Historical Imagination Research Articles

ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb’s Encounter with an Unnamed Monk: From History to Legend

ABSTRACT The Ambrosian Library in Milan has preserved thirteen very interesting folios written in an archaic semi-Kūfī Arabic script, describing an encounter between the second caliph of Islam ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb and an unnamed monk. We demonstrate how the anonymous author of this manuscript was familiar with the ṣulḥ agreements, the covenants of the Prophet Muḥammad, and historical and anecdotal accounts of encounters between ʿUmar and ecclesiastical authorities. We postulate that our author composed his narrative on the basis of his own historical imagination from sources that probably belonged to monastic archives to which he had access. The author aimed to deliver a subtle political message, highlighting the archetypal relationship between a Muslim ruler and a Christian subject living under Islam. Two adaptations of our text have been found in Islamic sources, the first in al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī’s Al-zuhd wa- al-raqāʾiq, and the second in Ibn ʿAsākir’s Tārīkh madīnat Dimashq, which we argue reflect a later re-working of the original narrative.

Myopia prediction for children and adolescents via time-aware deep learning

This is a retrospective analysis. Quantitative prediction of the children’s and adolescents’ spherical equivalent based on their variable-length historical vision records. From October 2019 to March 2022, we examined uncorrected visual acuity, sphere, astigmatism, axis, corneal curvature and axial length of 75,172 eyes from 37,586 children and adolescents aged 6–20 years in Chengdu, China. 80% samples consist of the training set, the 10% form the validation set and the remaining 10% form the testing set. Time-Aware Long Short-Term Memory was used to quantitatively predict the children’s and adolescents’ spherical equivalent within two and a half years. The mean absolute prediction error on the testing set was 0.103 ± 0.140 (D) for spherical equivalent, ranging from 0.040 ± 0.050 (D) to 0.187 ± 0.168 (D) if we consider different lengths of historical records and different prediction durations. Time-Aware Long Short-Term Memory was applied to captured the temporal features in irregularly sampled time series, which is more in line with the characteristics of real data and thus has higher applicability, and helps to identify the progression of myopia earlier. The overall error 0.103 (D) is much smaller than the criterion for clinically acceptable prediction, say 0.75 (D).

Sociological Futures and the Importance of the Past

This article argues that in order to engage sociologically with the future the discipline needs to rediscover its historical imagination. It makes three main points. First is the idea that sociology needs to be more historical and to illustrate how this has been done well before. Second, it explores ideas, concepts and theories used in thinking about the past, which are in turn useful in organising how we imagine the future – in particular nostalgia, and especially that surrounding industry. Finally, it offers ways of thinking about the sociologically mediated relationship between past, present and future through the burgeoning field of deindustrialisation studies.

Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust by Joanna Sliwa

Reviewed by: Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust by Joanna Sliwa Sean Martin Joanna Sliwa. Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2021. 218 pp. Joanna Sliwa has written a comprehensive and detailed account of the experiences of Jewish children in Kraków during the Holocaust. This meticulously researched yet brief study delivers on the promise of its title. Focusing tightly on sources from the children themselves, Sliwa outlines what happened to them from the occupation in 1939 to the immediate postwar years. The great contribution of her work is her excavation of the voices of these children. In addition to published testimonies and memoirs, Sliwa makes extensive use of the oral histories of the Visual History Archive of the Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California and the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. In Sliwa’s work, the children speak of their daily lives under the most tragic of circumstances, teaching us both more about what happened and about how they survived. Sliwa’s presentation of children’s lives and memories can sometimes make for challenging and compelling reading; the author does not shrink from sharing the disturbing details of the children’s worst experiences. But the author’s sensitive tone combines with her mastery of the sources to yield a volume that is at once respectful of its subjects and informative for its readers. Sliwa’s approach is chronological and loosely thematic. In six brief chapters, she addresses shifts in the city immediately following occupation, adaptation to life in the ghetto, the clandestine activities children participated in, the work of the local child welfare associations, followed by the experiences of children hiding in the Płaszów concentration camp, and those who survived by hiding and fleeing. An even briefer epilogue addresses the immediate postwar circumstances the children faced and the fate of child survivors living in Kraków today. The story Sliwa tells concerns just under 19,000 children, according to a census conducted by the Jewish Council in November 1939. Her story narrows tragically in its final chapters on the comparatively small number of children concealed in Płaszów and those who hid on the “Aryan” side or fled to other towns after the destruction of the ghetto. It also opens up, though, as the accounts of these children involve places and people beyond the ghetto and Płaszów. The strength of Sliwa’s narration is the details from the testimonies she has mined to learn more about her topic. Of note are interactions between parents and children. For example, she describes how, upon the impending dissolution of the ghetto in March 1943, Renate Leinkram’s mother cut her thirteen-year-old daughter’s hair and dressed her in adult clothes, hoping she would pass as an adult worker in Płaszów. Sliwa also notes often how children could help adults, for example, through smuggling, such as in the testimony of Janka Warszawska. The final chapters on hiding are also of great interest. Sliwa’s summary of the testimonies of street children who survived outside of Płaszów illuminates their relationships with other children and the dangers of public environments such as the train station. Sliwa’s structure resembles the many memoirs written by child survivors that, regardless of the child’s age, begin in 1939. While this lends focus, it also obscures the history of Jewish childhood before the war. Additional background on the history of the topic, both generally and in Kraków, would have given the [End Page 226] reader an even greater sense of both the continuity and rupture of the wartime period. For example, greater attention to questions of the languages used by children and adults could illuminate further the specific characteristics of daily life. In addition, the question of class could have been addressed more forthrightly. Sliwa does well to point out often that those whose parents worked in advantageous positions were more likely to be protected in a given situation. But is there anything else one might conclude about class from the qualitative and quantitative data Sliwa...

Richard Kearney’s Sacramental Play between Immanence and Transcendence

Abstract This article will discuss anatheist imagination in Kearney’s work. With the help of a poem by Sharon Olds, it will make a case for the sacramental – or anatheist – play between immanence and transcendence as a crucial motif to interpreting Kearney’s philosophy. Firstly, illustrating that the sacramental opens the door to a more embodied and carnal understanding of Kearney’s hermeneutics. Secondly, drawing on insights from my research, I’ll argue in a short history of anatheist imagination that there’s a continuity between the sacramental and Kearney’s early work on the hermeneutics of the possible. Finally, the article concludes with some considerations on the philosophical and/or theological character of Kearney’s emphasis on the sacramental imagination as a hermeneutic stance.

(Un)Seeing Goa’s Bom Jesus in Vishvesh Prabhakar Kandolkar’s This is Not the Basilica!

This article examines the interrogation of visual history associated with Goan church architectural legacies offered by Vishvesh Prabhakar Kandolkar’s installation series, This is Not the Basilica! (2021). The artist’s subject is the 16th-century Basilica of Bom Jesus, which was built in locally domesticated Baroque style during Goa’s Portuguese colonial era and which houses the remains of the Spanish saint, Francis Xavier. Kandolkar’s work makes viewers intimate with the Basilica’s history, I contend, so as to posit the need for conservation efforts that will save the deteriorating church while also revealing its unseen aesthetic past as a symbol of still-unfolding Goan identity.

Deborah Willis. The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship.

Readers interested in the Black freedom struggle of the nineteenth century will find Deborah Willis’s The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship a must read. While abolitionist portraiture and antislavery ephemera of the 1830s and 1840s have yielded some of the most iconic illustrations of the nineteenth century, this text reveals an equally robust image practice organized around Black soldiers, produced between 1860 and 1866, that continues to influence twenty-first century visualizations of Blacks in the military. Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery by Willis and Barbara Krauthammer (2013) might be the closest comparison to Black Civil War Soldier in terms of revelations about African American engagements with the camera around the question of freedom. However, Black Civil War Soldier contributes to a larger historiographic project that insists the abolition of slavery was the central motive for fighting the Civil War. Critical works such as Thavolia Glymph’s Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (2019) rebuff a larger swath of secondary scholarship organized around ideas about who fought and for what reasons. Yet Black Civil War Soldier is distinct in using photographs to assert the primacy of African Americans in the Civil War and freedom as their particular motivation for taking up arms. Willis organizes archival sources in ways that reveal the Black freedom struggle in visual media produced in a wartime context. By presenting readers with a vast collection of photographs, letters, diary writings, pension records, newspapers and contemporary art, Willis shows us that vision and visibility were of central importance to Black Civil War soldiers who fought to free loved ones and end the system of enslavement.

The Philosophical Roots of the Philosophy of Rights

Georg Wilhelm Hegel’s book Elements of the Philosophy of Right and the discussions of his work initiated modern perception of the philosophy of rights, support, and critique. Many studies focused on the concept of rights, especially natural and divine rights. Still, research on the roots of the philosophy of rights remains interesting. Accordingly, this research examines the concept of rights to understand the beginnings that heralded modern and contemporary philosophical positions, starting with Greek philosophy and all the way to the dawn of modern philosophy. The study aims to examine the philosophical origins and schools of philosophy on the issue of rights by tracing the gradual development of this concept, starting with Greek philosophy, through the Middle Ages and ending with Descartes. It aims to reveal the role played by these philosophical schools in developing the concept of rights within their various natural, social, and political frameworks. The research also reviews the works of the most prominent philosophers of the period. The problem at the heart of the research lies in the crucial questions it raises about the concept of rights, its origins and features and in showcasing the main differences among the philosophical schools regarding such a concept. These questions are: What are rights? What are the philosophical schools of thought on which this concept is based, and how did these contribute to its development? The research adopts the historical-analytical method, with the aim of providing a historical vision of the concept of rights and its predicaments. The historical review of philosophical positions reveals that the concept of rights had its origins in ancient and medieval philosophy, which had not been combined as an independent unit of philosophy; rather, it was a combination of the relationship among concepts of rights, duties, justice, and freedom. Therefore, Hegel’s description of the history of philosophy as evolutionary is valid since it is continuous, structural, and evolving in nature. The foundations of the concept of rights did not originate with Hegel, as these were natural and appropriate developments of the relationship of the idea and its opposite within a historical process that led to Hegel’s views extrapolated in his book “Elements of the Philosophy of Right”.

Digital visual history: historiographic curation using digital technologies

ABSTRACT Digital technologies are revolutionizing the way we study and understand history. Historical sources and material evidence are increasingly being transformed into digital objects and integrated into larger databases, offering new ways of researching history in the digital age. This article reviews dominant practices that deal with new forms of historiography. It does so by offering digital curatorial practices and outlines a new methodological concept of digital visual history. For that purpose, the article explores a particularly challenging test case of historical visual sources, which not only had a lasting effect on the collective historical imagination but has also increasingly turned digital: the difficult visual heritage of the Holocaust. Highlighting significant aspects of the afterlife of these visual sources, the article uses as an example the digital infrastructure developed in the framework of the EU Horizon 2020 project ‘Visual History of the Holocaust: Rethinking Curation in the Digital Age’ (VHH) (2019–2023) that aims at (re)contextualizing Allied atrocity records as relational and migrating images. In doing so, the article demonstrates how, through the combination of historiographic practices of curation and digital technologies, the visual heritage of past events is revealed as dynamic and interconnected.

The Pope’s New Clothes

The Pope’s New Clothes

Arts, Visual History and the Mores: Typifying Palace Relics and Sculptures of the Grass field Region of Cameroon

Arts, Visual History and the Mores: Typifying Palace Relics and Sculptures of the Grass field Region of Cameroon

Historical Imagination and the Unspoken Assumptions of Our Age

This article discusses changing conceptions of how the study of history should best inform present challenges. It contrasts the ‘historical sensibility’ embodied by Michael Howard with the teleological ‘historicism’ decried by Karl Popper. It explores what Howard termed the historical ‘imagination’ – the recreation of the belief structures which made historical events and developments possible – and his argument of how the study of history, including the history of foreign countries, might cultivate cultural empathy. It also examines James Joll’s concept of ‘unspoken assumptions’ and considers how it and Howard’s ideas might illuminate our understanding of our own age.

Book Maps of Russian Authors of the XIX – early XX centuries as a Source on the Visual History of Kazakhstan: Catalog

Book Maps of Russian Authors of the XIX – early XX centuries as a Source on the Visual History of Kazakhstan: Catalog

:Time and Power: Visions of History in German Politics, from the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich

:<i>Time and Power: Visions of History in German Politics, from the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich</i>

Sound and Sense: Poetic Form and Translating Sor Juana’s Amor es más laberinto

Abstract What is the role of rhythm, sound, meter, and rhyme in translations and performances of comedia? This essay discusses Sor Juana’s Amor es más laberinto and my process of translating moments of heightened verse in the play—sonnets spoken by the two princesses and sound-driven texts spoken (or perhaps sung) by the Chorus and by the character Music. The piece asks: How should these moments of heightened verse be translated? What is the relationship between author, translator, actor, and director as each participant in the creative process approaches form through their own understanding of sound and sense? Weaving together analysis of Sor Juana’s own reconfiguring of form and of contemporary innovations in poetic form, which each craft new visions of history and identity, the piece argues that translators are permitted, and perhaps obligated, to wield form and the poetic line to its full affective potential.

Eudora Welty Society

Eudora Welty Society Donnie McMahand and Kevin Murphy After two years of virtual events during the height of the COVID pandemic, the Eudora Welty Society made a much-anticipated return to inperson conferences in 2022. At the May conference of the American Literature Association (ALA) in Chicago, the Society met and conducted its annual business meeting with current officers presiding: Donnie McMahand and Kevin Murphy, Presidents; Rebecca Harrison, Vice President; and Laura Wilson, Treasurer. Additionally, the society sponsored two panels, a roundtable, and a reprised dramatic reading of Welty's "Moon Lake," led by adaptor and director Brenda Currin and performed by Welty scholars. (Thereafter, Laura Wilson interviewed Brenda Currin for the Eudora Welty Review volume 14, 2022.) In June, the society sponsored two panels at the biennial conference for the Society for the Study of Southern Literature (SSSL). The Society also presented a roundtable in October at the ALA Symposium "The Historical Imagination in American Literature" in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The year 2022 marked a transition to a new listserv for the Society, replacing the old listserv hosted by Emory University. All future Society correspondence should be directed to our new listserv at eudorawelty society@baylor.edu. Society members are also eligible for numerous awards sponsored by the EWS. The Society regularly supports young Welty scholars by awarding travel grants to graduate students presenting at ALA. Recipients for 2022 included Jacob Agner, Summer Delgado, Nathaniel Hawlish, and Grace McCright, who each received $100. In conjunction with the Eudora Welty Review, the Society awards the annual Ruth Vande Kieft prize for an outstanding essay on Welty. The 2022 prize of $150 went to Judy Butterfield for her essay "'An Is Different from My Is': The Lost Mother and the Subjectivity of the Motherless Child in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Welty's Delta Wedding," which appeared in volume 14 of this journal. At the 2022 SSSL conference, the society [End Page 193] honored two recipients of the biennial Phoenix Award given to a scholar who has made considerable contributions to Welty studies. Since the pandemic precluded public recognition of the 2019–2020 winner, David McWhirter, the Society recognized both David and the 2021–2022 winner, Mae Miller Claxton. The Critical Perspectives on Eudora Welty series published by the University Press of Mississippi released three new volumes in 2022: Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden In Plain Sight (Dec. 2022), edited by Jacob Agner and Harriet Pollack; The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty (May 2022) by Danièle Pitavy-Souques and editor Pearl Amelia McHaney; and Exposing Mississippi: Eudora Welty's Photographic Reflections (Mar. 2022) by Annette Trefzer, which won the 2022 Eudora Welty Prize. All three volumes can be purchased on the University Press of Mississippi's website: upress.state.ms.us. For further information about these volumes' contents and contributors, see the Checklist of Welty Scholarship elsewhere in this issue. The Eudora Welty Society will host two panels and a roundtable at the 2023 American Literature Association Conference in Boston. Topics include 1) Material Welty Roundtable, 2) Gender, Objects, and Welty, and 3) The Sensual, Sexual, and Erotic Welty. Below is a detailed list of the conference panels hosted by the Eudora Welty Society in 2022: American Literature Association Conference, May 26–28, 2022, Chicago, Illinois Eudora Welty and Performance Chair: Harriet Pollack, College of Charleston 1. "Stagestruck: Eudora Welty and the Theater," Suzanne Marrs, Millsaps College 2. "'That's me': Eudora Welty and the Performative Self," Katie Berry Frye, Pepperdine University 3. "The (Cinematic) Eye of Her Story: Eudora Welty and Film," Jacob Agner, University of Mississippi 4. "Eudora Welty's Cinematic Spaces: Inhabiting 'Why I live at the P.O,'" Dina Smith, Drake University 5. "On the Process of Adapting Eudora Welty for Performance," Brenda Currin, Independent Scholar, Actress, and Adaptor [End Page 194] Eudora Welty and Ecology Chair: Sarah Ford, Baylor University 1. "'It was said she believed in evolution': An Ecogothic Reading of 'Moon Lake,'" Grace McCright, Baylor University 2. "Eudora Welty's Dual Vision of Arcadia," Pearl McHaney, Georgia State University 3. "Laurel's Influx and Efflux: Reading the Non-human in The Optimist's Daughter," Nathaniel...

Untimely Women: Transgressive Histories in the Victorian Ghost Story

Abstract: This paper examines the creation of a feminine, untimely relationship to history in two late Victorian ghost stories, Vernon Lee's "Oke of Okehurst" (1886) and E. Nesbit's "Man-Size in Marble" (1887). Nineteenth-century ghost stories, I argue, perform a radical mode of historical thinking and narration, one that rebukes conventional linear time and empiricist historicism. As ambassadors from the past, these literary ghosts confirm the doctrine of historical continuity while simultaneously undercutting it through their subversion of the orthodox frame narrative. Lee's and Nesbit's female protagonists exploit the anachronistic potential of ghostliness, shattering their husbands' deterministic mode of nationalist historical reasoning. In this way, this paper refigures the genre as more than an antiquated diversion from the realist fiction of the period, revealing the ghost story's serious intervention in conventional historical imaginaries.

The Ballad of Morton Heilig: On VR's Mythic Past

Virtual reality (VR) became a cultural fixture in the 1980s, when advances in computing inspired a general belief in VR's revolutionary potential. To support this belief, VR enthusiasts at that time also constructed an imagined history. This article examines VR's historiography through one of its most enduring myths: that filmmaker and inventor Morton Heilig developed analog VR in the 1950s but never received public recognition because few understood his vision. I argue that this narrative of Heilig as VR's forgotten prophet functioned to justify the putatively revolutionary project of VR and to legitimize the VR community that was promoting it.

The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship by Deborah Willis (review)

The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship by Deborah Willis (review)

Resisting Narrative Closure: The Comparative and Historical Imagination of Evsey Domar

Abstract This article explores the peculiar approach to narrative argumentation taken by the MIT economist Evsey Domar (1914–97). Combining biography and textual analysis of his academic work reveals that Cold War themes permeated Domar's later research in comparative economic systems, Soviet economics, and economic history—and yet, Domar employed these themes in ways that challenge traditional understandings of postwar American social science. Against the heady partisanship and epistemic self-confidence that characterized his milieu, Domar offered conclusions that emphasized ambiguity, complexity, and open-endedness. He achieved this, the article argues, by thinking not only comparatively but also historically and speculatively. This article takes a journey through a number of Domar's historical and speculative narratives to demonstrate that what Domar was ultimately doing in many of his works was resisting normative, literary, and scientific closure.