Academic Historiography Research Articles

Granie w historię

The phenomenon of a democratization of history lies not so much in the equal status of different narratives about the past as in the society’s willingness to regard them as equally acceptable. In this sense academic historiography is not the only source of the cultural visions of the past. Movies, games, the Internet and other digital media all serve as a platform for creating these visions which, being usually the work of history-loving amateurs rather than professional historians, emerge within the framework of the so called non-conventional history (representations of the past found in movies or literature) or the alternative history (representations of the past found in computer games, historical portals or produced by reconstruction groups). The pluralism of the visions of the past and of ways of representing it turns out to be as much the result of the process of the democratization of history as it does the consequence of the technological possibilities that have emerged in modern culture, the essence of which seems to lie in its audio-visual character. In order to make it possible for history to carry out its cognitive functions, it is necessary not only to reformulate research programmes, which after all is being done, but also to devise new ways of representing the past. This is dictated not only by some key aspects of research practice, which is informed by the post-modernist critique of the traditional forms of practising history, but also by the new cultural context the historiography of today is set in. It is within this context that we may observe both verbal and visual articulations of the view of the past that is alternative to the representations of it in academic historiography. These articulations can be found in a variety of history games. It should also be kept in mind that the benefits of ‘playing at history’ are usually thought of as lying in the realm of education and of the commercialization of history. However, its cognitive potential is usually neglected.

Historiografía académica e historia escolar. Los libros de texto de historia entre dos centenarios

The school use made of history, the contents of history taught in the school maintain with academic historiography a complex and deep relationship but representations of the past that made school history are irreductible to institutionalized knowlege by historiography. In this article we analyze in textbooks published in the anterior and posterior decades to the two centennials of the May Revolution (1910-2010), the way the revolutionary process commenced in 1810 is presented and how it relates to these images with the interpretations academic historiography had stabilized in each one of the moments. To explore the ways it was understood history, its role in the educational system, the relationships between those stories and those built by academic historiography.

Cambios en la historiografía académica en Argentina (2001-2015)

This article discusses the changes lived by Argentina’s academic historiography at the beginning of the 21st century. Furthermore, here is offered some information about which have been the most attractive topics in scholar history, which definitively became an expanding and consolidated social science. It’s intended to show that one of 2001 economical and political crisis’ impact was the enlargement of discussions on how to spread historical scholar knowledge, mainly the one referred to the last dictatorship. Some of these debates and diffusion practices have stimulated historians to re-think the problems that professional “standardization” has generated in the eighties and nineties.

Mainstream: il XX secolo narrato attraverso i period dramas anglo-americani (2010-14)

Period dramas are both an important part of the production of television series of Anglo-American majors, and the only, or one of the few relations between a large number of users/citizens (scattered everywhere in the world) and history. In particular, US and UK productions have re-constructed, through highly successful period dramas, the idea and the image of the XX century for a growing number of spectators/ citizens. The three important issues that emerge (social inclusion, women’s emancipation and fear of the internal enemy) have their origins in a solid tradition of the Anglo- Saxon academic historiography: they have become classics, but in their television version also and primarily reflect the everyday questions of contemporary politics.

Religion in the National Historical Narrative of the Early Modern Times in Contemporary Ukrainian Schooling

This article deals with religious discourse in modern history school textbooks in Ukraine that cover early modern times in Ukrainian history. It analyzes the place of religious discourse within national discourse, the correlation between local Ukrainian religious and more general discourse, and the representation of the relationships between Christian churches. Further, it defines a methodological approach and assesses the accuracy of facts presented in textbooks as well as the interpretation of religious life, normative language, and denominational labeling. It demonstrates the discrepancy between the achievements of academic historiography and school history, including the isolated and exclusive nature of history discourse in Ukrainian schools today.

Recent Histories of Mexican American Women and Men

Recent Histories of Mexican American Women and Men Lilia Fernández (bio) Elizabeth R. Escobedo . From Coveralls to Zoot Suits: The Lives of Mexican American Women on the World War II Home Front. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press , 2013 . 256 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95 . Jeffrey Marcos Garcílazo . Traqueros: Mexican Railroad Workers in the United States, 1870–1930. Denton : University of North Texas Press , 2012 . 256 pp. Tables, maps, endnotes, bibliography, and index. $49.95 . Scholars of Mexican American history have been very productive in the past two decades expanding our historical knowledge of Mexican Americans in the United States. Elizabeth Escobedo and Jeffrey Garcilazo make two welcome contributions to this body of scholarship. Each in his/her own way offers a detailed interpretation of the Mexican American historical experience that enriches our understanding of the American past in an essential way. Historians well know that World War II has been immensely popular among U.S. history buffs and the general public. Popular culture venues such as the History Channel, for example, regularly feature programming on various aspects of the Second World War, focusing primarily on military history and the men who fought and the weapons on each side of the war. Women have been less visible in both popular and academic historiography, and Mexican Americans as an ethnic group even less so. Indeed, Elizabeth Escobedo ends her book with the controversy around Ken Burns’ glaring omission of Latinas and Latinos in his epic PBS documentary The War. This seems a fitting place to begin a discussion of her book, which expands our view of which “Americans” were impacted by the war and how. From Coveralls to Zoot Suits makes an invaluable contribution to World War II history by elaborating on the experiences of Mexican American women during this era. The book is a beautifully written account of the changing roles that Mexican American women played during the war. Escobedo outlines both the opportunities and challenges women faced as they entered newly available defense employment, enjoyed higher wages, encountered increasingly liberalized gender mores and [End Page 478] racial liberalism, but also persistent racial and gender discrimination. The text captures the complexity of Mexican American women’s experiences by documenting how women capitalized on newfound freedoms and possibilities to improve their lives and seek pleasure and self-fulfillment at the same time that traditional gendered divisions of labor and racial hierarchies also made those opportunities temporary and finite. Women experimented with new fashions (including the “zoot suit” look of the 1940s), enjoyed greater freedoms for interracial and heterosexual social contacts, had disposable incomes to purchase consumer goods, and discovered within themselves skills and strengths that wartime employment and volunteerism helped reveal. At the same time, however, they also experienced the brutal pace and work conditions of the defense industry, encountered sexual harassment and resistance from male coworkers, and occasional friction and tensions with family members. Escobedo begins with an overview of what she calls “the Pachuca panic”: the hysteria in the 1940s over Mexican female juvenile delinquency, especially as embodied by the “Pachuca” or young woman who donned the zoot-suit style. Most scholarship on zoot suits and Mexican American youth culture during this era has focused on young men. Escobedo adds to the work of Catherine Ramirez (The Woman in the Zoot Suit, 2009) with a focus on women. Pachucas, or young women who dressed in the ostentatious and risqué style popular among many Mexican American youth at the time, became increasingly visible in the media and associated with crime and juvenile delinquency. Escobedo reveals how some young women adopted the style of dress and associated social practices (heterosexual dating and socializing in public), much to the consternation of traditional immigrant parents and local authorities. Ironically, while immigrant parents lamented this as evidence of their daughters’ “Americanization” and adoption of more liberal gender and sexual norms, Anglo officials saw the adoption of “pachuquismo as a distinctly Mexican identity” (p. 33). While these young women were simply adopting the fashion of the age and distinguishing themselves from their parents’ generation, Anglos saw these practices as deviant and morally dangerous. Juvenile delinquency among all youth became...

Historiography, Cultures of Remembrance and Tradition in German Sport

Erinnerungskultur (culture of remembrance) is a widely discussed notion in German historiography. First, the meaning of Erinnerungskultur, including the specific role of academic historiography of sport, is described and explained with respect to sport and sport historiography. One main objective is to reveal the diversity of cultures of sport history and the specific obligations of academic historiography. Second, the actors of sport memories and/or Traditionspflege (heritage) are characterised, and, third, some controversial and perennial debates that permeate German sports history are explained and interpreted, especially that of Carl Diem, internationally known as ‘Mister Olympics’ of 1936. All in all, the paper provides an overview of the mainstreams, cultures and politics of history in Germany with respect to sport.

The 'Bystander' in Recent Dutch Historiography

‘Wij weten niets van hun lot’: Gewone Nederlanders en de Holocaust. By Bart van der Boom. Amsterdam: Boom. 2012. 536 pp. €29.90 (paperback). Bart van der Boom has written a controversial book about Dutch society under German occupation. Its title translates as ‘We know nothing of their fate’: Ordinary Dutchmen and the Holocaust.1 With his book, van der Boom seeks to weigh in on the debate about whether the Holocaust should be attributed to the Nazi regime alone or whether gentile societies throughout the occupied territories played a crucial role in aiding the mass murder of the Jews. It became a public issue after van der Boom won a prestigious book award in the autumn of 2012 in response to which a number of Dutch scholars published critical reviews. Occasionally, the current discussion is described as the second round of a Dutch Historikerstreit, a controversy among historians about the place of the Holocaust in the Netherlands. The debate is relevant to historians of the Nazi regime and of the Holocaust and its memory beyond the confines of Dutch historiography because it tackles not only academic issues such as the interpretation of sources and the theoretical and methodological standards being employed but also the intricate relationship between academic historiography and public discourses about history and memory.

Głód w latach 1932–1933 w historiografii ukraińskiej i w konstrukcji nowoczesnego mitu fundacyjnego Ukrainy

The author analyses the contemporary narrative of the Great Famine of 1932–1933 (Holodomor) in Ukraine in two contexts: the policy towards the state’s memory after 1991 and academic historiography. The first part of the article points to the fact that the Great Famine has become a modern foundational myth of Ukraine. The myth is compared with the myth of Sweden, which also relates to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century history and the fight to ensure food self-sufficiency of the nation. However, the messages of these myths turn out to be different. While in Sweden it expresses the society’s successful fight for the fruits of the earth, in Ukraine it has remarkably martyrological connotations – from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, the neighbouring nations and states have been playing the roles of perpetrators of poverty and misery of the Ukrainian people. The second part of this paper is devoted to the analysis of differences in the interpretations of the Great Famine made by two contemporary Ukrainian historians: Stanisław Kulczycki and Heorhiy Kasyanov. The former has eventually come to the conclusion that the Great Famine was caused by the genocidal policy of the Soviet authorities towards Ukrainians as a civic nation (2008). On the other hand, Kasyanov claims that the Great Famine was triggered unintentionally by the state authorities. In his opinion, it resulted from the chaos of forced collectivization policy, and then was used by Moscow to break the emancipatory aspirations of the Ukrainian elite. While the author admits that the second of these interpretations is more relevant, he does not fully agree with Kasyanov’s postulates regarding the way of presenting the disaster to the public. The “antropologization” of the narrative would be convincing for academic historians, but others would find it hard to understand. According to the author, the Great Famine was the second largest disaster caused by man in the history of Europe, next to the extermination of Soviet prisoners of war and the population of the occupied territories of Eastern Europe by the Third Reich. As such, it marks the history of Ukraine in a special way. The author agrees with Kasyanov’s criticism of presenting Holodomor as the genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by Russians.

Interwoven Colonial Histories: Indigenous Agency and Academic Historiography in North America

Abstract:Inspired by a recent call for greater integration between histories of capitalism and of Indigenous peoples in the United States, I argue that scholars across American studies should take stock of the ways in which Indigenous history pertains to fields beyond economic history. This article emphasizes Indigenous agency and activism to historicize how Aboriginal history has become (somewhat) more prominent in American studies. In reviewing some of the literature that has helped bring about this still incomplete shift, I look at developments in the settler states of the United States and Canada in order to highlight their shared colonial structures.

Nationalising the Bund? Zionist historiography and the Jewish labour movement

This article examines the academic historiography on the Jewish Workers' Bund produced by Israeli and Zionist scholars. While the contribution of Israeli scholars to the historiography on the Bund has been significant in both quantity and quality, their works have had to grapple with the tension between the goals of Zionist historiography and the Bund's political and ideological commitments, namely the party's radical opposition to nationalism in general and to Zionism in particular. To various degrees, Israeli scholars sought to “nationalise” the Yiddish-speaking labour movement in Eastern Europe and incorporate it into a coherent narrative of the Jews' past as an “organic” nation. As a result of their authors' ideological and methodological preconceptions, and by portraying it as a nationalist movement, these works often misrepresent the Bund's ideas, policies and activities.

A REPLY TO ABDELMAJID HANNOUM

I regret that Professor Hannoum believes I mischaracterized his argument. By their nature, book reviews synthesize and condense; they cannot capture all the nuances authors may have wished to convey in their larger work. For all of our shared interests and engagements, Professor Hannoum and I clearly disagree on the contours of the academic historiography of colonial Algeria, on the lasting influence of colonialism as a (violent) project of world-making, on the interplay of empirical description and theoretical reflection, and on the role of anthropological research in articulating a political critique of the present. Professor Hannoum's book was written as a polemic and thus invites argument. I encourage readers to examine his book and respond themselves.

L’état, C’est Tout: “История Российского государства” Бориса Акунина и канон национальной истории

The former literary scholar Grigory Chkhartishvili, now better known as the popular Russian detective writer under the pen name Boris Akunin, who is also a visible figure in the ranks of the Russian liberal opposition, in 2013 started the ambitious project of writing a multivolume history of Russia. Akunin announces his History of the Russian State as an alternative to the new mandatory history textbook currently under preparation by a group of professional historians on the request of President Vladimir Putin. According to Akunin, what sets his history of Russia apart from histories done by competitors is its objectivity: as he explains, he just wants to describe the past “as it actually happened.” Turning to the first volume of Akunin’s History of the Russian State published in the fall of 2013, Ilya Gerasimov does not discuss its merits as a history study, for it is beyond any professional criticism: Akunin is a pulp fiction writer, whose idea of historical craft corresponds to the standards of the 1820s or 1830s. Rather, Gerasimov uses this opportunity to discuss the influential “canon of Russian history” shared by both “conservative” and “liberal” historians. This canon was formed by the first Russian professional historian, Nikolai Karamzin in the 1820s, and then perfected by great historians of the late imperial period, the classic Stalinist historical text History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course , and the academic historiography of the 1970s. Despite conflicting interpretations of individual historical events and figures, all of these historians shared the fundamentally common view of Russian history as the history of “the Russian people” on Russian “historical territory”. The history of the state became pivotal to this dominant view of Russian history, as only political institutions offered the necessary sense of continuity and consistency to the millennium-long process. Akunin’s History of the Russian State provides Gerasimov with an ideal example of the archetypal version of the “canon of Russian history” as understood and thoroughly reproduced by a modern-day educated Russian. Akunin reveals the whole intellectual gestalt of social imagination of the Romantic historiography of the 1820s Restoration epoch that was preserved almost intact by the “scheme of Russian history”: the organicist perception of nation, the “blood and soil” imagery of national territory, the idealization of the state as a mystic embodiment of the nation’s “will,” the racialized understanding of the “people.” This type of thinking about society was instrumental in producing the ideal of nation-state in the late nineteenth century, and informed the politics of national purges in the 1930s (on political or ethnic grounds). Without dismantling this dominant scheme, Russian society is doomed to reproducing ideologies of variously framed nationalism, and even liberal historians will cultivate in their students the ideal of national purity and domination over “national” territory.

Theorizing Pentecostal Historiography

Historians of Pentecostalism are often faced with a number of problems specific to the movement, most importantly its fragmented diversity and its providential outlook. The sources they encounter therefore contain many conflicting claims about the past and miraculous assertions, which are difficult to integrate into an academic historiography. Creating a factual historical account from these sources, however, not only proves to be difficult or impossible in many cases, it also fails to really analyse their narrative abundance. Newer theories of history, inspired by post-colonial and post-structuralist thought may help to solve this problem, since they argue for a linguistic approach to history, which in turn makes the analysis of historiography a central point of departure for the historian. By tracing out four of these theoretical contributions and applying them to a specific example from Ethiopian Pentecostalism, the article seeks to show a way forward in the writing of Pentecostal history.

From Philosophy of History to Philosophy of Historicities: Some Ideas on a Potential Future of Historical Theory

Berber Bevernage does not share the pessimistic view that the philosophy of history is in crisis or coming to an end: it can have a bright and fascinating future. However in order to remain relevant, he argues, philosophy of history should look beyond academic historiography and transform into a broad ‘philosophy of historicities’ that also pays attention to the wide variety of extra-academic ways of dealing with the past. In order to do this current philosophy of history has to overcome a number challenges. First, it has to recognise that academic historiography did not develop in an intellectual vacuum but is closely related to particular social, cultural and political presuppositions about time and historicity on which it is partly dependent but which it can also reinforce or contradict. Second, it should recognise that different approaches to time and historicity have different social, cultural and political functions and not restrict its focus to philosophy of science or epistemological/cognitive issues. Third, it should focus on the ethics of history. This article is part of the forum 'Theoretical History'.

Popular Historiographies in the 19th and 20th Centuries: Cultural Meanings, Social Practices (review)

Reviewed by: Popular Historiographies in the 19th and 20th Centuries: Cultural Meanings, Social Practices Kevin Cramer Popular Historiographies in the 19th and 20th Centuries: Cultural Meanings, Social Practices. Edited by Sylvia Paletschek. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011. Pp. vi + 243. Cloth $90.00. ISBN 978-18454577402. It seems, in the era of the Internet and the History Channel, that we are all historians now. Information technology and digitalization, combined with the disseminative power of social media, have opened the possibility of infinite reconfigurations of evidence and narrative to legitimate all manner of obsessions, prejudices, and ideologies. Academic historians thus confront a challenging question: can the empirical ethos of conventional scholarship engage popular historical consciousness in this postspecialist age? Or, as Sylvia Paletschek puts it somewhat differently in her introduction: “History, what is it for?” (4). Although it addresses this larger issue, this volume of essays primarily frames the presence (and effect) of the past in our social and collective memory as a problem in the study of historiography. Paletschek conventionally points to the modern professionalization of the historical discipline as the beginning of a trend toward specialization that created the capacity to ask more and more questions, at the expense of [End Page 653] the ability to answer them satisfactorily. Outside the walls of academia, the reaction has taken the shape of an “expanded historiography” within popular culture, which, as Jörn Rüsen explains, integrates “the functions of instruction, entertainment, criticism, diversion, [and] education . . . into the comprehensive unity of historical commemoration” (8). In other words, the limiting of the history of history writing to the study of academic historiography, i.e., “objective and scientific” history, tended to marginalize what it considered the simplistic and teleological conclusions of what Wolfgang Hardtwig calls “history for readers” (73). The essays in this book challenge that prejudice, and usefully propose a more ecumenical analytical approach that can encompass the multifaceted productions of social, gendered, material, and popular historical and memory culture. The lines of demarcation emerged gradually. Chapters by Paletschek, Angelika Epple, and Sylvia Schraut examine how women historians, beginning in the nineteenth century, established popular biographies, commemorative feuilletons, and “light” historical literature appearing in illustrated mass media (such as Die Gartenlaube) as important components of a rising civic historical literacy. Yet, as a professionalized historicism based in the universities acquired a hegemonic methodological authority over what Ottokar Lorenz called the “rational construction” of the past, the moral judgments, characterological focus, and antiquarian narrowness of congenitally “nonscientific” historians (such as women and Catholics) were increasingly dismissed as subjective dilettantism. With one exception (Claudia Lenz on the popular memory of World War II in Norway), eight of this book’s twelve chapters (including the contributions of Paletschek, Epple, and Schraut) deal with specific case studies analyzing various aspects of the popular, or nonacademic, presentation of history in Germany: Helmut Bergenthum on the writing of world histories in 1900; Christoph Classen on the presentation of history on East German radio; Frank Bösch on film depictions of the Third Reich in the 1970s; Beate Ceranski on the mythmaking surrounding Albert Einstein and Marie Curie; and Franz-Josef Brüggemeier on the canonization of West Germany’s victorious 1954 World Cup team. The core of this volume, however, lies in two theoretical essays by Wolfgang Hardtwig and Dieter Langewiesche. These chapters address, respectively, the market-driven “history boom” beginning in the 1980s and the “democratization” of history within “communities of remembrance” (127). Both betray a characteristic German anxiety about “the unmasterable past,” and, in so doing, overcomplicate the challenges that historians of history writing face. Another problem is that they shy away from fully engaging with an already established interdisciplinary approach to the study of historical culture. Hardtwig, in looking at what he calls “audience-oriented modes of representation” (74), points out that the mass media’s selling of personality-based history has [End Page 654] always blurred the line between the imprimatur of scholarly rigor and marketability. He further acknowledges the danger of the “degradation” of the historical consciousness of an uninformed audience. But he also realizes that academia’s justified fear of simplification has led to a fear of simplicity and literary and narrative representations...

Migrations of the Antichrist: on European Apocalypses

The paper shows the main steps of the spreading of the Antichrist within the European religious culture and, in a second time, within the Americas. Created by the pens of Irenaeus and Hyppolitus, in the following centuries the eschatological figure of the Antichrist has become a powerful polemical tool for religious and ecclesiastical propaganda. In the 12th century, Joachim of Fiore operated a decisive change by locating the final events no more in the Holy Land, but in Rome. Since then, the rhetoric of the Antichrist became a common place in the polemics against or in sustain of the Holy See. In the Reformation age, however, the Antichrist was gradually expelled from the ecclesiological debate in Europe; but a new life for him started in the Americas, where the Antichrist is widely widespread in popular culture, as far as in the academic historiography about Christian and Jews eschatology and apocalypticism.

A magyar „emlékezet helyei” és a traumatikus múlt

Memory is gaining ever greater significance in the formation of national consciousness. With academic historiography losing ground, this phenomenon is mainly caused by the coming into the forefront of collective memory. One of the crucial features of the nation is that it is also a memorial community; that is, the members of the nation remember in the same way and forget collectively as well. From the point of view of Hungarian national consciousness as a memorial community the Trianon-syndrome is the dominant point of reference, actually implying various meanings even today. This mainly stems from political faction. The cult of Trianon has revived lately, and it is fed by public history, offering the political utilization of the past. As opposed to this, the other evident example of the traumatic Hungarian past, the Holocaust is still unable to become a real national lieu de mémoire. Thus, two „cold” cultures of collective memory stand fatally opposed to each other, while both claim the position of the sole victim.

Crítica de la historia, política emancipatoria y moralidades postmodernas: la obra de Keith Jenkins

Keith Jenkins is one of the most famous postmodern thinkers in the field of Western historiographical reflection. Without doubt, along with Hayden White and Frank R. Ankersmit, constitute the most influential trio of current postmodern historiography.We will present in this paper the evolution of Jenkins’ work from what we may call a radical critique of academic historiography to what we consider a real dislike to the form of thinking about the past, as it is conceived, practiced and used nowadays. We divided this article in two sections to accommodate our insight to these two key moments in the development of his theory and his work: the moment of the diffusion of postmodern critique to historiography and the time of the expulsion of the historiography of any emancipated political project.

La cuestión vasca en el hispanismo internacional

Departing from a lax concept of Hispanism, this article analyzes the numerous contributions that Italian, French, German, British, North American, and other authors from various countries have made to the study of the Basque question, understood broadly, from the last Carlist War in the nineteenth century to the present day. Our object of study is academic historiography, setting aside partisan historical literature; but we also include treatises from the social sciences that broach the Basque case, particularly from anthropology, sociology, and political science. Studies by those foreign authors have focused mainly on the history of Basque nationalism, predominantly on the present time and on the violent and radical nationalism of ETA, which not all have been capable of analyzing with sufficient objectivity. The other period that has provoked the most interest among them has been the Civil War, especially the destruction of Gernika and its international repercussions. However, there are few surveys of modern Basque history written by foreign Hispanists or social scientists.