The coordinators of the Special issue section offer readers a series of additional contributions to shed light on a common topic. They combine rigor and readability in an effort to bring historical research to life, as well as to provide a wider audience with the keys needed to understand the past and through it—whether directly or indirectly—the present.
In recent decades, the development of virtual reality has allowed us to propose realistic reconstructions of lighting in Bronze Age buildings of the Eastern Mediterranean and Aegean world.
The artificial but widely held binary conceptions of day versus night find themselves condensed in cities where strategies to recalibrate the nocturnal urban landscape are abundant. This transformation requires considerable energies and technologies to facilitate illumination.
This paper argues that historians and their disciplinary practices can enhance the analysis of energy transitions by non-historians.
The historical approach of energies consumers is based on several questions on the conceptual frameworks. In the dailylife anthropology framework, energy consumption disappears behind the use of the artefacts and becomes an infra-consumption.
This historiographical essay shows how historians have dealt with energy since the beginning of the 20th c. and until today.
Energy is a rich concept that can analyze much of the evolution of societies over time.