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The Industrial Revolution has traditionally been seen as a transformation in the technological basis of production and in the social arrangements surrounding it. On the other hand, the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries was originally conceived as a purely intellectual transition, a shift in mentalities or worldviews.
How do we conceptualise the African diaspora? The forced migration through the slave trade and its impact on the cultures of origin that slaves brought with them to the Americas has constituted an important area of academic research since the pioneering work of Melville Herskovits and Roger Bastide.
In the two decades since Margaret Rossiter’s first volume on Women Scientists in America (1), there has been a steady series of books which have investigated the place of women in science, seeking to discover if and where they existed, the nature of their of their contribution and the reasons why for so often and so long there has been a perceived disjuncture
Annette Becker’s new book, Apollinaire: Une biographie de guerre dissects how Guillaume Apollinaire negotiated a war made up of ‘cultures … privées et publique, intimes et proclamées’ [cultures … private and public, intimate and official] (p. 13).
Wayne Biddle’s Dark Side of the Moon joins a growing list of Wernher von Braun biographies published in the last two decades in Germany and the United States.(1) This renewed interest in the charismatic rocket engineer and manager of both the V-2 program for the Nazi regime and the Saturn V rocket development program for NASA seems reflective of a major re-eva
Most medievalists would be able to cite an example of the close parallels in symbolic thinking about the city and world in the Middle Ages, whether along the lines of ideas of Rome as caput mundi or Augustine’s Two cities.
At the height of summer in August 1996, The New Republic featured a front cover that depicted a young African American woman smoking a cigarette while feeding her baby. The words ‘Day of Reckoning’ were emblazoned in bold letters across the image, and the exhortation by the editors to ‘Sign the Welfare Bill Now’ was prominently placed underneath the photograph.
If one surveys post-1989 scholarship of the GDR, one puzzle cannot but catch the eye. Totalitarianism theory, nourished by the wider political climate, has been in rude health, and yet, study after study has exposed its inadequacies.
When historians of the future come to write about the historiographical preoccupations of 21st-century Britons, they surely will observe our growing obsession with consumer behaviour and material culture.
In Britain today, alcohol is a topic of concern to the government, media, and academics alike. The papers tell of ‘Binge Britain’, and academics inform us that there is a new kind of drinking and intoxication that attracts young people to our city centres.