History Research Works

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    The Double Legacy of Bernalism in Science Diplomacy
    (Wiley, 2022-11-03) Ienna, Gerardo
    Recent debates in the history of science aimed at reconstructing the history of scientific diplomacy have privileged the analysis of forms of diplomacy coming from above. Instead, the objective of this paper is to raise awareness of these debates by looking at attempts at scientific diplomacy from below. Such a shift in perspective might allow us to observe the impact of marginalized social agents on the construction of international diplomatic choices. This article particularly focuses attention on how the legacy of Bernalism has fostered the emergence of two different types of science diplomacy. On the one hand, Bernalism has influenced the goals of organizations such as UNESCO and the World Peace Council, which are forms of science diplomacy I would term from above. On the other hand, Bernalism has also been at the origin of radical scientific movements that I propose to interpret as forms of scientific diplomacy from below. These have, in fact, played a cardinal role not only in raising public awareness of the social and political roles of science, but also in the more direct participation of scientists in defining the political objectives of their research activity. From this point of view, I analyze how an association like the World Federation of Scientific Workers proposed (at least in the beginning) greater democratic participation than the top-down structures of other forms of scientific internationalism.
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    István Deák (1926–2023): In Memoriam
    (Cambridge University Press, 2023-05-25) Judson, Pieter M.; Rozenblit, Marsha L.
    This is a tribute to István Deák, a prominent historian of Habsburg history. The tribute covers his early life in Budapest, the son of a middle-class family of Jewish origins who suffered as a Jew in 1944. Deák left Hungary in 1944, spent several years in France and Germany, and then came to the United States in 1956. Much of the commemoration covers his career as a professor of history at Columbia University and his very significant scholarly contributions.
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    Creating a Common Law of Slavery for England and its New World Empire
    (Cambridge University Press, 2022-02-21) Brewer, Holly
    The current historical consensus is that English common law was somewhat confused, but that coerced servitude was legal in England before 1772, and certainly in its empire, where English law on slavery did not reach, because it was “beyond the line” of English justice. The common law is characterized by an effort to see continuity and consistency, and historians (despite our natural desire to track change) often look for those patterns too. Such efforts to provide a consistent overview of an England that was free and colonies that created slavery on their own—have obscured the vibrant struggle over slavery within the English judicial system—the common law—over more than a century. Not only did the common law on slavery change profoundly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the common law became an instrument of crown policy. It did so within a federal empire, wherein colonial legal norms had to adhere, in crucial ways, to that common law. English high court judges thus provided the legal foundation for an imperial common law of slavery that allowed people to be deemed absolute property. That definition of people as property was closely connected to absolutism, both in theory and practice. In theory the absolute power of kings over subjects was connected to that of masters over slaves. In practice, the crown's use of the courts to create laws without parliamentary consent (to bypass parliament) also increased crown revenue and thus their independence from parliamentary control. These powerful legal mechanisms made it possible to “recover” enslaved people as assets for debts, a legal definition that was essential for a market in people to function sucessfully. This history reveals the absolutist character of early capitalism, and the extent to which the character of capitalist development depends on the legal rules that define markets and justice.
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    Discovering the Gardens of Pompeii
    (www.CreateSpace.com, 2015) Jashemski, Wilhelmina Feemster
    Wilhelmina F. Jashemski received the gold medal of the American Institute of Archaeology for books on the gardens of Pompeii and the Vesuvian area. These memoirs, illustrated with over 400 color photographs, tell the human story behind the scientific books. They recount how a woman from a small town in Nebraska learned more about the gardens of Pompeii than anyone thought possible. They cover the years 1955 to 2005, with flashbacks to earlier years. Jashemski was a professor of history at the University of Maryland.
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    Womanist Consciousness: Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of Saint Luke
    (University of Chicago Press, 1989) Barkley Brown, Elsa