Historical Imagination Research Articles

Oligarchia Revisited

Summary This article revisits an ostensibly important monument in Classical Attic historiography: the so-called Tomb of Critias, as preserved in a scholium note in Aeschines’ “Against Timarchus” (1.39). We survey prior scholarly positions on the realia of this monument, suggest it is a fiction, and consider the possible sources for the hexameter verse associated with it. We argue that the poetic composition from which the entire tradition derives, rather than being an inscription on a tomb, may in fact be an oligarchic commemoration, perhaps an encomium or epitaphios logos recited at Eleusis in the aftermath of the fall of the Thirty. As such, the verse composition may allude to a historiographical tradition that viewed the Thirty as a subversive hetaireia/kōmos group led out to govern the unruly dēmos. The reception of this composition generates a ‘lieu de mémoire’ in the historical imagination of later readers. The composition offers a piece of comparanda for the political views expressed by other Athenians with pro-oligarchic tendencies, an extreme formulation that strongly contrasts with the extant writings of Critias, Plato, and Xenophon. In revisiting this short anecdote we highlight the relevance of both scholia and monuments in our understanding of Attic historiography.

At the crossroads: photography, ecology and heritage in Istanbul

This article looks at three contemporary photo-based projects that reference Istanbul’s visual histories and document its endangered ecologies. These works take a critical approach to cultural heritage practices in contrast to official discourses that serve state power or justify capital accumulation. Osman Bozkurt’s Scenes, Ali Taptık’s Topographic Nostalgia, and Cemre Yeşil and Maria Sturm’s For Birds’ Sake focus on the relationships between the human and non-human elements of urban geographies. Their projects conceive of heritage as a practice that combines ecological concerns with preserving the cultural remnants of the urban past. Whether critiquing the aesthetic conventions of the picturesque, evoking an affective engagement with the viewer, or conjuring memories of displaced populations, these artists explore different visual approaches to embodying and remembering urban space and place. Taking a cue from their works, this article contemplates the possibility of envisioning heritage futures that can protect Istanbul’s biodiversity while being inclusive of cultural difference.

Past, Present, and Future Thoughts on Immersive Visualization Laboratories Through the Story of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery Virtual Environments Group

Abstract Over the past 40 years, immersive visualization laboratories have existed in different forms across academia, industry, and government, each one typically unique in their own ways. The following paper will discuss the success story of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery Virtual Environments (WIDVE) research group, located on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. The paper will discuss the rich history of immersive visualization displays that members of the lab have worked with, display systems that exist throughout the lab space at present day, future plans, and thoughts on the importance of a focus on immersive displays beyond only commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) VR devices. The paper will highlight several workflows and data pipelines that the lab has developed over the years. Finally, the paper will outline a recommended set of dos and don'ts for immersive visualization laboratories in regards to sustainability, before providing some conclusions regarding the future of immersive visualization laboratories.

Digital restoration and 3D visualisation of the early Neolithic pottery from Ryńsk, Poland

The archaeological site of Ryńsk in north-central Poland produced sound evidence of long-distance journeys of people and pottery from the 6th millennium BC in Central Europe by yielding a sophisticated ceramic footed bowl that can be traced to the Carpathian Basin region. Archaeology indicates that the earliest ceramic vessels had a different functional, social and ritual role, but it is difficult to convey information on the significant role of pottery in ancient societies in a way that would pique the interest of the general public. This paper presents the digital restoration and 3D visualisation of the footed bowl from Ryńsk and other accompanying ceramics that may assist in feeding the historical imagination and education about the ancient pottery making of the LBK people and can be used to provide a wider audience with new forms of engagement and interaction with the archaeological heritage of the region.

Contemporary Europe in the Historical Imagination ed. by Darcy Buerkle and Skye Doney (review)

Contemporary Europe in the Historical Imagination ed. by Darcy Buerkle and Skye Doney (review)

Finding the Historical Imagination: Teaching Modern British History in a Social Sciences Context.

Finding the Historical Imagination: Teaching Modern British History in a Social Sciences Context.

NIETZSCHE'S CRITICISM OF THE MODERN VISION OF HISTORY

The article aims at researching the critics to modernity in Nietzsche’s philosophy, mainly in his youth work titled The usefulness and inconvenience of history for life. In this work, Nietzsche inquired on how some historical views that prevailed in the modern period made man sick, and looked for alternative historical visions that affirm life rather than deny it.

Relevance of Lev Karsavin’s Ideas on State Cultural Policy

The article substantiates the expediency of using domestic philosophical heritage in the development of concepts and other normative documents of Russia’s cultural policy in the current situation. At present, Russian society has gained an understanding of the need to abandon the strategy of catch-up modernization and to implement socio-cultural development on the ways of deepening the country’s traditional spiritual values and its own historical vision of the multipolarity of the world. The ideas of the Russian religious philosopher L.P. Karsavin concerning such fundamental aspects of cultural policy as the peculiarities of the development of state ideology, the design of culture and state cultural programmes, the vocabulary and language of cultural studies are considered. Special attention is paid to Karsavin’s understanding of Russian culture as having Orthodox origins and developing on the basis of Orthodoxy. Attention is drawn to the importance of ensuring the unifying and living, creative character of Russian culture, the conditions of equality of different cultures and, at the same time, the presence of a hierarchy of interpenetrating cultural spheres. The development of some of L.P. Karsavin’s ideas by his followers is outlined, including the need to clarify the Christian meaning of atheism and to overcome the “irreconcilable” antagonism between religious and atheistic worldviews. The study outlines a line of enrichment of cultural theory with little-known works by L.P. Karsavin and A.A. Vaneev, which, according to the authors of the article, opens prospects for further development of new approaches to understanding the essence of cultural policy.

Open Forum in the Dedicated Issue of East European Holocaust Studies on Oral History and the Holocaust

Abstract The events of the Holocaust are reflected in the numerous memoirs of rescued victims and witnesses of Nazi crimes. Collections of testimonies, memories and oral history on the Holocaust include thousands of early testimonies and life stories archived in for example the Yad Vashem and audio-visual collections initiated in later years such as the Institute for Visual History and Education USC Shoah Foundation, The Fortunoff Video Archives, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yahad-In Unum and others. In this open forum we how the knowledge from collecting and using oral history and testimonies in Holocaust research can inform current collecting initiatives in relation to for example the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine.

An index of longing

Feminist epistemology positions knowledge in relationship to, or as contingent on, its knower. From this framework, drawing can be situated as a relational and embodied form of knowing the phenomenal world. Drawing opens a space in which we can explore the margin between perception and representation as an epistemological problem. It asks: ‘How can we locate the relationship between knowers and what is known across time through the canon of drawing?’. Drawing is the enactment of this problem. It bridges the gap between the phenomenal and the constructed world of knowledge and, in doing so, visualizes the relationship between our senses and our sense of self. My research reflects on the visual history of ‘The Corinthian Maid’, a Roman origin story for the first act of drawing, and on its use in my own creative practice as a framework to explore the evolution of western ideas on gender, embodiment, knowledge and creativity. The Corinthian Maid functions as an access point through which to consider new understandings of the relationship between knowledge and the body, with drawing as our guide.

Pemanfaatan Album Sejarah Sebagai Sumber Belajar Sejarah di SMA

History learning will be more meaningful and effective if you use visual media as a learning resource. The problem of this research is how to use history albums as a source of learning history in high school. This study aims to find out about (1) The use of historical albums as a learning resource in history learning. (2) Responses of teachers and learners when using history albums in history learning. (3) Obstacles faced by teachers in utilizing historical albums in learning activities. The research conducted at SMA Negeri 1 Pontang used qualitative descriptive research methods, observation data collection techniques, informant interviews, namely students who participated in history learning with historical album media and subject teachers who used historical album media. The results showed that (1) The implementation of history learning with historical album media at SMA Negeri 1 Pontang has been put to good use by history teachers. (2) The use of historical albums helps students understand learning material, develops students' interest in learning with history subjects, and helps students in building historical imagination. (3) In the use of history albums as learning resources, there are obstacles felt by teachers when teaching, namely the quality of photos when converted from printed to digital form and the state of school infrastructure.

Digital Humanities at the Service of Remembrance: The Creation of Digital Archive-based Activities within the Project ‘Remembering the Past, Learning for the Future’

This article explores the usage of testimonies in the Visual History Archive of the University of Southern California's Shoah Foundation to create learner-centred activities on the history of the Holocaust targeted at Portuguese students. We describe the project ‘Remembering the Past, Learning for the Future: Research-Based Digital Learning from Testimonies of Survivors and Rescuers of the Holocaust’, housed at the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (ULICES). Via the international partnership (USC Shoah Foundation, Zachor Foundation, and the University of Eötvös Loránd), the ULICES team developed materials using testimony from witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust through digital tools with an innovative pedagogical methodology. We introduce the constructivist theory of learning, stressing the powerful impact of survival testimonies on raising student awareness and developing a wide range of skills. We also describe the methodological process that underlay this project, namely the creation of the six learning activities for the IWitness educational platform and the IWalk visits, focusing on the translation tasks of the written materials and the audiovisual translation of the videos. We also report on how students received the activities by retrieving information from teachers’ and students’ reports, and an onsite experience with two groups of students.

Comments on ‘historical imaginaries, historic urban branding, and the local state in China: rejuvenation discourse, manufactured heritage and simulacrascapes’ by Andrew Malcolm law

Comments on ‘historical imaginaries, historic urban branding, and the local state in China: rejuvenation discourse, manufactured heritage and simulacrascapes’ by Andrew Malcolm law

Blackness in Black and White: Serra Pelada and Sebastião Salgado

Since their publication in Sunday Times Magazine in 1987, the photographs of the biblically sized Serra Pelada gold mine in northern Brazil by Sebastião Salgado have garnered an emphatically positive reception. In “Blackness in Black and White: Sebastião Salgado and Serra Pelada,” I argue there is a system of racial coding in his photographs of the Serra Pelada gold mine, which has received little attention in the photographic discourse. I examine the photographs in dialogue with visual histories of enslavement and the exploitation of black bodies in 19th century Brazil and the United States, and the complexities of racial identity and hierarchy in late 20th century Brazil. Through this analysis, I also highlight blind spots in the English-language discourse on Salgado’s gold photographs, which seek to both universalize their themes and aestheticize their content, as well as challenge his own characterization of the photographs. My primary objective is not to argue that Salgado’s photographic decisions, which were made manifest in this systemization, were premeditated, but rather to assert its presence within the photographs and in doing so, offer a more politically and culturally nuanced and specific analysis of the photographs.

“All the world at the palm of the hand”: imagining history through the life of an early Afghan saint

AbstractIn this article I explore hagiographical narratives about Khwāja Yaḥyā Kabīr (d. 1430), among the earliest of the Sufi masters to be identified as Afghan. The social memory of Yaḥyā Kabīr's life exemplifies the function of hagiography as a key arena for the production of historical knowledge, generating a vivid and specific imaginary of the past for devotees. My goal here is to present a reading of the hagiography, but first I will situate it within the discursive nexus of Persian historical writing, which often essentialized Afghans as innately barbarous while peripheralizing Afghan homelands (identified with the Sulaiman Mountains). Yaḥyā Kabīr's hagiography is both reflective of Indo-Afghan anxieties about social hierarchies and a device by which marginalizing traditions could be subverted through a highly textured portrayal of the past. As such, it exemplifies how saints’ lives can index not only the hierarchies of imperial life, but also the techniques by which to escape them.

The influence of transmedia and extra-academic narratives on the formation of the historical culture of high school students

This paper concerns with the importance of traditional and extra-academic sources of knowledge in the configuration of historical culture of Spanish adolescents. To conduct the research, a descriptive phenomenological approach has been designed by analyzing the responses of forty-eight students to a semi-structured interview in which they had to choose 5 characters of contemporary history and indicate the origin of the information. The results show the high coincidence about who are historical significant characters: males and politicians, coincident with other studies conducted in Spain and other countries of the near sociocultural context. The degree of coincidence can be considered as a homogeneous image of the historical culture of the participants. In that sense, there is a high rate of coincidence in the source where this vision of history is mainly generated: the history classroom. The information obtained leads us to confirm the need to reflect on the important stereotypes generated after many decades of formal history teaching with contents far from a necessary critical review. For this reason, it is necessary to reorient the teaching of history to provide a better critical reasoning about how the past is used to understand current societies (ontological perspective) along with how we know about the past (epistemological perspective).

The Discourse of Secession in Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s House of Stone

ABSTRACT This article examines the depiction of the discourse of secession in Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s House of Stone (2018). Borrowing insights on secession from international law and drawing on postcolonial concepts of identity formation and the theory of ethnicity as entry points, the article highlights the elusive nature of nation in Zimbabwe and affirms that the secessionist calls are a manifestation of the Ndebele people’s struggles against the dialectics of otherness. The central argument advanced in this article is that the secession addressed in Tshuma’s novel is a particular instance of an ethnic group’s re-imagination of its identity that is given form and impetus by a past legacy that includes historical imaginations and memories of experiences in post-independence Zimbabwe. In addition, the article argues that this ethnic exclusiveness that is rendered under the political rubric of secession is in stark contrast to the common and shared imaginings of a single nation that is built upon the tenets of basic unity and the existence of a single set of shared principles as postulated by postcolonial theorists. Thus, the article concludes by highlighting the contested and paradoxical nature of secession since it can be viewed on the one hand as a negative rebellion against the status quo or, on the other hand, a positive affirmation of concepts, models and even blueprints for new societies. The article is significant in that it contributes to debates on national identity and contemporary discourses on justice and the accepted frameworks of human rights.

Культура исторической памяти современного немецкого монархизма

The article examines monarchism as a form of memorial culture and historical policy in contemporary German society. The research aims to analyze monarchism as a form of historical memory. The author explores the role and significance of monarchist intellectuals in shaping historical policy and the memorial culture that evolves within the framework of monarchist historical imagination. The novelty of the study lies in examining the current stage of monarchist ideology in Germany, not as a form of political participation, but as a version of historical memory and memorial culture, grounded in the principles of both historical revisionism and German nationalism. The article demonstrates that (1) monarchism in contemporary Germany cultivates its own perceptions of the past and history; (2) the historical imagination of German monarchism is a form of historical revisionism, as the monarchist past and legacy are systematically mythologized and ideologized in the political imagination of monarchist supporters; (3) in its historical imagination, monarchism constructs alternative versions of historical memory and memorial culture, distinct from those proposed by civic identity. The article highlights that monarchist forms of historical memory contribute to ongoing transformations in memorial culture, promoting the parallel development of alternative counter-memories that operate within the political and ideological framework of monarchism. It is suggested that the visualization of collective historical memory regarding the unique historical experience of monarchy, including the narrative and discursive tactics and strategies of contemporary monarchists, enhances the heterogeneous nature of Germany’s memorial tradition, fostering the consolidation of unique perspectives on the past, which form the foundation of monarchist historical imagination and memorial culture as a form of alternative memory.

Rewriting History for the Stage: The Theatricality of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris (1592)

In his 1592 play, The Massacre at Paris, Christopher Marlowe adapted his main source, François Hotman’s A true and plaine reporte of the furious outrages of France (1573), and undoubtedly gave his own version of the events of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. While representing the failure of language to solve the conflict, the playwright paradoxically created a specific sound environment and specific images to reconstitute and represent the event. This essay focuses the link between the creation of a certain vision of history on stage and the use of stage devices. The play illustrates the power of theatre to shape the collective memory of an event. Even though the dramatist cut short most of the dialogues, they are still of prime importance in the play and their brevity is significant. The paper also looks at the cacophony that emerges from Marlowe’s play and which seems to complement language when alluding to certain religious controversies. Finally, it argues that Marlowe represents the massacre as a dance of life and death in which the dancers move to the rhythm of a very precise tune and that the choreography may have reminded the audience of a hunting party where the sound of the bells stands for the sound of the horn. This created a powerful image which is still to be found in contemporary works on the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.

ТЕОРЕТИКО-МЕТОДОЛОГІЧНІ ЗАСАДИ ІСТОРИЧНИХ ДОСЛІДЖЕНЬ ІВАНА ФРАНКА

The article examines the theoretical and methodological foundations of historical research on Ivan Franko, an outstanding Ukrainian writer, scientist and public figure of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The main principles, approaches and methods that Franko used in his historical research, as well as their influence on the development of Ukrainian historiography, were studied. Special attention is paid to the analysis of Franko’s vision of history as a multifaceted process that requires a comprehensive approach to the study of various socio-economic, political and cultural factors. The article also considers the contribution of I. Franko to the criticism of sources and the interpretation of historical events, as well as his role in the formation of the national identity and social consciousness of Ukrainians. The importance of historical and methodological approaches of I. Franko in the context of modern historical science is determined.