Social History in Serbia: The Association for Social History

2008 ◽  
Vol 34-35 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 369-381
Author(s):  
Radina Vučetić ◽  
Olga Manojlović Pintar

This review essay provides a brief overview of the research and publication activity of the Udruženje za društvenu istoriju/Association for Social History, an innovative scholarly organization established in 1998 in Belgrade, Serbia. The association promotes research on social history in modern South-Eastern Europe, with a focus on former Yugoslavia, and publishes scientific works and historical documents. The driving force behind the activity of the association is a group of young social historians gathered around Professor Andrej Mitrović, at the University of Belgrade. Prof. Mitrović’s work on the “social history of culture” has provided a scholarly framework for a variety of new works dealing with issues of modernization, history of elites, history of ideas, and the diffuse relationship between history and memory. Special attention is given to the Association’s journal, Godišnjak za društvenu istoriju/Annual for Social History, which published studies on economic history, social groups, gender issue, cultural history, modernization, and the history of everyday life in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Methodologically routed in social history, these research projects are interdisciplinary, being a joint endeavor of sociologists, art historians, and scholars of visual culture.

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.


HISTOREIN ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 79
Author(s):  
Costas Gaganakis

<p>This article attempts to chart the “paradigm shift” from social history, dominant until the early 1980s, to new cultural history and the various interpretive trends it engendered in the 1990s and 2000s. The privileged field of investigation is the history of the Protestant Reformation, particularly in its urban aspect. The discussion starts with the publication of Bernd Moeller’s pivotal <em>Reichsstadt und Reformation </em>in the early 1960s – which paved the way for the triumphant invasion of social history in a field previously dominated by ecclesiastical or political historians, and profoundly imbued with doctrinal prerogatives – and culminates in the critical presentation of interpretive trends that appear to dominate in the 2010s, particularly the view and investigation of the Reformation as communication process.</p>


1987 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-169
Author(s):  
James A. Reilly

The importance of sharī‘a law-court registers as sources for the social and economic history of Syria/Bilād al-Shām in the Ottoman period has been recognized for some time. A number of studies based on them have appeared, but the registers are so vast that scholars have in fact barely begun to investigate them. The Historical Documents Center (Markaz al-Wathā’iq al-Tārīkhīya) in Damascus holds over one thousand volumes. Additional originals exist in Israel/Palestine and a large collection of Syrian and Palestinian registers is available on microfilm at the University of Jordan (Amman). Although it is difficult to use the Lebanese registers nowadays (and those of Sidon may have been destroyed) a volume of the Tripoli registers from the seventeenth century has been published in facsimile by the Lebanese University. Dearth of material, therefore, is not a problem. One obstacle facing researchers, however, is unfamiliarity with the manner in which the registers present information. Persons whose native tongue is not Arabic have the additional problem of language to overcome. Therefore, an orientation to the registers is helpful, and this article is written with that purpose in mind.


2010 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Heumos

SummaryAfter the collapse of the communist system in eastern Europe, the development of the historiographies in the Czech and Slovak republics, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and the Federal Republic of Germany has been characterized by a broad spectrum of differences. This article offers an overview of the ways in which these differences have worked out for the history of the working class in the eastern European countries under communist rule, understood here as the social history of workers. It shows that cultural and political traditions and the “embedding” of historical research in the respective societies prior to 1989, the extent to which historiography after 1989 was able to connect to pre-1989 social-historical or sociological investigations, and the specific national political situation after 1989 make up for much of the differences in the ways that the history of the working class is dealt with in the countries concerned.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Smith

This chapter defines the scope of the problem, and the central research question: Are there consistent patterns of political intent and impact in diverse public dance movements throughout the social history of the Americas? It surveys the existing literature from the fields of dance studies, anthropology, musicology, and cultural history. It lays out the argument, methodology, and disciplinary sources and explains the criteria for the selection of the specific case studies, linking the diversity of those case studies to the diversity of methodological tools necessary for their analysis and comparison.


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