History‐making is a defining property of the human species; the ability to retain information in symbolic form over time (an ability which is granted principally by the presence of true natural language) is a unique attribute of the human animal. It has allowed human beings to enter in a qualitatively different relationship with the physical environment, and to operate in and alter that environment in highly complex, highly effective ways. To a great extent, the types of events that structure this way of life are absent from the rest of the natural world; in order to describe them accurately, it is necessary to attend to the special quality which defines them, a quality which we can characterise as their 'historical‐ness'. Descriptions of human events cannot overlook the histories that organise and determine them, and to that extent they are not fruitfully apprehended with the tools of the exact sciences and instead require attention from the social sciences; but nevertheless, the phenomena of history are a part of the natural world, since they are part of the life of the organism. History itself arises in the non‐historical crucible of biology. The paper examines a particular suite of events which have distinct historical and non‐historical aspects ‐ the extinction of the Dodo ‐ in order to explore the epistemological difficulties which necessarily complicate any attempt to view human conduct as an integrated part of the natural world.
By examining official films of Palestine made during the British Mandate period, this paper seeks to show that a recognizable visual trope—the ‘street scene in Jerusalem’—can be identified, and that it can be linked historically to the proclamation of British martial law in Jerusalem by General Allenby. The paper argues that this trope, and in particular its recurrence in a news report on the King David Hotel bombing of 1946, can be understood as typical of the way that British imperial power was projected throughout the Empire. In conclusion, the paper argues that the tolerance and egalitarianism that Jerusalem signifies in British colonial films of Palestine are values whose invocation is historically linked to the advent of militarized colonial control.
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