scholarly journals Memories from the Margins: Stories and Images of Urban Homelessness

Linguaculture ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia J. Miller

AbstractAmong any city’s most wounded bodies and minds are the homeless - individuals who live on the streets, without any formal claim to place. For many of these individuals, the vessels of historical memory are not museums, or classrooms, or library archives, but parks, alleyways, and subway stations. As the numbers of homeless individuals increase dramatically each year, their social, physical, and psychological trauma increasingly characterizes urban life, even as their experiences fall to the margins of the city’s history and future. In response, this paper explores the merging of homeless histories with public history, through two interlocking projects carried out in Boston, Massachusetts - “Histories and Homelessness,” a community-based life-writing project, and “Images from the Streets,” a disposable-camera photography project - outreach and education projects, in which all participants are among the unsheltered homeless who spend their nights on heating grates, under highways, and in ATM kiosks. Together, these projects begin to map and make visible the landscape and memories of homelessness, as they are written and photographed by its inhabitants, and firmly situate these histories within the wider community. Recovering the personal and interpretive histories of homeless individuals, so intimately tied to “place,” creates a powerful strategy for expanding the history of the community to include voices and visions often excluded or left at the margins.

2015 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 45-75
Author(s):  
William S. Walker

This article explores the shared intellectual tradition in folklore, public history, and oral history of involving students in community-based field research. This case study of the collaborative research New York State folklorist Harold W. Thompson and his students undertook in the 1930s contributes to ongoing efforts to enrich our understanding of public history’s genealogy. It also demonstrates that a counter-tradition to the “lone genius” model of humanities research emerged through faculty-student community-based research projects in history and folklore.


2013 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy P. Appelbaum

Abstract The mid-nineteenth-century Colombian Chorographic Commission drew on geology, archaeology, and history to project a patriotic past onto the Andean landscape of the young republic then known as New Granada. This geographic expedition, led initially by Agustín Codazzi and Manuel Ancízar, explored and mapped the country from 1850 to 1859. For the commissioners and their associates among the creole elite, the history of past epochs was “written” on the mountainsides for scientific travelers such as themselves to “read.” They portrayed disparate historical and prehistoric events as overlapping and interrelated. The commission’s texts and images linked a catastrophic interpretation of geologic origins to historia patria (patriotic history). The commissioners merged the wars of conquest and independence into a two-act drama enacted on a singular territorial stage. Their reading of geologic, archaeological, and historical evidence endowed the impoverished young Republic of New Granada with a grandiose territory, a great precursor civilization, and a legacy of patriotic resistance to imperialism. Their interpretations, however, would prove controversial. During the second half of the nineteenth century, debates over geology, archaeology, and history reflected conflicting Liberal and Conservative political projects. Moreover, the midcentury intellectuals failed to incorporate contemporaneous indigenous and poor citizens into an imagined national community based on the ideal of a shared historical memory embedded on a readable landscape.


2007 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 5-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHLOE S. BURKE ◽  
CHRISTOPHER J. CASTANEDA

Inspired by our experience addressing the legacy of eugenics at California State University, Sacramento, this special issue presents an array of articles representative of diverse approaches to the historical investigation of eugenics. This article provides an introduction to the history of eugenics and explores the ways in which public history is particularly well suited to shape the historical memory of eugenics and encourage dialogue about contemporary biotechnologies.


Author(s):  
К.А. Панченко

Abstract The article examines the conquest of the County of Tripoli by the Mamelukes in 1289, and the reaction of various Middle Eastern ethnoreligious groups to this event. Along with the Monophysite perspective (the Syriac chronicle of Bar Hebraeus’ Continuator and the work of the Coptic historian Mufaddal ibn Abi-l-Fadail), and the propagandist texts of Muslim Arabic panegyric poets, we will pay special attention to the historical memory of the Orthodox (Melkite) and Maronite communities of northern Lebanon. The contemporary of these events — the Orthodox author Suleiman al-Ashluhi, a native of one of the villages of the Akkar Plateau — laments the fall of Tripoli in his rhymed eulogy. It is noteworthy that this author belongs to the rural Melkite subculture, which — in spite of its conservative character — was capable of producing original literature. Suleiman al-Ashluhi’s work was forsaken by the following generations of Melkites; his poem was only preserved in Maronite manuscripts. Maronite historical memory is just as fragmented. The father of the Modern Era Maronite historiography — Gabriel ibn al-Qilaʿî († 1516) only had fragmentary information on the history of his people in the 13th century: local chronicles and the heroic epos that glorified the Maronite struggle against the Muslim lords that tried to conquer Mount Lebanon. Gabriel’s depiction of the past is not only biased and subject to aims of religious polemics, but also factually inaccurate. Nevertheless, the texts of Suleiman al-Ashluhi and Gabriel ibn al-Qilaʿî give us the opportunity to draw conclusions on the worldview, educational level, political orientation and peculiar traits of the historical memory of various Christian communities of Mount Lebanon.


Author(s):  
Elena N. NARKHOVA ◽  
Dmitry Yu. NARKHOV

This article analyzes the degree of demand for works of art (films and television films and series, literary and musical works, works of monumental art) associated with the history of the Great Patriotic War among contemporary students. This research is based on the combination of two theories, which study the dynamics and statics of culture in the society — the theory of the nucleus and periphery by Yu. M. Lotman and the theory of actual culture by L. N. Kogan. The four waves of research (2005, 2010, 2015, 2020) by the Russian Society of Socio¬logists (ROS) have revealed a series of works in various genres on this topic in the core structure and on the periphery of the current student culture; this has also allowed tracing the dynamics of demand and the “movement” of these works in the sociocultural space. The authors introduce the concept of the archetype of the echo of war. The high student recognition of works of all historical periods (from wartime to the present day) is shown. A significant complex of works has been identified, forming two contours of the periphery. Attention is drawn to the artistic work of contemporary students as a way to preserve the historical memory of the Great Patriotic War. This article explains the necessity of preserving the layer of national culture in order to reproduce the national identity in the conditions of informational and ideological pluralism of the post-Soviet period. The authors note the differentiation of youth due to the conditions and specifics of socialization in the polysemantic sociocultural space.


Author(s):  
Thomas H. Reilly

This book is a history of the Chinese Protestant elite and their contribution to building a new China in the years from 1922 to 1952. While a small percentage of China’s overall population, China’s Protestants constituted a large and influential segment of the urban elite. They exercised that influence through their churches, hospitals, and schools, especially the universities, and also through institutions such as the YMCA and the YWCA, whose membership was drawn from the modern sectors of urban life. These Protestant elites believed that they could best contribute to the building of a new China through their message of social Christianity, believing that Christianity could help make Chinese society strong, modern, and prosperous, but also characterized by justice and mercy. More than preaching a message, the Protestant elite also played a critical social role, through their institutions, broadening the appeal and impact of social movements, and imparting to them a greater sense of legitimacy. This history begins with the elite’s participation in social reform campaigns in the early twentieth century, continues with their efforts in resisting imperialism, and ends with their support for the Communist-led social revolution.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shoko Aoki ◽  
Kazumasa Yamagishi ◽  
Koutatsu Maruyama ◽  
Rie Kishida ◽  
Ai Ikeda ◽  
...  

AbstractTocopherols, strong antioxidants, may be useful in preventing dementia, but the epidemiological evidence is insufficient. We performed a community-based follow-up study of Japanese, the Circulatory Risk in Community Study, involving 3739 people aged 40–64 years at baseline (1985–1999). Incident disabling dementia was followed up from 1999 through 2020. For subtype analysis, we classified disabling dementia into that with and that without a history of stroke. Dietary intake of tocopherols (total, α, β, γ, and δ) were estimated using 24-h recall surveys. During a median follow-up of 19.7 years, 670 cases of disabling dementia developed. Total tocopherol intake was inversely associated with risk of disabling dementia with multivariable hazard ratios (95% confidence intervals) of 0.79 (0.63–1.00) for the highest versus lowest quartiles of total tocopherol intake (P for trend = 0.05). However, the association was strengthened when further adjusted for α-linolenic acid intake (Spearman correlation with total tocopherol intake = 0.93), with multivariable hazard ratios of 0.50 (0.34–0.74) (P for trend = 0.001) but was weakened and nonsignificant when further adjusted for linoleic acid intake (Spearman correlation with total tocopherol intake = 0.92), with multivariable hazard ratios of 0.69 (0.47–1.01) (P for trend = 0.05). Similar but nonsignificant inverse associations were observed for α-, γ-, and δ-tocopherols but not for β-tocopherol. These results were similar regardless of the presence of a history of stroke. Dietary tocopherol intake was inversely associated with risk of disabling dementia, but its independent effect was uncertain owing to a high intercorrelation of α-linolenic linoleic acids with total tocopherol intake. Even with such confounding, a diet high in tocopherols may help prevent the onset of dementia.


2011 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 415-443 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOSEPH L. YANNIELLI

AbstractIn March 1742, British naval officer John Byron witnessed a murder on the western coast of South America. Both Charles Darwin and Robert FitzRoy seized upon Byron's story a century later, and it continues to play an important role in Darwin scholarship today. This essay investigates the veracity of the murder, its appropriation by various authors, and its false association with the Yahgan people encountered during the second voyage of theBeagle(1831–1836). Darwin's use of the story is examined in multiple contexts, focusing on his relationship with the history of European expansion and cross-cultural interaction and related assumptions about slavery and race. The continuing fascination with Byron's story highlights the key role of historical memory in the development and interpretation of evolutionary theory.


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