Did Volcanoes Accelerate the Fall of Chinese Dynasties?

After analyzing ice cores and historical documents, researchers found a link between eruptions and political change in China over the past 2 millennia.

Archival Reenactement and the Role of Fiction

The Atlas Group created a digital mixed-media archive of contemporary Lebanese history, made up of produced and found documents. These archives look immediately ambiguous: they don’t collect historical documents; they actually contain visual artefacts created by the Lebanese artist Walid Raad. These digital mixed-media archives — partly accessible on the web but also physically exhibited and performed — are not intended to preserve the memory of the past, but they become indeed useful to actualize history by giving it back in the form of a historical fiction. What if archives should not deal with memory, but with amnesia? And what kind of historical temporality do they re-activate?

«The Klutkoism». Saransk Case of 1934.

The article is devoted to the events of the first part of 1930-ies in the Mordovian Autonomous Region. The politics struggle between different groups of the soviet and party ruling elite, which accompanied the process of the formation of Mordovian statehood and the korenization of the State machinery are considering as well. On the example of Mordovian oblast committee and Saransk town committee of VKP(b) some features inherent in the regional Soviet nomenclature of the 1930s are shown. The article acknowledges that in Mordovia, the struggle between various groups of the Soviet and Party elite was significantly influenced by the national factor and the process of indigenization of the administrative apparatus. At the same time, there was tension between the First secretary of the regional Party Committee sent from the outside, who tried to rely on his own proteges, and the regional nomenclature clans formed from local national cadres. Meanwhile, in the existing system of close-knit corporate groups and bureaucratic clans based on personal ties and mutual responsibility, there was a rapid degeneration of Party and Soviet executives. This led to the spread of such negative phenomena as leaderism, embezzlements, abuse of official position, etc. In preparing the article, the method of analyzing historical documents, historical and systemic, historical and comparative methods were used. Archival documents (from the Central State Archives of the Republic of Mordovia), as well as materials of the Soviet periodicals from the newspapers Volzhskaya Kommuna and Krasnaya Mordovia served as the basis for the source base of the article.

Precious Arks of the 18th century Russian State Seals: the evolution of the iconography and manufacturing technology

The article presents the results of the trace-wear analysis and elemental composition of the arks of the pendant seals of 1700—1801 from the charters of Russian Emperors Peter the Greate, Catherine I, Peter II, Anna Ioannovna, Elizabeth Petrovna, Catherine the Greate and Paul I. The objects were studied in terms of their iconography, technological features, and metal composition. Comparison with historical documents shows that in the manufacture of all the arks the masters followed the iconography, regulated by decrees, and in general the artifacts reflect heraldic innovations of different periods. The peculiarities of the technological methods of the master jewelers of different periods, used in the production of these status items, have been identified. The evolution of the technology of making Russian seal arks has been revealed. The earliest ark (1700) was identified as belonging to the European technological tradition. The other arks belong to a different technological tradition, inclined to a more decorative depiction and the use of small complex embossings. Two of the arks show signs of later surface plating with electroplated gilding.

And the Rest is History: Measuring the Scope and Recall of Wikipedia’s Coverage of Three Women’s Movement Subgroups

Narrating history is perpetually contested, shaping and reshaping how nations and people understand both their pasts and the current moment. Measuring and evaluating the scope of histories is methodologically challenging. In this paper we provide a general approach and a specific method to measure historical recall. Operationalizing historical information as one or more word phrases, we use the phrase-mining RAKE algorithm on a collection of primary historical documents to extract first-person historical evidence, and then measure recall via phrases present on contemporary Wikipedia, taken to represent a publicly-accessible summary of existing knowledge on virtually any historical topic. We demonstrate this method using women's movements in the United States as a case study of a debated historical field. We found that issues important to working-class elements of the movement were less likely to be covered on Wikipedia compared to other subsections of the movement. Combining this method with a qualitative analysis of select articles, we identified a typology of mechanisms leading to historical omissions: paucity, restrictive paradigms, and categorical narrowness. Our approach, we conclude, can be used to both evaluate the recall of a body of history and to actively intervene in enlarging the scope of our histories and historical knowledge.

American constitutionalism and the mid-19th-century nation

The authors of the article have studied the causes of the American Civil War with due regard to the history of constitutional law. This research is based on several political, economic, legal and cultural factors. The authors used the method of analyzing historical documents. After analyzing judicial precedents and global historical trends, they have concluded that America's constitutional institutes lost their effectiveness and became a weapon in the hands of struggling parties during the constitutional crisis. As a result, the compromise system of the early nineteenth century became a new state and legal structure.

Anastas Benderev's 1890 Ethnographic Maps

This article deals with a pair of old ethnographic maps made by a Bulgarian officer (bearing the rank of Captain at the time) named Anastas Benderev (1859–1946). The maps were first published as folding attachments in Benderev’s book Military Geography and Statistics of Macedonia and Its Adjacent Territories on the Balkan Peninsula (Voennaia geografiia i statistika Makedonii i sosednikh s neiu oblastei Balkanskago poluostrova), which itself was published in Russian in Saint Petersburg in 1890. The stated purpose of the maps was to elucidate certain passages from the book, particularly those pertaining to the population’s ethnic composition. One of the maps (Etnograficheskaya karta Balkanskogo poluostrova) depicts the ethnicities across the entire Balkan Peninsula, while the other (Etnograficheskaya karta Makedonii) focuses on those within the confines of the historical and geographical territory of Macedonia. Due to a confluence of events, the maps in question are barely known and hardly ever used nowadays, even though they represent valuable relics from the era. This article aims to reintroduce them into the scientific discourse as historical documents of note.

Creating a corpus of historical documents for emotions identification

The aim of this article is to contextualize and describe the gathering and annotation of a conventual Hispanic and Novo Hispanic texts corpus for emotions identification. Such corpus will be the dataset for an emotions identification model based on machine learning ∖ deep learning techniques. Furthermore, this document describes several exploratory experiments carried out on the corpus. Within these experiments, it is described how the corpus is also used to obtain a lexicon mapped to polarities and emotions, and how some of the documents are hand-labeled by experts for the evaluation of the Machine Learning ∖ Deep learning -based emotion classification model. Finally, the future uses and experiments with said corpus are described.