Histories, Volume 3, Issue 2

Deserts confuse, fogging memory and electrifying the imagination. In 1853, on Utah’s Sevier River, a ritualized killing spawned a folklore of deserts that lives on to this day. Captain John W. Gunnison, an engineer, had detoured into an ambush....

This essay historicizes the concept of nature in French anarchist pedagogy around 1900. I argue that anarchist cosmology was not dualist in the sense that it did not neatly separate the natural from the cultural or social. Nature was rather understoo...

While long ignored, the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead has attracted considerable interest and wide academic reception since the 2000s. One reason for the renewed interest in Whitehead’s work is most certainly that his philosophy and conc...

This paper argues that the current age is best understood as a theological age in that its normal approach to the world is one based on a high level of abstraction. Theology stands in contrast with piety, which derives much more from immediate experi...

We describe a key moment during the world’s attempt to come to terms with enormously expanding populations. China was an extreme case, both in the magnitude of its population explosion and in its government’s control of reproduction throu...

The following article explores ideas of early ecological thinking within the natural sciences of early-19th-century Germany and discusses its possible roots. It tries to shed some light on the work of Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus who developed a hol...

The two decades comprised within the partition of Vietnam and the end of the Indochina Wars surprisingly saw major advances in prehistoric archaeology in the region. This article examines the political context and implications of archaeological inves...

The Mawgridge’s case in 1707 set the precedent where adultery was recognised as a justified trigger for the husband’s killing of his wife’s lover; this crystallised a partial defence for provocation. However, in an 1810 case, the ki...

Japan is often surrounded by the myth of featuring a unique “love for nature”, and its traditional culture and lifestyle as having been “in harmony with nature” before it was corrupted by modernization and Westernization. In t...