School Of Historiography Research Articles

Plural Marriage and the Half-Empty-Glass School of Historiography

Plural Marriage and the Half-Empty-Glass School of Historiography

A retrospective and prospective look at the ‘happy English child’1—the applicability of postcolonial theory to the British government's education policy in Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

This paper looks at traditional nationalist and revisionist schools of historiography in relation to the British government's educational policy in Ireland following the establishment of the national school system in 1831 until the beginning of the twentieth century. It contrasts this with the postcolonial historiographical approach. It also looks at concepts of ‘internal colonialisation’ and the concept of the ‘celtic fringe’. It relates these various approaches particularly to the effect of the government's educational policy on the position of the Irish language at that time.

The Future of the Philosophy of Historiography

This article argues that the perception of decline among philosophers of history reflects the diffused weak academic status of the discipline, as distinct from the booming research activity and demand for philosophy of history that keeps pace with the growth rate of publications in the philosophies of science and law. This growth is justified and rational because the basic problems of the philosophy of history, concerning the nature of historiographical knowledge and the metaphysical assumptions of historiography, have maintained their relevance. Substantive philosophy of history has an assured popularity but is not likely to win intellectual respectability because of its epistemic weaknesses. I suggest focusing on problems that a study of historiography can help to understand and even solve, as distinct from problems that cannot be decided by an examination of historiography, such as the logical structure of explanation (logical positivism)and the relation between language and reality (post‐structuralism). In particular, following Quine's naturalized epistemology, I suggest placing the relation between evidence and historiography at the center of the philosophy of historiography. Inspired by the philosophy of law, I suggest there are three possible relations between input (evidence)and output in historiography: determinism, indeterminism, and underdeterminism. An empirical examination of historiographical agreement, disagreement, and failure to communicate may indicate which relation holds at which parts of historiography. The historiographical community seeks consensus, but some areas are subject to disagreements and absence of communication; these are associated with historiographical schools that interpret conflicting models of history differently to fit their evidence. The reasons for this underdetermination of historiography by evidence needs to be investigated further.

Stephen F. Austin, empresario of Texas

Stephen F. Austin: Empresario of Texas. By Gregg Cantrell. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Pp. xiv, 493. Illustrations, maps. $29.95.) The last biography of Stephen F. Austin was written in 1925; thus, a scholarly reevaluation of his life and times has been long overdue. This need has now been very successfully satisfied by Gregg Cantrell's magisterial study. Cantrell has provided a narrative text of nearly 500 pages that fully explores Austin's career through the use of an impressive array of American and Mexican secondary and primary materials. Not only has Cantrell followed his subject from birth to death, but he has done so with a fully developed background of contextual detail that gives the biography a sense of being rooted in the time and place surrounding each sphere of Austin's life. One may question the necessity for such a long book on Austin. In places, the text does seem to bog down a bit, and no doubt a little tighter editing would have made for a more concise treatment. Still, this problem is minor in a well-written, even engaging, narrative that maintains a reader's interest. With only a couple of exceptions, the use of novelistic suppositions is avoided, and Cantrell constructs plausible and probable conclusions from scant evidence. There is an excellent set of maps to support the text and, at the end, a very useful essay on sources. Cantrell is overly modest in his introductory assertion that the work is simply a biography and not an attempt to analyze wider themes. In a number of places, the author offers insights about the events through which Austin moved that are informative and even provocative. For instance, Cantrell offers an overview of the debate between the old and new western historiography and places Austin's career within the differing interpretative themes. He finds that, often enough, it does not fit neatly or easily into either, suggesting a historical situation that was far more complex and layered than the rival historiographical schools allow. Also examined are the nature of east Missouri in the 18 10s and 1820s, the impact of the Panic of 1819 on that frontier, and the effect that the War of 1812 had on young Austin's career and on the region. Indeed, Cantrell suggests that the war created a labor shortage on the frontier that helped to expand slavery into the West. The bulk of the study, properly, concerns the evolution of Texas within the newly independent nation of Mexico. This required an introduction to Mexican political history, particularly on the contest between centralism and federalism that worked to constantly bedevil Austin's land schemes. Within Texas, Cantrell focuses on the growing American colony populated primarily by southerners who wanted a slave-based society and on this group's growing unrest under Mexican rule. The main focus of the work, of course, is Stephen Austin himself, a difficult man to pin down. He was a master diplomat and successful conciliator, a workaholic who could be paternalistic, cynical, and selfpitying. He was a life-long bachelor who had to deal with recurring bouts of ill health while being obsessively driven to follow his perceived calling: the Americanization of Texas. Cantrell faced the unenviable task of trying to pierce Austin's own smokescreen of misrepresentations and self-serving rationalizations, many of which do not stand up to Cantrell's investigations. The author has been careful to balance Austin's considerable accomplishments with his sometimes questionable ideas. Cantrell starts by tracing the fortunes of Austin's family, looking especially at the trials and tribulations of his father, Moses, and that man's desire for wealth and influence in east Missouri during the early republic. The almost continuous need for money and the spiralling debt that formed the essence of Moses's life would weigh heavily on his son. The need for economic advancement and financial security for his family underlies the moody and restless nature of much of Stephen Austin's career. …

Katholische Laien im nationalsozialistischen Bayern: Verweigerung und Widerstand zwischen 1933 und 1945 by Bernhard Höpfl

474book reviews problems in Europe and elsewhere, were issues a Christian should attend to: the Holy Spirit spoke through them, and called on Christian justice and charity to respond" (p. 337). Dr. Pereiro has written an important book that has made a significant contribution to the history of the development of ideas and to the greater understanding of nineteenth-century Catholicism. V Alan McClelland University ofHull Katholische Laien im nationalsozialistischen Bayern: Verweigerung und Widerstand zwischen 1933 und 1945. By Bernhard Höpfl. [Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, Reihe B: Forschungen, Band 78.] (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh. 1997. Pp. 359. DM 48,-.) With this study of resistance against the Third Reich, Dr. Bernhard Höpfl has considerably expanded our knowledge of opposition to the Nazis among the Bavarian Catholic laity. Höpfl's thoroughly researched study under the direction of Professor Dr. Winfried Becker at Passau University has merited publication by the prestigious Kommission für Zeitgeschichte. This prosopographical study of some four hundred mini-biographies chronicles the resistance and persecution of three groups of Catholic lay leaders whose convictions and values were shaped by Catholic doctrines and traditions . The groups include members and supporters of the Bavarian People's Party from a wide range of occupations that encompass farmers and members of Catholic trade associations, merchants, entrepreneurs, government officials, and the Harnier Group; secondly, editors, publishers, journalists, and thirdly, educators . The persecution of priests and clerics was generally not included by Höpfl, although their roles are discussed when a priest and lay person happened to be involved in the same cause. Central to the conceptual framework and conclusions of the book is the author 's broad definition of resistance, which places him in that school of historiography that includes Martin Brozat, Konrad Repgen, and Winfried Becker, aU of whom disagree with the narrow definitions of such scholars as Ian Kershaw, Thomas Breuer, Gerhard Paul, and K.-M. Mallmann. Höpfl defines resistance as "every form of active or passive behavior that indicates rejection of the NSRegime or a part of NS-IdeoIogy and which implied some risks" (p. 19). Accordingly , the cases describe a broad range of behavior including not only acts or plans of overt resistance, but also nonconformism such as the refusal to participate in Nazi rituals and customs, limited disobedience, self-preservation, opposition to officials or Nazi Party members, expressions of solidarity with those persecuted or discriminated against by the Regime, and demonstrative adherence to religious customs and symbols. This inclusive framework made it book reviews475 possible to portray the Catholic resistance in Bavaria as a quasi-popular phenomenon based on church teachings representing a definite social milieu rooted in a federalist culture expressed in religious faith and ritual. One of the justifications for the validity of this controversial definition was found in the Heimtückegesetz of 1934, by which the Nazis threatened to imprison anyone whose activities undermined the people's trust in Nazi leadership. One has to conclude that Höpfl found only limited evidence to support his assertion that Nazi racial theories were rejected by many Bavarian Catholics and that teachers ignored the racial elements of the curriculum and concerned themselves with Jewish students outside the schools. Some evidence is found that sanctions against Jews were not implemented, that contacts between Catholics andJews were not broken off, and that Catholics did help persecuted Jews to circumvent the boycott. A few examples were found, though not statistically significant, of protest against the persecution of Communists and beggars. One of the conclusions of this study is that the evidence contradicts the theory that Roman Catholics loyaUy supported the Third Reich except in its policies toward the Church. The Catholic laity were found to resist the Regime over many other issues, yet out of religious conviction and loyalty to their religious formation. Catholics resisted the demands of the racial Volksgemeinschaft and openly expressed their anti-Nazi attitudes. Nevertheless, it cannot be determined how representative of all Catholic Bavarians the case studies are. The author admits to the limitations of his study, because he did not consult all the archives and because of incomplete or inaccessible records. On the other hand, it is entirely possible...

Die Velt, Yene Velt, Roosevelt: The Legacy of Jewish Liberalism in American Political Culture

Die Velt, Yene Velt, Roosevelt: The Legacy of Jewish Liberalism in American Political Culture Marc Dollinger (bio) Murray Friedman. What Went Wrong? The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance. New York: Free Press, 1995. vi + 423 pp. Notes and index. $24.95. Stuart Svonkin. Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. xi + 364 pp. Notes, bibliographical references, and index. $32.50. In an oft-quoted Yiddish remark, Judge Jonah J. Goldstein, a Republican, lamented that his co-religionists lived in three velten (worlds): die velt (this world), yene velt (the world to come) and Roosevelt. Exaggeration aside, Goldstein’s muse foretold a generations-long connection between Jews and liberal politics. American Jewish support for Franklin Roosevelt, which started at 82 percent in the 1932 election, rose to an astronomical 90 percent in the 1940 and 1944 contests. In the sixty-five years since the creation of the New Deal coalition, American Jews have voted Democratic more than any other white ethnic group in the nation. They led many of the nation’s largest labor unions, wrote and implemented some of the New Deal’s most important social reform legislation, and spearheaded a drive for intergroup cooperation. In the postwar years, American Jews and the national organizations that represented them lobbied for anti-lynching legislation and an end to the Jim Crow system of racial segregation in the South. By the mid-1960s, though, many Jews retreated from liberal political activism. While American Jews celebrated passage of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, they could never recapture the spirit of interracial cooperation which eroded in the wake of the Black Power movement, ethnic nationalism, and calls for quotas in affirmative action programs. The chaotic political journey of American Jews has long captured the attention of historians. Intent on solving the mystery of a relatively wealthy and powerful Jewish community clinging to liberal social ideas, scholars have debated a series of interpretations. The first school of thought to emerge in the [End Page 599] postwar period attributed the community’s social reform posture to Jewish religious beliefs. The main proponents of this argument cited prophetic Judaism, the centrality of tzedakah (charity) and gimulut hasidim (acts of loving kindness) as well as the Jewish people’s historic sympathy for the oppressed in their analyses of Jewish social reform. Many Jewish civil rights activists embraced this position since they considered both racism and anti-Semitism a threat to American democracy. 1 The end of the modern civil rights movement inspired a new generation of historians to challenge many of the traditional assumptions undergirding Jewish political culture. Hardened by the movement’s failure to translate civil rights into genuine equality, they charged Jewish liberals with paternalism: what was once a credit to a shared history and a sacred tradition degenerated into Jewish self-interest. Murray Friedman’s What Went Wrong? The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance and Stuart Svonkin’s Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties revisit the two most recent historiographic schools as they continue a provocative debate on the nature of liberalism, inter-racial cooperation, and the legacy of the civil rights movement. Murray Friedman, the mid-Atlantic regional director of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and vice chairman of Reagan’s U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, offers a grand overview of black/Jewish relations from its earliest beginnings in colonial America to the current controversy over Afro-centrism. He takes aim at many of the post-Martin Luther King era historians who have sought to redefine our understanding of the black/Jewish alliance. In Friedman’s estimation, recent historical scholarship on Jewish participation in the civil rights movement minimizes, if not eliminates, the important sacrifices Jews offered in defense of racial equality. While some historians point to the reasons for the alliance’s collapse, Friedman considers remarkable “that it held together for so long—or indeed that it ever existed” (p. 3). His is an effort against those racial extremists and scholars who seek “to minimize and sometimes deny the existence of a black-Jewish alliance” (p. v). Friedman argues that...

The everyday in Black American history

The Everyday in Black American History Clarence E. Walker (bio) Sapelo’s People: A Long Walk Into Freedom. By William S. McFeely. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1994. 199 pages. $18.95. Twenty-seven years ago, William S. McFeely wrote a book that explored the love-hate relationship between black Americans and the federal government that developed after the Civil War. This monograph focused on the career of the first commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, General O. O. Howard, and his efforts to protect his wards from Andrew Johnson’s and white America’s racism. Howard’s defense of the freedmen, as McFeely shows, was ineffectual. The freed slaves were left to “root hog or die” because all the United States was willing to give them was freedom. In two subsequent biographies, McFeely analyzed the careers of two nineteenth-century giants, Ulysses S. Grant and Frederick Douglass. Both of these studies also dealt with the issues of freedom, the government and race relations, and black agency. What unites McFeely’s work in my opinion is splendid writing, through research, and a sympathy for his subjects. Sapelo’s People shows that these concerns continue to be at the heart of McFeely’s historical interest. In the afterward of his monograph, McFeely situates this book in the context of his previous work. There are many things that this book is not. It is not a history of Sapelo, and it is not a position paper addressing the problems those living on the island face in relation to those powerful enough to compound or alleviate those problems. And I have not attempted monographs on slavery, war refugees, or Reconstruction. . . . What the book is, if this is not to use too grand a varnish, is a meditation on race. After thirty years of scholarly cogitation and more than fifty of head scratching, I still don’t know what race is. But it is. (171) [End Page 445] McFeely’s insightful words about race should be compared to a recent article on this category of ascription by Professor Thomas Holt in the American Historical Review. Holt’s essay obscures more than it reveals, and what it does explicate is both obvious and not new. In this essay, Holt urges American historians of race to pay attention to macro and micro levels of “everydayness.” But the study of “everyday life and everydayness” has been at the center of writing about black American History since the eighteenth century. This tradition of historical analysis is central to many of the most important books written about slavery and emancipation during the last forty years, and McFeely’s Sapelo’s People stands squarely within this school of historiography. McFeely’s elegantly written narrative centers on his return to Sapelo Island, Georgia, for the 125th anniversary of the First African Baptist Church. If one wants to study the “everydayness” of black life, the church is a good place to begin because it has been a central institution in black life since the eighteenth century. Within black Christianity, a church’s anniversary is an important event that reunites the living with the dead and with God and reaffirms community. McFeely captures this communal sensibility in his description of the church’s anniversary service: The deacons entering in procession from their room to the side of the preacher’s platform would have been as formal and correct as London bankers, but they were coming into a room eager with gathering parishioners ready to swell into life. And that life is one of a religion that is physical in its reality. The self, the body, is not silenced or constrained, not separate from some piously transfigured spirit. There is no dark hush. People have come to join hands, to participate. From the first antiphonal responses to a deacon’s welcome, with voices swelling with the opening hymn, all is communal. What would formally be termed congregational responses—the progressively more vocal interruptions of the preacher’s prayers and sermon—are, instead, the message itself. These people are in conversation with a Lord who is a member of the family. (117–18) Who and what are Sapelo and its people? Sapelo is...

Die begrip ‘Calvinisme’ in die Afrikaanse geskiedskrywing. ’n Oorsigtelike tipering

The term "Calvinism" in the Afrikaans historiography. A historical survey This article deals with the uses of the term "Calvinism/Calvinistic" in the Afrikaner school of historiography. A careful investigation shows that it was first used during the latter part of the 19th century as a designation of the "northern" Afrikaners. During the 20th century, however, the term received a broadened meaning and application. As an image it articulated the meaning of Afrikaner history. Since its use was not documented, the issue of Afrikaner Calvinism needs theological and historical scrutinising.

Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime

This article challenges the false opposition between public and private spheres that is often imposed upon our historical understanding of the Old Regime in France. An analysis of the work of Jurgen Habermas, Reinhart Koselleck, Philippe Aries, and Roger Chartier shows that the authentic public articulated by Habermas was constructed in the private realm, and the of private life identified by Aries was constitutive of Habermas's new public sphere. Institutions of sociability were the common ground upon which public and private met in the unstable world of eighteenthcentury France. Having superimposed the maps of public and private spheres drawn by Habermas and Aries upon one another, the article then goes on to examine recent studies by Joan Landes and Roger Chartier to show the implications of drawing or avoiding the false opposition between public and private spheres for our understanding of the political culture of the Old Regime and Revolution. Public sphere and private life these domains are now the focus of considerable interest among historians of the Old Regime on both sides of the Atlantic. 1989 saw the publication of English translations of the two works most closely associated with public sphere theory and the history of private life: Jurgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, and volume three of A History of Private Life, edited by Roger Chartier.' Each domain, private and public, has its own historiographical tradition and, in a sense, its own partisans. This division of historical labor, however, has contributed to a misunderstanding of the relationship between these two spheres of activity in eighteenth-century France, a misunderstanding that has led to the creation of a false opposition between public and private spheres. My aim here is to show that the two visions of the Old Regime represented by these two historiographical schools are fundamentally complementary. By focusing on the simple real1. Jfrgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, transl. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass., 1989); and A History of Private Life: Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier, transl. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). Habermas's work was originally published in German in 1962, and then translated into French in 1978. Chartier's De la Renaissance aux Lumieres, volume 3 of Histoire de la vie privie, edited by Philippe Aries and Georges Duby, was published in France in 1986. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.231 on Thu, 06 Oct 2016 04:06:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

L'école historique burundo-française: Une école pas comme les autres

AbstractThe birth of a so-called “Franco-Burundian “ school of historiography under the intellectual guidance of the French historian Jean-Pierre Chretien raises critical questions about the extent to which the political constraints of the African environment are likely to deflect social science research from its recognized goals, i.e. to analyze and inform rather than to engage in special pleading on behalf of existing power structures. This article attempts to bring to light the flaws that have marred the work of some of the scholars associated with the “franco-burundian “ school and issues a strong call in favor of what Max Weber called “the ethics of responsibility” in social science.

Musical Learning in Nineteenth-Century America

American musical historiography has been dominated by two different perspectives. Nineteenthand twentieth-century writers, from Frederic Louis Ritter, Oscar Sonneck, and Louis Elson to John Tasker Howard and H. Earle Johnson, accepting music as a European-based art, have told history of music on American soil through tracing extension of European music-making, especially its art music, to New World. In their chronicles, beginning with seventeenthand eighteenth-century psalm-singing, each noteworthy event can be seen as another link in a chain of musical progress:1 introduction of regular in place of the old way in New England churches; replacement of Americancomposed psalm tunes with more smoothly harmonized European-style pieces; spread of music instruction, from informal singing schools to public school curriculum and then to conservatory and university; influx of talented musical immigrants from Europe, some as traveling virtuosos and others as residents; advent of talented American-born performers and composers who sought out European training; and, finally, emergence of an American concert culture that in creativity, performance standards, and general energy can be seen to rival or even outstrip those of mother countries whose sons and daughters have made America's music. Because beginnings of formal music-making by European settlers in America are both relatively well known and extremely modest, metaphor of growth is almost unavoidable when one talks about American music from this perspective.2 This is what might be called chip-off-the-old-block school of historiography, in spirit of he's looking more like his dad every day. More recently a second perspective on American musical history has come to fore, especially in work of such scholars as Gilbert Chase, Irving Lowens, H. Wiley Hitchcock, Charles Hamm, and others. Drawing on work of earlier scholars, they have nevertheless rejected assumption that European musicmaking is worthy and inevitable model for American music-making. From this

La trahison des clercs:British intellectuals and the first home–rule crisis

In the early months of 1882 two of the writers who were to be prominent four years later in opposing Gladstone’s first Irish home-rule bill made similar complaints to correspondents about the state of British public opinion. ‘Less is thought of the Irish question than of the Australian cricketers’, wrote Goldwin Smith; while in characteristic vein, James Fitzjames Stephen waxed choleric about the ‘extravagant idiocy’ of a public obsessed with ‘Jumbo the elephant’, while ignoring ‘one of the most disgusting and brutally dangerous civil wars ever known in these islands’. Each had a particular reason to be preoccupied about Ireland. Smith’s pique was, in part at least, that of the ‘expert’ whose warnings and admonitions had gone unheeded, while Stephen lived part of each year on his small estate in County Louth. However, they also reflected a general concern among politicians and intellectuals which historians have tended to ignore or underestimate — a belief that trends and events in Ireland and the British response to them had serious implications for the future of Britain itself. The recent major study of the home-rule crisis of 1885-6 by Alistair Cooke and John Vincent is remarkable in British historiographical treatment of the Irish question only in the way in which the normal presuppositions are made explicit. Cooke and Vincent argue with admirable clarity, and in remarkable detail, that virtually none of the politicians involved in the crisis were concerned with the ostensible issues of the home-rule policy, each being exclusively concerned instead with exploiting the political crisis which Gladstone’s adoption of the policy (also purely for tactical political reasons) had created. This denial of any importance to ideological differences in political crises is a characteristic of the so-called ‘high politics’ school of historiography, and constitutes perhaps its most serious defect. It is reinforced in the case of the Irish home-rule crisis by the view that, as it was undoubtedly true that few among the political élite cared about Ireland as such, they were equally indifferent to the issues it raised. However, not alone can it be argued that there were important ideological dimensions to most political crises in late nineteenth-century Britain, there is considerable evidence to show that this was particularly true of those involving Irish questions, and of home rule above all.

To Sabbatize in Peace: Jews and New Christians in Sixteenth-Century Portuguese Polemics

E. H. Carr's injunction that “when we take up a work of history, our first concern should be not with the facts which it contains but with the historian who wrote it” is well justified by the current state of research in the field of Iberian cryptojudaism and its subsequent development outside the peninsula. As in the study of Iberian history itself, vested interests, strong personal biases, and allegiances to national or partisan schools of historiography have frequently stood in the way of dispassionate inquiry into the subject and led to polarizaton and obfuscation. Over and above this, fruitful study has been impeded by the “blind-men-and-the-elephant” fallacy.

The Jidda massacre of 1858

The history of the modern Middle East resembles an intricate Persian rug with almost as many patterns discernible as there are observers looking at it. Any given major event may be analysed differently by adherents of the different historiographical schools. Some would claim that Great Power manipulations were the determining factor in history while others opt for political structural changes, technological modernisation, or religious identity. In actuality, while the thread of any one of these factors may be traced through the whole it is necessary to examine all of them and their relationship to each other to reconstruct an event. The violence which broke out in Jidda in 1858 is an example of the interaction between religion, politics, and economic change. The tension that this mixture caused was released by violence but the violence was ultimately powerless to reverse the changes taking place in the 1850s. The Hijaz has been the focal point of Muslim religious feeling throughout the world but it has remained, after the first Hijri century, on the periphery of Islamic political power. Mecca and Madina are the two holiest Muslim cities. Events taking place there reverberated throughout the Muslim world. There existed the strong feeling among Muslims that the Hijaz should be entirely Muslim, i.e., the presence of non-Muslims was a desecration. By extension the geographical restriction which had applied originally only to Mecca and Madina came to embrace the whole Hijaz. Jidda however, was an anomaly since it was the port of Mecca and the major entrepot of commerce in the Red Sea. Christian merchants were tolerated there by order of the Ottoman Sultan, guardian of the two sacred cities since 1517. Despite a massacre of English merchants in 1727, a small foreign community resided in Jidda continuously in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most of the trade, however, was either in the hands of Muslims, especially Indians, who were subjects of European states or with merchants from the Hadramawt settled in Jidda. The issue of Westernisation was seen in the Hijaz primarily in religious terms. The Muslim subjects of foreign powers provided in the Hijaz the crucial mediating role between East and West played elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire by the Greeks and other Ottoman Christians. Foreign consuls were restricted to Jidda. They had no authority whatever beyond the coast. The terribly hot climate, the high death rate, and the low prestige combined to ensure that the position of consul in Jidda would not be widely desired. The Hijaz lived on religion. Every year thousands of pilgrims came to Mecca and Madina in fulfillment of their religious obligation. The transport, housing, feeding and taxing of the pilgrims was the chief and nearly only business of the people and government of the Hijaz. Cairo and Istanbul annually sent gifts, subsidies, and grain to the Hijaz as religious acts of charity. In return protection of the Hijaz conferred upon the Sultan religious prestige and

The School Achievement of Immigrant Children: 1900-1930

Public schooling has held a central place in the mythologies celebrating the assimilation of immigrants into American life. It is no surprise then to find that the historiography of schooling and immigration has been characterized by a good deal of polemic and a paucity of data. Depending upon their political persuasions, scholars have either described the schools as an immense success in providing opportunities, or as reactionary institutions designed to perpetuate the existing class order.

‘At the entrance to science, as at the entrance to hell’: Historical Priorities for South Africa in an Age of Deconstruction

The departure point of this article is the postmodern critique of my book, The Dead Will Arise. The object of the article is not however to defend either the book itself or the 'constructionist’ school of historiography to which it apparently belongs. The first part of the article seeks to clarify the epistemological basis on which constructionist historians claim the right to engage with and interpret the past. In the process of doing so, it establishes a conceptual framework capable of defining relevance in the context of post-democratic South African historiography. It argues that historians have a duty to prioritise the ‘scars’ and ‘pitfalls’ of South African history failing which they become mere lapdogs, decorative but irrelevant. It is further argued that, although historians have the right to study whatever they choose, there is something intrinsically wrong with institutional mechanisms which produce nothing but lapdogs, and that university history departments need to take more of a lead.