Histories

The history of ideas is essential for understanding how scientific knowledge is produced and sustained. This is particularly true for Western climate science, whose intellectual history spans a long period and has undergone several major transformations. These range from climatic determinism and the development of the physics of the atmosphere and oceans to the prominent role climate science now plays in shaping climate policy. Yet, like many natural sciences, climate science pays relatively little attention to its own intellectual history. As a result, influential past scientists, abandoned ideas, and episodes, in which accepted views were later shown to be wrong, can gradually fade from memory. Oral history offers one way to preserve this intellectual history and to “put people behind the science.” It involves interviewing scientists about what happened, how they experienced important developments, and how they and their professional communities perceived the changing role of climate science. To this end, the author and his colleagues have conducted an extensive series of interviews. These include senior climate scientists nearing the end of their careers as well as younger researchers who entered the field more recently. Full article

This article examines the changing social meanings of mining in Roșia Montană (Romania) from late state socialism to the period following the withdrawal of the Roșia Montană Gold Corporation (RMGC), which had proposed a large open-cast gold project there. The study uses an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design. It draws on seven semi-structured interviews with local clergy of different confessions, conducted in spring 2019, and on questionnaire surveys of 282 residents and 45 resettled former residents, carried out in 2020, before the site’s inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2021. Perceptions are traced across four moments: the state-socialist period; the post-1989 years before the closure of the state mine; the RMGC investment phase; and its aftermath. Treating priests as local moral authorities and interpreters of change, the article finds that mining was remembered not merely as employment but as a source of order, prestige and collective identity under state socialism; that the post-1989 transition bred moral ambivalence; and that the RMGC years polarised the community. At the time of the research, perceptions remained divided but were increasingly articulated through memory, heritage and survival rather than extraction. The article shows how religious actors mediate collective memory and local responses to economic change in post-socialist mining communities. Full article

This essay constitutes the first part of an investigation into the origin and consequences of the concept of “national sovereignty,” focusing specifically on the concept of “nation” as derived from the Latin natio and the languages that adopted this lexical root. Consequently, this conceptual analysis is circumscribed strictly to the philological sphere of the Latin word, excluding terms in other languages that do not originate from natio. Most notably, natio initially functioned as a synonym for the Latin gens, carrying a slightly negative nuance. The author compares natio primarily with other Latin terms for “community”—chiefly populus, patria, and civitas—and examines early attempts at definition by Quintilian and Saint Isidore of Seville. The collapse of long-distance human relations from the fifth century onward facilitated the transformation of Latin and the formation of the Romance languages. Under the author’s hypothesis, this shift prevented the Latin word gens from being recovered in the sense of “nation,” causing it to take on the broader meaning of “people.” As gens became relegated to the strictly legal domain (ius gentium), natio and its derivatives progressively established themselves in common usage. Nevertheless, natio continued to denote a community defined by kinship. Because kinship inherently involves degrees, a distinction arose between “general nations” and “particular nations.” Each “particular nation” formed part of a “general nation,” giving rise to “nations of nations” composed of smaller constituent units. The author details the role played by universities and councils of the Roman Church, particularly from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. From the fifteenth century onward, a “territorialization” of the concept of “nation” emerges in certain countries, potentially linked to the evolving meaning of the word “State.” Finally, this text anticipates the impact of introducing the idea of “national sovereignty,” illustrating this dynamic through the case of the Spanish Monarchy and its extension to the antipodes from the sixteenth century onward. Full article

The historical evolution of Catholic sacred space has traditionally been examined through architectural, liturgical, or theological perspectives considered largely in isolation. Comparatively little attention, however, has been paid to ecclesiastical architecture as historical evidence of changing and sometimes coexisting conceptions of ecclesial identity, worship, and community. This article investigates the transformation of Catholic sacred space from the origins of Christianity to the present through a historical-interpretative and interdisciplinary approach integrating architectural history, ecclesiology, liturgical studies, and the history of Christianity. Rather than reconstructing the stylistic evolution of church architecture, the study proposes an interpretative framework that examines how changing theological and ecclesiological conceptions interacted with liturgical practices and found diverse material expressions in the organisation of sacred space. Through a chronological analysis extending from the domus ecclesiae to the post-conciliar church, which provides the historical framework for a more detailed examination of twentieth-century transformations, particular attention is given to the twentieth-century Liturgical Movement and to the contributions of Romano Guardini, Rudolf Schwarz, Johannes van Acken, Odo Casel, and Josef Andreas Jungmann, whose reflections established the intellectual foundations of the liturgical renewal formalised by the Second Vatican Council. The study demonstrates that the architectural transformations commonly associated with Vatican II should be understood not as an isolated rupture but as part of a longer and historically complex process of interaction between ecclesiology, liturgy, and architecture. It concludes that Catholic sacred space constitutes one of the Church’s principal material archives, preserving within its built fabric the historical evolution of Christian identity, worship, authority, and community. Full article

This study examines the socio-economic structure of Rumnos, a village in the district of Devrek in the Ottoman province of Bolu (now in Devrek district, Zonguldak Province, Türkiye), on the basis of Temettuat Register no. 3378, dated 1844–1845. The analysis is confined to a single village and makes no comparisons, and its findings cannot be generalized to the country as a whole; nevertheless, they may provide a model for future research. According to this particular volume of the Temettuat Register, agriculture and animal husbandry were the village’s principal sources of income. The prevalence of occupations directly related to agriculture is remarkable, as it generates the majority of wealth. The types of taxes paid by the tax-liable heads of household, together with their incomes derived from their occupational activities, were identified, and their overall tax burdens were determined. An income distribution analysis using statistical methods was conducted for this study. A Lorenz curve was constructed, and the Gini coefficient was calculated as 0.33. The analysis determined that there was a moderate level of inequality in the income distribution among the households in the village of Rumnos. Full article

This article re-examines the French military physician and physiologist Jules Héricourt’s (1850–1938) treatment of what he termed intoxications d’origine externe, intoxications of external origin, in his popularising 1904 book Les Frontières de la Maladie: Maladies Latentes et Maladies Atténuées. Héricourt grouped alcohol, tea, coffee, tobacco, and carbon monoxide under a single clinical logic: each, in his account, produced disease gradually, cumulatively, and at exposure levels too low to be recognised as pathological. Through close, critical reading of the primary text, supplemented by biographical and historiographical contextualisation, this study asks how Héricourt characterised each form of intoxication, on what evidentiary basis, and what his synthesis contributes to the historiography of chronic toxic exposure. The analysis shows that most of Héricourt’s specific clinical claims lack a stated evidentiary basis and that several derive directly from earlier authors; his scientific authority rested chiefly on his experimental physiological work with Charles Richet rather than on documented clinical toxicology. The article argues that the book’s historiographical significance lies not in medical originality but in its role as a widely read popularisation of the idea that ordinary domestic and social habits could produce disease through prolonged, low-intensity, unrecognised exposure, an idea that resonates, at the level of general logic, with later models of chronic and cumulative toxic exposure. This resonance is treated as suggestive rather than as evidence of direct influence. Full article

This article reconstructs the brief history of the Academia para la Historia de la Iglesia Latina (APHILA), a short-lived but revealing experiment in Latinx Protestant historiography in the early 1990s. Drawing on archival sources from the Justo L. González papers, it contextualizes APHILA within the boom of Latinx theological education that followed González’s booklet The Theological Education of Hispanics, as foundations invested heavily in new Latinx initiatives. The essay first narrates the network-building and grant-writing processes that led to APHILA’S creation and its only major conference at McCormick Theological Seminary in 1993. It then analyzes the organization’s internal tensions over methodology, language policy, institutional location, and lay versus professional participation, together with the external pressures of donor expectations. Finally, it argues that APHILA’S collapse exposes both the possibilities and the structural fragilities of Latinx Protestant projects seeking to craft an autochthonous historiography in the United States. Full article

This paper reframes the ancient Egyptian tomb as a borderscape, focusing on evidence from the 3rd millennium BCE—known as the Old Kingdom and the First Intermediate Period. While the identification of the tomb as a border between the worlds of the living and the dead is not new in modern scholarship, the actual implications of the tomb as a border, and its possible consequences for human interactions within, and through, the tomb, are yet to be analyzed in depth. The concept of borderscape, a polysemic term first established in border studies, recenters the tomb as an active place of convergence and of community building, a place where the social and political order can simultaneously be maintained and subverted. The tomb is understood as a complex stage where human feelings, emotions, and interactions are experienced, intertwined, and intensified, offering a more humanized and reflective view of the ancient experience of these monuments. Funerary rituals, inscriptions, and iconographic programs are thus interpreted as acts of bordering that sustained the tomb as both a physical and a symbolic threshold between two distinct but interconnected realities. By reframing the tomb as a borderscape, this paper aims to provide a theoretical and analytical instrument that highlights the fact that the tomb was not a neutral space, emphasizing the ongoing practices through which boundaries between worlds, identities, and social orders were negotiated and maintained—not just within, but because of, the tomb space. Full article

Imperialism as a system of exploitation profoundly shaped the natural and human landscapes of colonized regions. This paper examines how the Second World War accelerated imperial transformations in East Africa, focusing on the Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme (1947–1951) as a case of business-imperial collaboration. Set against Britain’s post-war reconstruction needs, the scheme shows how corporate interests, especially Unilever’s, shaped colonial development through industrial agriculture. Drawing on archival research and recent historiography, the article argues that the scheme was not merely a failed agricultural experiment. Rather, it was a structural expression of business-imperial partnership with lasting environmental and institutional legacies. Its ecological damage and social disruption reflect broader patterns of environmental violence inherent in imperial capitalism. This study contributes to imperial environmental history in two ways. First, it traces the long-term ecological impacts of post-war industrial development in colonial spaces. Second, it shows that imperial agro-economic practices were not temporally isolated events: the effects of even short-lived, failed ventures such as the Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme continued into the postcolonial period. Full article

This article examines the voyage of the Leviathan, a brigantine that sailed from Newport, Rhode Island, in 1773, in search of new sperm whale grounds in the South Atlantic but ended its journey off the coast of Brazil. There, its crew was arrested and persuaded to teach sperm-whaling techniques under Portuguese colonial authorities. Bringing together the trajectories of a Jewish merchant, a New England captain, a Portuguese viceroy, and sperm whales themselves, the voyage marked the beginning of sperm whale hunting in Brazilian waters. At the same time, it triggered an unplanned process of technological and environmental knowledge transfer across imperial borders. Drawing on Environmental History, Blue Humanities, and Atlantic Studies, the article argues that the Leviathan functioned as both a borderscape and as a boundary-crossing device, linking human and nonhuman actors across political, ecological, social, and oceanic frontiers. By reconstructing this incidental voyage through a connected and more-than-human perspective, the article proposes a transdisciplinary approach to the writing of Early Modern Atlantic history. Full article

In 19th-century Hungary, the German-language press provided an important intellectual platform for Jewish journalists, many of whom became significant actors in political communication and cultural transfer. This study examines the Pester Lloyd (founded in 1854) as an institutional case through which the mediating role of Jewish journalists in a multilingual press culture can be explored. By analyzing editorial strategies, journalistic networks, and forms of cultural mediation, the paper explores how Jewish intellectuals operated between Hungarian- and German-language cultural and political spheres. Methodologically, the study combines historical press research with institutional and intellectual–historical analysis, drawing on editorials, feuilletons, autobiographical writings, and contemporary press material. Special attention is given to Miksa Falk, whose editorial leadership embodied the ideals of liberal constitutionalism and linguistic and cultural mediation. The article situates the Pester Lloyd as both a product of and an important medium for journalistic modernization and the participation of Jewish journalists within Hungary’s evolving media landscape. Full article

This study examines Slovak compatriot associations in the United States at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as institutional structures of mutual aid, community organization and immigrant adaptation. The analysis focuses on the National Slovak Society and American Živena and is based on the qualitative content analysis of associational statutes and organizational documents. The study demonstrates that Slovak associations fulfilled functions extending beyond welfare assistance alone. Alongside systems of sickness, disability and death benefits, they also organized educational, publishing and cultural activities that contributed to the stabilization of Slovak immigrant community life in the United States. The comparison of the National Slovak Society and American Živena reveals differences between male and female organizational models within Slovak associational life. Whereas the National Slovak Society emphasized mutual aid and financial administration, American Živena focused more strongly on women’s educational and cultural activities. The findings situate Slovak associations within the broader context of immigrant mutual aid organizations in the United States and contribute to the historiography of Slovak migration and immigrant associational life. Full article

To date, many studies on the Nazi Special Courts have focused on the individuals involved in passing judgement or in the prosecution process in general, as well as on their political significance. For our study, we undertake a re-evaluation and computational ‘upcycling’ of an archive catalogue from the 1970s containing around 10,000 legal cases from the Munich Special Court (1933–1945). Although this was not an entirely new phenomenon–they were originally introduced by the Weimar Republic–, the Special Courts were unique in that they brought together general criminal law and ‘crimes’ in the form of non-conformity with National Socialist ideology under a single jurisdiction. Full article

This article reconstructs a largely forgotten episode in the history of Buddhist studies: the period in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when the Buddha was widely considered to have been Sri Lankan (Ceylonese) in origin. Contrary to modern scholarly consensus situating the Buddha firmly in northern India, early European encounters with Buddhism unfolded amid profound uncertainty regarding its geographical and historical origins. Drawing on colonial accounts, early translations, sacred relics, and the European interpretation of chronicle traditions, the article shows how Sri Lanka came to appear, within certain European scholarly frameworks, to possess a coherent and persuasive claim to Buddhist primacy, grounded in living religious practice, sacred geography, and continuous historical narratives. The article argues that the subsequent displacement of a Sri Lankan Buddha was not simply the result of improved evidence, but of a deeper epistemic transformation. During the nineteenth century, new standards of historical credibility—philology, cartography, archaeology, and comparative textual criticism—redefined what counted as authoritative knowledge. Through the interventions of figures such as Brian Hodgson and George Turnour, Ceylonese traditions were reclassified as local and symbolic rather than foundational. By tracing this shift, the article illuminates how scholarly consensus is produced through changes in method and authority, revealing how changing standards of evidence narrowed the range of historically credible possibilities. Full article

The figure of Cesare Borgia occupies a complex and revealing place in the political thought of Niccolò Machiavelli. This article argues that the historical Cesare complicates Machiavelli’s more schematic presentation of military autonomy in The Prince. Whereas Chapter VII foregrounds Cesare’s dependence on Alexander VI, fortuna, French assistance, and contingent political circumstances, Chapter XIII presents a compressed movement from French auxiliaries and mercenary captains to “own” arms. By reconstructing the composition, financing, and command structures of Cesare’s forces, the article shows that his attempts to reduce dependence remained incomplete. His military power remained structurally dependent on papal finance, French backing, mercenary captains, intermediaries, and temporary forms of local recruitment. Cesare therefore did not consolidate the kind of stable territorial military apparatus that Machiavelli elsewhere identified as essential to durable rule. His rapid collapse after Alexander VI’s death reflects the fragility of a principality built on external, negotiated, and revocable support. The article thus reframes Cesare not as a historical exemplar of achieved Machiavellian military self-sufficiency, but as a figure whose career exposes the tension between Machiavelli’s theoretical use of armi proprie and the composite realities of warfare in Renaissance Italy. Full article

This study proposes a new conceptual framework that moves beyond the widely used civic/ethnic dichotomy in nationalism theory by bringing Michael Billig’s concept of banal nationalism into dialogue with the literature on everyday boundary-making. It argues that the so-called “invisible” and routine markers of banal nationalism play a constitutive role in the everyday reproduction of national belonging and in delineating who is counted as inside and who is excluded as outside. Crucially, this process is not static; it is activated and contested through the constant dialectic between everyday border-drawing and the lived reality of border-crossing. Banal nationalism, therefore, is not merely composed of unnoticed symbols, but is deeply intertwined with the quotidian mechanisms of boundary-drawing that shape rights, belonging, and processes of exclusion. In this regard, the study critiques the limitations of the civic/ethnic distinction and introduces a new model (termed “banal boundary-making”) which links banal nationalism to practices of boundary construction and the management of border-crossers across linguistic, affective, material, and administrative dimensions. The aim is to contribute to nationalism theory with a mechanism-oriented approach that transcends the binary of civic versus ethnic nationalism by showing how boundaries are performatively redrawn at the very moment they are crossed. Full article

This article examines the terminological contributions of Gaspard Bauhin in his seminal work, “Theatrum Anatomicum” (1605). It is part of a series of articles exploring the development of anatomical terminology following Vesalius. Through linguistic analysis of the original Latin text, the study identifies four models of terminological transformation: (1) passive monosynonymy—the reduction of multiple synonyms to a single standard term (clavicula, scapula); (2) visual standardization—the transformation of descriptive phrases into binary terms through the labels of anatomical illustrations (musculus obliquus superior, musculus obliquus inferior); (3) conservative osteology—preservation of genitive constructions for cranial bones (os Frontis, ossa Syncipitis); (4) implicit consolidation—the establishment of terms with disputed priority (malleus, incus, stapes) by including them in an authoritative systematic text. Statistical analysis of the Index Rerum reveals a 70% binary form in the nomenclature of muscles compared to 38% in the nomenclature of bones, which confirms the selective nature of Bauhin’s standardization. The prescriptive language (vocamus, nominamus) indicates that Bauhin prescribes rather than describes. The study establishes that os frontale, os parietale, and os occipitale do not appear in Bauhin’s active nomenclature (Bauhin 1605, Lib. III, p. 531; Bauhin 1609, pp. 145–47)—a finding that qualifies the broad historiographical attribution of modern anatomical bone terminology to Bauhin (Pretterklieber 2024; Ghosh 2016) and confirms the selective character of his standardization programme. The parallel between Theatrum Anatomicum and Pinax Theatri Botanici (1671) reveals the universal applicability of the genus et differentia principle, anticipating Linnaeus’s binary system (1753). Full article

The rapid digitization of large source collections in the humanities over the last three decades has comprehensively transformed the discipline. The accessibility of primary sources has improved drastically, the pre-processing of research data has been revolutionized in some areas, and new transdisciplinary approaches have emerged and become possible. However, while digital and computational historians have produced extensive reflection on these developments, the theoretical grounding of this transformation has not been fully integrated into mainstream historical methodology: most critically, the concept of ‘information’, central to computer science and computational methods, has not yet been systematically received as a technical category within the discipline’s methodological canon. In this contribution, we employ a concept from Science and Technology Studies—Bruno Latour’s ‘circulating reference’—to analyze and render describable the processes of historical research within a digitized research environment. Through three case studies—AI-supported segmentation of Habsburg cadastral maps (1817–1861), computational analysis of the Hof- und Staatsschematismus (1702–1918), and the datafication of the Munich Special Court archive inventory (1933–1945, 1975–1977)—we demonstrate how and at which specific points historical research benefits from this framework, and what new insights it enables. Full article

This article examines two reports dated 4 October 1897 and 6 January 1898 written by the Ottoman military attaché in Madrid, Reşid bin Galib, Staff Senior Captain (Kolağası), to analyze how the late Ottoman Empire interpreted the Spanish military structure and the insurrection in Cuba. Situated within the broader development of nineteenth-century military intelligence practices, the study employs textual and contextual analysis, focusing on institutional language, strategic categorization, and threat perception. The report dated 4 October 1897 provides a detailed account of the military-administrative organization in Cuba, including command hierarchy, troop distribution, logistical infrastructure, and internal security mechanisms, while the report dated 6 January 1898 evaluates the historical trajectory of the rebellion and offers a comparative assessment of combat- and disease-related casualties, highlighting the importance of logistical and administrative capacity in warfare. Taken together, these documents show that Ottoman military intelligence systematically monitored a colonial crisis beyond Europe and interpreted it through an institutional military framework. The reports also reflect late Ottoman concerns regarding external intervention, security, and imperial stability. By examining a non-European colonial conflict, the article demonstrates how military knowledge was transferred, reframed, and integrated across imperial contexts, thereby contributing to the historiography of Ottoman military attachés and highlighting their role in shaping the Empire’s global strategic awareness at the turn of the twentieth century. Full article