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Historical Profession (historical + profession)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	100%

Selected Abstracts

Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History

HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 4 2003
J. R. McNeill
This article aims to consider the robust field of environmental history as a whole, as it stands and as it has developed over the past twenty-five years around the world. It necessarily adopts a selective approach but still offers more breadth than depth. It treats the links between environmental history and other fields within history, and with other related disciplines such as geography. It considers the precursors of environmental history, its emergence since the 1970s, its condition in several settings and historiographies. Finally it touches on environmental history's relationship to social theory and to the natural sciences as they have evolved in recent decades. It concludes that while there remains plenty of interesting work yet to do, environmental history has successfully established itself as a legitimate field within the historical profession, and has a bright future, if perhaps for discouraging reasons. [source]

Defamation Cases against Historians

HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 3 2002
Antoon De Baets
Defamation is the act of damaging another's reputation. According to recent legal research, defamation laws may be improperly used in many ways. Some of these uses profoundly affect the historian's work: first, when defamation laws protect reputations of states or nations as such; second, when they prevent legitimate criticism of officials; and, third, when they protect the reputations of deceased persons. The present essay offers two tests of these three abuses in legal cases where historians were defendants. The first test, a short worldwide survey, confirms the occurrence of all three abuses; the second test (an empirical analysis of twenty,one cases (1965,2000) from nine western European countries) the occurrence of the third abuse. Both tests touch on problems central to the historical profession: living versus deceased persons; facts versus opinions; legal versus historical truth; the relationship between human dignity, reputation, and privacy; the role of politicians, veterans, and Holocaust deniers as complainants; the problem of amnestied crimes. The second test,the results of which are based on verdicts, commentaries, and press articles, and presented in a synoptic table,looks closely into the complainants' and defendants' profiles, the allegedly defamatory statements themselves, and the verdicts. All statements deemed defamatory were about such contemporary events as World War II (particularly war crimes, collaboration, and resistance) and colonial wars. Both tests amount to two conclusions. The first one is about historians' professional rights and obligations: historians should make true, but privacy,sensitive or potentially offending, statements only when the public interest is served; otherwise, they should have a right to silence. The second conclusion concerns defamation itself: defamation cases and threats to sue in defamation have a chilling effect on the historical debate; they are often but barely veiled attempts at censorship. [source]

Making Sense of Theatre in the Third Reich

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 5 2010
Gerwin Strobl
In the crowded field of studies on Nazi Germany the role of theatre in the Third Reich continues to be a neglected subject. The reluctance to engage with the topic is particularly true among historians and is in striking contrast to the attention devoted in recent years to other branches of the arts. Yet theatre actually received lavish funding from the Nazi regime. Indeed at no time in the history of the German stage was the provision so opulent, and the Nazi leadership went to considerable lengths to maintain the theatre sector even in wartime. The neglect of the theatre therefore constitutes more of a reflection on the priorities of the historical profession than those of the Nazi regime. This article attempts to redress the balance and to explore possible reasons for the limited treatment of the subject in the existing literature. [source]

Technology and the World the Slaves Made

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 2 2006
Robert Gudmestad
The study of American slavery is a crowded field and each year the historical profession witnesses the publication of several new books. Despite this steady onslaught of scholarship, significant gaps remain in our understanding of slavery and its influence on the South. One area that has lacked sustained attention is the nexus of slavery and technological development. Several new books demonstrate that changes in technology profoundly altered the lives and labor of slaves. Historians have approached the presence of technology in a slave society from several different traditions. Some scholars argued that plantation development and mechanical progress were difficult to wed together, while others noted the progressive nature of southern agricultural production, but discussions of white attitudes and behavior overshadowed the effects of machinery on the lives of slaves. An innovative approach has emphasized the employment of slaves in factories, but such works have done little to provide insight into how technological innovation influenced plantation slaves. Several new studies have reversed these trends and promise to lead us in important directions. Examinations of the cotton gin, steamboats, sugar plantations, and clocks have revealed that technology brought enormous change to the bulk of slaves, not just those living in urban areas or working in factories. Patterns and practices of work, opportunities for autonomy, and time away from the master's unstinting gaze, all changed because of mechanical innovation. Taken together, these new works also provide clues to the making and remaking of the southern economy and society. [source]

"Real Solemn History" and its Discontents: Australian Political History and the Challenge of Social History

AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND HISTORY, Issue 1 2010
Frank Bongiorno
The relationship between Australian political and social history has received little historiographical attention. Political history has been lauded or, more often, dismissed as traditional historical practice, while from the 1960s social history took its place as a catch-all phrase for various "new" histories concerned with everyday life. This article examines the place of political and social history in the nascent Australian academic historical profession of the 1950s to the early 1970s, and then explores the impact of the new social history on academic political history. It will suggest that while there was only limited exchange before the late 1980s, in the last twenty years social history has contributed modestly to a reconstituted understanding of political history as part of lived experience. "[,] I can read poetry and plays, and things of that sort, and do not dislike travels. But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. Can you?" "Yes, I am fond of history." "I wish I were too. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all , it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention [,]"., [source]