It is a distinguishing feature of modern Western historical thought that it has striven self-consciously to free itself from the use of non-historical categories of explanation in order to consitute itself as an autonomous, self-explanatory and self-justifying form of thought. Croce believed this movement to be a late phase of humanism and identified it as the main ingredient in the Western intellectual tradition. In his view, the history of historiography in the West has been one long struggle to expel the category of transcendence from historical analysis, that is, a struggle of history against philosophy of history.

Unlike modern historical thought with its value free orientation, most previous historiography has been informed, either consciously or unconsciously, by a specific set of social values and has used historical materials as either a mine of examples for support of the position pre-chosen (like Cicero) or as evidence for the study of phenomena the noumena of which lie just outside the range of history proper (like Marx). The former approach never really arrives at history, the latter passes through it too rapidly to the goal which it believes lies beyond it. In so far as most previous historiography has been governed by these two tendencies, it has always been philosophy of history rather than history proper.

Based on long-term ethnographic research on contemporary exhumations of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), as well as analysis of the exhumation of Francisco Franco from the Valley of the Fallen, this paper looks at the ways in which the dictator’s moral exemplarity has evolved over time since his military victory in 1939. During the early years of his dictatorship, Franco’s propaganda machine built the legend of a historical character touched by divine providence who sacrificed himself to save Spain from communism. His moral charisma was enriched by associating his historical mission with a constellation of moral exemplars drawn from medieval and imperial Spain. After his death, his moral exemplarity dwindled as democratic Spain embraced a political discourse of national reconciliation. Yet, since 2000, a new negative exemplarity of Franco as a war criminal has come into sharp focus, in connection with the exhumation of the mass graves of tens of thousands of Republican civilians executed by his army and paramilitary. In recent years, Franco has reemerged as a fascist exemplar alongside a rise of the extreme right. To understand the revival of his fascist exemplarity, I focus on two processes: the rise of the political party Vox, which claims undisguised admiration for Franco’s legacy (a process I call “neo-exemplarity”), and the dismantling in October 2019 of Franco’s honorable burial and the debate over the treatment that his mortal remains deserve (a process I call “necro-exemplarity”).

The dramatic re-enactment of an event compresses in symbolic form psychological and social processes. For this reason, ritual dramas are useful events for the study of transmission of culture and reformulation of tradition. Dramatization as a communication strategy has a special importance for solidarity groups, as Young (1965:2) has pointed out. The potential for transforming given attitudes and values has not been explored by social scientists although playwriters, actors, and directors have consciously or unconsciously attempted this in dramaturgy.

Historians who have studied French primary education during the nineteenth century, Maurice Gontard, Jacques and Mona Ozouf, and Peter Meyer, have noted the great gains made by the instituteurs and their growing professional-ization from the time of the law of 1833 to the law of the 1880s. Improvements in the quality of teaching derived mainly from the introduction of a national system of normal schools (écoles normales primaires) by the Law on Primary Education of 1833. This article will discuss the history, programs, and organization of these schools and the origin and backgrounds of their students. It will also examine 280 essays written by schoolmasters in 1861 on the state of primary education in the towns and villages of France; these mémoires, written for the most part by graduates of the normal schools, provide first-hand insight into the teacher himself, his professional goals and sense of mission, and how he viewed the world around him in the middle of the last century.

The history of Muhammadan Law in India falls naturally into three periods: (A) The period of Muslim domination (1206 A.D.–1857 A.D.); (B) The British period (1661–1951); (C) The Republican period (commencing with the promulgation of the Constitution of India on 26 January 1950). The dates are in such cases somewhat misleading and not mathematically “neat”. They may overlap, as in the British period, or, be ambient, as during the Muslim Sultanate. On the other hand they indicate with some degree of clarity the historical evolution and the time sequence of each system of jurisprudence. It will thus be seen that the Muhammadan law in India is one more instance of law being a function of society, thus being in a continuous state of flux. It is hardly necessary for me to add that the above classification must be read culliert to itc natural limitations.

“It is one thing to be one of the Great; it is another to be noble.” The first are perhaps nobles as defined by locality, but they are not loved nor recognized by the People or by the Prince; the others are “well regarded and appreciated,” their nobility being linked not only to their birth but also to the recognition of their titles and merits. According to Bartolo, the Florentine jurist Lap da Castiglionchio attempted, around 1370, the difficult exercise of combining the rival definitions of nobility that circulated in the Italy of his times, and the justification of his own nobility. He wanted very much to be noble, but not “great”. Who then are these great people from whom these nobles mean to distinguish themselves?

This article seeks to place lament in the context of Asian modernities, theorize memory in relation to genres of performance, and introduce the notion of social technologies of forgetting. Evidence suggests that Bangladeshi culture is changing in ways congruent with some models of globalizing modernity. Indeed, my data indicate that displacing certain performance genres may be key to modernist transformation. Yet, several persons I describe here endured hardship over several years to continue performing genres their neighbors deemed dated or sacrilegious. This problematizes teleological visions of the progress of a monolithic modernity stamping out older expressive forms.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, European metropolitan powers succeeded in overcoming the dominance that Yemen had hitherto exercised over the world coffee supply. Two colonies of the New World stood out in this transformation, both employing African slave labor on a large scale: Suriname, owned by the Dutch, and Saint-Domingue, the main French colony in the Caribbean. However, Suriname’s growth was short-lived, and it was soon surpassed by the productive leap of Saint-Domingue. The article explores the divergent trajectories of these two colonies, focusing on the environmental conditions of the operation of coffee plantations. Rather than taking the specific combinations of land, labor, capital, and political power as an independent and locally determined set, the article examines how the coffee trajectories of Suriname and Saint-Domingue were mutually formative through the specific evolving relationships that each space had within the world-system.

The once well-defended border between legal history and social history has been overrun. The assault has been carried out on two fronts. In part, it occurred through internal subversion by legal historians actually interested in the nature of societies whose laws they studied. The attack has also been launched externally by researchers who persistently employed records generated by the operation of the legal system to shed light upon various aspects of contemporary social structure. This union of interest between disciplines with widely divergent research skills, a phenomenon somewhat similar to what French political commentators have termed cohabitation, has been soundly applauded. Conferences have been convened; journals have been founded; monograph series have been established. All of these have facilitated methodological and substantive dialogue between legal and social historians.

Despite marked geographical and sociocultural differences, Greece and the two major southern-cone Latin American countries share a significant number of characteristics which distinguish them from most other peripheral and semiperipheral societies. Although they began industralisation late and failed to industrialise fully in the last century, all three countries managed to develop an important infrastructure (roads, railways) during the second half of the nineteenth century, and they achieved a notable degree of industrialisation in the years following each of the two world wars. Moreover, until the beginning of the nineteenth century, all three countries were subjugated parts of huge patrimonial empires (the Ottoman and the Iberian) and thus had never experienced the absolutist past of western and southern European societies. Finally, all three acquired their political independence in the early nineteenth century and very soon adopted parliamentary forms of political rule; and despite the constant malfunctioning of their representative institutions, relatively early urbanisation and the creation of a large urban middle class provided a framework within which bourgeois parliamentarism took strong roots and showed remarkable resilience. It persisted, albeit intermittently, from the second half of the nineteenth century until the rise of military bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes in the 1960s and 1970s and, as the Greek and Argentinian cases suggest, such regimes do not necessarily entail the irreversible decline of parliamentary democracy.

In the past few decades, there has been an explosion of literature concerning the changes taking place in American art music. In many cases, this literature is the work of the very people who are making those changes, the composers of new music. Much of their commentary is written in a manifesto style reminiscent of avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. The dominant topic concerns the changes composers feel are needed to revolutionize American music.

This article analyzes efforts by Soviet and present-day scientists in Russia to “rationalize” and ultimately automate the diagnostic techniques of Tibetan medicine. It tracks the institutional and conceptual histories of designing a pulse diagnostic system, a project that began in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. It has recently been re-enlivened in Buryatia, an ethnic minority region in Southeastern Siberia, in efforts to mobilize indigenous medical practices in response to local and national public health concerns. I focus on the translational ideologies that informed efforts to develop the pulsometer as a medical imaging technology, and analyze obstacles to these efforts found at the core of the device. Scientists working on the pulsometer have systematically tried to discern whether their measurements indicate sustained bodily pathologies, or instead reflect only technological white noise, and they still recruit and rely on the embodied expertise of practitioners of Tibetan medicine to validate their findings. In so doing they reaffirm claims that Tibetan medicine in Buryatia is inextricable from the forms of knowledge and practice that their projects work to standardize. I show how the apparent failures at perfect mechanization have made the pulsometer a surprisingly productive site for creating new kinds of expert communities and forms of knowledge making.

The expansion of the Ford Motor Company into Soviet Russia has been understood as part of a unidirectional spread of American economic power and cultural forms abroad following the First World War. This essay looks beyond the automobiles and manufacturing methods sent from Ford facilities in Detroit to the emerging Soviet automobile industry to examine multidirectional migrations of workers between Russia and the United States that underlay but sometimes collided with Ford's system. Workers, managers, engineers, and cultural, technical, and disciplinary knowledge moved back and forth between factories in Soviet Russia and the United States. Efforts to define, track, and shape workers in both countries as Americans, Russians, or Bolsheviks were integral to the construction of the products and methods that Ford sold. But many workers fell in between and contested these classifications and they often defied company attempts to create an efficient and homogeneous American workforce. In Russia, too, more than Soviet and American automobiles were produced: people and ideas were created that crossed and blurred boundaries between “American” and “Soviet.” There, “Fordizm” became a popular watchword among Soviet commentators and workers as a near-synonym for industrialization, mass production, and efficiency. Many saw it as a potentially valuable component of a new socialist world. These multidirectional movements, recorded in Ford Motor Company archives and related documents, suggest that rather than separate and alternative projects, Ford's burgeoning system to transform manufacturing and workers' lives in Detroit was linked to the Soviet revolutionary project to recreate life and work.

In the April 1979 issue of CSSH I proposed a theory: The financial services of leading indigenous banking firms were indispensable to the Mughal state, and the diversion by these firms of resources, both credit and trade, from the Mughals to other political powers in the Indian subcontinent contributed to the downfall of the Mughal empire (p. 152). John F. Richards's article in the present issue takes exception to that theory, challenging the evidentiary basis for my assertions. While stating that further research was admittedly necessary to test and fully substantiate the theory, I certainly offered evidence that these banking firms supplied working capital to the empire and its officials for military campaigns, trade, construction, karkhanah (workshop) production, and personal loans. I also discussed the bankers' regulation of the valuation, exchange, and circulation of currency, and particularly the hundi system of bills of exchange. The political potential of these financial services – of their performance or nonperformance, and on what terms – is obvious. Indeed, I cited instances of political interactions between bankers and officials.

It seemed to me a simple question. “What happens in this dance-drama? What is the storyline, the narrative?” I am met by puzzlement. The dancer explains that each such dance has its own set of instruments, its own special costumes and masks. For this one they use a simple, one-man marimba and the costumes come from the nearby town of Chichicastenango.

In the second half of the Kamakura age (1190–1333), Japan's elite warrior society began to undergo a gradual but radical structural transformation. The outline of this change was the shift from a divided to a unitary inheritance practice, with a progressive consolidation of family property and authority into one “chief” (sōryō), to the exclusion of his brothers and sisters. Kinship relations changed accordingly. As in the twelfth-century Mâcon described by Georges Duby, there was a progressive emphasis on lineal solidarity, along with a trend toward multiplication of independent branch lines. Through this shift, each warrior family sought territorial and organizational cohesion—a requirement for survival in an atmosphere of intensified social unrest and competition.

The greatest shocks suffered by revolutionary movements occur in the blossoming of revolution or in its defeat. The experience of the Russian Revolution of 1905–07 and of the period that followed, described by contemporary radical commentators as a “reaction,” is a case in point. In a half-dozen years the revolutionaries traveled the road that led from a promising, growing movement to actual revolution in which the parameters of their field of action expanded rapidly and then contracted to an environment of retrenchment and disillusionment. The effects of this experience upon individuals and organizations have not, however, received meaningful attention from historians or social scientists. An understanding of the experience of defeat is as significant as an understanding of the experience of success in the perception of revolutionary movements.

The theory, practice and origin of sacral kingship have provided a source of lively controversy ever since enthusiasm for the ancient history of the Near East was first kindled in the early nineteenth century by the expedition of Napoleon to Egypt, but the discussion has been more fruitful following the publication of the pioneer anthropological work The Golden Bough, which suggested new lines of approach. It is now generally accepted that, when incipient communities larger than the clan or family group came into existence, a priest or warchief would emerge set apart to some extent from the people, and regarded as possessing supernatural powers of magic through his contact with the elemental forces or deities believed to surround human life on every side. Such beliefs were too widespread and durable for it to be possible to seek a common geographical area of origin.

The majority of Singapore Chinese originate from the rural areas of Kwangtung and Fukien provinces. They had already started to immigrate in relatively large numbers by the late nineteenth century, that is before the traditional society of the countryside had been greatly disturbed by new political events and ideas. The social systems Chinese developed in Singapore therefore have been considerably influenced by those existing in “traditional” times in the homeland. Yet they have also been very much modified by the new social environment of Singapore. Overseas Chinese have been free to associate according to a number of principles not open to them in their home villages. New alignments have resulted from the immigration of a body of people of diverse origins and from the heterogenous structure of urban occupations. They become manifest in organisations set up for a number of different kinds of activity.