he expression "Great Acceleration" denotes the sharp increase in human planetary footprint in terms of population and resource use in the second half of the twentieth century. According to Schimel et al., who developed the concept, acceleration "followed" World War II, 2 but these authors do not discuss the possible linkages between the war and the acceleration.
The Nature of the Humanities 43 at all, and sometimes a respondent made no comment to one of the questions. The responses also varied greatly in length. Sometimes they used a single word and at the other extreme wrote a long paragraph with follow-up references. There were also variations in the level of abstraction. Some answered the question in very general terms; others gave very specific examples from their own field. Many gave both types of answer. Also, some respondents took the question to be about their own research or that of their institute, rather than about their field generally. Some respondents challenged the terms of the questions, particularly in the case of the third question. A few asked whether talk of breakthroughs was actually appropriate in the humanities. This raises an epistemological issue, which we discuss in Part II. Occasionally, respondents queried whether there are dominant themes in research, past or present, but this response was quite rare. Thematic orientations Overview We initially divided the responses into three categories. At the specific or micro-level, we were given examples of research themes such as: Russian towns Ottoman Empire as seen from the periphery Early modern England Palestinian refugees Applied Buddhism Athenian democracy James Joyce and Wallace. At the more general or macro-level, we had examples such as: Race, class and gender Modernism and modernities Visual culture Identity Ethnicity and nationalities Media Memory (especially in relation to war) Postcoloniality History of crime.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.