In the early twentieth century, writers and artists in the San Francisco Bay Area embraced an ethos of outdoor bohemianism that differed significantly from urban bohemian circles in New York, London, and Paris. The focal point for this activity was the coastal literary community of Carmel-by-the-Sea, where scientists from the region's universities rubbed shoulders with writers, poets, and artists, who eagerly embraced the latest in eugenic pseudoscience. These writers included Mary Austin, who argued that literary works were doomed to failure unless they reflected a perfect marriage of blood (or what she called "racial resources") and soil (or the places where creative workers carry out their work). This essay argues that the creative work produced by writers in California constituted a cultural wing of the eugenics movement, helping justify Anglo colonization of the region by advancing dubious ideas about racial hierarchies and the ability of settlers to establish indigeneity through better breeding.
This article aims to demonstrate the impact that Johann Caspar Lavater's system of reading the face (a system called physiognomy) had on the development of portrait photography in nineteenth century Britain. Lavater published his major work on physiognomy in the 18th century but because it was aimed at discerning moral character, many of its elements were taken up and used by those nineteenth-century race scientists and state functionaries who, concerned about the nation's health, used photography to identify Britain's so-called degenerate classes. Focused on in particular are the key ideas and visual conventions that this style of portraiture took from Lavater - conventions that categorised people into group or types. A second major aim of the article is to demonstrate the continuing role pathognomy played in the development of the photographic portraits used to portray the nation's respectable classes. This was a style in which the emphasis was placed not on the physiognomic features of the face, but on those more elusive qualities that derive from the muscle movements associated with feeling and expression. Here, the focus was on individuality and the discerning people's personalities, the very features that made people stand out from the group or crowd. It is further argued that just as the style used to portray the degenerate classes owed much to Lavater's ideas, the style of photography used for Britain's respectable classes owed much to the champions of pathognomy, a body of writers that included some of Lavater's more outspoken contemporaries.
This article reopens the question of irreligion among the subaltern classes in European history, a subject long treated as marginal since Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms. It challenges the enduring assumption that popular culture was either sincerely devout or merely superstitious, arguing instead for the persistence of critical, sceptical, and materialist engagements with religion among peasants and other subordinate groups over the longue duree. Drawing on inquisitorial archives, oral traditions, and twentieth-century ethnographic research-particularly Giovanni Kezich's study of improvising peasant poets in central Italy-the article explores how irreligious motifs were articulated, transmitted, and reinvented across time. Through a comparative analysis of early modern figures such as Menocchio and modern peasant poets, it highlights continuities in naturalistic cosmologies, anticlericalism, and critiques of religious authority rooted in lived experience and literary circulation. Rather than positing a self-contained "popular irreligion," the article emphasizes the transversal circulation of irreligious themes across social strata, while showing how these ideas were inflected by the specific conditions of subaltern life. In societies where religion and political authority were closely intertwined, such forms of irreligion inevitably carried political implications, challenging both sacred legitimacy and social hierarchy. The article thus calls for a reassessment of popular culture as a site not only of religious persistence but also of enduring critique and dissent.
When historians speak of major turning points in the history of mobility and transportation, they often refer to transformational moments in modern times, such as the ‘railway revolution’ or the ‘automobile revolution’. What tends to be forgotten in such technocentric narratives is that the premodern period saw ‘transport revolutions’ of its own kind. One such consequential transformation was what may be called the ‘stagecoach revolution’ in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. This article argues that the stagecoach revolution was nothing less than a cultural revolution for early modern Europeans, fundamentally challenging and changing the way in which they experienced and conceptualized mobility. The preliminary exploration of this transformative process proceeds from multiple vantage points. The first section outlines the structural and cultural factors that contributed to the stagecoach revolution. The second section describes how this process unfolded in different parts of Europe (England, France, and the Holy Roman Empire). The final sections scrutinize traditional narratives about progress and innovation, with particular attention to early modern anti-coach discourses.
This article explores the evolution of fame discourse in Poland from 1750 to 1850, tracing its transition from traditional posthumous glorification to a nuanced understanding of contemporaneous recognition. As a response to the scholarship on the historical emergence of celebrity culture in Western Europe in the period, it highlights the correspondences between Polish and Western European discourses while noting the specificity of East Central European case. Drawing on a wide array of sources including academic texts, dictionaries, newspapers, and literature, the study explains how Polish discourse increasingly recognised celebrity as a distinct mode of public recognition. Despite the absence of a direct equivalent term, the Polish discussion on fame paralleled broader European discourse, notably regarding the democratisation of fame, its intersection with media, and its engagement with the audience.
The British Civil Wars of the mid-seventeenth-century endangered a great deal of contemporary concern about the dissolution of social norms in the trauma of war. This included not only the social hierarchy but also binary gender roles: which contemporary observers feared where being blurred by the conflict. However, this period also saw the maturation of print as a propaganda medium, and concern about gender was a valuable polemical tool in the newsbooks’ struggle for popular opinion. The Parliamentarian newsbook Mercurius Britanicus was particularly prone to this, repeatedly using the term “hermaphrodite” to describe enemies ranging from the royalist press to Parliamentarian turncoats. In the hands of Britanicus, as well as in rival Royalist publications, the hermaphroditic trope was used to collapse opponents’ gentle masculine or feminine honour, imply their politics’ monstrous nature, and as a tool of mockery against other “intelligencers”.
In mid 1650s, when Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) started her career as one of the century’s most prolific women writers of natural philosophy, poems, essays and dramas, she had a frontispiece made in which she was portraited standing as a statue in a classical niche between Minerva and Apollo, with her right hand on the hip and the elbow pointed at the viewer. The article elaborates on the akimbo pose. It was not in the picture by coincidence. By situating the pose in the context of an early modern culture of gestures and visual conventions, I aim to show how Cavendish’s self-representation drew on available means to portray masculine authority as well as create possible elbow room to challenge prevailing notions of gender. A title is proposed for the frontispiece – ‘libero arbitrio’ – which is one of the emblems in Ripa’s Iconologia, and according to which each person has the power to decide the purposes of his or her actions and thinking.
After the failure of the 1848 revolution in the Romanian Principalities, some of the exiled revolutionaries take refuge in European Turkey. Here, they come into contact with Vlach communities. Taking note of some obvious linguistic and cultural similarities between Vlachs and Romanians, several of the former revolutionaries start making plans towards ‘awakening’ the Vlachs’ supposed Romanian national consciousness. My analysis will focus on several letters exchanged among three Romanian former 1848 revolutionaries (namely, Nicolae Bălcescu, Ion Ghica and Ion Ionescu de la Brad) during their post-revolutionary exile. Based on these letters – which contain sparse allusions to future political action among the Vlachs –, I attempt to piece together the timid beginnings of a covert plan to initiate Romanian national propaganda in Vlach communities. It is my contention that such planning was followed by in situ prospections among the Vlachs, which were performed surreptitiously, in order to elude the vigilance of the Ottoman authorities. Moreover, I argue that this early planning and research laid the groundwork for the substantial Romanian propaganda activities which would come to fruition in the aftermath of the Moldavian-Wallachian union of 1859.
With the global rise of the social movements such as the BLM driven by quests for racial justice and symbolic reparations, monuments and street names have become objects of ideological contention. BLM movement's rapid expansion across the Western world – including Eastern Europe – has been countered by lamentations over the perils of ‘cancel culture’ towards national identity, memory, and liberal values such as free speech. This study critically interrogates the (in)adequacy of the notion of ‘cancel culture’ in the context of the politics of memory enacted in contemporary Romania. Drawing on a multiple case study research focused on three recent debates on public monuments from different Romanian cities, this study documents how the rhetoric of ‘cancel culture’ is politically instrumentalized by the conservative right. ‘Cancel culture’ is employed by the latter not only to defend the cultural values of national identity, but especially to counter any attempts at criticizing the revived celebration of tainted icons of the Romanian fascist and anti-Semitic past such as marshal Ion Antonescu, Mircea Vulcănescu, and Octavian Goga. It concludes that, instead of a hegemonic ‘cancel culture’ prevailing in postsocialist Romania, what characterizes the mnemonic regime in this country is a contested politics of memorial consecration of the nationalist past.
The article revisits the divide between modernizer and traditionalist ideological advocacy as it stretched through the body of the Right in interwar Romania and against the background of the political development of the country over the same period. The last one is shown to exhibit two main stages of evolution, dominated in turn by a milder form of authoritarianism claiming the legitimacy of liberal parliamentarianism adjusted in accordance with the urgencies of delayed modernization and, respectively, by a starker variety of authoritarian politics intermingling with the growing forces of radical and revolutionary fascism but always keen to defend its identity in relation to them. The corporatist doctrine is disclosed as getting disentangled from the body of authoritarian liberalism, being also shown as staying at the core of both the semi-fascist political design and the modernizer branch of right-wing ideology. Its confrontation with the arguments of right-wing traditionalism is explored by delineating, alongside it, the several other voices of the modernizer drive expressed in the language of the Right.
During the nineteenth century, South-Eastern Europe experienced a complicated construction of a new unity of political beliefs: the sacred unity of nationhood and national community. It was a visible and tangible scope of the political thought in the Romanian Principalities and a joined effort in absorbing a new mode of sacralised markers in secular institutions. Identified and put in texts and revolutionary discourse, the new secular religion takes over, influenced by a vast and intricated web of cultural and philosophical transfers. French reactionary thought, Vico’s Nuova Scientia, the penetrating force of a new Orthodox unifying virtues, all come together in constructing a political rhetoric based more on believing and confessing the new faith than institutionalizing secular politics. Shaping the Romanian sacralised modernity is not very different from the similar process unfolding in important parts of East Central Europe. And the main instrument used in order to obtain that type of motivation was the messianic view of the political construction of democracy itself, namely by the invention of the New History which dominated the methodological approaches during the long nineteenth century and operated on the perception and dealings with Historical Time and messianic and providential structures of Chronos. The main aim of the present article is to discuss, with examples, the beginning of this narrative in the first half of the nineteenth century, on the basis of Romanian political literature inspired mainly, but not exclusively, by the French and the Greek models, with consideration given to the degree of relevance of such texts, including pamphlets, short stories or history essays. The study of such grand mutations in the methodological perception of time and its different political usages implies a transdisciplinary analysis, more than ever in times such as ours, when the memory and the historical past are converted into political tools daily.
The article examines the traditional perceptions of martyrdom for the Romanian Iron Guard and the way it sparked a discursive debate in the legionary press. In the years between the two world wars, Orthodox views on martyrdom were a key cultural concept that distinguished Romanian fascism from other fascist movements. This clashed with the emerging 1920s and early 1930s narrative that portrayed militaristic heroism as martyrdom for the Fatherland. Religious practices were integral to all legionary political rituals, and martyrdom, as an ambiguous semantic and ideological category, became linked to ultranationalism, anti-Semitism, and anti-communism, serving as an inspiration for the core ideas of the Iron Guard. The revolutionary aim of rejuvenating Romanian society from the remnants of liberal malaise through heroism was a common theme among fascist movements in the interwar years. However, in the Romanian case, the public funeral of Moța and Marin in February 1937 marked a shift in focus for the Iron Guard's activists, intellectuals, and Orthodox priests. This shift placed religious martyrdom at the core of the Iron Guard’s fascist ideology, presenting fascist martyrs as Orthodox saints, thus differentiating it from the political religions of Italian Fascism and German Nazism.
The introductory article presents the history of experience as a new field that explores experiences in the socio-cultural world and their place in historical analysis. The article shows how experience as an analytic lens offers new conceptualisations of the past and its study by allowing one to look beyond the dichotomy of agency and structure. The introduction summarises how theoretical and methodological insights into temporality, spatiality, and social models of experience enrich the analysis of society, culture, and change.
