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This chapter addresses how “the past” was produced in Ceauşescu's Romania and how its production was intertwined with national ideology. Romanian history was produced through individual and institutional rivalries for the resources that supported historical research, and through arguments about the values that research should pursue. Such rivalries were at least as politicized as those in the literature, owing to the unusually central role assigned to history under Ceauşescu's reign—unusual even by the standards of Marxist–Leninist regimes. There were several reasons for this. Some of them were of a quirky, personal nature and others resulted from the regime's internal consolidation and its international relations. The most eccentric reason was that the brother of the Romanian president, General Ilie Ceauşescu, had a true avocational passion for the study of history; he promoted it and influenced its direction from his very powerful vantage point.

Chapter Five examines how squatters made different kinds of claims on themselves, each other and their neighborhood as they became homeowners, with a focus on the temporality of homeownership. While homeownership is often imagined as a status characterized by autonomy, freedom and control, the reality is that most homeowners are deeply indebted and that this debt structures both how they use their everyday time and how they imagine their futures. Squatters had described themselves as a family, as a collective “house,” drawing strength from both the material support and the symbolic power of kinship. As they became collective homeowners with shared responsibility for a mortgage they had to reckon with new pressures and new ways of valuing each other. How could they respect and preserve their shared history without risking their collective property? As squatters began to tell their story publicly in museums and archives as a way of laying claim to the Lower East Side they also privately managed the traces of history in their now-renovated buildings. Through the work of historical production the squatters’ lives became history and their buildings became archives, but the in a gentrifying neighborhood the meaning and value of this history were contested.

Far-reaching political, social, and cultural transformations have taken place since the end of the nineteenth century in North-Western Ghana, a region which in the pre-colonial period was neither politically centralised nor inhabited by distinct ‘tribes’. One of the most momentous innovations was the colonial introduction of chieftaincy which gradually re-ordered, or at least overlaid, older local concepts of belonging and authority. This book provides a social and political history of North-Western Ghana, paying particular attention to the creation of new ethnic and territorial boundaries, ethnic categories, and forms of self-understanding. It explores how, and in which contexts, ethnic distinctions and commonalities were created and continually re-defined by colonial officials, missionaries, anthropologists, chiefs, migrant workers, catechists, peasants, and educated elites. It also addresses the tensions between territorial, linguistic, and cultural criteria for drawing ethnic boundaries, and discusses the links between ethnic and other collective identifications. In the remainder of this introduction, three major themes are considered: the colonial encounter, the construction of ethnicity, and the production of history.

In the late nineteenth-century, steps were taken to tackle food adulteration in Ireland as the concept of purity to be upheld as a new safety standard. This activity coincided with the post-Famine evolution of a consumerist culture. This chapter demonstrates that the advance of consumerism in Ireland was met with new forms of scientific engagement with consumers and producers that encouraged food quality to be considered in new ways. From the 1860s, public health officials made concerted efforts to delineate the boundaries between purity and impurity and to impose relevant legal standards. The war on impure food was fought on various fronts ranging from cattle raising to butchering and dairy production. Resistance played out on two interconnected levels. Producers contested the need for scientific standards of purity because these threatened to displace long-standing butchering and food production practices. In addition, resistance emerged in the fraught context of late nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish economic relations as anti-adulteration legislation, coupled with an absence of policies to protect the Irish economy, allowed Irish traders and politicians to openly question whether state legislation pertaining to food production was truly benefiting Irish economic life. This pessimistic narrative reflected mounting concern over the economic implications of British rule.

Although the Catherines and Claude slowly passed from memory, their performances and those of the women around them continued to represent their interests. The book concludes with an integrated portrait of women’s performance in fifteenth-century Metz that emphasises four significant themes: the production of history, collaboration, material and bodily practice, and continuity. The discussion traces interactions among the actions of the Catherines and Claude and explores the echoes of their practices over time. From a Pucelle character in the fifteenth-century Mystère de Saint Clément de Metz to a modern depiction of Joan of Arc at the church of St-Martin, female performance remained relevant to local constructions of identity and history. The section closes by suggesting that Performing women, having transformed female performance from “rare” to representative within Metz, offers a model for discovering the hidden histories of other urban centers and regions.

Sand blows remain visible around the New Madrid earthquake epicenters, but are so large and abundant that they become invisible, part of the unseen background of terrain. In the same way, the New Madrid earthquakes have melted into the background of American history and the history of seismology. Calling them into attention reveals key themes in U.S. history, the history of seismology and earth science, and the history of knowledge production, as well as contemporary debates over disaster preparation.