The Svoboda Diaries project seeks to translate and digitize a nineteeth century travel diary written in Arabic by a nineteen-year-old European named Alexander Svoboda. The Newbook project is the second phase of the Svoboda Diaries Project. The first phase of this project focused on the development, transcription, and translation of the travel journal. Alexander Svoboda kept a thorough record of his journey including a trip with his family across the desert to Damascus, from there by train and boat to Cairo, then finally to Brindisi and Paris. Phase one of the project resulted in an XML mark-up text in both Arabic and English automatically rendered in HTML for web display together with notes and supporting materials such as maps, PDF's, rare books, and a Wikipedia associated with the site, referred to as a Svobodapedia, which organizes our rare materials into a easily accessible database. Presently our group is collecting and organizing images and genealogical material, to identify family members within the diary and lead to a better understanding of the Svoboda family and others who traveled with Alexander. Many factors have been undertaken on our road to publication, including correcting and regularizing the XML tagging and formatting to result in an errorless XML mark-up language. Finally, collaborating on a Newbook website, where text, supporting material, and a print-on-demand version of the text will be available to the public. The Newbook project is a collaborative effort, including research faculty, PhD students, and undergraduate researchers, the result of this this union has led to a more comprehensive approach to creating a visually interactive publication.

From the late 14th through the 15th century, the German Hanse was a major player in economic, political, and military conflict –areas traditionally associated with state actors –throughout northern Europe, despite being a decentralized, non-sovereign, non-territorial entity. The Hanse was a late medieval/early modern trade organization, the driving purpose of which, from its founding and throughout its development, was to provide for the mutual protection of its member cities’ merchants in the course of their business and ensure and expand their rights and privileges in foreign ports; to protect their merchants against the predations of both pirates and kings. It is thus one of the great historical ironies that the Hanse became a source of piracy and mercantile harassment rivaling those of the sovereign states of Northern Europe. The Hanse’s relations with England throughout the late 14th and 15th century, especially in the decades surrounding the English dynastic struggle of the Wars of the Roses and concurrent Anglo-Hanseatic War, exemplify the Hanse’s role as a state-like actor in international conflict. Current scholarship on the Hanse focuses on cliometric trade analysis and linear narrative history, but I emphasize the unique nature of the Hanse and how it determined their actions on the international stage, critically reading Parliamentary records, royal appeals, and major secondary sources in light of my analysis of the Hanse’s foundational documents. I explore the motivations of the Hanse in its conflicts with England and determine that the Hanse’s use of piracy and the harassment of English merchants represented a natural continuation of their founding principles. My research addresses questions of the motivations and internal dynamics of one of the most successful and longest-lasting international trade leagues to-date as it interacted with more traditional state-entities in diplomatic and economic contexts.  

How exactly is history of science related to philosophy of science? Answers range from denying there exists any substantial relation at all to asserting that the relation is one of necessity, in which philosophy of science without history of science is worse off and vice versa. In this research I give a brief survey of the relevant literature. I then suggest that thus far the various approaches taken toward resolving the general problem have not been satisfying and, hence, that a new approach is needed. I use a case-based analysis of a recent essay in philosophy of science by Kyle Stanford to demonstrate what I believe to be a novel, fruitful approach to the problem. Rather than speculating about the relation in the abstract, in this new approach I focus on how Stanford uses history of science to make his philosophical argument go through in practice. Here the problem becomes: How is history of science related to philosophy of science in Stanford’s essay? I argue that the payoff of this approach is that although the conclusion I draw is not as general in scope as those offered by previous philosophers, in its narrowness this new approach is more detailed and, hence, more illuminating of the relation between history of science and philosophy of science. Attending to how philosophers work out this problem in practice, I argue, is the approach that we should take in trying to understand the nature of this precarious relation. Finally, I compare my analysis of Stanford’s essay with some of the existing accounts delineated in the beginning of the paper, in order to determine whether any of the generalizations they offer hold in this particular case.

The essay “Radical, Racial Antisemitism: The Building Blocks of Nazi Policy” explores the progression of religious antisemitism throughout history into the modern practice of a more severe form of discrimination, radical, racial antisemitism. This resulting radical, racial antisemitism, or the belief that Jews belonged to an inferior race, penetrated the Weltanschauung (world view) of key founding members of the Nazi Party, including Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels. Nazi leadership embraced radical, racial antisemitic ideology as a foundational principle of their party politics during their rise to power between 1919 and 1933. As such, this radical, racial antisemitic philosophy determined Nazi policy, laws, and doctrine that led to the eventual mass extermination of the Jews of Europe. By examining and analyzing historical antisemitic documents, the writings of Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels, and texts of early Nazi laws, the essay establishes the connection between the radical philosophies of prominent Nazi officials and the formation of the foundations and frameworks of the early political policies implemented by the Nazi regime in the early 1930s.

In twelfth-century northern England, the historical imagination was dominated by the region’s most powerful and most popular saint.  The bishops of Durham drew on St. Cuthbert’s renowned history and well-established authority to underline their own spiritual legitimacy. Involvement with the saint’s cult was not limited to the ecclesiastical elite or the monks of the cathedral convent. Throughout the twelfth century, lay interest in the religious life dramatically increased, and saints’ cults were a popular focus of lay religious energy. Reginald of Durham’s Libellus de admirandis beati Cuthberti virtutibus, complied in the 1160s and 70s, provides a richly detailed glimpse of this period when the saint’s miracle working powers were claimed by religious and laity alike. Much scholarly attention has already been paid to the increasing prevalence of pilgrimage to Cuthbert’s shrine in the twelfth century. Pilgrims who visited Durham generally sought miraculous cures, and as we would expect there is a higher proportion of stories about healing miracles in the Libellus than in earlier Cuthbertine hagiography. But pilgrims were not the only laity who became involved in St. Cuthbert’s cult in the twelfth century. In addition to stories of miraculous healing, Reginald’s Libellus contains accounts of the saint arbitrating the conflicts of lay inhabitants of the bishopric of Durham. My research examines these often overlooked “miracles of justice” in order to provide a fuller picture of lay interaction with St. Cuthbert in twelfth-century Durham. I analyze miracle stories involving freeing from false imprisonment, protection of lay interests, and punishment of immoral behavior in order to explore how and why members of every social strata increasingly claimed the patronage of the saint in order to mediate secular conflict. What emerges is a clearer portrait of a distinctive local political and social culture underlined by communal association with St. Cuthbert.