Download or read book History Making and Present Day Politics written by Hans Erik Stolten and published by Nordic Africa Institute. This book was released on 2007 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection, some of South Africa's most distinguished historians and social scientists present their views on the importance of history and heritage for the transformation of the South African society. Although popular use of history helped remove apartheid, the study of history lost status during the transition process. Some of the reasons for this, like the nature of the negotiated revolution, social demobilization, and individualization, are analyzed in this book. The combination of scholarly work with an active role in changing society has been a central concern in South African history writing. This book warns against the danger of history being caught between reconciliation, commercialization, and political correctness. Some of the articles critically examine the role of historians in ideological debates on gender, African agency, Afrikaner anti-communism, early South African socialism, and the role of the business world during late apartheid. Other contributions explore continuing controversies on the politics of public history in post-apartheid South Africa, describe the implementation of new policies for history education, or investigate the use of applied history in the land restitution process and in the TRC. The authors also examine a range of new government and private initiatives in the practical use of history, including the establishment of new historical entertainment parks and the conversion of museums and heritage sites. For readers interested in nation building processes and identity politics, this book provides valuable insight.
Download or read book The Convolutions of Historical Politics written by Alekse? I. Miller and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirteen essays by scholars from seven countries discuss the political use and abuse of history in the recent decades with particular focus on Central and Eastern Europe (Hungary, Poland, Estonia, Moldova, Ukraine, Russia as case studies), but also includes articles on Germany, Japan and Turkey, which provide a much needed comparative dimension. The main focus is on new conditions of political utilization of history in post-communist context, which is characterized by lack of censorship and political pluralism. The phenomenon of history politics became extremely visible in Central and Eastern Europe in the past decade, and remains central for political agenda in many countries of the regions. Each essay is a case study contributing to the knowledge about collective memory and political use of history, offering a new theoretical twist. The studies look at actors (from political parties to individual historians), institutions (museums, Institutes of National remembrance, special political commissions), methods, political rationale and motivations behind this phenomenon.
Download or read book Making Histories written by Richard Johnson and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book New Perspectives on Power and Political Representation from Ancient History to the Present Day written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-06-07 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Perspectives on Power and Political Representation from Ancient History to the Present Day offers a unique perspective on political communication between rulers and ruled from antiquity to the present day by putting the concept of representation center stage. It explores the dynamic relationship between elites and the people as it was shaped by constructions of self-representation and representative claims. The contributors to this volume – specialists in ancient, medieval, early-modern and modern history – move away from reductionist associations of political representation with formal aspects of modern, democratic, electoral, and parliamentarian politics. Instead, they contend that the construction of political representation involves a set of discourses, practices, and mechanisms that, although they have been applied and appropriated in various ways in a range of historical contexts, has stood the test of time.
Download or read book The Politics of Moderation in Modern European History written by Ido de Haan and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-09-04 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book charts the varieties of political moderation in modern European history from the French Revolution to the present day. It explores the attempts to find a middle way between ideological extremes, from the nineteenth-century Juste Milieu and balance of power, via the Third Ways between capitalism and socialism, to the current calls for moderation beyond populism and religious radicalism. The essays in this volume are inspired by the widely-recognized need for a more nuanced political discourse. The contributors demonstrate how the history of modern politics offers a range of experiences and examples of the search for a middle way that can help us to navigate the tensions of the current political climate. At the same time, the volume offers a diagnosis of the problems and pitfalls of Third Ways, of finding the middle between extremes, and of the weaknesses of the moderate point of view.
Download or read book The Engaged Historian written by Stefan Berger and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2019-04-01 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the surface, historical scholarship might seem thoroughly incompatible with political engagement: the ideal historian, many imagine, is a disinterested observer focused exclusively on the past. In truth, however, political action and historical research have been deeply intertwined for as long as the historical profession has existed. In this insightful collection, practicing historians analyze, reflect on, and share their experiences of this complex relationship. From the influence of historical scholarship on world political leaders to the present-day participation of researchers in post-conflict societies and the Occupy movement, these studies afford distinctive, humane, and stimulating views on historical practice and practitioners
Download or read book End of History and the Last Man written by Francis Fukuyama and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2006-03-01 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since its first publication in 1992, The End of History and the Last Man has provoked controversy and debate. Francis Fukuyama's prescient analysis of religious fundamentalism, politics, scientific progress, ethical codes, and war is as essential for a world fighting fundamentalist terrorists as it was for the end of the Cold War. Now updated with a new afterword, The End of History and the Last Man is a modern classic.
Download or read book Shaped by the State written by Brent Cebul and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-02-21 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American political history has been built around narratives of crisis, in which what “counts” are the moments when seemingly stable political orders collapse and new ones rise from the ashes. But while crisis-centered frameworks can make sense of certain dimensions of political culture, partisan change, and governance, they also often steal attention from the production of categories like race, gender, and citizenship status that transcend the usual break points in American history. Brent Cebul, Lily Geismer, and Mason B. Williams have brought together first-rate scholars from a wide range of subfields who are making structures of state power—not moments of crisis or partisan realignment—integral to their analyses. All of the contributors see political history as defined less by elite subjects than by tensions between state and economy, state and society, and state and subject—tensions that reveal continuities as much as disjunctures. This broader definition incorporates investigations of the crosscurrents of power, race, and identity; the recent turns toward the history of capitalism and transnational history; and an evolving understanding of American political development that cuts across eras of seeming liberal, conservative, or neoliberal ascendance. The result is a rich revelation of what political history is today.
Download or read book Politics in Time written by Paul Pierson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-19 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking book represents the most systematic examination to date of the often-invoked but rarely examined declaration that "history matters." Most contemporary social scientists unconsciously take a "snapshot" view of the social world. Yet the meaning of social events or processes is frequently distorted when they are ripped from their temporal context. Paul Pierson argues that placing politics in time--constructing "moving pictures" rather than snapshots--can vastly enrich our understanding of complex social dynamics, and greatly improve the theories and methods that we use to explain them. Politics in Time opens a new window on the temporal aspects of the social world. It explores a range of important features and implications of evolving social processes: the variety of processes that unfold over significant periods of time, the circumstances under which such different processes are likely to occur, and above all, the significance of these temporal dimensions of social life for our understanding of important political and social outcomes. Ranging widely across the social sciences, Pierson's analysis reveals the high price social science pays when it becomes ahistorical. And it provides a wealth of ideas for restoring our sense of historical process. By placing politics back in time, Pierson's book is destined to have a resounding and enduring impact on the work of scholars and students in fields from political science, history, and sociology to economics and policy analysis.
Download or read book Archive Wars written by Rosie Bsheer and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the Saudi Arabian monarchy’s efforts to construct and disseminate a historical narrative to legitimize its rule. The production of history is premised on the selective erasure of certain pasts and the artifacts that stand witness to them. From the elision of archival documents to the demolition of sacred and secular spaces, each act of destruction is also an act of state building. Following the 1991 Gulf War, political elites in Saudi Arabia pursued these dual projects of historical commemoration and state formation with greater fervor to enforce their postwar vision for state, nation, and economy. Seeing Islamist movements as the leading threat to state power, they sought to de-center religion from educational, cultural, and spatial policies. With this book, Rosie Bsheer explores the increasing secularization of the postwar Saudi state and how it manifested in assembling a national archive and reordering urban space in Riyadh and Mecca. The elites’ project was rife with ironies: in Riyadh, they employed world-renowned experts to fashion an imagined history, while at the same time in Mecca they were overseeing the obliteration of a thousand-year-old topography and its replacement with commercial megaprojects. Archive Wars shows how the Saudi state’s response to the challenges of the Gulf War served to historicize a national space, territorialize a national history, and ultimately refract both through new modes of capital accumulation. Praise for Archive Wars “An instant classic. With incredible insight, creativity, and courage, Rosie Bsheer peels away the political and institutional barriers that have so long mystified others seeking to understand Saudi Arabia. Bsheer tells us remarkable new things about the exercise and meaning of power in today’s Saudi Arabia.” —Toby Jones, Rutgers University, author of Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia “There are now two distinct eras in the writing of Saudi Arabian history: before Rosie Bsheer’s Archive Wars and after.” —Robert Vitalis, University of Pennsylvania, author of Oilcraft “Archive Wars explores with conceptual brilliance and historical aplomb the various forms of historical erasure central not just to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia but to all modern states. In a finely-grained analysis, Rosie Bsheer rethinks the significance of archives, historicism, capital accumulation, and the remaking of the built environment. A must-read for all historians concerned with the materiality of modern state formation.” —Omnia El Shakry, University of California, Davis, author of The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt
Download or read book Making History written by G. A. Bremner and published by Proceedings of the British Aca. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'History is past politics, politics is present history.' Thus observed Edward August Freeman, 19th-century historian and public intellectual. He was an idiosyncratic and imaginative thinker who saw past and present as interwoven and had a way of collapsing barriers of time - a gift for making the reader feel part of history, rather than merely its student. Freeman's interests ranged widely beyond history, however, and this volume provides a biographical as well as intellectual survey of his activities. Thus chapters intersect with historical episodes such as Tractarianism, Liberal Anglicanism and the Gothic Revival, cutting across the divides that traditionally separate architectural, political, church and imperial history. New influences and nemeses emerge from this consideration of the 1830s to 1850s, providing context and added depth to the familiar view of the mature Freeman: to his historical writing as well as to the personal feuds (e.g. with Froude) for which he was equally known. This book fills a gap in the intellectual history of Victorian Britain by providing the first comprehensive, scholarly account of one of its most articulate and outspoken public intellectuals. More broadly, too, Freeman provides a historical context for current debates on multi-culturalism, race and national identity.
Download or read book History Policy and Public Purpose written by Alix R. Green and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-05-28 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes a fresh look at the connection between history and policy, proposing that historians rediscover a sense of ‘public purpose’ that can embrace political decision-making – and also enhance historical practice. Making policy is a complex and messy affair, calling on many different forms of expertise and historians have often been reluctant to get involved in policy advice, with those interested in ‘history in public’ tending to work with museums, heritage sites, broadcasters and community organisations. Green notes, however, that historians have also insisted that ‘history matters’ in public policy debate, and been critical of politicians’ distortions or neglect of the past. She argues that it is not possible to have it both ways.
Download or read book Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy written by Barrington Moore and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 1993-09-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic work of comparative history explores why some countries have developed as democracies and others as fascist or communist dictatorships Originally published in 1966, this classic text is a comparative survey of some of what Barrington Moore considers the major and most indicative world economies as they evolved out of pre-modern political systems into industrialism. But Moore is not ultimately concerned with explaining economic development so much as exploring why modes of development produced different political forms that managed the transition to industrialism and modernization. Why did one society modernize into a "relatively free," democratic society (by which Moore means England)? Why did others metamorphose into fascist or communist states? His core thesis is that in each country, the relationship between the landlord class and the peasants was a primary influence on the ultimate form of government the society arrived at upon arrival in its modern age. “Throughout the book, there is the constant play of a mind that is scholarly, original, and imbued with the rarest gift of all, a deep sense of human reality . . . This book will influence a whole generation of young American historians and lead them to problems of the greatest significance.” —The New York Review of Books
Download or read book Making Sense of History written by Mushirul Hasan and published by Manohar Publishers. This book was released on 2003 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making Sense of History is a historian's exploration of the past and present. Some articles, essays and interviews supplement his scholarly publications, but most reflect Professor Hasan's present-day concerns. Thus, he writes on 11 September, on Palestine and on pogrom in Gujarat. He dwells on the rise of Hindu nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism and critically evaluates their cultural and ideological resources. His is a story that resonates with ideas on the contemporary Indian scene. This book also devotes a section to some of the leading Western and South Asian interpreters of Islam. Without being apologetic about Islamic teachings. Professor Hasan engages with a wide range of topics of concern to contemporary Muslims in India and overseas. Covering a variety of themes including jehad, education, literature and political thought, he clears up some distortions and misrepresentation's about Islam and the Muslim communities. Professor Hasan airs his views with unusual candour. He is clear in his thinking, lucid in his exposition, and uninhibited in communicating with his newspaper readers. The book affords many valuable insights and interesting analyses. Readers seeking an understanding of aspects of Indian history and contemporary affairs will find a sensitive handling of the various social, cultural and political issues.
Download or read book The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey written by Esra Özyürek and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-18 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Turkish society is frequently accused of having amnesia. It has been said that there is no social memory in Turkey before Mustafa Kemal Atatürk founded modern Turkey after World War I. Indeed, in 1923, the newly founded Turkish Republic committed to a modernist future by erasing the memory of its Ottoman past. Now, almost eighty years after the establishment of the republic, the grandchildren of the founders have a different relationship with history. New generations make every effort to remember, record, and reconcile earlier periods. The multiple, personalized representations of the past that they have recovered allow contemporary Turkish citizens to create alternative identities for themselves and their communities. Unlike its futuristic and homogenizing character at the turn of the twentieth century, Turkish nationalism today uses memory to generate varied narratives for the nation and its minority groups. Contributors to this volume come from such diverse disciplines as anthropology, comparative literature, and sociology, but they share a common understanding of contemporary Turkey and how its different representations of the past have become metaphors through which individuals and groups define their cultural identity and political position. They explore the ways people challenge, reaffirm, or transform the concepts of history, nation, homeland, and “Republic” through acts of memory, effectively demonstrating that memory can be both the basis of cultural reproduction and a form of resistance.
Download or read book Shaping History written by Wayne Ph Te Brake and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1998-07-13 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A superb synthesis of popular politics in early modern western and central Europe. . . . Te Brake has cut across the barriers to find common properties and principles of variation in the politics of ordinary people."—Charles Tilly, Columbia University
Download or read book Thinking in Time written by Richard E. Neustadt and published by New York : Free Press ; London : Collier Macmillan. This book was released on 1986 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a process and framework for using historical knowledge in intelligent decision making, and presents several situations in which world leaders did and did not do this.
