what would you call this kind of historiography? The kind that's trying to set up a historical basis not for some country but for an ideological/political movements. Carol J Adams is fighting against real historical erasure (some of the older feminists she interviewed or whose archives she went through for the project honestly said they had no clue that other women they worked with were vegetarians and linked the two political ideologies even if the vegetarian feminists protested and organized and opined as such), but she's also trying to muster everything and plus the kitchen sink for her vegan feminist project. The result feels similar to a lot of arguments and projects I've seen on here over the years, projects in which someone wants both transhistorical presence for their politics but also relevance to present day issues, often without trying to do much analysis of the material they've gathered.
It turns hundreds of years of historical records into something very flat, that's one thing. Adams at one point quotes an early 20th century feminist recalling the disgust that women felt over the heavy bourgeois Sunday dinners of her childhood. The feminist mentions specifically the roast, the steaming vegetables and the pudding, but for Adams only "roast" means anything; never mind whether "multi-course, after-church, Sunday dinner" means anything to most people in the US in the late 20th century
but she's driven to read history in this way in part because unappreciated texts by people like Joseph Ritson and Percy Shelley once were catalysts for her intellectual growth. And the moral issue those earlier writers discussed has persisted without resolution. Her problem seems not so much how to remain aloof from her subject, but how to manage the tension between it and the intertwined feelings of continuity with it, which she would exalt and harness, and of discontinuity, which she would repress.
baratheonpilled
snowghoul
theartofmadeline
dailybridgerton
yousharknotpass
