Historical Inquiry Research Articles

Veritable Miracle: Situating Black Women Librarian Networks within a Feminist Historical Paradigm

Abstract: This article explores Black women's librarian networks in early twentieth-century Chicago, inspired by Mary Niles Maack's (1945–2023) groundbreaking research on women's history in librarianship and her historical methodology. To this end, the article first evaluates Maack's primary methodologies employed in her historical inquiries and examines their efficacy. Four key characteristics of Maack's approach are identified: placing librarianship within "a larger context," employing latitude and longitude comparisons, embracing theories beyond the library and information sciences field, and adopting a critical and feminist perspective. The article then demonstrates the extension of these methodologies by examining the collective presence of Black women librarians in early twentieth-century Chicago. This overview not only demonstrates Maack's methodologies in practice but also highlights their effectiveness in reading the nuanced contributions and experiences of Black women in librarianship. The text explores the often-overlooked networks of Black women librarians, drawing from the concepts of "a veritable miracle" and "reconciliation," and asserts the significance of Maack's methodologies for broader historical investigations and their utility in uncovering underrepresented narratives in the history of librarianship.

Ekiti Parapo War: A Historical Trajectory

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the historical factors that led to the war between the Ekiti and the Ibadan people who are all of Yoruba extraction in Southwestern Nigeria. The paper discusses the course and the process through which the war was fought; it also brought out the consequences of the war as it affects the Ekiti People and the entire people of southwestern Nigeria.
 Methodology: Being a historical study, the research methodology adopted was that of historical enquiry into the past. Primary sources of data consulted included archival materials such as correspondences, minutes of meeting and annual report of colonial government. While secondary data were sourced from theses, journal articles, books and other publications from the internet.
 Findings: The study revealed that it was the war that solidified the cultural unity and homogeneity of Ekiti people of Southwestern Nigeria. In fact, Olomola had described this period as “the most celebrated instance of the application of ‘ethnic’ solidarity among Ekiti communities.”[1]
 Unique Contribution to Theory, Policy and Practice: Knowledge acquired from this study would be able to make readers gain specific knowledge on the factors that led to the war between the Ekiti and the Ibadan imperialists who are both of Yoruba extraction of Southwestern Nigeria in the 19th Century. One unique point included in this study was the resilience and doggedness with which the Ekiti and her allies fought and sustained the tempo of the liberation war for the long period it lasted before the British intervention finally brought the war to a conclusive end. Therefore, peace advocates, policy makers, governments both at the national and international levels should draw from the collective memories of the war to strengthen cultural identity and rejig national consciousness in building a better and more formidable nation.
 
 [1]Isola Olomola, Ekiti Parapo Aspirations since Ekiti Parapo Aspiration since 1890, Ile-Ife, Ankilad Ventures Nigeria Limited, 2005, 42.

The Instructional Design of Place and Past

Extended reality (XR) can provide insights into the past, allowing learners to visualize history while helping them to sustain an inquiry by leveraging the concepts of “engagement first,” place illusion, and plausibility illusion. Using three cases of XR-based historical inquiries focusing on hidden or difficult histories (Christiansburg Institute – a former African-American school, Solitude – a university campus building that is a former plantation, and Vauquois – a First World War site in rural France), we describe the six principles that guide our instructional design process to enhance users and students’ engagement with historical places and historical sources as part of the process of engaging in historical inquiry.

Unravelling Second-Order Concepts in South African History Textbooks

This paper explores the progression of second-order concepts in seven purposively sampled South African CAPS-compliant history textbooks. History knowledge encompasses both the substantive and procedural knowledge types, with second-order concepts forming an integral component of the latter. Textbook writers and educators use this knowledge in their domains without a predetermined trajectory. These concepts are not mere skills but fundamental notions guiding historical practice. Their meaningful integration into learning materials forms a necessary toolkit for historical inquiry. Drawing from a broader PhD study,1 a Bernsteinian (1990) framework and the 'big six' concepts articulated by Seixas and Peck (2004) are used to analyse the content of seven chapters, one per book, telling the story of the history of South Africa across grades three to nine in the foundation, intermediate, and senior phases of the South African school curriculum. A continuum was populated, articulating the strengths of the second-order concepts ranging from a powerful presence to those weakly incorporated. The findings indicate a sporadic presence of the six concepts-historical significance, continuity and change, cause and consequence, historical perspectives, and the moral dimension across the textbooks. There is a more inclusive focus in the senior grades and less so in lower grades. The concepts also lack continuous and cumulative development. If these 'structural' historical concepts provide the basis for historical thinking, it is unclear how they advance through the grades with increasing levels of complexity. The methodology of history is thus not a universal or one-size-fits-all endeavour but an iterative process inculcating concepts that are nuanced and inherently abstract.

О КИНО, СОВЕТСКОЙ ДЕРЕВНЕ И НЕ ТОЛЬКО…: К ВОПРОСУ О ВОЗМОЖНОСТИ ИСПОЛЬЗОВАНИЯ ИГРОВОГО КИНЕМАТОГРАФА В КАЧЕСТВЕ ИСТОРИЧЕСКОГО ИСТОЧНИКА (О КНИГЕ: МАЗУР Л.Н., ГОРБАЧЕВ О.В. СОВЕТСКИЕ ФИЛЬМЫ О ДЕРЕВНЕ: ОПЫТ ИСТОРИЧЕСКОЙ ИНТЕРПРЕТАЦИИ ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННОГО ОБРАЗА. М.: РОССПЭН, 2022. 350 С.)

The monograph by L.N. Mazur and O.V. Gorbachev addresses an issue of the possibility of introducing such an unconventional source as the cinema in the capacity of the primary source of a historical inquiry. The reviewer proceeded from the thesis that the cinema is a “parallel reality” and it in no way reflects the real life. As the reviewer continued reading the book, he got the impression that the authors managed to quite convincingly put their thesis into practice and prove it. The reviewer analyzes in detail the content of the monograph, its successful plots and themes. Much attention is paid to the identification of the theoretical aspects of the issue, that are important not only for specialists, but for all historians. In some cases, the path from the appearance of an object in life to its appearance in the cinema is traced literally year by year. The main advantage of the monograph is the demonstration of the potential of the cinema as a historical source. The reviewer agrees with the opinion of the authors of the refereed paper that the cinema about the village shows us much more than the authors and customers of those films would like to show. It’s particularly evident in historical dynamics, when a historian considers all the films on the village theme “with one eye.” A conclusion is drawn about the theoretical, methodological and source study contribution of the authors to the investigation of audiovisual sources.

A Multi-Level Model of Institutional Innovation and Knowledge Creation Capabilities: Insights From the Development of Taiwan's Nation Health Insurance.

This study proposes a multi-level model of institutional innovation in the healthcare sector-in other words, field-level institutional change pressures that start as network-level institutional innovation by hospitals and government for their organizational performance, with an emphasis on the effect of organizational-level construct-knowledge creation capabilities. A case study using in-depth interviews and a historical inquiry approach has been used to qualitatively analyze our cases during the development of Taiwan's National Health Insurance (NHI). Our results propose a multi-level explanation of institutional innovation by showing how field-level institutional change pressures can stimulate the government's institutional innovation at the network level. Moreover, knowledge creation capabilities may positively influence the government hospitals' ongoing institutional change pressures induced institutional innovation activity for their performance at the organizational level in an institutional setting. This study contributes to health organization management researchers and administrators by developing explanations of institutional innovation and creating a much-needed multi-level insight into hospital behavior in the highly institutionalized healthcare sector.

La reconnaissance de l'écriture pour les manuscrits documentaires du Moyen Âge

Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) techniques aim to accurately recognize sequences of characters in input manuscript images by training artificial intelligence models to capture historical writing features. Efficient HTR models can transform digitized manuscript collections into indexed and quotable corpora, providing valuable research insight for various historical inquiries. However, several challenges must be addressed, including the scarcity of relevant training corpora, the consequential variability introduced by different scribal hands and writing scripts, and the complexity of page layouts. This paper presents two models and one cross-model approach for automatic transcription of Latin and French medieval documentary manuscripts, particularly charters and registers, written between the 12th and 15th centuries and classified into two major writing scripts: Textualis (from the late-11th to 13th century) and Cursiva (from the 13th to the 15th century). The architecture of the models is based on a Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN) coupled with a Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss. The training and evaluation of the models, involving 120k lines of text and almost 1M tokens, were conducted using three available ground-truth corpora : The e-NDP corpus, the Alcar-HOME database and the Himanis project. This paper describes the training architecture and corpora used, while discussing the main training challenges, results, and potential applications of HTR techniques on medieval documentary manuscripts.

Critical Timing, Discomfort, and the Architecture of Change

A review of It’s About Time: The Architecture of Change, an exhibition curated by Véronique Patteeuw, Léa-Catherine Szacka, Derk Loorbach, and Peter Veenstra, presented in the 10th Architecture Biennale Rotterdam at The Ferro. Rotterdam, September 22–November 13, 2022. The exhibition gathered the approaches of 50 contributors to ‘livable futures’ for the planet and its dwellers, juxtaposed to historical inquiry, to communicate a call to action.

The Recollection of Revolution

Abstract The present article addresses issues related to the preservation of revolutionary memory, and to the role of acts of writing and reading in securing the continuity of the revolutionary impetus that brings about new beginnings. The role of memory is discussed through a comparison between two seminal texts on revolution that are not usually read together: Gustav Landauer’s Die Revolution (1907) and Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution (1963). It argues that both texts attempt to avoid the risk of reducing revolution to an object of historical inquiry and to keep the “spirit of revolution” alive by employing unconventional narrative techniques and ascribing a central role to literature.

What It Is and Is Not: Pedagogy in Online Nursing Education Delivery

Nursing has employed distance education for decades. In the 21st century, distance programs have often been delivered online. This became even more prevalent since the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the preponderance of online nursing courses, the delivery of courses virtually does not necessarily mean that these offerings are intentionally developed online education. We discuss a secondary analysis of data examining the formation of online nursing programs at Athabasca University. This historical inquiry used interpretive description of the pedagogy, both learning strategies and the theories that substantiate the strategies, using thematic analysis. Participants discussed their theoretical substantiation of online education. We posit that online nursing education involves a purposeful pedagogy including theoretical bases and would benefit from a strong sense of mission behind the course delivery. Findings from this study may apply to online programs, irrespective of profession or discipline.

Greedy for Effect: The Historiography of US Naval Logistics and the Pacific War

Abstract Naval and military historians have generally not focused on logistics, and this is true for Second World War naval historians and, more specifically, for United States Navy logistics of the Pacific War (1941–45). Naval logistics deserves more serious study as they circumscribe what surface fleets can accomplish. Recently, historians have started to treat this topic as an integral part of naval strategy, operations, and tactics, which is a step in the right direction. This article explores the current state of historical literature and demonstrates that further historical inquiry is necessary – the topic deserves more attention from historians and, indeed, today’s navies.

Between agency and event: The Book of Job as a Greek Tragedy

ABSTRACT In this study, I explore a pragmatist and processualist perspective on the interpretation of historical sources. By analyzing Horace M. Kallen’s 1918 book, ‘The Book of Job as a Greek Tragedy’, regarded as an instance of pragmatist historical inquiry, this paper engages with recent processual and evental approaches to history. It elucidates a conceptualization of historical sources as ‘actor-events’. Through Kallen’s example, the paper demonstrates how cultural historians can effectively perceive sources as both actors that evoke meaning and as events that unfold. From this perspective, Kallen’s work illustrates how diverse temporalities hold simultaneous significance and how cultural and social struggles related to what is emerging, in the future, give rise to the emergence of truth in historical sources.

Pierre Gassendi: Humanism, Science, and the Birth of Modern Philosophy

Pierre Gassendi: Humanism, Science, and the Birth of Modern Philosophy

Tidalectic Un/mapping and the Performance of African Diasporic Imagination in the Repertory of Katherine Dunham

This article foregrounds imagination to consider how African diasporic conditions converge with choreographic expression. The analysis “un/maps” dominant understandings of the choreographic process of mid-twentieth-century African American choreographer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham by expanding Kamau E. Brathwaite's (1993) concept of Tidalectics beyond the Caribbean to the wider African diaspora and a distinctly Caribbean comprehension of diasporic imagination. Utilizing datasets and visualizations created by the project, Dunham's Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry, this article traces how the concept of Brazil is imagined and reimagined within Dunham's archive from 1937 to 1962. In doing so, it considers the complex positionality of Dunham as both a pioneering minoritized woman navigating the politics of race, gender, and financial precarity, and someone who yielded their imperial privilege as a US citizen through their career to bring nuance to Dunham's narrative as a canonical dance figure.

Techniques for Diagnosis and Treatment of Pathological Nipple Discharge

Nipple discharge is recognized as the third most common breast symptom, following breast pain and lumps. Although it is related to benign diseases mainly, an incidence of 5% to 12% associated with breast carcinoma still occurs. An entire procedure, therefore, of evaluating nipple discharge starts from historical inquiry and physical examination.

The ‘Migrant-Leper’ as the Undeserving Outsider: Historicising Leprosy Policy in Delhi, 1920–60

Discussions on migration and leprosy in India, largely absent from historical enquiries, feature dominantly in epidemiological studies that frame the migrant with leprosy as a bacterium-carrying outsider, crossing interstate boundaries to spread infection and increase prevalence rates in urban spaces. The paper seeks to reframe the debate by analysing the migrant with leprosy not as a risk factor, but as a social identity that has historically animated public policy. By analysing leprosy policy in Delhi from 1920 to 1960, the paper explores how leprosy-affected beggars in Delhi were seen as an indolent class of outsiders burdening state finances, unworthy of adequate support.

A critical review of the antecedents of enabling communities

PurposeAdopting a sense of critical enquiry when examining historical sources, it is possible to gain a richer and broader sense of present practice. The aim of this study is to emphasise the importance of historical research to present practice in teasing out the different elements at work and how they developed. A core assumption is that our consciousness depends on our interactions with others.Design/methodology/approachThis study is part of ongoing research into the historical background of the practice of discerning compassion. The methods used include archival research and the reading of primary and secondary literature.FindingsIn particular, it becomes clear that this way of working is always going to be problematic for political authorities as it promotes the questioning of accepted beliefs. This study emphasises that the core concepts underlying enabling community practice reach deep into the past and involve events not usually associated with the traditional histories of the approach. In particular, exploring outside of the traditional mental hospital background reveals a greater involvement of women than previously demonstrated. There are processes that have deep historical roots, the culture of enquiry, the benefits of mutual support and the understanding that people flourish better interacting with each other in a supportive and trusting environment rather than through coercion and instruction.Research limitations/implicationsAs with all historical research, this paper is limited by the resources available to examine particular events.Practical implicationsRecognition of the importance of historical enquiry as relevant to present-day practice.Social implicationsHistorical enquiry helps to acknowledge the importance of social events in shaping our present understanding. As W.H. Rivers argues, we have to understand what happened in the past before comprehending why present sociological events occur.Originality/valueThis paper is a unique enquiry into the early historical antecedents of enabling community practice. It is intended to stimulate more research into the field and to stimulate debate about the relevance of particular aspects of practice. It refers to sources that are not usually part of such discussions and, by implication, suggests that there is more to be explored. It is not an exhaustive account and is to be supplemented by another paper on leadership.

Retelling education in emergencies through the black radical tradition: on racial capitalism, critical race theory and fugitivity

ABSTRACT This article asserts that the Black Radical Tradition (BRT), grounded in historical and structural inquiry, offers tools to reinterpret EiE radically—the BRT encompasses a tradition rooted in diverse African intellectual and activist inquiries, providing a multifaceted theoretical framework. Relevant to humanitarian scholarship, the BRT challenges omissions of colonisation, capitalism, and enslavement histories in forced migration and aid, shedding light on their roles in perpetuating ‘white saviours’. The paper, adopting my roles as a scholar and aid practitioner, critically examines the EiE sector through three BRT lenses: racial capitalism, critical race theory, and fugitivity. It employs case studies, aligning with the BRT's interconnected focus, revealing the pervasive influence of educational aid, racial injustice, and structural inequalities. These lenses collectively illuminate the potential of Black radical thought to transform the EiE landscape. By tracing EiE's genealogies through Black radical historiography, the article advocates for sector-wide introspection, emphasising power redistribution, centring marginalised voices, and challenging prevailing hierarchies in humanitarian contexts.

DIGITAL TOOLS & INQUIRY-BASED LEARNING IN HISTORY EDUCATION

This paper discusses the Inquiry-based learning is a pedagogical approach that encourages students to ask questions and explore topics through research, critical thinking, and problem-solving. Digital tools have become an essential component of inquiry-based learning, allowing students to access vast amounts of information, collaborate with peers, and present their findings in creative ways. In history education, digital tools and inquiry-based learning can work together to create engaging and interactive learning experiences that deepen students' understanding of the past. Digital tools such as online databases, virtual tours, interactive maps, and multimedia resources can provide students with a wealth of primary and secondary sources for historical inquiry. These tools can also support the development of critical thinking and research skills, allowing students to evaluate sources, analyze historical narratives, and construct their own interpretations of the past. Additionally, digital tools can enable students to collaborate on research projects and share their findings with a wider audience, promoting communication and collaboration skills that are essential in the 21st century. Digital tools and inquiry-based learning have the potential to revolutionize history education by providing students with dynamic and interactive learning experiences that foster curiosity, critical thinking, and creativity. By embracing these innovative pedagogical approaches, educators can inspire students to become lifelong learners who are equipped to engage with the complex and diverse histories of the world around them.

Sacred Monuments and Stone Circles in Palestine: A Historical, Ethnographic and Mythological Inquiry

Sacred stone veneration is a global mythical phenomenon historically practiced by many groups, including ancient Semitic-speaking peoples. In their physical capacity, sacred stones themselves are not the object of worship or veneration. Their sanctity comes from the divine spirit believed to dwell within them. The common denominator among the mythological traditions of sacred stones veneration is the belief that they possess enormous spiritual powers that enable them to act as mediators between the worshipper and the gods. Stones were employed as tools in the rituals of veneration in many types of sanctuaries, such as stone circles. This study highlights this type of religious folklore in Palestine, representing one of the bridges linking the Palestinian present to its distant Canaanite past. It traces the various patterns of sacred stones in the central region of Palestine, the rituals that were practised using them, and the remnants of these practices found in oral folklore traditions. To these ends, the researchers relied on religious and historical primary and secondary sources, including oral interviews where available and possible.