Work Of Professional Historians Research Articles

Prospects for the Development of Source Studies in Modern Medieval Studies

Source study is the foundation of the research work of professional historians. It became the subject of the All-Russian Scientific Conference “Source Studies in Contemporary Medieval Studies”, which was held from 28 to 29 June 2021 at the Institute of World History at the Russian Academy of Sciences. The conference, conceived as a platform for regular communication of specialists in the history of the Middle Ages, allowed the participants and numerous listeners to get acquainted with the latest research on the source study of the history of Russia, Europe, the East and America. It included reports summarizing the experience of research and outlining the prospects for further work on key problems of source study of the history of the Middle Ages.

Liberal Epic: The Victorian Practice of History from Gibbon to Churchill

Liberal Epic: The Victorian Practice of History from Gibbon to Churchill. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. 336 pp. $22.97.Edward Adams argues in Liberal Epic that epics, defined by their emphasis on graphic combat scenes between heroes and the valorization of war, were liberalized and sanitized in poems, histories, and historical novels throughout the long nineteenth century. His oxymoronic (273) subject is to trace the representational and ideological dilemma of [Victorian writers'] effort to celebrate both murderous heroic power and liberal (8). Adams strives to identify this move by the entwining of two terms or notions, liberal and epic, one associated with progress, humanity, and self-determination and the other with tradition, war, and violent domination (19).One way to imagine this evolution is to compare the origins of Chinese martial arts rooted in necessity to the present-day acrobatic, flying, floating, stylized Wushu fighting in Ang Lee's celebrated film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). Figuratively similar to the warriors in the film, Adams appears to leap effortlessly across rooftops, to glide over water without leaving a ripple, and to dance nimbly on the tops of bamboo trees. The book's pace and sweep leaves the reader breathless at how quickly he travels from Homer's Iliad to John Romero's DOOM (a first-person shooter video game).Aside from his major analyses of nineteenth-century historical writing, Adams also provides tantalizing peeks into disparate works such as J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937), John Keegan's military histories, Samuel von Pufendorf's Of the Law of Nature and Nations (1672), and Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998)-all in three hundred pages or so. It inspires at once exhilaration, but also a touch of incredulity. And perhaps any skepticism results at least in part from the kind of narrowness that can be bred in the academy, with its sometimes stifling emphasis on specialization. An ambitious work such as this one can fall prey to knee-jerk suspicion. Liberal Epic is made of far sterner stuff and Adams has big ideas about big books and he is intrepid and relentless in advancing his thesis rather in the manner of a Pickett's Charge.There are many reasons to rejoice, not least because Adams breathes new life into books that were in their day bestsellers, but that now lead a more or less moribund scholarly existence such as Scott's Napoleon (1827), Creasy's Battles (1851), Carlyle's Frederick (1858-65), and Churchill's Marlborough (1934-38). In Liberal Epic Adams also considers seriously the work of professional historians whose writing demonstrates his thesis, such as G. M. Trevelyan and C. V. Wedgwood. The volume is highly suggestive in interdisciplinary ways, in particular when Adams makes sometimes oblique but always intriguing connections to the writings of Grotius and John Locke, to the influence of David Hume and Francois Fenelon, to the economic vision of Adam Smith, and to the modern political thought of Leo Strauss, Quentin Skinner, John Pocock, John Rawls, and Michael Walzer.Although he espouses a proposition about the softening (205) of Victorian epic under the spell of Gibbon, which he discerns in the movement from Homeric killing to Popeian dying (166), Adams clearly does not mean the work to be ponderously theoretical. He displays his wit throughout and has an eye for irony. There are occasional nods to theory and engagement with critical thinkers, but the real work is done by Adams himself in attempting to trace the often subtle contours (see his chapter on William Morris) and the evolutionary development of the tendency he identifies, namely, the emptying out of violent heroism in liberal epic's modern battle scenes (173). Adams renders Liberal Epic pliable enough to address literary scholars and historiographers. It is in the latter field that the book makes a needed and signal contribution. …

Editorial: AJFS at 50

AJFS was founded by Roger Laufer (whose obituary will be found elsewhere in this number) fifty years ago. It rapidly acquired a high academic reputation. Contributors to the journal during its first decade alone included Lloyd Austin, JeanBertrand Barrere, Haskell Block, Germaine Bree, Peter Broome, Ross Chambers, J.M. Cocking, Richard Coe, Alison Fairlie, Jean Giraudoux [sic], James Lawler, Ian McFarlane, W.G. Moore, Henri Peyre, Michel Raimond, Judith Robinson, Richard Sayce and Donald Stone, Jr.Laufer returned to to take up a post at Aix-Marseille, in 1967. Wallace Kirsop, assisted by his wife Joan, served as Editor from 1968 until 2002,1 when I took over. Laufer, in his brief Editorial in the first number of the journal, wrote: [.AJFS] will publish essays in textual explication, articles on literary history and linguistics, but also studies on important aspects of the French social and cultural background. In the late 1960s the journal discontinued its commitment to linguistics, given the creation of specialist journals and associations of applied linguists; but its vigorously eclectic approach to French Studies has remained one of its hallmarks and indeed has become even more pronounced in recent years. While maintaining an essential interest in literary studies, it has consistently reflected and actively engaged with the pluralization of French Studies. Special numbers have explored the pedagogy of cultural studies and everyday cultural practices in French-speaking environments (Teaching Cultures, 33: 2; Popular Culture in Post-War France, 35: 1), and Francophone literature (Voices from North Africa, 45: 2; Francophonie and its Futures, 48: 1), and French cinema (French Cinema, 36: 1; (Retro)projections: French Cinema in the Twenty-first Century, 45: 3; Jacques Rivette, 47: 2). work of professional historians has been published from time to time in the form of proceedings of the George Rude Seminars in French History and Civilization that have been held every two years in Australia or New Zealand since 1978. Also, just as the journal has contained reflections of Wal Kirsop's interest in bibliography and the history of the book, it has reflected my own interest in literary translation and the emerging discipline of translation studies (In Other Words: the Art of Translation, 47: 1; The Practices of Translation, 50: 2).My editorship remains a work in progress. number of guest-edited special numbers has increased from, on average, one per year to two per year. Dossier in the present number represents a model for collective work which I would be happy to see emulated. Proposals for special numbers or Dossiers, from colleagues working anywhere in the world, will be welcome. …

The State of the Field of Environmental History

Absract This article reviews the state and evolution of the field of environmental history since about 1970. It focuses chiefly on the work of professional historians, but because environmental history is pursued by many varieties of scholars, it occasionally discusses the work of archeologists, geographers, and others. It offers a working definition of the field and an account of its origins, development, and institutionalization from the 1970s until 2010. It briefly surveys the literature on several world regions, concentrating most heavily on South Asia and Latin America, where environmental history at present has grown especially lively. It considers the prominence of Americanists (that is, historians of the United States, not the same thing as Americans) in the field and how that prominence is now waning. It reviews the utility of environmental history for historians, sketches some of the critiques of environmental history, and comments upon some signal findings of recent years.

2007 Presidential Address of the CHA

In keeping with the Congress theme of “Bridging Communities: Making Public Knowledge, Making Knowledge Public,” this paper reflects on issues relating to public history and the impact of the Internet — that most public of media — on the ways in which academic historians create and disseminate knowledge. It explores the rise of public history as a profession and field of study over the past three decades, the efforts of the Canadian Historical Association (CHA) since its founding in 1922 to reach a broader public, and the impact of the Internet on the work of professional historians. By raising questions about the role of academic historians in general and of the CHA in particular in bridging what on the surface seems to be the divergent interests of academic and public history, it contributes to a larger discussion that will almost certainly preoccupy CHA presidents for the foreseeable future: where academic history and the arts disciplines generally fit into the postmodern university and into the rapidly expanding world of knowledge fuelled by the Internet and its related technologies.

Baghdad Burning: The blogosphere, literature and the art of war

In an age of embedded reporters and homogenized news reports, how can people dispense with the instant experts of the punditocracy and find out what is really happening? Quirky, edgy and raw, new media sources such as blogs have a freshness and an immediacy to them that does not come from standard-issue news reports. This is particularly apparent with bloggers covering the war in Iraq. In one sense, new media offer us “history from below,” before it hardens into the work of professional historians. Some serving in the U.S. armed forces are putting out their own blogs, the so-called “milblogs,” while their opponents in the insurgency are doing the same and turning cyberspace into a zone of “information wars.” As one commentator has noted, these activities have “repictured war as drastically as William Howard Russell’s telegraphed dispatches” from the front did in 1855. It was this new media constellation of “milblogs,” intermilitary email rings, and mobile phones which brought the images of Abu Graib into general circulation. This military sub-culture, it is maintained, has now “fed into the mainstream of the nation’s reading matter, and its high impact, wham-bam style has become fashionable. The most successful among these are cleaning up in book launches and moving in on the big literary prizes.

William McKinley and Us

In the presidential campaign of 2004, George W. Bush's advisor Karl Rove repeated to journalists his long-standing explanation of why he admires William McKinley and expects Bush to reproduce what Rove regards as McKinley's successes. In 2003, Kevin Phillips, a Bush critic, wrote a book explaining how much he also admires McKinley. Eric Schlosser, a muck-raking journalist, saw his play Americans debut in London in the fall of 2003 to a theater full of Britons drawn to a play about the assassination of McKinley. Schlosser explains his interest in McKinley by invoking William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It isn't even past.” By saying so he raises anew the old question of how much our interest in present events ought to inflect our study of the past, but he also raises a question of peculiar interest to historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The McKinley of Rove, Phillips, and Schlosser—the McKinley whom Rove wants the President to emulate—may sound dimly familiar to us. But does the work of professional historians sustain this gloss on current affairs?

History on Trial: The Case of Columbus

We already learned about Columbus, one of our eleventh grade American studies students told us at start of year. He was great explorer who killed all Indians, right? This student, like many others, viewed history as a collection of facts to learn rather than an ongoing debate to join. We wanted our students to do work of professional historians, to seek truth rather than to memorize truths others have reached before them. This was important to us because, as Gerald Graff points out in Beyond Culture Wars, the best way to make relativists of students is to expose them to an endless series of positions which are not debated before their eyes (1). We wanted our students to enter fray. Debating same complex issues which confront professional historians has intrinsic appeal to high schoolers. In fact, some students see activities as slighdy subversive. However, we knew that if students were truly to work as historians they would need to establish criteria for judging historical characters, research topics thoroughly, and arrive at historical interpretation based on that evidence. Over a three week period we asked our students to enter debate by arguing items on an introductory opinionnaire, writing a letter to a textbook editor, and taking part in a mock trial of Christopher Columbus.

Heroes, Myths and Anniversaries in Modern Scotland

One of the major problems with historiography the study of what historians have written is that it is concerned primarily with the work of professional historians. While historians may reflect the dominant ideological mores of the day, and the careful deconstruction of their works can offer useful insights into the political agenda which framed their manufacture, we can not take it for granted that their assumptions and values were exactly the same as those popularly held in society. Historians tend to work in a rarefied atmosphere for a rarefied audience. An example from our own times should illustrate the point. Although there has been a prodigious out-pouring from Scottish academics in the field of Scottish history, the truth of the matter is that most Scots will have had their historical consciousness shaped more by writers such as John Prebblc and Nigel Tranter, by television plays and by the film 'Braveheart' than by the work of professional historians.

Histoires contemporaines en pays d'Oc

La renaissance d'une sensibilité régionale en France est un phénomène multiforme et ambigu. Elle se pose en évidence en s'opposant à de très vieilles traditions centralistes et nationales. Mais, comme beaucoup de prises de conscience, elle fait naître plus d'interrogations qu'elle ne résout de problèmes — malgré les certitudes qu'affecte souvent le discours militant. Qu'est-ce qu'une identité régionale en France aujourd'hui ? Il était légitime que les historiens soient convoqués dans ce débat. C'est plutôt leur excessif empressement que critique Gérard Cholvy dans l'article que nous publions ici. Au-delà des polémiques — sans doute inévitables et peut-être nécessaires — on souhaiterait qu'il soit l'annonce dans les Annales d'une réflexion et d'une discussion sur la réalité et sur les perceptions de la région dans la longue durée.