The Thorny Road From Primary to Secondary Source: The Cult of Mumbo and the 1914 Sack of Kisii

1986 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 261-268
Author(s):  
R.M. Maxon
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Secondary Source ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Cautionary Note ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Western Kenya ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Town

For almost two decades, the cult of Mumbo or Mumboism has attracted the attention of historians and other social scientists interested in the colonial history of western Kenya. This has led to its recognition as an important protest response to colonial rule among the Gusii and Luo from the period just prior to World War I through the 1930s. Its importance has been magnified by ascribing to it responsibility for the looting of Kisii town, the administrative headquarters of what was then South Kavirondo district in southwestern Kenya. The Gusii people living near Kisii did indeed loot the town in September 1914 in the aftermath of the withdrawal of the British administration and a battle between an invading German force from German East Africa to the south and British troops, but the responsibility of the cult of Mumbo is at very best problematical. An examination of contemporary documentary and published primary sources shows that the cult of Mumbo or its teachings had nothing whatever to do with the looting and destruction of Kisii town, and offers a cautionary note on the use and abuse of colonial sources in Kenya history.Such a cautionary note is particularly highlighted by two recently published secondary works: Bill Freund's The Making of Contemporary Africa and E.S. Atieno-Odhiambo's chapter in volume VII of the UNESCO sponsored General History of Africa. In constructing their broad accounts, neither author had the opportunity to make extensive use of primary source material.

scholarly journals SEJARAH SYAIR GULUNG DI KETAPANG

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hera Yulita ◽  
Agus Sastrawan Noor ◽  
Yuver Kusnoto
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Local History ◽  
Secondary Source ◽  
West Kalimantan ◽  
Mass Society ◽  
The Social ◽  
Bird Beak ◽  
History Of ◽  
In The Beginning

<p class="Default" align="center"><strong>Abstrak</strong></p><p class="Default">Penelitian ini berjudul “Sejarah Syair Gulung di Ketapang”. Adapun rumusan masalah dalam penelitian ini adalah bagaimanakah sejarah syair gulung di Ketapang. Hasil penelitian ini diharapkan dapat memberikan kontribusi bagi masyarakat dan peneliti sejarah lokal yang ada di Kalimantan Barat. Penelitian ini adalah penelitian sejarah maka peneliti menggunakan metode sejarah yang ditulis dengan deskriptif analitis dengan langkah atau tahapan, yaitu : 1). Heuristik, 2). Kritik Sumber, 3). Interpretasi, 4). Historiografi. Dalam memperoleh data-data penelitian ini, peneliti menggunakan metode sumber primer, sekunder dan tradisi lisan atau folklor di dalam heuristik dengan menggunakan metode sejarah lisan.Hasil penelitian syair gulung pada awalnya hanyalah sebuah bentuk karangan atau disebut kengkarangan yang berada di Tanah Kayong, Tanah Tanjungpura yang sekarang bernama Kabupaten Ketapang. Ada juga yang menyebutnya Syair Layang karena isinya hanya selayang pandang. Lambat laun berubah menjadi syair gulung dikarenakan ditulis di atas kertas kemudian digulung dan disimpan di dalam parug burung. Isinya berupa bait-bait kata yang mengandung nasehat dan petunjuk hidup kepada masyarakat Melayu. Terdapat tiga fase syair gulung, yakni fase Kerajaan Tanjungpura yang diwakili oleh Syair Pangeran Syarif, fase kedua fase syair gulung jenaka, fase ketiga fase syair gulung berisi kritik sosial.</p><p class="Default"> </p><p class="Default"><strong>Kata kunci: </strong>sejarah, Syair Gulung, Ketapang</p><p class="Default"> </p><p class="Default" align="center"><strong><em>Abstract</em></strong></p><p class="Default"><em>The tittle of of this research is “The history of Syair Gulung”. The main problem of this research is how the history of Syair Gulung in Ketapang. The results of this research hopely could giving a contribution for the mass society and the researchers of local history studies in West Kalimantan. The research is a historical research. The methods of the research is descriptive-analitic includes four stages : 1) heuristic 2) verification 3) interpretation 4) historiography. The methodologies of research have been with a primary source, a secondary source, and oral tradition or folklore in heuristic with the oral history methods.The results of this research is in the beginning with namely of Syair Gulung is Kengkarangan, in Kayong Land, Tanjungpura Kingdom in nowdays becoming popular with Ketapang Regency. The several society knowing Syair Gulung with Syair Layang. At this time people knowing with Syair Gulung due to writed in paper and then rolled up and saved in the bird beak. The contents of Syair Gulung is a stanzas with the advice and life wisdom for Malay societies. The Syair Gulung includes three phases, such as The Tanjungpura Kingdom phase with with Syair Pangeran Syarif, The witty phase, and the social critics phase. </em></p><p class="Default"><em> </em></p><strong><em>Keywords:</em></strong><em> history, Syair Gulung, Ketapang</em>

scholarly journals Rijeka and its surroundings in 1918-1919

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-133
Author(s):  
Robert Doričić ◽  
Toni Buterin ◽  
Igor Eterović ◽  
Amir Muzur
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Death Certificates ◽  
World War ◽  
City Center ◽  
Daily Newspapers ◽  
Specific Mortality ◽  
Spanish Flu ◽  
The City

The Spanish flu, one of the worst epidemics in history, appeared in 1918, on the eve of the end of the World War I. The characteristic of the epidemic on the territory of the city of Rijeka has been poorly studied. Certainly, the lack of primary sources, such as hospital registries, have made the understanding of the incidence and the course of the epidemic in the city more difficult. Therefore, the death certificates have emerged as the main primary source. The purpose of this paper is to explore and describe mortality caused by the (Spanish) flu during 1918 and at the beginning of 1919, using the death registers of those who lived in the area of the city center and the surrounding parishes. The results of the Spanish flu mortality research in the area of Rijeka are compared to the Spanish flu specific mortality on the territory of the three parishes situated in the wider area of Rijeka – Brseč, Mošćenice and Lovran. The elucidation of the characteristics of the Spanish flu epidemic and its impact on the quotidian life in the city of Rijeka is possible through the analysis of daily newspapers as well. In this paper, we have explored such articles in the La Bilancia, Rijeka’s newspaper published in Italian.

Cookbooks as Historical Documents

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ken Albala
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
World View ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
Secondary Source ◽  
Intended Audience ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ethnicity And Race

Historians use cookbooks as primary source documents in much the same way they use any written record of the past. A primary source is a text written by someone in the past, rather than a secondary source which is commentary by a historian upon the primary sources. As with any document, the historian must attempt to answer five basic questions of provenance and purpose if possible. Who wrote the cookbook? What was the intended audience? Where was it produced and when? Why was it written? There are ways the historian can read between the lines of the recipes, so to speak to answer questions that are not directly related to cooking or material culture but may deal with gender roles, issues of class, ethnicity and race. Even topics such as politics, religion and world view are revealed in the commentary found in cookbooks and sometimes embedded in what appears to be a simple recipe. The most valuable of cookbooks and related culinary texts also reveal what we might call complete food ideologies.

German Settlements in the Southern Caucasus

2001 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 138
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
World War ◽  
Cattle Breeding ◽  
Short Overview ◽  
History Of ◽  
Southern Caucasus ◽  
The Town ◽  
Vast Territory

AbstractThe article deals with the German migration to Russia in general and the fate of German settlements in the Southern Caucasus in particular. After a short overview over the motives and ways of German migration to Russia from its early days in the 10th century until the end of the first Russian Revolution in 1908 the author describes at some length the history of German settlements in Transcaucasia, i.e. the territory divided today between the Republics of Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan. The first 31 German families of migrants, which belonged to the chiliastic sectarian movement arrived in the Southern Caucasus in spring 1817 and founded near to Tbilissi the settlement Marienfeld. They were soon to be followed by other German migrants which were engaging themselves all over Transcaucasia in agriculture, gardening and cattle-breeding. In 1900 the number of German settlers in the area amounted to about 12 thousand people. Although spread over a vast territory the German villages were in contact which each other, establishing their own network of religious and educational institutions. German-speakers reached as far south as Schuscha, a town in today's Nogorny Karabakh. Two small German villages were even to be found near to Mount Ararat, on the very Russian-Turkish border, around five kilometres from the town of Kars. Although both villages were left by their German inhabitants in 1914 due to World War I, still in 1971 some old German style houses now inhabi-ted by Turkish families could be identified in the place.

scholarly journals Provincial Land Use Planning Initiatives in the Town of Kapuskasing

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
O. W. Saarinen
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
World War I ◽  
Land Use Planning ◽  
Urban Fringe ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Special Mention ◽  
The City ◽  
The Town

Kapuskasing, Ontario warrants special mention in the history of Canadian land use planning. The town first acquired special prominence immediately following World War I when it was the site of the first provincially-planned resource community in Canada. The early layout of the settlement reflected the imprints of both the "city beautiful" and "garden city" movements. After 1958, the resource community then became the focus for an important experiment in urban "fringe" rehabilitation at Brunetville, a suburban area situated just east of the planned Kapuskasing townsite. The author suggests that the role of the Brunetville experiment in helping to change the focus of urban renewal in Canada from redevelopment to rehabilitation has not been fully appreciated.

scholarly journals Memory-Making in Kiruna - Representations of Colonial Pioneerism in the Transformation of a Scandinavian Mining Town

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 104-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanna Overud
Keyword(s):  
Colonial History ◽  
Mining Town ◽  
North East ◽  
Industrial Expansion ◽  
The People ◽  
Concrete Blocks ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Photographs ◽  
Grazing Lands ◽  
The Town

This article considers colonial rhetoric manifested in representations of early settlement in the mining town of Kiruna in northernmost Sweden. Kiruna was founded more than 100 years ago by the LKAB Company with its centre the prosperous mine on Sami land. Continued iron ore mining has made it necessary to relocate the town centre a few kilometres north-east of its original location to ensure the safety of the people. The ongoing process of the town’s transformation due to industrial expansion has given rise to the creation of a memorial park between the town and the mine, in which two historical photographs have been erected on huge concrete blocks. For the Swedish Sami, the indigenous people, the transformation means further exploitation of their reindeer grazing lands and forced adaption to industrial expansion. The historical photographs in the memorial park fit into narratives of colonial expansion and exploration that represent the town’s colonial past. Both pictures are connected to colonial, racialised and gendered space during the early days of industrial colonialism. The context has been set by discussions about what Kiruna “is”, and how it originated. My aim is to study the role of collective memory in mediating a colonial past, by exploring the representations that are connected to and evoked by these pictures. In this progressive transformation of the town, what do these photographic memorials represent in relation to space? What are the values made visible in these photographs? I also discuss the ways in which Kiruna’s history becomes manifested in the town’s transformation and the use of history in urban planning. I argue that, in addressing the colonial history of Kiruna, it is timely to reconsider how memories of a town are communicated into the future by references to the past. I also claim that memory, history, and remembrance and forgetting are represented in this process of history-making and that they intersect gender, class and ethnicity.

scholarly journals Approaching mercury distribution in burial environment using PLS-R modelling

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Noemi Álvarez-Fernández ◽  
Antonio Martínez Cortizas ◽  
Zaira García-López ◽  
Olalla López-Costas
Keyword(s):  
Soft Tissues ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Secondary Source ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Mercury Distribution ◽  
The Past ◽  
Complex Interactions ◽  
Target Organs ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

AbstractMercury environmental cycle and toxicology have been widely researched. Given the long history of mercury pollution, researching mercury trends in the past can help to understand its behaviour in the present. Archaeological skeletons have been found to be useful sources of information regarding mercury loads in the past. In our study we applied a soil multi-sampling approach in two burials dated to the 5th to 6th centuries AD. PLRS modelling was used to elucidate the factors controlling mercury distribution. The model explains 72% of mercury variance and suggests that mercury accumulation in the burial soils is the result of complex interactions. The decomposition of the bodies not only was the primary source of mercury to the soil but also responsible for the pedogenetic transformation of the sediments and the formation of soil components with the ability to retain mercury. The amount of soft tissues and bone mass also resulted in differences between burials, indicating that the skeletons were a primary/secondary source of mercury to the soil (i.e. temporary sink). Within burial variability seems to depend on the proximity of the soil to the thoracic area, where the main mercury target organs were located. We also conclude that, in coarse textured soils, as the ones studied in this investigation, the finer fraction (i.e. silt + clay) should be analysed, as it is the most reactive and the one with the higher potential to provide information on metal cycling and incipient soil processes. Finally, our study stresses the need to characterise the burial soil environment in order to fully understand the role of the interactions between soil and skeleton in mercury cycling in burial contexts.

Memory Test: A History of U.S. Citizenship Education and Examination

2010 ◽  
Vol 112 (9) ◽  
pp. 2379-2404
Author(s):  
Jack Schneider
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Citizenship Education ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Small Body ◽  
The United States ◽  
Memory Test ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Annual Reports ◽  
Sequence Of Events ◽  
History Of

Background/Context While much has been written about the history of immigration and naturalization in the United States, few scholars have looked at the history of citizenship education and testing. The small body of literature on the subject has primarily focused on World War I-era Americanization efforts and, as such, has excluded later periods. Further, while it has looked at citizenship education programs, it has usually done so without considering the context of the high stakes exam that immigrants must pass in order to become citizens. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study Each year, tens of thousands of would-be American citizens set out to conquer the U.S. citizenship test. To do so, they must be prepared to answer 10 fact-oriented questions about American government, history, and geography selected by a naturalization examiner from a master list of 100. A score of six correct answers earns citizenship. Consequently, aspiring citizens memorize the number of Amendments to the Constitution, the branches of government, the names of three of the original American colonies, and the location of the Statue of Liberty. Most immigrants pass. This article seeks to understand the roots of the memory test that currently serves as America's gauge of fitness for citizenship. In looking back over 100 years of history, it seeks to explore how a once highly pluralistic approach to education and an anxiety-producing system of testing conducted by naturalization courts became what we know today. By asking how we got here, it also implicitly asks whether we want to maintain this status quo or seek out change. Research Design In analyzing the history of U.S. citizenship education and examination in the 20th and early 21st centuries, this study utilizes three primary groupings of sources. First, it incorporates the voices of leaders at the naturalization agency—the organization that administers the citizenship test—through personal communications, annual reports, and other agency publications. Second, it draws on primary sources from outside of the naturalization agency, including descriptions of state naturalization efforts, reports on the purpose and practice of community Americanization programs, and evaluations of early- and mid-century naturalization agency work. Finally, it looks at the broader context within which the citizenship examination evolved, looking at the secondary literature on Americanization education by historians of education and historians of immigration, as well as at primary sources like presidential and Congressional records. Conclusions/Recommendations This study finds that the history of citizenship preparation and testing over the course of a century, despite its fairly consistent procession towards the goals of standardization and efficiency, is not the story of an inevitable sequence of events. Policymakers recognized the pitfalls inherent in a highly centralized approach focusing on standards. Yet, in light of this, they were consistently willing to trade depth and variability for efficiency and certainty. The result has been a fair, economical, and increasingly irrelevant program for making immigrants citizens.

scholarly journals Uncovering Indigenous Worlds and Histories on a Bend of a New England River before the 1650s: Problematizing Nomenclature and Settler Colonial History, Deep History, and Early Colonization Narratives

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Strobel ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
New England ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
History Of ◽  
Praying Town

The essay explores the often-ignored histories of the indigenous people who resided on the confluence of the Merrimack and the Concord rivers up to the 1650s. This place is characterized by a significant bend in the Merrimack River as it changes its southerly flow into an easterly direction. Today, the area includes the modern city of Lowell, Massachusetts, and its surroundings. While the 1650s saw the creation of a Native American “praying town” and the incorporation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s towns of Chelmsford and Billerica, it is the diverse and complex indigenous past before this decade which North American and global historians tend to neglect. The pre-colonial and early colonial eras, and how observers have described these periods, have shaped the way we understand history today. This essay problematizes terminology, looks at how amateur historians of the 19th and early 20th centuries have shaped popular perceptions of Native Americans, and explores how researchers have told the history before the 1650s. The materials available to reconstruct the history of the region’s Native Americans are often hard to find, a common issue for researchers who attempt to study the history of indigenous peoples before 1500. Thus, the essay pays special attention to how incomplete primary sources as well as archeological and ethnohistorical evidence have shaped interpretations of this history and how these intellectual processes have aided in the construction of this past.

scholarly journals NORMATIVE HORIZONS: READING ENSLAVED AFRICANS’ AUTONOMY THROUGH PRIMARY SOURCES IN COLONIAL BRAZIL

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael B Melia
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Peace Treaty ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Slave Rebellion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Socially Situated

This essay is an exploration of historical knowledge: how it is authored and, more importantly, how we can access it. Through in-depth inspection and careful combination of primary source documents from 1690 to 1806, the text is a result of my attempts to reconstruct Brazilian slave autonomy as a kind of historical knowledge. Disassembling the language that framed colonial encounters, I argue that historical knowledge from primary texts must first be framed within the everyday ‘encounters’ of others in 18th century Brazil social life. Utilising a socially situated textual analysis, the essay accesses the often overwritten autonomy of slaves through historical documents: (1) the text of a friar writing on slaves’ fantastic religious accomplishments, (2) two colonial mandates prohibiting slaves’ promiscuous and suggestive fashions, (3) a history of slave rebellion against colonial powers and (4) a list of demands composed by slaves offered as a peace treaty to their owner. Through exploring the ‘normative horizons’ of the authorial point-of-view of each text, what follows is not merely an ethnohistorical experiment in accessing historical knowledge, but an ethnographic exposition in imagining the lives and futures of slaves in the past.

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