As a periodization that is generally understood to refer to an era of Terrestrial relationships that developed with modernization and nuclearization, the Anthropocene cannot be applied simply to prem....

In The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany's Twentieth Century, historian Dagmar Herzog explores one of the most remarkable transformations in European approaches to human life: the rise ...

This review essay argues that the realist philosophy of history, as represented by Adam Timmins in Towards a Realist Philosophy of History, raises interesting questions about the nature of historical....

The Poverty of Anti-Realism: Critical Perspectives on Postmodernist Philosophy of History, edited by Tor Egil Førland and Branko Mitrović, celebrates the new dawn of historical realism, which it clai....

In 1955, Hisayuki Miyakawa published an article that sought to introduce American and European scholars to the work of the Japanese Sinologist Naitō Konan (1866–1934). Miyakawa drew particular attent...

This article intervenes in recent methodological debates in the history of political thought, particularly those involving the question of whether its practice should be considered primarily as a his...

This article critically examines Dipesh Chakrabarty's concept of Anthropocene history, a philosophy of history that is designed to respond to the universal challenge of the Anthropocene. It uses the ...

Nick Witham's Popularizing the Past: Historians, Publishers, and Readers in Postwar America provides cogent and accurate accounts of the careers of five American academic historians of the post-World....

In The Exemplifying Past: A Philosophy of History, Chiel van den Akker presents a compelling argument for understanding historical narrative as an instrument of historical cognition rather than as a ....

Drawing on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's monadological metaphysics, with its nominalist emphasis on the integrity of the individual, the eminent Dutch philosopher of history Franklin Rudolf Ankersmit p...

From the times of Herodotus and Thucydides until deep into the eighteenth century, the eyewitness account (or “autopsy”) was the model for historical knowledge. The eighteenth-century Historical Revo....

The problem of historical realism has gained some new momentum recently, with a fresh challenge to what is taken to be an anti-realist hegemony in the theory and philosophy of history. Unfortunately,...

This article is a posthumously published text that was written by Alf Lüdtke and Alexandra Oeser but was left unfinished when Lüdtke died in February 2019. It examines two central notions—and their a....

This article claims that the preambles of foundational human rights instruments, taken together, articulate a consistent view of the past. This view is firmly rooted in historical processes, embedded...

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Synchronizing History, with its interdisciplinary and international historiographical approach, is now in its third edition. The meetings in Palermo (2024) and Rio de Janeiro (2025) enabled the partic...

Language and history are inextricably entangled with each other, but can one be used to illuminate the other? This article focuses on the generations of philologists and Bantu speakers who have colle...

A central question for European philology, informed by various agendas and ideologies, concerned comparison and the positing of hierarchies among languages. With this “traditional” question of philol....

A surge of Arabic studies in Spain and Portugal during the eighteenth century responded to specific anxieties connected to national identities. Philology offered a means to contend with Iberia's Isla....

Persian developed a formal grammatical tradition comparatively late in its thousand-year history as a lingua franca. This article takes up the emergence of Persian grammar within the larger trajector...

In 1610, a Tagalog printer named Tomás Pinpin published a Spanish grammar in Tagalog that was intended to help natives avoid errors and misunderstandings in their interactions with Spanish colonizers...

The global history of philology, like that of writing systems and other technologies, is characterized by diffusion and adaptation. These processes are made more difficult to grasp if we maintain a p...

Most intellectual historians use the term “conjectural history” to designate a new form of speculative history created in eighteenth-century Scotland by Adam Smith and a few others. These writers tra...

This article argues that classical philology can play a vital role in debates about the importance of philology now and configures a genealogy that may contribute to the quest for alternative philolo...

What does philology mean today? And what can it do in the future? In this article, I respond to these questions by performing—again—a “return to philology,” as Paul de Man proclaimed in the 1980s. To...

In this introduction to the “Philology Now” theme issue, we make a case for “philology” as a useful sign under which to consider the ways historians are already working with words in their efforts to...

History and Theory, Volume 64, Number 4

This review essays situates Alain Corbin's Terra Incognita: A History of Ignorance in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries within current discussions of knowledge and ignorance related to intellec...

In Emotion, Sense, Experience (2020), Rob Boddice and Mark Smith put forth a paradigm-shifting argument for how we might employ experience as a master category of historical analysis—one that sees ma...

This review article discusses George Steinmetz's The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought, a history of the French social sciences and their colonial entanglements. Surveying a vast array of obj...

This review article examines the various methodologies practiced by Rome's Museum of Civilizations (Museo delle Civiltà) to discuss the contemporary curatorial approaches of traditional ethnographic ....

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Ewa Domańska & Zhang Zuocheng 张作成

Joseph Fronczak's Everything Is Possible: Antifascism and the Left in the Age of Fascism presents antifascism in the 1920s and 1930s as a universal cause that united people across social and ideologi...

Michael Sonenscher's After Kant: The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought offers a rich overview of nineteenth-century French, Swiss, and German political thought....