Informal History Research Articles

Urdu Crime Fiction, 1890–1950: An Informal History, written by C. M. Naim

Urdu Crime Fiction, 1890–1950: An Informal History, written by C. M. Naim

Teachable monuments: using the captain Kirk memorial for formal and informal history education

This study, part of the project “Museums, Monuments and Communities: Places of Public Memory,” investigates the unique value of the Captain Kirk Memorial, including those of the Aniz Domingos Museum and the Archives of the Federal Institute of Paraná as pedagogical tools in formal and informal learning environments about the Contestado War (1912-1916). These spaces, located in União da Vitória-PR and Porto União-SC, respectively, are not just monuments but “living entities” that engage the public, especially the students of the Thomaz Padilha School. Inaugurated in 2015, the Captain Kirk Memorial celebrates the historical significance of the Contestado War, which influenced public memory and often diverged from other narratives. Analyzing monuments and historical archives and conducting a community study between 2021 and 2022, we seek to deepen our understanding of the interconnections between monuments and memory, based on public history, and Oral history. We highlight the importance of pedagogical and exhibition practices, which not only provoke reflections on memory and history but also culminate in the creation of a monument for the centenary of the District of Taquara Verde, Caçador-SC, a significant site in the memory of the Contestado War. Thus, the project allowed the students and the community to connect with the past and reflect on the links between personal memory, the memory of the Brazilian army, and the memory of the thousands of caboclos-sertanejos (backlands) killed in the Contestado War. Therefore, these sites are not only educational means but also environments for dialog and understanding the dynamics of public memory. These are crucial for developing a diverse and shared historical consciousness.

Letters to the Editor

Letters to the Editor

Emergence, Social and Cognitive Trends, and the Next Step? Two Decades of STS in Contemporary Taiwan

From 1999 to 2019, I can roughly count a short history of STS in Taiwan as two decades. In this short article intended as an “informal history,” I roughly divide the article into three parts: an ea...

A Brief, Informal History of SFBT as Told by Steve De Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg

This account of the origins and development of SFBT is not based on a rigorous historical analysis of key events, recovered unpublished documents, or the formal writings of de Shazer, Berg, and their colleagues at the Brief Family Therapy Center (BFTC). Rather, it is taken from the author’s records of two experiences he had with de Shazer and Berg: 1) notes from a lecture de Shazer gave about the history of SFBT just one month before his death, and 2) a recorded interview with Berg in 1998 about the origins of BFTC and SF techniques. The article concludes with a few reflections by the author.

English

Grundtvig programme are activities aimed at providing adults with ways to improve their knowledge and skills. This study examined the opinions of adults who participated in four workshops on history and culture organized throughout Europe between 2009 and 2014 under the Grundtvig Adult Education Programme and Lifelong Learning Programme of the EU. The aim of the study was to analyze the opinions of adults from different age groups, professions, and ethnicities about these informal workshops. In order to determine the study group, an easily accessible sampling method was used. The study group there was 43 workshop participants from different countries. In order to learn their opinions, they were asked to fill a form with 4 open-ended questions. Data were collected and analyzed from workshops organized in different years and in various countries.  The content analysis method was used. Most of the participants stated that they learned about new cultures, and histories and developed their communication skills. They also stated that they learned most from the active learning, audiovisual and IT methods. Participants confessed that they had trouble in communicating with foreigners, managing time, and overcoming prejudices. They also stated that personal experience, motivation, audiovisual elements, study program, and themes facilitated learning. It was concluded that informal history education is possible for adults as shown by the answers of the workshop participants on subjects such as history education, national identity, historical prejudices, and intercultural learning.   Key words: Adult education, Gruntvig workshops, culture, history education, intercultural learning. &nbsp

Women Writers’ Consciousness of Talent and Fame During the Qian-Jia Reigns and Cultural Transition

<p>經過明末清初的才德之辨，閨秀文學發展到乾嘉時期，進入了一個新的階段。此期的閨秀有著更強的才名意識，她們充分運用文壇領袖所掌握的文化權力，通過拜師等舉措拓展交往空間，從而與著名文人唱和、題贈，躋身文壇，顯揚聲名。駱綺蘭通過結交袁枚、王文治和王昶等，以畫作、詩集遍求題贈，並編選《聽秋軒贈言》和《聽秋軒閨中同人集》，得以聲名鵲起；歸懋儀在乾嘉文人與閨秀之間構築了一個非常龐大的交游網絡，她執著於詩史留名的願望，成功藉助男性文人的資助，令詩稿付梓，並憑藉才名遊走於江浙間擔任閨塾師，承擔起養家的重任；汪端則欲通過選詩修史來達到不朽，其《元明逸史》的撰寫和詩集中大量的詠史詩，可見其修史的努力，編選《明三十家詩選》更見其不凡的識見。吳藻創作雜劇《喬影》，並繪《飲酒讀騷圖》，體現出懷才不遇的苦悶和強烈的性別意識。總體而言，乾嘉閨秀已經不滿足于內闈狹小的空間，做出了跨越閨門的種種努力，是晚清民國閨秀文化近代轉型的先聲。</p> <p> </p><p>Following the debates on female talent during the late Ming and early Qing eras, women’s literary production entered a new stage. Women poets who were active during the Qian-Jia reigns had a stronger sense of establishing their literary fame through making use of the cultural power held by the leading poets of their time. They became the female disciples of these leading figures, and expanded their networks by communicating and exchanging poetic works with larger communities of eminent literati. Luo Qilan, in particular, succeeded in achieving fame through her important connections, including Yuan Mei, Wang Wenzhi, and Wang Chang. She broadly solicited inscriptions for her paintings and collections of poetry, and published The Collection of Inscriptions for the Autumn Pavilion and The Anthology of Poetic Works by Friends of the Autumn Pavilion. Gui Maoyi, another well-connected woman poet, built a literary community that included both male and female poets. She obtained help from the male literati to publish her poetry collection, thereby realizing her ambition of establishing an undying literary reputation. At the same time, she turned her poetic talent into a means of providing for her family, travelling all over Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces to teach in elite families. Other well-known examples included Wang Duan and Wu Zao. Wang revealed her ambition of authoring history in a broad array of works, including An Informal History of the Yuan and the Ming, Selected Works by Thirty Ming Poets, and numerous poetic works on historical events. Wu was best known for her variety play, A Shadow in Disguise, as well as for her painting, “Drinking Wine and Reading the Sorrow of Departure.” In these works Wu lamented her unfulfilled ambitions and the limitations of gender roles. In general, women poets of this time made all kinds of efforts to venture beyond the inner quarters and can be viewed as the pioneer of the modern transformation of women’s writing culture during the late Qing and early Republican era.</p> <p> </p>

The History of Oxford University Press. General Editor, Simon Eliot. Vol. 1: Beginnings to 1780, ed. Ian Gadd; Vol. 2: 1780–1896, ed. Simon Eliot; Vol. 3: 1896–1970, ed. Wm Roger Louis

Here is a history of an organisation which is happy, quite rightly, to recognise itself as a National Institution; these volumes are clearly set forth as its official history. It is not the first account, having been preceded by I.G. Philip’s William Blackstone and the Reform of Oxford University Press in the Eighteenth Century (1957); Harry Carter’s A History of the Oxford University Press, Volume 1: To the Year 1780 (1975) and his other publications, including those on the Press’s financial records and the history of Wolvercote Mill; Peter Sutcliffe’s The Oxford University Press: An Informal History (1978); and Nicolas Barker’s The Oxford University Press and the Spread of Learning: An Illustrated History (1978), to name but several, all of them informative. The present three impressive volumes, by multiple authors (17 for vol. 1, 13 for vol. 2 and 23 for vol. 3), immediately raise the question of the relative advantages of multiple versus single authorship. The preferences of OUP, a battleship, and CUP, a frigate, have varied over the last 150 years or so. For example, Oxford’s History of English Literature (OHEL, as it was popularly termed) comprised a series of fourteen volumes by individual scholars appearing between 1945 and 1997, whereas CHEL, a less suggestive abbreviation, was a collaborative enterprise, edited by A.W. Ward and by A.R. Waller of Cambridge University Press, and had been published in fifteen volumes between 1906 and 1916. Conversely, the twentieth-century histories of the two universities (battleship and frigate again) appeared as eight collaborative volumes (Oxford) against four very disparate single-author volumes (Cambridge).

Letters from Langston: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare and Beyond

The coeditors of Letters from Langston have created an homage to a more than forty-year friendship between their parents and the renowned, prolific writer Langston Hughes. A research venture into Hughes's papers at Yale University's Beinecke Library became for Evelyn Louise (“Nebby Lou”) Crawford, daughter of Matt Crawford and Evelyn (“Nebby”) Crawford, and MaryLouise (“Mary Lou”) Patterson, daughter of Louise (Thompson) and William L. Patterson, a profound rendezvous with their familial past. Their exploration led to another important discovery: their parents’ correspondence with Hughes preserved an informal history of political engagement. In choosing From the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare and Beyond as their subtitle, the coeditors sought to offer convincing evidence that Hughes was motivated by an “essential socialist impulse” that “changed and matured, but it did not disappear” (p. xi). The book is divided chronologically into three periods: “the tumultuous 1930s,” “the far-reaching 1940s,” and “the fearsome 1950s and the promising 1960s.” Each of these sections is subdivided thematically. Instead of simply inserting letters into each section, the editors, in effect, created a narrative by introducing each subdivision with well-informed historical context, teasing out and further explicating the significance of the correspondence. This gesture is complemented by informative notes and, at the end, a glossary of names. The story that emerges from the collection is one about friendship, devotion, love, and much more. But the dominant motif is the waxing and waning of political commitment.

Support and Opposition: An Informal History of the Law of the Sea Convention in the United States and Alaska, Including a Tribute to Walter B. Parker

Support and Opposition: An Informal History of the Law of the Sea Convention in the United States and Alaska, Including a Tribute to Walter B. Parker

The SIOP story: An informal history of the International Society of Pediatric Oncology

The SIOP story: An informal history of the International Society of Pediatric Oncology

CGE applications in development economics

This paper begins with an informal history of developing country CGE models, going on to specification and closure, and finally describes a few models with financial extensions. Sectoral detail is central to CGE analysis, but after an initial sketch of an n-sector system most of the discussion focuses on the models’ “closures” or patterns of macroeconomic causality, because they strongly influence their sectoral results. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which international trade and fiscal linkages fit into applied models.

Rock Star: The Making of Musical Icons from Elvis to Springsteen

All stars are celebrities, but not all celebrities are states David Shumway in the introduction to Rock Star, an informal history of stardom. This deceptively simple statement belies the complex definition and meaning of stardom and more specifically of icons. Shumway looks at the careers and cultural legacies of seven stars in the context of popular music and culture - Elvis Presley, James Brown, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, Joni Mitchell, and Bruce Springsteen. Granted, there are many more names that fall into the icon category and that might rightfully appear on this list. Partly, that is the point: rock is a familiar and desired category but also a contested one. Shumway investigates the star as a particular kind of cultural construction, different from mere celebrity. After the golden age of moviemaking, media exposure allowed stars more political sway than Hollywood's studio stars, and stars gradually replaced movie stars as key cultural heroes. Because of changes in American society and the media industries, stars have become much more explicitly political figures than were the stars of Hollywood's studio era. Rock stars, moreover, are icons of change, though not always progressive, whose public personas read like texts produced collaboratively by the performers themselves, their managers, and record companies. These stars thrive in a variety of media, including recorded music, concert performance, dress, staging, cover art, films, television, video, print, and others. Filled with memorable photographs, Rock Star will appeal to anyone interested in modern American popular culture or music history.

Keepers: The Greatest Films—and Personal Favorites—of a Moviegoing Lifetime by Richard Schickel (review)

Reviewed by: Keepers: The Greatest Films—and Personal Favorites—of a Moviegoing Lifetime by Richard Schickel Michael Anderson (bio) Richard Schickel, Keepers: The Greatest Films—and Personal Favorites—of a Moviegoing Lifetime (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 320 pp. Richard Schickel happily labels his preoccupation with movies an “obsession.” He calculates that since adolescence he has watched at least two movies a week, “a grand total of, shall we say, 22,950 movies, or about 294 of them a year.” He has made a career of his pleasure. Since 1965 he has been a critic, for Time magazine for 45 years, now at the blog Truthdig.com. His 37 books range from biographies of directors, including a definitive life of D. W. Griffith, and actors, including James Cagney and Gary Cooper; an analysis of Double Indemnity; and industry histories, notably The Disney Version. (His dissection of America’s prurient fascination with celebrity, Intimate Strangers, published in 1985, seems uncannily prophetic today.) Particularly valuable has been his work as a documentarian; many of his 20 films about directors remain indispensable. In all of his work, Schickel melds his vast knowledge with the wonderment he felt as a five-year-old seeing his first movie, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. His synthesis of erudition and delight benefits both students of cinema and people who just like going to the movies. The pleasure of movie-watching animates Keepers, a sort of autobiography of films seen and an informal history of the medium, focused mostly on Hollywood. With so much to cover, Schickel delivers his assessments with memorable concision. Casablanca is “the perfect bad movie”; Sweet Smell of Success is “a cruel masterpiece”; Busby Berkeley “could be parodied, but he could not be equaled.” He resurrects unjustly neglected masterpieces, like Carl Dreyer’s excruciatingly exquisite The Passion of Joan of Arc, and calls attentions to lesser-known but worthy films, like Griffith’s Isn’t Life Wonderful. Anyone bored with special effects will applaud his opinion that F. W. Murnau’s silent classic Nosferatu remains “the greatest of the Dracula movies.” He can lead you to look anew at over-familiar films; for example, bemoaning that “critics are always chasing various forms of big think” in Federico Fellini’s work, he suggests that the real subject of 8½ is show business. He bemoans that Meet Me in St. Louis does not get proper respect as “one of the truly great musicals”; furthermore, he suggests that it contains Judy Garland’s “best work ever.” And on that score: for all her undisputed fascination, one must agree that Greta Garbo starred in only one great movie, Ninotchka. Schickel is equally incisive in puncturing overinflated reputations. Gone With the Wind he calls “a faux epic.” Both High Noon and Shane seem “too stiffened with the desire to rise above their station.” The Seventh Seal is “pretentious twaddle”; All the King’s Men is “better than the novel it is based on.” The early Soviet silents, like Battleship Potemkin, retain their historical importance—“they were vitally important when we were young and soaking up knowledge”—but “I don’t particularly want to see those movies again … they are a slog.” Anyone (like me) who has wondered why The Best Years of Our Lives and Rules of the Game receive such reverent admiration now has an ally. [End Page 443] Such critical aperçus, though as irresistible as salted peanuts, are, alas, ultimately just as unsatisfying; they stimulate the appetite without sating it. Much as Schickel wants to stir discussion—“You are supposed to argue with me,” he writes; “We should agree to disagree”—his quick hitters fail to uphold his side of the bargain. Although admirably firm in his opinions without being opinionated, Schickel does not consistently back them up. This is most evident in his considerations of directors. For example: his judgment that Orson Welles was “a great talker about movies, but only rarely a great maker of them” might win grudging assent from the director’s most fervent partisan. To continue that he is a “two-movie talent” is worth debating, but are those two films Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons? A better case can...

Lives of the laureates: twenty-three nobel economists

Lives of the Laureates offers readers an informal history of modern economic thought as told through autobiographical essays by twenty-three winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics. The essays not only provide unique insights into major economic ideas of our time but also shed light on the processes of intellectual discovery and creativity. This fifth edition adds five recent Nobel laureates to its list of contributors: Vernon L. Smith (2002), Clive W. J. Granger (2003), Edward C. Prescott (2004), Thomas C. Schelling (2005) and Edmund S. Phelps (2006). Also included is the editors' revised afterword, Lessons from the Laureates. Lives of the Laureates grows out of a continuing lecture series at Trinity University in San Antonio, which invites Nobelists from American universities to describe their evolution as economists in personal as well as technical terms. Each laureate achieves the goal of clarity without sacrificing inherently difficult content: Kenneth Arrow makes grasping the essentials of his impossibility theorem painless; Lawrence Klein clearly presents what goes into econometric model building; George Stigler masterfully describes his information theory; and so on. These lectures demonstrate the richness and diversity of contemporary economic thought. The reader will find that paths cross in unexpected ways -- that disparate thinkers were often influenced by the same teachers--and that luck as well as hard work plays a role in the process of scientific discovery.

Evidence-Based Medicine—An Oral History

The phrase evidence-based medicine (EBM) was coined by Gordon Guyatt1 and then appeared in an article in The Rational Clinical Examination series in JAMA in 1992,2 but the roots of EBM go much further back. The personal stories of the origins of EBM were recently explored in a filmed oral history of some of the individuals most strongly associated with the birth of the movement (see Video, Evidence-Based Medicine: An Oral History). JAMA and the BMJ invited 6 individuals (including us, with one of us as host, R.S.) who have played a prominent part in the development of EBM to participate in an oral history event and filming. Videos of this event and of interviews with 3 other EBM leaders (Box) have been woven together and may be accessed at http://ebm.jamanetwork.com. Just 20 years after the term EBM began to be used, an early and informal history has emerged.

The Story of intellectual disability: an evolution of meaning, understanding, and public perception

Accessible, engaging, and filled with contributions by the country's most celebrated disability experts, this fascinating volume skillfully captures how intellectual disability has been understood from prehistoric times to present. Readers will discover how different societies have responded to people with disability throughout history, how life has changed for people with intellectual disability and their families over the centuries, and how key historical figures and events sparked social change and shaped our modern understanding of intellectual disability. Enhanced with remarkable images and illustrations, including exclusive photos from the editor's private collection of cultural artifacts, this informal history is a must-read for anyone devoted to improving the lives of people with intellectual disability. Top Disability Experts Explore: Early ideas about the causes of intellectual disability Evolution of the concept of intellectual disability The role of religion in the ancient world's understanding of disability Changing approaches to education and intervention The rise and fall of the institution system Depictions of intellectual disability in film, literature, and art State-sanctioned sterilization programs in the twentieth century The self-advocacy movement The emergence and impact of parent associations, support groups, and training programs How and why terminology changed throughout the years and more

Studying the Dead: the Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus, an informal history

Studying the Dead: the Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus, an informal history

Creamy and crunchy: an informal history of peanut butter, the all-American food

Preface Acknowledgments 1. Peanuts 101 2. The Social Rise of the Peanut 3. The Birth of Peanut Butter 4. Peter Pan: Improved by Hydrogenation 5. How Peter Pan Lost Its Groove 6. Skippy: He Made His First Jar of Peanut Butter in His Garage 7. Skippy on Top 8. Jif: But Is It Still Peanut Butter? 9. Choosy Mothers Choose ... 10. Peanut Butter Goes International 11. The Music of Peanut Butter 12. Deaf Smith: What's Old-Fashioned Is New Again 13. The Rise and Fall of the Florunner 14. The Peanut Butter Crisis of 1980 15. You Mean It's Not Good for Me? 16. The Short, Happy Life of Sorrells Pickard 17. Peanut Corporation of America: There Was No Red Flag 18. Peanut Butter Saves the World 19. Where Are the Peanut Butters of Yesteryear? Appendix 1. Author's Recommendations Appendix 2. Peanut Butter Time Line Notes Index

The ‘art which conceals’: a cottage industry and the invention of Cushing's Island

The ‘art which conceals’: a cottage industry and the invention of Cushing's Island