Early Historians Research Articles

The tale of two sisters

What damage is done to the psyche of children who are lied to about their origins? This is a unique tale of two half-sisters who were deceived about their blood relationship and its effect can still be felt today within the history of psychoanalysis. The key players within this drama that ended in the murder of Hermine Hug-Hellmuth are Antonia Hug (1894–1915), Hermine Hug-Hellmuth (1871–1924), Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Isidor Sadger (1869–1942), and Hermine's illegitimate nephew Rolph Hug (1906–?) who murdered her. The early historians of psychoanalysis declined to mention her (Jones, 1953; Gay, 1988). We are indebted to Graf-Nold (1988) and MacLean and Rappen (1991) who have brought to our attention that Hermine Hug-Hellmuth was the first Viennese child psychoanalyst who made a remarkable contribution to understanding the psyche of women and children.

Endocrinology's early historians (1889-1914) and the forgotten prehistory of testosterone.

An often-retold historical outline of endocrinology was established over a century ago. An exhaustive history of sexual physiology remains forthcoming, however. To explore and contextualize the remarkable medical-historical and medical-anthropologic frenzy triggered by Brown-Séquard's 1889 self-injections with testicular juice, which ultimately settled down into an early history of endocrinology. Pertinent primary sources were selected from a broader study, primarily between 1889 and 1914, as well as selected older texts identified and unidentified by these sources. Endocrinology's early historians in a short space of time moved from the history of testicular opotherapy to that of glandular typology and physiology and to increasingly encompassing medical-historical accounts of internal secretion as an epochal idea. Early historians nominated "precursors" to Brown-Séquard but underestimated physiologic continuities-specifically, early modern protoendocrinologic notions concerning semen as a "recrement," notions still recited by Brown-Séquard and early Brown-Séquardists as well their detractors. Brown-Séquard himself worked through this old (recremental) concept of semen between 1889 and 1892 but was later identified with it, by among others Ancel and Bouin. Western sexual physiology is a medical palimpsest, the undertexts of which remain to be studied in detail.

The Transition of the Caliphate from the Umayyads to the Abbasids and Ṭabarī's Approach to what happened during the Abbasid Revolution

The way Islamic historians handle the change in Islamic history is just as significant as how the caliphate changed hands from the Umayyads to the Abbasids. To demonstrate their knowledge of historiography and whether they are impartial in the face of history in this setting, Islamic historians' approaches or perspectives on this subject are crucial. Our research focuses on how the caliphate was evaluated by Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad b. Jarīr al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923), recognized as an authority in Islamic history relating the developments over the transition period from the Umayyads to the Abbasids. Our objective is to identify Ṭabarī's historical perspective, influencing historians who came after him and all Muslims in light of the change in authority. No other study's content has mainly addressed the topic we include in our report. The methodology of our research is to make use of the aforementioned historian's Tārīkh al-rusul wa'l-anbiyāʾ wa'l-mulūk wa'l-khulafāʾ, Akhbār al-rusul wa'l-mulūk, or Tārīkh al-Ṭabarī, which is more commonly used today and translated into Turkish as Tārīkh al-Ṭabarī. The political conflict between the Abbasids and the Umayyads, who were fierce competitors before Islam, resumed during the caliphate of Uthman after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, especially Hazrat Uthman. With the death of Hazrat Ali, the Umayyads seized the caliphate and converted it into a reign. The Abbasids, who claimed that the caliphate had its own rights while accusing the Umayyads of taking the caliphate and engaging in non-religious practices, violently overthrew the Umayyad state in 750 and turned to non-religious practices like beheading prominent members of this family and even setting their graves on fire. It is probable to argue that al-Ṭabarī, who lived during the Abbasid period, did not examine the transition and form of power in question objectively, but rather displayed a pro-Abbasid view. For instance, he does not mention of atrocities like the Abbasids' sword-based massacre of the Umayyads or their removal of some of the corpses and subsequent burning. The fact that the mentioned historian lived around the time of the Abbasids, who were enemies of the Umayyads, and produced his work during this time strongly suggests that he supported an Abbasid stance. Likewise, at this era, as in the case of the -Mihna- example, a historian would be persecuted or even punished by the current political administration if they believed that the Abbasids and the Umayyads were equally right in their political fights or if they praised the Umayyads. As a result, this period, which encompasses the first two centuries of Islamic history and can be referred to as the first period of Islamic history, has been touched upon by taking into account the perspectives of early Islamic historians, and the events that occurred have been analyzed. This indicates that absolute objectivity in historiography is nearly unattainable, because historians, whether directly or indirectly, were influenced by the religious-political structures dominating at the time. It has been found that al-Ṭabarī, an essential early historian, stated events under the influence of the Abbasid state, the dominating force during his day.

The Popular Preachers and Storytellers (Quṣṣāṣ) – The Earliest Historians, Exegetes, and Legal Specialists in Islam

Popular preachers and storytellers (quṣṣāṣ; sg. qāṣṣ) appeared towards the middle of the first/seventh century and quickly became the earliest informal historians and exegetes in Islam. Before long, the Umayyad caliphs recognized the political impact of their sermons and institutionalized preaching and storytelling (qaṣaṣ) as a state office. Notwithstanding this fact, informal qaṣaṣ did not vanish altogether, sometimes giving voice to pious discontent with the ruling dynasty. In the present study, I demonstrate that during the Marwānid period qaṣaṣ was combined with judgeship and other official positions. A comparison with documentary sources suggests that during the same period the term qāḍī (judge) was not yet used, and it may have been retroactively grafted onto the Umayyad past by early ʿAbbāsid historical literature. Literary sources also imply the existence of regional hierarchies of quṣṣāṣ. During the second/eighth century, qaṣaṣ lost its significance to the professional collection and transmission of traditions (ḥadīth) for the needs of Islamic jurisprudence and exegesis. Ḥadīth transmitters and critics eventually came to dismiss the quṣṣāṣ with contempt and derision.

The penguins that wouldn’t explode: Accidental rewilding, militarized landscapes, and post-conflict islands

“Rewilding” is an increasingly influential concept, though the widespread, if unplanned, rewilding that takes place in “no man’s land” or demilitarized zones has received limited attention from environmental historians, and none at all from historians of islands. When former military bases or conflict areas are opened up to development and tourism, the continued presence of the new non-human residents poses both opportunities and challenges. This article will consider two late twentieth-century examples, Quemoy and the Falklands, where the classic traits of insularity—the natural limit of resources and the geographical separation from the mainland—were compounded by the presence of minefields and stringent military control, permitting the emergence of an insular military ecology. The later discovery of the “rewilded” areas by journalists, nature writers, and companies promoting tourism invited reflection on the ability of nature to regenerate and on the larger meanings of post-conflict landscapes. Islands figure here, once again, as sites of the production of knowledge and as opportunities for experimentation, yet in ways which differ from the examples considered by earlier historians of islands.

From Idols to Icons: The Emergence of Christian Devotional Images in Late Antiquity by Robin Jensen (review)

Reviewed by: From Idols to Icons: The Emergence of Christian Devotional Images in Late Antiquity by Robin Jensen Katherine Marsengill Robin Jensen From Idols to Icons: The Emergence of Christian Devotional Images in Late Antiquity Oakland: University of California Press, 2022 Pp. xv + 244. $65.00. Robin M. Jensen's latest monograph on the emergence and development of Christian images over the first six centuries c.e is a clear and informative presentation on an important topic. Across eight chapters, Jensen describes the rise of Christian art within a culture filled with images of the gods and the tension in the endeavor of church authorities to deny or justify the use of images in their own religious environments. Jensen begins with essential historiography, reasserting what scholars over the last few decades have come to understand: contrary to early historians like Edward Gibbon and biased churchmen of the Protestant Reformation who misinterpreted the earliest Christian writings, early Christians were not, in fact, categorically anti-art, nor aniconic; they did not adhere to nor cite Hebrew Bible/Old Testament law, nor follow a perceived Jewish precedent. Jensen goes through the early texts condemning idols, clarifying the nature of the apologiae on worshiping false gods. Early Christians objected to idolatry on the grounds that pagans worshiped non-existent deities and thus, by default, worshiped man-made objects fashioned out of stone, wood, and metal. Idols were images of beings who did not exist, or, if they had existed, were regular people, long-dead, and mistakenly elevated to divine status out of misguided fondness or grief. Although rife with hyperbole and simplifications of pagan practices, the apologiae were aimed at persuading Christians about the danger of engaging with paganism and its associated vices. Arguments against worshiping images of the gods were not uniquely Christian, since non-Christian philosophers of the second and third centuries also recognized [End Page 255] the dilemma. Jensen's discussion of the matter provides larger context for a belief system that imagined a divide between the physical and spiritual worlds and the supremacy of an invisible and incomprehensible deity who could not be represented. Some early Christian writers did indeed shun images, believing that the physical world did not find parallels in the spiritual world and thus that representations of it had no use as substitutes for spiritual things. And yet, as Jensen reminds us, early Christians did have images. Surviving examples date to the early third century, while texts point to possibly earlier images. By the fourth century, Christian pictorial art was displayed in churches, shrines, baptistries, tombs, and private homes, despite some protestations. One justification can be found already in ancient Greek and Roman texts: images of the gods provided the means for the less sophisticated to worship their gods. Images were meant to honor them and to inspire worship but were not meant to be "portraits" of them. Defenses of Christian images well into the fifth and sixth centuries often have similar arguments, claiming that images are useful for instruction, especially for those who needed visualization to aid them in mental contemplation. However, as Christian authorities noted, from Eusebius to Iconoclasm-era writers, a confusion between the image and that which was represented was to be avoided. Jensen then explains how Christians admitted into visual art the representation of the invisible divinity in the form of Christ. Hebrew Bible/Old Testament encounters with an otherwise invisible God could be understood in Christian terms and depicted in art if one recognized these appearances as the divine Logos and pre-Incarnate Word—Christ—whose Incarnation made the divinity visible to humans. This fundamental shift valued seeing with one's bodily eyes as a means of obtaining knowledge of God. Christian art transformed from symbols, to standardized figures placed in abbreviated biblical scenes, to portraits of Christ and the saints believed to be based on real appearances. This brings the reader to the advent of two-dimensional Christian portraiture (icons) in the fourth century and the accompanying criticism by church authorities of congregants who may have been too adoring of such images. Jensen describes the various contexts in which such portraits would have been found—at tombs, at martyria, and...

The Jewish ‘monopoly’ of the slave trade in the early Middle Ages: the origins of an enduring historical motif

ABSTRACT Phelan examines the evidence to support the claim that the assertion that Jews played a leading role in the slave trade in the period following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire originated with the work of a number of late nineteenth-century historians, particularly Heinrich Graetz and Wilhelm Roscher. He finds prior examples of this historical motif in the work of several earlier historians, and traces its origins back to the Henry Hart Milman’s History of the Jews published in 1829. His article demonstrates that Milman’s work was widely known and used throughout the nineteenth century, and examines the reasons behind the emphasis in his work on the mutual antagonism between Christians and Jews. Phelan then goes on to examine the adoption of this motif by late nineteenth-century Jewish writers, including the historian and folklorist Joseph Jacobs, and its appearance in standard reference works like The Jewish Encyclopaedia. He concludes with some reflections on the reasons for this surprising development, as well as some suggestions about the reasons for the renewed interest in this topic among historians in recent years.

Was There a Jerusalem School of Modern Jewish Politics? A Case Study in the Organization, Construction, Production, and Limits of Knowledge

This article examines how two central scholars based at the Hebrew University's Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Jonathan Frankel, and Ezra Mendelsohn, conceived, created, and codified the academic sub-field of modern Jewish politics. The article begins by discussing studies by earlier historians of the Jews like Salo W. Baron, Shmuel Ettinger, and Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi whose work often touched upon the intersection between Jews and politics. While Mendelsohn and Frankel's research was based upon key concepts developed by these scholars, their focus on the centrality of Jewish agency, the role of the Jewish intelligentsia, and the turn to "the (Jewish) people" helped create a new scholarly framework for imagining, analyzing, and researching modern Jewish politics. Despite their many achievements, they both overlooked several important topics in modern Jewish history including the role of religion, the activities of Jewish women, the experiences of Jews in North Africa and the Middle East, and the impact of Jewish politics on the Palestinians. By examining how these topics are dealt with in more recent works, the penultimate section in this article points to both the continuing influence of Mendelsohn and Frankel's scholarly paradigm as well as some of its inherent limits. In doing so, this analysis of modern Jewish politics makes for an intriguing case study regarding the organization, construction, and production of a particular field of knowledge while simultaneously raising critical questions regarding the very nature, limits, and future of Jewish studies.

Did the Early Historian Simonides of Ceos Ever Exist?

Did the Early Historian Simonides of Ceos Ever Exist?

Роль и место исторической науки в интеллектуальном наследии Арабского Востока VII – XII вв.

Introduction. The article examines the problem associated with the development and formation of medieval Arab-Muslim historical thought. Due to the fact that in domestic historiography there is no single approach and opinion in determining the role of historical science in the intellectual heritage of the medieval Arab East, this topic remains relevant. Based on the analysis of the works and statements of the early Arab scholars themselves, the author quite rightly came to the conclusion that the early Muslim “intelligentsia” approached the study of history with great trepidation and considered history an independent science worthy of study and development. Materials and methods. The study analyzes the works of early historians such as Ibn Ishaq, al-Tabari, al-Balazuri, al-Mas'udi, etc. The work uses the principles of historicism and objectivism and systemic analysis. Methods such as comparative historical and problem-chronological were used. Analysis. In the early Middle Ages, in the Arab-Muslim environment, historical science developed in several directions. An important place in it is occupied by such a genre as “genealogy”. The next no less important direction is such a direction as “Significant days of the Arabs”. A special place is occupied by “Sira” - the biography of the Prophet. Then follow the stories of kings and rulers and military-political achievements. Results. This article notes that already in the early Middle Ages in the Arab environment, history began to emerge as a separate science, making its rather significant contribution to the intel-lectual heritage of the Arab East. Medieval Arab scholars attached great importance to the collection and study of historical facts. Oral traditions, preserved in popular memory, are immortalized in the manuscripts of early Arab historians. The study of this intellectual heritage is of great interest to science today.

Bernard Bailyn's Barbarous Modernity

Bernard Bailyn's Barbarous Modernity

The Mexican Mission: Indigenous Reconstruction and Mendicant Enterprise in New Spain, 1521–1600

Almost three hundred mission church-monastery complexes were built in central Mexico from the fall of the Aztec Empire in 1521 to 1600. What did this extensive construction campaign signify? Early historians viewed it as a sign of mendicant zeal: Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians expanding into ever more Indigenous communities and gaining converts along the way. Revisionists rejected this narrative’s triumphalism and instead argued for continuities in Indigenous religion, emphasizing native adaptation of Christianity to fit Mesoamerican religious frameworks. Crewe challenges both interpretations by viewing the Mexican mission as a political and social project more than a religious one. He explores why Indigenous communities invested so much labor in building churches (for it was the Indigenes who actually built them) and how the missions were staffed and funded rather than the ways Indigenous peoples translated Christianity into a Mesoamerican context. This focus results in a set of interrelated arguments that center socially stratified Indigenous communities as primary agents in the missionary endeavor.First, conversion was more a political than religious act. The Native population soon learned that baptism offered a modicum of protection from colonialism’s worst abuses. Spanish conquerors enslaved recently defeated Indigenous populations to profit quickly from their victories. Spanish law, however, prohibited enslavement of Christian subjects. Moreover, missionary friars, though they demanded labor and tribute from their Indigenous flocks, tended to protect them from the settlers’ excesses. Conversion therefore granted Indigenes some defense against colonial demands.Second, mission church construction served to reconstitute Indigenous community in the face of Old World epidemics that killed over 90 percent of the Mesoamerican population during the sixteenth century. Three devastating plagues—in 1521, 1545, and 1576—each killed over a third of the Indigenous populace. Because of this, Native elites began mission-building projects. In fact, the most active construction period began in the 1550s despite population decline. Indigenous elites saw mission building as a way to reassert community identity. The mission church functioned similarly to the precontact teocalli, or temple, which had been the physical manifestation of the altepetl (pl. altepeme), or Indigenous city-state. But the friars had destroyed the temples early in their evangelization. The mission church took over the teocalli’s role as representation of the altepetl by mid-century, and Indigenous elites used churches to reinforce altepetl identity in the face of devastating loss.Third, Native elites built mission churches to proclaim altepetl independence from other city-states. The altepetl was the fundamental Mesoamerican unit of sociopolitical organization, and the Aztec Empire had subjugated hundreds of them. Once the empire fell, altepeme vied with one another for dominance. Friars contributed to these political maneuvers by establishing their first missions in the largest altepeme. This, however, effectively subordinated other city-states to the religious authority and labor demands of the mission altepetl. In part, the spurt of mission building starting in the 1550s reflects the desire of Native elites to assert their independence.The wave of mission expansion ceased by the 1580s. Although Native elites had used church building to reconstitute Indigenous community in response to colonialism and disease, the epidemics at the century’s end decimated the population such that church building was no longer feasible.Crewe offers a fascinating and innovative interpretation of Mexican missionary history that foregrounds Indigenous agency. The book is richly researched and clearly written and presents more arguments than can be addressed in this review. I do think Crewe underestimates the significance of religion in mission building, but he correctly points out that many have addressed this topic already. Crewe’s contributes significantly to the historiography, and scholars of colonial Latin America will welcome his work.

Gender, race, and the status of household labour in Lucy Maynard Salmon’s Domestic Service (1897)

ABSTRACT Lucy Maynard Salmon’s book, Domestic Service, aimed to change the terms of the ‘servant question’ at the end of the nineteenth century by treating it as a serious economic and labour issue, worthy of scientific investigation. This article explores three key analytical contributions Salmon made to answering the question: how did domestic work come to be uniquely stigmatised in the context of the United States? I argue that her answer reveals an innovative analysis of social relationships as they relate to industrialisation, an early constructivist position on gender, and an illuminating tracking of the construction of racial difference and boundary making—the making of whiteness in particular—in the early Northeastern United States. By highlighting the analytical dimensions of Domestic Service, this article builds on the work of feminist historiographers who have shed light on Salmon’s importance as an early social historian. Additionally, I draw on the insight of contemporary scholars of paid and unpaid household labour to suggest that understudied threads of her often-cited book extend Salmon’s interdisciplinary relevance.

Privileged Precariat: White Workers and South Africa’s Long Transition to Majority Rule by Danelle van Zyl-Hermann

<i>Privileged Precariat: White Workers and South Africa’s Long Transition to Majority Rule</i> by Danelle van Zyl-Hermann

Review: West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire, by Kevin Waite

The past decade has seen a major shift in the historiography of slavery. Thoroughly demolishing a century of Lost Cause revisionism, recent works by Walter Johnson, Edward Baptist, Sven Beckert and others have argued that southern slavery in the nineteenth century was no relic of a pre-modern age and was instead inextricably linked to the emerging global capitalist order. Southern elites are recast from reactionary states’ rights zealots to savvy nationalists tilting U.S. federal policy to their economic advantage. In his first book, Kevin Waite adds to this literature by shifting focus to the Far West, arguing for the existence of an expansionist continental South dedicated to international trade and maintaining various forms of unfree labor. Waite contends that the sway of pro-slavery politics extended to the Pacific coast, challenging the notion that the American West was somehow united against slavery.Waite breaks from earlier historians by urging readers to look beyond Bleeding Kansas for explanations on how westward expansion contributed to sectional dissolution. Instead, he adds a new region, the Desert South, to the historical framework of “many Souths.” Comprising Southern California, New Mexico, and Utah, the Desert South was a site where southern support for chattel slavery merged with local desires to preserve other forms of race-based coerced labor, including captive Native labor and lifelong debt peonage. Waite insists that southern lawmakers’ push for federal transportation projects (designed to link the South with Asian markets) merged with pro-slavery separatist movements in the West to hasten the arrival of the Civil War. Despite vain attempts to secure a southern railroad route and the political blunder of southern secession, the collaboration between southern and western politicians later achieved a remarkable postbellum revival.Waite’s scope is unusually ambitious for a debut. He begins by demonstrating how antebellum southern politicians utilized their influence within the federal government and exploited patronage networks in the favor of the planter class. Section two shifts focus to the West, examining local office holders who adapted pro-slavery politics to their own regional contexts. For instance, California Democrats sought to overturn the state’s free-soil constitution, New Mexico legislators passed an 1859 slave code, and Utah legalized slavery in 1852. Section three posits the Desert South as a theater of the Civil War where various separatist plots stoked a popular backlash, leading to the rise of the once floundering Republican Party in the West. The section ends with western Democrats’ postwar comeback, as white solidarity against the region’s diverse population of Natives, Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Hispanos—combined with antipathy towards an expanding federal government—helped fueled the demise of Reconstruction on a national level.Waite is a writer of unusual clarity, and his book is an accessible contribution to the new slavery historiography as well as the growing literature addressing linkages between free and unfree labor systems in the West. None of the information he provides is necessarily new, but he consistently reads his source material in fresh ways. Similarly, elements of his argument will be familiar to readers of earlier works by such historians as Richard White and David M. Potter, but no writer has so forcefully elucidated why the slave South cast such a long shadow in the Far West.

Lives of the Brothers of Syon Abbey: Patterns of Vocation from the Syon Martiloge and Other Records ca. 1415-1622

This paper is part of a major prosopography project which is nearing completion. The project traced around 600 sisters, brothers and benefactors of Syon Abbey ca. 1400-1600. Their names were recorded by the community in three obit lists: the Cambridge obit list ca. 1451 was copied into the second, the Syon Martiloge (BL Add MS 22285), in the 1470s. The third was copied from the Martiloge in Lisbon ca. 1608. The Lisbon obit list contains new information unused by earlier historians. Five lists of names provide snapshots of the community in 1428, 1539, 1557, 1587 and 1622. Short biographies based on other sources reveal family background, social status, education and book ownership. Collectively they tell the story of Syon Abbey's first two centuries. This paper is about the Syon brothers: 164 have been traced and their names are all published here. St. Birgitta of Sweden (1303-1373) founded her Order of St Saviour for nuns as part of a wider movement for reform and renewal in the late medieval church. The Birgittines spread rapidly in northern Europe ca. 1400. Each Birgittine monastery had a house for up to 60 sisters living enclosed contemplative lives and a smaller house for 25 brothers. Their role was to provide the sacraments for the sisters and the community’s patrons and pilgrims. Syon Abbey was the only Birgittine house in England, founded near London by the Lancastrian king Henry V in 1415. It went on to commemorate the Yorkist and Tudor dynasties and had links with the Stuarts. It was important for its proximity to royal power during the Hundred Years’ War, the Wars of the Roses and the Reformation. The Birgittines of Syon Abbey were renowned for their holiness and learning and their resistance to Henry VIII’s Reformation. Syon priest St. Richard Reynolds was martyred at Tyburn in 1535 and Lay Brother Thomas Brownell in Newgate Gaol in 1537. Syon was dissolved in 1539, but the Birgittines divided into groups and continued to follow the Rule, some in exile. In 1559 the whole community went into exile, enduring poverty and warfare in the Low Countries and France. Two sisters died in prison and three brothers were captured by pirates before settling in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1594. Syon Abbey was significant in forging English Roman Catholic identity and inspiring the revival of religious orders in Europe. Scholars have made two main assumptions about the brothers which are countered by prosopographical analysis: firstly medieval Syon attracted steady numbers from foundation by Henry V to dissolution by Henry VIII; secondly numbers declined rapidly from 1539 until they died out in the 1600s. The early death of the founder, and Henry VI’s transfer of patronage elsewhere reduced funding and prestige. Recruitment dwindled until Edward IV refounded Syon in 1461. Medieval Syon’s fame is based on the achievements of the Yorkist era. There were fewer brothers after 1539 and fewer sisters, but the brothers were vital to Syon’s survival as a house of enclosed nuns. In St. Birgitta’s Rule the brothers were 30% of the community. At Syon they reached ca. 20-25%, 1420-1594. After 1600 the brothers continued their work as ca. 10% of the community until 1695.

Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust by Natalia Aleksiun

Reviewed by: Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust by Natalia Aleksiun Helene Sinnreich (bio) Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust By Natalia Aleksiun. London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2021. 329 pp. Natalia aleksiun's new monograph, conscious history: polish jewish Historians before the Holocaust, makes the compelling case that through an examination of the early historians of Polish Jewry, one gains an understanding of Jewish experience in the Second Polish Republic. According to Aleksiun, this is because not only were these scholars formed by the time in which they wrote and lived, but also that as scholar-activists they helped shape interwar Polish Jewry. Aleksiun begins and ends her analytical volume with storytelling, which wraps herself and contemporary scholars of Polish Jewry into the long history of Polish Jewish historians, which she canonizes in her important contribution to the field. She brings readers on a journey of the evolution of professional writing about the history of Polish Jews, starting with her chapter "Historical Beginnings," in which she provides a rich history of the scholars who preceded and influenced the post-World War I community of university-educated Jewish historians. This early group "embraced history as an important political and cultural tool for improving the status of the Jews and for strengthening communal self-awareness" (61). Aleksiun then introduces us in the aptly named chapter "The Making of Professional Polish Jewish Historians" to a new cohort of scholars, the main focus of the volume, whose university training led to their professional approach to the field of Polish Jewish history. They rejected Jewish apologetics and embraced "the creation of a national Jewish historiography in accordance with academic standards of critical scholarship" (63). As scholars in a freshly emerged state where nationalism helped forge the historical narrative being formed in Polish universities, these scholars created a place for Polish Jewry in the new national narratives. However, as Aleksiun informs, even as these academics saw themselves as part of the academic project of national history formation, their marginal status as Jews made placement in university positions difficult. This led these men to take positions in the public sphere and disseminate their conceptions of Polish Jewish history into the wider Jewish community. In their roles [End Page 206] as teachers, journalists, and religious leaders, they imbued those within their sphere of influence with their conception of collective Polish Jewish identity. They created curricula for Jewish schools; they discussed their conceptions of the history of Polish Jewry from the pages of newspapers and pulpits. As a result, these historians became extremely important in the formation of Jewish Polish identity in interwar Polish Jewish communities. As Aleksiun notes, Polish Jewish history, which was studied almost exclusively by Jews, ended up influencing those Jews and the members of their community. Aleksiun grapples with "the questions raised by historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, probing within the Polish context his idea that in modern times a secularizing and consciously Jewish intelligentsia takes on history-writing as a profoundly Jewish act" (11–12). These scholars became Jewish actors on their communities. Ultimately, however, it was these same Jewish historians equipped in university settings with the tools of professional historians who set to work to write the first histories of the Holocaust in Poland. In ghettos, in hiding, and in occupied cities, they compiled the documents utilized later to tell the story of their community's devastation. They composed the first narrative and analytical histories of Jewish experience during the Holocaust. Ultimately, many died during the war, but as Aleksiun informs in her "Epilogue," their work lives on as a deep influence on those writing on the Jews of Poland today. [End Page 207] Helene Sinnreich Helene Sinnreich is director of the Fern and Manfred Steinfeld Program in Judaic Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is a scholar of Jewish experience during the Holocaust and European Jewry. Sinnreich serves as the coeditor in chief of the academic journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Oxford University Press) and was the founding editor of the Journal of Jewish Identities (Johns Hopkins University Press). Sinnreich obtained her PhD and MA from...

Religious, Intellectual, and Cultural History

Abstract Inspired by Merry Wiesner-Hanks’ What is Early Modern History? chapter on religious, intellectual, and cultural history, this reflection considers the current state of these three subfields. It advocates for early modern historians to expand their bounding of religion beyond Christianity and Europe. It is also a call to extend the list of agents credited with the production of science, Enlightenment, and “culture.”

A trove for historians of Africa: reflections from the International Studies Group and research associates

Trove opens possibilities for collaborative, transnational and comparative research from scholars in the Global South, who often work with limited financial resources. Indeed, Trove has been indispensable for the South African-based historians in the International Studies Group, who would otherwise face difficulties accessing Australian primary sources. It also enables Australian perspectives to be incorporated into African histories, fostering the emergence of new historical insights. However, mass digitisation has the potential to create an unevenness in transnational history by privileging certain connections, particularly between British settler colonies. These reflections will offer crucial perspectives from a network of early career historians outside Australia.

The Legacy of the Numerus Clausus One Hundred Years On

The Legacy of the Numerus Clausus One Hundred Years On