Through the reading of several novels and movies produced in Arabic, French, and Italian between the 1980s and the 2000s, in this dissertation I provide a literary and transmedia contribution to the field of Mediterranean studies. Responding to the challenge brought by the regional category of Mediterranean to singular national and linguistic understandings of literature and cinema, I employ a comparative and multidisciplinary methodology to read novels by Baha’ Taher, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Abdelmalek Smari, and movies by film directors Merzak Allouache, Abdellatif Kechiche, and Vittorio De Seta. I define these works as “harboring narratives,” as they engage with the two shores of the Mediterranean in a complex process of interiorization and negotiation, opening routes of meaning across languages, societies and cultures. As they challenge constructions of otherness that materialize in present-day conflicts in the region, the works of these novelists and filmmakers give voice to a perspective on the Mediterranean radically different from that upheld by the “paradigms of discord.” Whereas according to these paradigms there is nothing in the Mediterranean but an iron curtain, these works present migration and conflict, historiography and religion, intimacy and translation as experiences shared across countries and societies in the region. By following routes of meaning that draw together the linguistic, the geographical, the economic, the historical, and the religious, I study how these novelists and filmmakers establish relationships between “horizons of belonging” and “elsewhere,” selfhood and otherness. In so doing, I respond to Kinoshita and Mallette’s call for challenging the “monolingualism” inherent in our contemporary ways of reading linguistic and literary traditions. As I show how the routes of meaning opened by these novelists and filmmakers across the region lead to hope that one day we will rejoice in sharing a common Mediterranean shore, however, I caution against easy enthusiasms. These novelists and filmmakers urge us to respond to the challenge of the present-day conflicts they address in their works, and a shared Mediterranean shore will eventually appear on the horizon only after we overcome monolingual conceptions of selfhood and otherness, setting sail towards a shore we have never seen.

Photographs contain a wealth of information which may be used effectively in historical research. Visual images may be used as evidence, for illustration, for comparison and contrast, and for analytical purposes. Somewhat perplexing is the relatively minimal use of photographs as primary sources in historical inquiry concerning schooling. Many visual clues exist which can help to explain the activities, methods, resources and quality of schooling, and the people involved in schooling, in selected locations. Visual clues may be coordinated with text and with other artifacts to present a more complete picture of schooling in a specific time and place than text alone can provide. Photographs provide opportunities to compare systems of schooling and to engage in longitudinal analysis of a single school system. They can be useful in helping to investigate elements of schooling that may have elevated selected school systems to exemplary levels. The presence of a large collection of educationally related photographs reveals opportunities for utilization which are not present with individual photographs or small groups of photographs. The potential uses of photographs as primary sources for inquiry are not limited to professional historians, but may be taught to, and used by students, as well. This study shows benefits and possibilities of utilizing photographic images as primary sources in historical research in education, and in teaching historical research methods, through the use of examples contained in the Albert W. Achterberg Collection of photographs. The collection was developed during the period of 1940-1999 over an 8,000 square mile area in south-central Nebraska and features a school system in the town of Holdrege, Nebraska.

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No description available.

A trustworthy record is one that is both an accurate statement of facts and a genuine manifestation of those facts. Record trustworthiness thus has two qualitative dimensions: reliability and authenticity. Reliability means that the record is capable of standing for the facts to which it attests, while authenticity means that the record is what it claims to be. The trustworthiness of records as evidence is of particular interest to legal and historical practitioners who need to ensure that records are trustworthy so that justice may be realized or the past understood. Traditionally, the disciplines of law and history have relied on the guarantee of trustworthiness inherent in the circumstances surrounding the creation and maintenance of records. For records created by bureaucracies, that trustworthiness has been ensured and protected through the mechanisms of authority and delegation, and through procedural controls exercised over record-writers and record-keepers. As bureaucracies rely increasingly on new information and communication technologies to create and maintain their records, the question that presents itself is whether these traditional mechanisms and controls are adequate to the task of verifying the degree of reliability and authenticity of electronic records, whose most salient feature is the ease with which they can be invisibly altered and manipulated. This study explores the evolution of means of assessing the trustworthiness of records as evidence from antiquity to the digital age, and from the perspectives of law and history; and examines recent efforts undertaken by researchers in the field of archival science to develop methods for ensuring the trustworthiness of electronic records specifically, based on a contemporary adaptation of diplomatics. Diplomatics emerged in the seventeenth century as a body of concepts and principles for determining the authenticity of medieval documents. The exploration reveals the extent to which legal, historical, and diplomatic methods operate within a framework of inferences, generalizations and probabilities; the degree to which those methods are rooted in observational principles; and the continuing validity of a best evidence principle for assessing record trustworthiness. The study concludes that, while the technological means of assessing and ensuring record trustworthiness have changed fundamentally over time, the underlying principles have remained remarkably consistent.

This chapter contains a survey of historiographioal theory from the time of the Greeks up to the work of Sorokin and Mandelbaum. It is descriptive rather than critical. [...]

John Millar's historical works have not, since the era of their original publication, been viewed as such by their principal commentators. Though Millar's Discourse on the Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771) has received acclaim for its perceived sociological value, his intended masterwork, An Historical View of the English Constitution (1803) has been almost completely neglected by contemporary scholarship. The intent of this paper is threefold: first, by viewing Millar in the historiographical context of late Enlightenment Britain, Millar's texts become recognizable as they were when they were first read, that is, as works of history. Restoring Millar to this context, a time when sophisticated new modes of historical writing were being developed to explain the modern world, also reveals the origins and nature of Millar's characteristic "conjectural" or "philosophical" approach to the study of the past. Secondly, a methodological analysis of Millar's major works and his unpublished "Lectures on Government" will provide insight into how Millar's conjecturalism was reconfigured to fit different subjects, purposes, and generic norms. Third, a survey of Millar's reception in the early nineteenth century will illustrate how rapidly and how profoundly the perceptions of Millar's historiographical approach changed from laudatory to dismissive. Millar is thus revealed not only as a historical writer, but one who was dedicated to a sophisticated, systematic program of historical inquiry.

This study is launched from the general understanding that History is a dialectical process comprised by the contributions of multiple actors, all of which interact in a contentious give-and-take. Keeping in mind this precept, ,I look at the novel La carga, by contemporary Equatoguinean author Juan Tomas Avila Laurel, as an alternative source of history, and assess that history as he has constructed it. This entails not only a detailed exploration of the world he creates within the novel, but a look at the intertextual bonds he establishes with such nineteenth-century writers as Manuel Iradier and Jose Marti. My analysis begins with the general notion that in Avila's granting of textual agency to natural elements one can begin to see the first inklings of a challenge to typical Eurocentric historiography. In the first major, section I look at what for all intents and purposes has been deemed the colonial dialectic, or the greater social dynamic that maintained colonial hegemony, as it is presented in the vignettes of 1940 Equatorial Guinea that we see in La carga. In the next section, I look at what Avila does with some of the discursive tenets of Spanish imperialism, especially those associated with the monolithic conception of Africa and Europe. And finally, I look at the way that relations between spatiality—mainly the geographic classifications inherent in colonial discourses—and subjectivity give way to Avila's commentary on modern-day Equatorial Guinea. I try to close with some speculation on the strategic formation of which Avila and La carga may form part, beginning with a look at his prefacio and concluding with a questioning of where the attitudes outlined in the prefacio may place him on the grand scale of African discourses of resistance.

At the end of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Queen Charlotte Islands were witness to dramatic transformations. Surveyors and scientists mapped the islands, describing the resources and conditions. Because of the favourable climate and locale, settlers and capital flowed to the Islands, changing the landscapes. And although the Islands' indigenous peoples embraced many aspects of the modernisation in the islands, they were excluded from claims to the islands. The modernization of the Queen Charlotte Islands came to a fevered climax in 1913, with the building of canneries, mines whaling stations, and logging camps, and with a flurry of land speculation. Haida frustration also increased at this time, spurned by their alienation from the land and their treatment as wards of the state. This thesis considers these transformations in the Queen Charlotte Islands by reflecting on various representations of place. Through these disparate images is the common narrative of progress through which the Islands are framed - be it through various prospects of tourism, science, capital, church or bureaucracy. What becomes apparent in all attempts to define and describe this place are the failures of vocabularies that are brought by settlers and visitors and imposed upon the Islands. Rather, the ability to know and control becomes allusive, thus openning more questions into the meaning of place.

Many scholars have studied the role and function of history during Baroque and Renaissance in Europe. However, they often ignored that the challenges put out by the new religious, political and scientific reforms made the philosophy of history an ideological battlefield. Aiming to better understand the dynamics of the conflict in the field of history-thinking during the period 1580–1661, the definition of the Jesuits’ historiographic canon (coherently implemented at a European level) is the main goal of this research. The study of a symbolic and representative case of Jesuits’ method of history making has been defined as the object of this thesis. The emblematic case studied in this work is the historical production of the Lithuanian Jesuit Albert Wijuk-Koialowicz. The thesis demonstrates that the Jesuits, during the period 1580–1661, had actually elaborated an historiographic canon as an answer to the spread of the new scientific method and the dissemination of new moral and political values. This canon was based on the methodological theories of Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza and on the unionist prescriptions of Antonio Possevino. We proved that the canon was consistently implemented beyond the geographic limits usually attributed to the European intellectual debate with examples from Spain (J. de Mariana) to Lithuania (A. W. Koialowicz). Finally, we concluded that the historical production of A. W. Koialowicz could be described as a representative example of the implementation... [to full text] / Daugelis mokslininkų studijavo istorijos vaidmenį bei reikšmę Europoje Baroko ir Renesanso epochose, siekdami suprasti reformacijos ir kontrreformacijos bei naujosios mokslo galios įtaką istoriniam mąstymui. Naujųjų religinių, politinių ir mokslo reformų iškelti iššūkiai istorijos filosofiją iš esmės pavertė ideologinės kovos lauku. Siekiant geriau suprasti konflikto dinamiką istorinėje mąstysenoje 1580–1661 m. laikotarpiu, pagrindiniu šio tyrimo tikslu išsikeltas siekis apibrėžti jėzuitų istoriografinį kanoną. Be to, siekiama parodyti, kad šis kanonas radikaliai skyrėsi nuo ekleziastinio ir buvo nuosekliai įdiegtas visoje Europoje nuo Ispanijos iki Lietuvos. Tyrimo objektas – reprezentatyvus ir simbolinis jėzuitų istorijos kūrimo pavyzdys – lietuvių jėzuito Alberto Vijūko-Kojalavičiaus istoriniai veikalai. Disertacijoje parodoma, kad jėzuitai 1580–1661 m. laikotarpiu, duodami atsaką naujo mokslinio metodo plitimui ir naujų moralinių bei politinių vertybių sklaidai, sukūrė savą istoriografinį kanoną. Jo pagrindu tapo Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza‘os metodologinės teorijos ir unionistinės Antonio Possevino idėjos. Remiantis pavyzdžiais, apimančiais šalis nuo Ispanijos (J. de Mariana) iki Lietuvos (A. Vijūkas-Kojalavičius) įrodyta, kad kanonas buvo nuosekliai diegiamas nepaisant geografinių ribų, kurios dažnai ribojo Europos intelektualinius debatus. A. Vijūko-Kojalavičiaus „istorinę produkciją“ galima būtų apibūdinti kaip reprezentatyvų šio istorinio kanono diegimo pavyzdį. Tai... [toliau žr. visą tekstą]