Quiktales

History Articles
Articles About History

• Blended Voices: Crafting A Narrative From Oral History Interviews, by Rebecca Jones
  Between the oral interview and the written manuscript is a long, meandering journey in which a narrative is crafted. The oral history interview is the starting point in the process of creating the narrative, but the journey continues through transcribing and editing to publication. Editing the transcript for publication is the subject of this article. All historians and researchers who publish oral history interviews or extracts from interviews face choices and dilemmas about the way to edit an interview for publication. Presented here is a case study of one approach to editing oral history. I will discuss some of the issues encountered in the journey from interview transcript to publication of Blended Voices (2001,) a book based on oral history interviews with migrants living in the southeastern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia....
• A "Genuine Relationship with the Actual": New Perspectives on Primary Sources, History and the Internet in the Classroom, by Michael Eamon
  THE PEDAGOGIC VALUE of using archival holdings for the teaching of history has long been appreciated. Using primary sources in the teaching of history transcends the rote learning of facts and figures. It encourages critical thinking skills, introducing students to issues of context, selection and bias, to the nature of collective memory and to other like aspects in the construction of history. As Professor Peter Seixas, Canada Research Chair in the Study of Historical Consciousness, has observed, "historians do have something very important to offer students, which is neither the one big story, nor the recall of a common set of facts, but rather a way of using the traces of the past to construct meaningful stories in the present."...
• The Problem of Sovereignty in European History, by James J. Sheehan
  More than a century ago , James Bryce began his essay on "The Nature of Sovereignty" by admitting that "the reader may feel alarmed at being invited to enter once again that dusty desert of abstractions through which successive generations of political philosophers have thought it necessary to lead their disciples." I wish that I could assure you, as Bryce went on to assure his audience, "that my aim is to avoid the desert altogether, and approach the question from the concrete side." Unfortunately, it seems to me that in order to understand sovereignty we have to examine the relationship between the abstract and the concrete, that is, between sovereign theory and sovereign practice, between sovereignty as a way of thinking and sovereignty as a way of acting. The best I can promise is that I shall try to make our sojourn in the desert as brief as possible.
• Lords of the Auspicious Conjunction: Turco-Mongol Imperial Identity on the Subcontinent, by Lisa Balabanlilar
  Among the most critical developments in sixteenth-century world history was the emergence of powerful Muslim empires to replace the fragmented tribal alliances and minor sultanates that had remained in the void left by Mongol failure and collapse in the central Islamic lands. These great empires-the Ottoman, Safavid, Uzbek, and Mughal-shared Central Asian Turkic political traditions and a vision of conquest rooted in Mongol aspirations of world empire. Their development of military and political trends, centralized bureaucratic institutions, and vital artistic and cultural expressions would have a powerful lingering global influence.