Academic Historiography Research Articles

English Nationalism and the Study of the History of Anglo-Saxon England

The author in the presented article analyses the features and directions of development of English academic historiography, focused on the history of England before 1066, as a form of political memory. It is assumed that UK political elites do not pursue memorial politics in its classical forms. Therefore, the author notes that the role of a similar historical policy in Europe and in England is played by academic historiography.The purpose of the study is to analyse the role, place and significance of research focused on the history of Anglo-Saxon England in the context of the development of memory policy and memorial culture. The novelty of the research lies in the study of academic historiography as a form of historical policy in a society where there are institutions of memory and memorial laws.The article shows that 1) Anglo-Saxon narratives in modern memorial culture have become a form of nationalist historical interaction, 2) actors and agents of English politics are both historians and the intellectual community in general, since the ruling elites distance themselves from participation in the politics of collective historical memory, 3) Anglo-Saxon narratives in the historical general began to show interest in English cultural nationalism, since its political forms and dimensions are undeveloped.It is suggested that academic historians in modern England have become both important and forced participants in the politics of history, nationalizing history before 1066, drawing attention to the significance of the past in modern identity.The article shows that modern English historiography in the field of memory and memorial culture actually plays the role of a political expert and agent who shapes and promotes ideas about the past, instrumentalizing history as a political resource.

Doing History at the Edge of the Map: The “Digital Thrace” Research Project

Abstract “Digital Thrace: Mapping the History and Culture to Enhance the Tourist Economy” is a three-year (2021–2023) research project conducted by the Democritus University of Thrace. “Thrace,” a geographical rather than a regional or political designation, is divided into three nation-states (Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey). Despite historical nationalist conflicts and ethnic stereotypes, Thrace maintains its multicultural character. This article shows that the Digital Thrace Project not only generates research but also transforms it into knowledge and cultural experiences for visitors. It bridges the gap between academic historiography and cultural studies on one side and the public space on the other. This multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary project employs cutting-edge technologies to provide two main components to its users: a digital platform primarily aimed at researchers and educators, and a digital tour application for the general public. Special attention is devoted to the project’s pedagogical section. Based on the principles and methodologies of intercultural and democratic education, over 30 educational projects have been designed for primary and secondary school classes. These projects aim to engage students in exploring not only the history and culture of their own communities but also those of the others.

ANCESTRALIDADES

The current questioning of the practices, methods and episteme of human sciences in the Western world constitutes the background of this proposal for a radical revision of the conventional academic historiography of the northeastern booklet de cordel, as it was elaborated in the second half of the 20th century. The scripto and Eurocentric assumptions and dogmas of these cordel studies led to a distortion of their reality and history that made it possible to make invisible the fact that the cordel booklet was the product of the transition of the ars poetica of the ancestral world of orality to that of press technology and its capitalist western world. A new historiography of the cordel booklet is proposed, based on concepts – and their underlying assumptions – that animate nowadays the debates about the profound civilizational crisis that is shaking, at the threshold of the new millennium, the Western world and the basic epistemologies of its human sciences.

O afrykańskiej historii, znaczeniu teorii oraz edukacji historycznej w Nigerii. Z Olufunke Adeboye rozmawia Ewa Domańska

In this interview, conducted during the XXIII International Congress of Historical Sciences in Poznań (2022), Olufunke Adeboye (Professor of Social History at the University of Lagos, Nigeria) discusses the problems of decolonisation of African history, the relations between academic historiography and popular history, new trends in historical writing, the importance of theory for historical research, and the problems of historical education in Nigeria.

Teoria nie jest dla amatorów. Hugo Merlo rozmawia z Estêvão De Rezende Martins

In this interview, Professor Estêvão de Rezende Martins, an emeritus professor at the University of Brasilia, discusses his intellectual journey and research interests in the theory, philosophy, and methodology of history and historiography. The conversation delves into the development of historical thinking and consciousness, exploring how human existence is inherently historical and how individuals relate to their experiences through cognitive operations and historical culture. Moreover, the interview explores the evolution of the theory of history in Brazil, emphasising the shift from the speculative reflections of the philosophy of history to the meth-odological rigour of the theory of history or epistemology of history. The role of academic historiography in the face of contemporary challenges, such as the recognition of non‑human or post‑human planetary agencies, is also addressed. Martins discusses the diversification of his-toriography and its autonomy in exploring previously neglected topics, along with the need for historical education to empower individuals to think independently and critically in our border-less, globalised world. Ultimately, the interview sheds light on the ongoing theoretical experi-mentation in the field of history and the potential impact on historiographical practice in the future.

Javna i primijenjena povijest

The article presents key elements of public history. Firstly, it indicates the changes in contemporary historiography that enabled the emergence of public history, as well as its affirmation as a new historical sub-discipline and consequently its inclusion in university programmes. Secondly, it describes institutional development of public history from the 1970s onwards, and contemplates the still open question of its definition. In addition, the article presents the main highlights of applied history. Although applied history is often mentioned as an integral part of public history, it is worth talking about it separately, in order to highlight the practical dimension of history. This refers to history in practice and the possibilities of historians' work outside the academia and education. The article also presents controversies and criticisms provoked by public history and applied history and offers answers to them. The author argues that public and applied history can be a framework that enables historians to reconcile the professional needs and the audience's interests. He points out that it is important to take into account the relationship between academic historiography and the public. Lastly, the author discusses future perspectives of public and applied history, with an emphasis on local academic historiography. Considering the students' interest as well as that of a significant part of local historians, the author encourages discussion about a possible graduate studies in public history. Besides being an important challenge for academic historiography, the author concludes that public and applied history can also offer a great deal of practical skills to professional historians.

«Holodnaya vojna» v evropejskih uchebnikah istorii: praktiki kommemoracii i novye media

The article is a review of modern research on the representation of the Cold War in history textbooks of different countries of the world. A comparative analysis of video tutorials and textbook texts, practices of commenting on them and autobiographical memoirs of teachers raises the problem of heterogeneity of existing narratives and the need for reflection on the political component of these discussions. It is proved that academic historiography, memory studies and modern didactics presuppose the development of an analytical distance in relation to the past, including the exposure of myths and the binary opposition of freedom and slavery, individualism and collectivism, characteristic of the Cold War of1946-1991.

Arab States of North Africa: from the Ottoman Empire to the Colonial Empires of Modern Times

The modern history of the Northern Africa (Egypt and the Maghreb) was marked with the progress in transformation of the local social and political institutions with at the same a vast expansion of the Ottoman Porte and later of the West European powers. The Arab Maghreb which firstly became an object of the European aggression from Spain and Portugal in the 15th — 16th CC. later joined the Ottoman Empire together with Egypt. Morocco, however, managed to save its formal independence until the very beginning of the 20th C.A.D. With the European expansion in the 19th C. the Northern Africa turned into a field of colonial experiments: from the direct military occupation to the assimilation politics of the French departments in Algeria, with a later introducing the protectorate regimes in Tunisia and Morocco and transforming Egypt into a zone of strategic communications between the Great Britain and its colonies in Arabia and India. The civilization interaction within the Northern Africa during the colonial epoch brought to light, both in Europe and Russia, a numerous academic historiography, defining main trends in studying modern history of Egypt and the Maghreb area — the most important crossroads of the historical contacts between the peoples and cultures of the Orient and the Occident.

The Blister Club: The Extraordinary Story of the Downed American Airmen Who Escaped to Safety in World War II

The Blister Club: The Extraordinary Story of the Downed American Airmen Who Escaped to Safety in World War II

Aims in the practice of historiography: An interview study with Finnish historians

Many recent approaches to history education—such as those related to historical thinking, historical reasoning, or inquiry-based learning—have brought the practice of historiography (i.e. historical research and writing) to the center of learning about history. Students are to learn about how historical knowledge is constructed, and this is often pursued by instructional methods such as modeling or simulating expert historians’ practices in classrooms. In this paper, we approach historiography primarily as an epistemic practice that is shaped in part by (historians’) aims or goals. Understanding those aims can contribute significantly to our understanding of the historical inquiries that ensue. Yet education has not made these aims a central focus of research or instruction. Therefore, we explored academic historians’ aims in their practices of historiography. We interviewed 26 Finnish historians about their ongoing research endeavors. Our results display a range of aims in academic historiography, including general epistemological concepts (e.g. knowledge), dialogical aims (e.g., questioning existing ideas), textual products, dissemination (e.g., popularizing), bringing about societal change (e.g., influencing a sense of possibilities), connection to present, and emotions. These findings improve our understanding of the diversity of historiography as an intentional practice, and thus provide a better ground for developing the kind of history education that builds on historians’ practices.

Reconstructing the Uncertain Past: Cracked Docudramas That Question Their Own Authority

Reconstructing the Uncertain Past: Cracked Docudramas That Question Their Own Authority

Ghost of Colonies Past and Present: Spanish Imperialism in the Fiction of Benito Pérez Galdós by Mary L. Coffey

Reviewed by: Ghost of Colonies Past and Present: Spanish Imperialism in the Fiction of Benito Pérez Galdós by Mary L. Coffey Ana Mateos MARY L. COFFEY. Ghost of Colonies Past and Present: Spanish Imperialism in the Fiction of Benito Pérez Galdós. Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2020. 344 pp. In Ghosts of Colonies Past and Present, Mary L. Coffey contests the prevailing view that Spain systematically ignored the independence movements of its colonies in continental America until finally forced to acknowledge its diminished role in the new political configuration brought about by the independence of the last remaining overseas territories in 1898. Coffey attributes this opinion in large part to two "dominant explanatory paradigms" in historical studies (23). First, modern academic historiography, which first developed in France and Great Britain, privileged their own imperial histories, and neglected Spain's unique history, something still felt in the so-called imperial turn in today's academic scholarship. Second, guided by traditional historiographical paradigms, scholars have been looking for the wrong types of collective responses to the independence movements and thus have, for the most part, failed to appreciate a collective trauma in the works of nineteenth-century Spain's leading author, Benito Pérez Galdós, one that is of a completely different nature from the "disaster" of 1898 and which "historians might not always recognize" (22). Why should Galdós hold the key to Spain's engagement with its colonial past? Coffey's answer is clear: Galdós is significant not only as a fiction writer but also because his novels played an extraordinarily influential role in constructing modern Spain's national identity. The book offers an impressive and unprecedented journey through Galdós's enormous fictional output, which exhibits the writer's "lifelong engagement with Spain's imperial past" (4), and more specifically, the different forms that this engagement took on, depending on how tumultuous political changes variously affected Galdós's perceptions of the past. Particular attention is given to the writer's early and less studied works since, according to the author, they provide the fundamental framework in which his later fiction addressed Spain's imperial past and present. The six main chapters of the book alternate between general presentations, generally of better-known novels––occasionally, as with the novelas contemporáneas, focusing primarily on previous scholarly interpretations––and original close readings, generally of lesser studied novels. The Introduction, "Managing the Loss of Empire", analyzes the historical complexities and peculiarities of Spain's experience of the "imperial losses" of the 1820s, which not only made Spain the first European power to face the loss of its empire but also, as Coffey maintains, had an intense emotional effect that was felt in a psychologically idiosyncratic way. Coffey supports this central thesis, which draws on a Freudian framework, by appealing to two factors. First, Spaniards largely regarded Americans as part of the same Spanish family and implicitly viewed the wars of independence as "family quarrels." As in family quarrels, the early imperial losses were felt as incredibly profound, but also could not be immediately acknowledged or openly discussed (22). Thus, Coffey's main methodological approach is to look beyond the more immediate national discourse at the surface, on which scholars have traditionally focused, to an underlying imperial theme coded in allegories and metaphors and sometimes [End Page 239] interwoven with the stories of the secondary characters, less visible to the reader. In this coded language that says one thing on the surface but has another meaning at a deeper layer, Galdós found a way of dealing with a pain that was too profound to be directly confronted and accepted. Second, Spaniards did not experience the independence of the American territories immediately, mostly due to the censorship imposed by Fernando VII on news coming from overseas during the 1820s. Spain became aware of those changes after 1833, nine years after the 1824 battle of Ayacucho (37). This belated awareness softened the initial emotional impact of the imperial loss but enabled a decades-long awakening to a new political reality. It is not surprising, then, that fifty years after the Spanish defeat in Ayacucho, Galdós is still...

The Metaphysics of Historical Jesus Research: An Argument for Increasing the Plurality of Metaphysical Frameworks within Historical Jesus Research

In this thesis I examine the metaphysical presuppositions that influence modern academic historical Jesus research. I observe within the discipline a tendency to operate with the secular metaphysical presupposition to refuse to allow religious metaphysical presuppositions the opportunity to contribute to academic historiography, a tendency conceptualised in relation to the category of worldview (or Weltanschauung) as developed in the western philosophical tradition. The thesis is divided into two sections. In the first half of this thesis I lay a technical foundation by which I address the chosen topic. This involves careful and practical definition of the terms ‘metaphysics’ and ‘worldview’, whereby I define the latter in relation to the former. I define a worldview as a set of metaphysical presuppositions taken for granted when evaluating new information pertaining to the external world. I apply this category to the question of historical decision making, observing that historiography requires the historian adopt a worldview to make historical judgements. Thus, I distinguish between an historian’s worldview per se and the worldview they may adopt to undertake academic research, labelled an historiographical worldview. I then examine the phenomenon of secularism through the lens of three theories of secularization, concluding one might describe historical scholarship as secular if its historiographical worldview contains a metaphysical predisposition to refusing to allow religious metaphysical presuppositions to contribute to the historical task. In the second half of the thesis, having laid this technical foundation, I turn to modern academic historical Jesus research, understood as attempts undertaken within a higher education setting to apprehend the historical person of Jesus, beginning with Reimarus, until the present day. I examine the historiographical worldviews operative within the discipline by evaluating the extent to which its participants operate with the secular metaphysical presupposition that religious frameworks ought not to contribute to historiography. The first half of this task is taken up with a broad overview of this phenomenon within the quest, while the second half takes the critical realist approach of N. T. Wright as a specific test case and examines the extent to which this presupposition is manifest in Wright’s work. Between this overview of the quest and the detailed engagement with Wright, I claim secular metaphysical presuppositions significantly influence the quest for the historical Jesus, where its participants have refused to allow religious perspectives to contribute to the historical task. I conclude by outlining the implications of this argument for modern academic historical Jesus research: I invite the discipline to expand its notion of academic acceptability to include methods constructed within other (i.e., non-secular) metaphysical frameworks. I also offer suggestions regarding the shape Christian historiography might take as the result of further study on the matter, outlining a series of criteria such an historiography must fulfil to be both rigorously critical in its application and genuinely Christian in its metaphysical foundation.

Trianon in Popular History in Late-Socialist and Post-Transition Hungary: A Case Study

The main purpose of this article is to show how the changing dynamics of governmental memory politics and shifting institutional frameworks influenced the space for and type of discourses about Trianon in popular historiography in the decades spanning 1979 to 2010. I first introduce the way academic historiography addressed the issue of the peace treaty and its consequences. Second, I situate popular historical discussions about Trianon within the broader landscape of historical knowledge production. Analyzing publication patterns of História (1978) and Rubicon (1989), the two most widely read mainstream popular historical journals, complemented with a discussion of Trianoni Szemle, a journal established for the purpose of discussing this single topic, I reflect both on the journals’ (self-)positioning under changing currents and the intensity of governmental interest and control. As the centennial of the signing of the peace treaty draws near, such a case study provides an opportunity to observe symptomatic mechanisms of illiberal memory politics in juxtaposition to its authoritarian and democratic predecessors.

Miracles and Madness

This article analyzes the hagiographies, poems, oral traditions and miracle stories of an Islamic miracle worker (keramat) buried in Singapore named Sayyid Nuh ibn Muhd al-Habshi (ca.1788–1866). In his physical lifetime and beyond, he was described as a wandering ecstatic who adored children and burgled businesses, yet attained a reputation as “prophet” and keramat by performing miracles, healing the incurable and flying in and out of prisons and across the Indian Ocean. With appreciation for the historicity embedded in miracle stories, this article examines the Tamil devotional poems and songs, and the Malay hagiographies and oral traditions that commemorate this keramat. Attention is also paid to the historical concerns of his hagiographers, many of whom attempted to appeal to audiences informed by secularism, rationalism and “Wahhabism” by writing Islamic histories about this “Arab” Sufi master and the Sufi networks that operated in the Southeast Asian port city of Singapore at a time when it was dominated by western power. This article is thus concerned as much with the storytellers as with the miracle workers and members of devotional communities in nineteenth-century Singapore, all of whom are susceptible to being forgotten in academic historiography. By drawing upon ethnographies and newspaper reports about this prophet, saint, felon and “madman,” and discussing his mausoleum, which has remained intact in the face of war, colonialism and post-colonial infrastructural development, the article argues that the story of Sayyid Nuh is a history of Singapore Islam. A history that is interwoven with histories of the Indian Ocean, maritime Sufism, colonialism, capitalism and structural inequalities that were temporarily overcome by miracles. This is moreover a story of miraculous narratives, devotional cultures, social memories and sacral places that are often pushed to the margins of religious studies but refuse to “fade into folkloric oblivion.”

The Living Tree: Kr̥ṣṇā Sobtī’s Pre-Partition Punjab and the “Other History”

Historical fiction covers a wide range of texts and presents a large variety of views on the subject of history. It is often seen as a way of narrating history from a perspective ignored by academic historiography, thus offering an alternative narrative of the past. This other way of writing history, namely by way of literary texts, is not always conscious or openly acknowledged. In her essays on literature, the Hindi writer Kr̥ṣṇā Sobtī (1925–2019) clearly formulates her views on the role of the writer when she commits herself to represent the past, differentiating her role from that of a historian per se. Personally, as a writer, she is primarily interested in the perception of time of the people of a region and their understanding of their own past transmitted through tales, songs and other media; this constitutes what Sobtī calls the “other history”, a notion close to Jan Assmann’s “mnemohistory”. Through the example of Sobtī’s magnum opus, Zindagīnāmā, this paper explores what this specific way of narrating history reveals about the rural society of the pre-Partition Punjab.

1. TIMES OF THE EVENT: AN INTRODUCTION

ABSTRACTThis introduction sets the stage for the following contributions by outlining the current state of research on the two fundamental categories that this forum brings together: the event and time. In a brief survey, we discuss the ways in which the temporality of events has been theorized across disciplines. We also present our core argument for understanding the event as a temporal focal point. In dialogue with existing approaches, we seek to develop a theoretically enriched and empirically fruitful conceptualization of the event, thus offering new perspectives to the academic historiography of events as well as to historical culture at large.

Academic Historiography in Azerbaijan at the Crossroads of Time (1989-1991)

The scientific development in the USSR has come a long way. Despite all the obstacles posed during its formation and development, it has reached a reasonably high level by the mid-1980s. This achievement was mainly in the natural and technical sciences. The progress was determined by the USSR’s desire to keep the palm in space exploration, nuclear physics, petrochemistry, and other sciences of strategic importance for the country’s development. In these areas, contacts were established with world scientific centers and exchange of scientific achievements took place. As a result, Soviet scientists became winners of prestigious international awards, including the Nobel Prizes. As for the humanities and especially the social sciences, the dominance of Marxist-Leninist ideology and the corresponding interpretation of historical events significantly affected the development of Soviet sciences and reaching the world level quality. Until the mid-1990s, political history as an area of science of history, practically, did not exist. The “History of the CPSU” and the “History of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan” virtually monopolized the multifaceted nature of political themes, reducing it to the apologetics of the party history. Everything changed with the beginning of ‘Perestroika’ and ‘Glasnost’ (the officially announced publicity policy). As a result, the previously unknown pages of the past of the country and national republics became public. Almost every day, there were sensational publications of various authors published by popular magazines and newspapers, which also printed previously classified documents from historical archives. Traditional historical researchers and academicians were in shock. It was not easy for historians to abandon the 70-year-old account of history tied to ideological dogmas; the crisis associated with the loss of orientation was overcome with great difficulty and mainly by young historians. In the late 1980s, foreign historians, who studied the history of Azerbaijan, began visiting the country. Until that time, their existence was known only to a narrow circle of historians, who worked with foreign literature in specialized repositories of local and central libraries. For the first time, Azerbaijani historians left the USSR in 1990, when a conference was held at the University of London on the history of the South Caucasus. The event was attended by historians from Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia, as well as the so-called Sovietologists - scientists from Great Britain, the USA, and France. It is symbolic that in the same year in Moscow the last all-Union conference on political history was held. The event was attended by scientists from the Soviet republics, which declared independence the following year.

Martin Opitz (1597–1639), a Poet in the Diplomatic Service During the Thirty Years' War

The article is devoted to one of the greatest German poets of the Baroque era, Martin Opitz. Although during his lifetime he became one of the most honoured writers, poetry seldom brought him financial stability and independence, which he achieved thanks to his diplomatic service under various influential rulers of the Holy Roman Empire. M. Opitz never had a high diplomatic rank, usually holding the positions of an agent or a secretary, which, however, did not prevent him from often being in the thick of political events. Opitz's life spanned the years of the Thirty Years' War, which turned his life upside down. The article focuses on the problem of the influence of M. Opitz's diplomatic activity on the formation of his patriotic views and the development of the German national idea in his poetic works, thanks to which he became widely known. During his diplomatic trips, Opitz, by virtue of his pronounced artistic emotional perception of the events of the Thirty Years' War, tragic for the German lands, divided the world around him into “friends”, “Germans”, and “aliens”, i.e. enemies who sought, as the poet argued, “to enslave Germany.” The article evaluates the role of diplomatic activity in the life of Opitz in the formation of the specific phenomenon of German nationalism. The article is based on rare, only partially introduced into academic circulation historiography, where a special place is occupied by biographical materials, namely the private correspondence of M. Opitz, his first biography, compiled by a close friend Ch. Koeler, and the funeral sermon by the poet Jh. Rist.

A Victorian Wrenaissance: Historical Narrative at St. Paul's Cathedral

The condition of St. Paul's Cathedral was central to concerns about the perception of London over the course of the nineteenth century. Designed by Sir Christopher Wren, it faced public criticism from the start. Unlike gothic Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's was an eclectic amalgam of gothic and neoclassical architecture; its interior was never finished. Efforts to decorate were boxed in by the strictures of Victorian architectural revivalism. This is the story of how academic historiography resolved a problem that aesthetic and architectural theory could not. Throughout the century, cathedral administrators sought to improve the cathedral by borrowing tools from historians with varying success. In the 1870s, a solution emerged when historians reinvented the Italian Renaissance as a symbol of liberal individualism. Their revisionist Renaissance provided an alternative to pure gothic or neoclassical revivalism, able to accommodate Wren's stylistic eclecticism. Scholars have traditionally plotted disputes about St. Paul's within broader architectural debates. Yet I argue that these discussions were framed as much by historical discourse as aesthetics. Turns in Victorian historiography eventually allowed architects to push past the aesthetic limits of the Battle of the Styles. New methods in Victorian historical research were crucial to nineteenth-century experiences of urban space.