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Development as Rebellion , the massive biographical study of Julius K. Nyerere, written by three leading Tanzanian scholars and published in 2020 by the august Dar es Salaam imprint Mkuki na Nyota, illustrates how authors and audience are entangled in discursive practice. Jacques Derrida's postmodern concept of iterability suggests that any message, let alone a nationalist biography, never exists in a stable univocal state, but that its meaning takes form, continually mutating, in an interactive social context between author and audience. It is not merely that the authors address an audience imprinted with the intellectual traditions known as the "Dar es Salaam School" of the University of Dar es Salaam; they engage not just the concerns of that audience, of which they are themselves members, but their priorities and categories of thought. This essay offers a review of Development as Rebellion as evidence for a theoretical argument about how an audience shapes the composition of a piece of writing, and how this helps us address the ongoing debate about the way scholarly authority in African studies tends to reside outside Africa. Addressing this circumstance must begin counterintuitively with questions about the audience of Africanist scholarship rather than its authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This forum, curated by Michael Goebel (Freie Univ. Berlin), brings together twelve historians who draw on their own areas of specialization to rethink how we conceptualize the history of nationalism in our present moment of reactivated and often militant nationalist rhetoric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This annual AHR Conversation focuses on the issues and historiographic debates raised by the term "Black Internationalism." Participants Monique Bedasse, Kim D. Butler, Carlos Fernandes, Dennis Laumann, Tejasvi Nagaraja, Benjamin Talton, and Kira Thurman bring a wide array of interests and areas of expertise to bear on the origins, evolution, and meaning of the concept of Black Internationalism; its application within Africa, the U.S. and the African diaspora more generally; and its relationship to gender, nationalism, and anticolonialism. In addition to tracing the deep roots of this framework for writing the history of Black resistance to slavery, colonialism, and white supremacy as global phenomena, they insist on seeing Black Internationalism from multiple points on the compass. Perspectives derived from the history—and intellectual production—of Africa, Europe, South America, and the Caribbean prove just as important, if not more so, than those emanating from the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to recent discussions of the possibility of writing global intellectual histories, this essay asks what that might involve for world regions beyond the West, particularly for ethnically and linguistically diverse areas that make up the necessarily complex units of analysis with which global historians must reckon. This methodological task is undertaken here by way of a case study of the Indian Ocean during the high tide of European colonization. Two dominant historiographical tropes are challenged to clear sufficient interpretive room for the variety of intellectual transactions across so heterogeneous a space. The first is the routine characterization of the Indian Ocean as an arena of “cosmopolitanism.” The second is the premise that oceanic actors operated under the intellectual hegemony of a “colonial episteme.” To test these claims, and widen the remit of what global intellectual history might mean, the focus here turns to the vernacular spheres of writing that rapidly widened in the era of print. Overall, the essay argues for understanding the Indian Ocean through an alternative conceptual framework of “vernacularism” and “heterotopia” that allows for the multiple intellectual trajectories of such world historical contact zones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores on the imperial administration of the Virginia Governor Francis Nicholson, who had made an order against taking up land for the importation of negroes. It examines the impact of imperial power to the development of slavery associated with the influence on the American revolutionaries. It also cites the abstraction of political philosophy in the philosophical and historical research.

The essay provides an overview of the history of humanities studies in higher education in Arab Countries. It is part of a roundtable of articles on the international state of the humanities. Topics include humanism and higher education, Eurocentrism in history and the humanities, intellectual history, and Islam and the humanities.

The article discusses the Cold War history of a general theory of prediction first developed in the 1960s at Rand Corporation by logician and futurologist Olaf Helmer and futurist and engineer Theodore J. Gordon. Such prediction models, forecasting, and future studies were created with a goal of dealing with future problems being faced in the present and were applied to fields such as economics, sociology, political science, and international relations. Notable people discussed include American sociologist Daniel Bell, Russian prognostician Igor Bestuzhev-Lada, French political economist and futurist Bertrand de Jouvenel, and author Alvin Toffler.

The article discusses the concept of scholastic, or academic, disputation and explores its evolution throughout the High Middle Ages in Europe. Particular focus is given to an examination of the placement of scholastic disputation within cultural history as well as within the broader context of academic debating. Topics including the differences between real and literary scholastic argumentation, medieval academic discourse, and changes to monastic intellectual history are highlighted. The religious teaching methods of Saint Anselm of Canterbury, medieval theology, and the writings of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle are also discussed.

This article presents the author's perspective on historian Geoff Eley's book "A Crooked Line." The book charts developments in the practice of history, as it moves from a reliance on social history to an emphasis on cultural history. Eley concludes by believing in a successful merging of the two perspectives. The author, however, believes cultural history lacks the capacity for meaningful engagement with the present. Whereas social history emphasized large structures, cultural history argued that history was far more fragmentary.

The article discusses the role of historical understanding in nationalist discourses in colonial India. The author challenges the idea that modern history writing was state-centered and based on rational-positivistic methodology. Moreover, an examination of the relationship of rational-positivist history with romantic, popular history is presented. The author incorporates intellectual history with the history of nationalism and its culture. It focuses on colonial and emergent nations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Explores the construction of the needed synthesis of historiography on the U.S. Period when intellectual history became the synthesizing subfield in U.S. history; Teleology of the definition of modernity; Information on the book 'The American West: A New Interpretive History,' by Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher; Central themes of Quintard Taylor.

Comments on the book by Alfred W. Crosby, which traced the origins of West's modern advantage over other civilizations. Discipline of measurement; Information on European history; Continuity in European intellectual history; Sociological and political changes.

Presents a response to David Harlan's article 'Intellectual History and the Return of Literature.' Harlan's contention that poststructuralists have eclipsed the influence of contextualists; Agreement of the author with Harlan's opinion on how deconstructionists have routed the contextualists.

A list of essays included in the book "The Worlds of American Intellectual History," is presented.

The article discusses several articles that appeared in previously published issues of the scholarly periodical "American Historical Review" (AHR). It states that the October 1913 edition of AHR contained an article about intellectual life during the Middle Ages, the October 1938 issue contained a metahistorical article on historiography, and the October 1963 issue had articles written by William L. Langer, Franklin L. Ford, and Miriam Lichtheim.