Popular Historiography Research Articles

Zločini Prve kozačke divizije u NDH 1943. godine: perspektiva žrtava, hrvatskih vojnih i civilnih vlasti

During the Second World War, several Cossack units served in the German armed forces, and their movements and combat operations were already the subject of scholarly research and popular historiography. Contrasting the majority of published works, based on German military sources and focused on deployment and anti-partisan combat activities, this paper aims to analyze and showcase the First Cossack Cavalry Division on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) from a perspective of civilian victims and Croatian authorities. Such perspective portrays the Cossacks as uncompromising and exceptionally efficient fighters against communism and resistance, but also as undisciplined villains, leaving the trail of crimes, robbery, rape, molest and murder of civilians. The paper is mostly based on unpublished historical sources from the Archives of Yugoslavia and the Military Archives in Belgrade.

Reflections of the battle of Malazgirt on popular historiography: The case of Cumhuriyet Newspaper

Türklere Anadolu’nun kapılarını açan Malazgirt Savaşı, tarihteki Türk zaferlerini kutlayan ve eski Türk devletleri ile modern Türkiye Cumhuriyeti arasındaki sürekliliği vurgulayan tarihsel anlatının mihenk taşlarından biridir. Ayrıca toplumun geniş kesimlerince paylaşılan bir gurur kaynağı ve ulusal kimliğinin kurucu mitlerinden biri olarak kabul edilmektedir. Bu yönüyle, bilimsel çalışmaların yanı sıra popüler tarihçiliğin de ilgi alanına girmektedir. Bu çalışma, Malazgirt Zaferi’nin Cumhuriyet’in toplum tasarımında 1950’li yıllara kadar ihmal edildiği iddiasını akademik tarihçilik ve ulusal basının kesişimine odaklanarak tartışmaya açmaktadır. Ayrıca pek çok yönüyle savaş hakkında akademik çalışmalara nadiren yansıyan ya da hiç rastlanmayan bazı detaylara ışık tutmaktadır. Çalışmanın evrenini Cumhuriyet gazetesinin Türk basınında ilk kez linotip baskı kullanmaya başladığı 1 Ocak 1930’dan 31 Aralık 1950’ye kadar olan sayıları oluşturmaktadır. Cumhuriyet gazetesinin elektronik arşivinden temin edilen nüshalarda, nitel araştırma yöntemine uygun olarak belirlenen anahtar sözcükler ve üçüncü parti yazılımların yardımıyla doküman incelemesi gerçekleştirilmiş, toplanan veriler içerik analizine tabi tutulmuştur. Bu sayede, Cumhuriyet gazetesi örneğinde savaşın Türk basınına yansıma biçimi Türkiye’deki tarihçilik anlayışının yıllar içindeki evrimine uygun olarak mercek altına alınmıştır. Ayrıca, çalışmada Malazgirt Savaşı üzerine sahada yapılan etütlerin bugüne kadar bilinenlerden daha eskiye dayandığı tespit edilmiştir. 1930’lu yıllardan itibaren Türkiye’de Selçuklu tarihçiliğinin yükselişe geçmesiyle, akademik çalışmalar ile popüler yayınların dirsek teması içinde oldukları görülmüştür.

Efforts to create an erroneous perception in historiography: The case of Stefan Ihrig

Although history is a science based on concrete documents and information in the study of the past, it has started to be used as a tool of political powers, power centers, and groups who want to gain benefits by creating perceptions. As a result of the falsification of concrete facts, popularized history has started to replace real history and manipulate social perceptions. Dozens of popular historiographies create erroneous perceptions about the Turkish nation. These include the Blue Book, which portrays the 1915 events as the Armenian genocide, George Horton's "The Scourge of Asia", which claims that the Great Smyrna Fire was started by the Turks, and Margaret Housepian Dobkin's "Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City". One of these is Stefan Ihrig's "Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination". Immediately after the publication of the book by Harvard University Press, newspapers close to the Nazi Party and speeches of politicians within the party began to emphasize the admiration of the Nazis and Hitler for Atatürk, and it was discussed that Hitler took Atatürk as a role model. In particular, the book, which attempted to draw similarities between the Armenian deportation and the Holocaust, was also adopted and supported by some publications supporting the Armenian claims in order to strengthen the "so-called Armenian Genocide" allegations. This study aims to demonstrate the use of popular historiography as a method to create erroneous perceptions of societies by taking the book "Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination" by Stefan Ihrig as an example.

Writing the concubine: Anne Boleyn, Eustace Chapuys and popular historiography in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy

ABSTRACT Eustace Chapuys, the Imperial ambassador to Henry VIII’s court, is a vital source for historians of Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second queen. His writings are detailed and numerous, but they are also partisan and provocative – particularly in his descriptions of Boleyn. Historians must consider his writings carefully and contextualise his accounts. This article argues that historical novelists also have the capacity to incorporate historiographical analysis into their fictional narratives using the tools of their own craft, such as characterisation and focalisation. The inclusion of Chapuys as a character offers an opportunity for metafictional engagement with historiography and the process of writing historical novels. This capacity is evident in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy and the article offers a close textual analysis of her representation of Chapuys. It will compare Mantel’s approach to three novels which preceded Wolf Hall’s publication: Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl, Emily Purdy’s The Tudor Wife, and Suzannah Dunn’s The Queen of Subtleties. As neo-historical fiction, Mantel’s novels are authentic in their representation but also exhibit a scepticism toward the possibility of obtaining historical knowledge. Mantel’s representation of Chapuys speaks to this tension; she engages directly with his evidence while emphasising the flaws of its production.

The Occultist Background of Bolshevism

The revolution in Russia was not conceived among workers and peasants, as it has been accepted in popular historiography. It was a project with intelligentsia roots and an esoteric background. The aim of the article is to show the long occultist path that led to Bolshevism and communism, whose origins date back to the times of Peter I and his reforms, carried out in the spirit of Western Gnosticism with the help of secret societies. In the 19th century Russia was captured by an occult frenzy, which combined various currents of thought and made the society treat the revolution as a mystical action leading to the construction of a new world. The issue we deal with in the article covers a wide range of interrelated social, political and cultural phenomena over the three hundred years of Russian history, for which the international context is extremely important. For obvious reasons, we do not aspire to exhaust the subject. The text is intended to draw attention to the actual profound causes for the origination of Bolshevism and communism, creating a scientific basis for a study that will be soon brought out in the book form.

Between Exoticism and Ethnomusicology: Musical Representations of Greenland and India on European Interwar Radio

ABSTRACT In this article, I investigate how colonized cultures were presented to “home” radio audiences through sound (music, speech, sound montages) during the inter-war years. The focus is on how a small group of broadcasts containing musical representations of the colonies of Greenland and India afforded the imaginative work and temporary imagined communities to Austrian, Danish, and British radio listeners in relation to the spatiality and otherness of distant peoples and locations. I suggest a typology of four modes of musical representation in broadcasts reaching from the European tradition of musical exoticism to the use of recordings of indigenous music. Biography: Morten Michelsen is a popular music scholar and professor of musicology at Aarhus University. His research interests include popular music and mediation, music radio and sound studies, historical radio studies, questions of taste and music criticism, and popular music historiography. 2013–2018 he led the research project A Century of Radio and Music In Denmark ( www.Ramund.ikk.ku.dk) and contributed to other large research projects concerned with radio. Among his recent publications on sound, music, and radio are three anthologies on music radio, including Tunes for All? (Aarhus University Press, 2018) on Danish music radio and Music Radio: Building Communities, Mediating Genres (Routledge, 2019) on international music radio.

Trianon in Popular History in Late-Socialist and Post-Transition Hungary: A Case Study

The main purpose of this article is to show how the changing dynamics of governmental memory politics and shifting institutional frameworks influenced the space for and type of discourses about Trianon in popular historiography in the decades spanning 1979 to 2010. I first introduce the way academic historiography addressed the issue of the peace treaty and its consequences. Second, I situate popular historical discussions about Trianon within the broader landscape of historical knowledge production. Analyzing publication patterns of História (1978) and Rubicon (1989), the two most widely read mainstream popular historical journals, complemented with a discussion of Trianoni Szemle, a journal established for the purpose of discussing this single topic, I reflect both on the journals’ (self-)positioning under changing currents and the intensity of governmental interest and control. As the centennial of the signing of the peace treaty draws near, such a case study provides an opportunity to observe symptomatic mechanisms of illiberal memory politics in juxtaposition to its authoritarian and democratic predecessors.

Al-Khamsa: The Prophet’s Mares - Or Were They Stallions?

Arab(ian) horse enthusiasts perpetuate an origin legend for the breed that counts five foundational mares in relation to Islamic Prophet Muhammad. Challenging both the concept of a gender preference for mares among Bedouin and/or Arab people in the early Islamic empire as well as the popular historiography of the Arab horse as a Bedouin breed promoted by Islam and in particular its prophet, this paper contextualises Al-Khamsa (the five) as evidence of matrilineal horse breeding strategy by surveying premodern Arabic material on horses.

Epidemics and History: Multiple Approaches to the Subject

The problems of epidemics have increasingly attracted the attention of researchers in recent years. The history of epidemics has its own historiography, which dates to the physician Hippocrates and the historian Thucydides. Up to the 19th century, historians followed their ideas, but due to the progress in medical knowledge that began at that time, they almost lost interest in the problems of epidemics. In the early 20th century, due to the development of microbiology and epidemiology, a new form of the historiography of epidemics emerged: the natural history of diseases which was developed by microbiologists. At the same time, medical history was reborn, and its representatives saw their task as proving to physicians the usefulness of studying ancient medical texts. Among the representatives of the new generation of medical historians, authors who contributed to the development of the historiography of epidemics eventually emerged. By the end of the 20th century, they included many physician-enthusiasts. Since the 1970s, influenced by many factors, more and more professional historians, for whom the history of epidemics is an integral part of the history of society. The last quarter-century has also seen rapid growth in popular historiography of epidemics, made possible by the activation of various humanities researchers and journalists trying to make the history of epidemics more lively and emotional. A great influence on the spread of new approaches to the study of the history of epidemics is now being exerted by the media, focusing public attention on the new threats to human civilization in the form of modern epidemics.

Historical Crime Fiction as Popular Historiography

Due to the current history boom in the UK, which manifests itself in the conspicuous popularity of historical novels, costume dramas, and in rising visitor numbers to museums, the study of popular historiography has become a growing and vibrant field. Popular historiography formats such as costume dramas, historical romances, and re-enactments have been recognised as a key influence on the public's knowledge of the past. Consumed informally and voluntarily, entertaining and easily accessible, popular histories are often more significant for the public's perception of ‘historical fact’ than ‘academic’ forms of historiography.This article examines historical crime fiction as a genre of popular historiography with a special focus on recent novels set in the late seventeenth century, a period that has lately been the focus of a number of exciting crime series. As a genre mostly written to a formula, concentrating on a narrow theme (i.e. crime and violence), and typically showing the life of ‘the mean streets’, crime fiction has a genre-specific view of the past. Due to its focus on the everyday, it shows aspects of history which are particularly popular with a wider public. Additionally, as it is frequently preoccupied with history's dark secrets, crime fiction is especially suited to re-writing established images of the past.

Design as Cultural Representation: Visuality and Materiality in Postwar Japan

Design as Cultural Representation:Visuality and Materiality in Postwar Japan Yasutaka Tsuji (bio) Translated by Álex Bueno Following on the "Bibliography of Design and Society in Modern Japan" compiled for the "Design and Society in Modern Japan" issue of the Review of Japanese Culture and Society (RJCS) (2016),1 this issue engages design studies as an investigation of visual and material culture with an anthology of Japanese- and English-language discourse on the subject. In doing so, we hope to reveal how design emerged and developed as a representation of popular culture during the Cold War period. The World Design Conference held in 1960 in Tokyo was deemed revolutionary, and "design" came to be understood in Japan as a singular, distinct field. Yet, design also came to be used narrowly as a word representing technologies related to mass production and the functionalism underpinning it.2 It is questionable, therefore, whether design can be viewed as an individual field that is independent from painting, sculpture, architecture, photography and film, or music and literature, and whether its history can be narrated as such. Here, we offer a history of post-World War II design as visual and material culture by briefly revisiting earlier discourses. With this in mind, we draw attention to the texts we have selected as examples of how various individuals came to define the word "design" in the hope that we might establish a foundation for readers and future researchers. Followers of the Modern Movements Today, in 2020, it can only be said in hindsight that the historiography of design was developed—that is, in English-speaking countries—beginning in the fourth quarter of the twentieth century. Of course, it goes without saying that there were those who labeled themselves as designers and publicized their works, as well as critics and journalists who engaged with these works. However, it appears from today's perspective that it took some time for scholars to come together, to reflect on what is related to "design" and to compose their analyses academically. Continuously developing social classes [End Page 1] and international movements and changes in university curricula formed the impetus for such academic work. Therefore, to look at how design historiography developed in the latter half of the twentieth century, it is necessary to start with examining the political and economic background of this time period. The cases discussed below are a selection of relevant examples. The various texts on the subject by Sigfried Giedion, Lewis Mumford, Herbert Read, and Nicolaus Pevsner are indubitably worth mentioning as they have captured the long process of modernization that the authors experienced first-hand. Additionally, Philip Johnson, Edgar Kaufmann Jr., and Arthur Drexler curated exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and their efforts most certainly mark significant points in the history of design; the museum came to position design as part of the historical development of modern art, using the word "design" to name a curatorial department. In 1952, following these developments, Reyner Banham took an anthropological approach to the study of mass and popular culture as a member of the Independent Group, presenting his findings at Whitechapel Gallery and the Institute of Contemporary Arts.3 He published his doctoral thesis in 1960, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, which he developed under Nicolaus Pevsner at the Courtauld Institute of Art. In this text, Banham focused on early twentieth-century movements that had not been sufficiently examined until then, such as futurism. In delineating what constituted good and bad design according to standards of functionalism, he aimed to reconsider Pevsner's aesthetic criteria and Enlightenment perspective on mass culture. Through his experience in the Independent Group, Banham avoided understanding concepts merely as polar opposites, such as art of the elites and culture of the masses, avant-garde and Kitsch, or good and bad,4 and attempted to establish aesthetic criteria separate from these dichotomies.5 His writings attempted a comprehensive popular historiography of the painting, sculpture, architecture, and crafts of the early twentieth century. Two later studies from 1979 show that fitting "design" within the framework of the established academic field of the history of art and architecture was still...

An International Civil War: Greece 1943–1949 by Andre Gerolymatos, and: The Greek Civil War: Strategy, Counterinsurgency and the Monarchy by Spyridon Plakoudas

Reviewed by: An International Civil War: Greece 1943–1949 by Andre Gerolymatos, and: The Greek Civil War: Strategy, Counterinsurgency and the Monarchy by Spyridon Plakoudas Spyros Tsoutsoumpis (bio) Andre Gerolymatos, An International Civil War: Greece 1943–1949. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2016. Pp. xxxii, 399. Paper $25.00. Spyridon Plakoudas, The Greek Civil War: Strategy, Counterinsurgency and the Monarchy. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Pp. xi + 256. Cloth $99.00. In the midst of the Greek Civil War, Iraklis (Heraclis) Petimezas wrote to a fellow-veteran of the resistance struggle that it is "nearly not enough to present the current predicament as the fault of the British or the Russians" or as a by-product of political circumstances "outside our control." Petimezas reminded [End Page 431] his correspondent that that several western European nations had powerful left-wing movements, yet these countries "were spared the ravages of civil war" and concluded the letter by noting that "If we truly want to understand the root of these events we should carefully look at our recent history and try to understand what led us to where we are now" (Genika Arheia tou Kratous/Petimezas Archive/163/19/1/1947). Seven decades after the parting shorts of the civil war were fired, Petimezas's appeal has not lost its resonance. Andre Gerolymatos's An International Civil War: Greece 1943–1949 and Spiros Plakoudas's The Greek Civil War: Strategy, Counterinsurgency and the Monarchy attempt to address this question by locating the civil war in a broader comparative and theoretical framework. The authors are not unique in this respect. The study of the resistance and the civil war has witnessed an unprecedented renaissance in the preceding decade. These two books exemplify the progress made but also demonstrate the numerous problems and challenges faced by civil war scholars. This review of the two books is divided into three parts. The first part provides a brief overview of past scholarship and locates the two studies in relation to ongoing debates in the history of the 1940s. The second part provides a critical analysis of the two accounts while the third and final part delineates paths for future research. In the aftermath of the war, the study of this turbulent period was relegated to the margins of historical enquiry. The bulk of the studies was produced by conservative pundits, politicos, right-wing veterans, and amateur scholars. While these actors had widely different agendas, backgrounds, and political lineages, most of them agreed on one single point: the civil war was the act of a baleful, un-Greek minority with no roots or genuine support within the country. The real culprit behind the civil war was the nation's eternal enemies, the Slavs, who used the Greek left to realize their age-old ambition of partitioning northern Greece and gaining a foothold in the Aegean. The civil war years were therefore presented as a struggle between a unified nation and communism (Mazower 2000, 216–224). The advent and fall of the Junta dictatorship (1967–74) and the consequent discrediting of right-wing conservatism paved the way for a new generation of scholars who challenged the representation of EAM as a Soviet pawn. They re-examined the role of the British and American factor in Greek foreign policy and have provided new insights on foreign relations. The bulk of these studies was based on foreign archives and adopted a top-down perspective that stressed the actions and activities of political elites and top-level activists. At the same time, alongside the revisionist historiography, there emerged a popular historiography fueled mostly by memoirists—the majority of them ELAS veterans—who offered their own vision of resistance events. The book [End Page 432] that set the tone for this historiographical trend was Dominique Eudes's The Kapetanios. Influenced by the radical leftism of the 1960s, Eudes refashioned the resistance as an earlier version of Latin American liberation movements. The guerrillas were recast as peasant rebels fighting for grass-roots democracy and the enfranchisement of the people. In common with other contemporary radical leftists, Eudes criticized the conservative stance of the Communist Party, and accused it of stalling the revolutionary potential of the...

Nouvelle Biographie, Pulp Nonfiction, and National Crisis: The Year in France

Nouvelle Biographie, Pulp Nonfiction, and National CrisisThe Year in France Joanny Moulin (bio) By a stroke of fate, the summer of 2017 has seen the demise of two famous French biographers, Max Gallo (1931–2017) and Gonzague Saint Bris (1948–2017). Although they came from radically different social backgrounds, they both stood for a certain idea of biography as a popular literary genre characterized by conservative tendencies and a kitsch style of pop history. Max Gallo was the son of working-class Italian immigrants who had found in Nice, in southeast France, a shelter against Mussolini's fascism before his father took an active part in the French resistance. Having left school at the age of eleven to earn a living as a factory worker, then as a radio technician, Max went on educating himself as an autodidact. At the time of the Algerian War, in 1956, he was already leaving the Communist Party, and the next year he passed the agrégation to become a professor of history at Lycée Masséna. Then in 1968 he defended a PhD dissertation on Italian fascist propaganda that opened for him the door to a brief academic career as assistant lecturer at the University of Nice. Dabbling in politics and journalism, he became a socialist member of Parliament in 1981, the year when the socialist Union de la Gauche won the presidential election with François Mitterrand: Gallo acquired national notoriety as an official government spokesman. In 1992, he left the Socialist Party to found a center-left divergent current with Jean-Pierre Chevènement, whom he still supported in the 2002 election that saw the defeat of the Socialist Party and the extreme-right leader of the Front National reach the second round of the presidential election, a shocking first since World War II. In 2005, Gallo campaigned for the "No" in the referendum on the European Constitution that brought the build-up of political Europe to a halt. In 2007 he had completed his ideological metamorphosis, [End Page 588] and spoke publicly in favor of the right-wing candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, adhering with naïve sincerity to the apology for the necessity of the debate on the question of identité nationale. In 2008, Gallo was elected to the Académie française. This thumbnail life sketch is helpful in understanding the ideological meaning of Gallo's literary commitment, based on the conviction Gallo captured in his La Croix article titled, "La France est dans une crise nationale de longue durée" [France is in an extended period of national crisis]. In an interview to the news magazine Le Point, which claims to be a French equivalent of Time magazine, he declared that, contrary to the US, France is a country where the people are not united by an "attachement religieux" (Gallo, "Il suffit"), going as far as to say that the French Revolution was "un antimodèle qui pèse encore aujourd'hui" [an antimodel that still weighs on us today], a bloody, unfortunate birth of the Nation that Gallo saw as forever exposing it to "l'irruption de la violence et des barbaries" [an eruption of violence and barbarism]. In a 2002 interview, given to the Catholic news magazine La Vie, which republished this text in July 2017 on the occasion of his death, Gallo declared, "La France a besoin de retrouver ses racines chrétiennes" [France needs to rediscover its Christian roots] ("Pourquoi je prie"). He went on to explain that such had been the meaning of his literary work over the years: "essayer de donner une image la plus complète possible de la diversité de notre histoire nationale" [to attempt to give the most complete image possible of the diversity of our national history]. His multivolume historical novels—Les Chrétiens following Bleu Blanc Rouge and Les patriotes, soon to be followed by Morts pour la France—read like prosopographies, or group biographies, of the most obvious great figures of French history. It is a return to a form of popular historiography, implicitly assuming, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, that "there is properly no history; only biography" (15), turning the page on a few decades...

Piping Sung: Women, Canntaireachd and the Role of the Tradition-Bearer

Canntaireachd (pronounced ‘counter-achk’), Gaelic for ‘chanting’, is a complex oral notation used by Scottish pipers for centuries to teach repertoire and performance style in the courtly, ceremonial ceòl mór idiom. Its popular historiography since the 19th century suggests it was fixed and highly formulaic in structure and therefore formal (as befitting its connection to ceòl mór), its use the preserve of the studied elite. However, field recordings of pipers and other tradition-bearers collected and archived since the 1950s in the School of Scottish Studies present a vast trove of evidence suggesting that canntaireachd as a living, vocal medium was (and remains) a dynamic and flexible tool, adapted and refined to personal tastes by each musician; and that it was (is) widely used as well in the transmission of the vernacular ceòl beag idiom - pipe music for dancing and marching. In this paper, I offer some remarks on the nature of canntaireachd, followed by a review of the role of women in the transmission and performance of Highland, and specifically Hebridean, bagpipe music, including the use of canntaireachd as a surrogate performance practice. There follows a case study of Mary Morrison, a woman of twentieth century Barra upbringing, who specialised in performing canntaireachd; concluding with a discussion on what her singing of pipe music has to say about her knowledge of piping and the nature of her role as, arguably, a piping tradition-bearer.

R. I. MOORE. The War on Heresy.

This is a landmark work of history that sets out to do three things. As R. I. Moore explains in his preface, scholarly work on many aspects of heresy, inquisition, religion, and politics in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries has ramified for the past thirty years. It is high time there was a new synthesis. But a synthesis in this field cannot merely summarize scholarly consensus, for there is none. So the book also makes a bold intervention in its field, pursuing a clear and striking argument with which subsequent historians will have to engage, whether they agree with it or not. Finally, Moore attempts to convey all this synthesis and controversy in an accessible style with the aim of reaching out to a reading public that has shown considerable appetite for heretics, especially the Cathars. The erasure of this word—“Cathar”—from the historical lexicon deserves to be one of the book's lasting achievements. In popular historiography Cathars are portrayed as members of a coherent heretical sect or alternative church, with a systematic theology and an established hierarchy of believers, perfecti, and bishops. What is more, over the past century Catharism has also been a countercultural coat in which historical projections of Marxism, feminism, environmentalism, and occultism have, from time to time, been dressed. Although serious scholars have long recognized that the term imposes more unity upon high medieval dualist heretics than is historically plausible, “Cathars” have held on tenaciously in textbooks and lectures, captivating generations of undergraduate students and symbolizing the exotic appeal of the Middle Ages. For Moore, the persistent hold of “Cathars” on historical writing and teaching is a travesty. There were no such people. But he also goes much further than this, making a very bold case indeed. Taking each piece of evidence for heresy as evidence of its own concerns and its own times, and refusing every temptation to project backward from later sources, he systematically dismantles the case for the existence of a single dualist heresy across Western Europe between the early eleventh century and the beginning of the Albigensian Crusade.

Disremembering 1798? <em>An Archaeology of Social Forgetting and Remembrance in Ulster</em>

On the face of it, the legacy of the 1798 rebellion in the northeastern Irish counties of Antrim and Down seems to be a paradigmatic case of “collective amnesia.” Over the course of the long nineteenth century, growing identification of the Protestants of the area with unionism, loyalism and Orangeism, fortified through opposition to the rise of nationalism amongst Catholics, encouraged public effacement of discomforting memories of the mass participation of Protestants, in particular Presbyterians, in republican insurrection. However, the uncovering of a “hidden” (or perhaps relatively low-profile) popular historiography grounded in oral traditions reveals continuous obsessive, though characteristically ambivalent, local preoccupation with remembrance of the rebellion. Acknowledging that forgetting is not the antithesis, but an integral component, of memory, this case study of what appears to be an Ulster lieu d’oubli conceptualizes “social forgetting” as the outcome of multi-layered relationships between oblivion and remembering.

MOTHERS, WIVES AND DAUGHTERS SPEAK: THE RECOVERY OF ANGLO-SAXON WOMEN IN ANN HAWKSHAW'S SONNETS ON ANGLO-SAXON HISTORY

In Sonnets on Anglo-Saxon History (1854), a sequence of 100 sonnets retelling the history of Britain from the advent of its earliest inhabitants through to the Norman Conquest, Ann Hawkshaw makes an assured interjection into the conventional narratives of Anglo-Saxon historiography. With each sonnet faced on the page by a short prose extract from the work of prominent contemporary historians of the Anglo-Saxon period, such as Sharon Turner and Francis Palgrave, or from early nineteenth-century translations of Anglo-Saxon texts, Hawkshaw draws attention to the practice of popular nineteenth-century historiography. Through the sonnets that follow, Hawkshaw reworks the conventional historical narrative by way of a more intimate and personalized perspective. By moving away from both the masculine historical narrative and the genre of historical biography made popular by female historians of the Anglo-Saxon period, such as Hannah Lawrance and Mrs Matthew Hall, Hawkshaw finds freedom in the imaginative space of the sonnet to give Anglo-Saxon women a voice. Through close analysis of a selection of sonnets, this article shows how Hawkshaw repositions mothers, wives and daughters in a national narrative that habitually omits or marginalizes their contribution to British history.

Getting Away with Murder: Runciman and Conrad of Montferrat’s Career in Constantinople

In the second volume of his History of the Crusades (1952), Steven Runciman claimed that Conrad of Montferrat arrived in Tyre in 1187 after involvement in ‘a murder’ in Constantinople. This alleged murder was Conrad’s defeat in battle of the rebel general Alexios Vranas, described by Niketas Choniates and other chroniclers. Runciman’s use of sources is examined, together with possible reasons for misrepresenting the incident. Questions are raised about the relationship between academic and popular historiography through the uncritical repetition of the murder accusation in later popular works, and Conrad’s stereotyping in English-language fiction.

Ur-national and secular mythologies: popular culture, nationalist historiography and strategic essentialism

This essay examines the dynamic between nationalist historiography and popular cultural forms in postcolonial and post-global India. Concerned primarily with liberal nationalist historiography, particularly the kind that has been labelled the ‘Tagore–Nehru synthesis’, this essay traces the evolution of the said historiography during the colonial-nationalist period, examines the interaction of this historiography with contesting discourses in postcolonial and post-global India and, in doing so, attempts to address the questions regarding the modes of coexistence of religion and nationalism in a secular nation-state.

From the shadow of empire: defining the Russian nation through cultural mythology, 1855-1870

As nationalism spread across nineteenth-century Europe, Russia's national identity remained murky: there was no clear distinction between the Russian nation and the expanding multiethnic empire that called itself Russian. When Tsar Alexander II's Great Reforms (1855-1870s) allowed some freedom for public debate, Russian nationalist intellectuals embarked on a major project--which they undertook in daily press, popular historiography, and works of fiction--of finding the Russian nation within the empire and rendering the empire in nationalistic terms. From the Shadow of Empire traces how these nationalist writers refashioned key historical myths--the legend of the nation's spiritual birth, the tale of the founding of Russia, stories of Cossack independence--to portray the Russian people as the ruling nationality, whose character would define the empire. In an effort to press the government to alter its traditional imperial policies, writers from across the political spectrum made the cult of military victories into the dominant form of national myth-making: in the absence of popular political participation, wars allowed for the people's involvement in public affairs and conjured an image of unity between ruler and nation. With their increasing reliance on the war metaphor, Reform-era thinkers prepared the ground for the brutal Russification policies of the late nineteenth century and contributed to the aggressive character of twentieth-century Russian nationalism.