Project MUSE®: Journal of the History of Ideas - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/91
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Journal of the History of Ideas.daily12026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 57 (1996) through current issueLatest Articles: Journal of the History of IdeasTWOProject MUSE®Journal of the History of Ideas1086-32220022-5037Latest articles in Journal of the History of Ideas. Feed provided by Project MUSE®The Useful Caribbean: Settlers’ Botany and Plantation Cultures
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989310
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During his sojourn in Barbados, the natural historian Richard Ligon was fascinated by the strange morphology of the calabash tree. In A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657), he marveled that the tree’s fruits grew “so close to the body, and the largest of the boughs, as to touch them so, that till it be pulled or cut off, we cannot perceive any stalk it has.” The fruits were “the more beautiful, by how much they were the more strange; for . . . they seem to cleave, rather than grow to the trees.” Ligon’s rhapsody reflected and shaped an emerging transatlantic culture of empirical observation in which participants created knowledge through scrutinizing plants’ structures and appearances.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/91/image/coversmallThe Useful Caribbean: Settlers’ Botany and Plantation Cultures2026-05-02text/htmlen-USThe Useful Caribbean: Settlers’ Botany and Plantation Cultures2026-05-022026TWOProject MUSE®1940572026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-05-02An Ethiopian Lucretius? Giusto da Urbino and the Origins of the Ḥatäta Zärʾa Yaʿɘqob Controversy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989311
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This article uses new archival evidence to reframe the controversy that has raged since the 1910s over the authorship of the Ḥatäta Zärʾa Yaʿɘqob, a philosophical autobiography set in seventeenth-century Ethiopia. We demonstrate that, already in the context of the Catholic mission to evangelize the Oromo people of southern Ethiopia in the 1850s, accusations were made against a Capuchin missionary, Fr. Giusto da Urbino (1814–56), to the effect that he had endorsed, edited, or even forged this text. Catholic authorities promptly attempted to suppress the Ḥatäta Zärʾa Yaʿɘqob, then known as the Wärqe1—“Wärqe” being another name for the eponymous narrator Zärʾa Yaʿɘqob—which they identified in an 1857 report as “a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/91/image/coversmallAn Ethiopian Lucretius? Giusto da Urbino and the Origins of the Ḥatäta Zärʾa Yaʿɘqob Controversy2026-05-02text/htmlen-USAn Ethiopian Lucretius? Giusto da Urbino and the Origins of the Ḥatäta Zärʾa Yaʿɘqob Controversy2026-05-022026TWOProject MUSE®2188422026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-05-02Race: Histories of an Idea
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989312
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W. E. B. Du Bois opened his famous paper on “The Conservation of Races” (1897) with the following question: “What is the real meaning of Race; what has, in the past, been the law of race development, and what lessons has the past history of race development to teach the rising Negro people?” Underlying this question was the necessity “to survey the whole question of race in human philosophy and to lay, on a basis of broad knowledge and careful insight, those large lines of policy and higher ideals which may form our guiding lines and boundaries in the practical difficulties of every day.”1 Full emancipation required this comprehensive understanding. While Du Bois initially framed his own theory of race in the idiom
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/91/image/coversmallRace: Histories of an Idea2026-05-02text/htmlen-USRace: Histories of an Idea2026-05-022026TWOProject MUSE®443992026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-05-02“In me you see the Almighty’s wondrous Power”: Amelia Newsham, Race, and Black Women’s Intellectual History in Georgian Britain
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989313
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Over the summer of 1791, a “drawing-master” at a Naval Academy in London began publishing drawings and brief descriptions of the exhibitions and curiosities that “have been, and are, exhibiting in London in the years 1790 and 1791.”1 The accumulated prints were published together as Delineation of Curious Foreign Beasts and Birds, in Their Natural Colours and included the colored drawings of seventeen exotic animals. Among them were the drawings and descriptions of a three-year-old lion from Algiers, a tiger from China, a pelican from the Cape of Good Hope, and a rhinoceros from “the Great Mogul Empire,” bounties of Britain’s colonial entanglement in Africa and Asia.2 Among the animals and birds documented by the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/91/image/coversmall“In me you see the Almighty’s wondrous Power”: Amelia Newsham, Race, and Black Women’s Intellectual History in Georgian Britain2026-05-02text/htmlen-US“In me you see the Almighty’s wondrous Power”: Amelia Newsham, Race, and Black Women’s Intellectual History in Georgian Britain2026-05-022026TWOProject MUSE®703002026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-05-02Pan-Celticism and Racial Thought at the Fin de Siècle
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989314
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Racial thinking was ubiquitous at the turn of the twentieth century. “And just now, the world is in a sort of delirium about race and the racial struggle,” wrote H. G. Wells in his 1905 novel, A Modern Utopia.1 Although he did not doubt the existence of race, or that there were differences between races, Wells dreaded where burgeoning racial prejudice might lead humanity.2 History proved Wells right, and historians have sought to account for the origins and development of the idea of race and its almost uniquely destructive consequences ever since. The clarity of the resulting linear intellectual history of race can, however, sometimes obscure the variability in the uses of race, and the—to us incongruous and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/91/image/coversmallPan-Celticism and Racial Thought at the Fin de Siècle2026-05-02text/htmlen-USPan-Celticism and Racial Thought at the Fin de Siècle2026-05-022026TWOProject MUSE®728572026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-05-02“The African Problem Is a World Problem”: (Dis)locating Race in Late Colonial Indian Intellectual Thought
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989315
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In the early to mid-twentieth century, anticolonial thinkers in India produced their political ideas under imperial conditions—and thus questions of racial and civilizational hierarchy were central to their thinking. Yet the conceptualization of race by elite Indian thinkers has not been a subject of careful study within intellectual histories of India, as it is often superseded by or subsumed under categories such as anti-imperialism or anticolonialism.1 Early intellectual histories of “race” in South Asia tracked how the concept was coded as a “species, tribe or nation of people, or a great division of mankind.”2 However, in such studies, the focus has remained on how processes of racialization have shaped
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/91/image/coversmall“The African Problem Is a World Problem”: (Dis)locating Race in Late Colonial Indian Intellectual Thought2026-05-02text/htmlen-US“The African Problem Is a World Problem”: (Dis)locating Race in Late Colonial Indian Intellectual Thought2026-05-022026TWOProject MUSE®819192026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-05-02Race, Redemption, and Reform: The Interplay of Eugenics, Antisemitism, and Feminist Anti-Trafficking Efforts in Early Twentieth-Century Italy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989316
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The notion of “white slavery” (traite des blanches or Mädchenhandel)—the alleged abduction and forced prostitution of what reformers framed as “innocent white girls”—provoked intense moral panic at the turn of the twentieth century.1 Initially circulating in Anglo-European reformist circles, the term became a shorthand for anxieties about racial purity, migration, and gendered morality, especially in port cities across Europe where the alleged trade in European women was conceived as both racial and sexual “contamination.”2 Over time, the term was reframed to mean the trafficking and prostitution of working-class white women, typically of eastern or southern European origin, whose migration to global metropoles
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/91/image/coversmallRace, Redemption, and Reform: The Interplay of Eugenics, Antisemitism, and Feminist Anti-Trafficking Efforts in Early Twentieth-Century Italy2026-05-02text/htmlen-USRace, Redemption, and Reform: The Interplay of Eugenics, Antisemitism, and Feminist Anti-Trafficking Efforts in Early Twentieth-Century Italy2026-05-022026TWOProject MUSE®1344902026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-05-02Paracelsus’s Doctrine of Signatures Reconsidered
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989479
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To Andrew Weeks (1947–2024)“Nothing exists without a sign, for nature does not let anything escape from itself before it has marked what lies in it.”1 Paracelsus’s doctrine of signatures—the idea that remedies bear visible signs hinting at their potential uses—has fascinated historians, philosophers, and anthropologists for decades. Yet, despite the attention, its role in transforming medical theories has rarely been investigated. In the words of Walter Pagel (1898–1983), a founding figure in Paracelsus studies, the doctrine was consistently understood as a product of “mystic and magical as opposed to scientific thinking,”2 when not dismissed as pure superstition. Owing to its central role in Michel Foucault’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/91/image/coversmallParacelsus’s Doctrine of Signatures Reconsidered2026-05-02text/htmlen-USParacelsus’s Doctrine of Signatures Reconsidered2026-05-022026TWOProject MUSE®1700652026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-05-02