Development Of Historiography Research Articles

Jan Hus in English Language Historiography, 1863–2013

ABSTRACT This historiographical article seeks to delineate the main sources and trajectories of interpretation over a 150-year period that has shaped the understanding of Jan Hus in the Anglophone world. The article also assesses the scholarly value of the major writings that have appeared. The evaluation is intentionally limited to books written wholly or largely about Hus while recognizing that a handful of scholars have made serious or important contributions in ways other than producing a monograph. The author argues there is a serious lack of historiographical awareness in the English-speaking world around the figure of Jan Hus that has been apparent during the many international symposia and other events marking the six-hundredth anniversary of his death in 2015. This article, building on the seminal work of Jarold K. Zeman in the 1970s, identifies the existing historiographical traditions, recent developments and advances, and the major textual contributions, and offers an opinion on the future of Jan Hus studies.

‘Wearing the Breeches’? Almack’s, the Female Patroness, and Public Femininity c.1764–1848

ABSTRACTAlmack’s, a mixed-sex establishment run by a group of female patronesses, was a popular meeting place for the aristocracy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet, despite its contemporary appeal, the establishment has received little attention from historians. This article addresses this absence, exploring the varying, and often contentious, social, cultural and political functions and meanings the establishment held. Building on recent historiographical developments, this article demonstrates how certain aristocratic women were able to exercise power and influence at the heart of their class. In doing so, it considers the intersections between gender, urban space and political culture. It argues that the activities of the female patronesses were often highly contested, exposing the narrow, and often blurred, line between legitimate and illegitimate action.

Autonomy and Identity in the Cities of Norman Italy, c. 1050–c. 1200

AbstractUnderstandings on the medieval cities of southern Italy and Sicily have for long been shaped by the so‐called ‘Southern Question’ and problematic comparisons with the cities of North and Central Italy. An over‐arching conventional position emerged suggesting that the political and cultural dynamism of the cities of the South was drastically impaired by the arrival of the Normans and the creation of a monarchy. However, a corpus of revisionist, interdisciplinary work has been produced since the late 20th century. It has substantially reframed our perception of the types of autonomies and identities present within the cities of southern Italy and Sicily. This essay briefly tracks some of the most salient aspects of these recent historiographical developments.

Teaching Canada–US relations: Three great debates

The study of Canada–United States relations has a long, rich history as an interdisciplinary project, closely engaged with contemporary policy debates, and well integrated in the teaching curricula at Canadian universities. As the two societies become ever more tightly enmeshed—economically, demographically, culturally, and even politically—and the two states’ diplomatic relationship becomes ever more complex, the study of that relationship can and should become more reflective, purposive, and coherent. Having reviewed recent historiographical developments, in which the field’s three core debates have been taken in important new directions, we are hopeful about the prospects for renewal and reinvention. The challenge for students of Canada–US relations today, we maintain, is therefore to continue to unearth insights from the original great debates but also to challenge and revise the broader debates themselves to develop a more robust understanding of the relationship past, present, and future.

‘Laudably Communicating to the World’: Science in Sydney’s Public Culture, 1788–1821

It has long been held that the general population of the British colony of New South Wales before the 1820s was neither exposed to nor interested in science, and that there was little home-grown science in Sydney at this time. This prevailing view, however, is based on a definition of science as institutionalized knowledge producer. In this paper I examine the Sydney colony between 1788 and 1821 through the lens of recent historiographical developments that have redefined science as a form of communicative action, and that incorporate the study of popular discourse centrally within histories of science. Under this approach, an examination of Sydney's mass media and popular culture reveals a widespread, rich and invested fascination with science among the colony's general population, and active contributions to public science discourse by ordinary colony residents.

Studying Russian Religion Since the Collapse of Communism

This review article surveys the field of the religious history of Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. Increased accessibility to the archives in the early 1990s coincided with historiographical developments such as the “new cultural history” and the “lived religion” approach to the study of religious cultures, favouring a renewed interest in religious topics. The article argues that the lived religion approach has allowed scholars to rethink the classic question of the relationship between church and state, to demonstrate the significance of religion to the social, intellectual, and political transformations experienced in late imperial and early Soviet Russia, and to reconceptualize Russian Orthodoxy’s relationship with modernization and modernity. This research demonstrates the need to correct the traditional neglect of the Orthodox experience in histories of religion in Europe and in theorizing religious change and secularization in the modern era.

Accounting historiography: looking back to the future

Purpose– This paper aims to contextualise and critically evaluate the state of accounting historiography, its past and future agenda as a foundation for future scholars’ design and pursuit of accounting history research.Design/methodology/approach– Focussing on the historiographic accounting history literature, the paper draws on prior state-of-the-art reviews as well as a range of contemporary accounting history research studies to provide an overview of the accounting history community internationally, its emergence, institutions, theories and methodologies.Findings– Accounting history researchers are identified now as an established and growing international community of scholars, increasingly diverse in national origins and focus, yet still on the threshold of moving beyond its specialist literature into general accounting and history research literatures. Nonetheless, their historiography exhibits a vibrant theoretical and methodological discourse that has laid the foundations for expanding opportunities in both research subjects and approaches available for study.Research limitations/implications– Theoretical and methodological proliferation offers a wealth of options for further research in this field, in terms of subject matter focus and in terms of innovative and insightful approaches to their investigation.Practical implications– Findings already available in the accounting history literature offer useful foundational understandings that have the potential to better inform contemporary policy and practice decision-makers.Originality/value– The paper provides a reference point for emerging and established scholars in accounting history, presenting a summary of their underlying historical institutional and historiographic development contexts and offering a research agenda based on theoretical and methodological diversity.

Conflictiva secularización: sobre sociología, religión e historia

En los últimos treinta años, el paradigma de la secularización como modelo explicativo del cambio religioso en la modernidad ha estado sometido a intensa contestación y debate. Mientras que un número no desdeñable de sociólogos sigue manteniendo su validez, una cantidad cada vez mayor de estudiosos critican su inadecuación y proponen modelos alternativos que ayuden a explicar la sostenida presencia de la religión en las sociedades modernas. Este artículo pretende revisar el estado de este debate, que se desarrolla principalmente en el ámbito de la sociología, y contribuir a un mejor conocimiento del mismo entre los historiadores. Asimismo, se propone poner de relieve las posibilidades de reflexión para la historia religiosa y la historia en general que ofrecen las controversias actuales sobre la secularización. Por último, reivindica la utilidad del concepto secularización en el contexto español, siempre que esta se entienda como una «secularización conflictiva», una secularización problematizada en su conceptualización y en su desarrollo historiográfico.

Memoria y tiranía en la Confederación Aquea helenística (s. III-II a.C.)

The grant of amnesties to several Peloponnesian tyrants during the expansion of the Hellenistic Achaean Confederacy has not been studied. In this paper it is proposed to analyze some political and cultural features of this main practice taking into account the recent theoretical and historiographical developments on the field of collective memory and identity studies. In this sense it will be explored here the scope of the amnesty granted to these tyrannical regimes, focusing on how the members of the Achaean political elite chose to remember and not forget the tyrants and to build a collective and shared vision of the past in which the fight against them became a cornerstone to their identity definition process.

The Impact of the Second Vatican Council on United States Catholic Historiography

The Second Vatican Council’s impact on the historiography of U.S. Catholicism can be viewed through an evolution of topics and paradigms before and after the council. A new historical consciousness within the Catholic Church, the ecclesiology of the People of God, and the new post-conciliar ecumenical climate had a significant influence. Initially, the council and its interpretations contributed to an opening of the discipline of Church history to new currents of social and cultural history, placing Catholicism under the domain of “religious history.” Simultaneously, the Church history approach that favored institutional histories continued to be cultivated, while renewing avenues for research and analysis through the perspectives of the council’s proposals. Finally, the article suggests that in recent decades the impact of the council can be seen in historiographical developments including: 1) the quest for “continuity” in the historical narrative; 2) from a paradigm of “uniqueness” to one of “difference”; 3) a less “American” focused and more “global” Catholic outlook; 4) the exploration of a more religious “religious history”; and 5) Catholic history that contributes to a new reading of U.S. history.

Transnationalism and the History of Historiography: A Transatlantic Perspective

AbstractThis essay discusses recent research in the history of historiography. Much of this scholarship has been written from a comparative perspective. Even more recently, historiographical studies have turned to transnational approaches. The essay surveys the field and discusses the chances as well as the limitations of this “transnational turn.” While transnational approaches can contribute new insights into historiographical developments, one should see them as complementary rather than as a replacement for microhistorical, national, or comparative foci.

Suburban Erasure: How the Suburbs Ended the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey

Suburban Erasure: How the Suburbs Ended the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey

Charles Trevelyan, John Mitchel et l’historiographie de la Grande Famine

The books of Charles Trevelyan (1847) and John Mitchel (1860) constitute pioneering writings on the Great Famine and despite their extreme views they defined a framework which helps to understand later historiographical developments, from nationalism to revisionism and to post-revisionism. Beyond theoretical considerations as such, another factor of those historiographical trends is the context in which historians have worked: the state of Anglo-Irish relations and the conflict in Northern Ireland have also contributed to shaping interpretations of the Famine.

NAACP Youth and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1936–1965 by Thomas L. Bynum (review)

Reviewed by: NAACP Youth and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1936–1965 by Thomas L. Bynum Lee Sartain (bio) NAACP Youth and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1936–1965. By Thomas L. Bynum. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013. Pp. 226. $49.00 cloth) Any mention of African American youth in the civil rights struggle will evoke images of the sit-ins of 1960 and the Freedom Rides of 1961. Rarely (if ever) is the NAACP involved in this popular history [End Page 532] of youth activism because, as an organization, it is often considered staid and legalistic. In this respect, Bynum’s monograph on NAACP youth groups is an important historiographic development that places youth activism into the long civil rights history and shows that 1960s radicalism was but part of a tradition of youth activism dating back to the 1930s. Bynum has inserted NAACP youth members into the civil rights narrative in a comprehensive manner, although his book builds on the work of Rebecca De Schweinitz (If We Could Change the World [2009]) while having none of her legal or philosophical depth. Indeed, Bynum’s book has a broad approach and often misses nuance that local or state studies can give. Indeed, the very concept of youth required further examination as De Schweinitz does in her research. For example, the debate that the NAACP undertook on who exactly is youthful is mentioned in a footnote (p.155, n21). The concept of teenager had to be invented in a materialistic age and the debate of the delineation between childhood, young person, and the transition to adult was ongoing. Did the concept of youth in society change from the 1930s to the 1960s and was that reflected in NAACP organizing? There is little practical or structural deliberation given to the fact that organizational youth leadership was regularly decapitated through the aging process. NAACP college chapters had perennial problems of summer holidays and students who undertook paid work and studied rather than being activists. Sometimes the youth abandoned NAACP groups due to its conservatism and control by the adult branch, but often they just got older and moved on. However, the idea that young people contain special talents and are free from the constraints reserved for adults certainly required further acknowledgement. There is little development of gender or leadership theory and, therefore, the book feels somewhat old fashioned at times. The author highlights major female leaders of the NAACP youth wing, such as Juanita Jackson and Ruby Hurley, but does not explain why they were able to exert their leadership. Was it unique to the NAACP that women could become major organizational leaders? Was it youth [End Page 533] activism that allowed young and single women to pursue leadership? Interesting and important characters are often introduced, yet very little is made of their contribution beyond reporting with scant detail. For example, Muriel Gregg, a promising leader who joined the NAACP field staff in 1955, followed a familiar pattern for women by resigning to get married. Bynum states that Herbert Wright, NAACP youth secretary, “commented that the association needed someone as efficient as Gregg but with a better personality” (p. 69). This is quite a statement and really needs analysis. Was Gregg rejected by the NAACP due to being a strong female leader in a patriarchal organization? Similarly Herbert Wright, whose career went from student activist to NAACP leader, is underdeveloped in these pages as a major personality who developed the youth councils during the 1950s and seemed to have an intuitive understanding of how to build up a youth movement. Overall, this is a standard text that reports on an important aspect of neglected history. Its strength is in its focus on generational conflict between youth and adult members of the NAACP. However, there was so much more to be considered. Lee Sartain LEE SARTAIN is a senior lecturer in American history at the University of Portsmouth, England. He is the author of Invisible Activists (2007), Borders of Equality (2013) and co-editor of Long is the Way and Hard: 100 Years of the NAACP (2009). He is currently working on black youth movements of the 1940s and 1950s and also...

Lies of Our Fathers: Memory and Politics in the Basque Country Under the Franco Dictatorship, 1936–68

This article offers a historical review of the Franco dictatorship in the Basque Country and analyses the reverberation of old myths in contemporary essays on Basque history and identity. The article explores recent historiographical developments to challenge the understanding of Basque history in ‘primordial’ and mythical terms and upholds an interpretation of the Basque past within current Spanish scholarly debates. A new historical assessment of the Civil War in the Basque territories questions both the firmly-rooted thesis of the ‘Basque (Catholic) oasis’ inside the ‘(anti-clerical) Republican terror’ of 1936 and the traditional explanation of the lower levels of Francoist violence, funded in this alleged ‘oasis’. New interpretations also question the role of Basque nationalists under the Franco regime and contest the myth of the ‘Basque genocide’. Lastly, the article uses collective remembrance to explain why a ‘memory of revenge’ emerged through the 1950s and 1960s, despite the fact Basque nationalists suffered relatively low levels of repression. This memory of revenge would eventually play a key role in the emergence of ethno-nationalist terrorism and the deficient democratization of Basque society during the Spanish transition to democracy.

The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History, by Christopher Hodson

In this vivacious and wide-ranging first book, Christopher Hodson offers a welcome new perspective on the experiences of the French Catholic communities nestled around the Bay of Fundy who were ruthlessly expelled from their homes by British American forces in late 1755, and catapulted into unanticipated New Worlds around and beyond the Atlantic. As with the historical decision to ethnically cleanse Nova Scotia, Hodson’s study both stands by itself and owes much to (and makes more sense when read against) historiographical developments in recent years. For, though deplorably ill-treated by their contemporaries, the Acadians have done quite well in the past decade or so, as their victimisation, plight and survival have been the subject of at least three important Anglophone monographs: Geoff Plank, An Unsettled Conquest: The British Campaign Against the Peoples of Acadia (2003; rev. ante, cxviii [2003], 228–9); John Mack Faragher, A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland (2005); and Naomi Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian: A North American Border People, 1604–1755 (2005).

Reflections on the evolution of historiography and society

Reflections on the evolution of historiography and society

The Albigensian Crusade in Anglo‐American Historiography, 1888–2013

AbstractOf all the crusades which occurred in the crusade era, the Albigensian Crusade stands as one of the most infamous, although the Cathar religion and the Inquisition have drawn more academic and popular attention. Older scholarship treated the Albigensian Crusade as ancillary to the development of the Inquisition. Assigning the relative importance of the Albigensian Crusade within wider crusade historiography remains problematic for historians. An important historiographical development began in the 1970s as Anglo‐American scholars chose to treat the Albigensian Crusade not simply as precursor of the Inquisition but as a standalone event. Besides this advancement, Anglo‐American scholars have done valuable work on regions and towns affected by the crusade and Catharism. Since 9/11 and the on‐going ‘War on Terror’, crusades to the Eastern Mediterranean still drive the historiography, but more remains to be done on the Albigensian Crusade. The local church, regional studies, biographical treatments, and prosopographical work have barely been touched on in English.

La fine della Jugoslavia: tempo di bilanci

Twenty years since the initialdissolution of Yugoslavia we have at our disposal a rich literature about the events ofthe 1990s and their historical origins. The discussion illustrates the main results ofthe research devoted to the topic, recent historiographical developments, and somepossible aspects of a future research agenda. After a critical treatment of somewidespread theses on cultural incompatibility and ancient hatreds among the formerYugoslav peoples, scholars have focused more on the socialist period, in particularon the structural elements that characterized life in the common State. Internal andinternational factors, economy, institutional organization, social, national andpolitical issues, as well as a more refined analysis of the interaction between thepolitical elites and the rest of the population are all aspects that must be carefullyintertwined in order to approach properly the history that has been examined.

The Haitian Revolution, History's New Frontier: State of the Scholarship and Archival Sources

Focusing on the era of the Haitian Revolution, this article analyses recent historiographical developments in both French and English. Though the field has made great strides in recent decades, it occasionally remains hampered by insufficient archival research, a parochial approach by US and French scholars, and linguistic fragmentation. The article also includes a survey of the main archival resources that are available to scholars in Europe, the Caribbean, and the USA.