scholarly journals TELLING HISTORIES OR ACCOUNTING FOR ASPECTS OF THE PAST: A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL CHOICE IN A EUROPEAN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Author(s):  
R. Torstendahl ◽  

The article departs from the difference between two types of historical writings, one narrating stories about actors and the other trying to bring about evidence that justify claims to know certain things about specific aspects of the past. From the Iliad and the Odyssey, telling stories have been a common way of presenting past events. Inscriptions and annals, as well as graves and monuments, urged to present posterity with evidence for acts and occurrences. Storytelling was always more popular than searching for evidence. In the 19th century, historians began to systematise their doubts about the truth of many stories. This source criticism has been refuted by many “historical theorists” in the late 20th and the early 21st centuries with the argument that claims that it is impossible to bring truth about the past and that all history is to be regarded as a kind of literature with, at best, symbolic “truth”. I want to reject this standpoint as based only on an internal “theory of history”-discourse and ask for analyses of actual historical research, which claims to produce new historical knowledge.

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 195-217

Among the various human attitudes toward a pandemic, along with fear, despair and anger, there is also an urge to praise the catastrophe or imbue it with some sort of hope. In 2020 such hopes were voiced in the stream of all the other COVID-19 reactions and interpretations in the form of predictions of imminent social, political or economic changes that may or must be brought on by the pandemic, or as calls to “rise above” the common human sentiment and see the pandemic as some sort of cruel-but-necessary bitter pill to cure human depravity or social disorganization. Is it really possible for a plague of any kind to be considered a relief? Or perhaps a just punishment? In order to assess the validity of such interpretations, this paper considers the artistic reactions to the pandemics of the past, specifically the images of the plague from Alexander Pushkin’s play Feast During the Plague, Antonin Artaud’s essay “The Theatre and the Plague” and Albert Camus’s novel The Plague. These works in different ways explore an attitude in which a plague can be praised in some respect. The plague can be a means of self-overcoming and purification for both an individual and for society. At the same time, Pushkin and Camus, each in his own way and by different means, show the illusory nature of that attitude. A mass catastrophe can reveal the resources already present in humankind, but it does not help either the individual or the society to progress.


2002 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 332-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Telesco

Enharmonicism steps to the fore only occasionally in 18th-century music. Indeed, over the past two centuries, it has been commonly assumed that it was invoked only when a special affect demanded it (as in the much-discussed "Dance of the Furies" from Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie). But a survey of 18th-century music refutes this perception and reveals that the enharmonicism of the 18th century can be broadly defined as belonging to one of two categories: simultaneous or immediate enharmonicism, and retrospective enharmonicism. Most early 18th-century examples restrict their usage to the simultaneous/immediate type, which consists of reinterpretations of enharmonic pivot chords. Retrospective enharmonicism, on the other hand, is less common than immediate enharmonicism but is remarkable because it presages the expansion of the diatonic tonal system into the chromatic tonal system of the 19th century. Retrospective enharmonicism does not involve the reinterpretation of an enharmonic pivot chord, nor is a reinterpretation perceived at any one point; it becomes clear only in retrospect that one must have occurred. Rather than a negation of some resolution tendency, as happens in the reinterpretation of a dominant seventh as an augmented sixth, there is a (typically large-scale) trajectory away from some tonic which is eventually regained through the enharmonic door. Some note or chord is respelled as its enharmonic equivalent, but without any aural clue. Drastic key changes of the sort typically encountered in instances of retrospective enharmonicism are for the most part proscribed in the writings of such composers and theorists as Rameau, Kirnberger, Koch, Heinichen, and Vogler, all of whom wrote in detail about staying within an orbit of closely related keys and rarely going directly from one key to another too far away. Nevertheless, this type of enharmonicism was a recognized compositional resource which, though used relatively infrequently in the 18th century, came to occupy a more central place in the realm of available compositional techniques in the 19th century.


Author(s):  
Adam Kucharski

Among the accounts of travels in Spain in the 1st half of the 19th century, there is a rather unknown memoir of Piotr Falkenhagen-Zaleski, written on the basis of his 1843 experiences. This exceptionally capable and flexible emigrant began his career in international trade, having successfully tried his hand at journalism and politics in the past. He became an employee at the Henry Hall department store in London, and then opened his own company of the same sort, establishing contacts in many European countries. The travel to Spain aimed at securing another contract. It appears that he did not achieve this goal. On the other hand, the stay behind the Pyrenees, mainly in Barcelona and Madrid, and the very travel from France to Spain allowed the Polish traveller to become familiar with two elements of the Spanish (political and cultural) reality through an incident with the Carlists and the corrida spectacle. He put those experiences in an interesting, although brief report from Spain.


Author(s):  
Petr Stehlík

After the breakup of Yugoslavia and the “abduction” of Yugoslav name by the regime of Slobodan Milošević, it seemed that Yugoslavism is a concept solely belonging to the past. Yugoslavism lost its national-integrational role it used to have in the 19th century, as well as its privileged status of the state ideology, which it used to enjoy in both incarnations of Yugoslavia. However, at the dawn of 21st century several Croatian intellectuals – with historian and publicist Dragan Markovina at the forefront – strive to reconceive Yugoslavism. The aim of the paper is to present and contextualize their deliberations on Yugoslavism as a subversive strategy and a value alternative to the dominant cultural model in Croatia and the other countries of the former Yugoslavia.


1970 ◽  
pp. 33
Author(s):  
Carsten Paludan-Müller

History imagined and history as monuments and space - some reflections The paper discusses the difference in experiencing past realities indirectly and directly. Either these realiries are represented verbally and visually to be read, viewed - and imagined. Or they are directly available to all senses in the physical surroundings, as remaining monuments and buildings. Partly available they are exhibited in museums as material objects. It is further argued that there is a fundamental difference between the multisensory experience of entering the genuine historical space of a church or walking the streets of an old well-preserved town or village and studying the representations offered in museums where the objects are combined with texts and supporting visuals. The author points to the significant role monuments from the past have played through history in stimulating and shaping aesthetic taste and architectural ideas, from the Renaissance and the Baroque to the historicism of the 19th century. Monuments have served both as a counterpoint to modernity and as a Well of Time through which we perceive bygone realities. 


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric R. Scerri

<span>The very nature of chemistry presents us with a tension. A tension between the exhilaration of diversity of substances and forms on the one hand and the safety of fundamental unity on the other. Even just the recent history of chemistry has been al1 about this tension, from the debates about Prout's hypothesis as to whether there is a primary matter in the 19th century to the more recent speculations as to whether computers will enable us to virtually dispense with experimental chemistry.</span>


1997 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee D. Parker

Historical research in accounting and management, hitherto largely neglected as a field of inquiry by many management and accounting researchers, has experienced a resurgence of interest and activity in research conferences and journals over the past decade. The potential lessons of the past for contemporary issues have been rediscovered, but the way forward is littered with antiquarian narratives, methodologically naive analyses, ideologically driven interpretation and ignorance of the traditions, schools and philosophy of the craft by accounting and management researchers as well as traditional and critical historians themselves. This paper offers an introduction to contributions made to the philosophies and methods of history by significant historians in the past, a review of some of the influential schools of historical thought, insights into philosophies of historical knowledge and explanation and a brief introduction to oral and business history. On this basis the case is made for the philosophically and methodologically informed approach to the investigation of our past heritage in accounting and management


1997 ◽  
Vol 24 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 115-138
Author(s):  
Marina Maquieira

Summary This paper examines a treatise on Spanish grammar, i.e., a particular grammar which follows the tradition of French philosophical grammar. Bachiller D. Antonio Martínez de Noboa’s work, published in 1839, appears in a century when the Spanish grammatical tradition is at its best. Texts like Vicente Salvá’s (1786–1849) and of course Andrés Bello’s (1781–1865) have in recent years attracted the attention of researchers. However, Martínez de Noboa’s work is much less known, although Gómez Asencio (1981, 1985) did highlight its importance in his two indispensable studies of the period between 1771 and 1847. The Nueva Gramática de la lengua Castellana is indebted to the framework set by José Gómez de Hermosilla (1835) and Jacobo Saqueniza (1828), although it does include some original observations. This paper examines the structure of the work in question and aims to show how it is in global terms a unified text combining different aspects, of which the most striking is without doubt the syntactic one. With this aim in mind certain specific examples of the analogy pertaining to syntax have been studied. First those he himself highlighted, e.g., the article/pronoun and verb and then those comments on syntax which are logically pertinent, e.g., conjunctions. Noboa himself was cited as was Saqueniza as having been responsible for the introduction of distinction between coordinate and subordinate conjunctions in Spanish grammar, along with the distinction between simple and complex clauses. On the purely syntactic level, it was also Noboa who refined the whole notion of verbal government. Finally, there is a brief summary of the section dedicated to pronunciation and spelling which are also considered by the author to be in some way related to the other parts of the grammar. In sum, what makes this work particularly interesting is undoubtedly the emphasis on syntax as more studies had been carried out on morphology than in any other area up until the 19th century and continued after Noboa to monopolise questions concerning grammar throughout this century.


2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (S 01) ◽  
pp. S4-S8
Author(s):  
S. Bhattacharya ◽  
V. Khanna ◽  
R. Kohli

ABSTRACTThe earliest documented history of cleft lip is based on a combination of religion, superstition, invention and charlatanism. While Greeks ignored their existence, Spartans and Romans would kill these children as they were considered to harbour evil spirits. When saner senses prevailed Fabricius ab Aquapendente (1537–1619) was the first to suggest the embryological basis of these clefts. The knowledge of cleft lip and the surgical correction received a big boost during the period between the Renaissance and the 19th century with the publication of Pierre Franco's Petit Traité and Traité des Hernies in which he described the condition as “lièvre fendu de nativitè” (cleft lip present from birth). The first documented Cleft lip surgery is from China in 390 BC in an 18 year old would be soldier, Wey Young-Chi. Albucasis of Arabia and his fellow surgeons used the cautery instead of the scalpel and Yperman in 1854 recommended scarifying the margins with a scalpel before suturing them with a triangular needle dipped in wax. The repair was reinforced by passing a long needle through the two sides of the lip and fixing the shaft of the needle with a figure-of-eight thread over the lip. Germanicus Mirault can be credited to be the originator of the triangular flap which was later modified by C.W. Tennison in 1952 and Peter Randall in 1959. In the late 50s, Ralph Millard gave us his legendary ‘cut as you go’ technique. The protruding premaxilla of a bilateral cleft lip too has seen many changes throughout the ages OE from being discarded totally to being pushed back by wedge resection of vomer to finally being left to the orthodontists.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Rummel

The previously ignored model of Greek colonisation attracted numerous actors from the 19th century British empire: historians, politicians, administrators, military personnel, journalists or anonymous commentators used the ancient paradigm to advocate a global federation exclusively encompassing Great Britain and the settler colonies in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Unlike other historical templates, Greek colonisation could be viewed as innovative and unspent: innovative because of the possibility of combining empire and liberty and unspent due to its very novelty, which did not contain the ‘imperial vice’ the other models had so often shown and which had always led to their political and cultural decline.


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