial of the POUM. Members of the POUM were accused of participating in a “rebellion”, moving to change the social order of the Republic. The accusation of the POUM connections with Franco did not seem convincing, either in Spain or abroad. The international public’s attention was focused on the trial of the POUM. Despite the fact that Spain failed to organize a show trial in the style of the “Moscow trials” and the “conspiracy between Trotskyi and Fascists” was not confirmed, the verdict had a negative impact on the POUM reputation. Thus, the trial of the POUM remained in history as one of the “black spots” in the interaction between the Spanish Republic and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. However, the prisoners of the POUM resisted pressure, they were supported morally by participants of the campaign of solidarity in Spain and abroad. The struggle for a kind of rehabilitation of the party continued in emigration.


1972 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 16-19
Author(s):  
Kenneth Kirkland

The subject suggested in the title is so broad as to make it rather difficult to decide what boundaries to draw around the study of various resources available to the historian or other social scientist who sets out to study labor history, the social history of Italian workers and peasants, and the political and intellectual history of socialism and other radical movements. Keeping in mind that the following discussion is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather an indication of the necessary starting point to begin an investigation is probably the best way to understand this note.


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