Popular History Research Articles

Why Trust Academia? A Reflection on the Credibility of Specialists

Using examples from popular culture and history, the author speculates on the reasons and possible solutions to the crisis of trust in academia, especially along the line dividing specialists from non-specialists. The article begins with two case studies (of Yuval Noah Harari and Gustave Le Bon) that highlight the problem of conscious or otherwise data manipulation and the intention behind it. In the second part of the article, a broader approach is adopted to the matters of ethics of research and especially the crucial issue of the awareness (or lack thereof) of self-limitations and biases of which perhaps no academic is free. The article ends with the assertion that rather than individual researchers, we should trust in the academic process of the never-ending peer review.

A Testament to a Dying Vision of America

This article is a review of The League of Wives: The Untold Story of the Women Who Took on the U.S. Government to Bring Their Husbands Home (2019) by Heath Hardage Lee. The book presents a popular history of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, an organisation that advocated for the rights of American prisoners of war captured by North Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

The Myth of Skating History: Building Elitism into a Sport

Figure skating’s origin story relates the sport to Norse mythology, but this claim does not stand up to a careful analysis. Its roots can be traced to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antiquaries interested in the old north. The popularity of skating and early scholars' imperfect understanding of Old Norse led to skating appearing in translations and adaptations of medieval Scandinavian literature despite being absent from the original. The origin story's development can be traced through manuals and popular histories of figure skating from the eighteenth century to the present. This paper exposes figure skating's origin story as the invention of a privileged class to elevate a popular leisure activity and explains its enduring function in supporting the upper-class image of figure skating.

Imagining Crimean Tatar History since 2014: Indigenous Rights, Russian Recolonisation and the New Ukrainian Narrative of Cooperation

This article examines competing Crimean Tatar, Russian and Ukrainian views of Crimean Tatar history as they have developed since the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, via an examination of popular history and publistika. Crimean Tatar writing insists on the core principle of indigenous rights. In order to marginalise this discourse, Russian historiography adopts a neocolonial settler framing and a mythology of ‘ancient Russian’ Crimea, much of it derived from earlier Tsarist (late nineteenth century) and Soviet (1950s) historiography. Ukraine generally rather neglected the Crimean Tatar issue before 2014, but a new historiography of Crimean Tatar–Cossack cooperation and parallel state-building has emerged.

A alteridade no plano pedagógico a partir dos pressupostos de Enrique Dussel

O texto possui como objetivo tecer aproximações ao pensamento de Enrique Dussel por meio de um estudo descritivo crítico, fundamentado em uma pesquisa qualitativa, bibliográfica. Tem-se como intenção elencar os pressupostos que demonstrem a importância da categoria alteridade no que pese refletir sobre a construção de projetos de vida para o povo latino-americano, aproximando as ideias trabalhadas à área da educação. Reflete-se sobre a passagem da alienação à liberdade, movimento produzido pela libertação pedagógica. Problematiza-se sobre como descrever a experiência da proximidade entre os seres humanos como experiência da história popular e, por fim, reflete-se sobre a importância de destituir os obstáculos que impedem a revelação do Outro, por meio de um pensar que sabe escutar a palavra analética do Outro, comprometendo-se com a palavra reveladora e a sua justa interpretação.

How One Magazine Negotiated the Abyss Between Capitalism and Revolution

How One Magazine Negotiated the Abyss Between Capitalism and Revolution Miglena Sternadori (bio) Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America. E. James West. University of Illinois Press, 2020. 208 pp. $24.95 paperback. The role of magazines in documenting and interpreting history has been aptly explored by Carolyn Kitch, in her 2005 book, Pages from the Past, and by other scholars who have attempted to map the complex intersection between journalism and memory. But magazines’ historical texts are not just about commemoration and nostalgia, as E. James West points out. If they reveal unknown or suppressed facts and stories, they can also serve as textbooks, propel advocacy, or spawn moneymaking ideas. Ebony, the general-interest magazine for middle-class African Americans, is a prime example and the object of West’s recent book, Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr. In it West traces the contributions of Lerone Bennett Jr., a popular historian who supported the Black Power movement, to a magazine remembered for encouraging conspicuous consumption as a path to racial equality. How did such an unlikely marriage of philosophies survive? The answer lies, implicitly, in the ambivalent nature of the magazine medium, where progressive story lines often serve to ensure the advertising success of large corporations. Bennett, a Morehouse College classmate of Martin Luther King Jr., arrived at Ebony in 1954 and relentlessly published Black history articles and series until his entry into senior management in the late 1980s. Despite his lack of academic credentials, he conducted research like a professional historian, spending time in archives and finding primary documents. His efforts were rewarded. Long before universities had Black [End Page 113] studies departments and February was celebrated as Black History Month, readers wrote ecstatic letters to praise Bennett. His work—including series such as Negro History (later released as a book titled Before the Mayflower), Pioneers in Protest, The Making of Black America, and Black Power—filled some of the gaps in the whitewashed school curricula and historicized the struggle for civil rights. He depicted the richness of African heritage, the horrors of slavery, the ingenuities of Black resistance, and the achievements of Black politicians during Reconstruction. Publisher John Johnson was proud of Bennett’s contributions. Conveniently, their consciousness-raising nature was also useful in deflecting criticisms about Ebony’s apolitical and staunchly capitalist philosophy. For readers who had grown accustomed to reading Bennett’s articles in Ebony, it probably seemed natural in the 1970s to start to see advertisements from companies encouraging them to take leisure trips to Black-history monuments—or even to the South, which was presented as supposedly friendly and open to Black-heritage tourism. These ads appeared especially in the context of the celebration of the US bicentennial, in 1976. But although Bennett himself had helped usher Black history into the mainstream, he was livid about its capitalist co-optations. A number of his articles suggested that history was a tool of advocacy and even revolution, but these viewpoints, which reached wide audiences through the pages of Ebony, in no way stopped or discouraged profiteering from the cause he cared so deeply about. Despite these tensions over the uses of Black history, little changed. Johnson held steady to his capitalist course, while Bennett remained a trusted editor at the magazine—save for a brief, disappointing foray into academia to serve as the first chair of Northwestern University’s Black studies department. Over the years, many other thorny questions about the interpretation of history emerged at Ebony. For example, how was a “moderate” magazine supposed to cover radical activists such as Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael? Had Martin Luther King been an individualistic hero rallying for the cause of color blindness—as Ronald Reagan had framed him upon declaring his birthday a holiday—or a champion of racial consciousness and equality? Was MLK, in fact, a peaceful martyr or a true revolutionary? While Bennett may have had short-term wins by publishing articles containing some relatively radical viewpoints, in the long run, Johnson invariably steered the magazine’s ship toward more commemorative and middle-of-the-road perspectives. [End Page 114] The book is a useful read not only...

Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet's Terror State to Justice by Alan McPherson

Reviewed by: Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet's Terror State to Justice by Alan McPherson James Barefoot, Ph.D. Candidate Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet's Terror State to Justice. By Alan McPherson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019, p. 392, $34.95. On September 21, 1976, operatives of Augusto Pinochet's Chilean dictatorship and Cuban-exile allies murdered former Chilean Minister of Defense Orlando Letelier and his research assistant Ronni Moffit in the middle of Washington DC. The action stemmed from other international assassinations related to both Pinochet and his South American allies within Operation Condor, a transnational network and extradition treaty amongst Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay in the 1970s and early 1980s. While other operations proved successful in Argentina and Europe, Alan McPherson shows that Letelier's death permanently divided the U.S. and Chile, which ultimately put the dictatorship on the long path to collapse. Lack of secure financial and political relations with the U.S. had great relevance in a time where Chile's anti-communist stance should have served as an asset during the Ronald Reagan presidency. Thirty-nine years after John Dinges and Saul Landau published their groundbreaking work on these murders, Assassination on Embassy Row, McPherson enhances and expands the narrative and provides an approachable analysis for a broad audience. His subject matter already lends itself to a spy thriller if the antagonists were as incompetent as real political operatives. McPherson quotes U.S. diplomat Robert Steven, "The Letelier assassination in retrospect was of the more stupid things done by any government." He painstakingly captures the complexity and power relations of transnational murder, divided legal systems on two continents, the political rise of human rights, sparse evidence of covert and extrajudicial operations, and the bumbling ideologues who cost the aggressors their prized immunity in the end. Much like his historiographical counterpart Tanya Harmer, author of Allende's Chile, McPherson's bottom-up approach reads like a novel or screenplay. The text is centered around the people on the ground and sticks with them in chapters that truly read like scenes because of the level of detail associated with bibliographic backstories, setting, and allotting space to the voices of people on the ground. The narrative is linear, but it also overlaps on occasion due to groups of individuals getting their own chapters. If a chapter concerns a trial in the US, then the next chapter may retrace a few steps as the reader is now focused on simultaneous events in Chile. This is a big-picture text, but it is not a birds-eye-view analysis. The reader does not need a background in theory or Latin American history. The volume of information provided within each arm of the argument and the 'peopled' narrative makes this a hybrid between academic and popular history. This is a methodology that will draw even casual readers into a complex historical narrative. [End Page 586] The layout of the work is not simply a bonus for accessibility. McPherson's methodology drives at the age-old question of agency versus fatalism. Scholars phrase this dilemma as agency and post-structuralism vs structuralism. This competition gauges how much weight an author gives to the decisions of individuals in relation to often overwhelming 'structures,' such as culture, ideology, economics, and everyday things that are seemingly out of the control of an individual. At first, it may appear that he sides with structuralists. When he introduces the reader to historical actors, he includes their (un)happy childhoods, how they fared in school, and the ideologies of those around them. There is a notion of each person, from 1976 onward, as a product of all these shaping forces. In addition, the narrative of the separate trials and larger politics of judiciary systems in both countries can make individuals seem somewhat irrelevant as the system seems designed against the notion of justice. However, the crux of the story and a side-effect of all the included dialogue shows the overwhelming importance of individual decisions. Seemingly throwaway lines of dialogue, which sometimes seem like scenery or establishing their personalities, are clues...

Introductory Note to Bibliography of Atlantic Canadian Environmental History

Introductory Note to Bibliography of Atlantic Canadian Environmental History Teresa Devor Hall (bio) THE FIELD OF ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY is still relatively young in Canada, where scholarship explicitly focused on the mutual relations of humans and the rest of nature only became firmly established in the 21st century.1 Yet Canadian historical geographers and historians had already established traditions of inquiry into the relations between people and natural environments. For example, scholars analysed the development of modern Canada in the context of staple trades and the role of hinterland and metropolis in the distribution of resources, population, and finance.2 This bibliography recognizes a lineage of “environmental (or environmentally aware) history in Atlantic Canada” in its tracing of three generations of scholarship, starting with texts by William Francis Ganong, Harold Innis, Arthur Lower, and Andrew Hill Clark.3 Early works tended to treat nature deterministically, as a backdrop or obstacle presenting limits to human will and action, or as primarily a source of staples such as codfish and lumber, rather than as dynamic partner in the making of human communities, industries, and daily life.4 The next generation of scholarship represented in this bibliography emerged in the 1970s. Researchers sought to understand the transformation of particular spaces (geographical), places (cultural), and structures (economic and political) in Atlantic Canada while engaging earlier work and exploring the larger implications of close, bounded studies.5 Some practitioners, including historical geographer Graeme Wynn, described the transformations that humans wrought to the [End Page 163] landscapes that sustained them. But environmental history was not a significant area of exploration for historical geographers or other scholars of the region.6 This bibliography is, primarily, a testament to the f luorescence of environmental history within regional scholarship over the past two decades. Scholars continue to build on the themes and approaches in previous writings while drawing on new intellectual frameworks, and responding to contemporary ecological, scientific, cultural, social, economic, and political developments. These texts reflect theoretical work, including American historian Donald Worster’s tripartite explanation of the field as focusing on “nature, socioeconomic relations with nature, and intellectual and cultural relations with nature.”7 The latter two categories are especially well-represented in the historiography, much of which focuses on fishing, agriculture, and forestry. Most of the French-language Acadian history titles in the pages that follow centre on these three areas of study. Yet regional scholars have also made significant contributions to topics in environmental history, including national parks and heritage sites, environmental movements, natural history, the ecological knowledge of Indigenous and settler inhabitants, transportation, cultural representation, and climate history.8 This predominantly English-language bibliography represents a preliminary survey of over 100 years of inquiry into nature-society dynamics in the region’s past. The author’s choice to cast a wide net in the search for titles reflects a desire to represent the living environmental history of the region’s inhabitants, many of whom have a deep lived experience of interdependence with nature. The inclusion of titles in popular history, Indigenous history, and natural history demonstrates approaches and topics that can effectively foreground our mutual interrelatedness.9 A broad conceptualization of the field thus offers practitioners [End Page 164] innovative strategies and insights.10 Furthermore, the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission require that scholars of the regional past recognize and seek to repair the silences perpetuated within our disciplines. For those of us of settler ancestry, this includes creating opportunities for Indigenous people to speak – within and beyond the academy. The 2020s mark a social-ecological conjuncture of epic proportions. The architects of the United Nations Paris Agreement on climate change inform us that human actions in this decade will be decisive in setting a course for the future of life on Earth.11 Researchers in social and natural sciences refer to the current era as the Anthropocene to demarcate the high degree of human influence on the composition of the Earth and atmosphere.12 Students of the emerging field of planetary health argue that environmental degradation creates the context for novel pandemics such as COVID-19.13 Research into past relationships between people and the rest of nature, and the broad dissemination...

Recovery Work: Nathaniel Kahn's The Price of Everything and Mary Gabriel's Ninth Street Women

Recovery Work:Nathaniel Kahn's The Price of Everything and Mary Gabriel's Ninth Street Women John Paul Rollert Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art. Mary Gabriel. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2018. Pp. 944. $24.99 (paper); $12.99 (eBook). The Price of Everything. Directed by Nathaniel Khan. New York: Lorber Films (Kino), 2018. "The only way to make sure that cultural artifacts survive is for them to have a commercial value," Simon de Pury declares in the opening chapter of The Price of Everything, Nathaniel Kahn's cinematic meditation on the ambivalent relationship between commerce and contemporary art. The Swiss auctioneer speaks with the solemnity of an oracle, but he is hardly an objective observer of the art market, which, in 2017, reached an estimated $63.7 billion in sales. Still, in a narrow sense, he's right. The care you give your coffee mug is not that which you extend your 401(k). The one merely keeps you company; in the back of your mind, the other always accompanies you. So it is with any substantial investment. You strive to protect it, an undertaking, in the case of megadollar artworks, that is not encompassed by the mere purchase of picture wire and resilient wall hooks. At a minimum, a collector must also reckon with insurance, transportation costs, and upkeep aplenty, but in the rarified sphere that de Pury has in mind, there are sizable outlays of all sorts—museum benefactions, major exhibitions, artist's foundations, the academic enterprise of a catalogue raisonné, and endless marketing—that, stitch by stitch, embroider yet another name in the endless tapestry of art history. [End Page 377] But what about the artworks that fail to make the cut? Is the tautology de Pury assumes foolproof? Is a work of art a cultural artifact because it has commercial value, and does it have commercial value because it is a cultural artifact? Surely de Pury would never say as much, but the question (sotto voce) clearly motivates Kahn's inquiry. It also motivates Mary Gabriel, whose page-turning work of popular history, Ninth Street Women, was released not long before The Price of Everything. Insofar as it spotlights a series of art market underachievers from the abstract expressionist movement, the subtitle of the book—Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement that Changed Modern Art—makes clear that, as an exercise in art history, Gabriel's is a work of reevaluation. The moment is a long time coming, far longer, one suspects, than any of the artists surveyed could have imagined. Take the most enigmatic among them, Elaine de Kooning. She was a formidable individual, a woman no more likely to be perturbed than she was liable to be dismissed. The critic Lawrence Campbell likened her to "a figure out of Baroque history" who proceeded through life without "a sense of her own boundaries," a quality that younger artists like Grace Hartigan at once admired in de Kooning and hoped to discover in themselves (Campbell quoted in Gabriel, 62). "[F]earless and honest" was the impression she made on Hartigan in 1948 during their first meeting at her husband Willem's studio. As the younger woman later confided to her journal: "I had my model" (Hartigan quoted in Gabriel, 254). In January of 1971, however, de Kooning was perturbed precisely because she had been dismissed, in the pages of ARTnews, no less, the publication her own writing was synonymous with. She wasn't alone. The very title of Linda Nochlin's essay, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?," was nothing if not unequivocal in its judgment on the contributions of female artists, including those, like de Kooning and Hartigan, who had been part of the most important movement in the history of American art. Restlessness is an essential characteristic of contemporary art, and by the time of Nochlin's provocation, Abstract Expressionism had receded from the vanguard of American art to make way for Pop Art, Minimalism, and other movements whose answers...

Remembering Wayne Roberts, 1944–2021

Remembering Wayne Roberts, 1944–2021 David Sobel (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Wayne Roberts, aged 76, passed away on 20 January 2021 after a five-month battle with leukemia. An impressive and extensive community of family, friends, and admirers were part of a collective effort to support his treatment and care. It was a testament to the many people Roberts had touched and inspired through his activism, research, and writing on food security and urban issues. His contributions to the food, environmental, and green movements were rightly recognized in the media. [End Page 13] His work in Canadian labour history also merits remembering. He belonged to a group of Canadian labour historians, influenced by E. P. Thompson and others, who sought to expand the writing of history to include culture, social movements, and class struggle. Roberts completed a master's degree in history at the University of California at Berkeley in 1969, and he occasionally spoke of what an exciting and intellectually challenging environment that was. It was there that his interest and involvement in left-wing politics grew. He completed his PhD thesis at the University of Toronto in 1978, with Kenneth McNaught as the supervisor. Roberts' deeply researched and interpretively venturesome dissertation on Toronto's working class in the years 1896 to 1914 remains a vital reference for the labour history of the city. His historical writing and research helped develop an explicitly class-conscious Canadian labour history, informed, in part, by his participation in left-wing activism. For much of the 1970s to the mid-1980s, Roberts was a committed Trotskyist. He was part of a group aligned with Ross Dowson that parted ways with the League for Socialist Action (lsa) in 1974, forming the Socialist League, also known as the "Forward Group," after the newspaper of the same name. Roberts served as Forward's editor beginning in 1974 and continued to do so for about a decade. As his interest in more popular journalism grew in the early 1980s, Roberts, his then partner Ellie Kirzner, and his close friends Alice Klein and Michael Hollett established the alternative newspaper Now Magazine, where Roberts would become a featured columnist. Much of Roberts' early labour history scholarship detailed and interpreted the exploitation of women and men and their struggles under capitalism in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He had no illusions that these struggles had somehow come to an end. I first met Roberts while an undergraduate, in 1980 at a labour history conference at McGill University called "Class and Community: Perspectives on Canada's Labour Past," where he was speaking. The presenters were an eclectic mix of practitioners, indicative of a certain tumult that the discipline was then undergoing. Roberts' paper clearly reflected the perspective of the upstarts, and his brand of history upset the academic establishment. Though the questions I raised with him after his talk were clearly those of a novice to the discipline, he took them seriously and was generous with his response. This was typical of him, as I came to know decades later. Before completing his dissertation Roberts had already published two interesting works in women's labour history, uncommon for a male historian at the time. They first appeared in a collection of essays entitled Women at Work: Ontario, 1850–1930, published by the Women's Press in 1974. His chapter with Alice Klein explored the many challenges that confronted Toronto's women working for wages at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. The essay demonstrated a sensitivity and understanding of the material conditions in many occupations dominated by women in the period. [End Page 14] The contradictions that women encountered as union members were astutely noted, when Roberts and Klein observed that a 1905 column on women's work in a labour newspaper was reduced to recipe suggestions a few months later. The anthology, edited by Janice Acton, Penny Goldsmith, and Bonnie Shepard, provided information about how to do labour history, with suggestions for sources and methods. This aligned with Roberts' belief that writing history should not be left to academics alone. He later contributed to many popular history projects...

The First World War and the Homefront in Canada: Broadening the Analysis

The First World War and the Homefront in Canada: Broadening the Analysis Brad Shoebottom (bio) TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, WHILE I WAS A GRADUATE STUDENT of Canadian military history, a faculty member mentioned that historians faced difficulties selecting which histories to write given a vast potential list of topics and gave the example of the hypothetical local and rural “History of the Post Office in Gagetown, NB.” At the time, I could not have agreed more – being more interested in national-level questions – and I was unable to fathom that there would be enough interest in the operations of a village post office. However, after completing a thesis about a local New Brunswick entrepreneur and after the passage of 25 years, I have come to appreciate that a post office was one of the key hubs of small villages and rural Canada, lower in importance than only the church and the general store. Local community or institutional history, despite its amateur roots, was and still is incredibly popular history. And local history, in a time of war, offers a bottom-up approach to military history that offers a different home front perspective than the typical top-down national narratives about war. Local history – the study of social and cultural history in the local community – became more acceptable as an academic subject in the United Kingdom in the 1950s, when W.G. Hoskins made the case that the local perspective uncovers themes not always visible in a national narrative.1 John Beckett explained more recently that national and local history are both valid and can co-exist so long as both use rigorous analysis of sources.2 In Australia, Ian Willis argues that local history is a radical history as “local histories often look away from the histories of the elite to the experiences of the ordinary, the mundane, the intimate and the banal.”3 In the United States, Carol Kammen agreed with the broader history idea: “Local history is, despite its limited geographical focus, a broad field of inquiry: it is political, social, and economic [End Page 149] history of the community and it’s religious and intellectual history too. . . . Local history is the study of who remained in a community and who left – and why.”4 In Canada, Robert Rutherdale’s Hometown Horizon (2002) noted that the local history approach provides a first-hand experience on various Great War themes such as social conflict about enemy aliens, volunteering, the role of women, conscription, and returning soldiers based on analysis of gender, ethnicity, class, and age.5 Local history therefore offers an alternative approach to the study of history and, in this case, the impact of the First World War on Canada. Canadian military historians writing about the First World War spent much of the first 75 postwar years in a top-down, metanarrative approach debating three major questions: national unity, especially the impact of conscription on English and French relations and on urban and rural areas; the impact on national identity of the battlefield achievements of the Canadian Corps in France, especially the symbolism of the battle for Vimy Ridge in 1917 on the road to Canada’s nationhood; and the impact of the war on the industrialization of Canada.6 These themes help to explore why the war was necessary or to bring more meaning to the war. A more recent trend places less emphasis on overseas events and a military history methodology and more emphasis on a social history methodology to discuss the home front, historical memory, and gender and race issues.7 This is a new military history or, as some call it “war and society” history as pioneered by John Herd Thompson’s [End Page 150] The Harvests of War.8 As such, previously unheard voices have come to light. Typically, most locality-focused articles and books cover only a single subject like recruiting, conscription, women’s war work, race, industrialization, labour relations, or a disaster like the influenza in Winnipeg or the Halifax Explosion. Most of these local studies almost exclusively focus on a large urban centre (as in Montreal, Toronto, or Regina), or provinces (such as Quebec, Nova Scotia, or Ontario), or a...

České kramářské tisky – pokus o definici a typologii

The paper focuses on the issue of a relatively wide range of kramářské tisky – the medium of Czech popular literature of the Early Modern period and the 19th century. They mostly contained kramářské písně (Czech equivalent for broadside ballads), which are currently in the spotlight of Czech research interest. Kramářský tisk can also be defined by means of equivalents in other languages. The English term chapbooks, for example, may be helpful in emphasising the commercial focus of this literature (kramářské tisky could be literally translated as ‘chapman prints’). Although the English term cannot be clearly defined either, researchers generally come to an agreement that it is a publication of booklet character, of smaller extent as well as format (usually octavo or smaller, made of no more than three sheets of paper or having up to 99 pages). It was distributed by tradesmen at fairs, by colportage or soliciting. It was cheap (both in terms of production and price) and it brought what the broad spectrum of readers in towns and later in the countryside demanded – popular reading in the true sense of the word. It is complicated to include popular histories (knížky lidového čtení) in the comparison – they fit most of the features above, but they were made by folding and joining more sheets of paper and greatly exceed the imaginary limit of 99 pages. Therefore, this paper also deals with boundary media, which surpass the defined extent but principally are still chapman goods (i.e. small-format books of various lengths distributed at fairs and by soliciting). The text of the study draws attention to the appearance and development of certain types of kramářské tisky of both religious and secular content. For a better illustration, many of these types are mediated by an image.

The Hollywood Renaissance: Revisiting American Cinema's Most Celebrated Era ed. by Peter Krämer and Yannis Tzioumakis

Reviewed by: The Hollywood Renaissance: Revisiting American Cinema's Most Celebrated Era ed. by Peter Krämer and Yannis Tzioumakis Jonathan Hayes The Hollywood Renaissance: Revisiting American Cinema's Most Celebrated Era Peter Krämer and Yannis Tzioumakis, eds. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 255 pp. A critical consensus defines the era of Hollywood filmmaking between 1967 and 1974 as the Hollywood Renaissance, a brief period of relatively unmatched creative cinematic output made possible by the end of both the classical studio system of filmmaking and the restrictive censorship of the decades-old Production Code. That consensus is as follow: Led by a younger generation of directors inspired by the auteurs of European art cinema, the films made during this era were groundbreaking for the American film industry due to the creative freedom filmmakers had to portray sex and violence on screen and to tell stories that would be more appealing to a new generation of filmgoers. Peter Krämer and Yannis Tzioumakis, editors of The Hollywood Renaissance: Revisiting American Cinema's Most Celebrated Era, observe that the films of this period have "been the subject of an enormous amount of scholarly (and also of popular) writing" (xiv), and it is against this scholarship and journalism concerning such films as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Graduate (1967), and Easy Rider (1969) that the collection's editors and contributors provide revisionist accounts. The volume opposes the grand narrative that characterizes the Hollywood Renaissance as led by American auteurs who were uniquely disruptive cinematic revolutionaries, a framework established by scholarly and popular histories including Robert Kolker's A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Altman and Peter Biskind's Easy Riders and Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs, and Rock-n-Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. The revisionism of Krämer's and Tzioumakis's volume centers on industrial and commercial practices, creative participants other than directors such as film editors, actors, sound designers, and producers, and the science fiction photorealism created by the team of visual effects artists on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). It also shifts attention away from traditional accounts of the Hollywood Renaissance that focus on white male directors and protagonists, and instead examines dimensions of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and intersectional politics that have been largely ignored in existing scholarly and popular studies. Each of the volume's thirteen chapters focuses on a film taken as a case study. Justin Wyatt in his essay on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? notes that the 1966 film is not usually considered in discussions of the Hollywood Renaissance, yet it "truly paved the way for the Hollywood Renaissance" (13). Wyatt examines how the private relationship and public personas of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton fueled audience interest in the film, which launched a new mode of American filmmaking–"the American art film"–with its psychological realism advanced by Haskell Wexler's intimate cinematography and the screenplay's frank language adapted from Edward Albee's successful play, which directly resulted in new MPAA President Jack Valenti's decision to review and eventually abandon the Production Code. Melis Behlil examines the reciprocal influences of European cinema and American cinema on the 1970 film Zabriskie Point, focusing on MGM's distribution deal for the Michelangelo Antonioni-directed Blow-Up (1967) as setting the stage for the Italian director's work on Zabriskie Point, which the financially struggling studio financed: "By giving complete freedom to Antonioni, the studio was hoping to gain credibility with the coveted youth segment" (155). Behlil describes several waves of European influence on American studio cinema from the 1920s and 1930s onward in order to show that studios had always employed European creative talent in order to "garner prestige" (150) and that the European-influenced stylistic innovations of Hollywood Renaissance films followed this longstanding commercially driven pattern. Other contributors re-evaluate the contributions of creative artists other than directors. Editors, visual effects teams, sound [End Page 52] designers, and actors take center stage in many of the volume's essays, including Warren Buckland's piece drawing on the memoirs and interviews of film editors to examine their contributions to American cinema's new look. Buckland analyzes the work of Ralph Rosenblum on...

Age and Aesthetics in James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black

When one begins looking for them in the visual culture of the nineteenth century, aging and aged bodies crop up in a variety of media, styles, and contexts: in drawings, paintings, and sculptures; in popular history paintings and more obscure aesthetic experiments; in artists’ biographies and critics’ writings. However, the discipline of art history has yet to engage with the master identity that is old age, and practitioners of age studies have yet to truly utilize visual primary sources. This article breaks new scholarly ground by interrogating the relationship between old age and the visual in one of the most famous and best-loved representations of an elderly person in nineteenth-century painting: James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother (1871). The sitter for Whistler’s painting was his then sixty-seven-year-old mother, Anna McNeill Whistler. In this article, I propose that it was Anna’s aged body that caused or, rather, enabled Whistler to have an artistic revelation that was to define his approach to the visual and aesthetics, and propel him to notorious fame.

Introduction: What Does David McCullough Have That We Don't?

Why do books like David McCullough's The Pioneers sell so much better than academic monographs? This question is more complicated than it may appear, given that academic historians strive for many of the qualities for which McCullough is rightly known. The difference between this work of popular history and most academic histories centers on the moral coherence of McCullough's story, which makes it easier to read and digest. This coherence derives from key authorial decisions about characters and outcomes. Yet academic historians should not fear or envy these kinds of histories, for there is a great and growing demand for the kinds of contextual knowledge and precision that they can provide.

The Second Battle of the Alamo: How Two Women Saved Texas’s Most Famous Landmark by Judy Alter

Reviewed by: The Second Battle of the Alamo: How Two Women Saved Texas’s Most Famous Landmark by Judy Alter Allen W. ElliS The Second Battle of the Alamo: How Two Women Saved Texas’s Most Famous Landmark. By Judy Alter. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020. Pp. xxvi, 156. $22.95, ISBN 978-1-4930-3131-3.) After the famous 1836 siege and massacre at the San Antonio mission during the Texas struggle for independence from Mexico, the Alamo’s fate was not a pretty one. Today, the pride many Texans hold for the Alamo is incalculable, and it is astonishing that there was a time when the remains of the old mission were left to crumble in ruins, only co-opted for military or crass commercial concerns. What little of the physical Alamo that exists in the twenty-first century may well have not existed at all if not for the efforts of two women, Adina De Zavala (1861–1955) and Clara Driscoll (1881–1945). De Zavala and Driscoll were two vastly different women with family roots dating to the Texas Revolution and a common interest in preserving the Alamo and its story. To complicate matters, they had vastly different priorities in how the preservation should proceed. For De Zavala, the focus should be on the “long barracks,” the former mission’s convento that stood to the left of the famous Alamo church and where the most savage final fighting of the battle took place. For that reason, she believed, the barracks must be preserved and memorialized. Driscoll sought to demolish the unsightly long barracks. Her focus was on the Alamo church, which most people recognize as the true Alamo. She aimed to make the church the centerpiece of a memorial garden. Despite their differences, the fierce doggedness of the preservationist pioneer De Zavala and the sophistication and financial support of the well-to-do Driscoll prompted preservation of both the chapel and the barracks with “the plaza stand[ing] almost as the compromise the two women never reached in life, fulfilling parts of each of their visions” (p. 127). July Alter completed this book as a promise to Texas author Debra L. Winegarten, whose goals were cut short by cancer. It is a rather lightweight popular history, sparsely referenced (a scant eighteen endnotes) and containing an equally sparse “Bibliographic Essay.” Some parts are of questionable relevance, such as a chapter on the Alamo in movies, toys, and other popular culture. Numerous errors appear, such as referring to Colonel James W. Fannin Jr. and Captain Juan Seguín as general and colonel, respectively. Though mentioned twice, Seguín is missing from the index. Curiously, she has the hero of the movie The Man from the Alamo (1953) warning the townfolk of “Ox Bow, North Dakota,” rather than Oxbow, Texas (p. 121). The battle for the Alamo’s place in public history continues to this day, as addressed by chapter 10, “The Twenty-First Century and a Third Battle of the Alamo.” Besides representing current arguments about the Alamo’s physical presence in modern downtown San Antonio, Alter makes some cogent observations regarding the Alamo in light of twenty-first-century presentism and [End Page 754] so-called wokeness. Whatever the shortcomings of this book, it highlights the truth of the Alamo as an icon of multiculturalism. The truth is much more complex than modern critics allow. The first battle of the Alamo was a result of efforts to separate Texas from Mexico that were in place well before the great influx of immigrants who left the United States and Europe to start life anew in Texas. These “Texians” joined their native Tejano allies in revolt against a dictatorship. Years later, it was strong, independent women who faced down businessmen and politicians to preserve the legacy of what the Alamo truly stood for. Though De Zavala and Driscoll are long gone, their fight continues. Anyone interested in a more scholarly, albeit more succinct, treatment of this second battle of the Alamo might consult “Retrieving the Bones of History,” chapter 7 of A Line in the Sand: The Alamo in Blood and Memory (New York, 2001) by Randy Roberts and...

ROMANTIC HUMAN STUDY: PECULIARITIES OF PERSONALITY PHILOSOPHY IN THE LITERATURE OF THE 1820-1830-IES.

Purpose. The purpose of the study is to show the connection of romanticism with the anthropological doctrine that goes back to Hegelianism and Kantianism, and at the same time – with the concepts of the future, structuralism and postmodernism. Theoretical basis. The man is a central figure of the Romantic literary, therefore it makes sense to single out romantic human anthropological doctrine and the image of man associated with a specific historical and cultural era called the "epoch of romanticism"; to show that many romantic philosophical positions remained relevant to the basic foundations of contemporary anthropological research and coincide with it in analytical and critical thinking about a man, a person, his historical and evolutionary fate. Originality. The romantic worldview determined the specifics of anthropological discourse, both logical and illogical, remaining symbols and attaching, as for example, a real historical anecdote, a popular history, a philosophical thought, a myth, a famous literary episode and the arts multiplied by creative inspiration and imagination. This tendency determined the fragmentation of thinking and the scientific image of man as a dual being, nevertheless, presented and described in all the variety of relations with the world and with himself, that allows us to call this area of thought "the romantic human science". Conclusions. Structural analysis of numerous romantic texts allows us to draw the following conclusion: with mythopoetic imagery and anthropological thought about a man, romantic writers introduced the reader to any wisdom, to philosophical understanding of their human essence, to past and modern teachings, in a way processed antique, medieval and enlightening views, in which an important place was given to reflections on the place of man in nature, society, and history. Correlating the well-known statements about a person as a descendant of the "old Adam", "person", "personality", "soul", with the modern idea of historical and social development, about the evolution of the consciousness of a person who revealed himself as an individual in modern times, with scientific and aesthetic views, the writers of the first half of the XIX century gave romantic thought anthropological meaning and, in fact, laid the foundations of historical, social, psychological, cultural and psychoanalytic anthropology.

La musica di Stephen Collins Foster dall’Ottocento ai giorni nostri fra storia, cultura e società

Stephen Collins Foster (1826-1864) is a crucial figure in the history of popular music, and in American history at large: the author of globally known songs such as, among many others, Susanna or Old Folks at Home, in 1951 a Congress resolution described him as «the father of American popular music». Despite this, for several decades his work and his own figure have been at the center of a heated debate that is leading to removal from both the musical and civil world. This contribution proposes a didactic unit aimed at providing knowledge about what is ultimately a fundamental author, filling, among other things, a substantial gap in Italian musicological literature. It is addressed primarily to Secondary Schools. However, its basic concepts can also be useful for Upper Secondary Schools and for Italian Popular music history courses at university or conservatory level.

Reappraising The History of Arabic Culture in the Sudan by the Egyptian Scholar ‘Abd al-Majid ‘Abidin

In the aftermath of the fall of the Omar Al-Bechir regime in 2019, the time has come to reappraise the history of Arabic culture in Sudan, and its connection to Sudanese identity and Arab nationalism. To this end, this article considers a brilliant Arabic book that was first published in 1953, three years before Sudanese independence, by ‘Abd al-Majid ‘Abidin, an Egyptian professor in Khartoum. Called Tarikh al-thaqafa al-'arabiyya fi al-Sudan (“The History of Arabic Culture in Sudan”), ‘Abidin’s book presented Arabic culture in Sudan as robust, diverse, inclusive of women and men, and expressed in both high literary forms and popular oral media. A retrospective analysis of ‘Abidin’s book reminds us that while postcolonial Arabization policies may have failed and even backfired, Sudanese Arabic culture has had a genuinely popular history at the grass-roots. ‘Abidin’s book also serves as a historical document of the decolonization era, reflecting debates about Arab identity and Arabic culture that animated nationalists and shaped postcolonial policies.

The Fight for Scottish Democracy: Rebellion and Reform in 1820. By Murray Armstrong (London, Pluto Press, 2020) 296 pp. $99.00 cloth $19.95 paper

On April 1, 1820, a self-styled “provisional government” issued a proclamation from Glasgow, imploring the “inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland” to take up arms. This was no April Fools’ day joke. Striking weavers in the city and surrounding industrial towns, numbering 60,000, provided the insurgents with hope, but the rebellion soon petered out following a botched armed rising. Its leaders were arrested, and at summer’s end, three met their ends in public execution. Armstrong’s engaging account of 1820 begins where his last work on late eighteenth-century radicalism—The Liberty Tree: The Stirring Story of Thomas Muir And Scotland’s Fight for Democracy (Edinburgh, 2014)—ended. It centers on the experience of Scottish weavers, the skilled craftsmen who provided both the industrial strength and dense political organization that made the 1820 rising possible. Their secret societies and oath taking spooked the British state as it recovered from the Napoleonic wars and faced intermittent famines and the crushing effects of industrial business cycles.Armstrong is tactful in his discussion of the complexities that shaped reforming politics, effectively developing biographies to tell the story from the point of view of radicals and bourgeois “volunteer” soldiers alike. Less expectedly, he details weavers’ relationship with the Whig lawyers who repeatedly defended them in the courts. This cross-class alliance harked back to the 1790s but was visible again in 1812 when Francis Jeffrey implored courts to impose wage rates on employers attempting to use slack labor-market conditions to their advantage. These relationships challenge conventional models of the moral economy inspired by Thompson, which assume that liberals were the arch opponents of paternalism. However, political distinctions ultimately crystallized along class lines.1 Jeffrey represented the men who took part in the rising, but he viewed their actions as immature. The radical cause was separated from the liberal one after 1820, becoming more clearly imbued with confrontational class politics. Liberalism, however, became associated with the compromises that led to the limited suffrage extension of 1832.The Fight for Scottish Democracy begins with John Wilson’s family digging up the veteran revolutionary’s body after his execution. In fourteen short chapters, Armstrong runs through the 1812 weavers’ strike, another dispute in 1817, the outbreak of typhus fever in 1819, and the rising. The analysis draws from the radical press, court records, and government archives; together they detail paranoia among government ministers and the turning of Alexander Richmond, the fugitive weavers’ leader who became an informant. Armstrong’s eye for detail is one of the book’s key strengths. He authoritatively concludes that the widespread view of the rising as the work of spies is misplaced. The rising failed because Britain’s “manufacturing districts” were isolated from one another, despite attempts to maintain contact between London, the Midlands, Northern England, and West-Central Scotland. Armstrong’s caution regarding Scottish nationalist assessments of the rising are bolstered when he notes that bands at radical demonstrations played “Rule Britannia” alongside “Scots Wha Hae.” The investigation of songs and poetry written by the uprising’s supporters also reveals their international inspiration and sympathies for abolitionism.The book, however, betrays a lack of analytical depth. Despite its title, it pays insufficient attention to the role that Scottish national consciousness played in the rising and in shaping its memory. The blurb claims that the rebellion is a “little-known chapter of Scottish history.” In 2020 alone, however, Craig and MacAskill have released popular histories of 1820, and a landmark conference on the subject at the University of Glasgow was canceled only because of the coronavirus lockdown.2 Armstrong briefly recognizes the influence of the rising on both the labor movement and Scottish nationalist politics toward the end of the book, detailing that the rising was commemorated as early as the 1840s, but Pentland’s monograph presents a more thorough assessment of the rising’s longer-term impact.3 Nevertheless, Armstrong’s book is a significant contribution to our understanding of 1820. It demonstrates the value of micro-histories constructed through biography and the utility of combining the press and state archives with memoirs, songs, and poetry.