{"title":"Communist literary internationalism and worldmaking in the twentieth century: Kerala and the Soviet Union","authors":"Anand Sreekumar","doi":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.05.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.05.002","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>My paper explores the dynamics of twentieth-century literary manifestations of communist internationalism in the southern Indian region of Kerala vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. Drawing from Allan Pasco's notion of the literature-archive, I illustrate how communist internationalism in Kerala was expressed in terms of worldmaking in three chronological periods in response to political and literary shifts at the local, national and global levels. The first period deals with early engagements of the literature-archive from the 1910s till the 1930s, marked by a yearning for an amorphously defined new world characterised by individualised political canonical engagements with individuals associated with Marxism as well as situational identification with the worlds of Tsarist Russia and Soviet Union. The prominence of the progressive literature movement from the late-1930s until the late 1940s resulted in the emergence of multiple literary-political circles that wrought various imaginations of a socialist realist egalitarian internationalist world, producing and contesting various visions of Soviet Union. Finally, in the third period, I deal with how the Cold War context enabled the perpetuation of these literary contestations as well as the diffusion of a new mode of the cultural internationalism of the post-Stalinist Soviet Union from the 1950s till the 1980s making and contesting Soviet utopias in travelogs and children's literature.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47094,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Geography","volume":"88 ","pages":"Pages 108-117"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144291345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mapping Karen Parker's Journal: Student archival interpretation as feminist geographic worldmaking pedagogy","authors":"Lara Lookabaugh , Banu Gökarıksel , Sarah Carrier","doi":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.05.009","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.05.009","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper draws on an undergraduate archives project to consider student archival interpretation as a worldmaking feminist geographic pedagogy. In Spring of 2021, we embedded an archives-based digital humanities project into GEOG124: Feminist Geographies. The project had students map, analyze, and contextualize the archival journal of Karen Parker, accomplished journalist and the first Black undergraduate woman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH). The journal she kept as a student is a prized archival object in UNC's Wilson Library. In it, she describes her experience as both a student and leader in the Civil Rights movement against Jim Crow segregation. Student work to visualize her journal spatially onto the campus and town landscapes provided new ways to understand university and town histories. Through spatial and temporal interpretation of this archival object, which included consulting and learning from Parker in the present day, students brought together their own experiences of campus life and histories of struggle on their everyday landscapes. Students challenged official progress narratives to center the work of student activists and identified with recent histories more intimately. This project highlights not only archives themselves as worldmaking institutions but the practice of interpreting materials as also worldmaking.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47094,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Geography","volume":"88 ","pages":"Pages 146-156"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144291348","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Awadhendra Sharan , Li Zhang , Louis S. Warren , Margarita Gascón , Mike Hulme , Simon Naylor , David N. Livingstone
{"title":"David Livingstone’s The Empire of Climate: A History of An Idea","authors":"Awadhendra Sharan , Li Zhang , Louis S. Warren , Margarita Gascón , Mike Hulme , Simon Naylor , David N. Livingstone","doi":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.05.020","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.05.020","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47094,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Geography","volume":"88 ","pages":"Pages 173-178"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144291351","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Niamh NicGhabhann Coleman, Zenobie Garrett, Frances Kane
{"title":"‘That's a powerful map’– shared authority, public engagement, and the archives of the first Ordnance Survey of Ireland","authors":"Niamh NicGhabhann Coleman, Zenobie Garrett, Frances Kane","doi":"10.1016/j.jhg.2024.12.006","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jhg.2024.12.006","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article examines the extent to which the archives of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland (begun in 1824) can be explored through the lens of worldmaking. First of all, the archival materials produced as part of the processes of the Survey are described and considered, with an emphasis on the name books, the memoirs, and the letters. These are critically examined as being shaped by an inherently colonial and imperial worldmaking enterprise. The continuing association between the Survey archives and the cultural and linguistic loss is outlined. Secondly, the article examines the public engagement residency that took place at Enniskillen Castle Museums in Co. Fermanagh in September 2023. It traces the variety of engagements that took place between the authors of the article and diverse members of the community, and the potential that emerged from this process to use the OS archives as a space for new narratives of place. It outlines the role of public engagement as a research process, and reflects on the knowledge and insights that were gathered through public engagement on the limitations of current digital infrastructure for archives.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47094,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Geography","volume":"88 ","pages":"Pages 65-73"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144291342","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Worldmaking practices of the Polish Bureau of Settlement and Resettlement Studies: Geographical imaginations of settlers in the recovered territories of post-1945 Poland","authors":"Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska","doi":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.05.008","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.05.008","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article focuses on the Bureau of Settlement and Resettlement Studies, an institution established to study Poland's post-1945 'recovered territories'. It participated in worldmaking: shaping the geographical imagination and realities of Poland's postwar recovered territories in historically specific ways. Drawing on data from field collaborators, the bureau's archival practices contributed to framing the incorporation of the formerly German regions into Poland. By analyzing these materials, I demonstrate how scientific and political narratives were intertwined with settlers' everyday experiences, revealing how archives became tools of both documentation and active participation in shaping postwar territorial and social realities. While previous research has focused on the methods and processes of resettlement, less attention has been given to the institutions created to plan the process according to scientific criteria. Through a close reading of archival sources, particularly 69 report cards from the bureau's field collaborators in the Szczecin Voivodeship (1947–1948), this study demonstrates that the on-site correspondents, settlers themselves, actively shaped perceptions of the region, constructing narratives designed to guide official policy. In turn, this study offers new insights into how bureaucratic institutions and settlers co-produced knowledge designed to legitimize territorial claims and influenced the realities of postwar Poland's shifting borders.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47094,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Geography","volume":"88 ","pages":"Pages 95-107"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144291344","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Black archives, white philanthropists: Pan-African worldmaking in the interwar United States","authors":"Jake Hodder","doi":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.03.003","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.03.003","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper examines the development of key Pan-African collections in the United States during the interwar period, a time of heightened Pan-African consciousness among African Americans. The emergence of professionally trained Black curators and the growth of major US philanthropic organisations fostered a concerted effort to archive and document the global Black experience. These collections, housed at institutions such as the New York Public Library and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), became significant sites of ‘worldmaking’, establishing Pan-Africanism as a distinct and transmittable field of study. In this context, Black activism intersected with white philanthropic ambition. While activists saw archives as tools for social change, philanthropists viewed them as sufficiently apolitical to meet their preference for ‘uplift’ rather than activism. The paper underscores the capacity of archives to hold multiple, conflicting interpretations and shows how a geographical approach can help avoid narrow, singular understandings of collections in the present.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47094,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Geography","volume":"88 ","pages":"Pages 84-94"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143827721","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Historical geography and the cartographic illusion of exceptionalism","authors":"Matthew H. Edney","doi":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.05.005","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jhg.2025.05.005","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This essay explores how historical geography, and map studies more generally, remain caught within the illusion of cartographic exceptionalism. Map scholars might have successfully rejected the normative map, but they have not dispelled the normative commitment to maps as a distinct and special form of text. By tracing how maps move and where they come to rest, connecting producers and consumers within precise spatial discourses, we can see how they are fully integrated with other forms of text and how they are interpreted anew when translated into other discourses. By implication, there is no universal essence of mapness. Historical geographers are well-positioned to lead the way to the study of mapping processes, in which maps stand as unexceptional texts that are integral to social life.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47094,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Historical Geography","volume":"88 ","pages":"Pages 27-38"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144291338","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}