History

Joaquim Marques de Araújo ardently defended the Portuguese Inquisition for fifty years, only to find himself sidelined and forgotten. In Defence of the Faith offers an insightful examination of one man's career as a comissário of the Portuguese Inquisition in Pernambuco, Brazil, from 1770 to 1820.

James Wadsworth argues that as legal extensions of the inquisitors in Lisbon, the comissários played a role far superior to what their small numbers might suggest. They were not the psychopaths, fanatics, or secret network of spies so common in the popular imagination. Rather, they were the linchpins in the inquisitional system that policed the orthodoxy of the Catholic flock and qualified candidates for inquisitional office. Joaquim Marques's career demonstrates that comissários had considerable room to manoeuvre, though they remained distinctly vulnerable to social and political shifts in power. His story reveals an institution divided against itself, which proved unwilling or unable to support its men in the field. Consequently, Joaquim Marques's attempts to protect himself and the Inquisition from attack proved futile. He died a defeated man on the eve of the political, intellectual, and spiritual upheaval he had long predicted and resisted.

In Defence of the Faith is a study of the decline of the old regime and the rise of a new order in late-colonial Brazil as experienced by an unbending agent of a once powerful institution that slowly collapsed during his lifetime.

Few people outside of Portugal and Brazil know that the Inquisition reached its tentacles across the Atlantic and took hold in Portugal’s Brazilian colonies. Not only did it take hold, but it played a significant role in the formation of Luso-Brazilian society and the exercise of power in the colonies. Research on the structure and functioning of the Inquisition in Brazil continues to demonstrate that this institution and the records that it kept can tell us much about the creation, use and abuse of power, daily life, social hierarchies, sexuality, concepts of honor and prestige, ethnic discrimination, and competing forms of religiosity.

O impostor, Januário de São Pedro, andou pelo sertão no nordeste do Brasil entre 1735 e 1739 fi ngindo ser um sacerdote legítimo da ordem de São Domínico. As vezes era sacerdote, outras missionário. Mais outras era familiar do Santo Ofício e outras comissário dele. Depois de quarto anos de sucesso, Januário se encontrou preso e punido pelo Santo Ofício. Seu caso revela as estruturas sociais, seculares e religiosas que possibilitaram a impostura e restrigiram a ação extra-normal no Brasil colonial. Também nos permite questionar as estratégias utilizadas por imposturas e analizar porque tiveram sucesso incialmente, somente para depois cair em desgraça.

What happened on Columbus’s first voyage across the Atlantic? Who was responsible for the success of that voyage? How do we know? These questions were debated in the courts of Spain for decades after 1492. Some of those who sailed with Columbus left very different accounts, as recorded in those trial records. Their competing voices have long been silenced by the deafening crescendo of Columbus’s own narrative—a narrative riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies that beg to be explained. This documentary history allows the reader to encounter the founding documents of the Columbus story as well as the voices that dared to challenge it —even in his own day. What these documents reveal forces us to re-imagine Columbus and his voyage in surprising ways.

Columbus and His First Voyage brings together for the first time the two contemporary versions of what happened on the first voyage – the Columbian narrative and the Pinzón narrative – and embeds them in a thorough introduction to Columbus, his first voyage, and the myths that surround this pivotal event in the history of the modern world.

James E. Wadsworth is Professor of History at Stonehill College, USA. He is the author of Agents of Orthodoxy: Honor, Status, and the Inquisition in Colonial Pernambuco, Brazil (2007) and In Defence of the Faith: Joaquim Marques de Araujo, A Brazilian Comissario in the Age of Inquisitional Decline (2013).

Working with the past always presents a bevy of challenges for researchers, and when material collections fall into disuse, it can be especially difficult to appreciate their intrinsic value. Incorporating new technological methods (GIS) and primary document research allows archaeologists to synthesize original excavation and background information in innovative ways. The Southwest Corridor Project (Roxbury, Boston, MA), excavated in the 1970s, is a perfect collection for these purposes. Roxbury experienced a significant transformation from an essentially rural community to a more strictly suburban neighborhood during the mid-to-late nineteenth century during which an influx of immigrants settled and worked in the area, often living in multi-family units. Using archaeological material evidence, relevant historical advertisements, and GIS, this ongoing project reinvigorates an aging collection and investigates how residents negotiated immigrant identities and experienced "Americanization" through the material record they left behind at the Tremont Street and the Elmwood Court Housing areas.

This study highlights research on Iraq that includes the Assyrians. It does not intend to argue the validity of definitions of ‘nationness’ and nationalism, but provides a brief description of the variety of ways in which Assyrians have been both included and excluded from modern research on the Middle East and, more specifically, Iraq. Moreover, it resituates the Assyrians in the debate and historiography of Iraqi Studies.

This work concerning Assyrian Christians originally from Harput, Turkey who settled in the United States will serve as a case in point of the past and current problems in assigning arbitrary names and nomenclature as monolithic rubrics of imposed identification to various groups of the Assyrian people. In most cases these people are referred to by their ecclesiastical adherence and recently, the current trend and parlance in academic circles is to identify these people by the ecclesiastical designation utilized today namely Syrian or Syriac Orthodox.

"Sargon Donabed provides a comprehensive overview of the modern Assyrian story, merging emic and etic perspectives of their struggle to attain sovereignty over the past century and beyond. His work offers both an informative source for Assyrian ethnic history and an alternative reading for Mesopotamian regional history as a whole." -- Nabil Al-Tikriti, University of Mary Washington

"In telling the story of modern Assyrian responses to a history of tragedy, Sargon Donabed helps us understand them as actors in their own right. He thereby rewrites Iraqi history from the perspective of the oppressed. No longer may we ignore the plight of this misunderstood minority." -- Paul S. Rowe, Trinity Western University