The Journal of American History has published an excellent discussion entitled ‘Interchange: The Promise of Digital History‘:

This “Interchange” discussion took place online over the course of several months in the winter of 2008. We wanted the “Interchange” to be free flowing; therefore we encouraged participants not only to respond to questions posed by the JAH but also to communicate with each other directly. What follows is an edited version of the very lively online conversation that resulted. We hope JAH readers find it of interest.

The participants:

Daniel J. Cohen is associate professor of history and director of the Center for History and New Media (chnm) at George Mason University.

Michael Frisch is professor of history and American studies and a senior research scholar at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

Patrick Gallagher is a leader in the field of exhibit design. He is principal of Gallagher & Associates, a professional design services firm.

Steven Mintz is director of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Teaching Center at Columbia University.

Kirsten Sword is assistant professor of history at Indiana University.

Amy Murrell Taylor is associate professor of history and an affiliate faculty member in the documentary studies program at the State University of New York (suny)–Albany.

William G. Thomas III, professor of history at the University of Nebraska, holds the John and Catherine Angle Chair in the Humanities.

William J. Turkel is assistant professor of history at the University of Western Ontario and director of digital infrastructure for the Network in Canadian History and Environment.

Some of the questions tackled:

How might we define digital history?

What is the promise of digital history?

How do we teach graduate students about digital history?

What are the essential skills in training a generation of digital historians?

What institutional resources are needed to sustain digital history?

Do digital history and museum exhibitions have something in common?

Does digital presentation lend a depth that does something text and photographs in a book can’t do?

How has technology changed your research methods? How could it?

What would you like to see technology do in your own research?

What is the role of journals (or academic publishing more broadly) in these new projects? How might journals embrace such projects?

How might digital history change the publication and dissemination of scholarship?

Looking forward five or ten years, how will the profession be different? How will the discipline be different? What changes will institutions have to make?

The March issue of History Compass is now available here!

Here is a keyword stream for this issue:

African Languages, Global English, Education in Colonial India, Transnational Labour History, Museum Studies in New Zealand, Honor and High Politics in Early Modern Ireland, History of Women in Scotland, Occupation of Germany in 1945, Family, the State, and Law, History of Science and Technology in Latin America, Arabic and Persian Mirrors for Princes Genre, Australian Historians and the Great War, Afghanistan Historiography and Pashtun Islam.

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HISTORY COMPASS
Issue: March 2009

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Africa

African Languages in the World of Global English (p 343-362)
Ângela Lamas Rodrigues

Asia

Education for All: Reassessing the Historiography of Education in Colonial India (p 363-375)
Catriona Ellis

Australasia & Pacific

Reflections on Writing Comparative and Transnational Labour History (p 376-394)
James Bennett

Museums and Museum Studies in New Zealand: A Survey of Historical Developments (p 395-413)
Conal McCarthy, Joanna Cobley

Britain & Ireland

From Irish Eineach to British Honor? Noble Honor and High Politics in Early Modern Ireland, 1500–1650 (p 414-430)
Brendan Kane

A New Trumpet? The History of Women in Scotland 1300–1700 (p 431-446)
Elizabeth Ewan

Europe

The Occupation of Germany in 1945 and the Politics of German History (p 447-473)
Gareth Pritchard

Family, the State, and Law in Early Modern and Revolutionary France (p 474-499)
Matthew Gerber

Caribbean & Latin America

Constructing a Narrative: The History of Science and Technology in Latin America (p 500-522)
María Portuondo

Middle & Near East

Surveying Recent Literature on the Arabic and Persian Mirrors for Princes Genre (p 523-538)
L. Marlow

Teaching & Learning Guides

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Whose War Was It Anyway? Some Australian Historians and the Great War (p 539-547)
Frank Bongiorno, Grant Mansfield

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Afghanistan Historiography and Pashtun Islam: Modernization Theory’s Afterimage (p 548-553)
James Caron

The first Compass Interdisciplinary Virtual Conference, to be held in October 2009, aims to help break academic boundaries – within and between disciplines, between theory and practice, approaches and methodologies – by providing a space for multi- and cross-disciplinary review on the theme of “Breaking Down Barriers“.

Abstracts are invited for survey/review papers from the disciplines of History, Literature, Philosophy, Religion, Geography, Linguistics, Sociology, and Social Psychology.

In particular, we welcome papers that explore:

Paradigms | Borders | The Environment | Communication | Justice/Human Rights

Abstract submission deadline: 1 January 2009
An Abstract submission template is available here.
Send to compassconference@wiley.com.

Registration Is free! Click here to register
Join the largest online meeting of minds in the social sciences and humanities!

Papers will be peer-reviewed. Each accepted paper will receive two formal commentaries plus comments from attendees and will be published in one of the Compass journals. Preference will be given to papers which hold interest for more than one discipline.

For more information on the conference and instructions for authors visit www.blackwell-compass.com/home_conference.

For more information on the Compass journals visit www.blackwell-compass.com.

Welcome to the second in a series of debates being hosted on the History Compass Theory & Methods Blog:

“What can GIS offer World History?”
Dates: 3-14 November, 2008

Using Jack Owens’ History Compass article, ‘Toward a Geographically-Integrated, Connected World History: Employing Geographical Information Systems (GIS)’ as a starting point this discussion looks at the role of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in World History.

Short position papers from each participant are posted below, both in PDF format and an onscreen version.

We invite all of you ‘attending’ online to comment and get involved in the discussion! Just use the comments feature on this post to share your views and respond to the issues raised.

Ian Gregory (University of Lancaster) – Position Paper PDF HTML

Stephen J. Hornsby (University of Maine) – Position Paper PDF HTML

Jack Owen (Idaho State University) – Article

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Ian Gregory (University of Lancaster) – Position Paper

Professor Owens is correct in his argument that Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have much to offer to the study of history. “Historical GIS,” as the use of GIS in historical research has become known, has been around for about a decade. In that time large strides have been taken in a number of areas: the development of databases such as the national historical GISs, the development of methodologies suitable for the unique challenges that historical data and historical research imposes on GIS, the growing development of a literature on historical GIS, and most importantly of all, research that uses GIS to provide new insights into historical topics where the interest is not in the use of GIS per se, but instead in the knowledge that it brings to our understanding of a topic within the discipline of history.

At its core a GIS is a type of database. What makes a GIS unique is the fact that each item of data in the database is linked to a co-ordinate-based representation of where the feature is located. This may be a point, a line, a polygon (that represents an area or zone), or a pixel. This apparently crude structure that owes its origins to quantitative, data-rich disciplines such as the environmental sciences has much to offer historical research because a GIS is able to provide information on what, where, and when. The GIS structures information according to location in space, can integrate disparate sources based on where they are, allows us to visualise geographical patterns through maps and other techniques, and allows us to conduct analyses in which the results vary according to where the data under study are located. This has the potential to greatly enhance our understanding of space, place, location and geography in historical research.

GIS is frequently seen as a mapping technology. While I believe this to be a major over-simplification, it serves as a useful starting point in understanding what GIS has to offer to historical research. A map is commonly thought of as the end point of a piece of research, in GIS however it is close to the beginning. As soon a GIS database is created it can be mapped. These maps can be re-defined, analysed and re-created throughout the research process. The map is a way of identifying and describing the spatial patterns within the database. The GIS is thus a descriptive technology. Its ability to describe spatial patterns, combined with a computer’s ability to handle large volumes of data, allows us to describe complex spatial patterns in an easily understandable way. At its simplest this poses questions to the researcher – “why is this happening here but not here?”

More broadly however GIS allows us to challenge existing historical orthodoxies. In a piece of research that I recently conducted I used GIS to map changes in infant mortality rates across England and Wales from the 1850s to the 1900s. The patterns were striking: the largest absolute declines occurred in the cities, this might be expected. The biggest proportional declines however occurred in rural parts of the south and east of the country with the rural north and west showing the smallest proportional falls. The conventional explanation for declines in infant mortality over this period is that they were driven by public health reforms. This does not fit with the patterns that the GIS reveals: rates started to fall before public health reforms were introduced and were occurring in areas where the public health movement would not be expected to have its biggest impact. This is not to say that public health reforms were not important, they probably were especially in urban areas. What it reveals is that to understand change in infant mortality over this period we need to understand that different things were happening in different places. The GIS is able to identify the different stories and where they were occurring. The reduction in rates in the rural south-east shows that there was a significant process driving down rates in these areas but that this failed to happen in the north and west. Urban areas had a very different story, and one whose characteristics were consistent with the public health story.

Here the GIS part of the analysis reaches its limits. We are able to describe the different patterns that occurred in different places and use this to challenge an explanation that was only based on one type of place. What the GIS is unable to do however is explain why the different stories occurred as they did. It is therefore primarily a descriptive approach that challenges more traditional forms of history to produce one or more explanations. Another example of this type of work is Geoff Cunfer’s On the Great Plains that looks at the pattern of dust storms over the entire Great Plains in the early twentieth century. Cunfer shows that there was little relationship between the number of dust storms and the degree to which an area was ploughed; indeed dust storms frequently took place in areas where no ploughing had occurred. This again challenges an orthodoxy, namely that the Dust Bowl was caused by over-intensive agriculture. Cunfer argues that the orthodox explanation originated in detailed studies of only a few areas near the centre of the Dust Bowl. Instead he argues that the Dust Bowl was more closely related to drought than it was to insensitive agriculture driven by the pressures of capitalism.

Image (c) Ian Gregory, 2008

So GIS can and does alter the way that we are able to look at specific historical topics. As currently conceived however it does have some serious limitations. The first is that GIS to date has largely concentrated on quantitative data. This will inevitably make it only of limited use in much historical research which is far more orientated towards qualitative sources, especially texts. The way that GIS represents space is also strongly quantitative. GIS is well suited to representing precisely located features that can be well represented using points, lines or polygons. It is far less suited to “fuzzier” concepts such as cultural regions or to places whose exact location is not known. From a distance it might be thought that GIS is well suited to exploit the “spatial turn”, however the concept of space used by GIS is far removed from the concept used by cultural historians. There are also some higher level problems that limit the adoption of GIS amongst many historians. These fall into three main categories. First, GIS software has become easier to use in recent years but still represents a barrier to entry. Second, using the software is one thing but understanding how it can be applied in historical research and what can be expected from it remains a barrier. Thirdly, creating GIS databases remains expensive and tedious work that often requires different skills to those of conducting research on the database.

This leads me to my questions for Jack which are as follows:

1. Does he agree with my identification of the strengths and limitations of a GIS approach in historical research? If so, what can be done to overcome the limitations?

2. Could he be more specific about how he feels that his project will lead to new understandings of trade in the Atlantic World? Will it be challenging established orthodoxies or developing completely new knowledge? Will it be descriptive or can it also be explanatory?

3. Why do we need “Geographically-enabled history”? After all, we have Historical GIS which is tightly focussed on the use of GIS. Above this historical geography is a well-established field to which people conducting historical GIS research are contributing almost by definition. Why then does he see the need for this intermediate level between the two?

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Stephen J. Hornsby (University of Maine) – Position Paper

In his paper, Professor Owens provides several important arguments in favor of incorporating GIS into historical research, particularly for understanding patterns and processes at the global level. As a geographer, I am sympathetic to his call for greater visualization in the discipline of History and his awareness that the map can be a powerful representational tool. I am also convinced that Historical GIS would be extremely useful in helping to organize large databases, such as the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, and to present the material in spatial form. In comparison to a paper map, GIS allows manipulation of data and creation of dynamic animations. If done well, such a GIS would be a powerful aid in teaching students and educating the public. I am also intrigued by Professor Owens’ call for a Geographically-integrated history; many historical geographers are actively engaged in such a project. His suggestion that a Historical GIS could serve as a digital scaffold for a wide range of material, from documents to images and sound recordings, is excellent and something that I have considered building online, based on digital data in the forthcoming Historical Atlas of Maine.

Nevertheless, I remain skeptical of Historical GIS for several reasons. First, there is the obvious issue of data. GIS of the contemporary world are based on enormous databases. As we go back in time, such data diminish. Historical databases can be created but they usually need statistical information and a considerable investment of resources. Are the results from creating large Historical GIS going to justify the expense? Second, non-statistical cultural data are difficult to map and represent in a GIS. Are cultural data going to be left out? Third, as Professor Owens points out, maps and GIS are excellent for showing spatial distributions, but are not as effective as narrative text in representing or explaining change over time. A combination of text and map seems to work well. Fourth, the GIS that I have seen always seem clunky. The aesthetic representation of data in a GIS hardly seems to be have been addressed. I have yet to see a GIS that comes close to the work of a good cartographer. Finally, I wonder about the interest of historians in Historical GIS. History is a discipline wedded to text and narrative; the word is always privileged over the spatial image. Given the general lack of interest by historians in maps and in thinking spatially, I am dubious about the success of Historical GIS in the discipline.

Welcome to the first in a series of debates being hosted on the History Compass Theory & Methods Blog:

“Is British History European?”
Dates: 6-17 October, 2008

Short position papers from each participant are posted below, both in PDF format and an onscreen version.

We invite all of you ‘attending’ online to comment and get involved in the discussion! Just use the comments feature on this post to share your views and respond to the issues raised.

Stefan Berger (University of Manchester) – Modern Europe – Position Paper PDF HTML

Andrew Gow (University of Alberta) – Early Modern Europe – Position Paper PDF HTML

Malcolm Smuts (University of Massachusetts Boston) – Early Modern Britain & Ireland – Position Paper PDF HTML

Laura Smoller (University of Arkansas at Little Rock) – Medieval Europe – Position Paper PDF HTML

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Stefan Berger (University of Manchester) – Modern Europe
Position Paper

The Blackwell History Compass has different editorial sections for Britain and for Europe. Anyone looking for literature on Britain will find next to nothing on Britain in the section on Europe – despite the fact that to all intents and purposes Britain is a European nation state and has been so for many centuries. Not only its geography indicates that it is at the margins of Europe but still it is clearly identifiable as European, and its membership in the European Union, somewhat reluctant at times, also seems to confirm its position as a European nation. Britain was integral to a range of European storylines in the past: the Industrial Revolution, democratisation, colonialism and imperialism, free trade, the world wars of the twentieth century, the Cold War, the development of popular culture and consumption patterns, to mention but the most obvious ones. And yet, British history, at least in the Anglo-Saxon world, has a separate status from European history. People are hired at universities as specialists in either European or British history. Research centres are often designated as either British or European. Editors’ catalogues are subdivided into British (sometimes Irish is added here) and European sections, and, to come back to the beginning, our journal is also subdivided into British and European sections.

If we ask why this is so, the answer lies, of course, in history. I would argue that it has much to do with the prevalence of national history in history writing between (roughly) the 1850s and 1950s. This century saw the professionalisation and institutionalisation of history writing right across the European continent (earlier in some places, such as Germany, later in others, such as Britain). Such professionalisation went hand in hand with the thorough nationalisation of history writing to a point where, in all countries, national history became the dominant form of history writing (if never the only show in town!).^[i] Hence it was regarded as ‘natural’ to establish national history chairs, national history journals, national archives and libraries, etc. dealing, above all, with national history. Even in the East European communist countries after 1945 university history departments were reorganised in a way in which they were subdivided into (larger) sections for national history and (smaller) sections for the rest (following the Soviet model, of course). And in Western Europe it was arguably a slow and torturous path to overcome the dominant forms of national history writing. Let’s remind ourselves that it was at the Oslo world historical congress in 1928 that Marc Bloch gave his famous lecture calling on his fellow historians to avoid national tunnel vision and move towards comparative history. But up to this present day, we have historical societies representing national histories, and we have historians trained to become experts in national history. And yet, we can also observe a move, from the 1970s and 1980s onwards, towards more comparative and transnational history. True, this move was probably less marked in Britain than in other parts of continental Europe and it was most certainly more oriented towards comparison with other English-speaking countries (the latter point in some part due to an ever-increasing and alarming mono-lingualism among historians of Britain). Nevertheless, in particular younger generations of historians today seem keen to overcome the national orientation in history writing and move to perspectives which sideline the national perspective. In this respect I would argue that the continued division of history into British and European history is mistaken, unhelpful and indeed a hindrance to innovation in the historical sciences.

A good deal of comparative, transnational and entangled history writing involves Britain. Indeed, in much of the literature on nineteenth-century Europe Britain emerges as a model emulated, misunderstood and adapted by a whole string of European countries. Yet equally Britain makes an appearance as an exceptional case, a country set apart from developments elsewhere in Europe. This peculiar tension between model and exception is worth exploring at somewhat greater depth. Britain was clearly an early developer and experimented with ideas and practices later adapted on the European continent. Thus, visual constructions of national identity appeared in Britain already during the eighteenth century, while most continental countries only developed them during the nineteenth. The British parliamentary system was upheld by liberals throughout continental Europe as a model to follow, and even those who wanted to reject or modify it, still had to deal with it. British civil society was the most developed of its kind in the first half of the nineteenth century, and again served as inspiration for many continental Europeans. The London Metropolitan Police served as a European-wide model for civil police forces, especially as it was widely perceived as having played a crucial role in the defeat of Chartism in 1848. The European-wide prison reform movement also looked to Britain for explanations about the meaning of prisons and ways of imprisonment. In particular the famous Pentonville prison became a model for continental European prison reformers.

The ‘Norfolk system’ of crop rotation had an important impact on continental versions of the agricultural revolution, even if historians more recently have dismissed ideas of a unilinear British model in the economic development of nineteenth-century Europe.^[ii] There were many diverse paths to industrialisation. Thus it has been observed that the organisation of financial markets and industry in Britain and Germany provided diametrically opposed models in Europe. In terms of state building the British experience was characterised by the strength of aristocratic self-government which delayed state interventionism. If there was a European model of the state, it was the French, or more precisely, the Napoleonic state which became an export model with its centralised administration and separate educational facilities for technocratic state elites. State bureaucracies in Britain were only significant in one area: that of empire and British overseas expansion. But even allowing for diversity and dismissing ideas of a universal British model, it still remains the case that nineteenth-century Europe was looking towards Britain. It seems therefore all the more incomprehensible that many European histories, up to this very day, should exclude the history of Britain from the history of Europe. Jonathan Sperber’s argument about Britain inhabiting the same cultural world but on a ‘divergent track’ from the rest of Europe is intriguing,^[iii] but ultimately does not do justice to the fact that, first of all, Europe was characterised by a multitude of different tracks, but all of them, including Britain, were part of the same railway system. Britain needs to be treated at long last as an integral part of the European experience. Any continued exclusion of the British Isles from continental Europe will only prolong the mistaken assumption of an alleged ’splendid isolation’ of Britain within European history. The continued widespread division of university courses in Britain into British and European history is a most unfortunate one and needs to be challenged. The history of the European continent can neither be taught nor written without proper reference to the British Isles. Hence I conclude by calling for the abolition of distinctions between British and European history. As we have to start somewhere, I propose to dissolve the separate editorial sections in the Blackwell History Compass for British and European history and move to an extended European history section which emphatically incorporates Britain.

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Andrew Gow (University of Alberta) – Early Modern Europe
Position Paper

Stefan Berger argues that it is time to break down the artificial distinctions between Britain and Europe as objects of historical study. This distinction is based on the division of history into national units, which, as Berger suggests, goes hand in hand (in the case of British historians in particular) with a reluctance or inability to read sources and scholarship in other modern languages. This in turn is fed by monoglot training in (more recent) British history. There is already an area, however, in which national divisions are less relevant because British documents and other relevant texts are often in French or in Latin: in the medieval field.

It is hard to be a British medievalist without reading Latin, at the least, and that skill opens up the vast majority of documentary materials available for the study of Continental history. The key difference here between modern and medieval history, and between the study of British history and the study of a Continental topic by native speakers of English is the necessity, for the latter, of intensive and time-consuming language training at some point in their education. Yet all the administrative and institutional indicators point to increasing difficulty for students who need to learn languages: time pressure to finish dissertations ‘on time’ (meaning within four years) means that post-graduate students who start a degree without the necessary language skills will scarcely have time to develop them in such a short period AND write a dissertation (never mind those who must also go through a more or less rigorous exercise in ‘comprehensive’ or ‘preliminary’ examinations).

So while the goal of wiping out the historic national and linguistic distinction between British and European history is laudable, it will take a great deal more than drawing attention to the similarities and breaking down certain institutional barriers (as we are trying to do at my own institution). For such a development to function and not to produce adverse effects on the training of students in Continental fields, the conventions of British history regarding modern languages will have to be discarded, and all students in such areas will have to learn relevant languages — meaning that they will need more time and probably more resources to do so.

Johns Hopkins provides an entire extra year of (funded) language training for incoming Ph.D. students who have demonstrated promise but who need to work on their primary scholarly language. That’s the kind of model that would allow us to begin, in our generation, to transcend complex and culturally entrenched national-linguistic divisions without enforcing the most-streamlined version of graduate training. But then there’s the issue of what those colleagues used to supervising in British areas without reading sources or scholarship in other languages and their students would then do: are we calling for a system that would require all students to work comparatively, or all colleagues to supervise only across national divides? Most are not prepared to do so, precisely because of their training. I think this is a much more intractable problem than Berger suggests; and only rather dirigiste strategies will produce rapid change at any level other than at the surface.

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Malcolm Smuts (University of Massachusetts Boston) – Early Modern Britain & Ireland
Position Paper

I had just drafted a blog post myself when Stefan Berger’s interesting and provocative message arrived in my mailbox, and I have now modified my piece to engage with his views and Andrew Gow’s response.  At the outset I should say that in principle I agree with Berger entirely that Britain has always been part of Europe and that the separation of British from European history has effectively impoverished each.  Reintegrating British history back into European history is a laudable goal that we in History Compass ought to pursue. 

At the same time I think the practical obstacles are greater than he allows.  The linguistic barriers Gow emphasizes are one barrier, which should not be underestimated.  The challenge of becoming familiar with different archives and archival systems is another, especially now that many forms of historical research need to be conducted in local as well as national archives.  In an ideal world we should all master five or six European languages and conduct research in at least three or four European countries; in practice relatively few of us will find the time to do this.

We also need to remember that we have to integrate not only histories but historiographies.  Historiography has played a major role in perpetuating insular scholarship: most research agendas among English historians continue to be generated by conversations within the field of English history, some of which have now been going on for a century and more, rather than by questions raised by specialists in other European histories.  There is certainly much to be said for bringing English, French, German and other European historiographical traditions into a conversation with each other, and questioning why issues that dominate one national tradition seem more marginal in others.  But this is a demanding task, since it requires a real command of several dense secondary literatures.

In some ways the isolation of British from European history is also symptomatic of a larger problem: the tendency of our discipline to fragment into subfields and sub-disciplines as research accumulates and different methodological approaches proliferate.  At the University of London not only is English history separated from European history; the history of seventeenth century England is essentially a separate field from studies on the eighteenth century, and the political history of the Civil War has become separated from the social and economic history of the same period.  We all have to grapple with the problem of how to reconcile focused research agendas with the need to teach courses and design curricula intended to cover vast tracts of history.  History Compass was founded to address precisely this problem.  I am not convinced that folding British history into European history will necessarily get us very far unless we also simultaneously address the wider problem of how to prevent our discipline from fragmenting into narrow fields of study with relatively little connection to each other.

Finally we also need to recognize that virtually all nations continue to privilege their own histories in their University curricula.  Those of us who teach in the United States are familiar with departments that devote more resources to 250 years of American history than to all other kinds of history combined.  English universities devote a correspondingly disproportionate share of their resources to English history, while Scottish and Irish universities are bastions of Scottish and Irish historical scholarship.  This may or may not be a good thing but it is a fact of life, unlikely to change in the near future, despite the influence of the European Union.  One practical reason to continue a separate British and Irish section in History Compass is that since we are produced by a British publisher aiming at an Anglophone market, we are likely to have a disproportionately large share of readers for whom British subjects are of special concern.

In North America and other Anglophone societies the situation is more complicated but English and British history have undoubtedly benefited in the past from a perception that they have a special relationship to the histories of the English-speaking nations that originated as British colonies.  This view has now become less fashionable and English history has declined, partly as a consequence.  But it is not totally erroneous: the history of eighteenth century Britain does have a special relevance for American colonial history, or the story of the European discovery and colonization of Australia. British history also has an obvious connection to histories of the British Empire, which once encompassed a quarter of the world’s population – and therefore to fields like Atlantic History and the colonial and postcolonial histories of many African and South Asian societies. Finally, English history can also be connected to the study of English literature, which usually has a very large constituency in Anglophone universities. As literary studies have taken a historical turn, a situation has developed in North America in which certain kinds of historical questions are now being more thoroughly investigated in English departments than by scholars based in History.  Many of these literary scholars are eager for cross-disciplinary conversations.    

Of course other European histories also have considerable relevance to the histories of non-western societies or interdisciplinary fields.  The point is simply that there are various ways to integrate the programs of history departments and liberal arts curricula.  Exactly which bridges end up getting built will inevitably depend on specific needs and circumstances and we shouldn’t be dogmatic about insisting that English history always has to be tied to Europe, rather than to Atlantic, imperial or interdisciplinary perspectives. 

Having said all that, I nevertheless agree strongly not only with Berger’s general view that English and European historical studies would benefit by more contact with each other but many of the specific arguments he advances about how the two histories have long been intertwined.  But at this stage, at least, I would also argue that dialogue is best promoted by exploring specific connections, rather than by simply collapsing British into European history.  His comments are very suggestive about some ways in which we might pursue this goal, on which I hope we can follow up as an editorial team.^[1]  To his suggestions I would like to add a few more, from my perspective as an English early modernist.   

English political history in the early modern period has often been particularly insular because it has focused on Parliament, the common law and county government – all peculiar institutions that may appear to have been rooted in English traditions, rather than wider European patterns.  But in several ways recent work has at least opened the door in to more international perspectives.  Revisionists have argued that the court, rather than Parliament, remained the normal center of national politics in England for most of the seventeenth century. But the English court, like all major European courts, was always a highly cosmopolitan institution.  Studying politics in ways that include the perspective of the court will therefore inevitably tend to highlight Britain’s ties to Europe.^[2]  Research on English, Scottish and Irish soldiers has also begun to document the active involvement of some Britons in European warfare.^[3]  Religion and religiously inflected political disputes provided other bonds, both during the early period of reformation in the 1530s and forties and later.  As several historians have now recognized, the Thirty Years War and Louis XIV’s wars with the Netherlands had a profound impact on English and British society and politics, even before the reign of the Dutch King William III.^[4] Currents of political and religious thought also moved back and forth across the Channel and North Sea in both directions, in ways that have still not been fully explored, despite some important recent studies.^[5] Recent work on print culture and the precociously early development of a public sphere in England similarly cries out for a more comparative approach, perhaps especially with respect to the Dutch Republic.^[6]   

Economic history would also benefit from wider perspectives.  I sometimes ask my students how our perspective would have changed if the annals school had given us a northern counterpart to Braudel’s classic study of the Mediterranean, entitled The North Sea and the North Sea World in the Age of the Eighty Years War.  Such a book would surely have demonstrated that many of the regional economies of England, Scotland and Ireland were tied as closely to specific parts of the continent as to the rest of the British Isles.  It would also have documented the importance of the Wars of Religion and the English Civil War in setting in motion international patterns of migration and transfers of industrial technology and agricultural methods that ultimately influenced the trajectory of English, British, European and even global economic history.  Finally it might have given us a far more nuanced view of both similarities and differences between the British economy and those of comparable northwestern regions that were both trading partners and competitors, especially the Northern Netherlands, Flanders and Normandy.  The work of historians like Steve Murdoch and Alexia Grosjean in reconstructing political, social, military and economic ties between Scotland and Scandinavia can serve as one model of the kind of work that also needs to be done for England and Ireland.^[7] 

This list of possibilities could easily be extended.  The crucial task in moving forward is less that of identifying subjects that need exploration, however, than finding historians prepared to engage in serious comparative and integrative work.

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Laura Smoller (University of Arkansas at Little Rock) – Medieval Europe
Position Paper

While I am extremely sympathetic to the notion that History Compass’s editorial division of “Britain” from the rest of “Europe” is arbitrary and should be abolished, I feel compelled to play the devil’s advocate and offer, at least for the Middle Ages, a defense of Britain’s separation from the Continent.  I agree with Stefan Berger’s point that the main reasons for the division, by departments of history as well as by the editorial staff of History Compass, between European and British history are, in fact, historical, rooted in the predominance of national history-writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  I equally concur with Andrew Gow’s assessment that the problem also arises from Anglophone graduate students’ lack of training in Continental languages, not simply those needed to read documents necessary to their studies, but also those required to converse with archivists and librarians in the course of doing that research.  But, as Gow points out, in the medieval field, such linguistic distinctions are largely meaningless, since relevant texts for medieval England are often written in Latin or Anglo-Norman French.   In fact, there are strong precedents for considering medieval Britain (or at least England) to be somewhat of an exception to trends on the continent.   In the textbooks I grew up with, medieval English “exceptionalism” was virtually a given, and a modulated version of the same argument can be found among many medievalists today.

One factor often cited that distinguishes medieval Britain from the continent is the relative non-survival of Roman institutions after the British withdrew from the island in 410.  According to this line of reasoning, that lack of a Roman heritage meant that Britain was less urbanized than the continent, that Roman institutions and laws virtually disappeared from Britain, that Christianity either had to be re-introduced later or else survived in a vastly different Celtic form, and that Germanic customs survived in a more intact form in Britain.  In the stark language of Maitland’s classic History of the English Law (1895), “the language and the religion of Rome were effaced” from early medieval Britain, with “no trace of the laws and jurisprudence of imperial Rome” until the re-introduction of Roman law by scholars from Bologna in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.^[1]  According to the 1976 edition of Robert S. Hoyt and Stanley Chodorow’s Europe in the Middle Ages, similarly, the extension of English rule to the Danelaw involved the absorption of a “kin-based society once common to all the Germanic peoples” of a type “destroyed on the Continent by assimilation in the more structured Gallo-Roman society.”^[2]  And even in Barbara Rosenwein’s recent, widely-assigned A Short History of the Middle Ages, the example of England epitomizes the changes between the Romanized south and the non-Romanized north in the early Middle Ages.  Traveling south across the channel in ca. 750, she observes, a pilgrim would see the same sorts of emporia as dotted the English landscape, but also, in northern Francia, “old Roman cities.”^[3]

A second distinctive feature generally attributed to medieval England is what Marc Bloch once called “imported feudalism.”^[4]  Unlike the Continent (read: East and West Francia), the argument goes, where feudal structures developed gradually in the post Carolingian world, in England, as Hoyt and Chodorow put it, “feudal society failed to evolve,”^[5] and rather was introduced abruptly and almost completely from the outside by William the Conqueror, who made feudal tenure a cornerstone of royal control over his new kingdom.  While many medievalists now prefer to eschew the terms “feudalism” and “feudal,” still one can find even among historians who express hesitancy about such language the notion that, in the words of A. Daniel Frankforter, “the monarchy of medieval England [was] unique.”^[6]

Other aspects of the medieval Britain’s unique character touted by historians range from differences in the place of the vernacular, the importance of the English common law tradition, and the distinctive nature of the Church in England.  Thus, the Anglo-Saxon vernacular, it is argued, readily became a written language “used in every aspect of English life, from government to entertainment,” in Rosenwein’s formulation, even if she immediately backs off from this assertion of “the uniqueness of Anglo-Saxon culture” by pointing to similar developments in Ireland.^[7]  The role of English common law—so beloved a part of American national identity—is frequently invoked to explain seemingly aberrant moments of tolerance, from the more benign treatment of the condemned Knights Templar in England to the relative paucity of executions for witchcraft in early modern England, when compared to Continental examples.^[8]  And the English church, in the oft-cited analysis of Robert Brentano, was far more defined and structured than its loose, free-wheeling Italian counterpart.^[9]

Even at gatherings of medievalists, one can still see a tendency to separate out matters English.  The International Medieval Congress meeting at Leeds (UK) this past July included sessions on Anglo-Saxon authors and their sources, English royal rituals of power, mercantile piety in late medieval Yorkshire, and women of the court in the Anglo-Norman world—their ranks of speakers largely filled with British authors.  There were also, to be fair, sessions crossing national and linguistic boundaries, as well as panels devoted to matters Irish, Scandinavian, Byzantine, eastern European, and Iberian, all places that could equally mount a claim for “uniqueness” in the medieval world.  In truth, the best current scholarship neither exaggerates Britain’s exceptional character in the Middle Ages nor ignores the distinctiveness of all medieval cultures.  But there are precedents other than simply the institutional traditions of history departments for considering Britain separately from the continent.

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This free podcast offers a discussion between Yoav Di-Capua, co-editor of the Middle & Near East section of History Compass, and Tamara Sonn, Editor-in-Chief of Religion Compass and History Compass author. Here they skillfully examine Tamara’s article: Islamic Fundamentalism and Political Islam.

This succinct and engaging podcast explores common misconceptions about political actors from the Muslim world. An important distinction is made between Islamic fundamentalism and political Islam.

Click here to Listen to the podcast (mp3 file, 9.7mb, 13 minutes 55 seconds).

Download previous History Compass Podcasts for free at http://www.blackwell-compass.com/home_podpage.

Subscribe to future History Compass Podcasts for free via iTunes or other subscription options available here.

Send us your feedback via the comments feature here or at HICOeditorial@oxon.blackwellpublishing.com.

We are delighted to announce that AHA members now have free access to History Compass for 6 months starting 17 March 2008! Just login to AHA member services, and choose “History Compass” from the list of available member services on the right hand side.

Unique in both range and approach, History Compass is an online-only journal publishing original, peer-reviewed historiographical articles of the most important research and current thinking from across the entire discipline. History Compass plays an active role in fostering research that spans centuries and continents, and provides an ideal entry point for the non-specialist.

With more than 350 articles already available, History Compass supports your research and informs your teaching by offering you:

• A new kind of core content: Articles are not traditional reports on historical research but surveys of recent historiography, ongoing interpretive debates, or suggestions for fresh directions of inquiry
• Coverage of the entire field: History Compass takes all of the past as its purview – there are no restrictions in terms of geography, time period, or historical methodology.
• Reference-linked bibliographies for each article provide the ideal entry point into specialist literature.
• Teaching and Learning Guides accompany selected articles to help you inspire and engage your students
• 100 new articles per year: 3 times more than a standard journal
• Fast continuous publication: articles typically available 6-8 weeks after acceptance
• Innovative extra content such as podcasts and blogs

For more information about the Compass journals visit www.blackwell-compass.com

Many thanks to all of you who entered the 2007 Graduate Essay Prize.

The results of the Asia section prize have now been confirmed:

Winner

Education for all: reassessing the historiography of education in colonial India
Catriona Ellis, University of Edinburgh

Runner-up

Reading the Rural Modern: Literacy and Morality in Republican China
Kate Merkel-Hess, University of California, Irvine

The final results are listed below (and are also available as a PDF). Winners and runners-up will be published in History Compass, with winners also receiving $200 / £100 of free Blackwell books.

Winners

Education for all: reassessing the historiography of education in colonial India
Catriona Ellis, University of Edinburgh (Asia Prize)

Falsified by History: Menzies, Asia and Post-Imperial Australia
Mads Clausen, University of Copenhagen (Australasia & Pacific Prize)

How far is the ‘rhetoric of inclusion; reality of exclusion’ argument applicable to the relationship of Afro-Latin Americans to the nation-state?
Helen Creighton, University College London (Caribbean & Latin America Prize)

To what extent have historians exploited monster literature for their own ends?
Anna Dunthorne, Swansea University (Europe Prize)

Scholars and the Sea: a historiography of the Indian Ocean
Sebastian Prange, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (World Prize)

No Africa, Britain & Ireland, Middle & Near East or North America Prizes were awarded this year.

Runners-up

Reading the Rural Modern: Literacy and Morality in Republican China
Kate Merkel-Hess, University of California, Irvine (Asia)

The Jews in the Medieval Polish Economy: Some Thoughts on the Historiography of the Twentieth Century
Jolanta Komornicka, Boston University (Europe)

Many thanks to all of you who entered the 2007 Graduate Essay Prize.

The final results are listed below (and are also available as a PDF). Winners and runners-up will be published in History Compass, with winners also receiving $200 / £100 of free Blackwell books.

Winners

Falsified by History: Menzies, Asia and Post-Imperial Australia
Mads Clausen, University of Copenhagen (Australasia & Pacific Prize)

How far is the ‘rhetoric of inclusion; reality of exclusion’ argument applicable to the relationship of Afro-Latin Americans to the nation-state?
Helen Creighton, University College London (Caribbean & Latin America Prize)

To what extent have historians exploited monster literature for their own ends?
Anna Dunthorne, Swansea University (Europe Prize)

Scholars and the Sea: a historiography of the Indian Ocean
Sebastian Prange, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (World Prize)

The Asia Prize will be confirmed later in February 2008.

No Africa, Britain & Ireland, Middle & Near East or North America Prizes were awarded this year.

Runners-up

The Jews in the Medieval Polish Economy: Some Thoughts on the Historiography of the Twentieth Century
Jolanta Komornicka, Boston University (Europe)

History Compass’ third PODCAST is now available!

This free podcast offers a discussion between Professor Ron Schechter, retired early modern Europe editor for History Compass, and Dr. Laura Cruz, a History Compass author. Examining Dr Cruz’s published essay, ‘The 80 Years’ Question: The Dutch Revolt in Historical Perspective’, they discuss the field of Dutch history, how it is being affected by new global and transnational histories, the need for further theoretical development in light of the cultural and linguistic turn, and the ways this article could be used in teaching.

Click here to download the podcast: http://www.gabcast.com/casts/1696/episodes/1187707007.mp3 (12.1 MB, 16 minutes 59 seconds).

Download previous History Compass Podcasts for free at http://www.blackwell-compass.com/home_podpage.  

Subscribe to future History Compass Podcasts for free via iTunes or other subscription options available here.

Send us your feedback via the comments feature here or at HICOeditorial@oxon.blackwellpublishing.com.  

‘The 80 Years’ Question: The Dutch Revolt in Historical Perspective’

Abstract

Once heralded as the ‘leading event of modern times’, the Dutch Revolt took place over a period of eighty years (1568–1648) and historians have worked to interpret it for even longer. This historiographical article outlines the major points of contention and schools of thought surrounding interpretations of the deeper meaning of the Dutch bid for independence from Spanish rule. While the intellectual milieus of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe certainly left their mark on historical interpretations of this event, this article argues that writings about the Revolt distinctively trace changing perceptions of the role played by small countries in the history of Western Civilization. As is true in most contemporary historical scholarship, there are no more grand narratives for encompassing the Dutch Revolt in its entirety, but the article points to future directions for understanding the Revolt in its wider contexts, whether European or global.

Image details: ‘La Falaise à Fécamp’ by Claude Monet, 1881 © Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museum

Guest Post: Andrew Greg, Project Director, National Inventory Research Project, Department of History of Art, Univeristy of Glasgow

‘NICE Paintings’ is a pioneering database aiming to bring together in one searchable catalogue all 22,000 old master paintings in UK museums. The first phase of the project is now on line at http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/collections/NIRP/index.php. It contains detailed records of nearly 8,000 pre-1900 Continental European oil paintings from 200 public collections across the United Kingdom. Over 2,500 are illustrated with digital colour images, and more images are being added regularly.

Although a growing number of, mainly large, museums are producing on line catalogues of their collections, most museums do not have on-line catalogues and there is no union catalogue of any aspect of UK museums’ collections that brings together all their holdings into one searchable database. In addition, it has long been recognised that smaller museums do not have access to the expertise to enable them to research their specialist collections and that this is a barrier to publicising and making full use of these collections. The project’s methodology therefore was to bring together the research skills of academic art historians and the under-researched collections of often hard-pressed museum curators.

The project devised its own Access database, on established museum documentation principles, which was provided to project researchers in the field and on which they recorded their data. The individual databases were complied by the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) and mapped to VADS’ own database for web publication. We were not funded to systematically create or acquire digital images but museums have been generous with providing them where available and giving permissions. We are also very grateful to the Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF) and the Bridgeman Art Library for their help in providing images.

The project is aimed at everyone interested in the history of art, but will also be invaluable to teachers wanting illustrative material to teach history, geography, cultural history, and literature, mythology and bible studies material.

‘NICE Paintings’ was produced by the National Inventory Research Project (NIRP), based at the University of Glasgow. NIRP is a partnership between the University of Glasgow and Birkbeck University of London, and was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Getty Foundation and the Kress Foundation.

It is managed by a steering committee of curators from national and regional collections across the UK, chaired by Dr Susan Foister, Director of Collections at the National Gallery, London. The project is continuing to add digital images to the database, contributed by museums and the Public Catalogue Foundation, and is working to complete the project by adding to the database records on the 15,000 old master paintings in national, university and other major regional museums not included in this initial research phase of the project.

Over the next few months an alternative portal to the project’s database, with enhanced search facilities, will be provided through the University of Glasgow.

URL: http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/collections/NIRP/index.php

Contact: a.greg@arthist.arts.gla.ac.uk

Event: The second Courts & Capitals conference organised by The Society for Court Studies and The Victorian Society.

The nineteenth century was one of the great eras of court culture and architectural patronage on a grand scale. Royal courts made huge contributions to cities and their planning but this has not received the attention it deserves. This conference highlights recent reserach and will shed new light on the influence of royal courts on the architecture and culture of some of the world’s great cities. It is intended to publish the proceedings in a special number of The Court Historian.

Date: Saturday 29 September, 2007, 10 am-5pm.

Where: The Wallace Collection, Manchester Square, London W1

Cost: £45, inc. coffee, sandwich lunch and tea.

Contact: 020 8747 5895 or events@victoriansociety.org.uk

Theme: Westminster Palace

Event: A two day interdisciplinary conference on the Palace of Westminster from the Middle Ages to the Present Day.

Date: 4-5 October, 2007
04 Octotober: Study tours of Westminster Palace; thematic and chronological overviews.
05 October: Papers looking at the function, purpose, structure, and meaning of the palace in its national and international context from the 11th-20th centuries.

Where: Porticullis House, Victoria Embankment.

Contact: Ms. June Prunty, The Society for Court Studies, PO Box 57089, London EC1P 1RF; admin@courtstudies.org.

We’re also pleased to annouce the publication of our second Virtual Issue, entitled Aspects of Early Native American History! Three of our North America section editors, Peter Mancall, Adam Rothman, and Mark Wild have specially selected the articles, and drawn together a wide-ranging issue looking at race, education, identity, war and the economy, among other topics. This issue is also supplemented by a free PDF/HTML Teaching and Learning Guide, based on these articles, written by Peter Mancall. Visit Blackwell’s Synergy site now to view the Virtual Issue and read the first three articles for free!

We’re pleased to annouce the publication of our first Virtual Issue, entitled The British World! The issue collects material from across several geographic sections of the journal, and presents articles that address a variety of issues from culture, identity, and race through to migration, economy and the environment. Visit the journal Home Page now to download the cluster map and read the first three articles for free!

History Compass is very pleased to announce a collaboration with H-Diplo and H-France! We have made History Compass author Peter Jackson’s article Post-War Politics and the Historiography of French Strategy and Diplomacy Before the Second World War temporarily free on the History Compass site, and linked to the H-Diplo listserv where Prof. Robert Young has written up a commentary. H-Diplo are hosting a discussion around this piece, so add your feedback on the commentary to the Discussion List; alternatively, you can Post Your Feedback on the History Compass website.

 Prize Wording

Unique in both range and approach, History Compass is an online-only journal publishing peer-reviewed survey articles from across the discipline, spanning both centuries and continents.

The editors of History Compass invite submissions for the 2007 Graduate Essay Prize.

Each winner will receive $200/£100 worth of free Blackwell books and have their article published in History Compass journal!There will be a prize-winning graduate essay for each of the 9 sections on History Compass:

Africa
Asia
Australasia & Pacific
Britain & Ireland
Caribbean & Latin America
Europe
Middle & Near East
North America
World

Deadline: 15 October, 2007

Guidelines The prize is open to all graduate students engaged in study at a college or university after their first degree and having not yet completed their doctorate.Those entering either competition can choose their own topic, though this should be fairly broad. The style of submitted articles should be consistent with other published articles on the sites, that is: they should have a wide scope, be written for non-specialists to acquire an introduction into new fields, and adopt a review or historiographical approach.The upper word limit is 5000 words, including abstract, footnotes and bibliography.History Compass Graduate Essays should be submitted by email as a Word document to: HICOeditorial@oxon.blackwellpublishing.com

Graduates must specify:

*          which section they are entering their essay for
*          provide the details of their affiliation
*          provide their supervisor’s name and email address

For more information, see:

www.blackwell-compass.com/home_graduate_essay.

History Compass’ second PODCAST is now available

The podcast is a discussion between Professor Stuart Ward, History Compass’ Australasian/Pacific editor, and Professor Paul Turnbull, a published History Compass author and editor. They examine Professor Turnbull’s published essay, entitled ‘British Anatomists, Phrenologists and the Construction of the Aboriginal Race, c.1790–1830’, and discuss the cognitive evolution of racial science in Europe, the theft of Indigenous cultural property from the colonial Pacific, and the repatriation of skeletal remains in Australian and European museums.

Click here to launch the podcast: http://www.gabcast.com/casts/1696/episodes/1176813759.mp3 (mp3 file, 13.8MB, 28 minutes 44 seconds).

History Compass’ first PODCAST is now available

The podcast is a discussion between Professor Felice Lifshitz, History Compass’ medieval Europe editor, and Dr Andrew Gillett, a published History Compass author. They examine Dr Gillet’s published essay, ‘Ethnogenesis: A Contested Model of Early Medieval Europe’ and ask: What is ethnogenesis? What are the questions of evidence and interpretation for interested Medievalists? How do we draw the attention of non-Medievalists to the historiographic debate over interpretative models for one of the major revolutions in western history?

Click here to launch the podcast: http://www.gabcast.com/casts/1696/episodes/1168944449.mp3 (mp3 file, 14.4 MB, 20 minutes 33 seconds).