Parallel Histories Research Articles

Los días y los años de Luis González de Alba: ¿escritura condicionada o escritura liberadora?

Si bien los libros hablan a sus lectores por medio de sus contenidos, también lo hacen desde las situaciones en las que fueron creados. A través de estas líneas revisaré el proceso de escritura del libro Los días y los años (1971), de Luis González de Alba, tanto desde algunas de las ventajas que reportó a su autor como desde ciertos condicionamientos (políticos, de grupo y de género) a los que se vio sujeto durante su creación. Esta obra representó, en su momento, un contrapeso a la versión oficial que se manejó tras los sucesos del 2 de octubre de 1968, por medio de la cual varias generaciones pudieron conocer el movimiento estudiantil en voz de sus dirigentes. Algunos escritos, sobre todo aquellos que surgen en momentos coyunturales o en situaciones de excepción, como el que aquí nos ocupa, se encuentran sujetos a diversos intereses y tensiones que los moldean, o incluso, los determinan. Los días y los años resulta paradigmático pues, además de haberse escrito en la cárcel y de tener un origen colectivo, cuenta con una historia paralela, escrita casi 40 años después, la cual descubre aspectos del autor velados en el primer libro. ¿Desde qué “lugar” creó González de Alba su historia del ’68 mexicano, qué ventajas le reportó y cuáles fueron los condicionamientos que influyeron en su escritura? Con base en fuentes primarias como el libro objeto de estudio y las entrevistas que realicé a su autor, Luis González de Alba, y al representante del Consejo Nacional de Huelga, Raúl Álvarez Garín, y desde las nuevas perspectivas de la historia del libro y la lectura, se intenta tener un acercamiento no solo al libro y las circunstancias de su escritura, sino a aquellos procesos de índole social, política y cultural que marcaron una época.

Transboundary Environmental Governance across the World's Largest Border ed. by Stephen Brooks and Andrea Olive

Reviewed by: Transboundary Environmental Governance across the World's Largest Border ed. by Stephen Brooks and Andrea Olive Paul Todhunter Transboundary Environmental Governance across the World's Largest Border. Edited by Stephen Brooks and Andrea Olive. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2018. vii + 248 pp. Map, tables, contributors, index. C$39.95 paper. Transboundary environmental governance concerns management of resources where "manmade boundaries . . . have been inserted against nature's will." The book provides a significant contribution to a growing literature on transboundary governance along the Canada–United States border. This international border, the world's longest border, contains 20% of the available global fresh surface water, shares numerous and diverse habitats, possesses rich and varied natural resources, and is populated by peoples with close economic ties, parallel histories, and common cultural roots. Important differences also exist, however, that lead to divergence and conflict in transboundary governance. The aim of the editors is "to help us better understand the issues, processes, and challenges that characterize transboundary environmental governance between Canada and the United States." They asked volume contributors to describe the state of existing relationships, governance structures, and processes of transboundary governance, to assess the adequacy of these structures with respect to environmental impacts, and to evaluate opportunities for reform, improved outcomes, and successful accommodation of emerging environmental concerns. The editors have splendidly met these aims. I was most impressed by the coherence of the entire volume, and how each individual chapter made a significant contribution to the whole. Each contributor focused on the editors' aims, provided an entry of similar length and depth, presented interesting case histories, and addressed common themes. Contributors had access to drafts of other chapters, and often referenced points made in other parts of the book. The volume has none of the disjointedness that can characterize edited multi-author volumes. Most chapters share a common structure, with a summary introduction, a historical perspective on the development of environmental governance, a development of those initial structures to accommodate the increasing complexity of environmental and human affairs, and selected case histories. The volume is organized along a geographical gradient cross-cut by major resource types. The editors first provide a lengthy preface that summarizes each contribution. The first chapter reviews the International Joint Commission that grew out of the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909 and formed the basis of early Canada–United States transboundary governance, but is now overshadowed by multilayered regional agreements of varied types. The next three chapters examine the Great Lakes Basin, each focusing on a different environmental issue: water quantity, water storage, and river navigation; fisheries management; and water quality and pollution. The fifth chapter, on the Prairie Region, will be of greatest interest to this journal's readers. A historical prioritization of economic development led to full allocation of water rights in a region of scarce and unreliable water resources, but now faces challenges from new voices advocating for environmental conservation and sustainability. The St. Mary, Milk, and Souris river basins are the focus of the chapter, a decision for which rational support is given. The omission of the Red River of the North Basin is disappointing, however, given its unique properties and regional importance. A chapter on the Pacific West and two chapters on energy governance follow that are also highly relevant to the Great Plains. Here, in a unique twist, Canada has been the driver for resource development, and the US has been more resistant in its approach to resource development. The final chapter summarizes lessons learned, and looks forward to new challenges posed by invasive species, climate change, and development of the Arctic. Numerous themes emerge from the individual chapters. Multilayered governance has developed with a sharing of power between national, subnational, regional, and local levels of administration. New actors now bring their voices to the governance table, including environmentalists, nongovernmental organizations, and Indigenous, First Nation, and tribal peoples. The early dominance of economic development interests has broadened to consider environmental quality, habitat conservation, and sustainability perspectives. Common-pool resources require different governance structures and approaches depending upon the symmetry or asymmetry of regional benefits and costs of resource development. Transboundary governance has grown in complexity, often leading to institutional...

Spanish Dollars and Sister Republics: The Money That Made Mexico and the United States by Tatiana Seijas and Jake Frederick

Reviewed by: Spanish Dollars and Sister Republics: The Money That Made Mexico and the United States by Tatiana Seijas and Jake Frederick Sharon Ann Murphy (bio) KEY WORDS Currency, United States, Mexico, Gold, Silver, Coins Spanish Dollars and Sister Republics: The Money That Made Mexico and the United States. By Tatiana Seijas and Jake Frederick. (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. Pp. 196. Paper, $29.00.) In this concise volume, Tatiana Seijas and Jake Frederick attempt to provide the reader with a sweeping tour of the history of gold and silver coinage in the United States and Mexico. Designed mainly as a classroom text, this nicely illustrated book begins with a handy timeline of major events and concludes with a useful glossary of terms. The text itself is highly descriptive, explaining vignettes in the history of these sister republics through the lives of eight individuals. The book begins by placing the Spanish American real de a ocho or “piece-of-eight” at the center of the global trading network of the late eighteenth century, emphasizing its importance for the early development of the U.S. monetary system. Lacking in specie, the United States depended on the wide circulation of Spanish coins until the middle of the nineteenth century, when they finally possessed enough native coinage to ban foreign money. Revolutionary leaders such as (little-known) Virginia congressman John Page recognized their dependence on Spanish coins for trade, and thus adopted both the terminology (“dollars”) and the symbols ($) from the Spanish for the nascent United States currency. [End Page 370] In successive chapters, the authors recount the experiences of early U.S. banking through the eyes of Philadelphia banker Stephen Girard, Mexican independence from Spain through Mexican Treasury Secretary José Ignacio Esteva, the fight for Texas independence from Mexico through the life of Sam Houston, the Mexican–American War from the perspective of General Antonio López de Santa Anna, the settling of the new border between the nations from the experiences of John Russell Bartlett, the California gold rush through the eyes of the director of the United States Mint Dr. Robert Maskell Patterson, and the French intervention in Mexico through Emperor Maximilian I. The reciprocal monetary relationship between the United States and Spanish North America is apparent in a few of the stories—especially surrounding the twin revolutions in the United States and Mexico and the Texas rebellion. Several of the chapters, however, get too caught up in the biographies of the protagonists (such as Girard or Santa Anna) or on textbook accounts of commonly discussed events (the politics of the founding of the First and Second Bank of the United States, or the Mexican–American War) and lose the monetary thread altogether. Although the stated intention of the book is the interrelated monetary history of these sister republics, many of the chapters focus exclusively on the experiences of only one of these entities, with any relationship being merely tangential or accidental. For example, the chapter on the gold rush has the tightest focus on monetary issues but is exclusively about the U.S. experience; only California’s recent acquisition as part of the Mexican Cession connects the event to her sister republic. On the other hand, the authors present the monetary history of Mexico as being equally dependent on its relationship with Great Britain, France, and the United States. For the reader whose main knowledge base is U.S. or Mexican history, the book succeeds in providing a useful sketch of the parallel history of her sister republic. Although the importance of Spanish coinage is well-documented in most monetary histories of the United States, the reminder of this relationship is important for the more general student of U.S. history. But as a larger monetary history of the relationship between the two nations, it falls short. [End Page 371] Sharon Ann Murphy Sharon Ann Murphy is professor of history at Providence College, and author of Investing in Life: Insurance in Antebellum America (Baltimore, 2010), winner of the 2012 Hagley Prize for the best book in business history, and Other People’s Money: How Banking Worked in the Early American Republic (Baltimore, 2017). Her latest project...

Contemporary Practical Alternatives to a “Right To Be Forgotten” in the United States

The “right to be forgotten” (RTBF), perhaps more accurately described as a “right of erasure”, first emerged into mainstream public consciousness and practice with the European Court of Justice’s May, 2014 ruling in the Google Spain SL, Google Inc. v. Agencia Española de Protección de Datos, Mario Costeja González case. A targeted and bespoke process for requesting the removal of specific search engine results only emerged in the months immediately following that ruling. The final contours and scope of that process are still not fully settled, and will likely continue to evolve as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation takes effect in May 2018. However, the concept of an individual’s right or ability to exercise some control over publicly available information about themselves dates back well prior to Mr. Costeja’s lawsuit, and extends well beyond the EU. The Costeja case itself did not purport to create a new right, only to include search engine results as relevant to and controlled by the EU’s 1995 data protection law as “data controllers”. The discussion of some sort of analogous right in both legal academia and in the courts dates back to at least 2006, if not to much earlier, perhaps even to the early part of the 20th century, using an expansive definition of the cultural concerns underlying RTBF. In tandem with that global history of a de facto “right to be forgotten”, there is a parallel history of mechanisms and practices intended or used to achieve this “forgetting”, ranging from standard lawsuits to norms, to —more recently— the subversion of other, unrelated, official affordances for the removal or obscuring of online material. Using examples from the Lumen project’s database, this paper will examine some of the recent ways in which individuals in countries without a codified right of erasure have sought to be “forgotten” by using online content removal mechanisms originally grounded in other purposes and legal regimes, such as copyright, trademark, and defamation. The paper concludes with a speculative discussion of what effect, if any, the existence and repurposing of these alternative mechanisms might have on the development or rejection of a separate RTBF jurisprudence, and what form that regime might take were it to be adopted.

Epistemological approach to correspondence: silent history of intimate spheres

Cultural history, without which it is essentially impossible to speak about music, is composed, as we know, of a multitude of circumstances and coincidences affecting not only the musical artefacts but also the relations between those who create this history: Why did some people meet at some point? How was the link established between them? Why did this link last in some cases and why was it just punctual in other cases? What were the mutual influences? The project “The Nylon Curtain” is based on correspondence during the Cold War era, which was circulating between the Western countries and Lithuania. We allude to personal communication initiatives based on relationships, ideas, desires, and personal opportunities that helped create a “parallel history”. In the frame and context of official history, the formation of individual micro-spheres, namely the intimate world of correspondence, which would develop outside this framework, was one of a few publicly available tools to modulate the everyday environment. Thus, correspondence participated, independently of borders, in the establishment of a communication network, which functioned as an area without boundaries, and with its own specificities and problematics. This network became a “common” area, centred on cultural, professional and personal experiences. We should treat the correspondence of the Soviet period not only as a historical document but also as a reference to a certain emotional state of that period. The latter affects not only the language of the letters, but also what is read between the lines; not only what is said, but also what is implied by what is said: the silent language is the true discourse of the Soviet era. Consequently, the central element of our analysis, which allows us to make a link between the problems raised at the beginning, is emotional space: it is the key to understand that cultural acts in the Soviet era were carried out in spite of a greater or lesser presence of fear and in spite of the possibilities of the regime’s reaction.

The Final Years of Central State Hospital.

There is a rich literature on the deinstitutionalization movement in the US but few, if any, parallel histories of state mental hospitals. Under attack from the 1950s on, state hospitals dwindled in size and importance. Yet, their budgets remained large. This paper offers a case study of one such facility, Indiana's Central State Hospital, between 1968 and 1994. During these years, local newspapers published multiple stories of patient abuse and neglect. Internal hospital materials also acknowledged problems but offered few solutions. In 1984, the US Department of Justice intervened, charging Central State with having violated patients' civil rights, the first such action filed under the 1980 Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act. Although Indiana signed a consent decree promising major reform, long-lasting change proved elusive. Civil and criminal lawsuits proliferated. In 1992, as Central State continued to attract negative attention, Indiana Governor Evan Bayh ordered the troubled hospital closed. His decision promised to save the state millions of dollars and won plaudits from many, but not all, mental health advocates. Even as the last patients left in 1994, some families continued to challenge the wisdom of eliminating Indiana's only large urban mental hospital, but to no effect.

Comparative demography elucidates the longevity of parasitic and symbiotic relationships.

Parasitic and symbiotic relationships govern vast nutrient and energy flows, yet controversy surrounds their longevity. Enduring relationships may engender parallel phylogenies among hosts and parasites, but so may ephemeral relationships when parasites colonize related hosts. An understanding of whether symbiont and host populations have grown and contracted in concert would be useful when considering the temporal durability of these relationships. Here, we devised methods to compare demographic histories derived from genomic data. We compared the historical growth of the agent of severe human malaria, Plasmodium falciparum, and its mosquito vector, Anopheles gambiae, to human and primate histories, thereby discerning long-term parallels and anthropogenic population explosions. The growth history of Trichinella spiralis, a zoonotic parasite disseminated by swine, proved regionally specific, paralleling distinctive growth histories for wild boar in Asia and Europe. Parallel histories were inferred for an anemone and its algal symbiont (Exaiptasia pallida and Symbiodinium minutum). Concerted growth in potatoes and the agent of potato blight (Solanum tuberosum and Phytophthora infestans) did not commence until the age of potato domestication. Through these examples, we illustrate the utility of comparative historical demography as a new exploratory tool by which to interrogate the origins and durability of myriad ecological relationships. To facilitate future use of this approach, we introduce a tool called C-PSMC to align and evaluate the similarity of demographic history curves.

Why nationalism did not emerge earlier in Timor-Leste: customary cultures confront globalising modernism

ABSTRACTThis article explores Timor-Leste’s long history of colonial encounters with modernity and globalisation. Over a couple of centuries these forces contributed to creating a particular form of customary nationhood that differed from other nations which, on the face it, appear to have parallel histories. More than that, a sense of nationhood came later in Timor-Leste than in most colonial and postcolonial settings. Through an analysis of Timor’s predominantly customary forms of sociality and organisation, this article explores why political nationalism came so late to a territory that like many other colonies had an established generalising cultural identity and was part of a global history of colonisation. Drawing in issues such as Timor’s place in global history, conflict, resistance, Indigenous power, the unevenness of Portuguese colonisation, rejection of the homogenising process and the naming of the Timorese people, it is concluded that the continuing depth of customary-traditional cultures and the nature of the colonial experience cut against the early formation of a sense of nationhood, even as this became one of the strengths in the Timorese fight against colonial oppression.

Psychiatrists and psychiatry in late colonial India

The history of professionalisation of psychiatry in India is an array of parallel histories. The article describes the variegated processes of professionalisation, modernisation and Indianisation and the impediments that colonialism created in their path. It charts the reification of the professional identity of a psychiatrist which was uniquely different from the Western counterpart. The process that began at the turn of the twentieth century was far from complete even on the eve of independence. It argues that psychiatry remained at the margins of medicine and the colonial state maintained an indifferent attitude towards development of the mental sciences. Highlighting contributions of individual psychiatrists and juxtaposing them with those of the state, this article situates psychiatrists as historical actors and how the emergence of psychiatry was enmeshed with political histories of the period.

Tatanga Ishtima hinkna Įyá Waká: Sleeping Buffalo and Medicine Rock and Assiniboine Dislocation and Persistence

Tatanga Ishtima hinkna Įyá Waká:Sleeping Buffalo and Medicine Rock and Assiniboine Dislocation and Persistence Joshua Horowitz (bio) On the crest of a ridge near Cree Crossing of the Milk River is a group of glacial boulders which from a distance resemble a herd of sleeping buffalo. They were held sacred by the Indians and one in particular was thought to be the leader. It is now part of this monument. … The tribeshave legends of the herds' origins, and long before the white men came sacrificed possessions to the Sleeping Buffalo. a person reading these words, inscribed on a plaque that was created by the National Register of Historic Places in 1995 and placed at a National Park Service site called the Sleeping Buffalo and Medicine Rock on Highway 2 in northern Montana, for the first time might assume the buffalo and local Indigenous peoples have vanished from the area. As the plaque mentions briefly, these two boulders were relocated from their original site, where they once sat among a herd of buffalo rocks at a place that Assiniboine people call Cree Crossing.1 What the plaque does not state is that they were moved at various times in the twentieth century, eventually being confined to the current site in the 1980s and then inducted into the National Historic Registry in 1995. As a result of settler displacement, the rocks survived three forced migrations. Settlers first removed them from their original resting place during a development project on private property in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.2 At that time, they were placed in a local city park. Then, twice later, in the late twentieth century, they were moved again to open locations along the interstate highway. An additional plaque at the site quotes a local Indigenous view of the two rocks. On it, Pat Chief Stick is quoted as saying, "These rocks are sacred, just like our old people. The mountains, the rocks, earth, water, all the mountains, all the ecology, and Indian religion. They are all connected."3 An important distinction between these two excerpts is that Chief Stick uses present tense, whereas the previous quote describes "Indians" and their [End Page 123] practices in the past tense. Local Indigenous peoples continue to revere the Sleeping Buffalo and Medicine Rocks. ________ Sites such as the Sleeping Buffalo and Medicine Rocks, held sacred by Assiniboine people and other local Indigenous peoples, have helped to keep bodies of cultural and environmental knowledge alive despite colonization, settlement, national borders, and reservation systems. Sleeping Buffalo and Medicine Rocks' original location during the prereservation era was important not only to the Assiniboine but also to other tribes such as the Cree, Blackfeet, Chippewa, Gros Ventre, Crow, Northern Cheyenne, and Sioux.4 Assiniboine people's well-being depends on their abilities to interact with the Makoche Wakan (Sacred Mother Earth), including rocks, springs, plants, animals, stars, and the weather. For the Assiniboine, sacred sites inform how they see themselves as a community belonging to a homeland. Heard primarily through Assiniboine voices, Assiniboine relationships to places retain significant cultural and historical meaning, as well as remain sources of medicine and spiritual power. The relationships between sacred sites such as the Sleeping Buffalo and Medicine Rocks, with animals such as the buffalo, and between Assiniboine people demonstrate a mutual interdependence and parallel histories, as both Assiniboine people and these two sacred rocks faced similar consequences of American and Canadian colonization, settlement, relocations, and confinement. Subsequently, Assiniboine people express a responsibility not only to their own sense of community but also to the lands they inhabit, to animals, and to sacred sites. Assiniboine people's relationships to places remain integral to their own sense of existence as a distinct people. By focusing on the Sleeping Buffalo and Medicine Rocks as an example of a central and important Assiniboine sacred site, I illustrate how dispersed Assiniboine communities across several reservations share a sense of commonality, kinship ties, and identity through their relationship to ancestral lands. Sacred sites link Assiniboine people between communities and their relationships to places, animals, plants, weather, stars, rocks, and water, despite the geopolitical constructions of reserves in Canada and reservations in the...

Herta Müller’s <i>Atemschaukel (The Hunger Angel)</i> in the Context of Twentieth-Century Forced Migration in East-Central Europe

My paper elaborates Herta Müller’s Gulag novel, Atemschaukel (2009; published in English under the title of The Hunger Angel in 2012), in the historical, political and ethical contexts of twentieth-century forced migrations by placing the novel among those exodus narratives that have unfolded the parallel history of Romanian-German and Jewish communities during and after the Second World War. Given the fact that the memory of forced migrations and of the Gulag is a “soft memory” (Etkind 2004), there are no consensual remembrance policies in any concerned East or East-Central European country regarding their history. In the absence of official ownership, the legacies of these colletive and individual traumas became predominantly text-based (rather than image- or monument-based). One must therefore study those aesthetical forms by which literature is able to encode the physical, psychological, moral, social-political conditions of any totalitarian rule—and thus, attempt to establish the perceptional and sensational frames on which the universe of the Gulag can be re-constructed. Accordingly, my paper gives an amplifying view of the tendencies by which Müller’s Atemschaukel both preserves and subtly re-orchestrates the conventions of the genre of the Gulag novel. One of the main achievements of her (politics of) aesthetics consists in re-creating the image of the labor camp through an ethically grounded conception of literary testimony, which, at the same time, gains and fulfills a mediative (mimetic) function.

Parallel, additional or alternative histories of philosophy? Questions on the theory and methodology of the history of philosophy

ABSTRACTMethodologies and theories for writing histories of philosophy are particularly relevant today due to the abounding challenges to the discipline that have emerged: e.g. the problem concerning the precise mode of the inclusion of non-Western philosophies in the history of philosophy, the response to postcolonial considerations at large, the transformative impact of new media and the question whether the history of philosophy is primarily a philosophical, rather than merely historical, enterprise. À propos the relative scarcity that is to be witnessed in explicit articulations of methodologies and theories for writing histories of philosophy, in this note I focus on certain spontaneous, rather than theoretically planned, responses that have emerged to the above challenges – in particular, Peter Adamson’s History of Philosophy without any gaps – and in conclusion, as an example of methodological development, I touch on some of the problems we encounter in the case of the inclusion of Byzantine philosophy in the history of philosophy.

El fracaso del diálogo migratorio transatlántico en Vientos de agua

Este artículo analiza las connotaciones afectivas del diálogo transatlántico que propone la serie hispano-argentina Vientos de agua en su proyecto de instaurar una comunidad de significado común para todos los sujetos víctimas de estructuras de dominación, ya sean políticas o económicas. A través de las historias paralelas de Argentina y España, se establece una conexión entre el poder disruptivo del fascismo español a principios del siglo XX con el del capitalismo en Argentina a principios del siglo XXI, proponiendo la deconstrucción de una serie de estructuras binarias herederas del discurso colonial al establecerse las categorías universales de víctima e inmigrante. Consideramos este proyecto fallido dado el tratamiento de ciertos personajes que en última instancia quedan excluidos del circuito afectivo. Concluimos que estas estrategias se resuelven en la preponderancia del espacio peninsular, así como en la exclusión del elemento indígena y africano de la supuesta nueva comunidad de significado, resultando en el fracaso del dialogo migratorio transatlántico.

Approaching Russian History from European Seas

Approaching Russian History from European Seas Ryan Tucker Jones (bio) Lars Elenius, Hallvard Tjelmeland, Maria Lähteenmäki, and Alexey Golubev, eds., The Barents Region: A Transnational History of Subarctic Northern Europe. 518pp. Oslo: PAX, 2015. ISBN-13 978-8253036519. 349.00 kr. Michael North, The Baltic: A History, trans. Kenneth Kronenberg. 448pp. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. ISBN-13 978-0674970830. $22.95. Michael Pye, The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe. 360pp. New York: Pegasus Books, 2014. ISBN-13 978-1681772066. $17.95. Russian history, despite efforts such as Kritika’s, remains largely stuck within national or, at best, imperial and comparative frameworks. Few Russian historians have engaged with new trends in transnational histories, much less the sea-centric histories that have reshaped national histories around the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans.1 As Julia Leikin noted in a recent review for this journal, a few historians have begun to explore Russian relationships to the ocean, but the conversation remains at its beginning.2 The three works under review here suggest an alternative entry into this type of history. Scholars of neighboring countries, regions, and seas are increasingly incorporating Russia in their surveys, in recognition of the fact that Russia has long been [End Page 203] active in various European maritime spaces. As such, these books offer an intriguing avenue into Russian history, one that allows overlooked regions, stories, and people to come to the forefront in ways usually foreclosed by national histories. They also possess the potential to normalize Russian history by stressing Russian similarities to European historical trajectories, shaped by long-standing interaction and the leveling action of the regular tides of shared seas. Not all seas are the same, though. The North Sea, the Baltic, and the Barents, the subjects of three new books, all share high latitudes and convoluted shorelines inhabited by diverse peoples, but the similarities end there. While the North and Barents seas are bathed by a warm Gulf Stream, the Baltic is frozen for much of the year. The first two seas’ fisheries are also much richer. But such ecological characteristics and the environmental histories they helped shape are not the subjects of these books. This, in my opinion, is a missed opportunity to argue for the particular value of sea-based histories and leaves many important connections between Russia and Europe unexplored. An environmentally informed approach, for example, has been taken by scholars of the Pacific (e.g., Paul D’Arcy’s The People of the Sea), the Atlantic (Jeffrey Bolster’s The Mortal Sea), and the Indian Ocean, in the process uncovering entirely new historical narratives for new communities of humans and others.3 The three books under review here focus instead on the well-established but still fruitful themes of contact and convergence. This focus produces important insights for Russian history, though to varying degrees in each work. In general, the earlier each book’s chronological center of gravity, the less it has to say about Russia. Each book also varies in its commitment to a focus on the sea, with some telling parallel histories around a common center and others honing in on the maritime connections themselves. Taken together, they should alert Russian historians to the possibilities offered by the histories of seas, as well as some of the limitations of approaching the subjects without grappling seriously with the ocean itself. [End Page 204] Michael Pye’s The Edge of the World takes the strongest sea-centric approach to history. He claims that such an approach is actually the best way to recapture the viewpoint of his subjects, mostly the people of Northern Europe in the centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire and before the Renaissance. For them, there was no meaningful distinction between ocean and land, no “seaside” as an intervening space of leisure and barrier to the impact of far-off strangers. This is a world that many think of as the “Dark Ages,” but that Pye would prefer to call a “long morning” of modernity. Instead of darkness and isolation, the period was actually characterized by “constant exchange over water” and...

Select Document: John Hampden Jackson, ‘Finland and Ireland: assorted comparisons’ (1937)

AbstractThis select document is an annotated translation of John Hampden Jackson’s 1937 Finnish-language text ‘Finland and Ireland: assorted comparisons’, an article previously unavailable in English. It represents an intriguing and extended instance of the generalised comparisons that were made between Irish and Finnish history by observers from the nineteenth century onwards. Therefore, as an example of a mid-twentieth-century primer of the two countries’ ‘parallel histories’, Hampden Jackson’s article is an excellent resource. Moreover, although Hampden Jackson had carved out a niche by the 1930s as an expert on Finland, his reflections on Ireland expose a rather patchy and superficial knowledge, and arguably a degree of condescension. Some of the value of translating this article is that it exposes attitudes of the (broadly-defined) British Left towards Ireland in the 1930s, and particularly the way these were presented, in comparisons with other countries, to an overseas audience.

Electric shadows reloaded: the post-digital animateur, shadow play and handmade cinema

ABSTRACTThe lingering shadows (ying) in the word for cinema (dianying) did not seem to have a significant impact in Chinese film studies, which have been predominantly preoccupied with indexicality and issues related to realism. By bringing these shadows into focus, this essay reflects on the handmade nature of the moving images as key to better framing and understanding some of the most recent developments in Chinese digital animation. In the work of an increasingly visible number of solo producers (i.e. the post-digital animateurs), the moving image is more intimately connected to the human creator/manipulator/performer, rather than the technological medium (be it the kinoeye, the film strip or the digital software). Reframing their animations within the broader temporal and spatial context of handmade cinema, I explore a longstanding, but largely unscrutinized, connection between cinema and the performative apparatus of the shadow play to sketch a parallax story – rather than a parallel history – of manipulated and evocative moving images that are not contained in the institution of cinema and do not submit themselves to the supremacy of the index. The animateur's moving images offer meaningful evidence of the important, albeit mostly unrecognized, role that animation can play in (Chinese) film studies, and more broadly, film theories.

The Kladruby Games, the Paralympics, and the pre-history of disability sport

The place of Dr Ludwig Guttmann in the founding history of the Paralympic Games is universally acknowledged. Briefly stated, Guttmann is credited with the aspiration to improve the dismal prospects of postwar spinal injury patients, and the inspiration of using sports as rehabilitative practices. Given his initiation of the Stoke Mandeville Games in 1948 with a small-scale archery contest between two local teams, he was able to draw a ready parallel between his beginnings and the model of the London Olympic Games, and in a few short years the multi-disability Paralympic Games had been established. However, there was both an historical context and a co-history to these brief details – there are lessons from both time and place. We must not forget (or fail to acknowledge) some of the pre-history and parallel histories, which we should attempt to recover. This article presents an account of the development of the Kladruby Games in Czechoslovakia from 1948, which in 2017 celebrate their 100th edition, in order to bring to light some of the hidden history of disability sport. We might be led to speculate on how the Kladruby Games might have developed from these very promising beginnings, had Srdečný received earlier support from the authorities, and the impetus to consider Olympic connections. Such speculations we consider to be fruitless, given the very different conceptions of disability sport at work here. Srdečný’s continuing commitment was to seeing the Kladruby Games as an impetus to the rehabilitative and recreational benefits of sport, rather than the contradictions experienced by the Paralympics in balancing elite performance values with its other aims.

THE LIVES OF ORDINARY PEOPLE IN ANCIENT ISRAEL: WHERE ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE BIBLE INTERSECT

For various reasons this book by William Dever is not a history in the usual sense of the word. First, in this work the archaeological data are treated as the primary source, while textual data are only drawn upon once the archaeological data have been exhausted. Second, only the eighth century is treated in this history. At times Dever does infringe on both the ninth and seventh centuries, but the eighth century remains the focus. According to Dever, the fact that this period is archaeologically well documented favoured the choice of this period as subject matter. Dever basically constructs a parallel history of one era in the history of Israel and Judah to correct, so to speak, the history we construct according to the Hebrew Bible.

‘The Cure is Worse than the Disease’: Mumbai Dance Bars, and New Forms of Justice in the History of Female Public Performers in India

In 2005, a ban on dancing in beer bars was brought by the State of Maharashtra targeting the exploitation of bar dancers and the damage to society and public morality that dance bars were seen to engender. In 2006, the ban was successfully contested in the Bombay High Court, and in July 2013, this judgement was upheld in the Supreme Court. In this article, I explore the historical context to the bar girls, the ban and the court cases, and examine the kinds of justice that the court rulings represent. The dance bar ban constituted an almost exact repeat of the anti-nautch campaign of nineteenth-century India that left courtesans and devadasis marginalised from classical performing arts, and the majority of bar girls were in fact from courtesan and dancing girl communities. I also discuss the parallel history of marginalisation of transgender female erotic performers in India. I combine an interdisciplinary approach encompassing expertise on Indian dance and ethnomusicology as well as broader work on South Asia, modernity, gender, law and development. The article synthesises ethnography on the contemporary situation of India’s excluded erotic performers and changing patterns of work and social position and the deeper history of their circumstances.

Review: The Donatist Schism. Controversy and Contexts, edited by Richard Miles

Richard Miles, ed. The Donatist Schism. Controversy and Contexts . Translated Texts for Historians, Contexts 2. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016. 394 pp. xi. ISBN: 9781781382813. $120.00. For half a century after its publication, in 1952, William Frend's The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman North Africa remained the standard narrative on the late antique North African Christian controversy. Among the explosion of recent scholarship on late antique North Africa and the Donatist Schism in particular, Brent Shaw's monumental and magisterial Sacred Violence. African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine (2011) has had the most significant impact on revising Frend's traditional narrative. The book currently under review, itself revisionist, challenges several fundamental assumptions about the Donatist conflict, and its impressive roster of scholars systematically engages with Sacred Violence throughout, challenging its argument in numerous instances. This outstanding and important collection of studies is therefore an appropriate tribute to Brent Shaw, to whom it is suitably dedicated. Based on a 2014 conference held in Sydney, the volume includes fifteen chapters, three of them introductory, followed by twelve studies on a specific topic or theme of relevance to the Donatist Schism; there is also an excellent Bibliography and a useful Index. Following a general introduction by the volume's editor, Richard Miles (“The Donatist Controversy: Parallel Histories, Multiple Narratives”), John Whitehouse presents an overview of events (“The Course of the Donatist Schism in Late Roman North Africa”) as well as of its main scholarly interpretations (“The Scholarship of the Donatist Controversy”) which concludes with a list of “Key Themes for Future Research” (49–53). Both of Whitehouse's chapters are useful introductions to the topic, particularly for students and readers unfamiliar with the details of this religious controversy, and especially considering that the following chapters mainly address readers familiar with the topic. In addition to outlining the key historical moments of this controversy and its scholarship, Whitehouse introduces key vocabulary and concepts, surveys the main sources, and …