Histories, Volume 6, Issue 1 (March 2026) – 18 articles

Central European children’s literature can be read as both archive—recording shifting norms, institutions, and visual regimes—and agent, a medium through which childhood, citizenship, and cultural memory are made legible. This conceptual article proposes an edition-sensitive framework for analysing texts, images, and paratexts across Central Europe (1860–2025), with particular attention to institutional mediation. Rather than offering a comprehensive dataset or causal claims about reception, it synthesises research in childhood history, book and media history, memory studies, and translation and circulation studies to advance three arguments. First, children’s books are institutionally framed artefacts: paratexts and material features (series branding, curricular endorsements, library markings, pricing cues, regulatory traces) can be read as historically interpretable speech acts of legitimation. Second, shifts in visual and material regimes should be analysed as changing conditions of legibility—expectations of clarity, affect, and authority—rather than as mere stylistic evolution. Third, translation and circulation function as infrastructures that reorganise repertoires and interpretive horizons, complicating nation-centred narratives without exhaustive market mapping. The article concludes by stating methodological limits (catalogue gaps, survival bias, uneven metadata) and outlining a transferable agenda for paratext-centred documentation and edition-sensitive reading. Full article

This study evaluates whether a multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline originally developed for early modern woodcuts can be effectively transferred to the domain of medieval manuscript illumination. Using a dataset of Wenzelsbibel miniatures annotated with Iconclass, the pipeline combined page-level image input, LLM description generation, vector retrieval, and hierarchical reasoning. Although overall scores were lower than in the earlier woodcut study, the best-performing configuration still substantially surpassed both image-similarity and keyword-based search, confirming the advantages of structured multimodal retrieval for medieval material. Truncation analysis further revealed that many errors occurred only at the deepest Iconclass levels: removing levels raised precision to 0.64 and 0.73, with average remaining depths of 5.49 and 4.49 levels, respectively. These results indicate that the model’s broader hierarchical placement is often correct even when fine-grained specificity breaks down. Taken together, the findings demonstrate that a woodcut-oriented RAG pipeline can be meaningfully adapted to manuscript illumination and that its strengths lie in contextual reasoning and structured classification. Future improvements should incorporate available textual metadata, explore graph-based retrieval, and refine Iconclass-driven pathways. Full article

The memoirs of Baron Wenceslas Wratislaw are among the most significant Western sources portraying the Ottoman Empire in the late 16th century. Sent on a diplomatic mission and later taken captive, Wratislaw offers a dual image of the Empire: as a powerful, well-organised state and as a despotic regime evoking fear. His account reveals two contrasting perceptions of the Ottoman court and administration. While their rigid authoritarianism challenged Western admiration for Ottoman governance, it also reinforced existing notions of Oriental despotism. The shifting diplomatic conduct and hostile treatment of the Bohemian delegation further shaped the Ottomans as unreliable and deceptive in Western eyes. Culturally, Wratislaw presents the Ottomans as “the other civilization,” highlighting differences in religion, lifestyle, and social structure. Yet he also acknowledges their hospitality, generosity, and religious tolerance. This study examines how Wratislaw’s personal experiences reflect broader Western imaginations of the Ottoman world. It argues that cultural and diplomatic encounters shaped a complex and often ambivalent image, influenced by both structural dynamics and individual perspectives. Positioned at the intersection of historical sociology and imagology, the article contributes to the understanding of cross-cultural perception in early modern diplomacy. Full article

On 10 March 1933, an earthquake of roughly 6.4 on the Richter scale (retrospectively estimated) hit the City of Long Beach, California, and the counties surrounding it. Seismically, the quake was of moderate magnitude. However, to this day it remains one of the most destructive quakes in California history in terms of structural damage and fatalities, largely because of faults in building construction of the time that resulted in widespread collapses resulting from earth movement. This article tells the story of the quake itself in full detail; examines its role in the passage of the Field Act, tracing out how that act has impacted earthquake-resistant building design policy, law and practice in California and beyond; assesses the way in which the earthquake altered the trajectory of earthquake science; and details the economic policy response to the quake and the short-term stimulative effects this had on Long Beach and Southern California economies (referred to here as “Disaster Keynesianism”). While there is a large historiographical literature on the Long Beach quake and some of its singular impacts, this research is unique in that it describes and analyzes impacts across multiple dimensions and puts them in the context of contemporary literature on disaster studies, economic analysis, and the history of science, all based on extensive archival research. The paper concludes by positing that the policy, technical and economic response to the Long Beach earthquake represented a sort of “high modern” example of socially and institutionally constructed “disaster” that firmly set in place the notion that “natural disaster” could be managed and ultimately prevented by material and technical means. It is argued that such a view is still contained within more current and broader concepts of “Resilience” and “Anti-fragility”. Full article

This essay examines six depictions of the 1898 suicide of New Zealand businessman and politician William Larnach: four historical narratives and two dramatic/fictional depictions. Drawing on the insights of postmodern historiographers like Hayden White, I argue that these tellings reflect an increasing influence of the Hippolytus myth, a culturally authorized narrative rooted in traditional British colonial education structures and Antipodean reception of classics. In particular, as New Zealand shifted away from British identification to a distinctly Kiwi identity, classics legitimized New Zealand culture within a global north from which the Antipodean nation is geographically isolated. Analyzing depictions of Larnach’s death and the possible incestuous scandal leading up to it reveals important historiographic insights both into how history is conceptualized and emplotted and into how Antipodean cultures navigate their positions on the fringes of a larger global north primarily seated in Europe and North America. Full article

This study examines the social, economic and cultural impacts that Latin American women face due to climate-induced displacement, considering these impacts as arenas of conflict and negotiation. Using an intersectional framework, the study analyses how climate disasters exacerbate structural inequalities rooted in patriarchal systems, thereby constraining women’s adaptive capacity while simultaneously catalysing resistance strategies. Through a comparative analysis of Bangladesh and the Dry Corridor in Central America using a Gender Vulnerability Index (GVI), the study reveals that displaced women navigate contested spaces, disputing access to resources, legal recognition and territorial belonging, while constructing transnational solidarity networks and cooperative economies. The emergence of women climate refugees challenges international legal frameworks, exposing critical gaps in protection regimes. The findings emphasise the need for gender-responsive policies that recognise women as transformative agents who negotiate power asymmetries in contexts of environmental crisis, not merely as vulnerable populations. This research contributes to our understanding of the nexus between climate change, gender and migration by foregrounding the dialectic of domination and agency in Latin American displacement processes. Full article

This paper addresses the knowledge gap on the beginning of the history of contact with extraterrestrial intelligent beings in international astronautics. In the mid-1950s, the world’s space law practitioner, Andrew G. Haley, proposed the concept of Metalaw, the law governing interactions between all beings in the Universe, as he represented the American Rocket Society in the International Astronautical Congress, the single largest gathering of space-faring nations. Haley, with experience in radio communications law dating back to the 1930s, played a pivotal role in pushing for the international allocation of radio frequencies in space. Haley was, too, an agile mediator with the Soviet Union and its bloc, acting across various organizations and forums. This article, in contextualizing Haley’s introduction of Metalaw, shows how the onset of the Space Age coincided with the emergence of a contact scenario involving extraterrestrial intelligence enabled by the corresponding techno-scientific capabilities of the time. It demonstrates how extraterrestrial intelligence discursively addressed outer space regulation as a bone of contention between the two geopolitically divided parts, a regulation upon which the US’s global satellite system would depend. The analysis in this article recounts the birth of the Metalaw concept at the intersection of outer space imaginary, law, international organizations, science and technology, diplomacy, the Space Race, the Cold War, and radio astronomy’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Full article

This manuscript examines how distinct epistemic attitudes toward singularity and generality have been articulated in medical writing across different historical contexts, offering a conceptual and meta-historical analysis of two enduring genres in biomedical literature: the individualized case report and the systematically aggregated clinical trial. Hippocratic case narratives are considered as a particularly lucid articulation of a mode of inquiry that privileges detailed observation of individual patients, while medieval Aristotelian natural philosophy exemplifies a contrasting emphasis on regularity, intelligibility, and general explanation. Renaissance medical and philosophical traditions are treated as a mediating moment in which attention to anomaly, wonder, and singularity was explicitly re-legitimized within learned medicine. These historically situated articulations are not presented as stages in a progressive narrative, but as recurrent epistemic orientations that are repeatedly reconfigured under different theoretical, institutional, and technological conditions. The paper argues that the tension between attention to exceptional cases and the pursuit of generalizable knowledge continues to structure modern biomedical writing, where case reports remain essential for identifying rare, novel, or anomalous phenomena, while clinical trials formalize strategies for producing reproducible, population-level evidence. Full article

During the past decade, chatbots have been integrated into commercial platforms to facilitate second language acquisition (SLA) by providing opportunities for interactive conversations. However, SLA learner progress is limited by chatbots that lack the contextualization typically added by instructors to college and university courses. The present study focuses on a collaborative Digital Learning Incubator (DLI) project dedicated to creating and testing a chatbot with a physical form, or avatar chatbot, called Slabot (Second Language Acquisition Bot), in two upper-level university courses at the University of Tennessee, asynchronous online Spanish 331 (Introduction to Hispanic Culture), and in-person Spanish 434 (Hispanic Culture Through Film). Students in these two courses believe that their oral skills would benefit from more opportunities to speak in Spanish. To provide the students with more practice and instructors with a tool for assessing Spanish oral skills in online and in-person courses, the DLI project objective was to advance current avatar chatbot platforms by enabling Slabot to elicit student responses appropriate for evaluation according to the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) standards. An initial test of Slabot was conducted, and the results demonstrated the potential for Slabot to achieve the project objective. Full article

Medical history of psychopathology is, to some extent, the history of the overlapping traditions of Cartesian-Platonic dualism and physical reductionism looking for a taxonomic middle ground by means of diagnostic constructs. Building on such liminality, Freud first showed that traumatic memories could well be made of pure fantasy, a mind-only construct of experience, and still act traumatically on the patient’s body. Under that sway, Freud and Janet came to intentionally modify their patients’ memories to cure “hysterical” dysfunctional behaviours by means of hypnosis. The metaphorical practice of “writing new words in the human soul” has been adopted as a clinical device since the early days of psychotherapy, as the meaning of past experiences was clinically approached, verbally and emotionally negotiated, to remove somatic symptoms. Working on memory at the interdisciplinary level, we here show that what is nowadays referred to as the abstract mind, or psyche in medicine, is the historical precipitate of quite a unique cultural construction, resulting from the porous liminality between religious domain, philosophical theory and scientific method. We hereby address psychopathology, the philosophy of medicine and the frontiers between memory and fantasy—besides those between body and mind—to suggest how psychoanalysis can be considered more as a hermeneutic than as a science, or otherwise, how hermeneutics can be appreciated as a scientific, medical and therapeutic tool. Memory itself is addressed on the threshold between consciousness, organic life and intergenerational potential. Full article

A reading of the American Revolution and the post-Civil War Reconstruction period through the lens of W.E.B. Du Bois’s early writings provides new insights into his theory of racial monopoly capitalism. Many Americans saw the 1776 revolution as an idealistic fight for liberty, for the slaveholding elite who held disproportionate power within the revolutionary coalition; however, consolidating power and defending their property and expansionist ambitions were primary objectives. For them, the Revolution was a strategic move to establish racial nationalism and preserve slaveholder control over economic growth and national power. A century later, Du Bois’s analysis of the “bargain of 1876” revealed a similar consolidation of power, influencing both his research on the revolutionary period and his writings on Reconstruction. The political deal in 1876 abandoned the promise of Reconstruction’s “abolition democracy,” restoring white supremacist rule. Du Bois saw this as the victory of monopoly capital, which used racism to weaken interracial labor solidarity and enforce a system of super-exploitation. By linking 1776 to 1876, Du Bois demonstrated that U.S. capitalist development had been shaped by racial oppression from its settler-colonial roots through the rise of monopoly capitalism, consistently blocking the achievement of a true, non-racial democracy. Full article

In this study, we investigate the Suvarṇabhūmi area, corresponding to central–southern Mainland Southeast Asia. We test the hypothesis that this region, located to the south of the Himalayan foothills, can be characterised as a convergence zone in which diverse entities involving humans, animals, and artefacts have significantly diverged from their related counterparts outside the area. We argue that this process of convergence was facilitated by the Maritime Silk Road trade networks, which were particularly active between the 3rd century BCE and the 9th century CE. Comparative data are derived from multiple scientific disciplines, including linguistic typology, onomastics, epigraphy, archaeology, and evolutionary biology. This includes typological features of language, toponyms, inscriptions, glass bead chemistry and related material culture, and phylogenetic data from patterns of endemism to illustrate parallel convergence scenarios observed for each data type. The results reveal recurring patterns of convergence. Linguistic, technological, and biological entities tend to diverge from their original forms and realign with predominant regional types when entering the Suvarṇabhūmi area. The spread of Indic and Sinitic linguistic and cultural elements, the adaptation and development of Brāhmī scripts into distinct local forms, the secondary manufacturing of glass beads, and unique genetic lineages in mammals, amphibians, reptiles, fish, and plants all point to the region’s role as a dynamic interaction sphere. We argue that Suvarṇabhūmi functions as an ecological system, in which trajectories of convergence are notable across a number of individual aspects of cultural and biological diversity. Altogether, these components have contributed to shaping the region’s distinctive natural and cultural history. Full article

An architectural and cultural heritage analysis is performed in this study by systematically examining the social significance of historical hammams in today’s Historical Peninsula of Istanbul, which symbolize washing–cleansing–hygiene activities and also have socialization–entertainment–economic dimensions, as well as reflecting urban development and change. Within this scope, 81 historic hammams listed as cultural heritage sites were researched using a multi-layered dataset that integrates on-site morphological studies and historical maps. The physical and intangible transformations of these hammams are analyzed based on a database of 24 examples documented through in situ observations of hammams still in active use, revealing the effects of changing cultural and historical contexts on these buildings. The other 19 examples, which are not currently operating as hammams but still exist as buildings, are assessed to determine their current purpose or whether they are undergoing restoration. The findings reveal the evolution of hammams and identify dominant architectural typologies, such as double and single hammams. In this paper, a conceptual framework is presented that places the cultural heritage–tourism combination within a broader discussion while also revealing the current state of hammams in the Historical Peninsula of Istanbul, the primary source of their physical and cultural existence and development. This study demonstrates that hammams constitute an important part and provide concrete evidence of regional cultural heritage areas, human–environment interactions, and the spatial representation of urban memory regarding preservation and transmission to future generations. Full article

This article presents some information about the participation of nearly one hundred inhabitants of Castelló d’Empúries (currently located in the Alt Empordà region, province of Girona, in the northeastern corner of the Iberian Peninsula) in the Battle of Cape Orlando (coast of Sicily), which in 1299 pitted the fleets of James II of Aragon against those of his brother Frederick III of Sicily. The article provides the names of the participants and discusses several issues related to their involvement in this expedition. It also offers relevant information about the participation of the town’s inhabitants in other military ventures and about the commercial navy of the Empordà region during the same period. Full article

The idea of progress constitutes a foundational, self-justifying myth of modernity. This paper explores the conservative critique of this myth, tracing its intellectual history and diagnosing its contemporary consequences. It argues that the progressive narrative is not a scientific fact but a secularized eschatology that has evolved into a form of technocratic rationalism rooted in a materialist metaphysics. The analysis examines the culmination of this worldview in transhumanism and diagnoses it, following Martin Heidegger, as a symptom of the “forgetting of Being” (Seinsvergessenheit). In contrast, the paper outlines the conservative alternative, which is not a simple return to the past but a reorientation toward a “vertical” dimension of existence grounded in Tradition, the symbolic cosmos, and a transcendent order. Ultimately, the paper frames the conservative stance as a form of metaphysical guardianship—an existential practice of “remembrance of Being” that keeps open the possibility of transcendence in an age of ontological nihilism. Full article

This article focuses on ponds and reservoirs (PRs) in Sanuki, Kagawa Prefecture, Japan. Sanuki is a region in the Seto Inland Sea with low annual rainfall. In 1999, there were 14,619 PRs in the 1877 km² area. Mannō-ike, the largest PR, is said to have been constructed at the beginning of the ninth century by Kūkai, one of Japan’s most prominent Buddhist monks. Such huge man-made structures could have been achieved only through collective human labor. The motivation to build large PRs was driven by the risk of drought. However, it is important to note that there were many more small PRs managed by individuals or families than one might imagine. PRs can range in size from huge to small and in location from mountainous areas to mountain foothills and plains. Rather than hard clustering, which classifies PRs according to a single logic, this article takes a new, historically holistic approach by using soft clustering to analyze the classification mechanism by considering the “Living Spaces” the world of all living organisms, including humans, and quantifying its complex logic. Full article

John Adams asserted that the historical summation of republican political thought can be found in one writer: Polybius of Megalopolis. More clearly than any other, Polybius articulated those qualities that define good statesmen and citizens and make republics strong and successful. This article will examine this claim by bringing new historical analysis to Book 6 of Polybius’ Histories in order to identify the republican virtues important to Polybius. Polybius believed that Rome survived its early defeats in the Second Punic War and emerged triumphant over all of its enemies due to a unique combination of morals and merits that characterized good statesmen and strong republics. These extended deeper than political institutions and into the social fabric that bound the Roman people together and defined their relationships with one another, both in their homes as citizens and on campaign as soldiers. This article will work through Polybius’ analysis and show how Rome’s constitution used political institutions to suppress civic vices; armies in the field to cultivate civic service, sacrifice, and skill; military camps to shape public notions of duty, honor, and shame; and Roman families—as exemplified in public funerals—to habituate and showcase personal and civic virtues. Full article