This chapter provides a geographical, ethnic, and economic overview of the coal mining frontier of Quảng Yên in northern Vietnam during the precolonial period, before large-scale coal mining began in the late nineteenth century. The first part of this chapter highlights the ethnic diversity, political volatility, rampant piracy, cross-border smuggling, and illicit trade that characterized this porous Sino-Vietnamese borderland, where state surveillance was often absent. The chapter also examines precolonial mining patterns, the Nguyễn dynasty’s mining policies, and the role of the Chinese in precolonial mining exploitation in Vietnam. Notably, the chapter attributes the decline of the precolonial mining economy in Vietnam to several environmental, political, and technological factors. The last part of this chapter documents the French struggle to stabilize and pacify this complex and volatile mining frontier in the late nineteenth century, paving the way for the region’s first large-scale coal mining enterprises and mining settlements.

This chapter offers, first, some how-to tips for close analysis of documents and other texts to uncover a greater range and depth of meaning. Examining the choice of words, the grammatical structures, and the leaps of logic within metaphors and other figures of speech can yield fresh insight into the assumptions, the categories of analysis, and the overt as well as the less conscious agendas of historical actors. Cadence, inflection, repetition, and even silences can in this sense “speak.xy4 Physical presentation, cultural practices, and personal behaviors can suggest how leaders oriented themselves toward others and their likely intents. Second, this chapter explains how historians can read sources for evidence of the interplay between more emotional and more rational modes of thinking. Historians studying the emotions do not need training in neuroscience or psychology. Rather, they need to read texts carefully and evaluate such evidence as discussion of emotion, words signifying emotion, emotion-provoking tropes, and bodily actions triggered by emotion. Also significant is language evidencing excited behaviors, ironies, silences – and the cultural milieus of these and other expressions. Like all historical evidence, such signs of emotion should be interpreted and contextualized rather than taken at face value.

This chapter investigates how local priests related to their superiors by examining a set of handbooks for bishops that were made in the Rhineland and surrounding regions. These handbooks have been overshadowed in the historiography by Regino of Prüm’s well-known Sendhandbuch. However, Regino’s handbook was not the only collection of material available, and this chapter highlights nine manuscripts that – it argues – were composed for the organisation of the episcopal Sendgericht. Through these itinerary courts of law that these manuscripts point to, bishops imposed discipline on priests in their diocese, who during the tenth and eleventh centuries experienced an increasing degree of control that they had not known before.

The national security paradigm is a comprehensive framework or methodology that relates variables to one another and allows for diverse interpretations of American foreign policy in particular periods and contexts. National security policy encompasses the decisions and actions deemed imperative to protect domestic core values from external threats. This definition underscores the relationship of the international environment to the internal situation in the United States and accentuates the importance of people’s ideas and perceptions in constructing the nature of external dangers as well as the meaning of national identity, American ideals, and vital interests. This chapter outlines the key tasks to employ a national security methodology, beginning with identifying the key decision-makers, for example by reading memoirs, diaries, biographies, and oral histories. It then discusses the sources to use to appraise how these decision-makers assessed the intentions and capabilities of prospective foes, as well as perceptions of their own country’s strength and cohesion, the lessons of the past, the impact of technological innovations, and the structural patterns of the international system. The chapter emphasizes the importance of using empathy, understanding the core values of the past, and defining the meaning of power.

This chapter offers a brief historical overview of selected works by A. S. Mopeli-Paulus, Legson Kayira, Charles Mungoshi, Aldino Muianga, Miriam Tlali, and Yvonne Vera to foreground the historical and material presence of migrants from other Southern African countries in Johannesburg’s literary archive. Tracing trajectories of change and continuity in the post-apartheid migrant city, the chapter shows how South African texts have shifted from employing intra-African migrants as marginal figures or metaphors for post-apartheid urban precariousness and/or multiculture toward more nuanced depictions of migrants as embodied urban agents post-2008. While Johannesburg at best serves as a fragile home for migrant and diasporic characters who often remain dislocated or temporary sojourners in the city, the urban imaginaries by intra-African diasporic authors bring into focus narratives obfuscated by a narrow linguistic and national literary history of Johannesburg, reclaiming the continent’s long-standing place in the city’s literary archive.

The past is freighted for queer Africans. Because of the ubiquitous accusation of being “un-African,” envisioning historical existence for same-gender-loving and gender-diverse Africans offers the promise of establishing cultural authenticity in the present. Queer pasts, however, tend to be elusive, complex, and contested – as recent novels explore. Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea gives readers glimpses of a queer relationship from the past through two unreliable witnesses recounting their differing versions of what happened many years later, underlining the inevitable mediation of memory and narration. Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing places a more straightforwardly “gay” character in the 1790s, but this biracial, culturally hybrid figure entangles homosexuality with the history of slavery. Jennifer Makumbi’s Kintu and Nakisanze Segawa’s The Triangle take on a queer past that has been leveraged for homophobic ends, rather than leading to an acceptance of gay people – the story of late nineteenth-century Bugandan leader Mwanga II. Mwanga’s execution of Christian pages has been represented by missionaries then and Ugandan politicians now as the result of demonic homosexual desire. Kintu’s and The Triangle’s counter-interpretations of this historical nexus show the past and present to be linked sites of political struggle, rather than seeing the past as the source of an authenticated belonging.

Writers in African literature who address the thematic of transatlantic slavery either write historical narratives, mythic narratives, or “narratives of return” to an imagined homeland. The literature explored in this chapter include The Moor’s Account (2014) by Laila Lalami and A gloriosa família: o tempo dos flamengos (1997) by Pepetela, who fictionalize the earliest period of the trade. Two Thousand Seasons (1973) by Ayi Kwei Armah, Season of the Shadow (2013) by Leonora Miano, and the play Slave (1981) by Mohammed Ben-Abdallah mythically revision the past. A play like Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) by Ama Ata Aidoo and the novels Comes the Voyager at Last by Kofi Awoonor (1992) and Call Me by My Rightful Name (2004) by Isidore Okpewho, as narratives of return, focus on diasporic subjectivity. These texts, this chapter further argues, exemplify an “embodied archive” where the past and present and the ancestral and psychical bond entwine in bodily, experiential memory seen in how the characters approach common thematics such as African collusion in the slave trade intertwined with the colonial encounter, resistance to domination, diasporic subjectivity in relation to Africa, and the formation of Pan-African unity.

This chapter is where the writings and deeds of the upcountry’s lower-class "common whites" are analyzed most forensically. This material testifies to the genuine struggles ordinary households encountered due to the loss of male family members (and their labor) to Confederate armies, though this evidence also suggests that some white men remained home and played important roles in their households and neighborhoods during the first half of the war. These circumstances could provoke contests over power within families, contests that must be viewed holistically to appreciate the sometimes interwoven gendered and generational conflicts within them. The final part of this chapter considers the short-term military service that some older white South Carolinian men were required to complete at certain points of the war and how, by the final stages of the conflict, the well of white military manpower was finally running dry.

The introduction presents the aim and themes of the book within its historiographical framework. It accounts for the relative obscurity of local priests in historical research on the period by examining their role in three influential historiographical approaches and explains the way in which the study of this group of clergymen can improve our understanding of the tenth and early eleventh centuries. As well as setting out the structure of the rest of the book, this introduction provides an overview of the sources examined in the following chapters and briefly discusses the study’s geographical scope.

This chapter begins by analyzing the society and culture of the South Carolina upcountry during the late antebellum period. In particular, it outlines the subregional differences between the upper and lower piedmont parts of the state and considers the nature of class relations in the pre-Civil War upcountry. With respect to the latter, it argues that certain aspects of daily life, like socially and economically meaningful interactions between men of different classes and a prevalent culture of labor, helped ensure that class conflict did not cause white society to come apart at the seams. The remainder of the chapter focuses on sectional politics, fears about the ascendant Republican Party and what their success would mean for life in the U.S. South, and the secession crisis. Ultimately, a broad consensus on the necessity of secession was achieved in the upcountry in the aftermath of Abraham Lincoln’s election, but the prevalent ethos of unanimity could gloss over different levels of fervency toward disunion.

This chapter looks at moments when local priests came together. It focuses on the diocesan synod, the regular meeting which in theory all priests in the diocese were supposed to attend. Drawing on different kinds of evidence, including liturgies, charters, sermons, hagiography and poems, it argues that local priests attended these meetings more frequently than has been supposed, and examines what sort of things they might have learned and experienced at the synod. It argues for a change in the nature of the diocesan synod from the year 1000, as the occasion became more ceremonial, perhaps as part of episcopal strategies of representation, but perhaps also simply in response to the rising numbers of attendees, as the Church network continued to expand and consolidate.

This chapter explores the transformations caused by the 1920s coal boom in Tonkin, especially with respect to forests and the ways in which they were exploited. Demand for mine timber soared during this period, since coal mining enterprises required a large number of mine props to support their underground tunnels. With hard timber becoming a highly sought-after commodity, illicit timber exploitation and trading networks began operating under the radar of French colonial surveillance. Taking advantage of this mining-driven high demand for timber, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Dao loggers and traders exploited and sold hard timber to large-scale coal mining companies, often without permission. Forest rules were flouted in a frenzied search for mine timber. This chapter underscores how capitalist developments, such as coal mining, were the main perpetrators of the destruction of timber forests in Tonkin, as opposed to indigenous swidden farming practices. This story of coal mining and deforestation also demonstrates the adaptability of indigenous networks, the internal weakness of colonial rule, and the ecological consequences of unchecked capitalist developments.

This chapter examines the formation of a liberal mining regime in Tonkin, which fueled a mining frenzy in the 1920s. To encourage prospectors and capitalists to invest in and exploit the mining resources of remote colonies, such as Tonkin and Annam, a colonial mining regime that granted mine explorers extensive rights to control and develop mining concessions as they saw fit was formulated in 1897. This chapter also explores how the liberal mining regime in Tonkin enabled the rise of big coal companies, such as the French Coal Company of Tonkin (SFCT) and Đông Triều Coal Company (SCDT). Their rapid growth and illicit mining expansion subsequently led to increasing conflicts among the two companies, the colonial government, and local communities over the use of natural resources, such as timber forests, public land, and maritime zones. Overall, this chapter highlights how the bubble created by mining deregulation led to the wasteful use and arbitrary division of land, rampant prospecting fraud, widespread destruction of preexisting forests at mining perimeters, and the illegal tactics employed by the big coal companies to encroach upon public resources.

This chapter explores the relationship between technology and US national security. While it affirms the continuing importance of “traditional” historical subjects like war and diplomacy, it calls for scholars to bring more rigorous research and critical sophistication to bear on them. In other words, it calls for scholars to take a “process-based” approach to these historical subjects rather than the “outcome-based” approach favored by strategic studies scholars. It explains how the author came to study the relationship between technology and national security and how other scholars influenced her approach, which seeks to blend empiricism with theory and benefits from a comparative perspective. Next, the chapter offers tips for conducting broad and deep archival research, emphasizing the value of finding aids and the need to minimize reliance on intermediaries between the researcher and the evidence. It also offers tips on reading in and across subfields and disciplines. Finally, the chapter highlights the importance of taking technical matter, whether it be weapons technology or law, seriously on its own terms while also understanding its constructed nature.