“Here presented nonsequentially, and in a new relation to one another”: Primary Source Work and the Quest for Empathy in Tom Crewe’s The New Life

This article works backward from the targeting of Muslims in the war on terror to argue that religion and race have a historical relationship more intimate than typically thought. In particular, it argues that religion is not merely one more semiotic coordinate, alongside descent, phenotype, cultural identity, through which bodies have become racially ascribed as white or nonwhite. Rather, Islamophobia demonstrates that religion (and by extension, secular “ideology”) has historically generated a supplemental racial dynamic irreducible to the assignation of color. This second axis of race distinguishes between those who compose a society worth defending from those whose interior lives or mentalities count as a threat. Like the color line, this second axis of race has a venerable history as a strategy of power. It finds its origins in religious distinctions between the Christian flock and its enemies as constituted by the regime of power that Michel Foucault once called the “pastorate” of premodern Europe. With the rise of the modern governmental state, this medieval politico-theological enemy was translated in secular terms as a figure for ideological threats to civil order, both at the global level of the expanding world-system’s borders and internally within the individual state. A supplement to racisms of the color line, dogma-line racism maps populations along the other side of Cartesian modernity’s mind/body split, in primary reference to mind rather than body, ideology rather than corporeality, according to theologies, creeds, beliefs, faiths, and ideas, rather than their color, face, hair, blood, and origin.

An Accidental Historian

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Subjectivity, Agency, and the New Latin American History of Gender and Sexuality

This study investigates how religious soundscapes mediate historical trauma in Snow in Midsummer (2023), directed by Malaysian Chinese filmmaker Chong Keat Aun. Focusing on Ah Eng's auditory journey to locate the graves of her father and brother lost in the 1969 May 13 Incident, the film interweaves personal grief, collective memory, and spectral presence. The research applies a sound-oriented close textual analysis, in which auditory events are systematically annotated and archived with timecodes, categorized into religious, spectral, and environmental sounds, and then examined through semiotic and contextual analysis. Interdisciplinary theories from trauma studies, sound anthropology, and religious aesthetics, together with Malay-language historical materials, inform the interpretations. The analysis reveals that sonic elements such as the adhan, Buddhist bells, and Taoist rituals transcend multicultural reflection by generating a cross-cultural acoustic space that resists political amnesia. In doing so, the film stages a form of sonic memory work where mourning converges with resistance and ritual with historical critique, offering an ethics of listening rooted in spiritual hybridity and emotional resonance that allows the voices of the dead to reverberate within Malaysia's postcolonial soundscape.

Our chapter in this volume comes from the perspective of two trained historians who have taught on research methods courses in sports and events management courses. In a 2012 article, Doug Matthews stated that events management students needed to understand ‘historical spectacle’ and advocated that the study of historic events become a ‘mandatory core component’ of their education. We hope that this piece will provide something of a toolkit for those undertaking historical research on events, with regard to both the strengths and the potential problems or pitfalls involved in analysing primary source material.

The RUSA History Section's Historical Materials Committee follows an established method to identify the best materials for the year. The process uses standardized criteria, a broad, national call for nominations, and the work of committee members to review and select from the nominations. The 2016 Best Historical Materials' list is a mix of digital archives, collections, indexes, and print bibliographies that promote the research of unique, rich, and specialized collections. All resources were last reviewed on December 9, 2016. Bibliography of the East India Company. Contemporary Printed Sources, 1786-1858, Catherine Pickett This book continues Pickett's work, first published in 2011 as Bibliography of the East India Company: Books, Pamphlets and Other Materials Printed between 1600 and 1785. The second volume covers the years between the subordination of the Company to the Crown and the disestablishment of the Company after the Indian Rebellion. It offers not merely a list of published works, but also includes a preface for each year that is covered. The prefaces themselves offer a chronology and contextualization of events in the history of the Company for each year. The bibliography covers monographs written during the period but also includes ephemera such as price lists and cargo manifests. Although individual entries are not annotated (except to add caption titles, which often explain the contents of a book), the bibliography is indexed by author, title, and subject.--Steven A. Knowlton, Princeton University CALISPHERE, University of California Libraries, developed and maintained by the California Digital Library (https:// calisphere.org) Provides a central location to access a rich and diverse variety of digital collections on California. The site is hosted by the University of California system, but includes many state-wide partners: museums, public and special libraries, and archives. Content includes visual, textual, and audio materials. A single search box on the homepage searches across all collections. The result list includes limiting facets by type of item (moving image, text, etc.), decade, contributing institution, or specific collection. Includes a browse feature by collection or by exhibition. The interface is user-friendly and attractive, the digitization quality is excellent, and the material covers topics from all subject areas (history, literature, race relations, diversity, economic growth, performing and visual arts, architecture, etc.). Each entry includes a rights statement so that the end user is aware of copyright ownership and/or restrictions.--Eileen Bentsen, Baylor University Directory of American Tool and Machinery Patents (DATAMP), DATAMP is funded by the Old Woodworking Machines website (www.datamp.org) Patents aren't just for engineers anymore--they are an excellent primary source for cultural, scientific, and community history. Historical patent research has long been hampered by its arcane indexing system, with patents before 1976 indexed only by date and USPTO assigned classification codes. Historians are more likely to look for connections via the name or location of the inventor. Unfortunately OCR files in Google Patents are often unable to read full text of the older documents accurately. The open-access DATAMP database offers an extremely valuable tool for those tracking patented machines and tools, including household, agricultural, industrial, structures, and hand tools. This database supplements information in the patent record: names and locations of manufacturers, access to over 1300 non-US historic patents, Confederate States of America patents, and patents destroyed in fires at the USPTO. Russ Allen and his team of dedicated volunteers from antique tool and machinery circles (including retired York, NE librarian and library director Stan Shulz) have made this database easy to browse or search. For example, information about Albert W. …

Editorial

This study investigates the role of implicature in shaping the interpretation and emotional impact of song lyrics, with a focus on Sara Bareilles’ "She Used to Be Mine" and "Brave". The objectives are threefold: (1) to examine how implicature contributes to lyrical meaning and emotional resonance, (2) to identify instances of implicature within the lyrics, and (3) to analyze the relationship between linguistic expression and thematic message. Adopting a qualitative research design and a content analysis approach, the study draws on two primary theoretical references: Analyzing Meaning: An Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics (Textbooks in Language Sciences 5) for implicature characterization, and Grice’s Logic and Conversation as the principal framework for categorizing implicatures. The analysis identifies four types of implicature—Conventional Implicature (CI), Generalized Conversational Implicature (GCI), Particularized Conversational Implicature (PCI), and Scalar Implicature (SI)—present in both songs. Findings reveal that "She Used to Be Mine" predominantly employs Conventional Implicature (78%) and Scalar Implicature (60%), aligning with its introspective and reflective tone. In contrast, "Brave" relies more heavily on Generalized Conversational Implicature (56%) and Particularized Conversational Implicature (63%), reinforcing its motivational and empowering message. These results highlight the nuanced role of implicature in shaping both the interpretive depth and emotional impact of musical discourse.

Abstract: This article examines how contemporary Greek historical nonfiction for children engages with national trauma, focusing on three titles published during the 2022 centenary of the Asia Minor Catastrophe. Drawing on Sanders's framework of critical nonfiction and Seixas and Morton's historical thinking concepts, the study analyzes narrative stance, visual strategies, peritexts, and the use of primary sources to assess whether these texts promote inquiry or reinforce authoritative, ideologically framed accounts. The analysis reveals that while the books prioritize factual accuracy and emotional resonance, they largely suppress alternative perspectives and critical reflection, favoring national coherence and commemorative closure. Photographs and testimonies serve to elicit empathy but rarely provoke historical questioning. However, subtle gaps and visual ambiguities offer limited entry points for critical engagement.

This paper investigates the potential of character design in digital games as a medium for the preservation and reinterpretation of cultural heritage, using Slavic mythology as a case study. Despite its rich symbolic meaning and narrative complexity, Slavic mythology remains underrepresented in the global video game industry. By engaging with mythological deities, heroes and supernatural creatures from Croatian traditions, this research demonstrates how digital art practices can revitalize neglected cultural narratives and adapt them for modern audience. The design process combined historical and ethnographic research with artistic reinterpretation. Primary sources included historical chronicles, oral traditions, folk costumes and regional decorative motifs, which were then translated into a contemporary visual language suitable for interactive environments. Conceptual character designs were developed using Adobe Photoshop and Krita, supported by hand sketching and graphic tablet. Each stage of the design process from ideation and rough sketches to detailed rendering and final concept art reflected a careful balance between cultural authenticity and creative expression. The character design is not merely a technical or aesthetic exercise but a form of storytelling that shapes both the identity of a game and its emotional resonance with players. It can inspire audiences to rediscover and appreciate their own cultural history while presenting it to an international audience in an accessible and engaging format. This study contributes to broader discussions on the role of digital art in safeguarding intangible cultural heritage and highlights the capacity of video games to serve as a dynamic intersection of entertainment, education and cultural preservation.

Primary historical source materials represent a very real challenge to GIS. In contrast to modern datasets where tabulated and structured data usually correspond neatly to fixed boundary units, primary historical source materials occur in predominantly unstructured text format. In these instances, people, events, and places must be unraveled from handwritten scripts and, if possible, subsequently linked and coupled to some form of mapping. In this paper, a database solution to handling primary source material is discussed that enables the original text and its translation to be ingested into the system and for people, familial relations, events, and images to be linked and queried in real time. In particular, the system connects these databases via toponyms to a tightly coupled mapping interface. The system enables thesauri of people's names and places to be created on-the-fly and allows levels of confidence to be assigned by the investigator to these matches. Full database and toponymic search and linking capability is enabled. In addition, a mobile application supports investigation in the field to access details in the databases at the same time as ingesting additional data and information in real-time to the system. Through the use of this dynamic database coupling and union to a map interface it is proposed that the system provides a powerful platform for use with primary unstructured source material and contributes to a deeper mapping and understanding of historical place.

In the spring of 1998, I began work on a history of air pollution control policy, focusing on new mechanisms of local control that more actively included representatives of the public. In Pittsburgh, these new possibilities for local activism had contributed to the rise of the Group Against Smog and Pollution (GASP) in 1969. When I went looking for archival documents that could explain the history, demographics, rhetoric, and strategy of this environmental advocacy group three decades later, I found only strangely scattered pieces. By the late 1990s the leadership of GASP did not know if any material had ever been donated to any local archive; they were several generations removed from the original activists, many of whom had passed on, left the cause, or moved to Florida. Over the next twelve years, I attempted to chase down the records of individuals and the group. I swooped in to claim and sort discarded garbage bags full of paper when the group moved offices, and pursued material that some activists had donated to a library (which did not have any provisions for archival storage) without the knowledge of the rest of the group's leaders (who did not know where the records had gone). The only point in time that all of the records I used to write my dissertation came together in one place, with professional archivists assessing, sorting, and organizing the material, was after I had finished the resulting book—thirteen years after the spring of 1998.1I take this experience as one piece of evidence that the archival records of environmental activism in the 1960s are only now becoming ripe for historians. After all, with the transformation in the archival status of GASP records over the last decade, I can safely say that the book I have just finished would be a very different one if I were to write it today. Simply acquiring and organizing the materials consumed most of my time in the dissertation research. Today, with the same materials now located in professionally managed archives, I could spend more time concentrating on the context in which this organization developed its political responses to changing legal and legislative opportunities. I would also have a significantly different perspective on these materials were I to encounter them as a chronologically or thematically organized set of records inside an archive. While these anecdotal observations feel logical, when I began discussing the point with other scholars I became unsatisfied with my own limited viewpoint. This article results from an attempt to test out these assumptions through journalistic interviews with archivists throughout the Mid-Atlantic region. In so doing, I hope to consider the ways that “archival power” has shaped, and will continue to direct, the future of environmental history in the Mid-Atlantic.2At this moment in the early twenty-first century, the archival records of the modern environmental movement are ripening for use, creating a unique opportunity for new work on the history of environmental politics and policy in the Mid-Atlantic region. These records can be divided into at least three categories, including the documentary evidence of government decisionmaking, the materials produced by environmental organizing in the public sphere, and the records of corporate actions and deliberations. While internal corporate records of the late twentieth century remain comparatively rare, archival records in the other two areas are evolving into a new era of availability. Just as new sources, emphases, and concerns have worked to transform the political history of the civil rights era and of the social revolutions of the long 1960s, these same forces could prompt significant change in the narrative of twentieth-century environmental history. Indeed, the future story of environmental politics and policy in the Mid-Atlantic region depends almost entirely upon the materials that are in the archives now or will be added in the years to come.3Understanding the ebb and flow of archival preservation allows us to understand both the histories that have already been written and those that might be possible only now. Along these lines, historian and theorist Michel-Rolph Trouillot has contemplated the “archival power” or ability of formal institutions to shape history in preserving it. “Archives assemble,” he writes, but “their assembly work is not limited to a more or less passive act of collecting. Rather, it is an active act of production that prepares acts for historical intelligibility.”4 Trouillot is rightly concerned about the silences produced by unquestioned reliance on the purity of historical production, but an active understanding of the process by which records come into archives can also extend our comprehension of the narratives that have, and have not, been told.In the case of environmental history, the impact of archival power on the historical narrative has created a significant silence concerning the political history of organizations and activists since the 1970s. Since a larger number of historians began writing about environmental concerns in the late twentieth century, the most attractive archival sources facing them were always about events predating the modern environmental era. The records of earlier movements and moments were always far more organized, accessible, and attractive to environmental historians than the comparatively inchoate records of the late twentieth century. This has obviously placed a constraint upon environmental history since its inception, a built-in aversion to writing the history of the politics and organizations of the modern environmental movement.However, this constraint on historical work may be changing, for three reasons. First, the records that are now becoming accessible in archives are the voluminous product of the post–World War II environmental era. The hallmarks of this period include expanding litigation and legislation, an increasing reliance on scientific expertise, and a proliferation of bureaucracies and agencies. All of these developments produced extensive documentation. New technologies of the information revolution—Xerox machines, IBM Selectric typewriters, and magnetic tapes—multiplied and expanded these sources into occasionally ridiculous mountains of jargon-filled 10,000-page reports, comprising what archivist Terry Cook has called an “avalanche of paper.”5 All of this awaits the bleary-eyed historian.Second, the material from the individuals and organizations comprising the modern environmental movement is itself just now becoming available. Apart from the bureaucratic reports of government agencies, the records of the environmental movement are more closely identified with individual activism and counterculture politics, and often consist of personal correspondence, mimeographed newsletters, and alternative newspapers that might not have made it into an archive through any official document-retention policy. Those historians who wish to work in this era must be part archivists themselves—the oral histories of the environmental actors and organizations have not necessarily been created, and many of the records of activists have yet to be guided into archives. This might mean that the political history of the modern environmental movement still awaits its scholar; it is not clear that anyone has successfully completed a synthesis of the nationwide movement based on the documentary records of environmental organizing, at least not since Sam Hays's formative Beauty, Health, and Permanence, published more than two decades ago.6Third, there is a possibility that the modern environmental era fits into a unique moment in the development of the archival materials of the twentieth century. Michael Dabrishus, one archivist interviewed for this project, called it a lens of availability, but another way to think of it is as a python that has swallowed a pig: bulging in the middle, but narrowing at either end.7 There was a proliferation in paper records appropriate for preservation after World War II, and then a post-1980s decrease in archived deliberative correspondence due to the rise of electronic media practices and the deleterious effects of open records laws. In other words, the records of the environmental era coincide with a several-decades-long bulge in useful archived materials. This is both good and bad news: there is a clear increase in bureaucratic, technocratic, and legalistic records that continues into the present, but by the 1990s any personal correspondence or reflection is less likely to be archived due to various constraints, making the signal-to-noise ratio among archived materials particularly troublesome for environmental historians.These observations concerning archives and the history of the environmental movement, of course, stem from my own experience as a researcher. However, the importance of the present moment for collecting the records of environmental activism also became apparent in interviews with archivists and librarians, as illustrated by a story from Michael Dabrishus of the University of Pittsburgh. The story concerns Wyona Coleman, an environmental activist who finished donating her materials to the archives by 2005. Dabrishus noted that these papers document a long career “committed to issues like refuse disposal [and] coal mining; [as well as her] position as a representative of the Sierra Club,” and that Coleman had been “collecting this stuff all of her adult life.” While these materials originated in decades of activism, as Dabrishus observed, Coleman is “now in her seventies or eighties and only now making the decision to conserve her collections.” Indeed, the timing of this archival donation seems to be a pattern with environmental activists. Before the institutionalized environmentalism of the 1980s, these activists often worked out of their own homes and kept their own correspondence, and it is therefore up to them to decide when or if to donate these materials.Similarly, Eben Dennis of the Maryland Historical Society observed that “there's a major problem with advocacy; those people aren't actively thinking about saving their materials,” as they are often caught up in the throes of the temporary crisis that might have brought them into environmental activism in the first place. This oversight is certainly understandable: Dennis, trained as an archivist, noted that while his own father was “general counsel for the Nature Conservancy for decades, and the basement [of his home] is filled with his papers,” it is still “ironic that I have not done anything with them.” Of course, he added, politically involved environmentalists are “very attached to [their papers] when they are active, but they're active throughout their lives, so they only come to donating the materials from earlier decades now.” Cheryl Oakes of the Forest History Society thought this timing makes sense: “that lag time—40 or 50 years—is about the time that you get for any event; it takes a while to get” any documentary records into archival institutions.There is an interestingly ambivalent story here. While some of the papers of the environmental era clearly are not making it into the archives, there are tantalizing examples of useful material for historians in the ones that are preserved. At the University of Pittsburgh's Archives of Industrial Society, the papers of the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy—a group with a hand in seemingly every regional environmental issue in the last fifty years—have only recently become fully accessioned. Similarly, John Suter of the New York State Archives reported significant success from an organized effort to encourage preservation of the records of environmental activism throughout the state, noting that the state has funded efforts “to concentrate on the Storm King controversy; that material is now all at Marist College—building it into a center of archived materials on Scenic Hudson in only the last five years.”8As a part of the same project, SUNY Albany has received funding to collect materials of local environmental organizing, resulting in significant collections from environmental activism in recent decades—for example, sizable collections of records from the Atlantic States Legal Foundation (120 cubic feet), the Citizens' Environmental Coalition (44 cf), Environmental Advocates of New York (91 cf), and New York City journalist Matthew Reiss's Urban Documentation Project (30 cf).9 At the Maryland Historical Society, the records of the turn-of-the-century Fresh Air Society of Maryland were a recent surprise donation, and were rushed to the top of the processing queue. As Eben Dennis noted, although “we have a ten to fifteen year backlog of unprocessed materials, the Fresh Air Society is a high priority because it fills an underrepresented gap in our collection.” Due to both increased donations and meaningful efforts on the part of institutions to collect environmental materials, the records of environmental activism thus might be more accessible and prominent for future scholars.Dennis's comment on the backlog of processing also indicates a complication: the moment that records of environmental activists might be coming into the archives is also a time of economic austerity for all. As Elizabeth Novara of the University of Maryland archives put it, “we have not actively been pursuing this area for numerous reasons, including reduction in staff and resources.” Similarly, Dennis noted that “at historical societies, we're chronically underfunded: we need to keep the lights on and keep patrons happy—and while we do limited outreach, we don't actively seek out collections.” This ill-timed financial pressure might make it unlikely that historical societies will be broadly successful in guiding the records of aging activists into archives at this time. Indeed, the late twentieth-century environmental movement was driven both by activists and by academics, and several archivists indicated concern that even the papers of these professionals were not being actively prepared or sought for preservation. Maryland State Archivist Ed Papenfuse lamented that “most major institutions don't pay attention to the working materials of their professors” and thus lose the opportunity to preserve the very work that takes place on their own campuses. Archival institutions are rarely top budget priorities, but the early twenty-first century is obviously a time of increased peril; it is simply ironic that records of the modern environmental movement are ripening at this precise moment.Another anecdote from my own research indicates the precarious nature of this transition period for the records of the environmental era. An important find for my project was a 1972 Allegheny County court case pitting the giant U.S. Steel Corporation against local governments and activists attempting to regulate emissions from the infamous Clairton Coke Works. However, gaining access to the primary documents in the case file was a byzantine nightmare as they were held by an obscure county row office intended to provide access for lawyers, not for historians. While I knew these papers existed, getting even a brief look at them took me years, and some scheming. I finally got a few days to read and take notes from these papers in 2009, but since then the county government office that holds them was renamed and reorganized. I recently contacted the office and have been told not only that this case file does not exist, but also that they do not track pre-1980 civil complaints, and that no files were donated to any archive. So the records related to a very important case in Pittsburgh's environmental history are missing in action. There is no guarantee that they will ever make it into an archive and every reason to think that they will not.10In comparison to Allegheny County and Pittsburgh municipal government records of the 1960s, the Pennsylvania State Archives appears quite a bit more organized, indicative of the type of state-mandated documents preservation schedule also evident in Maryland, New York, and Virginia. Nearly every public hearing on successive state environmental statutes in the last half of the twentieth century was collected in the Pennsylvania State Archives, and they preserve the names, organizations, and statements of the public in absolutely exhausting detail. While this is certainly commendable, it is also evidence of the near-overwhelming bulge in bureaucratic paper records. There are fewer records before the late twentieth-century information revolution and environmental legislation that required public hearings, produced lengthy impact statements, and spawned litigation. This mountain of useful and available paper reaches a peak by the early 1990s and then trails off. That peak is difficult for archives to handle, leading to some lag between donations and availability: the “bureaucracy of the twentieth century leads to massive collections—they take up space, and that costs money” to both process and store, Dennis explained. Because of those financial constraints, he notes, “we're still working on processing the masses of paper from the twentieth century.” John Suter from New York described how quickly these demands upon resources can appear, seemingly out of nowhere: “A few years ago, the Department of Environmental Conservation in New York moved their offices, and there was a sudden and intense interest on their part to donate materials to us.” The resulting massive donation demanded significant financial and logistical resources on very short notice.While the flood of paper records from bureaucratic sources is noticeable, the trailing-off of useful materials is also noteworthy. As Pennsylvania State Archivist David Haury said, since archivists now know that historians are interested in environmental matters, if records are not being collected “it's about business practices or electronic media.” In other words, agencies conduct a great deal of day-to-day business on email, but efforts to capture these correspondences are rarely attempted and generally difficult. Haury notes: “I think the shift became pronounced in the mid-'90s. Before then, you didn't have email—the documents were created on computers in the '80s, but then they were printed out and distributed on paper.” It is only with a 1990s-era increase in electronic-only distribution and correspondence that the paper records disappeared entirely. Archivists have been discussing this transition to what they call “born digital” records for quite some time, with both hope and trepidation. Ed Papenfuse of Maryland flatly declared the great fear of archivists and the problem for future historians: “There are no records management policies for email,” he observed, at least not in comparison to the extensive and established policies for paper records of government agencies. However, it is not just the shift to email that has had the effect of bleeding archives of significant records. As one archivist said, for currently operating government agencies, “anything that is pre-decisional or deliberative is not a public record. [Pennsylvania's] three-year-old right-to-know law excludes those, and requires access only to the final policy or action.” In other words, archives in the new century might lose the ability to preserve records that will be of particular use to historians of environmental politics and policy, even as the quantity of all archived materials increases.11This structuring of the archives does not change the fact that environmental topics are very much on the minds of individuals working in primary sources at this very moment. One Pennsylvania archivist noted that “we are totally inundated with researchers … interested in Marcellus shale—we have people going through William records to out for have been in our papers for looking to out rights Michael Dabrishus that like just this year to us some of their which had been kept new sources on are becoming including records on the of the History in Pittsburgh another transition in archives that will future noting that archivists are currently working to and records that might be of interest to environmental historians. used the records of the Allegheny on a business as an say that there an environmental the … been as an and so those not find it. this is a an environmental historian know said, the of to the as archivists what is already these collections might on the of environmental understand the likely impact of these ripening archives on future it is to consider the of the project of writing a political history of the modern environmental era. Hays's Beauty, Health, and is the work in the of the environmental politics of the late twentieth century, but its and archival can also us to understand the future of the It is a historians that Hays's in that work was to to the and of every environmental organization throughout the from the late on, and to use these sources to environmental and When he made for those to be in the University of Pittsburgh's archives, a for an expanding related to environmental history. It is to that Beauty, Health, and Permanence, which came out of a personal of future work will be based on materials organized and made accessible by That is to and future histories of the environmental movement will be based on archival much that has come and it is likely that the in sources will in new and concerns in the transformation is The of the records of twentieth-century organizations, and environmental activists is in the of the Environmental The Forest History Society a of environmental and are reported in the The Forest History Society notes both when archival collections of environmental concern are being made and also when are being as being of interest to environmental Since the is created by scholars who the available materials of archives, these occasionally collections.” As Cheryl Oakes of the Forest History Society noted, “it's one of the that we continue to at the archival because we always the even if the did These might continue to be by the archives even after the Forest History Society them the don't know that we're this to observed how scholars these materials, it is clear that increasing of records from recent environmental activism are becoming in the issue the archival noted the New York State recently papers of the Society from and the papers of the the University of Maryland an of papers from years of the Environmental and two related to the Maryland Conservation and the Maryland Environmental These materials extensive and for future scholars to write histories of environmental activism based upon of primary the is not all good as in the preservation of legal records both and the one the many to legal records on case law and any archival provisions for or archival Ed Papenfuse was particularly concerned about the future of case that is if there is any effort to and preserve those court and the is … the that there is any public is on the other the proliferation of of case law indicates case management like to and are all making the obscure legal records of the twentieth century available with the of a and and like it are to making records The is more legal records be for or will they simply be more numerous while to preserve useful most from this concerns the aging of the who or the modern environmental As the of World War II for example, one last to preserve oral histories and was to capture that In a it seems that now is the time to on the modern environmental movement, and to actively the records of that era into archives in a meaningful do is an act of environmental as well as an of Michel-Rolph “archival the records of environmental to environmental concern at a moment when new and this clearly to environmental historians. As Maryland State Archivist Ed Papenfuse put it, for the most part are of the they are not of the The people that the most in environmental topics aren't making the case for the preservation and of the archival It is clearly time for historians and other environmental scholars to make that

This is the first of a projected six or seven volumes of source materials on East-West and intersocialist trade. The contents of the first volume provide a basis for a preliminary judgment of the nature and quality of the collection, while the included list of headings for all the volumes gives a preview of the scope of the work. Vol. r opens with a small amount of foreign trade data, and then goes on to cover the topics of organization of economic and of equality and discrimination in those regulations. Topics to be included in future volumes include the foreign trade system, foreign trade contracts, industrial cooperation, intellectual property, financial relations, transport and dispute settlement. A brief foreword by the editor outlines the principles used in selection and editing. The basic subject is international economic relations of socialist countries (Albania, Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Mongolia, North Korea, North Vietnam, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia). Considerations of utility and limitations of space and cost have led to the exclusion of a number of types of material. Areas not covered include legislation of nonsocialist countries dealing with East-West trade; domestic law of socialist countries only indirectly connected with trade (e.g. general rules of copyright law); historical materials not reflecting the current legal situation; materials of a clearly non-legal nature. Primary sources such as laws and treaties have been preferred to secondary sources such as speeches and articles, though a number of the latter have been included where the primary sources were inadequate. An effort has been made to include mainly materials relatively inaccessible in law libraries; material included in other readily available sources will be the subject of references in the bibliography to be published in the final volume. A

Reviewed by: Argument and Change in World Politics. Ethics, Decolonization, and Humanitarian Intervention Lora Wildenthal Argument and Change in World Politics. Ethics, Decolonization, and Humanitarian Intervention. By Neta C. Crawford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. This book examines the role of ethical argument in decolonization. Neta Crawford recognizes the importance of other factors, such as economic interest, in this process. However, her main argument is that ethical arguments, especially regarding human equality and the rule of law (133), have played the most important role in the longue durée of decolonization, by gradually undermining the legitimacy of existing colonial practices. Even figures who did not oppose colonialism or unfree labor in all its forms can be seen to have advanced this process, as their contributions framed subsequent debates and thereby narrowed options for how — and ultimately whether — formal colonial rule could be advocated and justified. Crawford is, in a sense, supplying the historical counterpart of today’s international human rights regime, which functions through obtaining public, written commitments from states, thereby narrowing those states’ options for public positions on human rights issues and gradually weaving a web of accountability. It is refreshing that Crawford’s book focuses on the empirical content of specific cases, rather than the theory of social movements or the philosophical and legal foundations of human rights, which have received more attention in the scholarly literature. Along the way, Crawford offers an impressive and judicious synthesis of the best recent and classic work in colonial studies. A newcomer to colonial history could do worse than to read her middle chapters as an introduction to the entire topic of colonialism. There, Crawford lays out the main issues of colonial policy, criticism, and reform since the 1400s and in various parts of the world (mostly the Americas and Africa). She reminds the reader of the absolutely fundamental importance of slavery and other forms of unfree labor to the colonial enterprise, and that allows her to link antislavery thought to the broader stream of ideas that “denormalized and delegimated” (160) colonialism. She pays special attention to German Southwest Africa/Namibia, the Belgian Congo, the Philippines under U.S. rule, Pan-Africanism, and the end of Portuguese colonial empire. The book opens with two chapters that lay the groundwork for how arguments can be understood to bring about political change. Chapter one provides a typology of arguments (instrumental, identity, scientific, and ethical), and situates them in relation to “belief” and “culture.” Chapter two focuses on ethical argument and how it effects change by denormalizing and delegitimizing existing beliefs and practices; offering alternatives that fit better with existing ethical norms; and finally institutionalizing change, if the “balance of capabilities” (7) has indeed shifted toward those who are demanding change. Two concluding chapters, Chapters eight and nine, return to a similar level of abstraction, to consider how to weigh the importance of various factors in bringing about change, and how to put Crawford’s theory of ethical argument into political practice via Habermasian discourse ethics and, in practical terms, a proposed convention on humanitarian intervention. It is the middle chapters, Chapters three, four, five, six, and seven, that contain the historical material in support of Crawford’s thesis about the centrality of ethical argument. These middle chapters treat, in turn, the Iberian and other European debates of the 1500s about the humanity of Amerindians and the permissibility of forcing Christianity and labor on them; the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debates about plantation slavery and the slave trade in Africa and the Americas; the turn toward humanitarianism as a justification for colonialism, specifically African partition, in the nineteenth century; the interwar League of Nations mandate system; and increasing prominence in the twentieth century of the principle of self-determination, both before and after the rapid series of decolonizations in the 1950s and 1960s. Chapter six, on the mandate system, is the best of the historical chapters. Because of the paucity of scholarly literature on the mandate system, Crawford used primary sources, and the result is a better melding of her thesis and evidence than in the other middle chapters. The vast chronological and geographical span of her project means that she depends mostly on...

The article examines the policy of further strengthening mono-cultural focus in the Uzbek SSR, which involved measures to build large irrigation canals and pumping stations across the republic based on archival sources and historical materials. It reveals the process of land reclamation and irrigation, as well as the organization of districts and state farms in these areas, which were specialized in cotton-growing according to the principles of the Soviet government's cotton monopoly policy. The article also discusses the increased delivery of cotton to the center and its negative consequences, supported by primary historical sources. Additionally, the author studies the reclamation of virgin lands in Uzbekistan and the history of state farms established on these newly reclaimed lands.