Formation Of Historical Consciousness Research Articles

Broadcasting the Past: History Television, “Nostalgia Culture,” and the Emergence of the Miniseries in the 1970s United States

:New forms of history television in the 1970s responded to and helped articulate a larger “nostalgia culture.” But this culture was not about escapism or a longing for a lost and irretrievable past, instead evidencing a new form of historical consciousness that allowed for closer identification and for a reevaluation of the past and the present. Television, because of its generic qualities of live delivery, immediacy, and intimacy, was particularly well positioned to illustrate and negotiate this shift. An examination of history programming, particularly the emergence of miniseries such as Roots, casts light upon these new forms of narrativization and identification.

Historical Understanding in China and the West

Abstract This essay describes and compares three attempts to provide accounts of the nature of historical consciousness, along with accompanying explanations of how one comes to have historical knowledge. It explores, compares, and contrasts the views of the late Qing dynasty Chinese philosopher Zhang Xuecheng 章學誠 (1738–1801) and two Western philosophers – R.G. Collingwood (1889–1943) and Louis O. Mink (1921–83). These three thinkers all present historical understanding as a distinctive type of knowledge and share the aim of defending the discipline of history as a special, independent field of intellectual endeavor. Aside from analyzing these aspects of their respective theories, this essay aims to stimulate extensive and nuanced comparisons between Chinese and more recent Western forms of historical consciousness. While the comparison presented here is but one way forward, it not only seeks to offer specific insights generated by the comparative project but also to set forth a range of themes worthy of future study. For example, the analysis presented here shows that Zhang’s reflections on how historians relate to the past can contribute to current discussions of epistemic virtues.

Learning and the Formation of Historical Consciousness – a Dialogue with Brazilian Curricular proposals

This is a report of research about the development of concepts of historical learning in Brazil from 1917 until 2006, but especially in the period 1931 to 2006. The aim of this investigation is to examine the learning concepts which have been behind the structure of the Brazilian curricular proposals across a long period of time, indeed from the Francisco de Campos (1931) reforms until the present curricular proposals. The outline proposed in this work includes an analysis of curricular documents from the National History Curricular Parameters for elementary and high schools (1997; 1998). The methodology adopted is a combination of qualitative investigation through case studies as well as documentary and bibliographic investigation. Some studies which had been undertaken to appraise the curriculum and school subjects as socially constructed (Goodson, 1997) were used as models to guide the critique. The curriculum can be seen as a visible text within the concept of the 'disciplinary code of history' (Fernandez Cuesta, 1997; 1998). Initial results indicate the predominance of the concept of historical learning as a set of competences based on educational psychology, rather than on the proper (formal, orthodox) science of history (Lee 2003; 2006).

THINKING HISTORICALLY WHEN THE MARGINS BECOME THE CENTER: INTELLECTUAL HISTORY AS HISTORICAL CRITIQUE IN MARTIN JAY'S ESSAYS FROM THE EDGE

ABSTRACTThis review of Martin Jay's recent published collection of essays examines his ongoing rethinking, supplementation, and revision of central themes—the negative and positive dialectics of historical totalization, the varieties and uses of conceptions of experience, the nature of visual cultures and scopic regimes, and the ambiguities of truth‐construction in the public realm—that have been the focus of his major works since the 1970s. It argues that his more recent work indicates a gradual shift toward an affirmation of the kinds of paratactic and deconstructive thinking of Adorno and Derrida as models for producing appropriate forms of historical consciousness and historical critique in the present, and it raises the question of how the issues of historical truth‐telling, consensual collective identity, ethical action, and the cultural role of the critical intellectual are reformulated in this process.

Tejer, construir y aprender del pasado: relaciones entre la construcción de la conciencia histórica y la formación del profesorado

En la formación de profesores de historia y ciencias sociales surge la dualidad entre la enseñanza disciplinar del saber específico y las intencionalidades formativas y pedagógicas, que genera la pregunta del para qué y del porqué aprender del pasado y las implicaciones sobre éste en torno a la formación de ciudadanos. Este planteamiento es la base del proyecto La formación de la conciencia histórica a partir del estudio de la historia regional, que a partir del enfoque metodológico de la “teoría Fundamentada”, pretende encontrar las relaciones y significados que docentes en ejercicio y formación tienen sobre la conciencia histórica y las implicaciones dentro de la formación docente. La intención del presente artículo es reflexionar en torno a los antecedentes y estado del arte sobre la conciencia histórica, para contrastar posteriormente con las representaciones sociales de maestros y estudiantes de la Licenciatura en Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad de Caldas, Manizales, Colombia.

Heterologies of revolutionary action: On historical consciousness and the sacred in Mahfouz’s Children of the Alley

This article considers a fundamental aspect of literary modernity: the emergence of new forms of historical consciousness that have attended the rise of new modes of discourse since the 1920s. It focuses on Mahfouz’s novel Awlād hāratinā [1959; 1967; 2006; Children of the Alley] – not on its well-known notorious and complex history of reception, but specifically on the form of historical consciousness presented in and through the narrative, a type of narrative phenomenology of the experience of time, in particular sacred time, in the popular imagination. This narrative phenomenology outlines a new type of “knowledge” when it comes to mass movements and the struggle of the masses for power, not to be found in official histories: “as if the masses could dream of a full stomach but never of exercising power”, as Foucault has succinctly put it (“Revolutionary Action” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice [Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977] 219). This insight ultimately draws on questions of amāra as explained briefly in the Introduction by Caroline Rooney. While the novel engages its own immediate historical context of the 1952 revolution, effectively offering an anatomy of its failures, and placing it in a particular conception of historical process, it anticipates in many ways the recent momentous People’s Revolution of 25 January 2011.

‘TO MAKE OF LISBON A NEW ROME’: THE REPERTORY OF THE PATRIARCHAL CHURCH IN THE 1720S AND 1730S

ABSTRACTThe elevation of the Portuguese Royal Chapel to the rank of Patriarchal Church in 1716 was part of a larger process of ‘Romanization’ – that is, of assimilation and adaptation of Roman models within Portuguese music and culture. This involved the training of numerous chaplain-singers and young Portuguese composers in Rome, as well as the importation of chant books, ministers, singers and even the maestro di cappella of the Cappella Giulia, Domenico Scarlatti. According to the anonymous ‘Breve rezume de tudo o que se canta en cantochaõ, e canto de orgaõ pellos cantores na santa igreja patriarchal’ (Brief summary of all that is sung in plainchant and polyphony by the singers at the holy Patriarchal Church) – a document written at some point between 1722 and 1724 – the repertory of the Patriarchal Church was a varied mixture of works by thirty-two identified composers, mostly Italian and Portuguese, from a period ranging from the sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century. Some of the repertory for Holy Week is also extant in three large choirbooks prepared by a copyist from the Patriarchal Church in 1735 and 1736 for use in the Ducal Chapel in Vila Viçosa. These include ‘modern’ additions to late sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century pieces and also some curious reworkings, made with the purpose of adjusting older works to newly ‘Romanized’ performance conditions and aesthetic ideals. The sources examined in this article thus show that Portuguese ‘Romanization’, far from being a simple transplantation of ideas and practices from the centre to the periphery, was a dynamic process of acculturation and adaptation rooted in emerging forms of historical consciousness.

‘Nothing is Straight in Zimbabwe’: The Rise of the Kukiya-kiya Economy 2000–2008

This article examines the development of what I term the ‘kukiya-kiya’ economy, a new logic of economic action in post-2000 Zimbabwe. In local parlance ‘kukiya-kiya’ refers to multiple forms of ‘making do’. I argue that it has spread from its former position on the urban margins and in so doing has effected a sweeping spatio-temporal shift in the country's economic life. ‘Straight’ transactions carried out in accordance with enduring, jointly-held rules and morals have given way to ‘zigzag’ ‘deals’ seen to be limited to a particular time and place and directed at individual ‘survival’. This reorientation to the short term, where ‘proper’ solutions of all sorts are suspended, is mirrored by a widely-held perception that the country's development has also been suspended. When put together, the two forms of suspension create a seemingly inescapable dialectic, where the dictates of ‘survival’ and temporary ‘necessity’ can be used to justify nearly any economic act. Indeed, I argue, the new economy is driven as much by a discourse of necessity – that is, by a particular form of historical consciousness – as by material ‘needs’ and the economic practices intended to meet them.

Lucian, Fronto, and the Absence of Contemporary Historiography under the Antonines

Starting with the question of why critical contemporary history is almost entirely absent in the century between Tacitus and Cassius Dio, this article examines Lucian's and Fronto's writings on the historiography of the Parthian war of the mid-160s. I argue that these authors demonstrate a particularly Antonine form of historical consciousness, in which the present is detached from any grand narrative, and the historian is seen as a narrator of events alien to his own life-experience. Elements of this view are also traced in the writings of Appian, Florus, and other contemporary authors.

Settler Society and Postcolonial Apologies in Australia and New Zealand

From the 1990s onward, collective apologies for historical injustices proliferated in political arenas across the globe, usually in response to intense activism by wronged parties or their descendants. Addressing this turn to symbolic reconciliation, I ask how such apologies might realign relationships between the Crown, indigenous communities, and settler society, with particular focus on apologies for the stolen generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children forcibly removed from their families in Australia, and on Treaty of Waitangi settlements in Aotearoa New Zealand. Interpretations of collective apologies as purely calculable, impossible, or self-interested transactions are rejected. Instead, I regard apologies as a powerful mode of discourse capable not only of acknowledging wrongdoing on the part of State authorities, but also of generating new forms of historical consciousness and collective identity within settler society. However, the extent of settler engagement in the politics of collective apologies varies greatly between Australia and New Zealand.

Settler Society and Postcolonial Apologies in Australia and New Zealand

From the 1990s onward, collective apologies for historical injustices proliferated in political arenas across the globe, usually in response to intense activism by wronged parties or their descendants. Addressing this turn to symbolic reconciliation, I ask how such apologies might realign relationships between the Crown, indigenous communities, and settler society, with particular focus on apologies for the stolen generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children forcibly removed from their families in Australia, and on Treaty of Waitangi settlements in Aotearoa New Zealand. Interpretations of collective apologies as purely calculable, impossible, or self-interested transactions are rejected. Instead, I regard apologies as a powerful mode of discourse capable not only of acknowledging wrongdoing on the part of State authorities, but also of generating new forms of historical consciousness and collective identity within settler society. However, the extent of settler engagement in the politics of collective apologies varies greatly between Australia and New Zealand.

Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century.

In a compelling inquiry into public events ranging from the building of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial through ethnic community fairs to pioneer celebrations, John Bodnar explores the stories, ideas, and symbols behind American commemorations over the last century. Such forms of historical consciousness, he argues, do not necessarily preserve the past but rather address serious political matters in the present.