Beyond the divide Mikkonen, Simo; Koivunen, Pia
2015., 2015, 2015-10-15
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Cold War history has emphasized the division of Europe into two warring camps with separate ideologies and little in common. This volume presents an alternative perspective by suggesting that there ...were transnational networks bridging the gap and connecting like-minded people on both sides of the divide. Long before the fall of the Berlin Wall, there were institutions, organizations, and individuals who brought people from the East and the West together, joined by shared professions, ideas, and sometimes even through marriage. The volume aims at proving that the post-WWII histories of Western and Eastern Europe were entangled by looking at cases involving France, Denmark, Poland, Romania, Switzerland, and others.
Narrating the city Fischer-Nebmaier, Wladimir; Berg, Matthew P; Christou, Anastasia
2015., 20150901, 2015, 2015-10-01, Letnik:
15
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In recent decades, the insight that narration shapes our perception of reality has inspired and influenced the most innovative historical accounts. Focusing on new research, this volume explores the ...history of non-elite populations in cities from Caracas to Vienna, and Paris to Belgrade. Narration is central to the theme of each contribution, whether as a means of description, a methodological approach, or basic story telling. This book brings together research that both asks classical socio-historical questions and takes narration seriously, engaging with novels, films, local history accounts, petitions to municipal authorities, and interviews with alternative cinema activists.
In this closely integrated collection of essays on colonialism in world history, Frederick Cooper raises crucial questions about concepts relevant to a wide range of issues in the social sciences and ...humanities, including identity, globalization, and modernity. Rather than portray the past two centuries as the inevitable movement from empire to nation-state, Cooper places nationalism within a much wider range of imperial and diasporic imaginations, of rulers and ruled alike, well into the twentieth century. He addresses both the insights and the blind spots of colonial studies in an effort to get beyond the tendency in the field to focus on a generic colonialism located sometime between 1492 and the 1960s and somewhere in the "West." Broad-ranging, cogently argued, and with a historical focus that moves from Africa to South Asia to Europe, these essays, most published here for the first time, propose a fuller engagement in the give-and-take of history, not least in the ways in which concepts usually attributed to Western universalism—including citizenship and equality—were defined and reconfigured by political mobilizations in colonial contexts.
Making Women's Histories showcases the transformations that the intellectual and political production of women's history has engendered across time and space. It considers the difference women's and ...gender history has made to and within national fields of study, and to what extent the wider historiography has integrated this new knowledge. What are the accomplishments of women's and gender history? What are its shortcomings? What is its future?The contributors discuss their discovery of women's histories,the multiple turns the field has taken, and how place affected the course of this scholarship. Noted scholars of women's and gender history, they stand atop such historiographically-defined vantage points as Tsarist Russia, the British Empire in Egypt and India, Qing-dynasty China, and the U.S. roiling through the 1960s. From these and other peaks they gaze out at the world around them, surveying trajectories in the creation of women's histories in recent and distant pasts and envisioning their futures.
Comparing and contrasting speeches attributed to barbarian leaders by ancient Roman historians, this book offers a systematic examination of the ways in which those historians valorized foreigners ...and presented criticisms of their own society.
The stories we tell of American beginnings typically emphasize colonial triumph in the face of adversity. But the early years of English settlement in America were characterized by catastrophe: ...starvation, disease, extreme violence, ruinous ignorance, and serial abandonment.Seasons of Miseryoffers a provocative reexamination of the British colonies' chaotic and profoundly unstable early days, placing crisis-both experiential and existential-at the center of the story. At the outposts of a fledgling empire and disconnected from the social order of their home society, English settlers were both physically and psychologically estranged from their European identities. They could not control, or often even survive, the world they had intended to possess. According to Kathleen Donegan, it was in this cauldron of uncertainty that colonial identity was formed. Studying the English settlements at Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth, and Barbados, Donegan argues that catastrophe marked the threshold between an old European identity and a new colonial identity, a state of instability in which only fragments of Englishness could survive amid the upheavals of the New World. This constant state of crisis also produced the first distinctively colonial literature as settlers attempted to process events that they could neither fully absorb nor understand. Bringing a critical eye to settlers' first-person accounts, Donegan applies a unique combination of narrative history and literary analysis to trace how settlers used a language of catastrophe to describe unprecedented circumstances, witness unrecognizable selves, and report unaccountable events.Seasons of Miseryaddresses both the stories that colonists told about themselves and the stories that we have constructed in hindsight about them. In doing so, it offers a new account of the meaning of settlement history and the creation of colonial identity.
The papers collected in this volume, although dealing with several different themes, congeal around a debate about the ways and extent of the dominance of linear time and progressive history and the ...concomitant delineation of the nation in Chinese and Japanese historiography.
The collection of well researched chapters assesses the uses and misuses of history 25 years after the collapse of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. As opposed to the emphasis on the recovery of ...memory or revival of national histories that seemed to be the prevelant historiographical approaches of the 1990s, the last decade has seen a particular set of narratives equating Nazism and communism and so providing opportunities to exonerate wartime collaboration, cast the nation as victim even when its government was allied with Germany, and acknowledge the Jewish Holocaust while obfuscating its meaning and significance. In their comparative analysis the authors are also interested in new practices of performing ‘Europeanness’. Therefore their presentations of Slovak, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian and Slovenian post-communist memory politics move beyond the common national myths in order to provide a new insight into transnational interactions and exchanges in Europe in general. The juxtaposition of these politics, the processes in other parts of Europe, the modes of remembering shaped by displacement and the transnational memory practices enable a close encounter with the divergences and assess the potential of the formation of common, European memory practices.
