Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 217-224
Author(s):  
Jeremy Prestholdt

Why do particular figures appeal to diverse audiences at specific historical moments? What social roles do icons play in an interfaced world? Tracing the history of global icons over the past half-century demonstrates that the answers to these questions lie not only in the form and connotations of icons, but also in their significant malleability across space and time. Global icons crystallize thought, channel ideas, foster real or imagined linkages, and focus communal energies. They represent imagination beyond the state, political party, or movement. In short, audiences transform iconic figures into the dynamic products of the transnational imagination and collective interpretation. Seemingly timeless, iconic figures symbolize transcendence and communal ideals while remaining malleable. Thus, attraction to icons is not the idolization of the individual per se. Rather, it is the idolization of possibility, of the visions and values that audiences imagine iconic figures to represent.

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 58-66
Author(s):  
Giuliano Pancaldi

Here I survey a sample of the essays and reviews on the sciences of the long eighteenth century published in this journal since it was founded in 1969. The connecting thread is some historiographic reflections on the role that disciplines—in both the sciences we study and the fields we practice—have played in the development of the history of science over the past half century. I argue that, as far as disciplines are concerned, we now find ourselves a bit closer to a situation described in our studies of the long eighteenth century than we were fifty years ago. This should both favor our understanding of that period and, hopefully, make the historical studies that explore it more relevant to present-day developments and science policy. This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam.


1988 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Sivin

Sinology and the history of science have changed practically beyond recognition in the past half-century. Both have become academic specialisms, with their own departments, journals, and professional societies. Both have moved off in new directions, drawing on the tools and insights of several disciplines. Although some sinologists still honor no ambition beyond explicating primary texts, on many of the field's frontiers philology is no more than a tool. Similarly, many technical historians now explore issues for which anthropology or systems analysis is as indispensable as traditional historiography.


2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 487-503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard M. Wachtel

Fifty years on, the Review of Radical Political Economics ( RRPE) lives on against the odds that such a quixotic 1968 adventure could survive for half a century. As the first managing editor of the RRPE and one of the founders of the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE), I have compiled a history of the first five years of the journal and the organization. This retrospective is primarily based on archival research, supplemented by my recollections. It concludes with some thoughts on how URPE and the RRPE affected the study and uses of economics in the past half century.


2006 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 369-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard T. Antoun

In the Middle East over the past half-century, three religious processes have grown together. One, the growth of fundamentalism, has received worldwide attention both by academics and journalists. The others, the bureaucratization of religion and the state co-optation of religion, of equal duration but no less importance, have received much less attention. The bureaucratization of religion focuses on the hierarchicalization of religious specialists and state co-optation of religion focuses on their neutralization as political opponents. Few commentators link the three processes. In Jordan, fundamentalism, the bureaucratization of religion (BOR), and state co-optation of religion (SCR) have become entwined sometimes in mutually supportive and sometimes in antagonistic relations. The following case study will describe and analyze the implications of this mutual entanglement for the relations of state and civil society and for the human beings simultaneously bureaucratized and “fundamentalized.”


2000 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-4
Author(s):  
Judith T. Sowder

The beginning of a new year as well as the threshold of a new century and a new millennium seem appropriate times to take stock of where we have been and where we are going as a mathematics education research community. We have accomplished a great deal in the past half century of our existence, and I for one look forward to reading the forthcoming book on the history of mathematics education, edited by Jeremy Kilpatrick and George Stanic. That book will review for us our progress thus far, but what are the challenges we now face? This question will be addressed in various ways at various gatherings in the coming year, and new agendas will result from those discussions.


Author(s):  
Reinhard Müller

This essay examines the nature of pentateuchal redaction, the various positions that scholars have taken on it across the history of modern biblical studies, and the ways that these theories contribute to larger theories of compositional history. It highlights the manner in which redactional theories have been especially productive among continental European scholars over the past half-century. The essay concludes with a consideration of external, empirical evidence for redaction, especially among the Persian and Hellenistic period witnesses to the Pentateuch.


Author(s):  
Stephen Skowronek ◽  
John A. Dearborn ◽  
Desmond King

The Deep State versus the unitary executive has been a spectacle too vivid to ignore. It should impress us all with the unsettled place of administration in contemporary American government. One might have thought that a matter of such vital importance to the effective operation of the state would have been resolved long ago. But over the past half century, questions surrounding administrative power and its political control have been growing more, not less, contentious. Trump’s presidency forces a reckoning that is long overdue. In the Epilogue, we evaluate the lessons of this clash between unity and depth. The problem is not that the president can’t find evidence to hang on his frame: the problem is the solution intrinsic to the frame. The state Trump would have us embrace is every bit as menacing as the state he would have us abandon.


2021 ◽  
Vol 136 (2) ◽  
pp. 102-111
Author(s):  
Karel Davids

Kennisgeschiedenis is in de BMGN nu beter vertegenwoordigd dan dertig jaar geleden. Dat betekent niet dat de toenadering tussen kennisgeschiedenis en algemene geschiedenis in dit tijdschrift al volledig is geslaagd, en evenmin dat alle beschikbare kansen zijn benut. Kennisgeschiedenis is in de BMGN geen mainstream geworden, zo wordt in deze bijdrage betoogd, en de toenadering komt tot nu toe vooral van één kant. De mogelijkheden voor kennishistorisch onderzoek over nationale grenzen heen worden bovendien maar mondjesmaat verkend. De meeste artikelen blijven immers tot één helft van de Lage Landen beperkt. Aan de hand van verschillende voorbeelden wordt geïllustreerd welke interessante connecties en belangwekkende vergelijkingen tussen Noord en Zuid zouden kunnen worden onderzocht. De BMGN zou dus voor de kennisgeschiedenis meer kunnen betekenen dan zij in de afgelopen halve eeuw heeft gedaan. History of knowledge is better represented at the BMGN nowadays than it was thirty years ago. This does not mean that a complete rapprochement between history of knowledge and general history has been accomplished in this journal, nor have all available opportunities been explored. History of knowledge has not become a mainstream school of thought in the BMGN, as is argued in this contribution, and to date the effort at rapprochement has been largely one-sided. Moreover, opportunities for research on history of knowledge beyond national borders are explored in very limited measure. After all, most articles continue to address only one half of the Low Countries. Various examples are presented here to illustrate which interesting connections and impressive comparisons could be examined between North and South. The BMGN could thus have done more to promote history of knowledge than it has in the past half century.


2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 30-43
Author(s):  
Josh Sides

California—simultaneously celebrated and reviled for its fabled sexual tolerance for the past half-century—has pioneered the use of sexual propositions, ballot initiatives designed to either expand the scope of “obscenity” censorship or to suppress the rights and aspirations of homosexuals. Viewed through the prism of the sexual propositions, the political landscape of California looks quite different than we generally imagine. This article examines the history of these propositions, their financial backers, and the politicians involved with them, including E. Richard Barnes’s Proposition 16, John Briggs’s Proposition 6 (The Briggs Initiative), and William J. “Pete” Knight’s Proposition 22.


Derrida Today ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 178-200
Author(s):  
Christopher Norris

In this essay I set out to place Derrida's work – especially his earlier (pre-1980) books and essays – in the context of related or contrasting developments in analytic philosophy of science over the past half-century. Along the way I challenge the various misconceptions that have grown up around that work, not only amongst its routine detractors in the analytic camp but also amongst some of its less philosophically informed disciples. In particular I focus on the interlinked issues of realism versus anti-realism and the scope and limits of classical (bivalent) logic, both of which receive a detailed, rigorous and sustained treatment in his deconstructive readings of Husserl, Austin and others. Contrary to Derrida's reputation as a exponent of anti-realism in its far-gone ‘textualist’ form and as one who merely plays perverse though ingenious games with logic I show that those readings presuppose both a basically realist conception of their subject-matter and a strong commitment to the protocols of bivalent logic. These he applies with the utmost care and precision right up to the point – unreachable except by way of that procedure – where they encounter certain problems or anomalies that cannot be resolved except by switching to a different (non-bivalent, deviant, paraconsistent, ‘supplementary’, or ‘parergonal’) logic. Philosophy of science in the analytic mainstream might benefit greatly from a closer acquaintance with Derrida's thinking on these topics, as it might from a knowledge of his likewise rigorous thinking-through of the antinomy between structure and genesis as it bears upon issues in the history of scientific thought.


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