Historical Material Research Articles

New Vernacular Architecture: Experimental Construction Site in Bärnau, Bavaria

This experimental construction site in Bärnau, a small town on the border between the Czech Republic and Germany, explores innovative approaches to vernacular architecture through a prism of sustainability, craftsmanship, and regionalism. The project addresses three key questions. First, how can we learn from historical building methods and materials to build more sustainably while maintaining social and regional relevance? Second, how to revitalize traditional craftsmanship, focusing on making local materials and techniques more attractive to ensure the preservation of valuable knowledge? Lastly, what potential is there for creating buildings with minimal environmental impact using only regional materials, thereby supporting local economies and ecological integrity?

A middle-class nation? The middle class and its moral boundaries in post-dictatorial Uruguay

AbstractIn this article, I examine the middle class as a contested category in contemporary Uruguay and the role of moral boundaries in its formation and maintenance. I contend that amidst the economic fragility experienced by the middle class, both individuals and the state grapple with the precarious position of the middle class. In this scenario, moral boundaries function as a crucial mechanism for navigating this uncertainty. Through an analysis of parliamentary debates and public statements of politicians, I redraw how, in these discourses, the middle class emerges as a moralized national and cultural identity centering around work ethic and colonial history. Central to my analysis is an examination of the historical material and symbolic struggles that have shaped the emergence and evolution of the middle class in Uruguay. Thus, I pay attention to its formative role during the early nineteenth century in the emergence and stabilization of the nation, as well as to the impact of the dictatorship (1972–1985). Finally, I show how these notions intersect with conceptions of (un)deservingness, ultimately legitimizing increasing punitivism.

TASHKENT NEIGHBORHOODS (MAHALLAS) IN THE DESCRIPTION OF SCIENTISTS AND RESEARCHERS

the article examines the reflection of the history of Tashkent mahallas in historical sources, literature and official documentsand their historical-ethnographic and socio-demographic description. It analyzes the works of scientists and researchers whoconducted scientific research on urban mahallas from a historical point of view. The article studies historical materials andliterature related to the way of life of the Uzbek people as a neighboring community, that is, the specific content and essenceof mahallas, from the point of view of historiography.

CHAIRMEN OF KOSTROMA DISTRICT COURT: THEIR ROLE AND PLACE IN THE JUDICIAL SYSTEM RUSSIAN EMPIRE (1871-1917)

Based on archival and historical materials, the article examines in detail the personalities of the chairmen of the Kostroma District Court for the period 1871–1917. Based on the study of the personnel of Kostroma District Court, the purpose of the study is to analyse the personalities of its chairmen as a special social group and their place in the system of judicial authorities of the Russian Empire. The main stages of their life path, formation and professional development as judicial figures are revealed. Topicality is due to insufficient research of the scientific biographies of the chairmen of the courts of post-reform Russia, as well as the expansion of the source base of research on their personalities. The author introduced new facts about the activities of the chairmen of Kostroma District Court into scientific circulation, which made it possible to recreate the portrait of judicial officials of the second half of the 19th – the early 20th century. Their estate origin, education, well-being, marital status, and official status are investigated. Their role and place in the activities of the judicial bodies of the Russian Empire are noted, including through effective public administration in the field of justice in the context of an increasing crisis of power. The conclusion is made about their personal contribution to the management of the judicial branch of government in Kostroma Province, their professionalism.

Strength- and Moisture-Related Studies of Historical Building Materials: A Case Study from Southern Estonia

Demolition of existing buildings turns building products into waste. The amount of demolition waste is increasing globally. The current case study is an example of fulfilling the EU Waste Framework Directive of reducing demolition waste by reuse of historical materials in their original structures. The aim of this paper is to investigate construction materials from 19th and 20th centuries and their mechanical and physical properties in a case study building from the conservation area of Võru city, South Estonia. Timber structures of the case study building were non-destructively tested on-site using a resistive method. Ceramic brick plinth and basement walls, as well as concrete and granite ceiling, were tested in situ non-destructively (rebound hammer test) for compressive strength estimation. Previously dismantled timber logs, slats and ceramic bricks were tested in the laboratory for compression and bending, respectively. The logs and slats matched the European timber bending strength classes C22 and C40, respectively. The compressive strength of the studied ceramic bricks was comparable to that of newly produced bricks. The non-destructive moisture content of timber structures varied in spring (5–20%) but was steady in the autumn (5–7%) tests. The rebound hammer test overestimated by 1.5…2 times the compressive strength of the studied materials compared to laboratory tests.

The Strategic Plan of the Working Day

“The Working Day” chapter of Capital makes sense today as an illustration of collective struggle over the sale of labor power by the hour. The historical materials in the chapter are instructive if read under the tutelage of Gertrud Kugelmann, considering the advice Karl Marx offers to her on where to start. A reassessment of Marx’s writing process is possible via his various plans in letters, his comments on method, the various sources used, and evaluating the role they have in Capital volume 1. Several scholars read Marx on commodities that “speak” but may sometimes miss idioms in English translation. Reading the German text can help us when searching for theoretical and political strategies for contemporary emancipation. With implications for replies to critics of Marx on slavery, my case is that the staging in Capital offers diagnostic potential where attention to the Parliamentary Blue Books might generate new research agendas, addressing current problems of time, social reproduction, climate, and class struggle. JEL Classification: B14

Fringe Consumers

Abstract We all consume the humanities through our engagement with the cultural, creative, and historical materials that influence our views on ourselves, others, and the world around us. However, can consumers also be considered humanists? We argue the answer is yes when consumption choices become symbols and expressions of one’s authentic self and meaningful connective points to others. Using hard-core surfing enthusiasts and thrifters as examples, we introduce the notion of fringe consumption as a form of cultural entrepreneurship and public expression of the humanities that centers individuality, authenticity, and otherness in an otherwise dominant mainstream environment that pushes people to always want more of the same.

Time, Materiality, and History in UK-Based Interfaith Solidarity Work

In this paper, building upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted among members of one initiative of Jewish-Muslim dialogue in the UK, I discuss how my interlocutors thematize the temporal dimension of anti-minority discrimination and perceive remaining historical material heritage associated with it. Using the example of problematic artifacts pertaining to mediaeval Lincoln, such as the so-called “shrine of Little Hugh,” I discuss how in engaging the memory of traumatic past events in Jewish history activists of inter-faith dialogue reflect on their current conditions of minoritization and attempt a projection of their communities’ lives in the UK in the future. I also borrow insight from the presentist theoretical framework in anthropology of time to highlight the impact my interlocutors’ life histories have had on the way they relate to and conceptualize their own and other minoritized groups’ histories and imagine their personal and collective futures based on their experiences in the present. I suggest that in these reflections, narratives of positive historical trajectories in the minority experience sit alongside an anticipation of multiple possible futures, some inflected with anxiety about a repetition of difficult pasts, others imbued with a vision connecting the past, present and future of minoritized communities into a common presence.

Godmother-Governesses and Biracial Cinderellas: The Use of Fairy Tales in Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Half-Caste

Abstract In Dinah Mulock Craik’s short and largely unacknowledged novella, The Half-Caste (1851), the half-Indian heroine, Zillah La Poer, achieves what seems impossible for a young woman of color in mid-century imperial Britain, rising from an uneducated and ill-treated biracial ward to a rich heiress-turned-bride, all under the watchful guidance of the novella’s narrator and main character, governess Cassandra Pryor. Though Craik’s novella has resurfaced in recent years with the help of a Broadview edition in 2016, the scholarly work and historical material in the introduction and appendixes do not highlight the fairy-tale inspirations and obvious Cinderella motifs in Craik’s text. Craik’s novella is, at its core, a Cinderella story, as Cassandra becomes a nonmagical fairy godmother tasked with transforming Zillah into a respected British citizen. As such, this article seeks to bring attention to Craik’s little-known novella by situating it in a larger tradition of Victorian Cinderella stories, highlighting the way it creates an idealized image of civilized harmony between non-white colonized people and white British citizens via governess-led education.

A study on the changes of China's parenting labor system from the perspective of legal culture theory (1949-1957)

In the early years of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Communist Party then referred to as CPC implemented a series of equality policies in favor of women. This type of policy is reflected in the allocation of childcare labor resources, emphasizing the construction of women’s social welfare. However, China’s women’s welfare policies are influenced by overall political decision making and exhibit an unstable state. This study discusses the changes in the CPC’s childcare norms from 1949 to 1957. Using the laws and regulations issued by the CPC government from 1949 to 1957 and the news materials published from 1949 to 1957, this study classifies and discusses these first hand historical materials in different periods using the method of literature analysis. This study uses Friedman’s legal culture theory to analyze the interaction between the internal legal culture of the government representatives of the CPC and the external legal culture of the people’s representatives. This study finds that by exploring the process of the construction of women’s welfare policy of the PRC from 1949 to 1957, it can be clearly seen that under the condition of limited financial capacity, women’s welfare work is easily abolished due to other more important national socio-economic work. From these results, this study finally concludes that women’s liberation become a tool to serve the national construction under the discourse construction of the CPC.

Wandalowie w Hiszpanii i Rzymie, czyli Macieja z Miechowa (1457–1523) metoda badania dziejów

In the article Robert K. Zawadzki examines the representation of the Vandals in the historical work entitled Chronica Polonorum of Maciej of Miechów. This race who settled on the south coast of the Baltic Sea provided fertile ground for the Polish writer to articulate his ideas about the origins of the Polish nation. By examining these historical tales, the author shows how the author constructed an image of journeys of the great nation in keeping with the patriotic and moralistic goals and context of his own work, while individually creating a vision of Poles as Vandals who occupied Transdanubian Pannonia, attacked the Roman provinces, devastated wide areas of Gaul, crossed into Spain, moved into North Africa and captured Rome. This combination of such historical narrative material aims to highlight both the splendor of ancient Polish history and the fundamental unity of the Polish and European history.

The Internal Causes of Pressure and Anxiety in the Living Environment of K-pop Idols

K-pop idols play a crucial role in South Korea’s cultural and economic development, with numerous new groups emerging annually. They present a polished image that promotes the country, but behind this facade lies significant mental health distress. This paper aims to analyze the long-term mental health issues faced by K-pop idols, highlighting the need for increased awareness and intervention to address these challenges. The study employs case analysis to investigate this issue. Reviewing historical materials and news reports identifies numerous instances of extreme behavior by idols suffering from mental illness. The paper focuses on a particularly representative case, detailing how intense industry pressures and personal struggles culminated in the idol’s suicide. Further analysis of various cases reveals two primary causes of mental health issues among K-pop idols. This study aims to shed light on the harsh realities faced by K-pop idols and advocates for greater attention to their mental health, hoping to mitigate the severe consequences of this ongoing issue.

History Teachers' Strategy in Integrating Historical Thinking Skills Through Academic Discussion Activities at SMA Negeri 1 Sangatta Utara

The changes that occur in history learning require critical thinking skill to support the teaching and learning process. The teacher needs to help students improve their historical thinking skill. This research aimed to a) find out and explain history teachers' understanding of historical thinking skill; b) explain the history teachers' strategy in integrating historical thinking skills through academic discussion activity; and c) know the factors that influence history teachers in integrating historical thinking skill through academic discussion activity. This research was qualitative research by using case study method. The research was conducted in SMA N 1 Sangatta Utara, with the research subjects were two history teachers and six students of XI class. Data collected by using observation, interview, and documentation techniques. Data analysis technique used Miles and Huberman model. The research result showed that a) the teachers understand historical thinking skill before conducting history learning by using academic discussion; b) the teachers' strategy in integrating historical thinking skill with academic discussipn was giving instruction gradually to students so that they can understand the use of historical thinking skill in history learning in academic discussion; and c) there are two factors that influence the teachers to integrate historical thinking skill and academic discussion namely a change in education system, and students condition which do not understand historical material and unable of students to develop critical thinking skills in history learning.

Exploration Of The Cultural Heritage Potential In Tasikmalaya City As Enrichment Of Local History Teaching Materials

Cultural heritage potential plays an important role in presenting meaningful history learning, unfortunately this has not been done in the Tasikmalaya city. This research aims to: 1) describe the use of cultural heritage in local history teaching materials; 2) describe a brief history of the city of Tasikmalaya, and; 3) Analyze the use of cultural heritage in the city of Tasikmalaya as enrichment of local history teaching materials. This research is qualitative research with a descriptive method where data is obtained through documentation and observation. The research results show that cultural heritage has an important role as a source of learning local history. There are 63 cultural heritage potential sites in the city of Tasikmalaya. There are a number of cultural heritage sites that can be used to enrich local historical material, including: 1) Lingga Yoni Indihiang as material to enrich local historical material during the Hindu-Buddhist era; 2) Sheikh Abdul Ghorib's grave in Kawalu during the Islamic era; 3) The Tasikmalaya Regent's official residence complex and cultural heritage in the center of Tasikmalaya city during the colonial period, and 4) the PETA Monument and the Cooperative Monument during the independence revolution. The use of the cultural heritage potentials in Tasikmalaya City in history learning can be done through two things, namely the application of the field trip method and the design of cultural heritage-based history teaching materials. This is expected to provide meaningful local history learning for students.

Faster extraction of matrimonial advertisements from digital archives using a signal processing pipeline: a case study on a 20th-Century Spanish newspaper

ABSTRACT With the exponential growth of digitized historical materials, historians and social scientists face the daunting task of navigating vast online collections. While online archives do provide search tools to query their materials, these usually do not meet the scholars’ need to trace and store all relevant materials from the online archive. This case study shows how computer vision methods, and more specifically a signal processing approach, can be used to identify, classify and extract relevant information items from a vast historical data collection. More specifically, this study reports the results of the construction of a data pipeline that extracts matrimonial advertisements from the digitized Catalan newspaper La Vanguardia. Matrimonial advertisements can provide genuine insights into the evolution of partner preferences over time, but they are hard to collect as they are scattered over millions of digitized historical newspapers and magazines. Moreover, to study variation in partner preferences by, for example, sex, social class, matrimonial status and time period, it is necessary to store the data into a database. The pipeline that we have constructed extracts matrimonial advertisements in a stepwise fashion, encompassing identification, through binarisation and segmentation, and classification based on Optical Character Recognition. By ways of a comprehensive evaluation, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the efficacy of the pipeline for the extraction of matrimonial advertisements is demonstrated. The findings not only underscore the viability of the signal processing approach but also underscore its potential for advancing research in historical demography, family history, as well as economic history, as similar pipelines can be set up to extract other relevant newspaper items, such as, marriage, birth, death and moving announcements, job vacancies or business announcements from digitized source collections.

ViCo: Human visual perception-based contour extraction of Chinese Tang dynasty textile patterns

The study of ancient textile patterns not only enriches historical material but also inspires modern costume art design. Recent developments in computer vision technology provide novel analytical methods for the study of ancient textile patterns. As contours are one of the most significant features in computer vision tasks, contour extraction serves as a prerequisite to accomplishing intelligent understanding and automatic design of textile patterns. In this paper, a perception-consistent contour extraction method (ViCo) that simulates the human visual system from the retina, the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), to the V1 area in the cortex is proposed, along with an ancient textile pattern dataset represented by TuanKe in the Chinese Tang dynasty. Experiments were conducted both qualitatively and quantitatively to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method on the TuanKe dataset. Analysis of the results implies the effectiveness of ViCo because the retinal and LGN filter enhances edge information and restrains tiny pixel changes, and the cortex simulation is direction selective. This study is among the initial efforts to employ computer vision technology for ancient textile pattern studies. The study presents a TuanKe dataset and a novel bio-inspired contour extraction method, which has significant historical research importance, fabric art design inspiration, and computer application value.

Historical insights at scale: A corpus-wide machine learning analysis of early modern astronomic tables.

Understanding the evolution and dissemination of human knowledge over time faces challenges due to the abundance of historical materials and limited specialist resources. However, the digitization of historical archives presents an opportunity for AI-supported analysis. This study advances historical analysis by using an atomization-recomposition method that relies on unsupervised machine learning and explainable AI techniques. Focusing on the "Sacrobosco Collection," consisting of 359 early modern printed editions of astronomy textbooks from European universities (1472-1650), totaling 76,000 pages, our analysis uncovers temporal and geographic patterns in knowledge transformation. We highlight the relevant role of astronomy textbooks in shaping a unified mathematical culture, driven by competition among educational institutions and market dynamics. This approach deepens our understanding by grounding insights in historical context, integrating with traditional methodologies. Case studies illustrate how communities embraced scientific advancements, reshaping astronomic and geographical views and exploring scientific roots amidst a changing world.

Рождение социологии спорта и Лестерская историко-социологическая школа

The paper describes the origins of sports sociology in Great Britain within the “Leicester School” of Historical Sociology of Norbert Elias, explaining the causes for the strong influence of the ideas of Elysianism on the present-day international sociology of sports. The overall development of the historical and sociological “Leicester School” of the 1960s and 1970s, its influence on the sociology of Great Britain, as well as the role of Elias and Ilya Neustadt in its formation are shown. The contemporary historical and sociological tradition of social analysis, inspired by the ideas of Elias and called the ‘sociology of process’ or ‘figurative research’, is described. Its key features are indicated: focus on relations–in–progress, relativism, studies of phenomena in their dynamics, the collection of historical materials, comparative analysis, and interdisciplinarity. The seminal works of Eric Dunning and Elias on sports sociology are considered, in addition to the early development of this field of studies. It is noted that both authors viewed sport and leisure activities as a means to understand society and proposed a sociological interpretation of sport as a tool for the civilizational process. Their work was based not only on a theoretical framework, but also on extensive historical research. This contributed to the early acceptance of the ideas of Leicester School during the establishment of international sports sociology in the 1960s. The paper is based on an informal interview in 2010 with Eric Dunning, the founding father of the British Sociology of Sport, co-author and student of Norbert Elias.

“Ruma Besi” Site as a Media Learning History at Madrasah Aliyah Sairun, Rhun Islands-Banda Naira

The purpose of this study is to show how the historical site "Ruma Besi" in Madrasah Aliyah in the Banda Islands can be utilized as a learning resource for Sejarah Indonesia. This study used a qualitative descriptive method. The results of field observations and relevant reference sources served as the basis for the source consulted for this study. The results show that the historical site "Ruma Besi" (iron house) is a British and Dutch colonial house that originally functioned as the home of the owner of a nutmeg plantation, or Perkenier. Even though only rubble remains, residents said the house was made of iron, starting with supporting pillars, walls, doors, windows, and roofs. Residents of Rhun Island today know it better as a "house of entertainment" because the site reminds them more of the attractions of Javanese dancers accompanied by Javanese music, which always decorated the afternoon breaks of nutmeg plantation workers at that time. The process of utilizing the historical site "Ruma Besi" as a learning resource for Indonesian history for Madrasah students is carried out by imagining historical facts about Indonesia in the past through a simple research step or discovery inquiry, which allows students to be directly involved as actors in activities. Historical discovery and study. This process is very beneficial for a complete understanding of historical material because of its closeness to the locus and its direct involvement in learning and introducing historical information. Keywords: Ruma Besi, Media Learning History, Rhun Island, Banda Naira

Data informed performance assessment and structural health monitoring for existing and historical concrete structures

AbstractOur generation inherits this cultural heritage of historic material and historic reinforced concrete structures and thus bears a certain responsibility to preserve these historic buildings with the help of the new technologies of lifetime management, conservation concepts and the new digitalization as well as the emerging safety concepts of our time. The aim of this article is to analyze the new technologies of data‐based service life management in relation to the assessment of historic reinforced concrete structures and to test the applicability of these methods to these historic buildings.