History Told Research Articles

Countdown to the apocalypse: the legitimization of white Christian violence in religious programming on the History Channel

ABSTRACT This paper describes the results of a content analysis of the History Channel’s religious programming, which shows that roughly 44% of episodes about religion from 1996 to 2020 prioritize violence. Additionally, an ideological critique of 17 selected episodes reveals that non-Christian violence is portrayed as inherent to geographic contexts outside the United States while Christian violence is portrayed as justified, heroic, and exceptional. From this we show how the History Channel’s telling of religious history perpetuates the deep and troubling alliance between American identity and violent forms of white, Christian nationalism.

Revolutionary Art and the Creation of the Future: The Afrofuturist Texts of José Antonio Aponte and Martin R. Delany

Afrofuturism (an artistic perspective in which Black voices tell alternative narratives of culture, technology, and the future) and the Dark Fantastic (interrupting negative depictions of Black people through emancipatory interpretations of art) are two interrelated concepts used by Black artists in the Atlantic World to counter negative images and emphasize a story from a Black perspective. Likewise, these concepts have been used to recreate and re-narrate history with an eye towards subverting white supremacist historical narratives. By using Afrofuturism and the Dark Fantastic as lenses through which texts by authors from the African Diaspora in the Atlantic World are examined, an alternative narrative of Black histories and futures concerned with revolution, liberation, and justice can be seen. The two texts that are the subject of this research include José Antonio Aponte’s descriptions of his book of paintings under interrogation in 1812–1813, and Martin Delany’s novel Blake; or the Huts of America (1859–1862), providing images of enslavement that run counter to a white supremacist telling of history. They both imagine alternative pasts and futures for Africa and the Afro-Diaspora involving revolution and magic. These works, though produced at different times and locations in the nineteenth century, offer new ways in which to discuss liberation and freedom in the context of the artistic production of the Atlantic World.

Field Notes: Athens in Flux

These Field Notes present a fragmented and diachronic portrait of Athens through the mobilities of people and cultures, which, as they clashed, intersected, and syncretized, defined different aspects of the city. Fourteen short essays and an introduction provide glimpses into an Athens continuously marked by the movement of people, labor, crafts, and capital, from the ancient city-state to the contemporary metropolis, a telling of history that is posed against ethnocentric narratives of continuity of presence. Demonstrating a multitude of historiographical approaches and voices, the essays collected here are treated as ‘field notes’ because of their brevity in treating a nascent field of study of the Athenian built environment that crosses time periods and disciplines.

What Is the Value of the Persianate to Afghan Studies? or, What Can Afghan History Tell Us about the Persianate? Lessons from the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

What Is the Value of the Persianate to Afghan Studies? or, What Can Afghan History Tell Us about the Persianate? Lessons from the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

From Canadian Surgeon to Chinese Martyr: Dr. Norman Bethune and the Making of a Medical Folk Hero.

This paper reexamines the public memory of Canadian surgeon Norman Bethune. In 1938, Bethune traveled to China to serve at the communist front and to treat soldiers fighting against the invading Japanese army. Throughout China, Bethune is a household name and a communist icon. Back in Canada, however, his name does not evoke the same ubiquity. While Canadians remembered Bethune through biographies, a film, statues, and a small museum, his story in the Anglophone world is confined primarily to the telling of distant history. To explain Bethune's greater notoriety and public presence in China, this essay first turns our attention to Chinese sources that mythologized Bethune's death in 1939. The essay then revisits Chinese propaganda that established Bethune as a lasting political symbol during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. These national efforts show how a volunteer surgeon such as Bethune became such an important figure in a remote foreign country. China's Communist Party turned Bethune's death into a political event to rally support for their war of resistance against Japan. Later, during the tumultuous period of the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong used Bethune to symbolize unwavering service and loyalty to leader and party. This essay utilizes primary materials in McGill's Osler Library and commentary from the field of memory studies to contextualize Bethune and to situate him within the broader narrative of political education that arose in China during the Cultural Revolution. A layered interpretation of Bethune - as doctor, martyr, and symbolic hero - slowly emerges. Political forces in China transformed his memory into legacy and carry this complicated figure into the present day.

What Can Evolutionary History Tell Us about the Functioning of Ecological Communities? The ASN Presidential Debate

What Can Evolutionary History Tell Us about the Functioning of Ecological Communities? The ASN Presidential Debate

Through the Sands of Time: A Historical Exploration in The Glass Palace

Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace is widely regarded as one of the essential historical novels of the last century. This paper explores the importance of The Glass Palace as a historical novel and why it remains relevant today. The novel allows readers to see imperialism’s devastating effects on individual lives and communities. It captures the cultural and psychological tensions of colonialism in one of the central locations it affected, Burma. Furthermore, The Glass Palace’s significance as a historical novel stem from its detailed portrayal of the social, economic, and political situation of the time. By presenting historical events in an entertaining, engaging way or with fictional characters, Ghosh makes his reader cull information from one of the more enthralling telling of Asian history.

Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All-Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War by Chris Lamb

Reviewed by: Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All-Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War by Chris Lamb Robert Greene II Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All-Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War. By Chris Lamb. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. Pp. xxii, 344. $34.95, ISBN 978-1-4962-1945-9.) The history of sport in American life has long been an important place to explore how race, sectionalism, and politics collide. While books such as Jules Tygiel’s Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (New York, 1983) and Adrian Burgos Jr.’s Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line (Berkeley, 2007) showcase the interplay of sport, cultural, and political histories, Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All-Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War offers another excellent example of this approach. For Chris Lamb, the story of the Cannon Street All-Stars is a stand-in for the larger story of the civil rights struggle in South Carolina. Describing this story of young Black boys who were not allowed to compete in South Carolina’s Little League tournament due to Jim Crow segregation as “inextricably linked to postwar Charleston,” Lamb has written an important history of a Little League ball club and a narrative of Charleston’s long and vexed history of racism (p. 3). The civil rights movement’s history was partially shaped by Jackie Robinson’s 1947 desegregation of Major League Baseball. Whether one argues for a “long civil rights movement” thesis or posits that the civil rights movement as we know it began in the mid-1950s, it is clear that Robinson’s symbolism was a crucial marker for Black American activists and their white liberal allies. The story of the Cannon Street All-Stars, like the slow desegregation of the majors after Robinson’s arrival, illustrates the halting pace of desegregation across American society in the 1950s and 1960s. As Lamb points out, the Cannon Street All-Stars were denied the right to play against white teams in South Carolina just a year after the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision. In another historical irony, the team traveled to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, to accept an invitation to watch the Little League World Series—after being denied a chance to play for it—the same week that Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi. One of the strengths of Lamb’s work is his ability to tie the earlier history of Charleston as a slave port and a flashpoint during Reconstruction to the plight of the Cannon Street All-Stars. For instance, Lamb highlights the Charleston Baseball Riot of 1869. Sparked by a confrontation on a baseball diamond between Black baseball fans and Charleston police, it became both a moment when the Reconstruction-era dreams of Black Americans were confronted with the reality of powerful support for white supremacy and an example of how much baseball was intertwined with American political struggles during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Lamb does an exemplary job of showing how the Cannon Street All-Stars served as a nexus of both change and continuity in South Carolina’s history of racism. For example, he reminds the reader that the white teams’ refusal to play the Cannon Street All-Stars led to the creation of Dixie Youth Baseball, a segregated youth league that “didn’t become integrated” until after its founder’s death, and that continues to play tournaments today (p. 197). He also points out that the Cannon Street All-Stars became an example of how the public [End Page 382] memory of the past is actively shaped by the public. Lamb tells the story of researcher Augustus Holt, whose investigation into why Dixie Youth players (including his son) wore Confederate flags on their uniforms in the early 1990s led to his becoming a prominent voice for greater recognition of the All-Stars in Charleston. Stolen Dreams works as a history told at the intersection of sports, civil rights, and southern memory, reminding readers of how often those fields are closely woven together. Robert Greene II Claflin University Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association

History as a Cautionary Tale

History as a Cautionary Tale

Peace, Cooperation, and Transatlantic Relations

Conflict often grabs attention, while cooperation goes unnoticed. Historical narratives about the twentieth century typically begin with World War I, then World War II, the Cold War, and the ending of the Cold War. Other wars may be added in depending upon one’s interests, but it is the violent conflicts, rather than the prolonged periods of peace, that tend to be the focal points. Given that we are now living through a global pandemic and know first-hand how disruptive and traumatic it can be, it is mind-boggling—and humbling—that the pandemic of 1918 was often overlooked in our telling of twentieth-century history, most likely because it did not entail violent conflict. Similarly, observers tend to focus on instances of economic conflict rather than the innumerable cooperative transactions that take place every hour of every day. We tell pollsters that we believe the economy is in decline when most indicators suggest it is doing remarkably well. We fixate on crime and believe it is getting worse, when, in fact, data demonstrates the reverse is true. And we overlook the fact that the overwhelming majority of people follow the law, despite the fact that laws often impose costs.

Reclaiming History: A Century of Intervention in Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones and Brother, I'm Dying

This essay analyzes Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones and Brother, I'm Dying to reconsider the vexed history of US militarism on the island of Hispaniola. Danticat's work demonstrates that literature has the potential to provocatively examine the lived experiences of multiple histories at once. Countering the rhetoric US administrations have long used to justify intervention, Danticat's literature reclaims the telling of history for those who have lived and felt its consequences. Narrating racialized state violence in hemispheric, transnational, and transtemporal domains, Danticat's work surfaces collective histories of resistance and demands for justice by Haitian and Haitian diasporic communities.

Weaponized History: The Underground Railroad’s Mythologized Legacy in Canada

ABSTRACT The Underground Railroad remains a popular feature in Canadian narratives. However, public discourse on the subject does not often reach much further than presenting a story of weary enslaved persons finding their way to freedom and happiness in Canada. The communities that they built and who these enslaved persons were outside of their enslaved status is rarely discussed. This uncomplicated telling of history allows Canadians to hold their country up as a historical champion of human rights and use Underground Railroad communities to prove a track record of equality in Canada that misrepresents the historical record. This article discusses the nature of Canadians’ fixation on the Underground Railroad narrative and Canada’s historical uses for this romanticized mythology.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold in Flanders

Abstract Many years ago, my master thesis advisor told me that if I wanted to understand the history of a country, I should read novels. His statement caused me to reflect seriously on what it is that novels do, the truths (and untruths) they yield. This creative piece is inspired primarily by literature and is an attempt to understand how the needless death of a black university student could occur in a society that doggedly continues to view racism as something other societies do. It is simultaneously an attempt to explore how silences in the telling of history have been challenged by authors of colour, how the past reverberates into the present, and the implications for those living in the (African) diaspora. I draw on research that I conducted in two Flemish primary schools, which explored how doxic conceptions of education and belonging, equally racialized, are both reproduced and contested.

Half Has Never Been Told

The use of primary source documents in the pursuit of understanding the complex histories Library and Information Studies (LIS) is essential to connecting the foundations of the profession. The historical perspectives SIG will create a sharing space where attendees can demonstrate how they use artifacts to tell both hidden and known histories. The showing and telling of historical artifacts provide the opportunity for telling historical narratives and fostering community engagement amongst educators and scholars in LIS history and archives. This program explores layered storytelling, with engagement through the expression both of pedagogical experiences and the histories of various historical artifacts. The assembled participants will each share an artifact or story to demonstrate how they use them in LIS courses and research to infuse historical teaching of various topics (Reference, Organization of Information, Collections Development, Youth Services, etc..). The goals for the session are to: 1) Demonstrate the use primary source materials and other artifacts to correct LIS history & hegemonic narratives prevalent in LIS historical studies. 2) Provide various models for students in how to engage with service communities in the telling of unknown histories. 3) Utilize participatory dialogue in sharing narratives in building community around the teaching of LIS history. The session will assist in the development best-practices for the integration of historical materials in LIS courses. It addresses which narratives are missing or need reinforcement in the LIS classroom. Through dialogue the session will answer questions: How can we better include historical contexts throughout the curriculum? What is the role of counterstories? How can we address inclusive histories?

Saints of Tonga: A Century of Island Faith

Saints of Tonga: A Century of Island Faith

Thou Shalt Tell Thy Daughter: Mothers Tell Daughters Their Holocaust Story—Three Case Studies of Contemporary Israeli Women Artists

The story of Israel and its raison d’être are suffused by memories of the Holocaust, which construct the self-definition and identity of the state. This article examines works by three contemporary Israeli women artists—Dvora Morag, Miri Nishri, and Bracha Ettinger—who subvert the traditional telling of history and enable rethinking of the past as the basis for the individual’s existence in the nation state. Through the works of these artists, official memory disintegrates into fragments of personal memories of the artists’ mothers, enabling a new moral, historical perspective. The reconstruction of history through stories that pass from mother to daughter contrasts sharply with Jewish tradition in which the historical story passes from father to son. The yearly Passover retelling of the Exodus admonishes “Thou shalt tell thy son on that day to say, ‘It is because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt’”. The two narratives, the Exodus from Egypt and the Holocaust, are told as stories of redemption of the Jewish people—from ruin to resurrection. The art examined here reassesses the past, while unraveling parallels between the stories from a female perspective that reflects a personal moral stance.

Archiving the Algerian Revolution in Zineb Sedira's Gardiennes d'images

Archiving the Algerian Revolution in Zineb Sedira's <i>Gardiennes d'images</i>

The Challenges of Global Church History for Those outside the United States of America

The Challenges of Global Church History for Those outside the United States of America

Go (Away) West!

Go (Away) West!

State Building in Crisis Governance: Donald Trump and COVID-19.

State Building in Crisis Governance: Donald Trump and COVID-19.