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BENEATH MEANING, ORIENTATIONAL NARRATIVES, AND DANTO'S ESSENTIALIST THEORY OF ART: ON NOËL CARROLL'S ELUCIDATIONS AND CONTESTATIONS History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2024-03-12 EKIN ERKAN
In this review of Noël Carroll's Arthur Danto's Philosophy of Art: Essays, I focus on the issue of Danto's philosophy of art history and Carroll's position that, unlike Danto, we ought to understand Danto's “end of art (history)” thesis as an orientational narrative (that is, a pragmatic‐instrumental narrative with cognitive purchase) rather than as a historical‐scientific narrative. In making this
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CLASS AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS ACCORDING TO E. P. THOMPSON History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Daniel Cunningham
In this article, I extract a theory of class from E. P. Thompson's historical works of the 1960s and 1970s, focusing especially on his 1963 magnum opus The Making of the English Working Class, the articles later collected in the 1991 volume Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture, and the essays “The Peculiarities of the English” and “Eighteenth‐Century English Society: Class Struggle
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TRANSLATION IN HISTORY AND METAHISTORY1 History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Alexandra Lianeri
Theo Hermans's Translation and History: A Textbook offers an insightful, clear, and sophisticated account of debates in translation history as a transdisciplinary field that remained, until recently, at the margins of historiographical debates. It discusses essential theoretical and methodological tools through which historians of translation may wrestle with the problem of defining their object; with
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MAKING THE PAST SPEAK: ACCELERATION, RESONANCE, AND PRESENCE1 History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Juhan Hellerma
This review essay offers an extended analysis of Hartmut Rosa's Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. By proposing a critical theory for our present times, the book dissects modes of being related to the world and how these relations are conditioned by the dynamic of escalation that is inscribed into modern social formations. Rosa argues that the wide‐ranging compulsion to grow,
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ADVENTURES IN TIMELAND History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2024-03-08 GAVIN LUCAS
One of the more significant issues to have emerged from the discourse surrounding the Anthropocene has concerned the apparent incommensurability of human and natural history and the vastly different timescales involved. More generally, such discourse raises critical questions about the very different way time is conceptualized in the natural sciences as opposed to in the social sciences and humanities
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(UN)DOING HISTORY: A CASE FOR EPISTEMOLOGICAL ALTERITY History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-12-30 VANITA SETH
This article addresses two primary tensions that currently beset medieval history. The first concerns a contentious debate within the field regarding the relative merits of two interpretative approaches: that which seeks to situate the Middle Ages within a narrative of continuity wherein aspects of the medieval bear some relationship of familiarity with the present and that which accords a radical
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THE UNCONSCIOUS IN INDIVIDUALS AND SOCIETY: ON THE APPLICATION OF PSYCHOANALYTIC CATEGORIES IN HISTORIOGRAPHY History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-12-30 MARTIN KLÜNERS
The long-held conviction of a mutually exclusive relationship between psychoanalysis, which allegedly proceeds purely in terms of individual psychology, and historical social science, which is interested primarily in the analysis of collectives, has significantly hindered dialogue between the disciplines. Norbert Elias's “figurational” sociology, which has been strongly influenced by psychoanalysis
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ACTS OF THOUGHT AND RE-ENACTMENT IN COLLINGWOOD'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-12-13 MARK IAN THOMAS ROBSON
This article explores one of Collingwood's most puzzling claims—that, in re-enacting a past act of thought, I can revive not just the propositional content of that act but also the very act of thought itself. This aspect of Collingwood's ideas has been largely ignored, and, when not ignored, it has been almost universally rejected. After all, we might ask, how can it be that two acts of thought—one
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WITH OR AGAINST HAYDEN WHITE? REFLECTIONS ON THEORY OF HISTORY AND SUBJECT FORMATION History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-12-13 María Inés La Greca
This article reflects on Hayden White's understanding of the subject and explores how best to move forward discussions in theory of history after his arguments about narrativity. To do so, I reconsider his arguments in light of more recent feminist and queer theorizations. Through a reconstruction of the current international new wave of feminism and LGBTQ+ activism as a rich and complex social movement
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WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT FASCISM History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Anna Duensing
Bruce Kuklick's Fascism Comes to America: A Century of Obsession in Politics and Culture offers a compact, accessible, and broad-reaching survey of “the linguistic career of fascism” in the United States. The book charts the widespread use of the term “fascism” across US political, cultural, and intellectual discourse from the early 1920s up through the present, arguing that rampant, uncritical overuse
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THE TIME OF POLITICS, THE POLITICS OF TIME, AND POLITICIZED TIME: AN INTRODUCTION TO CHRONOPOLITICS History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-10-16 Fernando Esposito, Tobias Becker
Time is so deeply interwoven with all aspects of politics that its centrality to the political is frequently overlooked. For one, politics has its own times and rhythms. Secondly, time can be an object and an instrument of politics. Thirdly, temporal attributes are used not only to differentiate basic political principles but also to legitimize or delegitimize politics. Finally, politics aims at realizing
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THE MANIFESTO, THE TIMELINE, AND THE MEMORY SITE: THE 22 JULY 2011 ATTACKS IN NORWAY AND THE CHRONOPOLITICS OF GENRE History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-10-16 Helge Jordheim
In addition to being heinous crimes, acts of terrorism are complex chronopolitical events. Perpetrators, victims, survivors, families, and authorities manage their relationship to the events by engaging with and giving shape to time, or, rather, to a plurality of times. To perform this time work, they avail themselves of different genres, which serve as chronopolitical tools. This article discusses
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CAN A PREDICTED FUTURE STILL BE AN OPEN FUTURE? ALGORITHMIC FORECASTS AND ACTIONABILITY IN PRECISION MEDICINE* History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-10-10 Elena Esposito, Dominik Hofmann, Costanza Coloni
The openness of the future is rightly considered one of the qualifying aspects of the temporality of modern society. The open future, which does not yet exist in the present, implies radical unpredictability. This article discusses how, in the last few centuries, the resulting uncertainty has been managed with probabilistic tools that compute present information about the future in a controlled way
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THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS? GENOMIC HISTORY AND THE RETURN OF RACE IN THE STUDY OF THE ANCIENT MEDITERRANEAN History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-10-08 Christopher Stedman Parmenter
This article discusses the impact of genomic history, a subdiscipline that emerged in the study of the ancient Mediterranean in the 2010s. In 2014, scientists first published a method for extracting genetic material, which they christened aDNA (ancient DNA), from ancient human remains in hot climates. After a decade of research, genomic history is now poised to transform our understanding of Mediterranean
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DECONSTRUCTING HISTORICIST TIME, OR TIME'S SCRIBE History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-09-27 Ethan Kleinberg
This article investigates the enduring chronopolitics of Historicism. To do so, I work through two dominant understandings of Historicism: the view that “historicism” is a means to account for the historian's own standpoint or historical situation as the place from which they take up and interpret the past, which I call Historicism A, and the separate (though now more popular) understanding of “historicism”
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“WHAT HAS POSTERITY EVER DONE FOR ME?”: FUTURE GENERATIONS, INTERGENERATIONAL JUSTICE, AND THE CHRONOPOLITICS OF DISTANT FUTURES History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-09-25 Benjamin Möckel
“Future generations” play a key role in current political debates. In the context of the climate crisis especially, political controversies are often framed as moral problems of “intergenerational justice.” This article aims to historicize the use of the concept of “future generations” in modern political discourse and to uncover its long—and often ambivalent—history. Its main argument is that talking
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MEDIEVALISMS AND MEDIEVAL TIMES: CONFRONTING CHRONOPOLITICS WITH MEDIEVAL TEXTURES OF TIME History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-09-08 Hannah Skoda
This review essay examines Nadia R. Altschul's discussion of medievalism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South America in Politics of Temporalization: Medievalism and Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century South America. She explores a chronopolitics whereby the notion that late medieval Iberia lagged developmentally behind the rest of Europe sustained the claim that parts of South America were still
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HISTORY: A HANDMAID'S TALE History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-08-02 Aparna Vaidik
Historians are generally coy and diffident when it comes to engaging with the moral question despite it being a critical aspect of doing history. However, historians of empire cannot evade the moral question given the ethical dilemmas that imperialism posed for the men at its helm. To portray the colonists as hypocrites is too facile and cynical an explanation. So, what allowed the British colonists
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SAME/DIFFERENCE? TOWARD A SAPPHIC/NONBINARY SEXUALITY OF HISTORY History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-07-26 SUSAN S. LANSER
What is the next step when one has published a strong intervention in a field but later recognizes that one's angle of vision deserves new scrutiny? In this article, which began as a roundtable talk, I return to The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565–1830 (2014) to interrogate its “same-sex” logic through a nonbinary/trans lens. My book argues that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
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MORE THAN MEETS THE FACT: THE UNIVERSALITY OF HISTORY AND THE COLONIAL MEDIATION History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-07-10 EUGENIA GAY
This article examines how mediation is not just limited to the format that's selected to convey the findings of previously conducted research that supposedly followed the conventional protocols of the historical discipline. Rather, it considers mediation as a fundamental part of building historical knowledge, for it assumes that every part of the historiographical operation can be defined as “mediation
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RESTORING CONTINUITY: NOTES ON HISTORY AND FICTION History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-07-06 JUAN GABRIEL VÁSQUEZ
In 1935, as Europe witnessed the rise of fascism, Paul Valéry tried to identify the origins of the crisis in a lecture titled “Le bilan de l'intelligence.” Things were better, he claimed, when people were able to understand their present moment as the result of past events—that is, when “continuity reigned in the minds.” In this article, I discuss why that sense of continuity with the past is, in fact
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VALIDITY NOW History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-07-04 SUZANNE MARCHAND
This review essay offers an extended analysis of Martin Jay's Genesis and Validity: The Theory and Practice of Intellectual History, highlighting Jay's emphasis on the need for intellectual historians to address the question of the present-day validity of ideas. In this volume of essays on twentieth-century philosophy and historiography, Jay contends that the perennial tension between historicism and
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GREEN BOUGHS ON THE GRAVES: UNMOORING HERAT FROM IMPERIAL TIME History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-06-27 TANVIR AHMED
The aim of this article is to explore how popular historical knowledge disrupts the spacetimes produced by imperial power. To this end, I present my reading of a shrine guide that was composed by Asil al-Din Waʿiz in 1460 and that documents the city of Herat's blessed dead. This work, the Maqsad al-Iqbal, anchors Herat to space and time by both the graves of the city's myriad saints and the tales told
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DEFENDING SPIRIT, SPIRITUALIZING MATTER: NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHY AND THE MEDICAL SCIENCES History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-06-26 GIUSEPPE BIANCO
This review essay discusses Larry Sommer McGrath's Making Spirit Matter: Neurology, Psychology, and Selfhood in Modern France (2020), a history of the philosophical current known as “spiritualism.” The book covers the long nineteenth century, focusing especially on the first part of the Third Republic (1870–1914), and studies how French academic philosophers confronted the discourses about human cognition
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HISTORY AND POLITICS AS IF WE STILL LIVED IN THE HOLOCENE History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-06-21 BRAD S. GREGORY
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), by David Graeber and David Wengrow, is a monumental, boldly revisionist study of the human past from the last ice age to the present. It is geared explicitly toward the present in political terms and seeks to explain how primordial forms of human freedom were lost in ways that resulted in our current structures of violence and domination. The
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ON FUTURES AND ENDINGS: NARRATOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS ON CONTEMPORARY FORMS OF CRISES* History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-06-18 ANNE FUCHS
The article examines the changing relationship of the present to the future from a narratological perspective. It argues that three dominant narrative schemas structure the contemporary experiences of temporality in the Western social imaginary: the modern crisis narrative, the apocalyptic narrative, and the chronic crisis narrative. In its first part, the article shows how the modern sense of crisis
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THE COUNTED TIME: TECHNICAL TEMPORALITIES AND THEIR CHALLENGES TO HISTORY History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-06-13 PEDRO TELLES DA SILVEIRA
One of the main debates regarding historical representation within digital media concerns narrative, particularly the difficulty in articulating it. Digital technologies are usually presented as opposed to linear, written narratives, which is of consequence to historical writing. Despite the many merits of scholarly approaches that try to circumvent this difficulty, the lack of theoretical understanding
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WHAT, AT LONG LAST, IS HISTORICAL THEORY FOR? REFLECTIONS ON HISTORICAL THEORY IN A POST-TRUTH WORLD History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-05-23 NANCY PARTNER
The term “post-truth” is a capacious trope that collects threats to the stability of shared knowledge on many fronts—digitally spread disinformation, ignorance and resistance to science, unabashed lies in the public sphere, mythologizing by resurgent nationalist forces, and so on. History is particularly vulnerable to this array. Post-truth threats to serious history produced to professional standards
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THE ANTHROPOCENE AND THE PLANET History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-05-16 Zoltán Boldizsár Simon
Dipesh Chakrabarty's The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is, in three respects, far more than a synthesis of over a decade of pioneering conceptual work aimed at making sense of the Anthropocene/planetary predicament and its implications for historical understanding. First, the book makes visible an intellectual trajectory in which Chakrabarty's conceptual struggles with the Anthropocene gradually
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DĒMOKRATIA'S POSSIBLE DISCONNECTION: UNTIMELY ANTIQUITY, TEMPORAL OUTSIDENESS, AND HISTORICAL FUTURES OF POLITICS* History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-05-06 ALEXANDRA LIANERI
This article discusses notions of possible disconnection in the post-1990s political present that are formulated as untimely articulations of the ancient Greek democratic past and of the concept of dēmokratia. These are modalities of transition that foreground political futurity as emanating neither from anticipation of evental change to come nor from abstract utopianism. Rather, dēmokratia’s projected
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METAPHYSICS IN HISTORY: NOTES ON THE ORIGINS OF AUTHORITARIANISM AND POPULISM History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-04-28 Federico Sor
This article contains an analysis of metaphysics in historical narrative, especially as it pertains to the study of authoritarianism and populism, and a brief exploration of the political implications of metaphysical narratives. The article engages closely with twentieth-century accounts of the origins of authoritarianism and populism and related topics insofar as they are relevant today. Some present-day
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AN APOLOGIA FOR ARTHUR LOVEJOY'S LONG-RANGE APPROACH TO THE HISTORY OF IDEAS History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-04-17 Nico Mouton
Arthur Lovejoy's long-range approach to the history of ideas is little appreciated and largely abandoned. The list of Lovejoy's supposed sins is long. His critics have charged that, among other things, he treated ideas as timeless entities with essences that are independent of individual thinkers, separate from specific texts, isolated from immediate contexts, and insulated from intellectual change
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EPISTEMIC WOUNDED ATTACHMENTS: RECOVERING DEFINITIONAL SUBJECTIVITY THROUGH COLONIAL LIBRARIES History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-04-10 HARLEEN KAUR, PRABHDEEP SINGH KEHAL
Postcolonial theorizing on empires and subjects focuses on governance and infrastructure as relevant geographies of relation. However, when governance-driven knowledge production migrates from colony to metropole, what postcolonial subjectivity formations are recovered from colonial archives, particularly if these archives are structured by epistemic difference? We theorize a wounded attachment to
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NOSTALGIA AND (PRE-)MODERNITY History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-04-06 Hannah Skoda
This article argues that, in the fourteenth century, there was a wave of nostalgia that was provoked by extreme structural change: this was a moment of demographic catastrophe (with famine and plague), endemic warfare, economic fluctuation, intensified urbanization, and intellectual and spiritual novelties. Yet scholars from a range of disciplines have assumed that nostalgia and modernity are intimately
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WITH SPLINTERS (OR STARS) IN OUR EYES: ON READING THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL WITH MARTIN JAY History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-03-15 Karyn Ball
This mostly admiring review article focuses on Martin Jay's 2020 essay collection entitled Splinters in Your Eye: Frankfurt School Provocations. Though it highlights details and insights from nearly every essay in the collection, the review devotes significant attention to chapter 4, which focuses on the relationship of the Frankfurt School's first-generation scholars with Sigmund Freud. The departure
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TO FLY THE PLANE: LANGUAGE GAMES, HISTORICAL NARRATIVES, AND EMOTIONS History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-03-01 William M. Reddy
The common Western distinction between reason and emotion (which is not found outside Western-influenced traditions) tends to obscure an important distinction between two kinds of thinking: logical and mathematical reasoning, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, what is sometimes called “situational awareness,” a kind of thinking that involves striving to take into account multiple simultaneously
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COLLINGWOOD'S WHALE, CHAKRABARTY'S CONUNDRUM, AND BRAUDEL'S BORROWED TIME History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-02-26 Stephan Palmié
As R. G. Collingwood noted toward the end of his life, the physiologically limited “time-phase” of human observational capacity cannot but deliver a fundamentally anthropocentric and temporally myopic conception of the world as eventful, destructive, and devoid of larger, perhaps cyclical, regularities. Developing at around the same time, Fernand Braudel's project of a history of the longue durée of
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POTENTIAL HISTORY: READING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FROM INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGES* History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-02-26 Rodrigo Bonaldo, Ana Carolina Barbosa Pereira
Until the beginning of the twentieth century, history, as a core concept of the political project of modernity, was highly concerned with the future. The many crimes, genocides, and wars perpetuated in the name of historical progress eventually caused unavoidable fractures in the way Western philosophies of history have understood change over time, leading to a depoliticization of the future and a
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HUME, HISTORY, AND THE USES OF SYMPATHY History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-02-19 ADAM SUTCLIFFE
This article focuses on the role of sympathy and antipathy in David Hume's History of England (1754–1762) in relation to the broader place of sympathy in Hume's moral philosophy. Hume, in his earlier philosophical work, argues that sympathy is a naturally occurring responsiveness to others’ feelings, similar to the resonance between musical strings. In his History, however, he carefully curates his
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RECONCEIVING THE PRACTICE OF HISTORY: FROM REPRESENTATION TO TRANSLATION History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-02-15 Sanjay Seth
Arguing that history is not the application of a rigorous method to sources bequeathed to us from the past but rather a practice of coding that constructs “the past” in particular ways, this article seeks to delineate the key elements of this coding. Modern history treats past objects and texts as the objectified remains of humans who endowed their world with meaning and purpose while constrained by
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HISTORY MAKING AND ETHICS—AN INTEGRAL RELATIONSHIP? History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2023-02-13 Stefan Berger
In this review essay, I examine the arguments made by Marnie Hughes-Warrington, with Anne Martin, in Big and Little Histories: Sizing Up Ethics in Historiography. While I find much to praise in this history, I also ask critical questions about the impact of non-Western ethics on historical writing, the role of ethics in historical writing generally, the need to further investigate the everyday lifeworlds
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HISTORICAL PRACTICE IN THE ERA OF DIGITAL HISTORY History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2022-12-20 JESSE W. TORGERSON
The current digital historical moment is an opportunity to formulate a new theory of historical practice. Our field's long-standing passive reliance on the widespread explanation of historical practice as deriving information from “primary sources” is unhelpful, incoherent, misleading, and an active inhibition to new opportunities. Our reliance on an incoherent explanation means our students are not
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DIGITAL DOPING FOR HISTORIANS: CAN HISTORY, MEMORY, AND HISTORICAL THEORY BE RENDERED ARTIFICIALLY INTELLIGENT? History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2022-12-16 WULF KANSTEINER
Artificial intelligence is making history, literally. Machine learning tools are playing a key role in crafting images and stories about the past in popular culture. AI has probably also already invaded the history classroom. Large language models such as GPT-3 are able to generate compelling, non-plagiarized texts in response to simple natural language inputs, thus providing students with an opportunity
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REPRESENTING SPATIAL CONCEPTS: MODERN EAST ASIAN HISTORY IN A DIGITAL PUBLICATION FORMAT History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2022-12-16 Christian Wachter
How do we adequately capture multivocal history? What are good ways to represent multiple narratives and arguments in an open-ended fashion? The online publication Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History, edited by David R. Ambaras and Kate McDonald, addresses these questions for modern East Asian spatial history. Mainly a tool for teaching and research, the website works
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APPROXIMATING ALGORITHMS: FROM DISCRIMINATING DATA TO TALKING WITH AN AI History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2022-12-12 N. Katherine Hayles
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun's Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition offers important tools to understand and, more importantly, transform the algorithms perpetuating and intensifying discrimination in North American societies. Unpacking her work's implications, this essay offers seven approximations—ranging from eliminating bias to rethinking the symbiotic relations
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THE OLD AND NEW OF DIGITAL HISTORY History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2022-12-07 STEFAN TANAKA
This article reflects on the expectations and changes that digital technologies have brought to history, activities that are increasingly codified as digital history. Because of the breadth of digital technologies and communicative media, the contours of a digital history are still unclear, so I frame my discussion with two potential narratives that begin from different ideas that emerged from World
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HISTORY AS ANTIDOTE: THE ARGUMENT FOR DOCUMENTATION IN DIGITAL HISTORY History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2022-12-07 LAURA K. MORREALE
The ephemeral nature of computer-enabled historical work is a well-documented concern within the field of history. The quick pace of technological change often renders digital scholarship obsolete, which in turn encourages historians to retreat to the stable and durable comfort of print, even as digital methodologies enrich our research and expand the audience for it. What has been missing so far in
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IMPLICATED GAMING: CHOICE AND COMPLICITY IN LUDIC HOLOCAUST MEMORY History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2022-12-07 TAMIKA GLOUFTSIS
Holocaust memorial sites and institutions have begun to embrace new media and digital technologies as methods of communication, public engagement, and memorialization. Despite increasing numbers of interactive digital media projects focused on Holocaust education, there is a significant gulf between the topics addressed by digital Holocaust works and those conceptualized and studied at a higher level
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OPENING THE BLACK BOX OF INTERPRETATION: DIGITAL HISTORY PRACTICES AS MODELS OF KNOWLEDGE History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2022-12-04 SILKE SCHWANDT
Digital history is more than just the implementation of algorithmic and other data practices in the practice of history writing. It places our discipline under a microscope and enables us to focus in on what history writing is in the first place: writing about the past under specific social and societal conditions. This article argues for a closer look at the traditions of history writing in order
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STILL PLAYING WITH THE PAST: HISTORY, HISTORIANS, AND DIGITAL GAMES History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2022-11-30 Esther Wright
Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History, edited by Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew B. R. Elliott, was a significant publication in the establishment of historical (digital) game studies, a field that has since continued to grow. This review essay notes some of the key interventions made by the edited collection and its scope in accounting for the complexities of digital
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THE PROPERTIES OF DIGITAL HISTORY History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2022-11-21 STEPHEN ROBERTSON
This article offers a definition of digital history that focuses on the core affordances of the personal computer and the process by which those properties come to be exploited. I begin by outlining the two properties of computers that I argue define digital history: they process data and (as Janet H. Murray noted) provide an immersive and interactive medium. I then examine how digital historians in
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COMPOSING HISTORY FOR THE WEB: DIGITAL REFORMULATION OF NARRATIVE, EVIDENCE, AND CONTEXT History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2022-11-20 SHAHZAD BASHIR
I recently published A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures, a digital book that presents a new way to understand Islam. This article describes the process and conceptual work that went into designing the book's interface. It emphasizes that hypertext enabled through digital means is not intrinsically more dynamic than print since work in both forms requires equally intensive hermeneutical effort
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TOWARD THE RECOGNITION OF ARTIFICIAL HISTORY MAKERS History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2022-11-20 MARNIE HUGHES-WARRINGTON
Artificial intelligence is a historical discipline. This does not simply mean that its history can be written. It is historical on account of its recursive basis for action: its systems turn to prior beliefs—often through multiple steps or layers—to make recommendations for the present or predictions for the future. Using the two rooms approach of Alan Turing's imitation game, I highlight the potential
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ISAIAH BERLIN AS A HISTORIAN History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2022-09-04 HUBERT CZYŻEWSKI
Intellectual history's methodology remains dominated by the Cambridge school and its approaches, which focus almost exclusively on the discursive context of political debates. However, a different practice of historical investigation may be found in the works of Isaiah Berlin. Although he is best known as a political theorist and an ethicist, Berlin pursued his philosophical agenda mostly through his
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NATURAL HISTORIES FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE: KOSELLECK'S THEORIES AND THE POSSIBILITY OF A HISTORY OF LIFETIMES History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2022-09-04 HELGE JORDHEIM
In this article, I offer a rereading of Reinhart Koselleck that puts his work at the center of ongoing debates about how to write histories that can account for humanity's changed and changing relationship to our natural environment—or, in geological terms, to our planet. This involves engaging with the urgent realities of climate crisis and the geological agency of humans, which, in current discourse
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WHAT'S IN A NAME? PAST POSSIBILITIES AND THE CHALLENGES OF HISTORICIZING COUNTERFACTUAL HISTORY History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2022-08-31 Gavriel D. Rosenfeld
As wondering “what if?” about the past has become increasingly prominent in Western life, scholars have sought to historicize the phenomenon. The latest attempt to do so is Quentin Deluermoz and Pierre Singaravélou's A Past of Possibilities: A History of What Could Have Been. A stimulating, if somewhat meandering, book of essayistic reflections on historical speculation, A Past of Possibilities highlights
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PREDICTIONS WITHOUT FUTURES* History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2022-08-24 Sun-ha Hong
Modernity held sacred the aspirational formula of the open future: a promise of human determination that doubles as an injunction to control. Today, the banner of this plannable future is borne by technology. Allegedly impersonal, neutral, and exempt from disillusionment with ideology, belief in technological change saturates the present horizon of historical futures. Yet I argue that this is exactly
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TIME GARDENS, TIME FIGURES, AND TIME REGIMES History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2022-08-22 Harry Jansen
In Zeitgärten: Zeitfiguren in der Geschichte der Neuzeit, Lucian Hölscher distinguishes between an embodied time and an empty time. Simply put, an embodied time includes histories, while its counterpart includes only dates and chronologies. He prefers the latter, for it offers an alternative to Reinhart Koselleck's idea of different layers of time. According to Hölscher, historians can achieve more
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SO YOU WANT TO BE A HISTORIAN? History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2022-08-18 Nicholas B. Dirks
If the directed focus on “scholarly personae” recommended in How to Be a Historian: Scholarly Personae in Historical Studies, 1800–2000 is to be genuinely useful, we would need to attend far more systematically to historiographical differences, debates, and styles as rooted not only in the counterpoint between individuals and institutions but also in the larger contexts that govern how we identify
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UNTHEORIZING DISCOURSE History and Theory (IF 0.718) Pub Date : 2022-08-08 Karen S. Feldman
A New Philosophy of Discourse: Language Unbound, by Joshua Kates, examines a range of philosophical, literary, and literary-theoretical approaches in attempting to formulate a view of language sheerly as individual events. Kates considers works from philosophers including Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer in the Continental tradition; Donald Davidson and W. V. O. Quine in the analytic tradition