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Category: #English

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The Monument as a Mirror for the History of Historical Epistemology

Shahzad Bashir – Regazzoni’s purpose in The Episteme of the Gallic Past is to show that, in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe, the term “monument” had a variety of meanings that underwent significant change with the passage of time. She leverages deep archival research to argue that tracking the term’s multiple significations can help us rethink the evolution of European ideas about history in this important period. I will unpack three valences embedded in the example of a ‘speaking monument’ to help us appreciate the arguments presented in Regazzoni’s book.

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American (Hi)storytelling: Report #1 from a Real Experience. Written by a Theorist of History after a Tourist Visit to Salem, Massachusetts.

Lisa Regazzoni – October 5th, 2025. In Salem, Massachusetts, the temporal horizons seem to merge. In this small town near Boston, the past – specifically the year 1692 – is present in a way I had not yet experienced. Finding words for this post that will convey the unique amalgamation of the past and the present I discovered on October 5th is truly not an easy task.

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Court Cases as Epistemology: Reconstructing African History through Legal Archives

Sauda Nabukenya – Can court records be more than legal sources – can they serve as epistemological workshops for reconstructing African history? This essay argues that they can, drawing on more than 150,000 case files I discovered, organized, and catalogued from Buganda’s native courts and the High Court of Uganda.

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Multimodal History – Convergence of Text, Image, Diagram and Virtual Space

Christian Wachter – How can images reshape the way historians produce and share knowledge? What happens when we rethink the interplay between text and image, or even explore immersive formats like virtual reality? These questions were at the heart of a recent workshop on Multimodal History at the Center for Theories in Historical Research. This post offers a brief account of key contributions and reflects on the epistemic potential of multimodality in historical scholarship.

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Traces of Meanings in Catalogues and Collections. The Eighteenth-Century Mineral Cabinet.

Daria Novgorodova – A museum item has no single meaning but layers of them. All these meanings, both historical and contemporary, interact and accumulate, are unseen but remain a crucial part of its museum essence, and they leave traces. In this contribution, I aim to address the question of traces left behind, engaging with the history of the Mineral Cabinet of the SPb Kunstkamera (1714-1836), the first public mineral collection in Russia.

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Beyond ‘Reading’ Materials: Trace (on Trace) and Value

Agnes Piekacz – In the early 20th century, British colonial government representatives introduced a new tariff schedule in British-South Africa. At the docksides of British-South African ports, colonial customs officials were subsequently tasked with sorting the commodities they encountered into the orderly classifications that the tariff schedules prescribed. The ensuing early-20th century disputes between customs officials and importers over the causational links drawn by the latter point to broader theoretical-methodological issues faced by historians: How do we link the messiness of the objects we encounter to a past we aim to access and reconstruct?

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Françoise Vergès’s post-museum: the culmination of a programme for decolonising history in Western museums

Thibault Sauzaret – Rethinking the history of countries formerly colonised by European powers is a broader issue than might seem at first glance, since it involves not only the need to decentralise our perspective, but also to question how this past is represented, particularly in museums.
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