Scholarly Works, History
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Browsing Scholarly Works, History by Content Type "Article - Refereed"
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- American Wildlife Policy and Environmental Ideology: Poisoning Coyotes, 1939-1972Dunlap, T. R. (University of California Press, 1986-08)
- Bridewealth and Female Consent: Marriage Disputes in African Courts, Gusiiland, KenyaShadle, Brett L. (Cambridge University Press, 2003)From the early 1940s Gusiiland (Kenya) underwent a series of transformations that pushed bridewealth to unheralded levels. As a result, many young couples could not afford a proper marriage and eloped. Some fathers forced their daughters into marriages with men wealthy enough to give cattle ; many of these women ran off instead with more desirable men. In the hundreds of resulting court cases, Gusii debated the relative weight to be given to bridewealth, parental approval and female consent in marriage. Young people did not reject marriage, but fought against senior men who would ignore women’s wishes. Gusii court elders usually agreed with fathers and husbands but also believed that female consent did carry some significance.
- ’Changing traditions to meet current altering conditions’: Customary Law, African Courts, and the Rejection of Codification in Kenya, 1930-60Shadle, Brett L. (Cambridge University Press, 1999-11)If the aim of British colonizers, Frederick Lugard wrote, was to civilize Africans ‘and to devote thought to those matters which…most intimately affect their daily life and happiness, there are few of greater importance than the constitution of native courts’. Moreover, he argued that only from native courts employing customary law was it ‘possible to create rudiments of law and order, to inculcate a sense of responsibility, and evolve among a primitive community some sense of discipline and respect for authority’. Britain had not the manpower, the money nor the mettle to rule by force of arms alone. Essentially, in order to make colonial rule work with only a ‘thin white line’ of European administrators, African ideas of custom and of law had to be incorporated into the new state systems. In a very real way, customary law and African courts provided the ideological and financial underpinnings for European colonial rule. In Kenya from at least the 1920s, but especially in the 1940s and 1950s, administrators struggled with the question of how customary law could best be used in African courts. Prominent among their concerns was the codification of customary law, against which most administrators vigorously fought. British officials believed that reducing African custom to written law and placing it in a code would ‘crystalize’ it, altering its fundamentally fluid or evolutionary nature. Colonizers naturally harbored intentions of using the law to shape society (as Cooper has demonstrated for the Kenya coast) but a fluid, unwritten law provided much greater latitude to pursue these goals. It was necessary, as one administrator put it, to allow ‘changing traditions to meet current altering conditions’. This case study of Kenya offers a different understanding of the history of customary law.
- Commemoration, Controversy, and Campus Buildings: A Case Study—Virginia Tech, 1997-2020Wallenstein, Peter (2021-01-14)Part historical reconstruction and part memoir by a participant observer, this article reveals the path that led, between 1997 and 2020, to three changes in names of campus residence halls at Virginia Tech. Major spurs to such reconsiderations of the names of campus buildings at many schools over the past decade were the shooting murders at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in June 2015, the “Unite the Right” violence in Charlottesville in August 2017, and the public murder of a Black man by a uniformed police officer in Minneapolis in May 2020. The particulars of the Virginia Tech story were more local and began earlier—in 1997–1998 and 2004–2005—but converged with the national narrative in 2020.
- The Currency of Kinship: Trading Families and Trading on Family in Colonial French IndiaAgmon, Danna (Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 2014)In the French colony of Pondichéry, French and local actors alike drew on the shared idiom of kinship to strategically advance their political and commercial agendas. Recent scholarship has shown that the structures of family underlay early modern European state building and imperial expansion. This essay deploys this insight in the colonial context, to examine how indigenous families in the Tamil region entered into the European colonial project. For native commercial brokers, involvement with European newcomers could actually strengthen local family ties. Simultaneously, French employees of the Compagnie des Indes were eager to insert themselves into Tamil networks and did so by deploying public and inscribed performances of kinship.
- An Exchange of Opinion - MacArthur, Quezon, and Executive Order Number One--Another ViewRogers, P. P.; Petillo, C. (University of California Press, 1983)
- From postcard to book cover: illustrating connections between medical history and digital humanitiesEwing, E. Thomas; Randall, Katherine; Reznick, Jeffrey S. (2019-10)This article illustrates the value and impact of collaboration among scholars, archivists, and librarians working across universities and government institutions, and how changes in medium-from a born-physical photograph and printed postcard to a digital reproduction to a simultaneously born-digital and printed book- create new possibilities for scholarly analysis, interpretation, and dissemination, which in turn suggest future directions for research and engagement across fields of inquiry. In doing so, this article argues that history matters by illuminating past networks that, through humanistic inquiry, continue to connect people, ideas, and institutions in the present and into the future.
- A Hard Job to Quit: Camaraderie, Crabbing, and Change on the Chesapeake BayTaylor, Jessica; Daglaris, Patrick (University of North Carolina Press, 2022)
- Historical Gaps and Non-existent Sources: The Case of the Chaudrie Court in French IndiaAgmon, Danna (Cambridge University Press, 2021-10-01)This article develops a typology of historical and archival gaps - physical, historiographical, and epistemological - to consider how non-existent sources are central to understanding colonial law and governance. It does so by examining the institutional and archival history of a court known as the Chaudrie in the French colony of Pondichéry in India in the eighteenth century, and integrating problems that are specific to the study of legal history - questions pertaining to jurisdiction, codification, evidence, and sovereignty - with issues all historians face regarding power and the making of archives. Under French rule, Pondichéry was home to multiple judicial institutions, administered by officials of the French East Indies Company. These included the Chaudrie court, which existed at least from 1700 to 1827 as a forum where French judges were meant to dispense justice according to local Tamil modes of dispute resolution. However, records of this court prior to 1766 have not survived. By drawing on both contemporaneous mentions of the Chaudrie and later accounts of its workings, this study centers missing or phantom sources, severed from the body of the archive by political, judicial, and bureaucratic decisions. It argues that the Chaudrie was a court where jurisdiction was decoupled from sovereignty, and this was the reason it did not generate a state-managed and preserved archive of court records for itself until the 1760s. The Chaudrie's early history makes visible a relationship between law and its archive that is paralleled by approaches to colonial governance in early modern French Empire.
- How did we get here: what are droplets and aerosols and how far do they go? A historical perspective on the transmission of respiratory infectious diseasesRandall, Katherine; Ewing, E. Thomas; Marr, Linsey C.; Jiminez, J. L.; Bourouiba, Lydia (Royal Society, 2021-10-12)The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed major gaps in our understanding of the transmission of viruses through the air. These gaps slowed recognition of airborne transmission of the disease, contributed to muddled public health policies and impeded clear messaging on how best to slow transmission of COVID-19. In particular, current recommendations have been based on four tenets: (i) respiratory disease transmission routes can be viewed mostly in a binary manner of ‘droplets’ versus ‘aerosols’; (ii) this dichotomy depends on droplet size alone; (iii) the cut-off size between these routes of transmission is 5 µm; and (iv) there is a dichotomy in the distance at which transmission by each route is relevant. Yet, a relationship between these assertions is not supported by current scientific knowledge. Here, we revisit the historical foundation of these notions, and how they became entangled from the 1800s to today, with a complex interplay among various fields of science and medicine. This journey into the past highlights potential solutions for better collaboration and integration of scientific results into practice for building a more resilient society with more sound, far-sighted and effective public health policies.
- Introduction: Towards a History of Violence in Colonial KenyaCarotenuto, Matt; Shadle, Brett L. (African Studies Center, Boston University, 2012)An introduction to the journal is presented in which the authors discuss topics addressed in the issue related to violence in colonial Kenya, including corporal punishment, the connections between the death penalty and racial hierarchies, and repatriation.
- Invisible Inequalities: Persistent Health Threats in the Urban Built EnvironmentSchlichting, Kara Murphy; Kiechle, Melanie A. (Brepols, 2020-12)A city’s materiality creates health and illness. We both write about air - its movement and its temperature - as it affects human bodies. We offer two topics as case studies, heat and ventilation, and how they exacerbate the effects of each other, to illustrate the long history of seemingly new challenges posed by the novel coronavirus. The environmental inequalities of heat exposure and access to fresh air underscore that cities can only be considered ‘low impact’ on the environment from a top-down, large-scale approach. In writing about air and heat, we direct attention to the feel and the bodily impacts of unseen but persistent problems in housing. Centuries of building inequalities into the urban environment are coming to bear on our present debates about indoor space, ventilation, and viral spread as cities encounter the COVID-19 crisis.
- La Grippe or Russian Influenza: Mortality Statistics During the 1890 Epidemic in IndianaEwing, E. Thomas (Wiley, 2019-02-12)Background The Russian influenza, which began in late 1889, has long been recognized as a major global epidemic yet available statistical evidence for morbidity and mortality has not been fully examined using historical and epidemiological tools. This study of cases and deaths in Indiana during the extended time period associated with the Russian influenza is the first scholarly effort to determine the number of victims from this influenza outbreak across a broad regional case study in the US. Methods The sources for this study include historical records from the US Census, Annual Reports from the Indiana State Board of Health, and death notices published in newspapers. The available evidence is analyzed using historical and epidemiological methods to determine the consistency of reporting categories, the accuracy of death records, and the applicability of contemporary categories for measuring mortality. Results In the 3 years during and following the outbreak of “Russian influenza” in January 1890 in the state of Indiana, approximately 3200 died specifically of this disease while a total of 11 700 died of influenza and other respiratory diseases. These results confirm that extremely widespread influenza contributed to higher than normal death rates by causing additional deaths in related categories, especially pneumonia and other respiratory diseases. Conclusions More reliable and thorough analysis of morbidity and mortality during the Russian influenza based on systematic and critical review of local, regional, and national statistics can inform contemporary understanding of the long‐term history of influenza epidemics.
- Labor, Landscape, and Four Virginia WatermenTaylor, Jessica; Daglaris, Patrick (Southern Historical Association, 2022-05-31)
- The Mystery of the Commandant’s Writing: Turning First-Year Students into ResearchersBecker, Trudy Harrington (American Historical Association, 2018-10-15)Relates a transcription project using the letters of Joseph Ware from Virginia Tech's Special Collections.
- Night Matters—Why the Interdisciplinary Field of “Night Studies” Is NeededKyba, Christopher C.M.; Pritchard, Sara B.; Ekirch, A. Roger; Eldridge, Adam; Jechow, Andreas; Preiser, Christine; Kunz, Dieter; Henckel, Dietrich; Hölker, Franz; Barentine, John; Berge, Jørgen; Meier, Josiane; Gwiazdzinski, Luc; Spitschan, Manuel; Milan, Mirik; Bach, Susanne; Schroer, Sibylle; Straw, Will (MDPI, 2020-01-10)The night has historically been neglected in both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research. To some extent, this is not surprising, given the diurnal bias of human researchers and the difficulty of performing work at night. The night is, however, a critical element of biological, chemical, physical, and social systems on Earth. Moreover, research into social issues such as inequality, demographic changes, and the transition to a sustainable economy will be compromised if the night is not considered. Recent years, however, have seen a surge in research into the night. We argue that “night studies” is on the cusp of coming into its own as an interdisciplinary field, and that when it does, the field will consider questions that disciplinary researchers have not yet thought to ask.
- Noah Webster and the Invention of ImmigrationShumsky, Neil Larry (MIT Press, 2008-03)Like all lexicographers, Noah Webster built his dictionaries on the works of others. But in the case of the verb to immigrate and its derivatives, he coined a new definition, one that has had a profound impact on how Americans conceive of the phenomenon of immigration.
- Nonsense and Morality: Interwar Egypt and the Comedy of Najib al-RihaniGitre, Carmen (2020-05-12)
- Patronage, Millennialism and the Serpent God Mumbo in South-West Kenya, 1912–34Shadle, Brett L. (Cambridge University Press, 2002-02)This article traces the history of Mumboism, a millennial cult of south-west Kenya, 1912–34. Mumbo, the serpent god of Lake Victoria, promised to eject whites and chiefs from the region and usher in a period of prosperity. Mumboism gained followers, it is argued, because it mixed older ideas of patron–client relations with newer ideas of omnipotent, unseen beings, introduced by Europeans as Government and God. Mumbo challenged chiefs and missionaries, struggling to create patronage networks, by attracting clients, and threatened to unmask Government and God as impotent. Chiefs and, to a lesser extent, missionaries directed state power to the repression of Mumbo, eliminating it before it could undermine the very basis of European power.
- Politicizing Water: Rescaling Resistance to Extractive Development in GuatemalaCopeland, Nicholas M. (Elsevier, 2023-02-22)Many Indigenous and peasant movements denounce the expansion of extractive development as a threat to their lives, livelihoods, and territories that reinforces legacies of colonization and armed conflict. Grassroots resistances to extractive projects converge on concerns over water access and contamination. This essay draws on politically-engaged ethnographic research with Indigenous territorial defense organizations in Guatemala and political ecological perspectives on water politics to examine how the strategic politicization of water affects the scalar potential of Indigenous and peasant environmental movements. I describe how Indigenous and peasant communities, political organizations, and NGOs use water as a transfer point to demonstrate the harms of extractivist projects; pursue legal strategies; form local, regional, and national networks; and to articulate resistances across a range of industries, environmental paradigms, and geographic and ethnic divides, strengthening alliances for alternative ways of being on the land.