scholarly journals Editorial

Transfers ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. v-vi

As announced in our most recent editorial, this issue of Transfers features a series of reflections on the role of movement and mobilities in the fields of history of science, technology, and medicine. Four major collaborative projects in different stages of completion are introduced: “Moving Crops and the Scales of History”; “Individual Itineraries and the Circulation of Scientific and Technical Knowledge in China (16th–20th Centuries)”; “Migrating Knowledge”; and “Itineraries of Materials, Recipes, Techniques, and Knowledge in the Early Modern World.” Over the past few years, historical research on scientific and technological change and movement has altered substantially in form and content. Many projects have taken on a collaborative format as globalization and global exchange methodologies advanced and brought about an increased awareness of geographies, cultural differences, and postcolonial debate but also as sources became increasingly visible and available through digital means and researchers themselves became more mobile. The four examples selected can inevitably provide only a glimpse into this changing landscape and were chosen as offering a representative geographic coverage of European and US American scholarship in which, however, colleagues from a wide range of areas including India, South America, and Asia were involved.

How was history written in Europe and Asia between 400–1400? How was the past understood in religious, social, and political terms? And in what ways does the diversity of historical writing in this period mask underlying commonalities in narrating the past? The volume tackles these and other questions. Part I provides comprehensive overviews of the development of historical writing in societies that range from the Korean Peninsula to north-west Europe, which together highlight regional and cultural distinctiveness. Part II complements the first part by taking a thematic and comparative approach; it includes chapters on genre, warfare, and religion (amongst others) which address common concerns of historians working in this liminal period before the globalizing forces of the early modern world.


2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 307-325 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dániel Margócsy

The introduction to this special issue argues that network breakdowns play an important and unacknowledged role in the shaping and emergence of scientific knowledge. It focuses on transnational scientific networks from the early modern Republic of Letters to 21st-century globalized science. It attempts to unite the disparate historiography of the early modern Republic of Letters, the literature on 20th-century globalization, and the scholarship on Actor-Network Theory. We can perceive two, seemingly contradictory, changes to scientific networks over the past four hundred years. At the level of individuals, networks have become increasing fragile, as developments in communication and transportation technologies, and the emergence of regimes of standardization and instrumentation, have made it easier both to create new constellations of people and materials, and to replace and rearrange them. But at the level of institutions, collaborations have become much more extensive and long-lived, with single projects routinely outlasting even the arc of a full scientific career. In the modern world, the strength of institutions and macro-networks often relies on ideological regimes of standardization and instrumentation that can flexibly replace elements and individuals at will.


Author(s):  
Barbara Pitkin

Distinctly modern forms of historical consciousness emerged first after the Enlightenment but were anticipated by early modern developments in attitudes towards and strategies for recovering the past. Scholarship has only recently focused on how religious perspectives of the sixteenth century and the demand for alternative visions of religious history contributed to broader developments in early modern historiography. This chapter investigates the role of the past in Calvin’s vision of reform through the lens of his 1543 treatise, Supplex Exhortatio, to show how an early modern version of historical thinking is reflected in and shapes his reforming agenda. Though much of his programme is in continuity with Western reforming traditions, Calvin’s vision involves more conscious and critical engagement with and re-evaluation of the past. Attention to the contours of Calvin’s historical thinking illuminates the highly complex relationships among religious orientations, religious conflicts, and engagements with history in the sixteenth century.


Author(s):  
William Tullett

In England during the period between the 1670s and the 1820s a transformation took place in how smell and the senses were viewed. This book traces that transformation. The role of smell in creating medical and scientific knowledge came under intense scrutiny and the equation of smell with disease was actively questioned. Yet a new interest in smell’s emotive and idiosyncratic dimensions offered odours a new power in the sociable spaces of eighteenth-century England. Using a wide range of sources from diaries, letters, and sanitary records to satirical prints, consumer objects, and magazines, William Tullett traces how individuals and communities perceived the smells around them. From paint and perfume to onions and farts, this book highlights the smells that were good for eighteenth-century writers to think with. In doing so, the study challenges a popular, influential, and often cited narrative. Smell in Eighteenth-Century England is not a tale of the medicalization and deodorization of English olfactory culture. Instead, the book demonstrates that it was a new recognition of smell’s asocial-sociability, its capacity to create atmospheres of uncomfortable intimacy, that transformed the relationship between the senses and society. To trace this shift, the book also breaks new methodological ground. Smell in Eighteenth-Century England makes the case for new ways of thinking about the history of the senses, experience, and the body. Understanding the way past peoples perceived their world involves tracing processes of habituation, sensitization, and attention. These processes help explain which odours entered the archive and why they did so. They force us to recognise that the past was, for those who lived there, not just a place of unmitigated stench


2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (6) ◽  
pp. 511-525 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giuseppe Marcocci

In the past two decades, empires have increasingly attracted the attention of historians of the early modern period to the detriment of the traditional focus on states as the default political unit of analysis. The emergence of global history is not alien to this turn. This article maintains that our understanding of configurations of the early modern political map would only benefit from detaching the history of the state from its European trajectory and focusing on the multiple connections between states and empires across the world. Not only did both states and empires share the problem of having too much to rule, but their differences were not always so clear to the historical actors. Therefore, looking at their interactions at a local level might be a promising line to follow in future research.


Author(s):  
Mark Everist

The history of music is most often written as a sequence of composers and works. But a richer understanding of the music of the past may be obtained by also considering the afterlives of a composer’s works. Genealogies of Music and Memory asks how the stage works of Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–1787) were cultivated in nineteenth-century Paris, and concludes that although the composer was not represented formally on the stage until 1859, his music was known from a wide range of musical and literary environments. Received opinion has Hector Berlioz as the sole guardian of the Gluckian flame from the 1820s onwards, and responsible—together with the soprano Pauline Viardot—for the ‘revival’ of the composer’s Orfeo in 1859. The picture is much clarified by looking at the concert performances of Gluck during the first two thirds of the nineteenth century, and the ways in which they were received and the literary discourses they engendered. Coupled to questions of music publication, pedagogy, and the institutional status of the composer, such a study reveals a wide range of individual agents active in the promotion of Gluck’s music for the Parisian stage. The ‘revival’ of Orfeo is contextualized among other attempts at reviving Gluck’s works in the 1860s, and the role of Berlioz, Viardot, and a host of others re-examined.


2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 649-662
Author(s):  
Endang Susilowati ◽  
Singgih Tri Sulistiyono ◽  
Yety Rochwulaningsih

This article explores maritime diplomacy as a relatively new field of research in the maritime history of Southeast Asia. It is argued that maritime diplomacy was an important element in the history of the region, whose natural character places the sea as a key factor in its historical evolution. The significant role of the sea in the past shaped coastal civilizations, which in turn preconditioned the development of maritime diplomatic links between political centres in Southeast Asia, leading to the integration of this region. During the premodern period, coastal civilizations were the means through which diplomatic negotiations between political powers were conducted in Southeast Asia. Although coloured by conflicts and competition, such diplomatic ties did not result in colonial relationships, as which occurred during the early modern era, when Europeans succeeded in gaining control of almost all of Southeast Asia’s political and economic centres.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Sullivan ◽  
Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild

This introduction surveys the rise of the history of emotions as a field and the role of the arts in such developments. Reflecting on the foundational role of the arts in the early emotion-oriented histories of Johan Huizinga and Jacob Burkhardt, as well as the concerns about methodological impressionism that have sometimes arisen in response to such studies, the introduction considers how intensive engagements with the arts can open up new insights into past emotions while still being historically and theoretically rigorous. Drawing on a wide range of emotionally charged art works from different times and places—including the novels of Carson McCullers and Harriet Beecher-Stowe, the private poetry of neo-Confucian Chinese civil servants, the photojournalism of twentieth-century war correspondents, and music from Igor Stravinsky to the Beatles—the introduction proposes five ways in which art in all its forms contributes to emotional life and consequently to emotional histories: first, by incubating deep emotional experiences that contribute to formations of identity; second, by acting as a place for the expression of private or deviant emotions; third, by functioning as a barometer of wider cultural and attitudinal change; fourth, by serving as an engine of momentous historical change; and fifth, by working as a tool for emotional connection across communities, both within specific time periods but also across them. The introduction finishes by outlining how the special issue's five articles and review section address each of these categories, while also illustrating new methodological possibilities for the field.


Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-303
Author(s):  
Michael Connors Jackman

This article investigates the ways in which the work of The Body Politic (TBP), the first major lesbian and gay newspaper in Canada, comes to be commemorated in queer publics and how it figures in the memories of those who were involved in producing the paper. In revisiting a critical point in the history of TBP from 1985 when controversy erupted over race and racism within the editorial collective, this discussion considers the role of memory in the reproduction of whiteness and in the rupture of standard narratives about the past. As the controversy continues to haunt contemporary queer activism in Canada, the productive work of memory must be considered an essential aspect of how, when and for what reasons the work of TBP comes to be commemorated. By revisiting the events of 1985 and by sifting through interviews with individuals who contributed to the work of TBP, this article complicates the narrative of TBP as a bluntly racist endeavour whilst questioning the white privilege and racially-charged demands that undergird its commemoration. The work of producing and preserving queer history is a vital means of challenging the intentional and strategic erasure of queer existence, but those who engage in such efforts must remain attentive to the unequal terrain of social relations within which remembering forms its objects.


2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-54
Author(s):  
Dildora Alinazarova ◽  

In this article, based on an analysis of a wide range of sources, discusses the emergence and development of periodicals and printing house in Namangan. The activities of Ibrat- as the founder of the first printing house in Namangan are considered. In addition, it describes the functioning and development of "Matbaai Ishokia" in the past and present


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