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Social Historians (social + historian)
Selected AbstractsThe Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) Report SummariesCRITICAL QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2004Anthony Smith These reports are useful summaries of a quantity of research undertaken over a course of years by the independent HEPI research unit, based in Oxford. They are researched responses to the range of issues and questions which have been current in UK higher education over the last five or six years. Future social historians will surely discern, through their tiny print and clear thought, the growing instrumentality of this era, the nervous concern of the authorities, as costs rise, to ensure that university education brings economic benefit to the nation as a whole. [source] Calculating credibility: print culture, trust and economic figures in early eighteenth-century England1ECONOMIC HISTORY REVIEW, Issue 4 2007NATASHA GLAISYER Credit in early modern England has been studied by both social historians of the market and historians of the book. The intersection of these literatures is explored by asking the question: how did producers of books about interest (which was closely connected to credit) convince readers that their books could be trusted? One particular book is considered: a palm-sized book of interest calculations by John Castaing. Most importantly, and unusually, many copies of this book contain his signature, which, it is argued, must be interpreted in the context of the particular role that signatures played in guaranteeing financial transactions. [source] Reconstructing Culture in Historical Explanation: Narratives as Cultural Structure and PracticeHISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 3 2000Anne Kane The problem of how to access and deploy the explanatory power of culture in historical accounts has long remained vexing. A recent approach, combining and transcending the "culture as structure"/"culture as practice" divide among social historians, puts explanatory focus on the recursivity of meaning, agency, and structure in historical transformation. This article argues that meaning construction is at the nexus of culture, social structure, and social action, and must be the explicit target of investigation into the cultural dimension of historical explanation. Through an empirical analysis of political alliance during the Irish Land War, 1879,1882, I demonstrate that historians can uncover meaning construction by analyzing the symbolic structures and practices of narrative discourse. [source] Risk as a Window to Agency: A Case Study of Three DecoratorsJOURNAL OF INTERIOR DESIGN, Issue 1 2008Nancy H. Blossom M.A. ABSTRACT This paper explores the idea of "risk" by examining the role of three women in interior design in the twentieth century (Elsie de Wolfe, 1865,1950; Dorothy Draper, 1888,1969; and Sister Parish, 1929,1994). Women's roles as arbiters of taste were consistent with the social construction of the female gender at the turn of the century; that these roles involved risk,the perception of possible loss or injury,is, for the most part, overlooked by social historians. Our theoretical framework is built upon three keywords from the vocabularies of postmodern social history and women's history: discourse, experience, and agency. These three terms represent the important recognition that the collective understanding of history is not static, but is dependent on the social constructs of the period, as well as (1) how individuals experienced, interpreted, and acted within these constructs and (2) how historians understand and interpret the individual actions in the context of the same constructs. These concepts suggest that individual characters have agency (i.e., power or choice) in framing or reframing an event, based on their unique view of the world. It is through agency that we explore unique qualities of de Wolfe, Draper, and Parish. The stories of de Wolfe, Draper, and Parish demonstrate that risk of traditional values, risk of public persona, and risk of financial security all influenced the ways that they navigated the social and economic circumstances that surrounded them. Each risk, whether imposed on or undertaken by our protagonists, was a seed of change that ultimately affected the social and professional construct of the field of interior design. [source] | ||||||||||