Historical Writings Research Articles

Issue Notes

The following papers were presented to the Canadian Society of Church History in 2008, but were not made available for publication: Julia Rady-Shaw, “Church Front: The Case of Bloor Street United Church’s War Effort, 1939-1945″; Gordon Heath, “When Friends and Neighbors Become Enemies: Canadian Baptists and the War of 1812″; Wolfgang Breul, “Martin Luther’s Development as a Reformer in Light of His own Statement from 1518: New Light on an Old Question”; Douglas H. Shantz, “Pietist Autobiography and the Rise of Secular Individualism”; Sarah Bruer, “Unselfish Devotion: Deaconess Zaidee Stoddard and the Social Gospel”; Kristin Burnett, “Acknowledging the ‘Unacknowledged Quarantine’: Religion, Faith, and Nursing at the Blood Hospital, 1893-1930s”; Renee Lafferty, “The ‘Spirits’ of Religion: Evangelicals and Medical Care for Toronto’s Dipsomaniacs, 1860-1890″; James Robertson, “‘T.T. Shields and the Des Moines Affair’: The Attempted Establishment and Subsequent Collapse of a Fundamentalist University in Des Moines, 1927-1929″; Ian Hesketh, “The Victorian Bible: Ecce Homo and the Manufacturing of a Literary Sensation”; Todd Webb, “‘Popery is Evidently Nodding to its Fall’: Methodism and Anti-Catholicism in British North America, 1837-1860.” Papers from a joint session with the Canadian Historical Association not made available for publication include: Marguerite Van Die, “Practising Medicine and Spiritualism in the 1860s: The Encounters Between Drs. Moses Colby and Susan Kilborn as Problem and Possibility in the Writing of Religious History”; Pamela E. Klassen, “The Holistic Trinity: Body, Mind, and Spirit among Twentieth-Century Protestants”; and Ruth Compton Brouwer, “When Missions Became Development: The Churches and CUSO in the 1960s – Linkages and Tensions.”

The Future of our Roots and the Land: The Re-vival of the Atayal Weaving Material Ramie

This study focuses on ramie, a nettle plant known for its length and toughness used in traditional weaving by the Atayal, an Indigenous people in Taiwan. It discusses the Lihang Workshop’s revival of traditional weaving practices over the last thirty years and the application of these practices in art and culture. It also looks at historical writings about ramie, its role in the development of contemporary culture, and the use of the entire plant in adhering to the concepts of zero waste and a circular economy in Atayal culture.

SEJARAH GLOBAL SEBAGAI PENDEKATAN BARU DALAM SEJARAH INDONESIA

History science should not be separated from the development of world philosophical thought. As a science, history is still survived and used by many scholars until now. It proves that history is still relevant to solve problems in our life. Since the nineteenth century, history science is excessively influenced by the Eurocentric view that it had been used to legitimate the power of European imperialism and colonialism in many colonies, like Netherlands Indies, British Malaya, India, and so forth. Many scholars from social humanities fields, such as Syed Hussein Alatas and Edward Said, have criticized the Eurocentric view in social humanities scholarships. Lately, historians have been using a new approach that emphasizes global history. Global history writings discuss problems on a larger scale to reduce the Eurocentric view in history science. It has been written and discussed by scholars in Europe, North America, and East Asia for several times ago. However, the global history approach has not been used yet as an approach by academic or public historians in Indonesia. This article explores global history as an approach to historical methodology. In this article, the author uses historical literature that has been using global history as an approach. The author argues that the global history approach should be explored further to reduce the Eurocentric view in historical writings.

Sejarah Penulisan Ilmu Sirah: Analisis Perubahan Paten Dan Landskap Historiografi Islam

Examining the complex nature of Islamic historiography, Robinson adduced the discourse in a tripartite typology of historical works namely as chronography, biography, and prosopography. The formative period of historical writings in the early Islamic era has been one of the interesting topics especially the development of Sirah literature. This paper aims to explore the nature of early Islamic historical writings, analyze the emergence of its literature, and examine the basic pattern of Sirah Nabawiyyah. The present study is qualitative in nature and is one in which the researcher will employ both descriptive and source-critical approaches. The study in its findings confirm that the earliest proponents of the Prophet were principally attempting biography, and were responsible, above all, for the transmission of tradition. They apparently took any narration or anecdote about the Prophet, even, on occasions, contradictory accounts. With its specific patterns, circumlocutions, and diverse emphases, in which no one part is given distinction or importance over another, the Sirah itself contains the totality of what the compilers could gather, as scrupulously as they found possible.

Fanning Out Possibilities: Dung Kai-cheung and the Multiplicities of Time

Hong Kong has brought to world literature some of the most prolific and best-loved fiction writers in modern Chinese history. Dung Kai-cheung is one of them — a Hong Kong-based writer who has found the city to be a constant source of inspiration. This article discusses the significance of multiplicity in Dung’s fictional representation of Hong Kong (“the V-City”), focusing on his 2007 novel Histories of Time: The Luster of Mute Porcelain. In this novel, Dung explores the narrative possibility of perceiving Hong Kong as a multi-historical space through the lens of multiplying temporalities. I have coined the term “V-shaped time” to refer to this multiplication of characters and archaeology of ideas. Time, in Dung’s work, fans out with multiple possibilities of individual and collective experiences in history, with mirrored Vs resembling an hourglass. In this stratified narrative, characters create their fictional selves in their own writing. Identifying the creative self as a literary architect, Dung’s fictional writing challenges the reader to rethink a local history that has been marginalized in the linear narrative of colonial modernity.

The image of the Umayyad Caliph Marwan bin Muhammad (127-132 H/744-749 AD) according to historians of the third and fourth centuries AH

The era of the late Umayyad caliphs witnessed political fluctuations, opposition movements, family and tribal conflicts, and the emergence of the Abbasid da’wa. Marwan bin Muhammad from the religious, political and administrative point of view, and what is the effect of that image on the future of the Umayyad state and the factors for its downfall, and the extent of the caliph’s responsibility for that, according to what the writings of historians of the two centuries provide us with information.

Ten Commandments for Historical Writing: June 1962

Ten Commandments for Historical Writing: June 1962

OPENING THE BLACK BOX OF INTERPRETATION: DIGITAL HISTORY PRACTICES AS MODELS OF KNOWLEDGE

ABSTRACTDigital history is more than just the implementation of algorithmic and other data practices in the practice of history writing. It places our discipline under a microscope and enables us to focus in on what history writing is in the first place: writing about the past under specific social and societal conditions. This article argues for a closer look at the traditions of history writing in order to understand its principles and to determine what the digital condition contributes to historiography. Does the work of historians actually change in principle, or does digital history instead reflect the digital condition under which we operate? The article begins with a reflection on the works of Wilhelm Dilthey and Michel de Certeau to discuss how the society in which the historian writes influences the practices of interpretation. The article then presents what can be understood as the digital condition of our present societies and shows how algorithms function as “black boxes” that influence our social interactions, communication, and understanding of the world. The article's third part brings together the earlier discussions of practices of history writing and the digital condition in order to examine the role of modeling for knowledge production in the sciences and the humanities. The closing argument then focuses on the use of visualizations in digital history as an example of the operational use of models of knowledge in opening the “black box” of interpretation.

Comparative History in Sociological Writings of Max Weber

There have been several contentions, characterisations and controversies over Max Weber’s treatment of history in his sociological writings both during his lifetime and after him as well. While some contest his contentions, others doubt the type of English translations made of his German writings. There is a need to take stock of and consolidate the sociologically relevant historical writings of Max Weber in proper perspective. The article raises the following two issues: (a) How can the claim be justified that Max Weber is one of the users of the comparative historical approach rather than one belonging to those using the evolutionary historical approach? (b) What are the specialities of his treatment of history in his methodology and substantive works? It is the specific intention of this article to consolidate the historical materials in the sociological writings of Weber so as to reconstruct his comparative historical approach as against positivist evolutionary history.

Lewis Carroll y Fiódor Dostoyevski: genios más allá de la epilepsia

Fyodor Dostoyevski, considered one of the best writers in history, not only wrote novels and short stories, he was also a journalist, a forerunner of philosophical and scientific trends such as existentialism or psychoanalysis, and also an epileptic. Dostoyevsky learned to live with epilepsy, and his first-hand accounts of the crises he suffered make it possible to delve into the reality of a patient with epilepsy, and learn about the best example that people with this disease should not be judged based on this pathology but of its nature, which in this case left us a legacy as valuable as that of its literature. Key words: Fyodor Dostoyevski, Lewis Carroll, writer, epilepsy, fatality

Runse hongye: Hanshu wenben de xingcheng yu zaoqi chuanbo

Runse hongye: Hanshu wenben de xingcheng yu zaoqi chuanbo

Review: Boyle Heights: How a Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy, by George J. Sánchez

Nearly three decades after exploring the history of Los Angeles’ Boyle Heights neighborhood through the lens of twentieth-century Mexican migration and settlement, George J. Sánchez has invited us to revisit those same streets and their residents through the lenses of world history and U.S. immigration and civil rights history writ large. The result is a coherent, sweeping, dazzling array of new understandings: of the ways Los Angeles urban policies pushed multiple marginalized groups into a shared space; of how political and economic transformations around the globe intersected in one specific place through human relationships; and of how those relationships, in turn, shaped major social movements in ways we had not previously appreciated.The first half of the book, which spans the early nineteenth century through the 1950s, recovers and recasts the neighborhood’s multi-ethnic past. Popular accounts imagine a simple story of “ethnic succession,” from a predominantly Jewish to an entirely Mexican neighborhood. Indeed, a leading historian of L.A. Jewry had earlier concluded that, “[Jewish] Boyle Heights evoked little nostalgia upon its demise.”1 Sánchez convincingly argues the opposite as he recounts the specific dynamics of warmth and tensions in relationships amongst Boyle Heights’ Jewish, Mexican, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Black residents—each in their own way refugees from violence and economic convulsion around the world. Through Sánchez’s eyes and exhaustive archival work, we come to understand Boyle Heights as a major center of Black community life; see Japanese American internment as a transformative experience in American Jewish history because it pushed Los Angeles’ Jewish residents and institutions to connect their struggle to others’; and appreciate the ways that Mexican and Jewish labor activists played formative roles in each other’s early political empowerment. Drawing on his 2004 article, Sánchez shows that the Jewish exodus from the neighborhood in the 1950s was shaped by the relentless forces of state-sponsored segregation yet was at once a site of internal community struggle about the nature of Jewish identity and its relationship to radical politics and to other neighboring communities.Sánchez’s work on the Civil Rights period and beyond revisits the highlights of Los Angeles Chicano history with an emphasis on the role of contingency and lived experience in a multi-racial city. We now see the East L.A. student walkouts of 1968 as inspired more by student leaders’ interest in the Watts Riots than Chicano nationalism. We learn, in detail for the first time, about daily life during this iconic neighborhood’s shift from majority Mexican American to majority undocumented immigrant, and how the former came to embrace the latter’s cause. And we gain a window into recent struggles over “gentefication” as college-educated Latinos faced rejection from some local activists when they returned to the neighborhood to start businesses.As an historian of the Mexican American past, I am grateful for this endlessly rich social history to inform ongoing struggles and give deeper meaning to present-day political coalitions. As the granddaughter of Beverly Millman, a Jewish American teen who moved to Boyle Heights with her parents in the early 1940s but joined her community’s “exodus” to other neighborhoods just a few years later, I am grateful for this chance to place my own family in America’s story anew. It is fitting that Sánchez, who has transformed the field of Chicano History through graduate mentorship, would now perfect its promise of offering usable pasts for both families and communities to construct more humane futures.

Trends in Historical Writing Jordan during the First Centennial of the Jordanian State: An Analytical Study of Research Methods and Content

This article focuses on the beginning of interest in historical writing on Jordan as well as on the political trends of those writings about the modern history of Jordan: the official trend, the exaggerated loyalist trend and the political opposition trend. The article also examines the Arab historical writings on Jordan according to research methodology, throughout the ancient, Islamic, Ottoman and modern periods. Their scientific and methodological orientations as well as the authors’ remarks on those writings are included.

Rhetorical Strategies and the Manipulation of Discourse in Machiavelli’s Writings

Abstract This chapter sheds light on the narrative strategies and techniques involving reported speech in Machiavelli’s diplomatic records and historical writings. The focus is on the diplomatic correspondence of his 1502 mission to Cesare Borgia and on his Discourses on Livy. Analysis of the rhetorical devices that Machiavelli uses to report his own words and those of others shows that his letters and the Discourses exploited the intrinsically reconstructive nature of reported speech and its paradoxical communicative function: to maximize the perception of veracity through unrestrained manipulation. Two case studies will shed light on the relationship between fact and fiction and between information and its manipulation in early modern Italy. In particular, these relationships are captured by analyzing the interplay between, on the one hand, the communicative dynamics of diplomatic writings and, on the other, research into old historical texts and the writing of contemporary history. Machiavelli’s writings demonstrate clearly that direct discourse could be used as a tool to reinforce the verisimilitude and credibility of a narrative. At the same time, his careful selection and manipulation of reported words exploited the persuasive force of the words of others to further his own line of argument.

The Bilad al-Sham Conferences: Their Role in The Development of Historical Writing

Conferences on the History of Bilad al-Sham have been held at the University of Jordan since the first one in 1974. The conferences examined various topics in the history of Bilad al-Sham through different historical periods, shedding light on various aspects of the political, economic, and social history of Bilad al-Sham, and studying the development of systems and institutions related to Bilad al-Sham across Jordan, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon. Hundreds of researchers have participated in these conferences, representing various Jordanian and international academic institutions and universities. In addition to the conferences and the publication of their proceedings, the History of Bilad al-Sham Committee has published many specialized studies and analytical indexes related to the history of the Bilad al-Sham in general and the history of Jordan in particular. This paper introduces those conferences and the studies about Bilad al-Sham that have been published, as well as traces the contributions of Jordanian researchers in those conferences and their impact on the development of historical writing about Jordan.

The Evolution of Historical Writing on Jordan in English

Within fifteen years of the creation of the state of Jordan, the first histories of the new country began to appear. Over the past century, three distinct phases of history writing can be discerned: subjective histories, written by British and Jordanian participants in the mandate state-building project; objective histories, written by researchers who were independent of the Anglo-Jordanian founders of the state; and revisionist historians who based their work on archival sources to challenge and extend the scope of earlier histories. Over the past quarter century, revisionist historians have come increasingly to rely on archival resources and previous research work in Jordan.

IMITATION AND SIMULATION OF THE MEDIEVAL NARRATIONS IN MODERN MEDIEVALISM: FEATURES OF THE STRUCTURE AND ITS (DE)CONSTRUCTION

Goal. The goal of the article is to analyze the constructed “medieval” narrative in the texts of George Martin and other American authors, who form synthetic versions of the political, social, cultural and religious history of the Seven Kingdoms.
 The novelty of the article lies in the study of the features of the historical narrative in the texts of George Martin in contexts of its imitation and simulation of the medieval narrative structure of the text in combination with elements and techniques of postmodern prose.
 Methodology. Methodologically, the article is based on the principles of interdisciplinary historiography proposed in intellectual and cultural history, as well as in the study of medievalism as a synthetic form of mass ideas about the Middle Ages in the modern consumer society.
 Results. It is assumed that George Martin and his co-authors proposed a successful model for imitation of the medieval historical narrative, simulating the style and narrative techniques of medieval historical writings. This article analyzes the problems of historical narrative in the contexts of imagination, invention, simulation, imitation, construction and deconstruction. The author analyzes the systemic themes that form the historical narrative of George Martin. The author believes that chronology, religiosity, the heterogeneous nature of the text, images of Otherness, the presence of a hero of history form the basis of the simulated medieval historical narrative. It is shown that George Martin’s texts formally imitate the style of medieval narration, but actually actualize the potential of simulation and imitation of modern postmodern culture.
 Conclusions. The article shows that 1) George Martin and his co-authors reproduce a conditional “medieval” text, which is actually a construct, 2) the analyzed text can be interpreted in the categories of construction, deconstruction, assimilation, simulation and imitation, 3) the analyzed narrative is a form of deconstruction of the past, constructing alternative and parallel images of the Middle Ages, 4) George Martin’s texts can be described as attempts to assimilate academic medievalism and mass cultural medievalism.

Pendekatan Sejarah Lokal dan Kepentingannya dalam Pensejarahan Malaysia

The historical transition from political aspect to social and economy aspect has brought development to various approaches in historical writings. One of them, is the local history approach. However, there are still doubts among the historians and underestimate the approach in history writings. This approach is considered as antiquarian, consists of loads unimportant facts, no chronology and abandoning the theory and method of history. In fact, historical studies using this approach is said to not have any importance to the national historiography. Hence, this research paper aims at denying all of those opinions and proves that local history approach is actually emphasizing on ideas and historical thinking. In short, local history approach is important in perfecting the national history narrative by focusing on the research on the aspects and locations that were previously considered insignificant to the national historiography. In fact, this approach can actually contribute to the new findings in national historiography. For example, the discovery of the study regarding the Malay migration to Kerian, Perak has proven the significant contribution of the Malay society in the economy during the British colonisation apart from denying the judgement of the British on the nature of the Malay of being lazy as a result of their backwardness in economy aspects during the colonisation. This study also successfully proves that the internal migration of the Malay plays a significant role in the development of Kerian as the main paddy cultivation district, not only in Perak but also in the Federated Malay States. Keywords: Local history; historiography; national history; social history; economy history

Æthelflaed and Other Rulers in English Histories, c.900–1150

Abstract This article explains why Æthelflaed, ruler of Mercia, mattered to writers of history in twelfth-century England. It argues that these writers evaluated and compared rulers based not on sex or bloodline, but on the quality of a ruler’s achievements relative to the set and scale of challenges the ruler faced. They thought Æthelflaed remarkable because her triumphs for Mercia distinguished her from other rulers. The article shows that a new understanding of attitudes in twelfth-century England towards rulers, past and present, is required. It accounts for the absence of gendered comments about rulers, as well as the presence of non-binary concepts of gender, in medieval writing. It also challenges the enduring idea that Latin writers imposed a shared, Wessex-dominated national vision on the English past. They asserted Mercia’s independence under Æthelflaed’s sole rule, which shows that English regional interests persisted in the historical imagination long after the Norman Conquest.

Towards understanding the nature of digression in the writings of al-Jaahiz: Few pages from the introductory chapter of Kitaab al-Bayaan wa al-Tabyeen, the book of eloquence and exposition as a model

The writing style of al-Jaahiz (d. 869 CE), one of the most successful and popular prose writers of Arab history, is sometimes pedagogically made questionable; for al-Jaahiz comparatively digresses to a great extent. Some literary critics hold that the aim of his digressions is nothing but to digress. Is his digression a mere digression, void of art and therefore methodically disorganised? Is there any artistic scheme functional behind it? What does this style emanate from? To lay bare these facts, this article aims to grapple to find the answers to aforesaid questions and therefore a few pages from the introductory chapter of his famous work on Arabic rhetoric titled kitaab al-Bayaan wa al-Tabyeen are chosen as a model; for style and stylistics are both closely connected to rhetoric. Accordingly, this article is divided into 5 sections: first, an introduction; second, the concept of digression and its rhetorical merits; third, the source, aim and framework of digression in al-Jaahiz’s works; fourth, an analysis of text extracted from the book al-Bayaan wa al-Tabyeen to discern the nature of this stylistic device along with its artistic underpinning; and, finally, a conclusion containing the findings. The article follows inductive and qualitative methods to obtain its results. Foremost among these results is that there is an underlying chain pattern in his digressions. It is hoped that this research would benefit all those who are involved in the studies of style and stylistics, in general, and in the writing style of al-Jaahiz, in particular.