Plot Of History Research Articles

The Keller Plantation and the Racial Plot of Disability History in the U.S.

Between the popularization of Helen Keller’s autobiography, The Story of My Life (1903), and the cinematic dramatization of The Miracle Worker (1962), scenes of Keller’s early life and education have served as touchstones through which nondisabled Americans have imagined disability’s history and narrowed its political possibilities: toward the conditional dispersal of access based on individual acts of overcoming. Yet, if Keller’s story has played an outsize role in consolidating disability’s history and politics, it is also a site of profound racial occlusion. The context of Keller’s early life on the Keller plantation in Tuscumbia, Alabama is largely absent from her popular legacy. With the disappearance of this context, the black people who facilitated Keller’s disabled coming of age have also fallen away, as well as the history of slavery and Indigenous removal that made her life story possible. This void—at the locus of perhaps the most hegemonic origin story of American disability history—is cause for critical race inquiry. This essay traces the relationship between the material background of Keller’s autobiography and its imaginative foreground; from her family’s role in settler conquest and slavery in the Alabama Muscle Shoals, to Keller’s status as a transcendent icon of disability. Reading between the plantation and the plot of Keller’s Story while locating both beside the Tennessee River’s shoals, this essay turns to theories of cartography and narrative authored by Sylvia Wynter and Tiffany Lethabo King for insight into a critical paradox: the antiblack and anti-Indigenous structure of ableism, and the whiteness of disabled representation. By resituating Keller’s iconicity in relation to conquest, slavery, and their afterlives, this essay locates the problems and possibilities of narrating black and Indigenous disability history from the Keller plantation’s surround. Yet, while invested in unsettling the landscape, I neither recover these stories nor entomb them as untellable. Instead, I write toward further investment in black and Indigenous counter-archives that have complicated who has been—and who remains—the imaginable and politically traction-able subject of disability.

The topic of memory and identity in contemporary Ukrainian prose

The relevance of the study is determined by the need to highlight the issues of memory and identity in the context of globalization, decolonization, the escalation of the Russian-Ukrainian war, and the intensification of the search for national and individual identity, particularly through the means of literature. The object of the research is Ukrainian prose of the beginning of the 21st century, which records memory and raises the issues of identity and historical continuity. The epic dimension of the problem is most fully represented by such novels as “Oblivion” by Tania Maliarchuk, “Amadoka” by Sofiіa Andrukhovych, and “Beech Land” by Maria Matios. The subject of the research is individual and group memory and identity, at one time artificially displaced from the national narrative and deliberately interrupted by the dictatorial Soviet-Russian regime. The study aims to investigate the artistic reconstruction of the memory and identity of Ukrainians in national literature of the beginning of the 21st century, to find out the instrumentalization of memory meanings and the role of remembering/forgetting. As a result of the research, using the hermeneutic method, we trace the artistic interpretation of memory in the context of an intensive understanding of the place and role of Ukrainians in the unfolding of the plot of history, returning to them a sense of individuality, and simply uniqueness, integrality, and durability (that is, permanence). Tania Maliarchuk’s novel “Oblivion” tells about the memory and place of modern man in the post-colonial Ukrainian space, about his awareness of the connection and continuity of the past, present, and future. Sofiіa Andrukhovych's novel “Amadoka” deals with the history of four generations of different eras and is united by the theme of the rupture of memory, tradition, time, and space. A successful attempt at positive processing of memory and identity based on the material of the history of Bukovyna in the 18th–21st centuries was performed by Maria Matios in the novel “Beech Land”. In addition to the common goal of exposing the Soviet pseudo-memory and (re)nourishing specific Ukrainian identity, the authors raise issues of regional specificity of public perception and debunking Soviet-Russian myths about the USSR. The prospects of research on the topic of memory and identity are reproductions of the entire range of semantic resources encoded in Ukrainian literature. This can become a way to escape from the power of the myths of the Russian Empire.

Pokolenie «revolyucionnogo pereloma» v sud'be russkoj derevni pervoj treti XX v.: problemy istoriografii

The article deals with the most actual problems and main trends in historical science related to the topic of agrarian history of Russia in the first third of the 20th century. Particular emphasis is placed on the review of works devoted to the problems of generational history, first of all, the role of the «revolutionary turning point» generation in the historical fate of the Russian village in the first third of the 20th century. Despite the fact that modern historians and sociologists consider various aspects of the described plot of the agrarian history of Russia from different methodological positions, a significant area of problems in the context of the main topic falls out of the researchers' attention.

Nostalgia and nationalism: Facebook ‘archives’ and the constitution of Thai photographic histories

This article considers the implications of the popularisation of Facebook groups that share historical photographs for the writing of Thai national and photographic histories. Rather than dismissing these groups as lacking in historical rigour, I propose that the nostalgic impetus behind their formation indicates an important way through which we may rethink the continued relevance of Thailand's history to its current sociopolitical situation. Drawing from Craig J. Reynolds’ (1992) argument regarding the interrelationship between the ‘plot of Thai history’ and the narrative historical form, I consider how this plot might be challenged or displaced through a movement from text to image, and from the material to the digital.

Colonial Counternarratives in Therese Robinson's Die Auswanderer

Die Auswanderer (1852), a novel of German immigration to the United States, by the German American philologist and novelist Therese Robinson (1797–1870; pseud. Talvj), presents colonial counternarratives that challenge both the masculine colonial fantasy of love with a native woman and the nineteenth-century myth of Germans as model colonizers. In contrast to these wish-fulfilling colonial fantasies, Robinson stages Germans' complicity in imperialist domination through a doubled plot of colonial history and family romance. She also revises the Amerikaroman genre, in which the United States typically functions as an imaginary geography for the projection of heroic German identities, by representing complex historical spaces permeated by colonial conflicts and ethnic tensions. Although Robinson's discourse and spatial dimensions reinforce dominant paradigms of Eurocentric history and ethnography, examining them also discloses a less formulaic perception of differentiation among racial others and a realignment of gender through the diminishing of German patriarchal and national identity.

El proceso de construcción de la memoria de los años cincuenta en Colombia

Este artículo muestra en qué consiste el proceso de construcción de la memoria de La Violencia de los años cincuenta (el periodo del enfrentamiento a muerte entre liberales y conservadores), proceso que se llevó a cabo durante el Frente Nacional. El artículo parte de la idea de que desde el momento en que la memoria pasa a un primer plano en los ámbitos internacional y nacional es necesario leer con esta clave los acontecimientos de la vida política. Más aún, se considera que la memoria no es una simple búsqueda de la verdad de lo sucedido, sino una elaboración al servicio de múltiples intereses políticos, tanto de liberación como de dominación, en la que toman parte las víctimas y los victimarios. En este texto, se identifican tres campos de elaboración de la memoria y se definen tres formas de rememoración desde el Frente Nacional: la memoria de las múltiples recriminaciones entre conservadores y liberales; la representación de La Violencia como una forma de cataclismo social, a la manera de una fuerza impersonal y ciega; y la consideración de la época como una cruel dictadura, que funciona como un recuerdo encubridor de las atrocidades cometidas. En la construcción de esta última forma de memoria, la gran prensa desempeñó un papel fundamental, con el periódico El Tiempo a la cabeza. La conclusión es que La Violencia no ha encontrado una verdadera integración en la trama de la historia nacional y que el Frente Nacional puso en marcha un proceso de invención de la desmemoria que ha hecho ininteligible lo sucedido para las nuevas generaciones.

Epidemiological and genetic analysis of hand-foot-mouth disease by enterovirus A71 in Taizhou, P. R. China, between 2010 and 2013.

Out of a population of 1,098 enteroviruses (EVs)-positive hand, foot, and mouth disease (HFMD) specimens, 352 were screened positive for EV-A71-accounting for 32.1% of all EV-positive specimens. This percentage denotes EV-A71 as the second major serotype of enteroviruse among HFMD suffers in Taizhou. An epidemic outbreak of EV-A71 among HFMD children was found in Taizhou in the second quarter of 2012. Phylogeny analysis based on the VP1 complete sequences leads us to find a sub-clade (designated TZ1-1) of EV-A71 circulating in Taizhou, whose emergence might be correlated with the epidemic outbreak. This correlation was further supported by the followed two analyses (namely skyline plot of population history and birth-death SIR simulation of epidemic history). And more importantly, at a positively selected site of VP1 caspid, a mutation of N31D was found to be a synapomorphy of TZ1-1 and its occurrence might be correlated with the epidemic outbreak. J. Med. Virol. 89:782-790, 2017. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic

Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic

El arte del bordado en Santiago de Compostela. Nuevos datos sobre bordadores de los siglos XVI y XVII

In this article there is contributed new information from Santiago de Compostela embroiderers of the 16th and 17th century. There includes news related to the life of these makers and to the artistic production of the same ones, that is to say, contracts, concerts, etc. It is the result of a meticulous work of investigation in the file of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela and in the Historical University of the same city. With it we try to penetrate into this plot of the Galician history of the art for many forgotten and to mark a point of item to future investigations.

Independencia y Revolución (la historia en la novela)

An analysis of two novels with historical background (Gil Gomez, el insurgente, from Juan Diaz Covarrubias, and Andres Perez, maderista, from Mariano Azuela), in one case about Independence and in the other about the Revolution. The concepts of Ricoeur are applied to the plot of history and the plot of the novel as complements. The ways in which the two novelists, one from the 19th and one from the 20th century, work with a historical background, are analyzed. How to construct a fictional plot in order to create a parallel with the discourse of history, in accordance with the time of each work, is also observed.

Review article: The mountain motif in the plot of Matthew

This article reviewed T.L. Donaldson’s book, Jesus on the mountain: A study in Matthean theology, published in 1985 by JSOT Press, Sheffield, and focused on the mountain motif in the structure and plot of the Gospel of Matthew, in addition to the work of Donaldson on the mountain motif as a literary motif and as theological symbol. The mountain is a primary theological setting for Jesus’ ministry and thus is an important setting, serving as one of the literary devices by which Matthew structured and progressed his narrative. The Zion theological and eschatological significance and Second Temple Judaism serve as the historical and theological background for the mountain motif. The last mountain setting (Mt 28:16–20) is the culmination of the three theological themes in the plot of Matthew, namely Christology, ecclesiology and salvation history.

Supernatural Realism

This essay argues that the relationship between realism and supernaturalism in realist novels is more complicated—and more symbiotic—than critics generally acknowledge. Taking Walter Scott's Waverley, George Eliot's Silas Marner, and Charlotte Brönte's Jane Eyre as representative nineteenth-century realist novels, I show that the supernatural is not subversive but in fact constitutive of their respective realist projects. Scott's use of the Bodach Glas ghost to signal the novel's commitment to both historical facts and imaginative interventions in the plot of history, Eliot's foregrounding of the referential/nonreferential duality of realism and the semantic slipperiness of language via a debate on the existence of ghosts, and Brönte's deployment of extrasensory perception to advance an open-ended conception of reality and blur the distinction between “normal” and “paranormal” suggest that the supernatural is integral to realism's formal properties, thematic concerns, and critical self-reflections. Indeed, novel criticism frequently addresses readers in the idiom of the supernatural and paranormal, a language that seems particularly conducive to understanding how realist novels do what they do.

Histories of Historiography: A Review Essay

38 Historically Speaking · September/October 2008 Histories of Historiography: A Review Essay Zachary S. Schiffman The complexity of the history of historiography derives not only from its self-reflexive nature but also from the shifting and multiform aspects of its subject matter. "Historiography "—our American shorthand for the more cumbersome and British-sounding "history of historiography"—encompasses at least three separate but overlapping subject areas: the history of historical writing, the history of historical scholarship, and the history of historical consciousness. At the risk of creating confusion, we might also add a meta-subject: the history of writing about historiography, which, as we shall see, is not entirely synonymous with the genre of historiography itself. If all this sounds bewildering , it is, especially for the less method-conscious among us. Fortunately, though, we have at hand two practical examples of this undertaking whose clarity and good judgment dispel all confusion while, at the same time, revealing die manifold richness of this seemingly arcane subject. John Burrow's A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances, and Inquiriesfrom Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century—the long tide itself has an antique air—focuses primarily on the original and traditional meaning of historiography, namely the history of historical writing. This is not to say that he doesn't venture into the areas of historical scholarship and historical consciousness , but the beating heart of his subject lies in historical narrative. And what a veritable cicerone he is to die whole vast range of historical writing! His work everywhere bears the marks of a truly refined historical judgment, presented in a wry but economical style that belies its 500-page length. Indeed, if any comprehensive historiography might be deemed a quick read, this is it. Burrow confesses at the outset that "most readers of this book will not have read many or most of the historical works it discusses; indeed, that is a part of the book's justification." Although he certainly intended his work as an enticement for others to read further in the genre of history, most of his readers probably will not deepen their acquaintance with many of the authors he discusses beyond the very thorough narrative summaries and literary examples he provides. Perhaps he inclined toward thoroughness for this very reason, and in lesser hands the all too predictable rhythm of plot summary and exemplary quotation would have become tedious. But Burrow's trained eye is so discriminating, and his observations so apropos, that even those intimate with the works he discusses will benefit from his account of them. Predictably, Burrow begins by rounding up the usual suspects: Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Polybius among the Greeks, and Sallust, Livy, Tacitus, and Ammianus Marcellinus among the Romans. He also includes a number of their known associates: Arrian, Curtius Rufus, Plutarch, Appian, Cassius Dio, and Josephus. All in all, an auspicious gathering, with each individual suitably spotlighted and investigated. One can, of course, quibble here and there with what Burrow has to say about these figures. One might argue that, in his effort to oudine the plot of Herodotus's history, Burrow gives short shrift to Book Two, with its all-important chronology of Egyptian gods, under which Herodotus subsumes Greek religion and culture. An analysis of this topic would have resonated nicely with Burrow's treatment of Egyptian record keeping in the prologue . One might also dispute Burrow's inference that Thucydides cast his account of the Peloponnesian War as the story of Athenian hubris and nemesis, arguing instead that he sought to transcend the traditional moral economy of his day. And on a more factual note, one might observe that the great Roman defeat at Adrianople, detailed by Ammianus Marcellinus, was at the hands of the Goths, not the Persians. These quibbles, though, seem mean-spirited when one considers that innumerable differences of opinion will inevitably arise with a book of this breadth and depth—an enormous scope that itself excuses even the rare factual errors. Let Burrow's valedictory to Thucydides epitomize the style and substance of his impeccable judgment: "Almost all historians except the very dullest have some characteristic weakness. . . . But Thucydides seems immune . Surely no more lucid...

On the Limits of Historical Imagination

Over the last decades of the 20th century, the writing of history underwent serious political and epistemological criticism, especially in US academic circles. Yet it remained attached, by its origins, its academic structure, and its goals, to the nation and the state, as well as to unchallenged racial, ethnic, and identities. Over the same decades, however, a renewed idea of Europe-despite its flows and uncertainties-saw an interesting experiment in the conscious rewriting of histories and cultures, re-examining the 19th-century focus on the nation as the central plot of history.1 Almost four decades of documenting a common historical and cultural consciousness for might, in the long run, turn out to be a political and social failure. The constitutional challenge, rapid expansion, and the Turkey factor might in the end make the story of Europe an obsolete tale. Yet the mere effort, and, so far, its consequences in terms of peace, political stability, and economic progress make the effort to create an idea of a more appealing intellectual temptation than keeping untouched the craft of the national historian.Why has the idea of a European-like process of integration not been even remotely considered for and in North America? Can North America become a symbol of a different kind of relationship between Mexico, Canada, and the US, a relationship in which cultural particularities exist but which responsibly assumes a common past and a common future? What is certain is that maintaining civilizational differences-though in the short run intellectually comfortable and academically profitable-is particularly risky and undoable in the long term. The consequences of maintaining and nurturing assumed differences will affect the ' peace, stability, and good standards of living in the region. This is not only because of Mexico's growing inequality and uncertain economic and political future, but also because of the world's violent challenges and the vicious cycles in the US that blend inexorably-if irresponsibly-economic growth, immigration, all sorts of nativisms, notions of national security, and dangerous racio-cultural conceptions of the American identity.NORTH AMERICA: BASIC THESIS ON THE FAILURE OF A SYMBOLNorth America does not have a symbolic, cultural, political, or legal existence. Yet it is the gigantic economic and human fact within which Mexico, Canada, Central America, and the US live without ever discussing it. It resembles a gigantic statue of a medusa-like lady whose name has been lost by history but whose gaze we avoid, knowing that upon looking at those eyes we would see our own.North America has been a timid geographical mark that has paled in comparison to the clearly unconcealed map-not cartographical but moral and racial-known as America. North America has been a geography that is conventionally used in reference to the indigenous people of Canada, the US, and northern Mexico. North America is real when it is about native Americans, a pre-national reality. The cultural-racial dichotomy (Anglo vs. Latin), however, is conceptually mightier than the map of either America as a whole or that of North America as a complex but integrated geographical unit. As in a 19th-century history of civilization, the continent is divided into the nonsense of an and a part, as if such Anglo and Latin races, territories, and civilizations were first, real, and second, locatable in clearly defined cultural and geographical spaces. Three decades of post-new left, post-this and post-that historical and cultural criticism have only re-emphasized these essentials with endless excursions into cultural-racial-ethnical certainties.Today North America is an undeniable commercial and economic reality, though its benefits are still a matter of controversy after more than 10 years of NAFTA.2 Economic integration, however, is a fact that NAFTA only accelerated and institutionalized. …

Civilization and the rights of woman: liberty and captivity in the work of Mary Wollstonecraft

Recent scholarship has shown how, in her political writing, Mary Wollstonecraft developed a troubling evaluation of femininity – one that ironically brought her sexual politics into line with those she attacked in Edmund Burke's account of the French Revolution. This article identifies a different contradiction in her feminism. It argues that her challenge to the lingering conservatism in Enlightenment philosophy relied on a model of social history that put reasoning women at the center of a “civilized” culture threatened by a “savage” periphery. It suggests that Wollstonecraft's strong critique of the contradiction in Enlightenment political thought, which saw women as lacking in civic character, is organized rhetorically around the contrast between polished civil subject and violent savage. Because this distinction rests to a large extent on the assumption that domestic virtue is a central feature of more advanced societies, her argument finally locates women in a morally invigorated domestic sphere rather than in public life. In the second half of the article, the author examines how Wollstonecraft's fiction shows her political philosophy depending, to a large extent, on the logic of the captivity narrative – a logic according to which female virtue must be protected against the horrors of a savage wilderness. By reading both the Vindications side by side with Maria, we can see how Wollstonecraft's political arguments are tied to the domestic plot of conjectural history and how, as a result, she is unable to free women entirely from the sentimental narrative of captivity that defines and limits their civic lives.

The Plot of History from Antiquity to the Renaissance

The Plot of History from Antiquity to the Renaissance

The Plot of History from Antiquity to the Renaissance

In the Poetics Aristotle introduced the notion of plot or mythos as a distinctly poetic form of rationality and coherence absent from history. In the course of antiquity and the Renaissance Aristotle's notion of plot underwent a curious inversion by which history came to supplant poetry as the main literary form of emplotment. To account for the readjustment or even reversal of Aristotle's distinction between history and poetry, we will examine the notions of order, causality, and chance expounded by classical historians and literary theorists before tracing their influence to Renaissance writers. In the Renaissance the transmission, conflation, and distortion of Aristotelian doctrine exerted a profound influence on historiography and literary criticism, particularly in the latter part of the sixteenth century. It is even possible to understand some of the new and hybrid forms of Renaissance fiction as a reaction to this transference of the idea of plot from poetry to history. While history may indeed possess no coherent plot, as Aristotle speculated, literary history can nevertheless reconstitute the genealogy of competing notions of plot and order in Renaissance narrative. We can situate Aristotle's definition of plot in the context of his inquiry into cause and coincidence. In book two of thePhysics Aristotle proposes a rigorous typology of cause, distinguishing between formal, material, efficient, and final causes, and he also considers the status of chance and fortune as accidental causes or aitia kata symbebekos (197a5-6).' The Metaphysics takes up the question of to kata symbebekos, translated alternately as accident or coincidence, and in doing so develops several arguments that pertain to the treatment of plot in the Poetics and to the larger issue of the coherence of fiction and history. As Richard Sorabji points out, the key to Aristotle's notion of coincidence is the

Diderot and the Plot of History

Aristotle was the first to raise the metaphysical question of freedom and determinism in the context of literary theory. In its definition of plot, the Poetics maintains that while the events of history follow merely one after the other {meta tade), the events of poetry must follow one because of the other (dia tade) (1452a21).1 Fiction supplies the causal connection lacking in the realm of fact. This particular tenet was not destined to be the most authoritative element of Aristotle's system, for his own disciples immediately defied him by writing historical tragedies and tragic histories.2 Moreover, since antiq uity, historical thinkers have not hesitated to discern a causal connection in history and have even based their professional competence on that discernment. In short, history has aspired to the dignity of poetry by appropriating the concept of plot. Yet, the counter-Aristotelian concept of the plot of history need not vitiate the fundamental distinction between arbitrary and necessary sequence, or between chronological and logical order. When history simulates the coherence of fiction, fiction can cultivate the disorder of history in a corrective or compensa tory relationship consistent with Aristot?e's thesis. In the early modern period, when historians cultivated a predominantly aesthetic approach emphasizing the intelligible pattern of the past, fiction achieved remark able experiments in arbitrary action and gratuitous plot. From this juxtaposition, we may infer that the arbitrary plot developed as a corrective mimesis of history or a repudiation of historiography. Yet to draw this inference would be to rehabilitate the plot of history in the history of plot. If history has no pattern, can we discern a pattern among fictional works which subvert the very notions of sequence and order? Does literary history contend against the historical process? This hypothesis can be tested through a more careful definition of arbitrary or gratuitous action. Human action is often felt to be arbitrary when it responds neither to ethical norms nor to self-interest, as in the case of such French literary protagonists as Panurge, Mme. de la Pommeraye, Lafcadio, and Meursault. These figures may exemplify an enduring fascination with pure volition as a metaphysical, theological, or even political issue, but it is difficult to integrate their conduct in a

Wordsworth and the Polemic Against Hunting: "Hart-Leap Well"

Increasing compassion for animals led in Wordsworth's era to a polemic against hunting. Wordsworth's "Hart-Leap Well" is part of this campaign. Wordsworth's strategy and arguments in the second part of "Hart-Leap Well" are typical of the discourses that attacked hunting, chiefly for its cruelty, but Wordsworth was unusual in also leading readers in the first part of the poem to sympathize with the hunter's emotions, and he illustrates in the figure of Sir Walter the warrior virtues that hunting was said by its defenders to inculcate. The poem reaches more deeply, however, to explore irrational grounds of hunting's appeal in Sir Walter's enlarged sense of secure dominance, power, lust, and megalomania in the aftermath of the chase. As with Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, egoistic self-assertion expresses itself in killing an animal and is figured as solitude. Just as Sir Walter embodies "the coarser pleasures of my boyish days" (as Wordsworth represents them in various poems), the figure of the poet possesses the more reflective, sensitive, and profound awareness that Wordsworth credits to his adult self. In "Hart-Leap Well" Sir Walter's mentality is that of the historical past, and the poet's represents the future. The poem offers a version of the Enlightenment plot of history as the moral progress of mankind. But in the end the poem may contemplate, with pleasure, the vanishing of mankind from the face of the earth, while nature remains in its beauty.

A Response to Blum's “Diverse” Plot of History

A Response to Blum's “Diverse” Plot of History