This book makes a compelling case for utilising experiences of resonance in various academic and societal fields. The concept of resonance was first introduced by Hartmut Rosa to foreground the importance of affective, emotional, transformative and uncontrollable experiences in socio-political contexts that he characterizes as alienating. Based on a critical reading of Rosa's theory and further developed through engagement with Theodor W. Adorno, Gilles Deleuze, Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler and others, this book introduces the notion of a 'spectrum of resonance' which encompasses both critical resonance and affirmationist resonance. This spectrum of resonance is used to analyse various forms of aesthetic experience illustrated with reference to Edgar Reitz's film Heimat and the music of Nick Cave and Kayhan Kalhor. The spectrum is also deployed in the fields of museum, memory and trauma studies to show how experiences of resonance contribute to the constitution of political and social identities. The focus here is on memory practices in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and the book seeks to decolonize resonance theory.

This book addresses the preoccupation with memory in contemporary artists' moving image installations. It situates artists' moving image in relation to the transformations of digitalization as hybrid intermedial combinations of analogue film, video and digital video emerge from mid 1990s onwards. While film has always been closely associated with the process of memory, this book investigates new models of memory in artists' remediation of film with video and other intermedial aesthetics. Beginning with a chapter on the theorization of memory and the moving image and the diverse genealogies of artists' film and video, the following chapters identify five different mnemonic modes in artists' moving image: critical nostalgia, database narrative, the 'echo-chamber', documentary fiction and mediatized memories. Stan Douglas, Steve McQueen, Runa Islam, Mark Leckey and Elizabeth Price are of a generation that has lived through the transition from analogue to digital. Their emphasis on the nuances of intermediality indicates the extent to which we remember through media.

What is gender and who has it? History, theory and gender are inextricably linked, but how exactly do they fit together? How do historians use theories about gender to write history? In this jargon-free introduction, Susan Kingsley Kent presents a student-friendly guide to the origins, conceptual framework, subjectmatter and methods of gender history. Assuming no prior knowledge, Gender and History: - Sets out clear definitions of theory, history and gender - Explains that gender is not solely applicable to women, but to men as well - Tackles the hotly debated topic of power and gender relations - Explores gender history from a variety of angles, including anthropology, psychology and philosophy - Spans a broad chronological period, from the times of Aristotle to the present day - Includes a helpful glossary that explains key terms and concepts at a glance Lively and approachable, this is an essential text for anyone who wishes to learn how to use theories of gender in their historical studies.

Today there is much talk of a 'crisis of trust'; a crisis which is almost certainly genuine, but usually misunderstood. Trust: A History offers a new perspective on the ways in which trust and distrust have functioned in past societies, providing an empirical and historical basis against which the present crisis can be examined, and suggesting ways in which the concept of trust can be used as a tool to understand our own and other societies. Geoffrey Hosking argues that social trust is mediated through symbolic systems, such as religion and money, and the institutions associated with them, such as churches and banks. Historically these institutions have nourished trust, but the resulting trust networks have tended to create quite tough boundaries around themselves, across which distrust is projected against outsiders. Hosking also shows how nation-states have been particularly good at absorbing symbolic systems and generating trust among large numbers of people, while also erecting distinct boundaries around themselves, despite an increasingly global economy. He asserts that in the modern world it has become common to entrust major resources to institutions we know little about, and suggests that we need to learn from historical experience and temper this with more traditional forms of trust, or become an ever more distrustful society, with potentially very destabilising consequences.

This journal, published twice yearly, explores and assesses the past of the socialist movement and the broader processes in relation to it, both for a historical understanding, and as a contribution to the movement's development and future. This issue considers America at the millennium.

This open access book uses Finland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an empirical case in order to study the emergence, shaping and renewal of a nation through histories of experience and emotions. It revolves around the following questions: What kinds of experiences have engendered national mobilization and feelings of national belonging? How have political and societal conflicts turned into new communities of experience and emotion? What kinds of experiences have been integrated into, or excluded from, the national context in different instances? How have people internalized or contested the nation as a context for their personal, family and minority-group experiences? In what ways has the nation entered and affected people's intimate spheres of life? How have "national" experiences been transmitted to children in the renewal of the nation? This edited collection points to the histories of experience and emotions as a novel way of studying nations and nationalism. Building on current debates in nationalism studies, it offers a theoretical framework for analyzing the historical construction of "lived nations," and introduces a number of new methodological approaches to understand the experiences of the nation, extending from the investigation of personal reminiscences and music records to the study of dreams and children's drawings.

Flodoard of Rheims (893/4-966) is one of the tenth century's most intriguing but neglected historians. His works are essential sources for the emergence of the West Frankish and Ottonian kingdoms in the tumultuous decades following the collapse of the Carolingian empire in 888. Yet although Flodoard is a crucial narrative voice from this period, his works have seldom been considered in the context of the evolving circumstances of his turbulent career or his literary aims. This important new study is the first to analyse and synthesise Flodoard's entire output, suggesting that his writings about Rheims, contemporary politics and the Christian past have until now been taken at face value without regard for his own intentions or priorities, and therefore have been misunderstood. Edward Roberts' re-evaluation of the relationship between political participation, historical understanding and authorial individuality casts important new light on the political and cultural history of tenth-century Europe.

As the world negotiates immense loss and questions of how to memorialize, the contributions in this volume evaluate the role of culture as a means to promote reconciliation, either between formerly warring parties, perpetrators and survivors, governments and communities, or within the self. Post-Conflict Memorialization: Missing Memorials, Absent Bodies reflects on a distinct aspect of mourning work: the possibility to move towards recovery, while in a period of grief, waiting, silence, or erasure. Drawing on ethnographic data and archival material from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Argentina, Palestine, Israel, Wales, Peru, Colombia, Hungary, Chile, Pakistan, and India, the authors analyze how memorialization and commemoration is practiced by communities who have experienced trauma and violence, while in the absence of memorials, mutual acknowledgement, and the bodies of the missing. This timely volume will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and scholars with an interest in memory studies, sociology, history, politics, conflict, and peace studies

Historical Teleologies in the Modern World tracks the fragmentation and proliferation of teleological understandings of history - the notion that history had to be explained as a goal-directed process - in Europe and beyond throughout the 19th and into the 20th century. Historical teleologies have profoundly informed a variety of other disciplines, including modern philosophy, natural history, literature, humanitarian and religious philanthropism, the political thought and practice of revolution, emancipation, imperialism, colonialism and anti-colonialism, the conceptualization of universal humankind, and the understanding of modernity in general. By exploring the extension and plurality of historical teleology, the essays in this volume revise the history of historicity in the modern period. Historical Teleologies in the Modern World casts doubt on the idea that a single, if powerful, conception of time could function as the unifying principle of all modern historicity, instead pursuing an investigation of the plurality of modern historicities and its underlying structures. By bringing together Western and non-Western histories, this book provides the first extended treatment of the idea of historical teleology. It will be of great value to students and scholars of modern global and intellectual history.

Drawing on theories of historiography, memory, and diaspora, as well as from existing genre studies, this book explores why contemporary writers are so fascinated with history. Pei-chen Liao considers how fiction contributes to the making and remaking of the transnational history of the U.S. by thinking beyond and before 9/11, investigating how the dynamics of memory, as well as the emergent present, influences readers' reception of historical fiction and alternate history fiction and their interpretation of the past. Set against the historical backdrop of WWII, the Vietnam War, and the War on Terror, the novels under discussion tell Jewish, Japanese, white American, African, Muslim, and Native Americans' stories of trauma and survival. As a means to transmit memories of past events, these novels demonstrate how multidirectional memory can be not only collective but connective, as exemplified by the echoes that post-9/11 readers hear between different histories of violence that the novels chronicle, as well as between the past and the present.

This book focuses on discourses of the politics of history education and history textbooks. It offers a new insight into understanding of the nexus between ideology, the state, and nation-building, as depicted in history education and school textbooks. It especially focuses on the interpretation of social and political change, significant events, looking for possible biases and omissions, leadership and the contribution of key individuals, and continuities. The book discusses various aspects of historical narratives, and some selected key events in defining identity and nation-building. It considers the role of historiography in dominant historical narratives. It analyses history education, in both local and global settings, and its significance in promoting values education and intercultural and global understanding. It is argued that historical narratives add pedagogies, grounded in constructivist, metacognitive and transformational paradigms, have the power to engage the learner in significant and meaningful learning experiences, informed by multiple discourses of our historical narratives and those of other nations.

Niketas Choniates' History is the single most important source for a crucial period in Byzantine history, which began with the death of Alexios I Komnenos in 1118 and culminated with the capture of Constantinople by the armies of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. In this first book-length study of the History in English, Simpson reviews the complex manuscript tradition and transmission of the text, and examines the substantial differences in style, content, and purpose between the two main versions in which it has been preserved. Investigating issues related to historical narrative and imperial biography, including genre and characteristic features, narrative structure, and character depiction, the volume also explores the sources from which Niketas Choniates compiled his account and the literary models and historical concepts which guided him. It emphasizes his literary mimesis of earlier writers, his creative and often innovative use of rhetorical forms and techniques, and his historical methodology and outlook. Finally, the book delves into the author's world in order to uncover his personal prejudices and preoccupations, and takes into account his other works, namely the orations and letters as well as the theological treatise, the Dogmatike Panoplia.

This volume explores ways in which the literary trope of the palimpsest can be applied to ethnic and postcolonial literary and cultural studies. Based on contemporary theories of the palimpsest, the innovative chapters reveal hidden histories and uncover relationships across disciplines and seemingly unconnected texts. The contributors focus on diverse forms of the palimpsest: the incarceration of Native Americans in military forts and their response to the elimination of their cultures; mnemonic novels that rework the politics and poetics of the Black Atlantic; the urban palimpsests of Rio de Janeiro, Marseille, Johannesburg, and Los Angeles that reveal layers of humanity with disparities in origin, class, religion, and chronology; and the palimpsestic configurations of mythologies and religions that resist strict cultural distinctions and argue against cultural relativism.

This book redefines the relationship between Marxism and history. At its roots, Marxism was aimed at analyzing society in order to change it, reflecting on the past to create the 'poetry of the future.' No single event of the past was as important to early Marxists as the French Revolution of 1789. Studying the varying uses of the history of that past event among Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and prominent European Marxists before 1914 (Karl Kautsky, V.I. Lenin, and others), this book argues that we should take the historiography of concrete past events seriously. It was not only an auxiliary element of Marxism, but a core constitutive element in its formation. Thus, this book calls for transcending traditional approaches to Marxism as a fixed set of social theories combined with strategies for the present and future. Important to students of Marxism, the labor movement, and the French Revolution alike, this study contains refreshing perspectives on the interplay between past, present, and future and on the role of states, social classes, socio-economic determination, and political organization in history.

This work takes familiar historical narratives and provides alternative readings for them. It endeavours to expand the parameters of comparative history by focusing on the economic, social, political and historiographical connections among societies, and by observing these intertwined histories from different vantage points. The author aims to take the reader beyond culture and society into the imperial webs of association found inside and outside the discipline of history.

This book investigates the economic organization of ancient societies from a comparative perspective. By pursuing an interdisciplinary approach, including contributions by archaeologists, historians of antiquity, economic historians as well as historians of economic thought, it studies various aspects of ancient economies, such as the material living conditions including production technologies, etc.; economic institutions such as markets and coinage; as well as the economic thinking of the time. In the process, it also explores the comparability of economic thought, economic institutions and economic systems in ancient history. Focusing on the Ancient Near East as well as the Mediterranean, including Greece and Rome, this comparative perspective makes it possible to identify historical permanencies, but also diverse forms of social and political organization and cultural systems. These institutions are then evaluated in terms of their capacity to solve economic problems, such as the efficient use of resources or political stability. The first part of the book introduces readers to the methodological context of the comparative approach, including an evaluation of the related historiographical tradition. Subsequent parts discuss a range of development models, elements of economic thinking in ancient societies, the role of trade and globalization, and the use of monetary and financial instruments, as well as political aspects.

Karl Leyser's intuitive and imaginative historical writing drew on deep reading in the primary sources and, above all, on an intimate knowledge of the major historians of the period displayed in this collection of his work. It was his contention that only through an understanding of the minds of such historians as Nithard, Regino of Prum, Widukind of Corvey and Thietmar of Merseburg, and a reconstruction of their outlook on the world, can we appreciate the aristocratic worlds which these historians depicted in their works.

The balance of power is one of the most influential ideas in international relations, yet it has never been systemically and comprehensively examined in pre-modern or non-European contexts. This book redresses this imbalance. The authors present eight new case studies of balancing and balancing failure in pre-modern and non-European international systems. The collective, multidisciplinary and international research effort yields an inescapable conclusion: much of the conventional wisdom about the balance of power does not survive intact with non-European evidence.

In November 1918 a revolution overthrew the old imperial system in Germany and inaugurated a republic. The revolution was formally completed in August 1919 when the social democrat Friedrich Ebert was sworn in as president. By this time, however, many of the revolution's original aims and intentions had been swallowed up by new political concerns and lived experiences. For contemporaries the meaning of '9 November' changed, becoming increasingly contested between rival parties, military experts and scholars. This book examines how the debate on the revolution has evolved from August 1919 to the present day. It takes the reader through the ideological battles of the 1920s and 30s into the equally politicised historical writing of the cold war period. It ends with a consideration of the marginalisation of the revolution in academic research since the 1980s, and its revival from 2010. -- .

Ludwig Wittgenstein's brief Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) is one of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century, yet it offers little orientation for the reader. The first-time reader is left wondering what it could be about, and the scholar is left with little guidance for interpretation. In Tractatus in Context, James C. Klagge presents the vital background necessary for appreciating Wittgenstein's gnomic masterpiece. Tractatus in Context contains the early reactions to the Tractatus, including the initial reviews written in 1922-1924. And while we can't talk with Wittgenstein, we can do the next best thing-hear what he had to say about the Tractatus. Klagge thus presents what Wittgenstein thought about germane issues leading up to his writing the book, in discussions and correspondence with others about his ideas, and what he had to say about the Tractatus after it was written-in letters, lectures and conversations. It offers, you might say, Wittgenstein's own commentary on the book. Key Features: Illuminates what is at stake in the Tractatus, by providing the views of others that engaged Wittgenstein as he was writing it. Includes Wittgenstein's earlier thoughts on ideas in the book as recorded in his notebooks, letters, and conversations as well as his later, retrospective comments on those ideas. Draws on new or little-known sources, such as Wittgenstein's coded notebooks, Hermine's notes, Frege's letters, Hansel's diary, Ramsey's notes, and Skinner's dictations. Draws connections between the background context and specific passages in the Tractatus, using a proposition-by-proposition commentary.

In this new study of George Eliot's fiction, textual attempts to imagine a coherent and unified national past are seen as producing a contradictory vision of Englishness. It is a historiographical national identity, constructing the image of predominant, and conflicting, trends in the Victorian writing of history. The inherent uncertainty caused by the shift between different perceptions of English history leads, in later fiction, to an abandonment of contemporaneous grand narratives. The consequence is a history that anticipates a more modern, radical philosophy of history.

This book investigates the representation of the Axis War - the wars of aggression that Fascist Italy fought in North Africa, Greece, the Soviet Union, and the Balkans, from 1940 to 1943 - in three decades of Italian literature. Building on an innovative and interdisciplinary methodology, which combines memory studies, historiography, thematic criticism, and narratology, this book explores the main topoi, themes, and masterplots of an extensive corpus of novels and memoirs to assess the contribution of literature to the reshaping of Italian memory and identity after the end of Fascism. By exploring the influence that public memory exercises on literary depictions and, in return, the contribution of literary texts to the formation and dissemination of a discourse about the past, the book examines to what extent Italian literature helped readers form an ethical awareness of the crimes committed by members of their national community during World War II.

The Histories Against the Pagans of Orosius, written in 416/7, has been one of the most influential works in the history of Western historiography. Often read as a theology of history, it has been rarely been set against the background of ancient historiography and rhetorical practice in the time of Orosius. Arguing for the closeness of rhetoric and historiography in Antiquity, this book shows how Orosius situates himself consciously in the classical tradition and draws on a variety of rhetorical tools to shape his narrative: a subtle web of interextual allusions, a critical engagement with traditional exempla, a creative rewriting of the sources, and a skilled deployment of the rhetoric of pathos. In this way, Orosius aims at opening the eyes of his adversaries; instead of remaining blinded by the traditional, glorious view of the past, he wishes his readers to see the past and the present in their true colours. The book paints a more complex picture of theHistories, and argues against the tendency to see Orosius as a naive apologist of the Roman empire. In fact, he can be shown to put the Church at the heart of view of Roman history. Setting Orosius in the context of contemporary historiography and literature, it sheds new light on the intellectual life in the early fifth century AD.

This book explores hybrid memoirs, combining text and images, authored by photographers. It contextualizes this sub-category of life writing from a historical perspective within the overall context of life writing, before taking a structural and cognitive approach to the text/image relationship. While autobiographers use photographs primarily for their illustrative or referential function, photographers have a much more complex interaction with pictures in their autobiographical accounts. This book explores how the visual aspect of a memoir may drastically alter the reader's response to the work, but also how, in other cases, the visual parts seem disconnected from the text or underused.

In November 1918 a revolution overthrew the old imperial system in Germany and inaugurated a republic. The revolution was formally completed in August 1919 when the social democrat Friedrich Ebert was sworn in as president. By this time, however, many of the revolution's original aims and intentions had been swallowed up by new political concerns and lived experiences. For contemporaries the meaning of '9 November' changed, becoming increasingly contested between rival parties, military experts and scholars. This book examines how the debate on the revolution has evolved from August 1919 to the present day. It takes the reader through the ideological battles of the 1920s and 30s into the equally politicised historical writing of the cold war period. It ends with a consideration of the marginalisation of the revolution in academic research since the 1980s, and its revival from 2010. -- .