The Epilogue discusses how the narrative and arguments of the book can help us revisit the debates in Ottoman intellectual historiography over the concept of order (nizam), underlining how labor history and class perspectives can expand the scope of questions and offer new agendas for Ottoman and global histories of the modern era. It offers a conceptual discussion of reform, and highlights the distinctive characteristics of Ottoman Reform in the long nineteenth century, by focusing on its connections with modern capitalism. It emphasizes the capitalist characteristic of the order which the reformist elites struggled to institute throughout the nineteenth century. It underlines how focusing on a specific worksite, and, in particular, studying relations of production within an Ottoman military-industrial site, could help us to reveal these capitalist patterns and class dynamics in Ottoman reform processes. It points to the necessity of the dialogue between labor/social history and intellectual history to better understand how these capitalist practices shaped or were shaped by the mentalities and ideas of Ottoman state elites during this period.

Historiographies of modern literature are often dominated by a view that perceives modernity as emerging from a break with tradition. This chapter challenges that view by arguing that Hasidic hagiography, a devout religious genre, played a fundamental role in modernizing Jewish culture and shaping the Jewish masses as a new phenomenon in Jewish experience. It proposes a historical model that examines the negative dialectic tensions among fragments of literary history, drawing on Sergei Eisenstein’s concept of montage in film theory. The approach compares fragments of literary history as independent “shots” within a dynamic system. The chapter contrasts the Hasidic popular genre of the 1860s with the contemporary Hebrew writings that set the tone for literary canonization and historiography. It highlights how Hasidic literary, theological, and ideological values differed from and even threatened the teleological narratives of secular Hebrew literature while also complementing them. Hasidic popular stories provided lingual flexibility freeing rabbinical Hebrew from the confines of Halakhic writing and avoiding eschatological national and secular ideologies. This allowed the masses to achieve modern literacy without breaking with tradition. The historiographical montage enables a reconsideration of literary historiography as a dynamic network of convergences and ruptures.

This opening chapter sets out the framework for a more systematic discussion of ancient Greek personal religion in the subsequent chapters. It starts from a working definition of personal religion by clarifying its relationship to the much better documented civic dimension of ancient Greek religion. Its core consists of a substantial historiographic section that grounds the study of personal religion in the larger trends that have shaped and continue to shape the study of the religions of the ancient world – including parallel developments in the study of Roman religion. Taking stock of where we stand helps us to sketch out what is at stake in foregrounding individual religious beliefs and practices and how they fit into our understanding of ancient Greek religion more broadly conceived.

This chapter considers conceptual books, conceptual writing and concrete poetries, while distinguishing conceptual books and writing from other experimental work. It analyses several examples to demonstrate how their very structure forms a critique of dominant knowledge systems, including structures of settler colonialism and nation. It also considers the relationship between conceptual art and conceptual writing, and the focus on materials, processes and practices surrounding the poem or book’s existence, value and consumption. It discusses the role of visualism in much of conceptual writing. It discusses how conceptual writing has troubled both First World and North-centric mappings and influences, creating parahistoriographies that might be considered parallel to, and separate from, dominant histories.

This introduction provides an overview of the theories and methodologies necessary to reveal the social, economic, and political lives of Afro-descended Mexicans after the abolition of slavery and caste. Beginning with the cofradía del Rosario in what is now Morelia, it sets the stage for the collection by showing how references to Afro-descended communities continued after independence in 1821. The introduction argues that the limited sources about Afro-descended Mexican citizens do not preclude the study of these communities after emancipation. Instead, it requires careful, often against the grain, readings of racial identities as well as of individual and collective agency, historical themes related to slavery and freedom that are better known in the colonial period. Ultimately, the introduction attempts to provide a roadmap for future studies into the history of Afro-Mexicans in the nineteenth century.

This chapter explores the methods and theories used in anthropology and music to understand Mexico's African presence and its relevance after the 1910 Revolution. Despite disciplinary, methodological, and theoretical differences at midcentury, Mexican scholars, chiefly anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán and musicologist Gerónimo Baqueiro Foster, focused on the colonial period and the postrevolutionary present. Their histories glossed over the nineteenth century. Their debates about how to study Afro-Mexico in the 1940s—and the research methodologies that buttressed them—elucidate why the history of nineteenth-century Afro-Mexico continues to be ignored in the historiography about Mexico’s place in the African diaspora. The intellectual and cultural histories explored in this chapter also explore why concerns about Mexico’s African presence have continued to loom over the field of Afro-Mexican studies.

The introduction explores the idea of an Islamic legal philosophy within the broader history and historiography of Islamic thought. It situates Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s career and reputation in historical and contemporary sources and situates his contribution in the fields and debates of Islamic intellectual and legal history. It explains the importance of the study and the key contributions it makes. Finally, it presents an overview of the sources used in the study and an outline of each of the book’s chapters.

The Conclusion considers the implications of the revisionist framework that seeks to hold the histories of Eastern Amazon together, even if there is much tension and conflict between its constituent parts. Specifically, the study forces a reconsideration of three aspects: the making of Indigenous territories in the sertão; how the concept of the sertão can be reworked in Brazilian historiography; and a reconsideration of the ways in which historical periods are conventionally broken up. Regardless of the changing meanings and varying human interactions with the Amazon environment, the enduring character that shapes human societies and the spaces they inhabit lies in its flowing waters. Understanding the Amazon through the aforementioned spatial history involves seeing it as a geographical place shaped by the interactions between the peoples who have lived there. To understand the Amazon today, these histories must be woven together, as the region was shaped by conflict and dispossession – legacies that persist to this day.

This book examines contemporary progress rhetoric and its history by focusing on medicine, a field that has become the touchstone of the focus on progress. In recent decades, the term progress has been used by a wide range of people, including politicians, scientists, engineers, physicians, and patients, to make sense of medicine’s past developments, current achievements, and desired future. Large, private companies such as Meta and Google, for example, link artificial intelligence research and genomic analysis to progress in medicine and praise their own contributions for that reason. Using a philosophically informed historical approach, this book argues that debates about progress in medicine are always political debates underpinned by different interests, which reflect distinct approaches to persons, health, and society. It draws on academic engagements with the history and philosophy of progress, as well as the insights of physicians, patients, and tech actors, to show how medical progress can hold multiple meanings simultaneously.

The introduction explains how the Eastern Amazon was shaped in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; this means appreciating the diverse spaces and peoples of the Amazon and how they define one another. The introduction shows how this approach re-centres the Amazon as part of a continental space and elucidates its role in continental history by analysing the historical agency of the people who inhabited the region. Sections make the theoretical and methodological justification for analytically joining up the spaces and territories that are historically considered separate. It discusses the use of a spatial history approach, and how this perspective contributes to a new understanding of the Amazon, and presents a revisionist and historically anthropological framing of the argument along definitions of keywords used in the book.

An epilogue assesses the impact of the antiwar movement. Both activists and scholars disagree over its significance. Despite common misperceptions of the movement by the public, antiwar activists generally represented mainstream American political values. While the movement did not stop the war by itself, it imposed real limits upon presidential decisions to escalate American military expansion. Movement activists overwhelmingly waged peace using the tools of democracy to align the nation’s practice with its most righteous vision.

This introduction argues against analyzing the Democrat Party in terms of strict binaries such as liberal–illiberal, center–periphery, secular–reactionary, or victim–perpetrator. While the divisions that scholars emphasize are real enough to affect the lives of people in Turkey, these divides are multiple and cross-cutting. Instead, I present an account of the Democrat Party, its role in Turkey’s democratization, and its engagement with the emerging Cold War order that is mindful of the divides in Turkey but that also acknowledges the party’s ability to transcend those divides – or, at least, embody their multiple contradictions. This book presents a portrait of the Democrat Party that encompasses these contradictions while also emphasizing Democrat Party leaders’ connections to the domestic political order that preceded them and to the international order of the 1950s.

Adopting a microhistorical approach and narrowing the scale of observation offers Cold War historians invaluable heuristic and narrative opportunities, uncovering little-known, seemingly “small” stories that nonetheless hold significant illustrative and historiographical power. This approach repositions human agency at the center of historical narratives and examines its interplay with broader political, geopolitical, and ideological structures. Drawing on Edoardo Grendi’s famous “exceptional/normal” antinomy, the book reconstructs the story of the evangelical Church of Christ’s mission in Italy – a story that is, at first glance, highly exceptional, but on closer examination proves to be remarkably normal within its broader historical context. The analysis seeks to connect global history with microhistory, bridging the dynamics of world integration, such as the Cold War, with the bottom-up perspectives of long neglected actors. This methodological challenge is compounded by the abundance of primary sources available to historians of post-1945 international relations. By exploring the Church of Christ’s Italian mission, the book highlights the potential of microhistory to enrich global historical frameworks, weaving together large-scale structural forces with the intricate, human-scale dynamics that often drive historical change.

Later performances of the Nonet led to great critical acclaim for Farrenc, and the relationships that it fostered led her to write more music for wind instruments (a sextet for piano and wind, a flute trio, and a clarinet trio). She won a newly founded prize (the Prix Chartier) for chamber music composers twice in the 1860s. The success of the Nonet in later performances led critics to call for more performances of her symphonies by Paris’s major orchestras, but these seem not to have materialized. Farrenc’s legacy after her death was as one of France’s best composers of instrumental music. Although her works were rarely performed after the 1870s, she was consistently named among lists of women composers in Western history when writers began to pen feminist critiques of concert music culture – these began during her lifetime, as early as the 1850s, and emerged intermittently during the 1880s and up to the present day. Recordings of Farrenc’s music began to bring her to wider attention in the 1970s, and with reviews of these and of the increasingly common public concerts of her chamber music and symphonies, Louise Farrenc has entered the canon of historical women composers.

The vernacular historiographical tradition has evolved since the ninth century through merging core genres like annals, chronicles and historical narrative with empirical antiquarian treatises. It became clearly distinguished from religious and fictional writing only in post-medieval times, thus also adapting its concept of truth and its methods. While its earlier history is best described by way of a discourse tradition (Koch), a Wengerian community of practice emerges in the late modern period. Starting off as a purely narrative text-type, historiographical writing developed into a typical narrative–expository–argumentative conglomerate over the early and late modern periods. The heteroglossia so typical of historiography becomes less literary or dramatic and more evidential in nature, also evolving citation styles and footnotes. The evaluative and ideological potential of historiography is present from the start and realised by such means as group/person labels, evaluative lexis and superlatives.

Despite Prague’s exponential growth in the early twentieth century, its musical communities of Germans and Czechs still operated like small villages, locked in a perpetual struggle over cultural values, long-standing grudges, and personal advancement. Not only did the Czech and German music critics inhabit almost entirely separate musical worlds – rarely, if ever, commenting on the other community’s accomplishments – but each also contained rival factions, most notoriously those of the Czechs at the Prague Conservatory and the emerging Musicology faculty at Charles(-Ferdinand) University. Though these divisions existed before 1900, the appearance of musicologist/critic Zdeněk Nejedlý (1879–1962) on the musical landscape of Prague became a watershed moment that solidified polemic lines of battle over much of the twentieth century. Though less virulent, conditions at the German University paralleled the Czechs’ near obsession in this generation over what constituted Czech or Bohemian music, and who might be included or excluded as its representatives.