History Matters Research Articles

Developing Concepts of Authenticity: Insights From Parents' and Children's Conversations About Historical Significance.

The present study investigated children's understanding that an object's history may increase its significance, an appreciation that underpins the concept of historical authenticity (i.e., the idea that an item's history determines its true identity, beyond its functional or material qualities, leading people to value real items over copies or fakes). We examined the development of historical significance through the lens of parent-child conversations, and children's performance on an authenticity assessment. The final sample was American, 79.2% monoracial White, and mid-high socio-economic status (SES) and included 48 parent-child pairs: 24 with younger children (R=3.5 to 4.5 years) and 24 with older children (R=5.5 to 6.5 years). Parent-child pairs discussed three books we created, with three storylines: a museum (culturally authentic) storyline, a clean-up (personally authentic) storyline, and a control storyline. Across measures, conversations suggested that authenticity may begin as a "placeholder concept" that is initially rooted in a broad appreciation for the significance of old objects and only later filled in with specifics. This placeholder initially directs children's learning about authenticity by linking, in an unspecified way, the value and significance of objects to their past. For example, we found that young children appropriately appealed to history (vs. perceptual or functional features of objects) in contexts regarding authentic objects but struggled in determining which objects were more significant on the post-test assessment, suggesting that they attend to object history but are not yet sure how histories matter for making authenticity judgments. We also found some evidence that directing children's attention toward conceptual information related to object history may in turn direct them away from material or perceptual considerations, as seen in trade-offs in parents' and children's conversations. Together, this exploratory report offers many new avenues for work on the development of authenticity concepts in childhood.

The Matter of Material History (and Others)

The Matter of Material History (and Others)

History matters: evolutionary and demographic reconstruction of the Southwest Atlantic loggerheads (Testudinata: Cheloniidae)

History matters: evolutionary and demographic reconstruction of the Southwest Atlantic loggerheads (Testudinata: Cheloniidae)

The beast that never forgot? Baboon conservation and the role of multispecies history

History and culture were long seen as definitionally human. As other distinctive traits that once defined our species as unique disappeared, at least we still had those two. But are we really the only species shaped by our pasts and who have cultures that change over time? This article explores animal cultures, the significance of history (and individual and group memory) in the survival of social animals and the role the discipline of History can play in conserving them. Haraway contends that people are “becoming with” other species and that these shared histories matter ethically. I argue that it is not only a matter of ethics but one of coexisting better with each other. By considering animals’ culture with a historical lens, we understand them better and adjust interactions with them. Human-wildlife connections can be fundamental to ecological assemblages rather than ancillary. Second, I show how human-animal history can push back into Deep History, also challenging static representations of human-animal relations in indigenous cultures or the pre-colonial past. Most importantly, I argue that other animals (especially social ones) have cultures themselves (neither static nor uniform) and that these can be reconstructed and used in conservation.

Private monitoring revisited: When does a shared history matter?

We study experimentally whether and when a shared history of signals affects players’ incentives to cooperate in infinitely repeated prisoner’s dilemmas. We compare games where the player can privately observe imperfect signals about her partner’s actions to games where signals are perfect and games where signals are imperfect but public. Based on evidence from multiple specifications of stage payoffs, we find that when the return to cooperation is low, subjects are more likely to cooperate in games with public signals than in games with private signals. However, when the return to cooperation is high, the difference is not significant. Furthermore, we show evidence that strategies are more lenient with public signals than with private signals when the return to cooperation is low. The results suggest that a shared history of signals could increase players’ incentives to cooperate when the return to cooperation is low.

A dialogue on history and gentrification

For the second edition, AMJournal introduces the section of the ‘guest editor interview’ in the form of a dialogue between the editor and (another) renowned scholar in the field. For this edition, Tim Verlaan invited acclaimed scholar Suleiman Osman to discuss how and why history matters when investigating gentrification processes.

Why history matters: A review of Watters's Teaching Machines, the History of Personalized Learning

AbstractThe book Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning by Audrey Watters (2021) is of interest to the readers of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior because the roots of teaching machines and programmed instruction are in the experimental analysis of behavior. Furthermore, the book addresses use‐inspired basic research in education, one of our country's most pressing problems. The review begins with an introduction, followed by an overview of the book chapters, extending the historical, cultural, and behavior‐analytic context presented by Watters. Particular emphasis is placed on the work of two not‐so‐well‐known researchers in behavior analysis, Susan Meyer Markle (1928–2008) and Benjamin Wyckoff (1922–2007). The review continues with an assessment of the audience for the book and its contributions to behavior analysis and some perspectives. An overarching theme throughout the review is the importance of learning and teaching the history of behavior analysis.

The impact of processes of long duration on the cultural potential for economic development in the peripheries of the European Union

The factors of cultural potential for economic development are: elite exclusion, management style, confidence, and conservatism. This study focuses on two research questions: (1) Do cultural factors affect economic development?; (2) Do cultural factors of significance to economic development derive from long-duration processes or from current adaptations within an international distribution of labour? The study compares countries where capitalism originated (United Kingdom, Netherlands) and historical manorial economies (Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary). A country’s position in the international distribution of labour is indicated by its business service sector, industry, and agriculture. Economic development is measured based on productivity and GDP per capita. The study is based on data from the European Social Survey (ESS Round 6–8), OECD, and Eurostat. Cultural factors correlate with economic development; a regression analysis demonstrates that in terms of development, history matters more for cultural potential than does the current position in the international distribution of labour. Survey results indicate that the core-periphery model is one-sided, overemphasising the influence the core has on the underdevelopment of the peripheries.

Subsidy-driven firm growth: Does loan history matter? Evidence from a European Union subsidy program

Subsidies should target firms with profitable opportunities and insufficient funding, but this is difficult due to information asymmetry between firms and the government. We study how credit history of firms can help design more efficient subsidies. To this end, we combine data on non-repayable firm subsidies and the credit registry from Hungary. Using subsidy winners and losers as treated and control groups and leveraging variation in access to loans, we identify the differential impact of subsidies. While subsidies lead to an incremental impact on assets of loan-deprived as compared to loan-acquiring firms, the impact is transitory and fades after a few years. The impact on profitability follows a similar pattern despite the higher expected marginal value of capital for loan-deprived firms. Thus, loan deprivation is likely caused by borrower shortcomings instead of credit rationing by banks. In such cases, subsidies need not target loan-deprived firms.

MAKING THE PAST SPEAK: ACCELERATION, RESONANCE, AND PRESENCE1

ABSTRACTThis review essay offers an extended analysis of Hartmut Rosa's Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. By proposing a critical theory for our present times, the book dissects modes of being related to the world and how these relations are conditioned by the dynamic of escalation that is inscribed into modern social formations. Rosa argues that the wide‐ranging compulsion to grow, accelerate, and innovate produces a distorted and alienated mode of being in the world, suppressing and limiting possibilities for developing dialogic and responsive relations that are characterized by the concept of resonance. This review essay parses the categorical distinction between alienation and resonance, critically interrogating Rosa's notion that resonant relations form the basis for a good and successful life. While my analysis argues that the structural shortage of resonant relations can make subjects and collectives vulnerable to acting on the promise of resonance—possibly giving rise to problematic and undesired effects—I nonetheless contend that the concept of resonance is an effective explanatory tool that exhibits significant potential for interdisciplinary engagement. To illustrate this potential, I explore the extent to which Rosa's theorizing can illuminate contemporary matters of history and historical temporality. More specifically, I consider the perspective that the framework of resonance provides a comprehensive background for the paradigm of presence and the related surge in interest to theorize bodily and perceptual modes of being connected to the past.

Gendering Public and Private International Law: Transversal Legal Histories of the State, Market, and the Family through Women's Private Property Rights

This essay takes up Karen Knop's challenge to reconstruct the oft-made distinction between private and public law by engaging private international law (PrIL) as a “lost side of international law.”1 To do so we interrogate the changing fortunes (literally) of women's private property rights in the long nineteenth century—a period characterized by the divestment and reinstatement of gendered rights in national law—focusing on the Nordics, Europe more broadly, and the Colonial world. Following Knop and other feminist legal scholars, and by engaging with questions of what Mariana Valverde calls “scale,”2 we bring women's property rights in conversation with international law. In doing so, we point to sites of engagement where the politico-economic structures of international law are lived, negotiated, reconfigured, and made real.3 We use scale to frame and inform our analysis bringing attention to how the “small” (micro) economics and politics of everyday life, women's labor, and gendered legal concerns, underpin and are an intrinsic part of the “large-scale” structures of international law. “All scales shifts,” Mariana Valverde notes, meaning that such “processes . . . br[ing] certain phenomena into focus that had previously been blurred or pushed to the background.”4 Recovering matters of women's history and everyday life, which, as Knop has argued are often “hiding in plain sight,” with a focus on women's property rights, brings to the fore the critical relationship between family/household, market, and the state, and the fundamental role international law has played in implementing a specific economic vision through the organization of gendered power relations.

Comparative performance of Algeria's education districts: The Influence of colonial legacy through cultural capital

This article aims to analyze the comparative performance of Algeria's education districts using a two-stage DEA methodology. Modeling their functioning as non-homogeneous parallel sub-unit production systems, districts are considered Decision-Making Units with three educational subunits. This type of modeling provides an overall regional efficiency analysis of the entire education sector. Furthermore, the current research links early colonial policy of educational discrimination across regions to present-day regional educational performance. The main DEA-like model evaluates the average overall efficiency at 74.5% and identifies no efficient district while the standard DEA overestimates this average by 20.8% and identifies five efficient districts with no efficient subunits. Moreover, IV truncated regression estimates the impact of one standard deviation increase in cultural capital to be a 0.81 standard deviation increase in the efficiency score with a 95% bootstrap percentile confidence interval covering estimations of all alternative methods. The findings confirm that history matters and seem to fit the narrative of the link between colonial legacy and present-day educational performance through the cultural capital transmission channel.

Ecology explains anhydrobiotic performance across tardigrades, but the shared evolutionary history matters more.

Desiccation stress is lethal to most animals. However, some microinvertebrate groups have evolved coping strategies, such as the ability to undergo anhydrobiosis (i.e. survival despite the loss of almost all body water). Tardigrades are one such group, where the molecular mechanisms of anhydrobiosis have been more thoroughly studied. Despite the ecological, evolutionary and biotechnological importance of anhydrobiosis, little is known about its inter- and intra-specific variability nor its relationship with natural habitat conditions or phylogenetic history. We developed a new index-anhydrobiotic recovery index (ARI)-to evaluate the anhydrobiotic performance of tardigrade populations from the family Macrobiotidae. Moreover, we compared the explanatory role of habitat humidity and phylogenetic history on this trait using a variance partitioning approach. We found that ARI is correlated with both microhabitat humidity and yearly rainfall, but it is mostly driven by phylogenetic niche conservatism (i.e. a high portion of ARI variation is explained by phylogeny alone). Finally, we showed that anhydrobiotic performance is highly variable, even between closely related species, and that their response to local ecological conditions is tightly linked to their phylogenetic history. This study not only presents key insights into an emerging model system, but also provides a new methodological approach for wider scale studies of the ecological and evolutionary implications of anhydrobiosis.

Conservation biology and conservation paleobiology meet the Anthropocene together: history matters

As a species, we have reached a tipping point for Earth derived from our unsustainable resource use. While conservation efforts occurred early in human civilization, it was not until 1980 that the full force of environmental destruction, including the Santa Barbara oil spill in the 1970s, culminated in the new discipline of conservation biology focused on the biosphere. Similarly, conservation paleobiology, named two decades later, brings the unique perspective of the fossil record to conservation efforts, uniting biosphere and geosphere scientists. To date, conservation history does not include paleontological or geological perspectives. Further, each discipline has a different benchmark—near time—for when Earth’s ecosystems were modified by humans. Accordingly, the history of conservation efforts leading up to conservation biology and conservation paleobiology was examined from a geological and ecological framework. To provide a benchmark for near time, the hominin record and their geo-environmental modifications were also examined and revealed that by the start of the Holocene, all continents except ice-covered Antarctica and Greenland had human-modified ecosystems. Therefore, near time is dispensable when the Holocene Epoch is universally understood and precisely defined as a time when H. sapiens dominated environments. Lastly, a conservation corps is urgently needed, following the long tradition of F.D. R.’s Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s and J.F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps of the 1960s, to promote a global network connecting all students and practitioners of conservation disciplines to focus on biotic resilience, recovery, and solutions for the world’s most pressing environmental problems.

Holocaust Denial as Memory Criminal Law Seen Through the Nordic Lenses


 
 
 Dealing with historical matters by means of law has become increasingly common. The matters, such as the Holocaust, that have merited the attention of legislatures are, however, exceptional. The painful memory of the horrible events has required a profound rethinking of the basic premises of political and legal life in Europe.
 When criminal law is being used to protect the memory of those facts and of the victims of the offences, we enter a level of highly symbolical legislation. In Continental Europe, the discussions concerning criminalisation of Holocaust denial emerged in the 1970’s, and in the 1990’s criminalising was already in full swing.
 The Nordic countries have been slow in joining such developments. In this paper we will try to bring the Nordic countries on this map by introducing some of these discussions to the Nordic scholarly audience, but also by reporting to the international scholarly community about some Nordic and particularly Finnish aspects of those subject issues. It is time for Nordic criminal law scholars to join these debates and to bring in viewpoints on the basis of Nordic criminal law and theorising. This article aims at contributing to such a discussion.
 
 

Дети и детство у средневековых тюрок. VI—VIII вв.

Social relations are among the most complex matters in history of the Inner and Western Asia. Archaeological and narrative sources do not offer us a complete picture of daily life and intra-family relations. Written accounts focused on the warriors, campaigns and deeds of the rulers. However, episodic information and ethnographic data allow us to look into the world of children and childhood. Among the medieval Kok Türks, the relations among children in the same family are a model in the construction of the state. As in any patriarchal family, the relationship was based on obeying to the elders, i. e. the father and elder brothers. The elders take care of the general well-being of the family, protect the younger ones, and in return, the younger brothers and sisters obey them and their requirements. Among the Kok Türks, the dynastic clan “Ashina and Ashide” were recognized as “elder brothers”, while the people — “Budun” — became their “younger brother”. All this, together with religious ideas, ensured the stability of the society during the 200 years of the existence of the Khaganate and in subsequent successor states of the Kok Türks.

Does the amount of family history matter? Perspectives of adult adoptees.

Family history is considered the gold standard for risk assessment of inherited conditions and is often used to inform preventative care. There are currently no provider guidelines that address caring for patients with a lack of family history, and adoptees report inconsistent care because of this. Through this qualitative study, we explored (1) how the amount of family history impacts adoptees' perceptions of healthcare and (2) adoptees' suggestions for improvement of their healthcare. Fourteen adult adoptees participated in semi-structured interviews via telephone or Zoom audio. Transcripts were analyzed using thematic analysis and interpretive phenomenology. Results revealed five themes: adoptees should have access to their family health history; several factors influence the importance of family history (reproduction, identity formation, age, and health concerns); many adoptees use direct-to-consumer testing to gain information about health risks or to find family members; completing history forms or being asked about family health history invokes negative emotions in adoptees; experiences with healthcare providers are variable for adoptees. These results show that unknown family health history can contribute to a negative perception of healthcare. Adoptees perceive family health history as important to know, and not having this information brings up complex emotions in the healthcare setting. To help mitigate the disparities and the negative emotions that adoptees feel, genetic counselors should consider acknowledging the complex emotions, reassuring adoptees with available preventative care, and revising preclinical paperwork, such as family health history questionnaires, to be more inclusive of those who lack this information. These changes have the potential to significantly improve healthcare experiences for adoptees. Healthcare providers, especially genetic counselors, need to continue to learn about and advocate for this population.

Why history matters for moral responsibility: Evaluating history‐sensitive structuralism

AbstractIs moral responsibility essentially historical, or does an agent's moral responsibility for an action depend only on their psychological structure at that time? In previous work, I have argued that the two main (non‐skeptical) views on moral responsibility and agents’ histories—historicism and standard structuralism—are vulnerable to objections that are avoided by a third option, namely history‐sensitive structuralism. In this paper, I develop this view in greater detail and evaluate the view by comparing it with its three dialectical rivals: skepticism about moral responsibility, historicism, and standard structuralism. Each comparison includes discussion of new work on moral responsibility and agents’ histories, and along the way I offer new arguments for preferring history‐sensitive structuralism, paying special attention to the view's explanatory power.

Sequencing of Births by Wantedness: Implications for Changes in Mid-Life Health Among Aging NLSY79 Women.

As life course frameworks highlight and gerontological studies confirm, the health implications of early birth timing (e.g., adolescent births) and unplanned births (e.g., unwanted or mistimed births) extend years after those births into mid and later life. Yet past research often overlooks the considerable diversity in sequencing and timing of unplanned births even within the same individual (e.g., having both wanted and unwanted births), which are likely fundamental for women's long-term health trajectories. We develop a holistic understanding of birth timing and wantedness to provide insight into when and how childbearing histories matter for aging women's health. We use sequence analysis with hierarchical cluster method and estimate regression models using the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (N = 3,231) to examine how timing and patterning of births by wantedness are associated with changes in physical and mental health from ages 40 to 50. We identify 7 clusters of childbearing sequences. Of those 7 clusters, respondents with sequences characterized by wanted births in their 20s and 30s had the smallest declines in health in mid-life, whereas respondents with sequences with mainly unwanted births at any age or with mainly mistimed births beginning in adolescence had the greatest health declines. Adjusting for social and economic variables accounted for some, but not all, health differences across childbearing clusters. This project demonstrates the need for comprehensive life course perspectives on long-term health implications of birth wantedness and timing, recognizing diversity within and between individuals.

Individual light history matters to deal with the Antarctic summer

The effect of light, main zeitgeber of the circadian system, depends on the time of day it is received. A brief trip to the Antarctic summer (ANT) allowed us to explore the impact of a sudden and synchronized increase in light exposure on activity-rest rhythms and sleep patterns of 11 Uruguayan university students, and to assess the significance of light history in determining individual circadian phase shift. Measurements collected in the peri-equinox in Montevideo, Uruguay (baseline situation, MVD) and in ANT, included sleep logs, actigraphy, and salivary melatonin to determine dim-light melatonin onset (DLMO), the most reliable marker of circadian phase. The increase in light exposure in ANT with respect to MVD (affecting both light-sensitive windows with opposite effects on the circadian phase) resulted in no net change in DLMO among participants as some participants advanced their DLMO and some others delayed it. The ultimate cause of each participant’s distinctive circadian phase shift relied on the unique change in light exposure each individual was subjected to between their MVD and ANT. This study shows an association between the individual light history and the circadian phase shift.