The Search for Ideas in Historical Investigation

1981 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 371 ◽  
Author(s):  
William O. Aydelotte
2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Skues

In 1892–3 Freud published his first substantial case history, which concerned a patient treated by means of hypnotic suggestion. For some years this has been one of the few remaining of Freud's dedicated cases histories where the patient has not been identified. More recently, however, two publications independently arrived at the conclusion that the patient was none other than Freud's wife, Martha. This paper sets out the reasons why this identification should always have been treated with suspicion, even if the real identity was not known. Nevertheless, the paper goes on to offer a more plausible identification from among Freud's known social circle. The second part of the paper questions the circumstances under which the original misidentification could plausibly have been sustained in the face of such glaring evidence to the contrary. It concludes that, among other reasons, recent tendencies in controversies about Freud's trustworthiness have the hazard of leading to unreliable assumptions about Freud's honesty being taken as a basis for sound historical investigation.


Cultura ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-65
Author(s):  
Jingdong YU

During the 17th and 18th centuries, European investigations into Chinese geography underwent a process of change: firstly, from the wild imagination of the classical era to a natural perspective of modern trade, then historical interpretations of religious missionaries to the scientific mapping conducted by sovereign nationstates. This process not only prompted new production of maps, but also disseminated a large amount of geographical knowledge about China in massive publications. This has enriched the geographical vision of Chinese civilization while providing a new intellectual framework for Europeans to understand China. Concurrently, it has formed another route for the travel of knowledge and intercultural interactions between the East and the West. Those interactions between space and knowledge have been reflected in the production, publication and dissemination of numerous maps of China in early modern Europe.


Author(s):  
Nadia Maria El Cheikh

This chapter discusses how research into court culture is an essential part of the growth in historical anthropology. The main historiographical developments have focused first, on the ritual and symbolic aspects of rulership; and second, on the personal and domestic world. Any historical investigation of the court faces the problem of definition because courts were so diverse and also because any ruler's court could be different depending on the occasion. This may explain why it is that court studies are almost nonexistent for various periods of Islamic history. This is the same for the Byzantine court as well as the Abbasid society: the Byzantines, like the Abbasids, did not isolate the court as a social and cultural phenomenon worthy of literary attention; rather, court culture was a fact of life which those who lived in it did not feel the need to articulate.


Water ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 849
Author(s):  
Demetris Koutsoyiannis

We revisit the notion of climate, along with its historical evolution, tracing the origin of the modern concerns about climate. The notion (and the scientific term) of climate was established during the Greek antiquity in a geographical context and it acquired its statistical content (average weather) in modern times after meteorological measurements had become common. Yet the modern definitions of climate are seriously affected by the wrong perception of the previous two centuries that climate should regularly be constant, unless an external agent acts upon it. Therefore, we attempt to give a more rigorous definition of climate, consistent with the modern body of stochastics. We illustrate the definition by real-world data, which also exemplify the large climatic variability. Given this variability, the term “climate change” turns out to be scientifically unjustified. Specifically, it is a pleonasm as climate, like weather, has been ever-changing. Indeed, a historical investigation reveals that the aim in using that term is not scientific but political. Within the political aims, water issues have been greatly promoted by projecting future catastrophes while reversing true roles and causality directions. For this reason, we provide arguments that water is the main element that drives climate, and not the opposite.


1981 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 371-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
William O. Aydelotte

There has been over the last several decades an active campaign for the use of systematic methods in historical research, particularly for the verification of contentions by the most rigorous means that our information and our analytical tools, quantitative ones when possible, can provide. It is probably correct to say that by now this battle is largely won, in principle at least. Few historians still object to formal arrangement of the evidence or to counting, even if many of them do not do things quite this way themselves. Methods that a generation ago were regarded as outrageous and on the lunatic fringe of scholarship are no longer controversial. It is true that a few diehards in the profession still protest against these innovations. On the other hand, some at the opposite end of the methodological spectrum contend that we have not gone far enough—that historical projects have not maintained acceptable technical standards and that ventures of historians into formal methods have been elementary and intellectually sloppy (Kousser, 1977). It is proper that these questions should be raised and no doubt there is room for improvement. Yet at least scholars have become aware of the value of systematic research and have begun to discuss in constructive fashion what needs to be done to make it more effective.


Author(s):  
Arturo Ezquerro

This article aims to explore a constellation of individual-attachment, family-attachment, and group-attachment experiences, as well as other psychosocial, cultural, and political factors, which contributed to the dual filicide perpetrated by Captain Gonzalo de Aguilera Munro—a count, landowner, cavalryman, and propaganda press officer for General Francisco Franco’s army during the Spanish Civil War. Learning from Luis Arias González and, above all, Paul Preston’s biographies of Captain Aguilera, the article will employ a combined methodology of historical investigation, psychiatric clinical formulations, and group analysis. In doing so, it will take into account a highly complex context of brutal group dynamics of national depression and exaltation, unresolved trauma, military rebellion, war, genocide, holocaust, and dictatorship.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Babette Hellemans

This pioneering textbook explores the theoretical background of cultural variety, both in past and present. How is it possible to study 'culture' when the topic covers the arts, literature, movies, history, sociology, anthropology and gender studies? Understanding Culture examines the evolution of a concept with varying meanings depending on changing norms. Offering a long-duration analysis of the relationship between culture and nature, this book looks at the origins of studying culture from an international perspective. Using examples from the several scholarly traditions in the practice of studying culture, Understanding Culture is a key introduction to the area. It identifies the history of interpreting culture as a meeting point between the long-standing historical investigation of 'humanism' and 'postmodernism' and is a comprehensive resource for those who wish to further their engagement with culture as both a historical and contemporary phenomenon.


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