Volume 59
Written By Elizabeth Boyle
ARTICLES
Erika Harlitz-Kern, “The Puzzle of the Banquet Hall of the Dukes: The Professionalization of Swedish Historical Research Studied through Ludwik Fleck’s Thought Collective and Thought Style," History and Theory 59, no. 1 (2020), 3-21.
In 1312, the Swedish dukes Erik and Valdemar Magnusson married the Norwegian princesses Ingeborg Haakonsdaughter and Ingeborg Eriksdaughter at a ceremony in Oslo, Norway. In 1313, the two couples were reunited at a purpose‐built banquet hall, believed to have been located in the medieval Swedish town of Lödöse. The main source of information concerning these events is the Swedish medieval rhyme chronicle The Chronicle of Duke Erik. However, a closer reading of the chronicle reveals that Lödöse is never mentioned in relation to the banquet hall. The article discusses the passing down of knowledge through generations of the same professional collective, in this case the professional collective of Swedish historians during the twentieth century, and demonstrates how the validity of once‐established prescientific knowledge persists. To achieve its goal, the article applies Ludwik Fleck's terms “thought collective,” “thought style,” and “tenacity in science,” as well as Thomas Kuhn's concept of the “paradigm,” to a historiographical case study of how the proto‐idea of the banquet hall being located at Lödöse has survived to become an established scientific fact. The location of the banquet hall concerns but a minor detail in the turbulent political situation of the Swedish kingdom during the first decades of the fourteenth century. However, the continuing reiteration of this minor detail is evidence of a larger phenomenon, namely how contemporary historical research is influenced by scholars in the prescientific past.
Katherina Kinzel, “Method and Meaning: Ranke and Droysen on the Historian’s Disciplinary Ethos," History and Theory 59, no. 1 (2020), 22-41.
In this article I revisit nineteenth‐century debates over historical objectivity and the political functions of historiography. I focus on two influential contributors to these debates: Leopold von Ranke and Johann Gustav Droysen. In their takes on objectivity and subjectivity, impartiality and political engagement, I reveal diametrically opposed solutions to shared concerns: how can historians reveal history to be meaningful without resorting to speculative philosophy? And how can they produce a knowledge that is relevant to the present when the project of “exemplary” history has been abandoned? I focus especially on the relativist themes in Ranke's and Droysen's answers to these questions. Ranke's demand for impartiality leads him to think of all historical epochs as equally valid, whereas Droysen's emphasis on subjectivity relativizes historical truth. In order to explain why Ranke and Droysen nevertheless remained unfazed by the problem of historical relativism, I analyze their normative conceptions of the historian's disciplinary ethos. I show that Ranke and Droysen think of objective impartiality and subjective partiality not only in methodological terms but also in terms of justice and ethical duty. By way of this normative element, their historical methodologies secure for the professional study of history an ethical‐political relevance for the present.
Felix Wiedemann, “Migration and Narration: How European Historians in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries Told the History of Human Mass Migrations or Völkerwanderungen," History and Theory 59, no. 1 (2020), 42-60.
Historians’ interest in the history of human migrations is not limited to recent years. Migrations had already figured as explanatory factors in connection with cultural and historical change in the work of classical and ancient studies scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the writings of these scholars, migrations acted as historical landmarks or epochal thresholds and played a key role in the construction of geo‐historical areas. This model has been called “migrationism” and cannot be explained simply on the basis of the history of individual disciplines, but must be seen in its complex interaction with scientific and historical contexts. However, “migrationism” does not relate to fixed political and scientific positions or movements. For this reason, it cannot be explained adequately by using a historically or ideologically based approach. Relying on narratological approaches, this article examines migration narratives that historians of this period used to explain the rise and fall of ancient civilizations. Referring to contemporary historiographical representations of the ancient Near East, it distinguishes three main narratives that are still common today: narratives of foundation, narratives of destruction, and narratives of mixtures. In this sense, analyzing older migration narratives helps us to sharpen the critical view on the genealogy of our own views on the history—and present—of human migrations.
Timo Pankakoski, “From Historical Structures to Temporal Layers: Hans Freyer and Conceptual History," History and Theory 59, no. 1 (2020), 61-91.
This article assesses, for the first time, the significance for German conceptual history of the sociologist, philosopher, and conservative political theorist Hans Freyer. Freyer theorized historical structures as products of political activity, emphasized the presence of several historical layers in each moment, and underscored the need to read concepts with regard to accumulated structures. He thus significantly influenced not only German structural history but also conceptual history emerging from it in the work of Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and, most notably, Reinhart Koselleck, whose theories of temporal layers in history and concepts reworked the Freyerian starting points. Underscoring the openness and plurality of history, criticizing its false “plannability,” and reading world history as European history writ large, Freyer shaped the politically oriented theory of history behind Koselleckian Begriffsgeschichte. Further, Freyer theorized the eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century transition to industrial society as a historical rupture or “epochal threshold,” which bears close, and by no means coincidental, similarity to Koselleck's saddle‐time thesis (Sattelzeit). Freyer's theory of history sheds light on the interrelations of many Koselleckian key ideas, including temporal layers, the contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous, the plannability of history, and the Sattelzeit.
Jörn Rüsen, “A Turning Point in Theory of History: The Place of Hayden White in the History of Metahistory," History and Theory 59, no. 1 (2020), 92-102.
This article intends to place Hayden White's reflection on the basic principles of meaning‐construction in history into the historical context of modern historical studies. It first presents the self‐understanding of professional historians in which they emphasize the academic (wissenschaftlichen) character of the discipline. In this way of reflection, the traditional (premodern) interpretation of history as a part of rhetoric was pushed back and replaced by methodological argumentation about the rules of research (with an emphasis on source critique). Historiography, or the presentation of the results of research in a narrative form, was not completely neglected, but was not widely recognized. After the analytical insight into the narrative form of historical knowledge, significant discussion of the principles of historical thinking dramatically changed from the issue of research to that of representation (historiography). Hayden White's Metahistory (1973) marked this change paradigmatically. It turned the shift from rhetoric to science in its contrary direction: a new turn to rhetoric was proclaimed. This new anti‐turn set off a hitherto unanswered question as to how research methodology should be treated. Source critique was not refuted but did not attract significant attention. The research procedure of interpretation, in contrast, was met by a new understanding and interest: it was identified as representation by the linguistic procedures of meaning‐construction. Its role as a part of historical method, however, was completely ignored. The article ends with a still unresolved problem of metahistory, namely the relationship between interpretation and representation. They are not identical, but are closely related. Their synthesis and their differences have to be systematically inquired into and reflected upon if metahistory is to step forward and engage in this task. Then the merits of White's return to rhetoric will be appreciated as well as its one‐sidedness criticized, before a further step is taken.
REVIEW ARTICLE
Philip J. Ethington, “Of Boundaries, Places, and Situations," History and Theory 59, no. 1 (2020), 103-127.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Sébastien Ledoux on The Latest Catastrophe by Henry Rousso, History and Theory 59, no. 1 (2020), 128-141.
Peter Gottschalk on Subjects of Modernity: Time-Space, Disciplines, Margins by Saurabh Dube, History and Theory 59, no. 1 (2020), 145-155.
Luther Obrock on The Making of Early Kashmir: Landscape and Identity in the Rajataraṅgiṇī by Shonaleeka Kaul, History and Theory 59, no. 1 (2020), 156-164.
ARTICLES
Robert Fredona and Sophus A. Reinert, "Leviathan and Kraken: States, Corporations, and Political Economy," History and Theory 59, no. 2 (2020), 167-187.
In our politico‐philosophical bestiary, no monster has historically been more prominent than the Leviathan, the whale of the Book of Job, transformed by Hobbes, which has long been ubiquitous as a metaphor or as a signifier in all intellectual traditions touching upon the political. Like the state itself, we argue, the Leviathan has played an outsized role in the way we theorize and imagine relations of sovereignty in the world. This essay seeks to add a new hermeneutical creature to the bestiary: the Kraken. Said to be huge and to lurk in Norway's icy waters, the Kraken first emerged in the accounts of natural philosophers in the eighteenth century, at the very moment when political economy was becoming the premier science of governance in Europe. Leviathan is an emblem of a kind of state that no longer exists and has never existed, and it remains our most potent emblem of the state's reification, a relentlessly compelling figure that has long blinded historians to alternate sovereignties within, across, and outside the physical territories of states. From stateless financial capital to multinational corporations acting like states on the world stage, such forms of sovereignty are an essential feature of the global politics we are now living. These forms are not new, nor is their emblem: the Kraken.
Juhan Hellerma, "Koselleck on Modernity, Historik, and Layers of Time," History and Theory 59, no. 2 (2020), 188-209.
In the scholarly reception of his work, Reinhart Koselleck's notion of modernity and his theory of multiple times have been cast as essentially at odds with each other. This article argues that although these positions are valid, Koselleck's writings can also accommodate an interpretation according to which the theory of multiple temporalities, or “layers of time,” provides theoretical ground for the modern understanding of time and history. Elaborating on this insight, the article shows the linkages sustaining the unity between Koselleck's formal theory of multiple times and his interpretation of modernity. To that end, I outline the main premises of the temporalization thesis that lies at the heart of Koselleck's theory of modernity, scrutinize his notion of Historik within which the framework “layers of time” belongs, and explore Niklas Olsen's and Helge Jordheim's interpretive accounts on how to conceive of the relationship between the two strands in Koselleck's thought. Ultimately, I argue that “layers of time” entails the formal conditions for historical acceleration, which is crucial for explaining the emergence of a specifically modern temporality wherein experience and expectation increasingly grow apart.
Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan, "Temporalities in Southeast Asian Historiography" History and Theory 59, no. 2 (2020), 210-226.
The challenge of globalizing historical theory requires that theorization be grounded in material from all parts of the world. Southeast Asia is a world region that is somewhat underrepresented in the theorization of history. The distinctive historical traditions of Southeast Asia present an opportunity to bring new insights to existing theories of history. In this article, I offer a theoretical approach to historical temporality that is grounded in close readings of texts from this region by focusing on how these texts construe temporality through choices of narrative organization. I develop a toolkit for analyzing the temporalities in historical texts from equatorial Southeast Asia (the region covering present‐day Indonesia and Malaysia), which includes a precise analytical vocabulary to fully account for their diversity. This approach leads to a theoretical stance that supersedes the conceptual dichotomies of linear/cyclical time and empty/full time, in favor of a more pluralistic understanding of temporalities. The grounded theory presented in this article is not only better suited to working with Southeast Asian materials, but it can also be placed in useful dialogue with existing theories, such as the narrativist approach of Hayden White and recent theorizations of the medieval historiography of Western Europe.
Timothy Crimmins, "Universal and Profane: The Historiographical Consequences of Natural Religion" History and Theory 59, no. 2 (2020), 227-254.
Natural religion in the eighteenth century was seemingly unhistorical or even antihistorical: it “dehistoricized” morality. It posited a morality that was uniform in all ages, not dependent on any particular revelation, watermarked onto the fabric of our nature, and accessible merely by the light of reason. Even so, natural religion played an important role in the secular historiographical turn in eighteenth‐century England. There was in fact an organic relationship between the two, one that historians have failed to articulate. Precisely because natural religion was thought to rest on timeless and universally valid rational foundations, it became possible to treat traditional religion (meaning above all, but not only, Christianity) as a subject of secular historical study, in the sense that it was subject to the same laws of historical knowledge and historical development as all other subjects of historical study, and left no room for miracles. A central figure in this conceptual relationship was Conyers Middleton, a once‐famous, now‐obscure Cambridge librarian. Middleton's account of natural religion has been swamped by the attention lavished on Matthew Tindal, and his turn to secular historiography lies in the shadows cast by Edward Gibbon. Yet Middleton played a crucial and distinctive role in laying historiographical foundations without which Gibbon could not have written as he did. His understanding of natural religion differed from that of other participants in the “deist controversy” in ultimately far‐reaching ways. Those differences explain why he could treat Cicero as a kind of saint in the church of natural religion, reversing, as it were, the elevation of the Bible above Cicero that Augustine had put into effect at the beginning of medieval history. They explain above all why Middleton could approach the history of Christianity in a manner that anticipated both Voltaire and Gibbon and made their historical writings possible.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Babette Babich on Being with the Dead: Burial, Ancestral Politics, and the Roots of Historical Consciousness by Hans Ruin, History and Theory 59, no. 2 (2020), 255-269.
Paula Findlen on The Matter of History by Timothy LeCain and History and Its Objects by Peter Miller, History and Theory 59, no. 2 (2020), 270-282.
Q. Edward Wang on Debating New Approaches to History, edited by Marek Tamm and Peter Burke, History and Theory 59, no. 2 (2020), 283-302.
Jay Winter on The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War by Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers, History and Theory 59, no. 2 (2020), 303-307.
ARTICLES
William Rankin, "How the Visual Is Spatial: Contemporary Spatial History, Neo-Marxism, and the Ghost of Braudel,” History and Theory 59, no. 3 (2020), 311-342.
Contemporary spatial history is founded on the potential for maps and other visualizations to show the historical constructedness of space, usually in broadly neo‐Marxist terms, yet neo‐Marxist geographical theory is famously critical of visual representation, especially mapping. At stake in this contradiction isn't just the relationship between digital enthusiasm and spatial theory (or the wider spatial turn), but the theoretical status of the visual itself in spatial scholarship. It raises a crucial question: how does visual material—everything from today's statistical maps and cutting‐edge data graphics to the broader use of primary‐source photographs or drawings—in fact shape our understanding of space, and what theoretical work does it do? By extension, how can humanists make critical theoretical interventions through their own visual production? This article proposes an analytic vocabulary of “visual argument” grounded in an image‐focused rereading of two canonical bodies of work: the neo‐Marxist theory most cited by spatial history (Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Doreen Massey, and Edward Soja) and the conspicuously uncited work of Fernand Braudel. By focusing on how these authors’ illustrations make claims about spatial subjectivity and the historicity of space—especially through visual relationships of background and foreground—I argue for a new way of understanding and responding to this work and to the visual project of spatial history today. A visual analysis highlights not only the limitations of neo‐Marxism but also the pervasiveness of certain assumptions—shared across the neo‐Marxists, Braudel, and digital visualization—about temporality, the natural/human dichotomy, and the methodological tensions between argument and visualization. I present my own mapping of Phoenix as one possibility for an argument‐driven rethinking of familiar visual commitments, which also suggests a broader meditation on the relationship between visual and textual scholarship.
Vanita Seth, "The Origins of Racism: A Critique of the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 59, no. 3 (2020), 343-368.
This essay has two objectives. First, it seeks to engage critically with contemporary scholarship on the origins of racism through the lens of an older debate centered around the history of ideas. Specifically, it argues that Quentin Skinner's influential critique of the history of ideas can help identify the pitfalls of our current fascination with the origins of racism—most particularly when such origins are traced back to antiquity and the European pre‐ and early modern periods. In pursuing its second objective, the essay turns from histories cataloguing ancient, medieval, and early modern racisms to objections leveled, in these same literatures, against scholarship defending the modernity of race. The defense of a premodern origin to race is, I argue, not just a historical argument but a contemporary politics embedded in a narrative of continuity that insists on the relevance of the medieval past to the racial configurations of our current moment. Rather than demonstrating continuity and sameness, this essay seeks to draw attention to alternative modes of historicizing that are more attentive to the alterity of the past.
FORUM: DECOLONIZING HISTORIES IN THEORY AND PRACTICE
COEDITED BY WARWICK ANDERSON AND GABRIELA SOTO LAVEAGA
Warwick Anderson, "Decolonizing Histories in Theory and Practice: An Introduction,” History and Theory 59, no. 3 (2020), 369-375.
Michelle Murphy, "Some Keywords toward Decolonial Methods: Studying Settler Colonial Histories and Environmental Violence from Tkaronto,” History and Theory 59, no. 3 (2020), 376-384.This article provides keywords and reflections for decolonial methods, drawing on insights from the Indigenous‐led Land and the Refinery project, which concerns the history of Canada's Chemical Valley. This project is crucially organized as Indigenous people co‐researching the Imperial Oil Refinery, not as academics studying Aamjiwnaang, and asks how Indigenous and decolonial methods might reorient the use of archives toward other futures. Together, the keywords begin to outline a particular place‐based theory of change within decolonial historical practice.
Anja Kanngieser and Zoe Todd, "From Environmental Case Study to Environmental Kin Study,” History and Theory 59, no. 3 (2020), 385-393.This article explores the relationships among place, knowing, and being in environmental histories. Grounding ourselves in the work of Indigenous scholars from North America and the Pacific, we propose a method of listening and attuning that can attend to the dislocation and abstraction often found in work addressing ecocide and environmental violence. Against the ubiquity of the case‐study approach, we propose a method we call “kin study,” which invites more embedded, expansive, material, and respectful relations to people and lands. This article frames the issues and then proposes, though a dialogue, how kin studies may be constituted and applied in studying environmental histories of the Pacific and Western Canada.
Tom Özden-Schilling, “Technopolitics in the Archive: Sovereignty, Research, and Everyday Life,” History and Theory 59, no. 3 (2020), 394-402.This article explores the place of the archive in the context of land claims research. This essay develops a critical approach to identity technopolitics with the aim of helping historians working with indigenous communities to ask new kinds of questions about the relationships and subject positions opened up by archivization and the myriad other technologies of land claims research. Since researchers first began preparing for the Canadian case, Delgamuukw’ and Gisday'wa v. The Queen, four decades ago, the immense stores of documentary evidence generated for the trial have given ground to numerous new claims and conflicts. Tracing the experiences of one prominent Gitxsan historical researcher who has leveraged his own archive and expertise to build genealogies for hundreds of individuals, I explore the intimate disappointments and impossible obligations that indigenous historians must mediate.
Timothy Neale and Emma Kowal, "‘Related’ Histories: On Epistemic and Reparative Decolonization,” History and Theory 59, no. 3 (2020), 403-412.What are we talking about when we talk about decolonization? In this article, we differentiate between epistemic and reparative decolonizing approaches and then consider the differences between postcolonial and decolonial modes in two fields: histories of science and, separately, museology. Touring these fields leads us to affirm the need for scholars to consider the consequences of their allegiances to different critical movements and moments. Whatever it will mean to decolonize history, we conclude, it is both a necessary and necessarily relational enterprise with material and conceptual excesses to address.
Juno Salazar Parreñas, “From Decolonial Indigenous Knowledges to Vernacular Ideas in Southeast Asia,” History and Theory 59, no. 3 (2020), 413-420.Relations between humans and orangutans in present‐day Malaysia show the historiographic and ethnographic problem of using the term “Indigenous knowledge.” Iban and Malay relationships with nonhuman animals are intersubjective and informed by particular subject formations, and indigeneity explains only one kind of relation. To analyze their relations simply in terms of decolonial Indigenous knowledge would be a culturally imperialist act from the Americas: decoloniality is specific to the development of racialization in the West via white settler colonialism, antiblack enslavement, and anti‐Indigenous exploitation and genocide. Instead, this article draws from southern African historical sources and Southeast Asian ethnographic sources to advocate a historiography and ethnography of vernaculars, both vernacular knowledge and vernacular ignorance, in order to avoid autochthonous and potentially xenophobic claims.
Miranda Johnson, “Toward a Genealogy of the Researcher as Subject in Post/Decolonial Pacific Histories,” History and Theory 59, no. 3 (2020), 421-429.Recent discussion has drawn out some important differences between postcolonial and decolonial theories. The former are associated primarily with the work of South Asian scholars working in cultural, literary, or historical studies; decolonial scholarship, by contrast, is located in Latin America and has emerged from sociological critiques of dependency theory. Shifting the locus of debate to the Pacific centers another subject in globalizing critiques of colonialism: the historian in indigenous communities. In this article, I examine how the role of the researcher is conceptualized in Linda Tuhiwai Smith's landmark work Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999). Revealing tensions between objectivity and intersubjectivity, on the one hand, and between essentialist identity and hybridity, on the other, I ask why Smith's book hinges on dichotomizing nonindigenous and indigenous researchers, who are by turn enabled or constrained in a colonial present. I situate this late twentieth‐century subject in a genealogy of indigenous engagement with history and anthropology in New Zealand and contemporary problems of historical justice.
Warwick Anderson, “Finding Decolonial Metaphors in Postcolonial Histories,” History and Theory 59, no. 3 (2020), 430-438.This is a reflection on the close relations of the writing of postcolonial histories and recent decolonial critiques, and on the tensions between them. Postcolonial historical analysis often has been preoccupied with hybridity and mixture, conjugation and adaptation, exchange and interaction—with subversions of sovereignty in contact zones, borderlands, and on the beach. As a structuralist formulation, decolonial historical binarism in contrast echoes Indigenous politics of self‐determination, even suggesting at times an ontological decoupling of settler and Indigenous histories and practices. Stringent decolonization of historical inquiry—implying the sabotage and superseding of settler colonial linguistic, narrative, and temporal conventions and the disturbing of standardized assumptions about evidence, agency, and authorship—would give us an epistemic assemblage perhaps not recognizable as “history.” Even if desirable, is that imaginable now except as metaphor or ideal?
Gabriela Soto Laveaga , "Moving From, and Beyond, Invented Categories: Afterwords,” History and Theory 59, no. 3 (2020), 439-447.The decentering of narratives is no longer sufficient for bringing the past into sharper focus. As a discipline, we must contend with the continued power imbalance in the production and circulation of histories. It is necessary to give equal valence to histories produced by embracing a range of historical methods, many of which the essays in this forum explore. Doing so expands understandings of what counts as theory in our histories and their obligations in society.
REVIEW ESSAYS
Marek Tamm on Défaire la tyrannie du présent: Temporalités émergentes et futurs inédits by Jérôme Baschet, History and Theory 59, no. 3 (2020), 448-458.
Jaume Aurell on History as Wonder: Beginning with Historiography by Marnie Hughes-Warrington, History and Theory 59, no. 3 (2020), 459-470.
David Carrier on What Was History Painting and What Is It Now?, edited by Mark Salber Phillips and Jordan Bear, History and Theory 59, no. 3 (2020), 471-481.
Suzanne Marchand on Ideas in Time: The Longue Durée in Intellectual History by John Potts, History and Theory 59, no. 3 (2020), 482-489.
Maria Grever on The Work of History: Constructivism and a Politics of the Past by Kalle Pihlainen, History and Theory 59, no. 3 (2020), 490-496.
HISTORY OF KNOWLEDGE
Helge Jordheim and David Gary Shaw, Opening Doors: A Turn to Knowledge, History and Theory, Theme Issue 58 (December 2020), 3-18.
Lively debates have taken place about what the history of knowledge can offer that other approaches cannot. In this article we argue that the advantage of the history of knowledge is its capacity to open up new possibilities for historical work and reflection that are deeply infused with interdisciplinary perspectives and tools. This is important because, within both the academy and in society and politics more widely, we are actually within a knowledge turn or moment in which the stakes of delivering and challenging knowledge are unusually high. At the level of events, experiences, and concepts, the knowledge turn needs examination. The articles in this theme issue also show how issues within the theory of history and the theory of knowledge are ripe for deeper understanding, as both explore deeply issues and doubts about such things as historical development and progress and the existence and importance of knowledge itself, its relation to science and humanistic endeavors, as well as its European, Western, and global historical contexts. These articles also advance a knowledge toolkit of great attraction for historians of all subfields: notions like disknowledge, delay, conceptual and logical comparison, media, materiality, information, and networks are dynamic and productive. In the end, we argue that historical knowledge is itself a key concept that is open to present and past, necessarily constructive in orientation, and skeptical in approach without denying that some types of knowing are more powerful than others and that knowledge as a concept and topic strengthens our interdisciplinary historical and cultural work.
Federico Marcon, "The Critical Promises of the History of Knowledge: Perspectives from East Asian Studies," History and Theory, Theme Issue 58 (December 2020), 19-47.
This essay, written from the vantage point of a historian specialized in early modern Japan, asks if and in what capacity the history of knowledge offers an advantage for our understanding of the past compared to established historiographical forms. It accounts for the intellectual relevance of this genre of history and concludes with a strong endorsement of its self‐reflexive methodology. It also contends that historical research on East Asia is of inestimable value for this historiographical approach because of its resistance to uncritically universalizing Eurocentric terminology and because of its direct engagement with transcultural translation of both archival sources and heuristic apparatus. Historians working on knowledge production in East Asia or in other parts of the “non‐Western” world must constantly question the effects of their interpretive categories on the topics and archives they study; they are thus accustomed to the epistemological self‐reflection that this new approach seems to require. The essay concludes by advocating metaphorical comparison as a formal model that best expresses historians’ heuristic practices.
Jeremy A. Greene, "Knowledge in Medias Res: Toward a Media History of Science," History and Theory, Theme Issue 58 (December 2020), 48-66.
Media history offers an essential but easily overlooked set of tools for understanding scientific facts as historical processes. This essay argues that the “when” of the specific media through which scientific knowledge is created, disseminated, and taken up as authoritative has played a central part in the “how,” “what,” and “why” of scientific fact‐making as well as our iterative attempts to historicize science, medicine, and technology. Attending explicitly to how new (and old) media engage in the production, circulation, and consumption of knowledge can further help the historian understand dilations and contractions in the threshold of participation in scientific fact‐making itself. Manuscripts, printing presses, cheap newsprint, and open‐source digital publications open up and shut down possibilities of who gets to learn about science as news, who gets to act as a nodal point in the circulation of scientific knowledge, and who is able to make and share an observation about the natural world in the first place. Centering the media of scientific knowledge‐in‐the‐making offers a means of relating the history of science to the broader history of knowledge not in terms of absolute difference but in terms of the specificity of mediation.
Lisa Gitelman, "Popular Kinematics: Technical Knowing in the Age of Machines," History and Theory, Theme Issue 58 (December 2020), 67-85.
The history of knowledge easily includes the history of science but has a harder time including the history of technology. Although the historical profession has productively explored how technology is knowledge, the framing of this equivalence can itself be historicized, and nineteenth‐century analyses of machines offer one opportunity to do so. Taking popular illustrated representations of machine components—mechanisms—as its examples, this essay pursues a mechanic's answer to the question of how technology is knowledge. Henry T. Brown's immensely popular Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements (1868) draws on a long publication tradition to present mechanical motion as the key to understanding machines, a notion that would be revised by practitioners of the emergent science of kinematics and profession of mechanical engineering. Brown's book takes up but does not solve the problem of representing mechanical movement on the page, and it exhibits contradictory commitments to technology as ideational—invented by individuals—and technology as the cumulative expressions of human culture. Itself the product of the latest industrial printing techniques, Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements represents technical knowing as a species of intuitive visualization stimulated by text‐image correlation as well as by experiencing machines themselves.
Vera Keller, "Into the Unknown: Clues, Hints, and Projects in the History of Knowledge," History and Theory, Theme Issue 58 (December 2020), 86-110.
This essay argues for integrating the history of ignorance into the history of knowledge. Through a case study of the (failed) project of colonial Virginian sericulture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it explores the entanglement of various forms of knowledge and ignorance. These comprise forms of knowledge that have been presented as certain, such as clues and rules, and empirical, such as observations and questionnaires. They also include forms highlighting probabilism and risk‐benefit analyses, such as projects, and forms that made a virtue of uncertainty, such as hints. By exploring the cultural meanings and social functions of these forms of knowledge, this essay illustrates their coproduction with sociopolitical ideals, norms, and biases. The history of unspecified ignorance—including knowledge suppressed due to racism, misogyny, and other social biases—intersects with the history of these agnotological and epistemological tools. Such intersections collectively make up the history of knowledge.
Johan Östling, "Circulation, Arenas, and the Quest for Public Knowledge: Historiographical Currents and Analytical Frameworks," History and Theory, Theme Issue 58 (December 2020), 111-126.
The recent surge in publications on the history of knowledge may obscure the fact that there are several parallel understandings of what the field is. In this article, I discern five major historiographical directions in contemporary scholarship regarding the history of knowledge. The analytical framework that has so far attracted the most attention is the circulation of knowledge. As productive as it is, the very concept of circulation is in need of both elaboration and theorization. In order to achieve this, I focus on the public circulation of knowledge. This kind of circulation implies that knowledge should be studied as a broad, societal phenomenon. There are a number of possible methodological approaches to study the processes, situations, or contexts where knowledge has or gains public significance. Here I focus on and develop the concept of public arenas of knowledge, which might be virtual, physical, or hybrid spaces. Drawing on several new studies, I demonstrate how different public arenas of knowledge functioned during the postwar period and how they were part of a larger infrastructure of knowledge.
Shadi Bartsch, "The Rationality Wars: The Ancient Greeks and the Counter-Enlightenment in Contemporary China," History and Theory, Theme Issue 58 (December 2020), 127-143.
Amid contemporary discussions about the relationship of logic to knowing, an entirely different conversation about the moral status of rationality is taking place between Chinese and Western thinkers. Although most would agree that deductive thought has been a highly privileged feature of the Western philosophical tradition since Plato (for good or bad), the question of its role in Confucian thought is less clear—and considerations of this topic tend to be highly charged. In turn, the question of whether the West has been tarred by a Weberian descent into a merely instrumental form of rationality has emerged as a hot topic in Chinese scholarship. However, the question merely supplies a way of engaging in cross‐cultural comparisons that are political rather than genuinely philosophical in nature. This article explores the sparring over terminology and concepts that characterizes this recent trend in scholarship. Ultimately, it suggests that instead of Chinese scholars appropriating the ideas of Western authors in order to raise anti‐Western specters of spiritual derangement, both traditions would be better off discarding this outdated and essentializing terminology in the first place.
Suzanne Marchand, "Weighing Context and Practices: Theodor Mommsen and the Many Dimensions of Nineteenth-Century Humanistic Knowledge," History and Theory, Theme Issue 58 (December 2020), 144-167.
This essay argues that the history of knowledge, especially when applied to humanistic knowledge making, ought not to study practices of knowing to the exclusion of the peculiarities of individuals and the specifics of the wider contexts in which they operate. It uses the life and work of the Roman historian Theodor Mommsen as a case study, sketching first his qualities as a writer and political actor formed by the particularities of the post‐Romantic era. Showing that Mommsen belongs to the world of realist writers and liberal nationalist reformers, this essay then demonstrates how much these aspects of his thought‐world resonated with and informed the ways in which he practiced as a scholar. This essay aims to remind historians of the humanities that a focus on practices of knowing might bring us into exciting conversations with historians of science, but we ought not to lose touch with our colleagues in general and intellectual history.
Clifford Siskin, "Enlightenment, Information, and the Copernican Delay: A Venture into the History of Knowledge," History and Theory, Theme Issue 58 (December 2020), 168-183.
This essay pursues the history of knowledge in the form of what Francis Bacon called a “literary history”—a “story of learning” that tracks “the antiquities and originals of knowledges.” It focuses on the changing interrelations of information and knowledge from the seventeenth century to the present day in order to identify a fundamental continuity in a knowledge project that links the Enlightenment to our own era of quantum computation. At the core of that project has been Bacon's and Robert Boyle's dreams of re‐making the world through a “handshake” between the intellectual and physical worlds. Quantum theory tells us that the lingua franca that realizes that handshake is information. I track that realization from the simultaneous emergence of newspapers and modern science 350 years ago to today's moment of fake news and quantum computation. In doing so, I identify a feature of the history of knowledge that is applicable to other ventures into that history: a taxonomy of “delays” in explanatory knowledge caused by mismatches between concepts and technologies.
Cover image: “The Destruction of Leviathan,” by Gustave Doré (1865)
