History Of Diaspora Research Articles

“Trying to twist your way out of your skin” — different faces of Chinese Canadian experience in selected poems by Grace Lau

The notions of inclusion, exclusion, and otherness remain at the core of the diasporic experience and an integral part of the history of Chinese diaspora in Canada. In her debut collection The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak (2021), Grace Lau, a Chinese Canadian poet, explores these ideas and their impact on individuals and on the whole Chinese diaspora. Through the analysis of four of Lau’s poems — “When Yuhua Hamasaki Went Home”, “3 a.m. Communion”, “Pedicure at Pinky’s”, and “Escape Artist” — this article discusses how the poet connects experiences of inclusion and exclusion with both historical instances of prejudice and discrimination and their modern counterparts, highlighting the role consumerism plays in those processes.

Introduction to the special issue: Asian diaspora theorizing: defying Racism~Re-imagining alternate Nows~Invigorating otherwise futures

ABSTRACT This is an introductory article to Part I of a special issue series entitled, “Asian Diaspora Theorizing: Defying Racism~Re-imagining Alternate Nows~Invigorating Otherwise Futures.” This special issue is a trilogy of our Asian diaspora studies project: Asian diasporas as theories, Asian diasporas as methodologies, and Asian diasporas as praxes. Part II of this special issue will appear in DIME 19(2) in 2025. This special issue features the cutting-edge work of Asian diaspora educational workers who engage in diaspora theorizing, where we rememorize our diaspora histories and critically examine ourselves, our works, and our lives to defy racism, re-imagine alternate nows, and invigorate otherwise futures.

Collective Memory in the Diaspora as Represented in Crossing the River by Caryl Phillips and Small Island by Andrea Levy

The current study seeks to investigate how Crossing the River (1993) by Caryl Phillips and Small Island (2004) by Andrea Levy engage with what is known today as postcolonial counter-discourse to show how colonialism, slavery and racism shape the collective memory of African and Afro-Caribbean diaspora. It is also significant to understand how such a process allows both writers to use tangible or intangible forms of collective memory as tools in representing, reassessing and documenting the diaspora history from the perspective of the oppressed other. Moreover, a chance will be given to understand how they abrogate/dismantle essentialist hegemonic Western assumptions through collective forms of remembrance in multicultural contexts. In that sense, the analysis will draw on the concept of collective memory as defined by Maurice Halbuach, Aleida Assmann and Linda Shortt's description of memory as a powerful agent of change and Pierre Nora's sites of memory to explore how the diaspora characters remember or deal with their colonial past and its aftermath beyond their national borders. The study concludes that the process of memory recovery and transmission from one diasporic generation to the other, as representative subjects of multiple movements and dwellings, resulted in acquiring problematic senses of belonging due, in large part, to the pervasiveness of ethnic and racial oppression in the new world. At this stage, each diasporic member would consider such traumatic social environments as their premise to define and select what should be remembered or forgotten from a past marked with constant transformations. This selectivity is triggered by their impossible return to a place once called home in their collective diasporic consciousness.

The Perception of Anti-Semitic Hatred in the Italian Media and Justice System

The so-called neo-anti-Semitism, perceived differently by Italian journalists and lawyers, highlights the problem of identity in a multicultural society at the local level, of understanding the Other and (its) history, of the relationship between the public sphere and the networked society: the Jews, due to their unique history of diaspora, have always brought out the dialectic between the particular and the universal in the eyes of the world. This condition further “stretched” hatred in societies, especially anti-Semitic sentiment combined with conspiracy. Therefore, it is necessary for public institutions to understand and investigate contemporary forms of hate. This article will present part of the results of research that investigated the level of perception of journalists and jurists on the phenomenon of anti-Semitism.

Lietuvių diasporos dokumentinis paveldas: susigrąžinimo, pažinimo ir tyrimų problemos

During the three decades of independent Lithuania, a lot of important work was done in preserving and researching the documentary heritage of the Lithuanian diaspora. Various state institutions have expressed concern about the fate of the archival heritage of the diaspora, and the documentary heritage of the diaspora, its search, and the accumulation of information in state strategic documents, have been identified as significant barriers to the activities of state institutions for almost two decades. The work of identifying and recovering heritage important to Lithuania abroad is successfully underway, and collections of diaspora cultural heritage are returning to Lithuania from various parts of the world. During these decades, many important studies of the cultural history of the diaspora have been conducted, and a number of books and monographs have been published. Still, the history of the Lithuanian diaspora, its documentary heritage, remains a little-known and rather foreign thing to Lithuanian society. The article discusses the issues of the fate of the documentary heritage of the Lithuanian diaspora and analyzes the relevance, dispersion, preservation, accessibility, research, and dissemination of cultural heritage, which are faced by the institutions protecting the documentary heritage operating both in Lithuania and abroad. From the end of the 19th century to the present day, many cultural values were created through emigration. Only a small part of the documentary heritage of the Lithuanian diaspora has been preserved and known, part of which was inevitably destroyed by time, and the rest is kept in various institutions and private archives in Lithuania, Canada, the USA, Australia, Germany, and other countries. The heritage of the Lithuanian diaspora, which is disappearing rather rapidly in various countries, remains one of the most pressing problems to this day. As the number of representatives of the Lithuanian diaspora who created and preserved this heritage decreases, the questions of the fate of this archival heritage become more and more relevant. In Lithuania, there is still no unified information archiving system of the documentary heritage related to Lithuania located abroad: there is a lack of information on which and how many are the diaspora archives, and in which institutions they are stored. Archives that have returned to Lithuania are scattered among various cities and towns, museums, libraries, state archives, and scientific institutions, where their storage, management, and digitization work is strongly influenced by the availability of financial and human resources. Institutions protecting the historical heritage of the Lithuanian diaspora are increasingly faced with the problems of identifying and evaluating this heritage, because: a) the ranks of the actors of the cultural life of the diaspora who created, preserved and can recognize this documentary heritage are constantly thinning, and the young generation of diaspora is almost not interested in the legacy of their parents; b) in Lithuania, there is a decrease in the number of specialists working and researching the history of the diaspora. In order for the documentary heritage of the Lithuanian diaspora not to be condemned to oblivion, it is not enough just to take care of the preservation of these diaspora archives, their transportation to Lithuania, and their safe storage in archive storage facilities: it is necessary to research and get to know it so that this heritage becomes its own, important and necessary part of the historical legacy of the Lithuanian nation.

Daughters of Aataentsic: Life Stories from Seven Generations

Daughters of Aataentsic: Life Stories from Seven Generations

Editorial Note

This issue of Polish American Studies opens volume 80 of the Polish American Historical Association's journal. Volume 1, edited by Constantin Symonelewicz, appeared in 1944 under the imprint of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, PAHA's parent organization. A lot has of course changed since 1944, but Polish American Studies remain a premier scholarly journal with a mission to present and promote the history of Polish diaspora in the Western Hemisphere. Polish American Studies is now broadly indexed and available online through JSTOR (past issues) and Scholarly Publishing Collective (current issues). Subscribers to Polish American Studies, both individuals and institutions, come from countries on all continents, and our editorial board as well as contributing authors represent a variety of disciplines, methodologies, and research interests. Volume 80 is certainly a milestone worth celebrating.As tradition dictates, we open the issue with an address by the outgoing PAHA President, Neal Pease, who reflects on his term in office during the challenging pandemic and post-pandemic times. In the first article in this issue, James S. Pula revisits foundational questions of why immigrants from the Polish lands came to America, how many came and when, and where they settled. Taking a long view of the problem, Pula examines both Polish and American circumstances, and uses the most recent research on the topic.In the second article, Thomas Hollowak presents a more focused view of American Polonia's history in a particular place and particular time. Hollowak explores the press chronicles of crime and murder in Baltimore that involved Polish immigrants as both perpetrators and victims, highlighting an understudied aspect of Polish American experience at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An announcement of note follows: John J. Bukowczyk shares news about PAHA Books, a new publishing initiative of our organization.In “Varia,” we present another research institution that focuses on the history of Poland and the history of Poles in America. The Polish Heritage Library and Archives in Panna Maria, Texas, although a relatively new institution, grows out of the tradition of Polish immigrant settlement in Texas, which continues since 1854.Last but not least, the book review section includes reviews of books authored or edited by Magdalena Kubow, Imogene Salva, Joanna Kulpińska, Dominik A. Stecula, Beata Dorosz, and Karen Walczyk Prescott.

Корейское хан и диаспоральная меланхолия

The article is devoted to the Freudian term melancholia, which is widely used in psychoanalysis, gender studies and postcolonial studies, and is also applied to diaspora studies. Scholars link diasporic melancholia with the traumatic experience of diaspora history and loss of the homeland, which is thought of as an ideal abstraction. At the same time, in studies of Korean-Americans’ literature, the word han is often used instead of the term ‘melancholia’, despite the fact that the scholars cite works by Freud and Judith Butler. Han is a Korean politically and culturally labeled term of emotion which denotes a combination of rage, sadness and despair. The meaning of han as a collective emotional state was not developed until the colonial period (1910–1945), however, this meaning became essential in South Korea, where it is used in the doctrine of some Christian churches (as so-called minjung theology) and in the realm of art. Among Korean-Americans han also became a popular concept in literary autobiographies and academic papers. In these works, han is interpreted as an inherent emotion which defines ethnic and cultural identity. Even for the second generation han carries inexpungible remains of memory of the lost homeland, and this interferes with assimilation into American society.

Decimal Diaspora: Ten Exiles and a Medieval Construction of Jewish History

The present article reviews religious constructions of Jewish diaspora History in their long-term evolution and discusses a midrashic text that hints at a historical turning-point in the 12th century. In the Antiquity, gendered metaphors were most commonly used to characterize the troubled relations between God, the Land, and the people of Israel. Early medieval conceptions speculated about the cyclical repetition of deportation events and other calamities. That meant that that number rather than gender became the dominant organizing principle of the historical narrative in the later period. Since the medieval “Midrash of the Ten Exiles” expresses this new numerology most straightforwardly, the redactional history and literary context of this short text is the focus of this study.

A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea, ed. Samantha Kelly

This cohesive volume offers a comprehensive yet highly readable introduction to the ‘medieval’ history of Ethiopia and Eritrea, covering a broad range of subjects from the seventh to the mid-sixteenth centuries. The editor, Samantha Kelly, has brought together more than a dozen leading scholars, international experts in their respective fields, whose articles explore the religious, political and cultural history of the Christian, Muslim and local-religious realms of the North-East African highland plateau and adjacent areas, as well as the history of women, diasporas and trade in and out of the region. Kelly’s introduction clearly sketches out the aims and content of the volume; it introduces the reader to the region’s specific historical and historiographical terminology and draws attention to several threads running through the book, among them the centrality of the region’s links with the eastern Mediterranean and the Red Sea area. The very first chapter, by Marie-Laure Derat, casts the history of the Christian kingdom(s) in the post-Aksumite and Zagwe eras, and thus the seventh to late thirteenth centuries, in an entirely new light, significantly revising long-held scholarship beliefs on the ethnic identity, territorial anchorage and even chronology of Zagwe rule. Deresse Ayenachew subsequently traces the territorial and political expansion of the Solomonic dynasty from 1270 CE to the mid-sixteenth century, delineating the development and adaption of the Christian kingdom’s administrative structure, and how the evolution of courtly and military offices enabled the Solomonic kings to govern their highly diverse and geographically challenging realm. Amélie Chekroun and Bertrand Hirsch contribute two chapters to the volume: the first, on the Sultanates of medieval Ethiopia, combines the findings of recent archaeological research with new readings of textual sources. It offers a cohesive view of the Islamic history of the region between the ninth and sixteenth centuries, tracing two different axes of Islamisation, shedding light on the different polities’ political organisation, and their conflicts and connections with their Christian neighbours. François-Xavier Fauvelle, meanwhile, uses recent archaeological findings to shine a light onto the political and economic history of the local-religious societies that resisted conversion to monotheistic faiths, from the regions of Šäwa to Damot.

Review: Ireland’s Farthest Shores: Mobility, Migration, and Settlement in the Pacific World, by Malcolm Campbell

Ireland’s Farthest Shores: Mobility, Migration, and Settlement in the Pacific World is a superb piece of transnational history. For the last two decades, Malcolm Campbell’s work has stood at the vanguard of a historiographical movement to expand the focus of Irish diasporic history beyond the dominant case of the United States to consider other locations around the globe. Ireland’s Farthest Shores marks a fitting culmination to this research project.In his previous work, especially Ireland’s New Worlds: Immigrants, Politics, and Society in the United States, 1815–1992 (2008), Professor Campbell questioned a prevailing framework among Americanists that traced the social problems of Irish people abroad to their pre-migration culture, in particular a deeply rooted predisposition to see departure from Ireland as exile rather than opportunity. Irish immigrants struggled economically and encountered considerable animosity in the American Northeast, to be sure, yet Professor Campbell found little evidence that they did so in Australia, or for that matter in the American Midwest and West. Using tightly focused trans-regional comparative analysis, he emphasized networks of chain migration, the timing of Irish immigrants’ arrival in settler-colonial societies, the fluid and dynamic character of these societies, patterns of rural settlement, and racism against Chinese immigrants as the dominant themes in Irish American history beyond the Northeast. Exchanges of people and information between California, Australia, and New Zealand, Professor Campbell concluded, took place in the context of a Pacific Irish culture that could be analyzed through cross-regional comparisons as well as transnational interactions. This insight led to Ireland’s Farthest Shores, his broadest and most ambitious work to date.In Ireland’s Farthest Shores, Professor Campbell sets out to explain how Irish migrants shaped the Pacific World and how that world shaped them. Historians have been asking similar questions about the Atlantic World for many decades, but Professor Campbell’s geographical focus is new. He is careful and sensitive in avoiding Eurocentric myopia and bias in defining the Pacific World. Whose world was it, who defined it, and how? He is equally careful in establishing his chronological boundaries so that they do not coincide simply with the age of European incursions, even if Irish migrants were both products and agents of that process. Breaking, like his earlier work, from the nation-state paradigm that shapes many studies of immigration and ethnicity, Ireland’s Farthest Shores places its subject within the dual context of expanding empires and specific regions in the Pacific World, especially in the American West and present-day Australia and New Zealand. The first half of the book examines the process of migration, arrival, and settlement from the early sixteenth century through the late nineteenth century. The second half analyzes how Irish migrants and their descendants engaged with the host societies—principally in Anglo-Pacific regions, as that is where most of them settled—with a focus on religion, radicalism, ethnic nationalism, dispossession of Indigenous populations, and eventual integration into the host societies, in forms notably different from the dominant pattern in Irish America.Thoughtful, deeply researched, and elegantly written, Ireland’s Farthest Shores is not only a powerful and original study of an important and neglected topic, it will be recognized as a landmark work in Irish diaspora history and in transnational migration history more generally.

Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific

In the late 1840s Magdalena, a young woman of African descent, was held overnight in the stocks, “accompanied only by the steady rain, constellations of stars, and animals that roamed the village of Noanamá,” an Indigenous settlement in Chocó, Colombia (p. 1). Magdalena was “a child of the Free Womb,” born after the introduction of gradual abolition legislation in 1821 and into a world of limited and violent freedoms (p. 2). She emerged from the stocks with one of her hands disabled and scarred. Yesenia Barragan's Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific begins with this vignette, immediately immersing the reader in the physical world of nineteenth-century Chocó during “gradual emancipation rule.” Freedom's Captives retells the story of gradual emancipation, abolition, and liberalism by centering free womb children like Magdalena and their families.The book is organized into three parts. The first, “The Social Universe of the Colombian Black Pacific,” comprises two chapters that use journeys as entry points into rural aquatic Chocó (chapter 1) and its urban settlements (chapter 2). The second part of the book, “The Time of Gradual Emancipation Rule,” consists of three chapters. Chapter 3 narrates the creation of gradual emancipation rule and the emergence of an abolitionist public sphere, while chapter 4 turns to technologies of governance and analyzes the articulations of these processes on the ground. Chapter 5 examines modes of manumission, self-purchase and testamentary manumission, that continued and were transformed during gradual emancipation rule, and the infrequent emancipations granted by manumission juntas. The third part of the book, titled “Final Abolition and the Afterlife of Gradual Emancipation,” consists of a chapter considering final abolition, its immediate afterlives, and the Pacific iterations of the “problem of freedom” (p. 264). The book finishes with an epilogue that explores more recent histories of political conflict, racialized violence, and Afro-Colombian mobilization for peace in Chocó.Two key threads weave through Freedom's Captives. Its major contribution, the first thread, is that gradual emancipation rule was central to the history of slavery and Black freedom. Gradual emancipation rule begins in 1821, after Colombia's first gradual abolition law, and ends in 1852, with the final abolition of slavery. Barragan thus spotlights a period that often appears as an addendum to slavery proper or as part of the institution's inevitable slow decline. This book retells the political history of nineteenth-century Colombia by centering slavery and unfreedom; liberal elites sought to associate slavery with Spanish colonialism and themselves with republican freedom. Yet gradual emancipation rule, characterized by dynamic transformation and uncertainty, was also a form of domination through which liberal governments produced new modes of unfreedom to control Black people and their labor, on the one hand, and performed freedom as white generosity, on the other. Significantly, Barragan eschews the question of citizenship, about which there is a vast and ever-growing literature. She complements this work by demonstrating the particularities of place in Chocó, where other political processes were of more pressing significance—namely, gradual abolition.The second thread is geographical and material. Barragan captures the paradoxical place of Chocó. It was simultaneously a site of violent enslavement and a landscape of possibilities, where mining gold could allow the purchase of freedom and the rivers and forests permitted refuge from slavery and a measure of autonomy. While deepening understanding of Chocó’s racialized and marginalized location in the Colombian national imaginary as a frontier, she also makes clear that it was a central place, where Black people extracted gold from the soil, capital was accumulated, and ideas were circulated and transformed.Freedom's Captives imaginatively interweaves myriad archival sources, including laws, court cases, baptismal records, notarial records, and wills, with travel narratives. Barragan's historical ethnographic approach is impressive. She uses travelogues and visual materials to immerse the reader in Chocó’s aquatic landscape in a process that she describes as mobilizing the “narrative eye [of travelers] to draft potential universes rendered invisible by slavery's archive” (p. 31). Barragan is highly attentive to the ethics of working with slavery's archive to reconstruct the material world of nineteenth-century Chocó, as much as is possible from extant sources.Freedom's Captives will be of interest to scholars and students of Colombian, Latin American, US, and African diaspora history. The work is deeply situated in Black studies as well as Latin American historiography. Barragan makes extensive reference to the antislavery movements and emancipation in the Caribbean, Latin America, and North America, reflecting the need for more scholarship on gradual emancipation in Colombia. Gradual emancipation rule is a useful interpretive lens that can be applied across the Americas and opens up new analytical possibilities. Pioneering and beautiful, Freedom's Captives is the first historical monograph to center the Colombian Black Pacific, a crucial and understudied part of the diaspora that offers “its own distinct history of black dispossession and possibility” (p. 7).

The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History by Karlos K. Hill

Reviewed by: The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History by Karlos K. Hill Ben Davidson The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History. By Karlos K. Hill. Foreword by Kevin Matthews. Greenwood Cultural Center Series in African Diaspora History and Culture. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 274. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-6856-2.) In the foreword to Karlos K. Hill's stunning The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History, Oklahoma state senator Kevin Matthews writes that "Karlos Hill and the photos he has drawn together here tell the truth in a unique, compelling way" (p. xi). W. E. B. Du Bois also mused on the importance of truth to historians: "shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?" (Black Reconstruction [New York, 1935], p. 714). In collecting and organizing this collection of often harrowing images, Hill asks not only about the truth of the Tulsa Massacre, but also how photographs of the violence have served multiple truths over time. Most of the images were produced by white photographers, at least some of whom saw the scenes depicted as triumphant. Is it even possible, then, that these artifacts might be used to tell a different story in 2021? Hill successfully answers this question in the affirmative, making a number of key contentions: that the photographs support scholars' recent shift from the terminology of "riot" to that of "massacre"; that Tulsa is likely the most photographed event of racial violence in U.S. history; and that these photographs and the accompanying narratives provide evidence of the ongoing need for reparations. In six chapters composed of photographs accompanied by descriptive captions and selections from remembrances of survivors, Hill takes the reader through the horror and chaos of Tulsa in late May and early June 1921. Having combed through approximately 500 photographs of the massacre, Hill selected approximately 150 images as especially powerful and informative. A scholar with expertise in the history of lynching, Hill draws a comparison between photographs of the violence in Tulsa and postcards of lynchings collected by white spectators. Indeed, a key argument of this book is that this "extensive race massacre photo archive exists because so many white participants desired to visually represent and share with other whites their role in the violent destruction of the Greenwood district" (p. 8). Presenting and preserving an array of important archival materials alongside this historiographical intervention about the place of the Tulsa Massacre within a longer history of white supremacist violence as spectacle, Hill has produced a work that scholars of racial violence, photography, spectacle, and U.S. history more broadly must grapple with. I especially appreciated Hill's attention to Black children as those who lived with experiences of the massacre over the longest stretch of time. Chapter 6 opens with a quotation from Ruth Dean Nash, a massacre survivor who was not quite six years old in May 1921: "'I was so traumatized by that riot, I don't remember much about anything, except for my terror. I'll never forget that'" [End Page 418] (p. 224). Chapter 6 also presents a different set of images: contemporary photographs of massacre survivors placed above narrative memories of their experiences. The contrasts between these more recent images and those from 1921 highlight the "grit and resilience of the Black survivors," to use Hill's own description (p. 7). Though The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre should be valued by scholars for preserving and collecting these images and for its historiographical importance, Hill's "ultimate goal with this book is to pay tribute to the victims and survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre" (p. 16). Hill has met this goal in profound ways, and I have no doubt that this book will remain deeply meaningful to descendants of survivors. The photographs in this book contain endless stories and will thus undoubtedly be useful to a wide range of readers as they seek to "tell the truth" about a horrific and all-too-ordinary moment of racial violence (p. xi). Ben Davidson Saint Michael's College Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

Women and Photography in Africa: Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges

Women and Photography in Africa: Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges

Ethnic Jokes: Mocking the Working Irish Woman: Winning Essay, Journal of Victorian Culture Graduate Essay Prize 2021

Abstract The figure of the laughably ignorant Irish maid was one of the most recognizable Irish stereotypes in Anglo-American print culture over the late nineteenth century. Jokes about ‘Bridget’ and ‘Biddy’ crossed the Atlantic in both directions, contributing to a transnational repository of comic Irish tropes. While the cultural representation of Irish immigrants was often shaped by regional concerns, Irish servant gags were comparable, and at times identical, across locations – an indication of just how interlinked domestic sensibilities were in England and the United States. Ethnic humour of this kind partly reflected the prevalence of anti-Irish sentiment, echoing older anti-Irish caricatures. The class and racial biases revealed by transatlantic depictions of the Irish is stressed in the existing literature on Irish diaspora history, and certainly such biases help to explain many of the jokes told about servants. This essay moves beyond these perspectives, however, in arguing that comic representations of domestic service also spoke to the anxiety of the middle and upper classes reliant on external help to maintain household order, an intricate endeavour in the context of elaborate Victorian domestic protocols. The huge volume of social commentary devoted to the so-called servant question over these years was a marker of the discomfort felt by employers about managing domestic labour, and joking about the competence of maids and cooks was one means of alleviating some of the tensions prompted by servant-keeping.

Baltic Studies at the Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences: Round Table on the 25th Anniversary of Research and the Release of the 10th Collection of the Serial Publication “Russia and the Baltic States”

The academic meeting was held on the occasion of 25 years of studies into the history of the Baltic states and peoples in the Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences and of the publication of the 10th issue of the series “Russia and Baltia”. The meeting was opened by the Scientific Director of IVI RAS, Academician A. O. Chubarian. The head of the Centre for the History of the Northern Europe and the Baltic States Dr. A. A. Komarov, the Centre's researchers Dr. E. L. Nazarova and Dr. Y. L. Mikhailova, as well as the researcher of the Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences Dr. I. A. Kukushkina made presentations on the reasons and main objectives of this research area. The speakers stressed that the need for a systematic study of the history of the Baltic countries and peoples arose in IVI RAS after the reestablishment of the independent Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania republics in 1991. The history of the Eastern Baltic region as a part of the Nordic space is studied in parallel with the history of Scandinavia and Finland. The main problems to be studied are related to the history of the formation of the modern Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian nations in the context of the imperial policy of the Russian state, the creation of the Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanian states, their domestic and foreign policies, including their diplomatic relations with the Soviet Russia/USSR, the history of Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanian diasporas in Russia and the post-Soviet space.

Dharma in America: A Short History of Hindu-Jain Diaspora by Pankaj Jain

As a scholar of diaspora studies and having read a fair share of literature on diaspora, there is one question that I always ask before starting to read a book on diaspora: why is it important to know about diaspora? A related question is, important to whom? Why do we need to tell stories of those who have left? I determine the eminence of the book based on how far the author has been able to answer the above questions and Dharma in America doesn’t disappoint me. Although every immigrant story is amazing, the Journey of Indians in America is distinctive on many fronts including education, income and entrepreneurship. Once “lost actors” are now “national assets” for both the host country and the homeland. Immigration to the United States from India started in the early 19th century when Indian immigrants began settling in communities along the West Coast. Although they originally arrived in small numbers, new opportunities arose in the middle of the 20th century, and the population grew larger in the following decades. As of 2019, about 2.7 million Indian immigrants resided in the United States (Hanna & Batlova, 2020). Today, Indian immigrants account for approximately 6 per cent of the U.S. foreign-born population, making them the second-largest immigrant group in the country, after Mexicans (Ibid).

He Almost Forgets That There is a Maker of the World

What can jewishness be — a nation, a race, a religion, a style of humor? A history of diaspora? A relation to whiteness? A commandment to work for justice? Where is jewishness in the body? In this illuminated video essay, 30 minutes of uncut experimental songwork practice are augmented by 50 annotations or “illuminations.” These are embedded into the video, as they would more commonly be embedded in prose, providing a dense critical context for what unfolds. A handful of songs provide the spine of the work, while four carefully selected books stud the flow of song and evoke the elusive potential of a jewishness to come: antique, mystical, anticolonial, renewed. The four practitioner-researchers draw on their shared backgrounds in laboratory theatre to explore these materials in a dynamic flow of action and interaction. The uncut video grounds the viewer in the temporality of the practice and demands a close reading of the documented moment. The annotations enhance, clarify, and in some cases critique or interrogate the embodied research, offering a layer of commentary as a contemporary riff on talmudic ways of thinking. “He Almost Forgets…” was created through a new audiovisual embodied laboratory research method (Spatz 2020). It demonstrates the capacity of artistic research to generate new molecular identities and alternative forms of knowledge.

American opium smuggling trade and John Jacob Astor

The subject of this research is the activity of John Jacob Astor and his role in the American opium smuggling trade. Description is given to the differences between the American and British opium models in China. An attempt is made to determine the peculiarities of Astor's activity in the opium business. The article employs the following sources: works of the German historian Alexander Emmerich from the University of Augsburg dedicated to the American Germans and their fate in the United States; work of the American historian John (Jake) Chen on the history of Chinese diaspora in the United States; work of Jeff Goldberg who specialized in the history of psychotropic substances; article by the member of the Massachusetts School of History  Fredrik Delano Grant, Jr. on the Roosevelt’ opium track’ text of the debate in the British Parliament of April 9, 1840. The novelty of this research lies in familiarization of the Russian-speaking audience with the problems of opium smuggling trade through the research works that have not been previously translated into the Russian language. The conducted analysis of the parliamentary debates in Great Britain determines the commonality of interests of the British and American opium traders with regards to China. The study confirmed the enormous fortune of John Jacob Astor in the American opium smuggling trade, although this type of commercial activity was not primary in his business. The article also describes his continued commercial activity (including opium) in the United States after leaving the Chinese market.

The Patriotism Education in History Courses of Israeli Middle School

Promoting patriotism and national cohesion in history classes is a well-known practice in modern countries, and especially evident in countries embroiled in ongoing conflicts. Patriotism in middle school history education of Israel bear the task to inherit the essence of Jewish traditional culture, promote awakening civic consciousness and teach the history of nation building. The courses contains main lines of national image creation, complaints for diaspora history, reflection on the holocaust, the current situation of the stalemate with rivalry countries and the outlook for the trend towards integration. It aims at shaping the minds of nation residents with different ethnic, religious, cultural and political background, and turn them into social members with a strong sense of responsibility, characteristics of multicultural and harmonious coexistence. In the comprehensive educational system, Israeli patriotism education is conducive to national unity, social integration and modernisation, but at the same time smacks of Zionism.