Vol. XXXVI, 2023
The rise of cultural history has played a significant role in how we think about and narrate imperialism from the ancient world to the twentieth century. For decades the province of geopolitics, diplomacy and the “official mind”, imperial history is now just as likely to be told from the bottom up as from the top down. The aim of this article is to show how, by adopting the methods of cultural history, histories of empire have been transformed in the last two decades. Cultural histories of empire investigate often overlooked subjects and offer new angles of vision on familiar topics through a cultural lens.
2. Alexandru Mamina, Revoluția din 1821 – o temă desuetă, p. 17-23.
Lʼarticle est une approche sur lʼévolution de lʼintérêt historiographique roumain à propos de la révolution de 1821 durant les trois dernières décennies. On constate alors, en considérant le nombre de volumes et dʼarticles publiés, une chute en désuétude de ce thème, qui tende à devenir une préoccupation surtout locale en Olténie. Les explications proposées concernent les éléments de la culture politique dominante dans lʼespace publique après 1989, qui comportent lʼidée révolutionnaire en général et la valorisation de lʼÉtats-nation notamment parmis les générations plus jeunes des historiens.
The article aims to present the echo of slavery in the Romanian Principalities in the Italian public opinion, during the period of the emancipation of gypsies’ slaves (1831-1856). The Romanian and the Italian space were marked, during this period, by the fulfillment of the national projects embodied in the establishment of unitary, national, independent states. The national program of the political elites it was complemented by the structural reforms. The existence of North Danube slavery was a reality perceived with astonishment and revolt by Italian travelers. For their part, the consuls of the Kingdom of Sardinia and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies located in the Danube cities wrote detailed reports in which they presented the social structures, noting the institution of slavery, the types of slaves, their customs, and occupations, surprising the abolitionist movement embodied in the acts of emancipation. Other sources used were the accounts of Italian linguists, geographers, ethnographers regarding the origin of the Roma people and language, supplemented by Italian press fragments, in which aspects of the lives of slaves and information about the policy of emancipation were captured.
In a transitional time for Romanian lands, in Wallachia starts the process of establishing a medical system and a network of midwives at national level. After the foundation of a School of Midwives that coexists with the presence of foreign midwives with diploma the State encourages the counties to receive them as collaborators of official appointed doctors. The present study traces the presence o such midwives sent from the capital to the residence-towns of the counties through the case-study of Brăila, a port-city of Wallachia. It follows the dynamics of a relationship between authorities, community, patients and the midwife for more than a decade (1841–1860).
This paper deals with the way Russia and Wallachia signed a convention that regulated the supply of the Russian army, while it was stationed in the principality between 1828 and 1836. If establishing such a procedure through mutual agreement might appear as positive, the manner in which the act was validated reveals that diplomacy and reciprocity were in fact abandoned. In the end, what prevailed was the pretention on the Russian representatives to impose their will unilaterally, by breaching protocols that they themselves initiated in the winter of 1831-1832. Wallachian authorities were never notified as to who was to sign the convention on Russia’s behalf, and the principality’s legislative body (co-signer, alongside the Wallachian government) never even received a notification of Russia having signed the act. As far as we know from the Romanian archives, this did not take place, even though the convention was fully applied. Moreover, the legislative body saw itself in the rare position of not being granted a duplicate or copy of the convention, as even documents related to the matter were redrawn from its offices.
In an entire timeline of obeying orders under the guise of concluding an agreement, Wallachian lawmakers requested in vain that some formalities be respected. They asked the Russian governor to sign the convention, and later demanded the local government to hand over copies and related documents. What was supposed to be an act that would lead to the “stabilization of the country’s blessing, concluded in a joyful day for all Romanians”, was informally classified and obscured in archival files.
9. [Venera Achim (23 mai 1962 15 octombrie 2023). Memorial de Raluca Tomi, p. 141-142]