ABSTRACT Twenty-four cartographers. Twenty-four theme park landscape designers. Twenty-four theoreticians-in-training. Twenty-four dragon chasers. Twenty-four undergraduate students ready to slay. Not the dragons – theory. This is an article about my attempt at constructing an interdisciplinary theory and methods course. It is a course about theme parks. These theme parks are situated on a map. This map will show you where some dragons are. Curious? Sceptical? Confused? None of these, but reading this article fits into your schedule? Then, come on … a quest awaits us!

ABSTRACT One of the most mythologised Australian explorers is the Prussian-born Ludwig Leichhardt, who famously ‘disappeared’ in 1848. The only seemingly authenticated relic from his final journey is a gunplate, purchased by the National Museum of Australia in 2006. In a context conditioned by the Australian History Wars, the Museum presents the plate in singularising, largely heroicising fashion and occludes the uses to which the gun was once put. However, an expanded object biography – a ‘ballistic biography’ that wonders about trajectories, interactions with the media through which an object travels, and terminal impacts as well as subsequent repercussions – can contemplate the significance of guns and their parts in Indigenous lifeworlds, and their after-effects. Plumbing these hidden histories and effects can add nuance and complexity to the simpler story of colonial nostalgia accreting around objects like this gunplate in its current institutional setting. By encouraging speculation it can prompt museum visitors into a more activated state.

ABSTRACT How can the poetic line translate history? In this article, I trace the methods of translation and transmission that accompanied my writing of an archival poetry collection. Immersed in Mexican Inquisition documents and crypto-Jewish oral histories of the Southwest, the collection interrogates questions of genre, form, empathy, and memory. I argue that historical poetry can foreground the materiality of history, embrace the sensual and strange, and hold at once conflicting narratives of the archive. Poetry’s ability to evade coherence and preserve simultaneities allows the ambiguities of history to surface, mythologies intact. The archival poem brings to bear the rhythms of the past through the language of the present.

ABSTRACT Developing an idiom derived from deep southern female politeness, this article calls out one of the sexual assailants whose assaults undermined the author’s career path as a historian of the Mexican revolution, its counter-revolution, of Mexican gender, ethnicity, race, and poverty. Behaving not as though the assailant – and those people and institutions supporting sexual assault – deserve to know her background, the extent of her work in Mexico and South America, but rather as though her democratic ethos matters, she creates a literary road map – or talisman – into the woman the assailants permanently undermined.

ABSTRACT ‘Historically informed performance’ (HIP) has become standard practice for the performance of ‘early music’ composed before 1800 and is increasingly applied to more recent compositions. The approach provokes controversy for the tension between its claims to replicate historical performance practice, the observation that the resulting ‘period’ style often reflects present-day stylistic preferences and the inference that its attribution to the past is more imagined than real. Musicians who practice HIP identify dilemmas which relate to questions of historical evidence and interpretation. The philosophy of music currently neglects the dilemmas that performers identify as problematic for HIP. In contrast, the philosophy of history makes scant reference to musical performance but extensively examines the understanding and interpretation of historical texts. Musicians share with historians the need to engage with the past. Musicians should find it instructive to consult the philosophy of history on how historians construct an account of the past. Historians may find informative the way in which the nature of music and the HIP of older music highlight performative aspects of the historical account, allow comparison between parallel debates in historiography and musicology and suggest how changes over time in audience reception affect the comprehensibility of the historical account.

ABSTRACT History offers the chance to act as an author and actor at the same time. It works as a great stage on which the theatre of the world plays out. The historian has the privilege of being apart from and a part of history. The historian thus functions as both author and actor, and the historical operation should always combine theory and practice. Theoretical reflection allows us to delve into the reality of historical authorship, connecting us to the present from which we try to access the past. Historical practice brings us closer to the protagonists of the past, trying to improve the world we live in. When historians practice both theory and practice, they are immunized from an archaeological history that is not relevant for its society as well as from a critical history conditioned by ideological, reductionist, or manipulative presentism. In this sense, being open to practicing history and theorizing the practice of history makes historians more realistic in their approaches to the past and in their theories of how to approach that past.

ABSTRACT This article explores anti-Japanese racial discrimination in the mid-twentieth century as it was experienced in everyday life from the 1940s to the 1960s. Drawing on oral-history interviews with nisei (‘second generation’) individuals, it presents four ‘memory moment’ portraits to consider the transformation of anti-Japanese discrimination, whereby colonial mechanisms prevalent during the Second World War gave way to make employment, education – and later, intimate – opportunities commonplace, even as ‘micro-aggressive’ forms of racism powerfully if subtly continued. Central to understanding how remembering narrators perceived discrimination were ‘The English’. Emergent from memories of painful engagements with real individuals, ‘The English’ were a stereotype whose ambiguous indeterminacy could create opportunities at a time when Canada and Japanese Canadians’ place within it were in a state of flux. The ‘postcolonial ambiguity’ that the four ‘memory moment’ portraits explore is not solely a characteristic of the past. Rather, the ‘memory moment’ portraits describe instances of remembering in close detail as performative acts animated by the remembering narrator’s desire to script their histories and share them. These are also quantum moments in which past and present are straddled, sparking a potent conjuncture of history and memory.

ABSTRACTThis conversation originated in a plenary session organized by Ewa Domańska and María Inés La Greca under the same title of ‘Globalizing Hayden White’ at the III International Network for Theory of History Conference ‘Place and Displacement: The Spacing of History’ held at Södertörn University, Stockholm, in August 2018. In order to pay homage to Hayden White’s life work 5 months after his passing we knew that what was needed – and what he himself would have wanted – was a vibrant intellectual exchange. Our ‘celebration by discussion’ contains elaborated and revised versions of the presentations by scholars from China (Xin Chen), Latin America (María Inés La Greca, Veronica Tozzi Thompson), United States (Paul Roth), Western (Kalle Pihlainen) and East-Central Europe (Ewa Domańska). We took this opportunity of gathering scholars who represent different parts of the world, different cultures and approaches to reflect on White’s ideas in a global context. Our interest was in discussing how his work has been read and used (or even misread and misused) and how it has influenced theoretical discussions in different parts of the globe. Rather than just offering an account as experts, we mainly wanted to reflect on the current state of our field and the ways that White’s inheritance might and should be carried forward in the future.

ABSTRACT Historical thinking and historical learning face great challenges in our present times of permanent uncertainty. How can it be possible to make sense and provide orientation through historical narration in times when there seems to be no more security? In order to answer this question, I try to show, by means of contemporary autobiographical narratives, in their form as specific historical narratives for someone, how historical thinking in late modernity can help to orientate oneself as a narrative self in this uncertainty, but at the same time to insure oneself productively permanently against this uncertainty.

ABSTRACTBy considering new scholarship on the social distribution of cognition, artificial intelligence (AI) and philosophies of mind, this article suggests another epistemology for research in history. The contrast of new models of AI with old existentialist phenomenologies of being-in-time now suggests how meaningful action can operate without representations. These issues affect research in history. ‘Picturing’ theories of mind grounding Historicist and Poststructuralist academic historiographies are here re-appraised against these new trends. History research is found to be also now a quasi-ethnographic ‘ontological’ study of life-worlds in past being. The new epistemology I suggest here is a hermeneutic of inferences of descriptive disclosure of situated human predicaments.