Popular History Research Articles

METHODS FOR SOLVING PROBLEMS RELATED TO THE TRANSLATION OF TEXTS WITH A HISTORICAL FOCUS

The relevance of this article is related to the ongoing demand for translators of historical texts. Since the dawn of writing, there has been a demand for translations of various chronicles, scrolls and manifestos. A similar situation persists to this day, only now the popular history genre is gaining more and more popularity. A historian, like a writer, can recreate events and the face of the past, although this scientific recreation differs from the artistic one. Based on historical data, the writer at the same time always takes the path of creative fiction, without which art is impossible, and the historian depicts only what was, historically based facts. An informative historical text does not tolerate fiction, yet it is an excellent source for gaining knowledge and learning about history.

The Curious Case of Aistija: Sidelights on Latvian–Lithuanian Rapprochement During the 20th Century

The nascent Aistijan movement centred around the idea of establishing a Latvian–Lithuanian state following the Second World War. This article surveys the background of the idea, with particular attention to the public diplomacy of Lithuanian American émigrés, demonstrating its prevalence during the First World War. The activities of interwar Latvian and Lithuanian rapprochement societies are outlined, noting the prominence of the Aestii – the earliest recorded inhabitants of the eastern littoral of the Baltic Sea – in both academic and popular history, in addition to the emergence of the Aistijan movement following the Second World War. Examining the initial successes and rapid decline of the movement, the article also charts developments and material circumstances of language learning practices in connection with the idea of a Latvian–Lithuanian state.

Boardgaming after the fall of Kabul: player and designer (re)engagement with A Distant Plain

ABSTRACT During summer 2021, the world watched the swift and, for some, surprising collapse of Afghanistan’s government. However, a Taliban victory was always a possibility for players of A Distant Plain (ADP), a boardgame about insurgency and counterinsurgency in post-9/11 Afghanistan. These events inspired many ADP players, and its designers, to (re)engage with the game, thus providing scholars with a unique opportunity to investigate in real time how historical practice occurs within the popular culture space. Utilizing primary sources, this article demonstrates that contemporary history games – those which depict current events or open-ended, unresolved periods, rather than ones designed to model what is seen as ‘settled’ history – are uniquely subject to external, out-of-game interventions which may prompt reevaluations of their assumptions and models, since players and designers are repeatedly challenged by changing circumstances to integrate new data into how they perceive and consume the historical representations found therein. These games are therefore exceptionally suited to engendering genuine and ongoing historical practice, through the use of evidence, argumentation and debate, retrospective reassessments, and counterfactual analysis. The broader discipline will greatly benefit from taking a more inclusive view of popular history by paying greater attention to historical games of this type.

Inventing the language of Things: the emergence of scientific reporting in seventeenth-century England

ABSTRACT As a style of writing and a form of communication, the modern scientific report enables the creation, sharing and continuous updating of natural knowledge in such a manner that the idiosyncrasies of ordinary language are reduced to a minimum. This article examines how the standards for scientific reporting were ‘born’ in the seventeenth century and their legacy. The first part of the article reviews the existing literature on this topic. The second part outlines the key features of the scientific report and the common standards for scientific reporting. The third part presents detailed historical evidence to trace the emergence of these standards in seventeenth-century England. The final part discusses why the scientific report means so much for the progress of science, for understanding the history of science and science popularization, and even for the development of academia more generally.

The Role of Martyrdom and Victimhood in the Memory of the Greek Civil War Refugees in Czechoslovakia through the Prism of ‘Refugee’ Literature

This article focusses on the narratives of collective victimhood and martyrdom in the memories of refugees from the Greek Civil War (GCW, 1946–1949) to post-1948 communist Czechoslovakia (later, the Czech Republic). It analyses literary production by refugees, that is, ego-documents, popular history books and fiction, assessing refugees’ motivations in writing their own histories. It investigates the role of collective victimhood and its effect on the diaspora's identity, its aims and its functions. It determines that the narratives of martyrdom were an early representation by GCW refugees to portray themselves as heroic partisans and anti-fascist fighters and gain the high ground on the moral side of the conflict. Such perceptions, however, have in some cases persisted among communist-oriented authors to this day. This article distinguishes them from more personal expressions of collective victimhood, allowing for a plurality of interpretations of their refugee experience as well as a greater variety of motivations for capturing it in written form for a broader audience. This study aims to show how fluid and permeable these narratives of collective victimhood have been and how fundamentally they have affected the constitution of the GCW diaspora's identity.

SOLVING PROBLEMS RELATED TO THE TRANSLATION OF TEXTS WITH A HISTORICAL FOCUS

The relevance of this article is related to the ongoing demand for translators of historical texts. Since the dawn of writing, there has been a demand for translations of various chronicles, scrolls and manifestos. A similar situation persists to this day, only now the popular history genre is gaining more and more popularity. A historian, like a writer, can recreate events and the face of the past, although this scientific recreation differs from the artistic one. Based on historical data, the writer at the same time always takes the path of creative fiction, without which art is impossible, and the historian depicts only what was, historically based facts. An informative historical text does not tolerate fiction, yet it is an excellent source for gaining knowledge and learning about history.

Of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Correspondents

If the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk, what are we to make of the recent flurry of popular histories about foreign correspondents? In 2021, with You Don't Belong Here, Elizabeth Becker told us “How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War” in Vietnam, and Judith Mackrell gave us the stories of “Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II” in The Correspondents.1 The year before, Nancy Cott, the pioneering scholar of U.S. gender history, explored the intertwined biographies of interwar journalists Dorothy Thompson, Vincent Sheean, Rayna Raphaelson, and John Gunther in Fighting Words.2 And then, in 2022, Deborah Cohen, an acclaimed historian of British and European cultural politics, subbed the relatively obscure Raphaelson out of Cott's quartet and added in H. R. Knickerbocker, the Pulitzer Prize–winning European correspondent in Last Call at the Hotel Imperial.3 (Cohen also elevates the role of Frances Gunther, John's wife, who suffered from crippling writer's block but was perhaps the most interesting thinker of the bunch.) When two leading, accomplished historians at the height of their games write essentially the same book, you know that something is in the air. So what era's eclipse are these works marking?

O afrykańskiej historii, znaczeniu teorii oraz edukacji historycznej w Nigerii. Z Olufunke Adeboye rozmawia Ewa Domańska

In this interview, conducted during the XXIII International Congress of Historical Sciences in Poznań (2022), Olufunke Adeboye (Professor of Social History at the University of Lagos, Nigeria) discusses the problems of decolonisation of African history, the relations between academic historiography and popular history, new trends in historical writing, the importance of theory for historical research, and the problems of historical education in Nigeria.

UKRAINIAN AND POLISH POPULAR SCIENCE BLOGS ON THE YouTube PLATFORM: FUNCTIONAL FEATURES

In this scientific research, attention is paid to the functioning of the Ukrainian and Polish blogospheres.The popular science blogs of those blogospheres with the widest audience are considered. The problem is urgent, since blogs on various platforms are not only informative or entertaining, but also educational.It is already possible to receive educational, scientific and cognitive information from blogs. In fact, popular science blogs function as a relatively free educational resource that operates parallel to government and commercial institutions. Based on the theoretical developments of Ukrainian scientists, we can say that blogs, in which you can use audiovisual and textual components, are the most convenient means of creating popular scientific content. Actually, this meets the demands of the modern consumer of information. The novelty of the article lies inrevealing the specifics and trends of the functioning of popular science blogs and highlighting the features of blogs on the YouTube platform, which have audiovisual and textual capabilities for creating popular science content. Based on the ranking and content analysis, it was found that the most popular are historical topics, followed by natural sciences, astrology, medicine and psychology. In particular, the top five popular Ukrainian blogs include: «Imeni T.H. Shevchenka (Named after T. H. Shevchenko)», «Istoriia bez mifiv (History without myths)», «Kliatyyratsionalist (Damn rationalist)», «WAS: Populiarnaistoriia (WAS: Popular history)», «Interesting science». And among Polish popular science blogs, «Historia bez cenzury», «SciFun», «emce», «Uwaga! NaukowyBełkot», «Polimaty». On the basis of the analyzed popular science blogs, the following trends have been identified: the presentation of material in the blogs has features of the author’s journalistic programs; use of historical methods of science; use of emotionally colored vocabulary, subjective judgments and other artistic techniques in materials (in their titles, on the covers or in the videos themselves); features of citation of sources of information used in a blog differ in blogs on different subjects (while all the blogs note their sources, their mention specifically in the description of the video is mostly absent in materials on historical subjects, but present in the rest of the studied blogs).

Заимствованная буддийская лексика бурятского языка в историко-лингвистическом освещении

Introduction. The article is devoted to Buddhist terms, which represent a significant layer in the lexical system of the Buryat language. The borrowed Buddhist vocabulary of the Buryat language is the result of the enteringprocessof Buddhist terms into the Buryat language taken place over centuries. It was not stable, it, like any process, had periods of decline and activity. Of course, borrowing of Buddhist terms is a consequence of the development of Buddhist ideas. The main purpose of the study is to describe the features of borrowed Buddhist terms, which are the result of an inextricable connection between the process of their appearing in the Buryat language and the history of Buddhism popularization among the Mongolian–speaking peoples. The objectives of the study include: 1) justification of intensification periods of entering the Buddhist terms into the lexicological system of the Buryat language against a historical background; 2) a brief historical and linguistic description of periods of the mass appearance of the Buddhist terms; 3) identification of the peculiarities of the semantics of individual borrowings belonging to different periods of borrowing and different donor languages. Results. Based on the historical and linguistic facts, the authors justify the validity of the allocation of periods of appearing of Buddhist terms associated with periods of intensive development of Buddhism. The study showed that in the first period of borrowing Buddhist terms of the Buryat language, their guides were the Sogdian and Uighur languages: from Sanskrit and Tibetan they fell into Sogdian, then into Uighur. It was only after Uighur that they appeared in the Mongolian languages through the old-written Mongolian language. In the second period, Buddhist terms came directly from the Tibetan language to the Buryat language, in some cases the Mongolian language was the intermediary. The third period of intensification of the appearance of Buddhist terms is characterized by the revival of previously borrowed words. The authors conclude that the features of Buddhist terms depend on the donor language, while the roads along which they came to the Buryat language also play an important role: directly or through an intermediary language, orally or in writing.

Sugar or milk: Tribological study on the sensation of coffee beverages

Coffee is a beverage with a long history of global popularity. In this study, the physicochemical characteristics, rheological and tribological properties, and oral tribological simulations of six different coffee formulations were investigated, and 12 characteristic attributes were quantitatively evaluated. The results showed that the coefficient of friction (COF) was directly related to the important sensory characteristics of coffee beverages and that changes in both sugar and milk content manifest as changes in the COF, which affect the stress and strain distribution at the tongue-palate interface. Our study demonstrated that tribology can, in conjunction with the characterization of other physicochemical properties, be used as a tool for the fast and easy prediction of important taste parameters of food.

History in the pub: The historiography of J.D. Wetherspoon

J. D. Wetherspoon is a popular pub chain in the United Kingdom. Despite its prominence in British cultural life and active and deliberate engagement with history, it has received scant academic attention. Here, this engagement with history is explored with a particular focus on how Wetherspoon approaches the history of science. This paper highlights the focus of Wetherspoon on local history and, in particular, on local exceptionalism, before discussing how such an understanding of history informs wider debates—such as Wetherspoon’s support of Brexit (the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union). It contributes to understandings of what constitutes popular history and, through doing so, emphasises the need for historians to engage with historical narratives outside the academy.

Decolonization and Theatre History

‘Decolonization’ has superseded ‘postcolonial’ as the most compelling catchword of the present moment. Broadly speaking, the term possesses two parallel genealogies: African decolonization and Latin American decoloniality. But where are Asian territories such as India and Hong Kong, and, more specifically, fields such as theatre history, located in the debate? This article analyzes the stakes and struggles, inner contradictions and blind spots, involved in decolonizing or decentring the curriculum. It asks whether the decolonial temporalities of our time constitute an adequate lens to theorize theatre history by firstly examining the term’s misuse by popular historians, media, and government; and, second, by interrogating a spectrum of positions on ‘Indian Theatre’ from the nineteenth century onwards. Through this double focus, the article probes the scholarly possibilities for undoing the dominant mode when the ‘decolonization trope itself becomes a tool for colonization’.

“The First White Mother in America” Guðríðr Þorbjarnardóttir, Popular History, Firsting, and White Feminism

This article takes Ásmundur Sveinsson’s statue "The First White Mother in America" as a starting point. With reference to this work, its several later casts, and three illustrative examples from recent popular history writing, the article demonstrates how popular representations of the statue's subject, Guðríðr Þorbjarnardóttir, frequently reinforce traditions rooted in racially exclusive historical standards and Indigenous erasure. While Guðríðr’s story offers a valuable counterpoint to male-dominated and often hyper-violent images of “Viking” history, writers and other popular history purveyors depicting her story also run the risk of simultaneously reinforcing settler-colonial and white supremacist ideals regardless of their individual motives.

The Mayflower and Historical Culture in Britain, 1620–2020

Abstract In 2020 the Anglo-American world marked the 400th anniversary of the trans-Atlantic Mayflower voyage with a programme of activities. Intensive and focused interest in the story of the Mayflower is not a new phenomenon—especially in the United States, where it is the bedrock of the nation’s ‘origin story’. But the tale of the Pilgrims has historically also captured the British imagination. This article outlines a chronology for understanding the cultural importance in Britain of this voyage, from the New England chroniclers to the postcolonial critiques of historians today. In between, it offers a thematic analysis of the different groups which could use the story in their construction of morality and identity, from Romanticists and abolitionists to Anglo-American diplomats and civic boosters. Understanding the afterlife of the voyage in this long perspective, we argue, provides us with a more nuanced understanding of how ideas of history develop and evolve within broader arenas of politics and civil society. We use the concept of historical culture: an approach that is attuned to the interplay between memory, public history, heritage and popular history, and across forms of media (novels, plays, film) and spaces of interaction (cities, politics, movements). As the vogue for commemoration continues to exert power in Britain and beyond, and so does an increasing demand for more critical approaches to historical redress, we thus develop a critical framework that understands the powerful draw of ‘history’—both past and present.

Oromo Tarih Yazımının Bazı Yönleri ve Etiyopya Siyasi Yönelimleri (16-21. Yüzyıllar)

This article investigates the Oromo historiography vis-a-vis the Ethiopian political orientations, 16th-21st centuries. Oral and written sources and the researchers’ empirical knowledge have been analyzed qualitatively to produce this work. Ethiopian history has centered on the north, Semitic and elitist revolving around politics. For so long, Oromo historiography has been a neglected object though the Oromo are the largest ethnic group in the Horn of Africa. This study is thus undertaken to portray how far and in what way the Oromo have been studied historically. The study shows that social, economic, and cultural studies of the Ethiopian people have been neglected even after professional history was launched in Ethiopia in 1963. The Oromo historiography has not only been neglected but also distorted, prejudiced, and exposed to controversy. Recent studies however have been trying to redress these imbalances. This is however far from enough and popular history should be given more attention.

A micromorphic phase-field model for brittle and quasi-brittle fracture

In this manuscript, a robust and variationally consistent technique is proposed for local treatment of the phase-field fracture irreversibility. This technique involves an extension of the phase-field fracture energy functional through a micromorphic approach. Consequently, the phase-field is transformed into a local variable, while a micromorphic variable regularizes the problem. The local nature of the phase-field variable enables an easier implementation of its irreversibility using a pointwise ‘max’ with system level precision. Unlike the popular history variable approach, which also enforces local fracture irreversibility, the micromorphic approach yields a variationally consistent framework. The efficacy of the micromorphic approach in phase-field fracture modelling is demonstrated in this work with numerical experiments on benchmark brittle and quasi-brittle fracture problems in linear elastic media. Furthermore, the extensibility of the micromorphic phase-field fracture model towards multiphysics problems is demonstrated. To that end, a theoretical extension is carried out for modelling hydraulic fracture, and relevant numerical experiments exhibiting crack merging are presented. The source code as well as the data set accompanying this work would be made available on GitHub (https://github.com/ritukeshbharali/falcon).

Teaching women's work and thought in undergraduate history of science courses

AbstractAs a rich field of scholarship now demonstrates, from at least the early modern period, women have consistently contributed to natural philosophy, science, and medicine in Europe and the Anglo‐American world. Their participation in these fields, like men's, has been shaped by gendered social and cultural expectations. It has risen and fallen on cyclical waves of effort to exclude them or minimize their contributions. In historical accounts, until recently, women's roles have been neglected or forgotten. Even today, in both scholarly and popular histories, women in science are often presented as surprising rediscoveries. Women are persistently perceived as newcomers in the sciences. Unless women's contributions are consistently integrated into mainstream narratives in the history of science, women could easily become invisible again. To counter this possibility, I first examine the structural factors shaping women's participation in the sciences and their historical visibility from the early modern period through the 19th century. I then suggest ways to include women in undergraduate surveys in the history of European and Anglo‐American science that encourage students to engage with women's ideas and with women as complex, multi‐valent historical actors. I show how we can situate women's contributions in a narrative that invites students to examine the history of science as a history of ideas, people, and practices and to explore history as a resource for understanding the role of scientific knowledge and authority in the present. Though my own examples are limited to the history of science in Europe and the Anglo‐American world from the early modern period, I argue that a similar thematic approach could be explored and implemented in other historical contexts, given appropriate secondary and primary sources.

New Perspectives on the East Africa Campaign of the Second World War

Abstract The East Africa campaign of the Second World War – although the first Allied victory of this conflict – has been largely forgotten by scholars and popular historians. The causes are multi-factored and due mainly, perhaps, to the concurrent and interrelated military operations that occurred in North Africa, the Soviet Union, Greece, and Crete between 1940 and 1941 – operations that had first call on Allied resources, and drew popular attention then as they continue to do now. The East African campaign is as a result one of the war’s forgotten campaigns, despite significant military engagements, the unique military operating environment, the allure of iconic personalities, and the rich human stories associated with it. The historiography remains fragmented with a focus on individual, national histories of the contributions made by the British, Italian, Indian and South African forces, for instance. This special issue, as a counterpoint, brings together a variety of articles covering a range of heretofore neglected topics. Most of the participants in the campaign are addressed in one form or another and in ways that address historical lacunae and complement this literature.

Present Pasts of Colonial Modernity: Embroideries by Lucie Kamuswekera

Present Pasts of Colonial Modernity: Embroideries by Lucie Kamuswekera