Myth Of Golden Age Research Articles

Populist desires, nostalgic narratives: the Marcos golden age myth and manipulation of collective memories on YouTube

ABSTRACT This article investigates the Marcos golden age narratives on YouTube before the 2022 Philippine presidential elections. Despite evidence of brutality during the Marcos years, many Filipinos reminisce about his tenure as a period of peace and progress, influenced by selective historical accounts propagated through digital media. Expanding Laclau's theory of populism, we identify affective storytelling techniques prominent pro-Marcos YouTubers employ to glorify the Marcos era and examine them to understand how the populist logic of difference and equivalence guides the articulation of a romanticized past and endorses the vilification of elites and Marcos critics. Our analysis underscores the potency of nostalgia in populist and authoritarian politics, demonstrating their capacity to foster a collective yearning for a mythic past and stoke a collective desire for Marcos-brand authoritarianism. Ultimately, this article contributes to understanding the dynamics of historical revisionism and its implications for political discourse and historical consciousness in the digital age, emphasizing the role of YouTubers in shaping political landscapes through nostalgia and the manipulation of social memory.

Das ›Goldene Zeitalter‹ im modernen Spanien

Speaking of a ›Golden Age‹ or a Siglo de Oro in reference to Spanish history, culture and literature transforms an ancient myth into a historiographical concept, which seems rather problematical, even contradictory, and at the same time, seen in a wider European context, exceptional. Nevertheless, the Siglo de Oro is still being used not only as a key term in contemporary academic works – inside and outside Spain – on the Early Modern period, but also as a highly controversial idea in political and ideological debates, especially on behalf of what may or may not be Spanish identity. This article seeks to give a brief overview of the discussions that try to define the concept of the Siglo de Oro and to present the literary canon as well as the ideological implications linked to it. Starting in the aftermath of the epoch itself, in other words the 18th century, it focuses on the convergence of the political and aesthetical discussions that oppose the ›Two Spains‹ during the 20th century in terms of how to choose and interpret their ›classics‹. Finally, it tries to give a (necessarily incomplete) view on the actual situation, where the Golden Age myth still interferes not only in literary but also in socio-political debates.

Negotiation of the Prehistoric Past for the Creation of the Global Future

The article presents a study into the implementation of environmental and spiritual ideas of alternative communitarian movements during the establishing of quickly spreading nature-based spirituality communities and their settlements in the East-Central European region. It focuses on the Anastasia “spiritual” movement, classifiable as New Age, which emerged in Russia in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and since has spread to East-Central Europe and beyond. It considers the process of indigenization via assembled nature-based spiritualities and traditionalistic ideas in the movement. It will discuss how the Anastasian process of sacralization of natural space, together with the romantic mode of a narrativization of the archaic past, serve as a source for the formation of images of “indigenousness” in the movement. During the process of “indigenization,” a negotiation, interpretation and presentation of nationalistic and traditionalistic ideas serve as a basis for an imagination of (trans)local prehistoric and local national pasts— including a golden age myth, a “back to nature” worldview with attempts to reconstruct variously perceived traditions, as well as a development of utopian visions of a prospective heaven on earth—intended to widely spread future social projects. The findings are based on data obtained from fieldwork in 2005–2015, including participant observation and interviews with respondents in the Baltic countries and Russia.

Political myth as a legitimation strategy

Abstract Golden age myths as an answer to political crises are a recurrent phenomenon. This article demonstrates how the idea of a past golden age as the answer to a crisis of society was employed in the discourses of the Third Way: At the turn of the 20th century, the Social Democrats (SPD) in Germany and New Labour in Britain employed a golden age myth to define their politics. Analysing a corpus of texts from the Labour Party and the SPD between 1990 and 2005, this article demonstrates how global ideological trends are locally legitimized differently through the use of local political myths. The major contribution to the field of political discourse analysis lies in the discussion of mythopoesis as a legitimatory strategy, as well as in the analysis of the local adaptation of the golden age myth, which draws on Laclau’s discourse theory and its idea of empty signifiers.

The Archival Value of Television in the “Golden Age” of Media Collecting

The Archival Value of Television in the “Golden Age” of Media Collecting Lauren Bratslavsky Television’s Golden Age ended almost as quickly as it began, with writers, directors, programmers, and critics pining over the “quality” days of certain live programs. The Golden Age for American television refers to “the medium’s first decade, from 1948–1958, when (or so the myth goes) program forms and norms were not yet entrenched, and the level of ingenuity and sheer talent on display was unparalleled.”1 The live drama anthology was at the heart of this myth, giving “the new medium respectability and prestige,” especially when stage plays and movies were adapted from the television scripts as a “new body of literature.”2 Complicating television historians’ critical assessment of the Golden Age myth is the lack of moving-image records (e.g., films and tapes).3 Yet numerous archives hold manuscript collections documenting the creative and industrial processes behind Golden Age drama anthologies and a larger swath of television from that era and later. These materials began to be collected in the 1960s during what we might call a golden age of (media) collecting—a window of time with favorable conditions for building collections. Although many major archives devoted to television had yet to be fully established, the “Golden Age” label helped launch the acquisition and preservation of television in existing institutions.4 This article contributes to television historiography by tracing the entry of television materials into one particular media archive with attention to discourses about the preservation of television (or lack thereof) and factors that influenced the archival process in the 1960s. Click for larger view View full resolution Examining the formation of an archive devoted to the performing arts—how archivists and scholars tasked with archival duties decided which materials merited preservation—explains how parts of television came to be thought of as a subject worthy of academic study. Curated repositories preserve important cultural memories and their [End Page 12] associated artifacts, generally connoting “notions of sanctioned cultural value, protection, ownership, and power.”5 As one film historian explains, “If we understand the archive as a site with its own histories, we can better know the histories of which the archive is a custodian.”6 Using the Wisconsin Center for Theater Research (an affiliate of the International Federation of Film Archives) and the Wisconsin Historical Society’s documentation of the relevant archival processes, including solicitation letters, donor correspondence, and internal reports and its first decade of operation in the 1960s, I want to show how a case study of an archival process can reveal the way archivists and academics conceptualized the worth of television as they crisscrossed cultural and economic systems of value. Although television was not identified explicitly in the Center’s scope, television materials make up a considerable portion of its holdings. Television studies ascended into the academy alongside critiques of literary canons and critical appreciation for popular culture and cultural histories.7 To be accepted as a legitimate field, however, television studies required that, one, scholars recognize television as a distinct medium with its own contexts of production and reception and, two, scholars take television as seriously as other cultural forms such as the literary, visual, and established performing arts.8 In the early days of archiving television, archivists and academics used relationships between television and already-valued art forms as a means to justify the medium’s entry into archival spaces. Indeed, the scholars in charge of the Center approached television as part of the field of theater rather than evaluating television as its own entity. By the end of the decade, however, new leadership led to new acquisition priorities and a more expansive conception of television’s archival and scholarly worth, welcoming television as a unique medium with its own artistic and industrial properties, albeit limited by markers of taste and quality. Later, though, changes in the federal tax codes effectively closed the golden age of media collecting. As a result, the Center forged a more explicit case for television’s distinct cultural value. Television in the Theatrical Tradition The way archivists and academics defined television (and the rigidity or flexibility of those definitions) influenced the...

“The Days When Ideals Shined”: Journalistic nostalgia and the myth of golden age in China

This study explores Chinese journalists’ discursive practices of nostalgia in the context of transition and “crisis” of media and the journalism profession in order to understand how the journalistic community looks back and forward at such a historical juncture. I conduct a textual analysis of writings of nostalgia produced by journalists and media commentators in a wide range of settings: the commemoration of diseased journalists, resignation letters by former journalists, celebration of media organizations’ anniversaries, and reflections on scandals and crises in the media. The analysis reveals that golden ages emerging from such writings refer to the period of the press reform and the rise of market-oriented media in the mid-1990s and through the early 2000s. Within the interpretive community, the ideal of golden age is constructed to serve as a benchmark for critiquing the state of journalism, enhance the legitimacy of those journalists who embrace the new practices in the new media era, and chant a requiem for both the press reform and the decline of traditional media.

How Do Education Professionals Understand Creativity A Study of The Implicit Theories On Creativity In A Sample Of Educators

This study explores implicit theories on creativity in a group of educators, and some associated myths and beliefs, such as: can do nothing to develop childhood is the of and school kills creativity. The sample was composed by educators graduated from the undergraduated program of Early Chile Education and the graduated students from the Masters Education of the School of Education at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana of Bogota (Colombia). The analysis of the 110 answers, found that to define creativity, educators utilize the concepts of transformation, expertise, innovation, and problem solving. Most participants indicate that the most creative is childhood, which confirms the golden age myth. Regarding the relation between creativity and schools, educators believe that schools can and must develop creativity, but they need specific conditions to achieve this. Based on these results it is important to stress the importance to develop pre-service and in-service teaching programs that allow educators to overcome these false beliefs and to understand how to foster creativity in educational settings.

‘The Time's Alteration’: Popular Ballads, Rural Radicalism and William Cobbett

The object of this essay is straightforward it is to try and 'make sense' of the songs of rural protest which were published as broadsides and/or were present in the oral tradition in the first forty years of the nineteenth century.' These songs have been called 'songs of complaint' since, while they stated social and economic grievances, they seldom offered solutions to these problems, or at least not ones recognised as such by modem historians. Where they have been used as soVrces, they have been seen as inarticulate on politics if eloquent on problems. Thus many commentators have read an external meaning into them, projecting an 'objectified' social situation of increased distress and misery onto the complaints, but ignoring the solutions and indeed the sources of much of the criticism within the songs themselves. Sadly, this has been especially true of socialist and marxist analysis. The 'left' atmosphere of the folk-song revival of the 1950s and 1960s led singers and theorists to search for politically sound songs, and they used these ballads as 'examples' of the problems of the past. The difficulty came when the remedies presented in the ballads were examined, since these clearly did not 'fit' with any twentieth-century notion of political action. This was explained by concepts like 'mediation', 'hegemony' or political naivity. Thus the songs were seen as presenting a set of problems ('new men', longer hours, time discipline, separation of classes, urbanisation) which define the songs in relation to some prior reality of 'working class experience', while the explanations offered by the songs are reduced to a 'golden age myth'.2 This problem is similar to the one raised by Gareth Stedman Jones in his article 'Rethinking Chartism'. Central to his analysis is the notion that Chartism should be examined in its own terms: