This essay offers an introduction to select disciplinary developments in the study of history and in historical study of the Hebrew Bible. It focuses first and foremost on “cultural history,” a broad category defined by nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments in anthropology and sociology, literary theory and linguistics, and other fie…[Read more]

Part of a larger roundtable series on Arab American histories for the Journal of American Ethnic History.

Review of “Follow the Money: A Spatial History of In-Lieu Programs for Western Federal Lands.” Stanford University, Jay Taylor, Erik Steiner, Krista Fryauff, Celena Allen, Alex Sherman, and Zephyr Frank. Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 49, Issue 3, 1 July 2018, Pages 344–345, https://doi.org/10.1093/whq/why049.

When the United States took possession of Puerto Rico in 1898, an aggressive
Americanization project introduced cultural practices, including
American sports. However, although Puerto Ricans incorporated U.S.
sports to their sporting profile, they did so adhering to a larger Hispanic-
American ideology. Although soccer, or f ´ utbol, was…[Read more]

An essay on the Greeks in Egypt during the Archaic and Classical periods.

Personal and object biographies can be interwoven and reveal much about the transnational connections between Australia and other places. This chapter features two interwoven biographies: Guna Kinne, a Latvian Displaced Person who began making a national dress as a school girl in Latvia and continued to make it as she fled the Soviet army to…[Read more]

The Museum of Chinese Australian History reopened on 29th August 2010 with newly refurbished exhibitions displaying Chinese Australian history and contemporary Chinese Australian identities. This article reviews the new exhibitions in comparison with the Gum San Heritage Centre at Ararat and the Golden Dragon Museum at Bendigo and specifically…[Read more]

SHOWING OFF: QUEENSLAND AT WORLD EXPOSITIONS 1862 TO 1988 BY JUDITH
MCKAY. ROCKHAMPTON AND SOUTH BRISBANE: CENTRAL QUEENSLAND UNIVERSITY
PRESS AND THE QUEENSLAND MUSEUM, 2004; 128PP, APPENDIX, NOTES,
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND INDEX; PAPERBOUND, $29.95

The problem with using royal inscriptions as historical sources is their inherent bias. The interests of the king drive the narratives of royal inscriptions. Yet this essential feature reveals their underlying concept of history. In royal inscriptions, historical thought is defined by the life and experience of the king. This article will present…[Read more]

The Samaria Ostraca contain a subset of receipts that record wine shipments from what were evidently royal vineyards. But this particular group of ostraca has been largely overlooked in the study of the Northern Kingdom, probably resulting from the fact that not all of the ostraca were published in the editio princeps. This article presents a new…[Read more]

The comparison of Qoheleth and Gilgamesh begins with the so-called carpe diem advice of Siduri and Eccl 9:7-9. Additionally, the rhetoric of kingship evoked through Gilgamesh’s narû (“stele”) at the beginning of the epic parallels the royal voice of Qoheleth beginning in Eccl 1:12. Yet these similarities raise several historical issues. First,…[Read more]

Clark Ashton Smith—unlike the more famous H.P. Lovecraft—engaged with the medieval as a setting for his fiction. Lovecraft admired classical Roman civilization and the eighteenth century, but had little time for medieval themes. As Brantley Bryant has related, Lovecraft wrote contemptuously that the Middle Ages was a period that “snivel[ed] along…[Read more]

This essay uses Arnaldo Momigliano’s genealogy of antiquarianism and historiography to propose a new method for engaging the past. The Italian historian Arnaldo Momigliano (1908-1987) traced antiquarianism from its advent in ancient Greece and later growth in Rome to its early modern efflorescence, its usurpation by history, and its transformation…[Read more]

A family tale inspired the author to explore seemingly minor, but related details of the Saint-Domingue, French, and American Revolutions, including the population movements to and from the United States. “A Haitian Tale of Diasporas and Revolutions” is a documented historical and personal narrative through cultures and continents, as…[Read more]

This photoessay documents the 82nd Annual Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival, which took place in Morgan City, Louisiana over Labor Day weekend in 2018. It contains photographs of the festival, including images of pageant queens, food vendors, and the Blessing of the Fleet. The essay documents the authors’ experience of the festival, and c…[Read more]

This article explores the interface of multiple legal systems in early modern Daghestan. By comparing colonial engagements with legal plurality with indigenous genres of Daghestani legal discourse, I aim to shed light on the plurality of legal systems that preceded as well as informed legal discourse under colonialism. The Daghestani turn to…[Read more]

In this essay I sketch an outline of how the book of Isaiah presents its politics, working from the assumption—based on the research of Peter Ackroyd and others—that the presentation of Isaiah, the prophet, in the book’s opening chapters is key. I end up arguing that the book advocates for Davidic politics, as others have claimed, but that its d…[Read more]

This chapter uses Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive to consider the ways that collaborative, public-facing digital humanities initiatives can conflict with institutional conventions and methods of evaluating academic labor. Collaborative work creates challenges as well as opportunities for its organizers and laborers. The particular…[Read more]

The Wellcome Library, in considering a project to digitise and transcribe recipe manuscripts using crowdsourcing technologies, commissioned this report from Ben Brumfield and Mia Ridge in Summer 2015. The report addresses issues specific to this project, and to the Wellcome Library’s digital infrastructure.