Social and Cultural History

This paper illuminates the role played by Sicilian cities in state building in the late Middle Ages through their involvement in the intense process of negotiations between the king and his subjects. This study heads in the opposite direction of the interpretations that negate the existence of municipal freedom and allege the existence of an exclusively top-down model of power relationships between king and kingdom. The focus is on one of the main royal officials in local government—the capitaneus or captain, who was intended to be the king’s instrument of control. The captain gradually came to represent the municipal will and his role was defined by decision-making interaction between the king and local governments. The dynamics surrounding the captaincy go well beyond the local sphere and will lead us to address the positive effects of the encounter of various political traditions in the Crown of Aragon. This in turn, made the establishment of new political balances possible, which had a crucial role in government building in Sicily

From the mid sixteenth to the mid seventeenth centuries small wooden plates, or trenchers, were used to serve special sweetmeats and sugared fruits to guests at the ‘banquet’ course held at the conclusion of meals in prosperous English households.  Painted and gilded with flowers, images and written texts that were often biblical or moralising but sometimes bawdy, the trenchers were intended to provoke discussion amongst the diners, encourage conviviality and provide prompts for story-telling.  The paper argues that understanding these decorative objects can help towards a reconstruction of the ephemeral spectacle of the banquet as theatre within elite dining cultures of the time.

In 1927, the French essayist Julien Benda published his famous attack on the intellectual corruption of the age, ”La Trahison des clercs”. (...) Benda tells us that he uses the term “clerc” in “the medi eval sense” to mean “scribe” — someone we would now call a member of the intelligentsia, an“intellectual.” Academics and journalists, pundits, moralists, and pontificators of all varieties are in this sense clercs. The English translation, The Treason of the Intellectuals, sums it up neatly.
The “treason” in question was the betrayal by the “clerks” of their vocation as men devoted to the life of the mind. (Roger Kimball)

This article tells the story of the friendship between the late Belgian theatre director and author, Eric De Volder, and Turkey, more specifically, the fishing village Karaburun, the most nordic point on the peninsula in the İzmir province, and one of the most western points of Anatolia, on the coastline of the Aegean Sea. The story is based on anecdotes and archival materials, and has at least three protagonists: that of his wife, photographer and visual artist, Tania Desmet; his friend, director, cofounder of Theater RAST in Amsterdam, and translator of three of his plays, Şaban Ol; and Karaburun itself, which delivers the setting and the mise-en-scène in which their encounters were perhaps less coincidental than that the protagonists could ever imagine. Eric De Volder's story in Karaburun is focused around themes of authenticity, intercultural contact, work process, and social history. The article ends with a short reflection on the politics of friendship (Derrida 1994) through Eric De Volder's work and the time he spent in Turkey.

The central contention of this article is that early nineteenth-century Irish landlords were constrained in their ability to control their estates by the prospect of peasant resistance. The apex of that resistance took the form of what are generically known as whiteboy movements, and this article examines the impact of one particular such movement, the Whitefeet, active in the East Midlands and SouthEast in the early 1830s. The article argues that two forms of landlord versus tenant conflicts can be identified: an absolute form, in which landlords (or subletting rentiers called middlemen) behaved as if they had absolute rights over their properties and were the victims of retaliatory violence; and a negotiated form, in which landlords (or their agents) proceeded in a more restrained, and piecemeal fashion, and compromised in the face of opposition. The fact that the magistracy, at least in some instances, condemned the practitioners of absolute conflict would suggest that more measured approaches were the socially accepted norm, precisely because of the potential for retaliatory violence. The article will conclude with a discussion framing the foregoing in terms of moral economy. It will be argued that the balance between landlord power and tenant resistance created a grudging acceptance of respective rights.

This article reviews recent publications in the fields of women's and gender history in Russia, and assesses their contribution to the revitalization of Russian historiography and the search for new approaches and research methods over the last fifteen years. The impact of these works is considered in the context of current debates about social and cultural approaches to the history of women and gender, and about the role of the individual and the collective, the peculiar and the universal in history. The author underlines the importance of the fruitful dialogue of Russian historians with representatives of the leading Western schools and the role of the new periodicals (such as Odysseus, Dialogue with Time, Adam and Eve and Casus) that stimulated these developments. The rise of women's history and, later, of gender history during the past three decades has introduced a new perspective to the writing of history and led to some important innovations. The development of the concept of gender has helped to shift the focus from ‘women’ to socially and culturally constructed notions of sexual difference and has stimulated fundamental critiques of the epistemological assumptions of historiography. Women's and gender history is seen as a strategic jumping-off point for the development of a new ‘general’ history able to integrate personal, local, social and cultural history.

Introduction The volume in which this essay sits explores the long and social relationship between humans and alcohol, but, of course, no one really orders a pint of alcohol to drink. As Michael Dietler (this volume, Chapter 8), Lewis Daly (this volume, Chapter 9), and Asher Rosinger (this volume, Chapter 10) make clear, people have created a huge range of fermented beverages over time, with very different tastes, qualities, and uses. We also know that humans have not routinely drunk alcoholic beverages from their hands, nor (with the notable recent exception of the beer bottle and can) do they tend to drink from storage or serving vessels. Yet, by focusing on the manufacture of, trade in, and physical and psychological effects of alcoholic beverages, scholars can sometimes appear to imply that, in lived experience, alcohol drinking looked something like this: Moreover, intoxicating drinks are not, of themselves, inherently pleasurable. Learning to like wine, beer, tea and coffee, and how much and how best to drink them, has long been part of growing up, in Britain as elsewhere. The taste for, and effects of, alcoholic drinks is a continually evolving and contingent process-as much over the short lifespan of an individual life as it is for human societies over aeons of time. (Burnett, 1999; Courtwright, 2001; Herring et al., 2013; Withington & McShane, 2014) As we reach for a more nuanced and materialized social history of human drinking practices , physicist and gender theorist Karen Barad has usefully refocused our attention on the performativity of matter in social situations. She proposes a contestation of the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real [and of] the unexamined habits of mind that grant language and other forms of representation more power in determining our ontologies than they deserve. (Barad, 2003: 802)

Özet
Osmanlı Devleti’nde, eğitim alanında görülen yenileşme hareketleri içerisinde önemli bir yer tutan Rüşdiye mektepleri, zamanla ülkenin en yaygın ve en önemli eğitim kurumu hâline gelmiştir. Bu çalışmanın konusu olan Tarsus Rüşdiyesi de kuruluşunda itibaren Cumhuriyet yıllarına kadar şehrin en önemli Müslüman okulu olma özelliğini korumuştur. Ancak bu süreçte yapısal olarak birçok değişikliğe uğrayan okul, zamanla klasik rüşdiyeden ibtidaî programlı rüşdiye statüsüne geçirilmiş daha sonra da ilkokula dönüştürülmüştür. Tarsus Rüşdiyesi’nin bu değişim süreci ile ilgili en önemli kayıtlar Tarsus’ta bulunan Sakarya İlköğretim Okulunun arşivinde bulunmaktadır. Devlet Arşivleri Genel Müdürlüğü’nün envanterine girmemiş ve adeta bir köşede saklı kalmış olan bu arşivde, Tarsus Rüşdiyesi başta olmak üzere Rehber-i Füyûz, Memba-ı İrfan, Erkek Numûne ve Misak-ı Milli Okullarına ait sene sonu imtihan cetvelleri, muallim sicil defterleri ve künye defterleri bulunmaktadır. Bu vesikalardan eğitim-öğretimin süresi, okutulan dersler ve bu derslerde yıldan yıla yapılan değişiklikler, öğrenci sayıları ve başarı oranları gibi birçok konuda istatistikî veriye ulaşılmıştır. Bu verilerin değerlendirilmesiyle de Osmanlı Devleti’nde sıradan bir taşra rüşdiyesinin nitelikleri belirlenmiş, açılışından kapanışına kadar geçen süreçte, değişimi ve dönüşüm evreleri ortaya konmaya çalışılmıştır.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Tarsus, Rüşdiye, Rehber-i Füyûz Mektebi, Erkek Numune Mektebi, Misak-ı Milli İlkokulu

FROM RUSHDIYE OF TARSUS TO MISAK-I MILLI PRIMARY SCHOOL
DEVELOPMENT AND TRANSFORMATION OF A SCHOOL
Abstract
Rushdiye schools which has an important place among the reform movements on education has been most common and important education establishment of Ottoman Empire. Rushdiye of Tarsus as a subject of this study maintained its role as most important Muslim school of the city since its foundation to the first years of Turkish Republic. On the other hand school has been exposed many structural varieties in this process and has been completed its mission as a primary school while it had started as a Rushdiye. The most important records about Rushdiye of Tarsus were at the archives of Sakarya Primary School in Tarsus. Nowadays final exam statement, teacher registry notes and personal records about Rehberi Füyuz, Memba-ı İrfan, Erkek Numune schools and most of all Rushdiye of Tarsus has the most excessive documentation of all. Statistical data about length of academic year, lessons, and changes of lesson applied year after year, number of students, successes of student and lots of related issues were obtained from these statements which are the main source of investigation. This study aims to indicate characteristics of an ordinary country rushdiye, development and transformation stage within the duration from its beginning to its closing with evaluationing these data.
Key Words: Tarsus, Rushdiye, Rehber-i Füyuz School, Erkek Numune School, Misak-ı Milli Primary School

В современном мире существуют три суперцивилизации – это египетско-месопотамская
разделяющая суперцивилизация, индийская суперцивилизация множества и китайская объединяющая суперцивилизация. В данной статье описаны символы, а также материальные и  духовные характеристики этих суперцивилизаций.

Claudius made substantial changes to the laws governing women as he "upgraded the mother's right to inherit. This concession to her contribution to the family was also a move in line to the 'cognatic' principle of wills, which tended to spread goods beyond the male line of agnatic succession.  Claudius also denied the right of slave owners to kill their slaves because they were old or had a physical impairment.

This edited volume maps the field between the history of emotions and capitalism. It asks how bodies and affects are formed in liberal market societies? And, conversely, what roles do affects and bodies play in the genesis, stabilization and development of market societies? These are the questions examined by the authors in several insightful and theoretically ambitious case studies. The contributions concentrate on developments in Europe, the USA and Australia from the 19th century to the present.

‘When a person dies, a library is lost’ is an adage in oral history that underpins and motivates this thesis. Not only is personal history lost but also social history. This thesis explores the use of oral history methods to record personal and professional histories in Solomon Islands and to recover post-war social history that might otherwise be lost or forgotten.
The thesis presents the life histories and oral testimonies of 27 Islanders and seven expatriates who lived and worked in Solomon Islands during the colonial and independence eras and relates their experiences to the post-war social history of Solomon Islands. The life histories and oral testimonies are presented as three collective case studies. The first case study includes four individuals—two Indigenous and two expatriate—who were prominent in Solomon Islands government and civil society. The second case study includes five Australian missionary nurses and relates to their recollections of their work at Fauabu hospital on Malaita from 1968 to 1984. The third case study records the career histories of 25 nurses who trained during the colonial era and became nursing officers after Solomon Islands achieved Independence in 1978. The interview narratives were summarised and supplemented with other source materials to produce individual, group and collective histories. These histories illuminate multiple connections, changes and continuities in Solomon Islands since the Pacific War ended in 1945.
The thesis includes analysis of the impact that my personal background has had on the research. My career as a health care professional and social researcher in Solomon Islands since 1989 positioned me as a (former) insider to the country’s health care systems. I was an outsider in terms of Solomon Islands identities and cultures. My status as both an insider and outsider has inevitably influenced the contents of the oral histories and social history produced. 
The thesis presents a new model of oral history methodology divided into in six ‘domains’—visual, spatial, oral-aural, textual, numerical and digital—covering three phases of oral history—primary (recording and collection), secondary (curating and processing), and tertiary (analysis and interpretation). I also develop a social history framework which situates individual and group lives within their wider social, historical and geographical contexts, and viewed from the micro (personal and group), meso (social, institutional and cultural) and macro (national and international) perspectives.

The thesis examines literature from oral history, social history and sociology—in particular, C. Wright Mills’ Sociological Imagination (1959) and R.W. Connell’s Southern Theory (2007). I also draw on, and draw attention to, Solomon Islands history and anthropology, and decolonisation of Pacific history and research. Pacific scholars such as Tracey Banivanua Mar, David Gegeo, Kabini Sanga, Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Teresia Teaiwa argue that Pacific history and research by outsiders often ignore or diminish Indigenous history and peoples. Decolonising oral history methods requires methods and protocols that are culturally appropriate and the engagement of Indigenous people in all phases of the research process. However well-intentioned outsiders might be, using oral history methods in academic research can recolonise (or neocolonise) Pacific oral history by adopting hegemonic academic methodologies and protocols. 
The contributions made by this thesis fall into three categories. Firstly, it collects individual and collective histories and illuminates multiple levels and contexts of social history in post-war Solomon Islands. Secondly, it contributes to the history of nursing and medical services, revealing the extent to which they have been shaped by the colonial legacy, as well as the extent to which they continue to be influenced by international agencies in the post-independence era. Thirdly, it presents two heuristics—a conceptual model of oral history and a social history framework—that bring clarity and coherence to the complexities of oral history research and to the social history of Solomon Islands.

This is the contents and introduction for my book by Amsterdam University Press:
Corporeality and immersion in material environment make people inherently spatial beings and their communities spatially ordered. This book explores urban space in Turku in the seventeenth-century kingdom of Sweden. It studies people from all segments of society, dismantles the dichotomy of public and private, and diversifies the perspective to early modern urban space, order, and hierarchy. It shows that studying mundane practices relating to gates, fences, houses, and rooms unveils the ways in which communities and individuals built their lives in and through their material environment. Order, Materiality and Urban Space in the Early Modern Kingdom of Sweden shows how local ordering of dwelling was not necessarily patriarchal, and reveals the ways in which the home was simultaneously open and shared as well as personal and demarcated. In its examination of banishment, it reveals a culture of inclusion; and in its inquiry into entering and exiting the town, it exposes constant mobility and control of movement.

http://en.aup.nl/download.php?file=Flyer%20-%20Order,%20Materiality%20and%20Urban%20Space%20in%20the%20Early%20Modern%20Kingdom%20of%20Sweden%202017.pdf

In this anthology chapter, I relate Miwon Kwon's different definitions of sites and site specificity to the field of street art. The case being studied is a photograph of two stencil works by the British artist Banksy and the artist collective Faile respectively.

Gli anni Ottanta del Novecento, considerati da più parti del ‘disimpegno’ sembrano cambiare di segno se si guarda alle profonde trasformazioni che hanno riguardato l’infanzia e l’adolescenza. La straordinaria espansione delle tv private, l’affermarsi dei videogame, lo scompaginamento del panorama musicale con l’emergere della cultura underground, la trasformazione profonda dell’editoria rivolta a bambini e ragazzi, hanno segnato una profonda linea di demarcazione tra un prima e un dopo quella che Antonio Faeti ha definito «la svolta». Il volume intende affrontare i cambiamenti che hanno interessato i bambini e i ragazzi nell’arco di un ventennio – da inizio anni Ottanta a fine anni Novanta – al fine di restituire la complessità di un’epoca ricchissima di implicazioni nella storia sociale e culturale della nostra contemporaneità.

The eighties of the twentieth century that are considered by many parts of the ‘disengagement’ seem to change sign if we look at the profound transformations that have affected childhood and adolescence. The extraordinary expansion of private TV, the rise of video games, the disruption of the music scene with the emergence of the underground culture, the profound transformation of the publishing sector aimed at children and young people, marked a deep line of demarcation between a before and an after what Antonio Faeti called «the turning point». The book aims to address the changes that have affected children and young people over a period of twenty years – from the early ’80s to the late ’90s – in order to restore the complexity of an era rich in implications in the social and cultural history of our contemporaneity.

Within the realm of modernizing the humanities, the aspiration of art history to transform into a universal discipline and modern science manifests itself as a cultural, anthropological, and spatial orientation toward world art and universal history. The ground for this modern shift was prepared by the universalization of art as based on the concept of mutual cultural influences and historical transfers. At the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, art history joined forces with subbranches of history such as universal history and cultural history. Through these interdisciplinary linkages, it also opened to a new self-definition and revaluation as image history.

A close study of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik reveals Schumann's innovative role as an editor and the journal’s capacity to create a public platform where musicians negotiated the legitimacy of their aesthetic and intellectual positions. (in French)

The case study of the Stansfields of Inchfield, Walsden (Transactions, 159, 2010) illuminated the worlds of a Lancashire yeomanry family during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by utilising their (six) surviving wills and (four) inventories to explore their kinship networks, religious perspectives, and farming practices. Following discovery of a further (seventh) family will and (fifth) inventory and other evidences, it is possible to amend assumptions and ameliorate evaluations. The testament and inventory of John Stansfield (d.1681) facilitates (re-)construction of broader family relationships as well as evaluation of farming interests, usury, and literacy; whilst the case of the (unproven) will of Abraham Stansfield IV (1712–41) — as recorded in the notes of the antiquary F. R. Raines — raises questions concerning inheritance and identities.

Fashion in the twenty-first century in Iran has become highly inventive, surprisingly innovative, and undoubtedly glamorous. This is a surprise to some in the West who are accustomed to seeing images of large public gatherings of men and women in drab clothing engaged in religious or political activities that seem to be decidedly lacking in any elements that could be called “fashionable.”

Women in particular are portrayed in the all-enveloping
chador, usually solid black, which has become a Western trope for female repression. Fashion in Iran has, in fact, been remarkable for its flexibility and for its role in cultural communication. It has been directly responsive to social and political events in the country for as long
as documentation has existed. Iranians take enormous care in their dress, exhibiting a great deal of attention and individualism.

Every element of Iranian fashion is socially coded, making it easy to determine the political, social, and personal attitudes of the wearer. Because dress is such a potent public statement, attempts on the part of the Iranian state to impose standards and requirements
on the population have been a universal phenomenon over many centuries.

Before one can understand the current status of fashion in Iran, it is necessary to understand the elements from which fashion is constructed. These consist both of material element, like fabrics and tailoring, ethnic traditions from the many cultural groups that live under the rubric of Iranian culture, and historical social forces that have inspired the expression of Iranian identity
over the years. These three elements: material, cultural, and historical, have shifted and interacted with each other to create fashion variation.

This paper reconstructs the history of the reception across the Italian Catholic world of the first sex education film ever screened in Italy, the documentary “Helga” (Erich F. Bender, 1967). Most Catholics were initially fearful and skeptical about the film and its pedagogical potential, and condemned in particular the decision by the national censorship board that the film was “suitable for all”. However, as the weeks went on, and while the film surprisingly topped the box office, their position became less hostile, and more and more nuanced, to the point that some Catholic teachers started testing “Helga” with teenage classes on sex education.

Much of the French department of the Nord was occupied during the First World War. This book considers the ways in which occupied locals responded to and understood their situation, focusing on key behaviours adopted by locals and the beliefs surrounding such conduct. Key topics examined include forms of complicity, disunity, criminality, resistance, and the memory of the occupation. This local case study calls into question overly-patriotic readings of this experience, and suggests a new conceptual vocabulary to help understand certain civilian behaviours under military occupation. Drawing on extensive primary documentation, this book proposes that a dominant 'occupied culture' existed among locals: a moral-patriotic framework, born of both pre-war socio-cultural norms and daily interaction with the enemy, that guided conduct and was especially concerned with what was considered acceptable and unacceptable behaviour.

Bertellini traces the origins of American cinema's century-long fascination with Italy and Italian immigrants to the popularity of the pre-photographic aesthetic—the picturesque. Once associated with landscape painting in northern Europe, the picturesque came to symbolize Mediterranean Europe through comforting views of distant landscapes and exotic characters. Taking its cue from a picturesque stage backdrop from The Godfather Part II, Italy in Early American Cinema shows how this aesthetic was transferred from 19th-century American painters to early 20th-century American filmmakers. Italy in Early American Cinema offers readings of early films that pay close attention to how landscape representations that were related to narrative settings and filmmaking locations conveyed distinct ideas about racial difference and national destiny.

This paper focuses on the geographical factors in cultural aspects of early Bengal from the 5th to the 13th centuries CE. In South Asian history, this period has been considered as the time when significant socio-cultural transformations took place and regions in the subcontinent were moulded into distinct contours. These changes and dynamics lead to the socio-cultural formations of the later age. Bengal was one of these geographical regions where distinct geographical features played a role to make it a 'cultural territory' in the given chronological bracket. Therefore, the purpose of the paper is to bring together the variety of data available in the sources and to highlight the contributions of geography in aspects of socio-cultural trends in early Bengal.

This article on Fakir Mohan Senapati, the famous Odia writer in the last phase of the 19th century and the first two decades of 20th century is based archival records as well as on a reinterpretation of literary documents. The main focus of the article is to unravel the secret of the novel Chhamana Athaguntha which presents the landlordism and money lending activties in Odisha in the 19th century.

Os  estudos  dedicados  às  representações  de  tempo  na  Idade  Média  foram  um  dos  principais responsáveis pela projeção historiográfica do nome de Jacques Le Goff, uma vez que ocupam um lugar de destaque  em  suas  investigações  sobre  os  imaginários  e  mentalidades  medievais. Este  breve artigo tem por propósito estabelecer algumas reflexões críticas sobre um importante elemento constituinte da  produção de um dos mais  influentes e divulgados medievalistas do século XX e de conhecidas abordagens referentes à constituição histórica do Ocidente. Para tal elaboramos um esboço de revisão historiográfica seguida de um estudo de caso apoiado em fontes documentais do período medieval.