Selections from DE LA MANUFACTURE AU MUR: Pour une histoire matérielle du papier peint 1770-1914 (From the Workshop to the Wall – Toward a Material History of Wallpaper 1770-1914) a thesis by Dr. Bernard Jacqué, University of Lyon (2003). Translated by Robert M. Kelly.

PDF 1: A Historiography of Wallpaper

Historic Nova Scotia is a digital humanities and public history project that aims to bring community histories to life online (https://historicnovascotia.ca/). This paper will explore how collaborative, digital-storytelling can help bridge the gap between heritage theory and practice. We will provide an overview of the project followed by specific…[Read more]

Anton Pannekoek (1873-1960), prominent astronomer and world-renowned socialist theorist, stood at the nexus of the revolutions in politics, science and the arts of the early twentieth century. His astronomy was uniquely visual and highly innovative, while his politics were radical. Anton Pannekoek: Ways of Viewing Science and Society collects…[Read more]

Guttman scale analysis is a very useful tool to understand the evolution of societies. It shows the accumulation of cultural traits throughout history in various societies and that those cultural traits were usually accumulated in the same order. The results of studies, by Robert Carneiro and others, shows the accumulation of cultural traits is…[Read more]

This paper was written to question the widespread belief among anthropologists that prehistoric hunter gatherers knew about agriculture long before agriculture began to be practised. The paper suggests gradually accumulating human knowledge led to the development of agriculture rather than population pressure, favourable mutations or convenient…[Read more]

The genealogy of board games in Britain is also an expression of its imperial past. Built on colonialist and orientalist tropes that reinforce a hierarchy of race, their legacy is still discernible in the worlds created for the games played today.

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An updated version of my Portolan piece from 2018.

The chapter deals with the image of the personal union between Saxony and Poland as portrayed in the novels of the Polish writer Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, who emigrated to the Saxon capital of Dresden in the 19th century. His so called Saxon Novels are an important source for popular conceptions of history until today.

Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Leslie White, Allen Johnson and Timothy Earle, and Stephen Sanderson, all produced some of the more interesting theories of history, social change and cultural evolution but their theories have a common deficiency. None of them provide an ultimate explanation for social, cultural and historical change. This failure was…[Read more]

Georg Leibbrandt (1899-1982), one of the leading figures in the NSDAP Office of Foreign Affairs and the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, claimed his status as an expert for questions concerning Eastern Europe on the basis of his origin: Born as a Volksdeutscher in the Ukraine, he devoted himself early to racial thinking and to…[Read more]

Monarchy – Republic – Dictatorship. The District of Görlitz between 1900 and 1939

The article deals with the images and perceptions of Paris and London as seen by German intellectuals in the era of the French revolution. It discusses the key concepts “freedom” and “equality”, using the examples of Joachim Heinrich Campe and Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz.

The chapter gives a biographic account of Georg Leibbrandt (1899-1982), one of the leading figures in the NSDAP Office of Foreign Affairs and the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. It deals especially with his involvement with the infamous Wannsee conference of 1942.

The articles of the volume deal with the German-Polish relations in and after World War I until the first years of the Nazi regime.

The article deals with the different images and perceptions leading figures of the Nazi regime made themselves of Russia, and with their political consequences. A special focus lies on those of Adolf Hitler, Jospeh Goebbels, and Alfred Rosenberg.

The functioning of truth in a history text does not depend only on its episte-mological conditions, but also on an ethical relation between the historian and the reader. Paul Ricoeur proposed that such ethical relation is based upon a tacit reading pact, a contract in which the author ensures his reader that his narra-tive is…[Read more]

In Historians of Brazil, Francisco Iglésias reviews some of the great names in Brazilian historiography as divided by him into three distinct moments: up to 1838, from 1838 to 1931, and from 1931 onwards. This article shall focus on the third of these moments, which has traditionally been considered the moment of the “modern Brazilian hi…[Read more]

This study presents the results of a marine geophysical survey performed in the Igaliku fjord in southern Greenland in order to understand the harbour setting of the former Norse settlement Garðar (modern Igaliku). The aims of the survey were (a) to reconstruct the former coastline during the first centuries of the Norse settlement period (c.…[Read more]

The abstract of my doctoral dissertation, which I defended on December 2018 at the University of Washington, with distinction.

This paper suggests ever increasing human knowledge of the world around us is the driving force for much social and cultural evolution. It examines the order of discovery of our knowledge of the world around us and notes this knowledge comes to us in a particular and necessary order from the easiest to discover to the more difficult to discover.…[Read more]