Robert R. Palmer exemplified the best that historians have to offer. He wrote with conviction, empathy, and at times passion, yet he always managed to maintain balance and portray both the good and the bad in the people and events he brought to life for his readers. Because he wrote with conviction, he also wrote with exceptional clarity. He never displayed the impulse to hide behind highfalutin language, contorted prose, or excessively specialized topics. He believed that democracy was an absolute good, that it had its origins in European history, and that its rise provided one of, or even perhaps the principal theme of all of modern history. As a consequence, he never lost his sympathy for the French revolutionaries of 1789–1794, however terrible their actions, however much they fell short of living up to their ideals.
Search Results
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2011
- Article Type:
- Editorial
- Pages:
- v–viii
Art to Table
The Power of Aesthetics in Women’s Cookbooks of the Belle Époque
Samantha Presnal
Abstract
Throughout much of the nineteenth century, men enjoyed hegemony in the French culinary arts, an entitlement enshrined in the books they wrote about cooking and gastronomy. The Belle Époque brought the first challenge to this absolute authority with the publication and popularization of cookbooks written for women, by women. Through the close reading of a selected corpus from the period, this article considers the implications of this shift in authorship. Women cookbook writers infused aesthetic discourse and principles into both the content and style of their texts. While male chefs had also drawn parallels between the culinary arts and the fine arts in order to augment their professional status, female authors evoked this relationship in as well as on di?erent terms. I argue that women cookbook writers engaged with aesthetic theory in a way that legitimized the labor of the private sphere and contested normative ideas about the inferiority of the feminine.
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2017
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 63–81 (19 total)
Women and Family Law in Byzantium
Some Notes
Niki Megalommati
According to Roman law, the foundation of society was the patria potestas (the power of the father of the household or paterfamilias ), which constituted an absolute authority over wives and children. 47 Christian teachings attempted to restrict the power
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2017
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 19–32 (14 total)
Daniel Lord Smail
chronic stress is associated with poverty and the condition of being disempowered. Crucially, what may matter is not absolute poverty but relative poverty. As Amartya Sen pointed out in 1999, African Americans as a whole are wealthier than the inhabitants
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2018
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 117–127 (11 total)
Were There Better Angels of a Classical Greek Nature?
Violence in Classical Athens
Matthew Trundle
emphasize the justness of open and honest war making. This ideology of fairness in warfare included both an aristocratic belief in the absolute good of heavy infantry hand-to-hand fighting, and a consequent prejudice against missile weapons, slings, bows
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2018
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 17–28 (12 total)
Depictions of Women in the Works of Early Byzantine Historians and Chroniclers
Between Stereotype and Reality
Ecaterina Lung
, that a wife’s obedience to her husband should be so absolute as to go against moral laws. Procopius presents the case of the Persian king Cabades, who, when imprisoned, asked his wife to give herself to the keeper of the prison, so he could escape. 64
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2017
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 4–18 (15 total)
The “Moral Effect” of Legalized Lawlessness
Violence in Britain’s Twentieth-Century Empire
Caroline Elkins
. They castigated Mill’s “sentimental liberalism,” which reputedly undermined political stability in the empire and at home. For his part, Stephen was relentless, asserting an unapologetic racial superiority and advocating for absolute rule in the
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2018
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 78–90 (13 total)
Whitewashing History
Pinker’s (Mis)Representation of the Enlightenment and Violence
Philip Dwyer
Germany, 1600–1987 (London: Penguin, 1996), 135, 214, 193–196, 225–226; and Mark Hewitson, Absolute War: Violence and Mass Warfare in the German Lands, 1792–1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 128–131. 16 Matthew White, “‘Rogues of the Meaner
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2018
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 54–65 (12 total)
From Act to Fact
The Transformation of Suicide in Western Thought
Daniel Gordon
framed with increasing comparative nuance. Since meaning could no longer come from absolute moral principles, it had to emanate from the juxtaposition of competing visions. Ultimately, this approach, which Montaigne had already called “contrast
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2016
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 32–51 (20 total)
“Such a Poor Finish”
Illegitimacy, Murder, and War Veterans in England, 1918-1923
Ginger S. Frost
plead postpartum insanity, shame, and poverty more convincingly. The HO insisted that seven years in prison was the absolute least a man should serve for such a crime, if only to act as a deterrent. Pole’s case was an extreme example of violence from ex
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2016
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 91–111 (21 total)