Download or read book Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early Nineteenth Century Germany written by Susan A. Crane and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative book challenges long-held assumptions about the nature of historical consciousness in Germany. Susan A. Crane argues that the ever-more-elaborate preservation of the historical may actually reduce the likelihood that history can be experienced with the freshness and individuality characteristic of the early collectors and preservationists. Her book is both a study of the emergence in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany of a distinctively modern conception of historical consciousness, and a meditation on what was lost as historical thought became institutionalized and professionalized. Public forms of remembering the past which are familiar today, such as historical museums and historical preservation, have surprisingly recent origins. In Germany, caring about the past took on these distinctively new forms after the Napoleonic wars. The Brothers Grimm gathered fairy tales and documented the origins of the German language. Historical preservationists collected documents and artifacts and organized the conservation of cathedrals and other historic buildings. Collectors formed historical societies and created Germany's historical museums. No single national consciousness emerged; instead, many groups used similar means to make different claims about what it meant to have a German past.Although individuals were responsible for stimulating new interest in the past, they chose to band together in voluntary associations to promote collective awareness of German history. In doing so, however, they clashed with academic and political interests and lost control over the very artifacts, collections, and buildings they had saved from ruin. Examining the letters and publications of the amateur collectors, Crane shows how historical consciousness came to be represented in collective terms—whether regional or national—and in effect robbed everyone of the capacity to experience history individually and spontaneously.
Download or read book Nothing Happened written by Susan A. Crane and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-19 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The past is what happened. History is what we remember and write about that past, the narratives we craft to make sense out of our memories and their sources. But what does it mean to look at the past and to remember that "nothing happened"? Why might we feel as if "nothing is the way it was"? This book transforms these utterly ordinary observations and redefines "Nothing" as something we have known and can remember. "Nothing" has been a catch-all term for everything that is supposedly uninteresting or is just not there. It will take some—possibly considerable—mental adjustment before we can see Nothing as Susan A. Crane does here, with a capital "n." But Nothing has actually been happening all along. As Crane shows in her witty and provocative discussion, Nothing is nothing less than fascinating. When Nothing has changed but we think that it should have, we might call that injustice; when Nothing has happened over a long, slow period of time, we might call that boring. Justice and boredom have histories. So too does being relieved or disappointed when Nothing happens—for instance, when a forecasted end of the world does not occur, and millennial movements have to regroup. By paying attention to how we understand Nothing to be happening in the present, what it means to "know Nothing" or to "do Nothing," we can begin to ask how those experiences will be remembered. Susan A. Crane moves effortlessly between different modes of seeing Nothing, drawing on visual analysis and cultural studies to suggest a new way of thinking about history. By remembering how Nothing happened, or how Nothing is the way it was, or how Nothing has changed, we can recover histories that were there all along.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Memory in the Nineteenth Century written by Susan A. Crane and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-09-08 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A Cultural History of Memory in the Nineteenth Century comprises scholarly inquiry into representations of memory and historical cultures during the 'long nineteenth century'. In the era that invented photography, revised the history of the earth, and saw innovative communication and transportation technologies transform the experience of time and distance, both personal and collective memories were translated into new forms of expression. Material cultures of memory produced relics and souvenirs within institutions such as museums and archives dedicated to preservation, while commemorative practices expanded within both the private sphere and the growing public sphere, generating monuments and memorials while erasing other stories about the meaning of the past. Innovative writers and thinkers creatively engaged 'memory' in ways which continue to shape psychology, history and literature today. In this volume, thematic chapters survey representations of memory in power and politics; remembering and forgetting; time and space; media and technology; knowledge, science and education; high culture and popular culture; philosophy, religion and history; and rituals and faith practices in everyday life"--
Download or read book Historians and Historical Societies in the Public Life of Imperial Russia written by Vera Kaplan and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-27 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was the role of historians and historical societies in the public life of imperial Russia? Focusing on the Society of Zealots of Russian Historical Education (1895–1918), Vera Kaplan analyzes the network of voluntary associations that existed in imperial Russia, showing how they interacted with state, public, and private bodies. Unlike most Russian voluntary associations of the late imperial period, the Zealots were conservative in their view of the world. Yet, like other history associations, the group conceived their educational mission broadly, engaging academic and amateur historians, supporting free public libraries, and widely disseminating the historical narrative embraced by the Society through periodicals. The Zealots were champions of voluntary association and admitted members without regard to social status, occupation, or gender. Kaplan's study affirms the existence of a more substantial civil society in late imperial Russia and one that could endorse a modernist program without an oppositional liberal agenda.
Download or read book Mendelssohn Time and Memory written by Benedict Taylor and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-27 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Felix Mendelssohn has long been viewed as one of the most historically minded composers in western music. This book explores the conceptions of time, memory and history found in his instrumental compositions, presenting an intriguing new perspective on his ever-popular music. Focusing on Mendelssohn's innovative development of cyclic form, Taylor investigates how the composer was influenced by the aesthetic and philosophical movements of the period. This is of key importance not only for reconsideration of Mendelssohn's work and its position in nineteenth-century culture, but also more generally concerning the relationship between music, time and subjectivity. One of very few detailed accounts of Mendelssohn's music, the study presents a new and provocative reading of the meaning of the composer's work by connecting it to wider cultural and philosophical ideas.
Download or read book The Redemption of Things written by Samuel Frederick and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-15 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collecting is usually understood as an activity that bestows permanence, unity, and meaning on otherwise scattered and ephemeral objects. In The Redemption of Things, Samuel Frederick emphasizes that to collect things, however, always entails displacing, immobilizing, and potentially disfiguring them, too. He argues that the dispersal of objects, seemingly antithetical to the collector's task, is essential to the logic of gathering and preservation. Through analyses of collecting as a dialectical process of preservation and loss, The Redemption of Things illustrates this paradox by focusing on objects that challenge notions of collectability: ephemera, detritus, and trivialities such as moss, junk, paper scraps, dust, scent, and the transitory moment. In meticulous close readings of works by Gotthelf, Stifter, Keller, Rilke, Glauser, and Frisch, and by examining an experimental film by Oskar Fischinger, Frederick reveals how the difficulties posed by these fleeting, fragile, and forsaken objects help to reconceptualize collecting as a poetic activity that makes the world of scattered things uniquely palpable and knowable.
Download or read book Fortunes of History written by Donald R. Kelley and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Fortunes of History Donald R. Kelley offers an authoritative examination of historical writing during the “long nineteenth century”—the years from the French Revolution to those just after the First World War. He provides a comprehensive analysis of the theories and practices of British, French, German, Italian, and American schools of historical thought, their principal figures, and their distinctive methods and self-understandings. Kelley treats the modern traditions of European world and national historiography from the Enlightenment to the “new histories” of the twentieth century, attending not only to major authors and schools but also to methods, scholarship, criticisms, controversies, ideological questions, and relations to other disciplines.
Download or read book The Emergence of the Antique and Curiosity Dealer in Britain 1815 1850 written by Mark Westgarth and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rather than the customary focus on the activities of individual collectors, The Emergence of the Antique and Curiosity Dealer in Britain 1815–1850: The Commodification of Historical Objects illuminates the less-studied roles played by dealers in the nineteenthcentury antique and curiosity markets. Set against the recent ‘art market turn’ in scholarly literature, this volume examines the role, activities, agency and influence of antique and curiosity dealers as they emerged in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. This study begins at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, when dealers began their wholesale importations of historical objects; it closes during the 1850s, after which the trade became increasingly specialised, reflecting the rise of historical museums such as the South Kensington Museum (V&A). Focusing on the archive of the early nineteenth-century London dealer John Coleman Isaac (c.1803–1887), as well as drawing on a wide range of other archival and contextual material, Mark Westgarth considers the emergence of the dealer in relation to a broad historical and cultural landscape. The emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer was part of the rapid economic, social, political and cultural change of early nineteenth-century Britain, centred around ideas of antiquarianism, the commercialisation of culture and a distinctive and evolving interest in historical objects. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, histories of collecting, museum and heritage studies and nineteenth-century culture.
Download or read book The Purchase of the Past written by Tom Stammers and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-25 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a broad and vivid overview of the culture of collecting in France over the long nineteenth-century.
Download or read book Germany s Ancient Pasts written by Brent Maner and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-11-27 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Germany, Nazi ideology casts a long shadow over the history of archaeological interpretation. Propaganda, school curricula, and academic publications under the regime drew spurious conclusions from archaeological evidence to glorify the Germanic past and proclaim chauvinistic notions of cultural and racial superiority. But was this powerful and violent version of the distant past a nationalist invention or a direct outcome of earlier archaeological practices? By exploring the myriad pathways along which people became familiar with archaeology and the ancient past—from exhibits at local and regional museums to the plotlines of popular historical novels—this broad cultural history shows that the use of archaeology for nationalistic pursuits was far from preordained. In Germany’s Ancient Pasts, Brent Maner offers a vivid portrait of the development of antiquarianism and archaeology, the interaction between regional and national history, and scholarly debates about the use of ancient objects to answer questions of race, ethnicity, and national belonging. While excavations in central Europe throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries fed curiosity about the local landscape and inspired musings about the connection between contemporary Germans and their “ancestors,” antiquarians and archaeologists were quite cautious about using archaeological evidence to make ethnic claims. Even during the period of German unification, many archaeologists emphasized the local and regional character of their finds and treated prehistory as a general science of humankind. As Maner shows, these alternative perspectives endured alongside nationalist and racist abuses of prehistory, surviving to offer positive traditions for the field in the aftermath of World War II. A fascinating investigation of the quest to turn pre- and early history into history, Germany’s Ancient Pasts sheds new light on the joint sway of science and politics over archaeological interpretation.
Download or read book Museums of the Mind German Modernity and the Dynamics of Collecting written by and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Search for Normality written by Stefan Berger and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author follows the debates beyond the unexpected unification of the country in 1989/90 and analyses the most recent trends in German historiography, hoping that it doesn't return to the stifling homogeneity that characterized it before the 1960s.
Download or read book The Fontane Workshop written by Petra S. McGillen and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures (Awarded by the MLA) With an innovative approach that combines material media history, media theory, and literary poetics, this book reconstructs the great German writer Theodor Fontane's creative process. Petra McGillen follows Fontane into the engine room of his text production. Analyzing a wealth of unexplored archival evidence--which includes a collection of the author's 67 extant notebooks, along with an array of other "paper tools," such as cardboard boxes, envelopes, and slips--McGillen demonstrates how Fontane compiled his realist prose works. That is, he assembled them from premediated sources, literally with scissors and glue, in an extraordinarily inorganic and radically intertextual manner that turned "writing" into a process of ongoing remix. By exploring the far-reaching implications of Fontane's creative practices for our understanding of his authorship, originality, and poetics, this book opens up a completely new way to think about his works and, by extension, 19th-century literary realism. This conceptualization of authors' notebooks as creative tools makes a substantial contribution to scholarship on the history of writing media in several disciplines, from German studies and literary studies to media history, and to our understanding of the relationship between mass media and literary creativity in the late 19th century.
Download or read book Making Prussians Raising Germans written by Jasper Heinzen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-31 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reframing the German War of 1866 as a civil war, Making Prussians, Raising Germans offers a new understanding of critical aspects of Prussian state-building and German nation-building in the nineteenth century, and investigates the long-term ramifications of civil war in emerging nations. Drawing transnational comparisons with Switzerland, Italy and the United States, it asks why compatriots were driven to take up arms against each other and what the underlying conflicts reveal about the course of German state-building. By addressing key areas of patriotic activity such as the military, cultural memory, the media, the mass education system, female charity and political culture, this book elucidates the ways in which political violence was either contained in or expressed through centre-periphery interactions. Although the culmination of Prusso-German state-building in the Nazi dictatorship represented an exceptionally destructive outcome, the solutions developed previously established Prussian-led Germany as one of the most successful states in recovering from civil war.
Download or read book Sensitive Pasts written by Carla van Boxtel and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heritage, as an area of research and learning, often deals with difficult historical questions, due to the strong emotions and political commitments that are often at stake. In this, it poses particular challenges for teachers, museum educators and the publics they serve. Guided by a shared focus on these “sensitive pasts,” the contributors to this volume draw on new theoretical and empirical research to provide valuable insights into heritage pedagogy. Together they demonstrate the potential of heritage as a historical-educational domain that transcends myopic patriotism, parochialism and simplistic relativism, helping to enhance critical and sophisticated historical thinking.
Download or read book Romantik 5 written by Cian Duffy and published by Aarhus Universitetsforlag. This book was released on 2017-02-01 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The articles in this number of Romantik include new research on reverie and dream as the locus of metaphor in Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound; an enquiry into the Royal Swedish Society for the Publication of Manuscripts Relating to Scandinavian History and the role it played in the construction of national memory and heritage; a discussion of Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg's and John Martin's iconographies of the sublime in the intersection between art and popular visual spectacle; archival discoveries related to the publication of medieval romance in early nineteenth-century Britain; and a reassessment of The Prelude as a formation narrative, arguing that William Wordsworth displays a conflicted attitude to the growth and progress usually found in the Bildungsroman. The journal also contains reviews of new books on the romantic period published in the Nordic countries.
Download or read book The House of Fragile Things written by James McAuley and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-01 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful history of Jewish art collectors in France, and how an embrace of art and beauty was met with hatred and destruction In the dramatic years between 1870 and the end of World War II, a number of prominent French Jews--pillars of an embattled community--invested their fortunes in France's cultural artifacts, sacrificed their sons to the country's army, and were ultimately rewarded by seeing their collections plundered and their families deported to Nazi concentration camps. In this rich, evocative account, James McAuley explores the central role that art and material culture played in the assimilation and identity of French Jews in the fin-de-siècle. Weaving together narratives of various figures, some familiar from the works of Marcel Proust and the diaries of Jules and Edmond Goncourt--the Camondos, the Rothschilds, the Ephrussis, the Cahens d'Anvers--McAuley shows how Jewish art collectors contended with a powerful strain of anti-Semitism: they were often accused of "invading" France's cultural patrimony. The collections these families left behind--many ultimately donated to the French state--were their response, tragic attempts to celebrate a nation that later betrayed them.
