Historiographical Practice Research Articles

«Руский тип» подводных лодок: от «Дельфина» до «Барса»

The rise of submarine shipbuilding in Russia of 1900–1915 was influenced by the shortage of financial, technical and personnel resources. And yet the fleet received, along with American and German, boats of domestic design. Their design was concentrated in the hands of the outstanding theorist and engineer I.G. Bubnov, who announced the development of a special "Russian type" of a submarine that embodied the theoretical installations professed by him. The ships created according to Bubnov's designs are often regarded by fleet historians as unsurpassed in the world naval technology. Such a view contradicts the concrete data accumulated in historical research and needs critical consideration. For this purpose it is used classical methods of source studies and analysis of historiographical practice. The actual data indicate the harm brought to the fleet by the monopolization of scientific and technical activities. Submariners have developed a critical attitude towards the imposed type with its inherent number of persistent shortcomings. Bubnov refused to correct the shape of the hull which caused excessive water resistance. At the same time, in an effort to achieve the set speed of the boat, the designer envisaged in his projects such a powerful power plant that it exceeded the real capabilities of mechanical engineering and was also heavy and cumbersome. The boat commanders and engineers pointed out the need to reduce the submerging time of the boats, increase their survivability, add watertight bulkheads, abandon the low-impact mine vehicles of Dzhevetsky system, make the hull shape more streamlined, but the maritime administration preferred to save time and money and dismissed claims, sacrificing the comfort and safety of the crews. The experience of the First World War and familiarization with the most successful American and British designs nevertheless prompted I.G. Bubnov in 1915-1916. to revise the design principles concerning the shape of the hull, the internal structure of boats, the nature of engines, weapons, but the more advanced projects prepared by him could not be realized.

Buranjis and the Asian History Writing Tradition

The historiographical tradition of Assam called Buranji reached the Northeast of India with the coming of Ahoms in the first quarter of thirteenth century. The history of pre-colonial Assam is largely constructed on the basis of buranji and most modern historians mainly from the region have engaged with the buranji literature reproduced and interpreted by native scholars after the coming of the British. While the main focus of modern historians have been on the relevance and importance of buranji in the historical study of Assam, no significant study is visible in tracing the historical journey of this tradition itself. This article, thus, is an attempt to locate the buranji tradition in a trans-regional context by linking it with the historiographical practices of East and Southeast Asia, particularly by looking at the Chinese historical tradition to propose that certain similarities found in them are highly suggestive of a more active historical interaction between the Tai (Shan) and the Chinese, bearings of which can be seen in the buranji tradition.

Namen auf einer Liste: Aufzählen und Erinnern in der Troja-Tradition

Abstract Lists and catalogues play an integral role in collective memory: since antiquity, victims of acts of violence have been remembered on monuments that list their names. Such lists of victims can also be found in the medieval tradition of the Troy story. At the end of several texts about the Trojan war, there is a list of those who were killed on the battlefields. Building on historiographic practices, these lists become an attempt to complete and thereby close the story of the Trojan heroes in the aftermath of the war. At the same time, they open up a space in which the war and its promise of glory are cast in a critical light – what remains of many battles is not the heroes’ fame but futile deaths. The article is rounded off by an analysis of Alice Oswald’s poem Memorial (2011), which uses the name list of the Trojan war victims to reflect on memory and loss in a similar vein.

Beethoven jako aktor historyczny. Perspektywa mikrohistoryczna w muzykologii

The article focuses on issues of microhistory and the usefulness of this historiographical practice in musicological research. The author begins by presenting the key issues relating to microhistory, referring extensively to the book What Is Microhistory? by István M. Szijártó and Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon. She then quotes and briefly discusses the most significant musicological works which employed microhistorical strategy. These are Mark Everist’s book Music Drama at the Paris Odéon, 1824–1828, Tamara Levitz’s Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone and Peter J. Schmelz’s article “Shostakovich” Fights the Cold War: Reflections from Great to Small. The main part of the text is devoted to Mark Ferraguto’s monograph Beethoven 1806. That publication is wholly based on the microhistorical approach, thus open- ing a new perspective in reflection on the instrumental works by the Master from Bonn. Ferraguto analyses Beethoven’s works from 1806 and early 1807 in the context of the people and the instruments for which they were composed; he also explores the nature of and reasons for the composer’s retreat from the „heroic phase”, analysing various aspects of contemporary musical, social and political life in Vienna. He does so while concentrating on selected, characteristic moments which define the given opus. Unlike the earlier musicological works based on the microhistorical strategy, Ferraguto’s monograph is not overburdened with detail, but makes an excellent job of linking contextual issues with analysis of musical composition. In this way it enriches musicological research by providing it with a new, interesting dimension.

De viajes con libros y viajes de libros. Algunas reflexiones sobre el contexto salmantino a finales del siglo XIV y comienzos del XV

Con cierta frecuencia la historiografía ha recurrido a los viajes de determinados personajes para explicar la presencia de objetos o conceptos aparentemente ajenos a la realidad local. Es el caso del Colegio Mayor de San Bartolomé de la Universidad de Salamanca y de la colección de libros de su fundador, Diego de Anaya, donde su volumen y novedades solo era comprendida por sus desplazamientos fuera de la península. Así, se plantea una revisión de la influencia de estos traslados para la adquisición de libros, frente a la situación del mercado librario en la ciudad. Por otra parte, a partir de la práctica historiográfica que clasifica la producción de manuscritos iluminados en base a las identidades regionales, se abordan una serie de reflexiones en torno a la recepción y percepción de estos matices formales por sus promotores y primeros propietarios.

Untraining the Bauhaus

Discussing the artistic-research project ‘Jakob K./The New Man', we propose a set of contemporary techno-speculative training practices that challenge historic discourses on body optimization. Created by a collective of performance artists and architectural researchers, the project reconstructs the work of fictional Bauhaus choreographer and gymnastics teacher Jakob Klenke, thus proposing an alternative method of performance historiography. Involving field work, site-specific re-enactment, 3D-scanning, animation and digital fabrication, it culminated in a series of live performances at Kampnagel (Hamburg) and during the 2019 ‘Bauhaus100’ centennial. The text takes the form of an experimental flow-chart manifesto that combines images and descriptions of various elements of the research and performance, such as the speculative training equipment cross-contaminating Breuer's bent-tube furniture with open-ended fitness apparatuses; Klenke's eco-feminist gymnastics classes; or the interpolated reconstruction of Jakob's trans-identity through photogrammetric scanning, scripting and projection. Throughout the text, our methodological proposition unfolds: whilst acknowledging the normalizing effects of training cultures, the reconstruction of Klenke's practice regards training equipment, exercises and the methodologies of their reconstruction as generative and indeterminate. With and against modernist fantasies of formalizing and aligning bodies via training and technology, it imagines a retro-futurist training utopia that allows for the formulation of heterogeneous techno-social practices shaping disobedient (post-)human bodies. Training here carries the potential to create a post-anthropocentric, expanded perceptual sympathy within more-than-human assemblages, enriched with technological agents that can unsettle our habituated perceptions. To train is to repeat and hence is a historiographical practice: by inserting ourselves into a history of fabricated bodies we have the potential to fabricate them differently, untraining dominant historiographical narratives and dominant techniques of power simultaneously. This is what the fictional choreographer Klenke can do: He is a subversion of historical and contemporary modes of entraining subjectivity, a subversion from within-an affordance to repeat differently.

¿El «giro de 1920»?

El valor y el sentido de un texto no depende sólo de su contenido o de suautor sino también de las lecturas que se proponen para abordarlo. El presente texto seinicia con una presentación somera de distintos modos históricos de “leer” a Freud enArgentina. Luego, se intenta analizar más detenidamente una lectura, introducida en ladécada de 1990, que interpreta “Más allá del principio de placer” como un “giro” queconduciría a valorar los textos anteriores como meros “antecedentes”. A partir de algunosprincipios de la práctica historiográfica y de la investigación histórica del psicoanálisis,se realizan algunas críticas a este tipo de abordajes. Finalmente, se propone una nuevalectura que permitiría interpretar el escrito de 1920 no sólo como un punto de inflexión,sino también como una nueva respuesta a viejos problemas vinculados con el conceptode repetición. Se intentará fundamentar que estos problemas no sólo atraviesan transversalmentela “obra” freudiana sino, incluso, la historia íntegra de la clínica de las neurosis.

The symptomatology of a surpassing disaster: Narrativization and temporality in the work of Walid Raad

Abstract Since the 1990s, the common thread to artistic practices based on the collection, archiving and presentation of historical documents can be derived from what is happening with the space, time and the regimes of visibility and knowledge as part of digital reproductivity. Nevertheless, roughly two separate key approaches can be identified: construction approaches that are often designed as an intervention in the dominant historiographical practice, on the one hand, and approaches focusing on the study of infrastructural, epistemological and other conditions for the possibility of archiving and historicization in general, on the other. The latter approaches frequently question the standard treatment of documents that is most often based on the ability to trace their origin as well as on their presumptive expressive and narrative potentials. The article therefore analyses the approach to studying history adopted by Lebanese-American artist Walid Raad, drawing from the performance-lecture Les Louvres and/or Kicking the Dead, which is part of a broader project about “a history of art in the Arab world”. In the process of defining the specifics of Raad’s approach based on the concepts of “spaces of interrupted histories” and “self-historicization”, the article draws a comparison between artistic uses of documents in the context of former socialist countries and the Middle East or, more specifically, the Lebanese socio-political context. Instead of unifying both “spaces of interrupted histories” by focusing on narrativization and temporality in Raad’s work, I concentrate mostly on the differences.

«El manchado lienzo de la historia»: Usos y apropiaciones del pasado medieval en la historiografía de la ilustración. El caso de Pedro el cruel

The aim of this paper is to explore the political meanings of the medieval past in the historical understanding of individuals in the 18th century. Beyond the familiar Gothic myth, I will focus on the multilayered image of the monarch Peter of Castile (1334–1369), considered cruel, lustful and passionate in the eyes of enemies and historians. The aim is to analyse the different attitudes towards and uses of this historical figure (one that was quite problematic given the cultural values of the period), ranging from the most negative of connotations to the most passionate of defences and including some more ambiguous stances. For this analysis, I will explore certain Enlightenment debates that are useful for broadening the theoretical frameworks available for understanding representations of Peter of Castile. In doing so, I will establish a link between the controversies surrounding civilization, sensibility, masculinity, patriotism and «national characters». The varied appropriations of his personality and reign, found in different chronicles, compendiums, periodicals and tributes, are understood in the framework of the controversies surrounding critical history and the reliability of witnesses and historians. Their study highlights the diversity of processes through which the past, in its different forms, played a political role in 18th-century society and culture. And, ultimately, it reveals the tensions and disagreements that arise in the process of shaping historiographical practice.

O “mal de Alzheimer nacional”: algumas reflexões sobre os usos políticos do passado e o ensino de história

O objetivo é trazer à lume algumas reflexões sobre as relações entre presente e passado, memória e história, pensando os caminhos da prática historiográfica e o ensino de história frente aos recorrentes usos políticos do passado e aos ataques e demandas negacionistas na contemporaneidade brasileira. Contrapondo as múltiplas violências visíveis e in(visíveis) na sociedade, destacamos a força da literatura e a dimensão ética, sensível, política e estética da historiografia e do ensino de história como possibilidades de constituição de um repertório mais humano e ético numa cultura marcada por tradições autoritárias e pela violência, negação e apagamento dos rastros dessa mesma violência.

A genealogia de Michel Foucault e a história como diagnóstico do presente: elementos para a História da Educação

Michel Foucault afirma que seus livros não são tratados de filosofia nem estudos históricos; mas que são, no máximo, fragmentos filosóficos em canteiros históricos, o que torna possível dizer que suas pesquisas se situam entre a reflexão filosófica e a prática historiográfica, sendo que o que está na perspectiva de sua história é o próprio presente. Trata-se de interrogar a irrupção dos acontecimentos que produziram nossa atualidade e investigar historicamente como e porque nos tornamos o que somos. Na abordagem da história pela genealogia, a análise foucaultiana recai sobre o saber em termos de estratégia e táticas de poder, o que implica situar o saber no embate das lutas e a verdade no jogo da disputa. O propósito aqui é remeter a discussão da história genealógica para o campo da educação, entendendo que ferramentas genealógicas podem fornecer elementos para a suspeição e o questionamento acerca não só da constituição da educação, mas também da própria noção de história, permitindo compreender a construção discursiva das memórias educacionais como efeitos de vontades de verdade.

Form and/as Mode of Existence

Abstract This essay focuses on two of the modes of existence posited by AIME, a collaborative project comprising Bruno Latour’s monograph An Inquiry into Modes of Existence and a multiauthored website associated with it. I juxtapose the modes of reference [REF] and fiction [FIC] with a famous digression reflecting on historiographical practice in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum. AIME offers analytical rigor to medievalists’ discussions of the notorious overlap between “history” and “fiction.” William’s bold use of [FIC] to advance [REF] is in the spirit of AIME’s project, though he goes further in trusting [FIC] than AIME is always willing to do. An instance of medieval historiography thus leads the way in overcoming a residual Modern suspicion of a nonreferential mode of existence and of knowledge. Additionally, although AIME’s restriction of crossings to two modes is useful for defining each, in practice more than two are often found “plaited.” I make this argument through a discussion of the use of brackets to mark verse form and rhyme scheme in medieval manuscripts: an example of [TEC•FIC•REF] plaiting. Finally, I call for further development of the multimodal possibilities of “form,” which AIME flags but does not pursue, and for a new mode of existence to be added to Latour’s list: [FOR].

The Historiography of Victorian Britain and the US Civil War

The Historiography of Victorian Britain and the US Civil War David Brown (bio) The influence of the American Civil War within British historiography, by which I refer to the historiography of the Victorian era and of the British Empire in the mid-nineteenth century, is minimal. Of course, Anglo-American and transatlantic historians taking a comparative approach have written extensively on this topic, but this essay confines its analysis to the work of card-carrying historians of British history in the Victorian era. There has been a long and distinguished tradition of British scholars of the American Civil War—which includes William Brock, J. R. Pole, and Peter J. Parish—and more recently much interest the war’s transnational impact, but what impact has this literature made outside of its subfield? To be frank, it has had very little influence on scholars of Victorian Britain, and I took a couple of weighty books from the library shelf at random to illustrate the point. [End Page 156] How many pages do you think the US Civil War takes up in the work covering 1846–1886 in Oxford University Press’s multivolume New Oxford History of England? The index of The Mid-Victorian Generation has just four subheadings under the United States of America: agriculture; economic competition; relations with; and Civil War. The three separate entries listed under “Civil War” begin on page 13 by suggesting that the supply of wheat to Britain was disrupted “by wars in the Crimea and the United States.” The eagle-eyed might raise an eyebrow at this, because common wisdom suggests that transatlantic wheat exports increased during the early 1860s, partly compensating for the dearth of cotton in calculating the war’s disruption of the British economy.5 On page 197, two sentences discuss the “good deal of interest in British military circles” in battle tactics and weaponry, although with little lasting effect because “British experts dismissed” them “as aberrations arising from unique circumstances.” Coverage of the American Civil War peaks on pages 230 and 231 of this 787-page work. When I say “peak,” I mean ends—and two full pages are not given to the Civil War, because Poland’s 1863 rebellion against Russia takes up half a page, as does Garibaldi’s British visit in 1864. The narrative of the American Civil War’s transatlantic effect is covered in one paragraph that is, it must be said, remarkably cogent. The paragraph emphasizes neutrality threatened by the “rabidly anti-British” William Seward, diplomatic spats over the Trent and the Alabama, and Gladstone’s speech at Newcastle in October 1862, where much alarm was caused by his declaration that Jefferson Davis “has made a nation.” The war’s significance is covered in just three sentences in the next paragraph, contextualizing Gladstone’s faux pas at Newcastle and his subsequent transition to liberal champion of working-class reform.6 The Civil War does not have much traction for domestic historians of the Victorian era, then, but surely it has more purchase within the context of Empire? No. The forty essays of a 756-page 2012 edited collection, The Victorian World, provide more separate index entries for the American Civil War, but in terms of the events between 1861 and 1865, greater detail is found in The Mid-Victorian Generation.7 The citations are, without exception, brief mentions of the war in passing, set within the context of other themes, even in a final essay titled “The Victorian Period of American [End Page 157] History.” This chapter appears most pertinent but does not examine the war’s impact within Victorian Britain. Instead, it contests the standard historiographical practice of using the Civil War as a convenient periodization device that divides US history into ante- and postbellum to argue that the last two thirds of nineteenth-century American history should be treated as one era: the Victorian period.8 In other words, it examines the ways the British Victorian experience informs US history, rather than vice versa. There are just two strands of British historiography in which the Civil War makes an intervention. The first is the domain of military historians who confront the—by now venerable—question...

International Legal Histories as Orders: An Afterword to Martti Koskenniemi’s Foreword

Abstract In this article I address the question of what Martti Koskenniemi refers to in his EJIL Foreword as Hugo Grotius’ legal imagination – the type of values he was trying to convey and the strategies he meant to pursue while constructing his idea of an international legal order. As a matter of fact, focusing on such an apparently narrow aspect is not just relevant to those with a historical interest in Grotius. It also tells us something about the inveterate relationship between international law and historiographic practices. What I want to suggest here is that the history of international law is not just an a posteriori critical reflection on the international legal order – a subgenre for lovers of intellectual escapism in search of a distraction from the many problems of the contemporary world – but, rather, that one of the many successful projects of international law was (and still is) the ambition to order the world through histories.

Natura e storia

The article deals with John Hermann Randall’s theory of history, namely, the philosophical account of what it takes for an object to be a historical object. The goal of the article is to highlight the deep connections existing between Randall’s philosophical views on history and the writing of history, heavily indebted to Dewey’s and Woodbridge naturalism (the so-called Columbia Naturalism), and his historiographical work. In the first section, I briefly sketch some major aspects of originality of Randall’s historiographical work, as well as the intellectual context to which he belonged. In the second section I lay out the most important features of Columbia Naturalism. In the third section I discuss in detail Randall’s theory of history, focusing on its ontological, epistemic, and epistemological features. In the fourth section, I confront Lovejoy and Randall’s historiographical works in order to show how philosophical theories affect historiographical practices.

Práctica historiográfica y ciencias sociales en México. Una aproximación a la historia contemporánea y del presente

Se abordan las condiciones que explican la evolución de la práctica disciplinaria de la historia en México a lo largo del siglo XX. Esta revisión permite advertir que dicha práctica es el resultado de un contexto político, nacional e internacional, y de procesos históricos que definimos como la contemporaneidad. Esta, a su vez, refleja la forma en que las disciplinas abocadas a su estudio se despliegan perfilando una colaboración inter y transdisciplinaria (hibridación). Este proceso se observa con el surgimiento, en primer lugar, de subdisciplinas incorporadas a la práctica historiográfica -historia económica, social, demográfica, por ejemplo, o sociología histórica- y, en segundo lugar, de campos temáticos que se relacionan con la historia del presente como la etapa más novedosa. Se termina haciendo un recuento de la práctica de esta en México en las últimas décadas.

Historiographische Praxis und politische Ästhetik

Abstract Schiller-research is quite dissonant with respect to the question whether or not his second play, The Conspiracy (1783), is »republican« in a ›modern‹, political sense. Many readers have concluded that the historiographic approach displayed in the play was utterly implausible. This article summarizes the interpretations on Schiller’s historiographic practice and takes them to a deeper understanding of the political aesthetic the play is set out to expose. A close reading of the animal fable in the play, with a special focus on its anthropomorphic dimension, shows that its political implications are rather diverse and exist side by side – a narrative technique that illustrates formally what has been addressed as a »play with different options«.

Historiographische Praxis und politische Ästhetik

Abstract Schiller-research is quite dissonant with respect to the question whether or not his second play, The Conspiracy (1783), is »republican« in a ›modern‹, political sense. Many readers have concluded that the historiographic approach displayed in the play was utterly implausible. This article summarizes the interpretations on Schiller’s historiographic practice and takes them to a deeper understanding of the political aesthetic the play is set out to expose. A close reading of the animal fable in the play, with a special focus on its anthropomorphic dimension, shows that its political implications are rather diverse and exist side by side – a narrative technique that illustrates formally what has been addressed as a »play with different options«.

The forgetting of Mary Wollstonecraft’s religiosity: teleological secularism within feminist historiography

ABSTRACTReligious concepts and themes are central to many of Mary Wollstonecraft’s writings, yet rarely feature within popular representations of her life, work and legacy today. This paper examines the forgetting of Wollstonecraft’s religiosity in light of the broader narratives that western feminism circulates about its past and present, focusing particularly on the historiographical practices and temporal tropes that construct feminism as a quintessentially secular project. It also considers the potentially transformative impact that unforgetting Wollstonecraft’s religiosity could have within feminist historiography and politics in the present, in terms of parochializing the political certitude of secular feminism and the politics of division conducted in its name.

Utility, Reason and Rhetoric: James Mill's Metaphor of the Historian as Judge

James Mill'sHistory of British India(1817) made a rather strange claim: first-hand experience of India was not vital in writing a history – potentially, it led to false ideas about its subject-matter: eyewitnesses are susceptible to bias. The historian was thus to perform his task as a judge: sifting through various testimonies to obtain a ‘more perfect’ conception of the whole than those who witnessed its various parts. Although strange, Mill's claim does not bewilder his readers: after all, Mill was a ‘militant’ exponent of theorizing utilitarianism. I argue that such a reading of Mill's method is injudiciously restrictive. Not only did Mill draw on well-known methodological concerns in contemporary historiographical practice, not necessarily linked with Jeremy Bentham or the Scottish theoretical historiography, but he also seemed to adopt the vocabulary of forensic rhetoric, making his claim that his was a ‘judging’ history more literal than it has been supposed.