Unified History Research Articles

Unified History Textbook: Preservation of Historical Memory in the Context of a National Strategic Priority

Unified History Textbook: Preservation of Historical Memory in the Context of a National Strategic Priority

About the Unified History Textbook. Conceptual Approaches

About the Unified History Textbook. Conceptual Approaches

Merchant Kings. Corporate Governmentality in the Dutch Colonial Empire, 1815–1870 by Albert Schrauwers

Reviewed by: Merchant Kings. Corporate Governmentality in the Dutch Colonial Empire, 1815–1870 by Albert Schrauwers G. Roger Knight Albert Schrauwers. Merchant Kings. Corporate Governmentality in the Dutch Colonial Empire, 1815–1870. New York: Berghahn, 2021. Merchant Kings is focused on an elite cadre of technocrats and their associates in government and business, something that Albert Schrauwers envisages as fusing colony and metropole into a single—in this instance Dutch—"corporate governmentality." It's an impressive and intriguing hypothesis, valuable not least for the way in which it draws attention, if not to the singularities of the Dutch empire, then at least to the dangers of conflating "empires" into an homogenous whole: clearly, the Heeren in Amsterdam, The Hague, and Rotterdam set out to run their vast Asian empire on lines considerably at variance from that of the Gentleman of London, Manchester, and Glasgow. The spotlight it plays on its subject in this respect illuminates what are arguably some substantial contrasts—as well as comparable features. All in all, it is a thought-provoking essay in trying to make sense of the interwoven history—a single, unified history—of what it has become increasingly threadbare to term merely as "core" and "periphery." The Dutch empire in Asia, transformed in the middle of the last century into the Republic of Indonesia, has long attracted the attention of historians and others, above all on account of developments there during the middle decades of the nineteenth century on its centerpiece island of Java, far the most populous of the sprawling archipelagic territories that came to constitute what their colonial hegemon invariably referred to as "the Indies." It was there, in the shape of the Cultivation System (Dutch: Cultuurstelsel), that the colonial regime set about commandeering the land and labor of the island's peasantry for what became the highly profitable production of a "tropical" commodities for the world market, notably coffee, sugar, the dye-stuff indigo, and tobacco. In respect to the forging and intermeshing of commodity chains linking metropole and colony, however, a crucial development was the fact that Java's extensive population (there were already perhaps as many as nine million Indonesians living on the island c. 1850) provided a potentially lucrative market for the manufactures of the metropolitan country. It was here that—as Schrauwers's account emphasizes—the heavily state-backed Netherlands Trading Society or NHM, one of the key entities in the evolution of the corporate regime that he identifies as coming into existence c. 1830 onward, played a key role. For not only did it transport and sell in Amsterdam the agricultural staples produced under the aegis of the system and act as banker to the colonial government, while subsequently playing a role (somewhat exaggerated in this account) in the industrialization of Java's sugar manufacture: the NHM also acted to bring into existence a "complimentary" cotton goods manufacturing industry in the Netherlands itself, especially in the "cheap labor" northeastern parts of the country. The potential for an integrative analysis of the Dutch empire overseas with that of the empire at home, of course, was not lost on an earlier generation of scholars: Leiden professor Cees Fasseur, albeit from a potentially very different historical perspective from that of the book currently under review, might well have done so—building on series of publications beginning in the mid-1970s—had he not been deflected into the writing [End Page 233] of a warmly received two-volume biography of the twentieth century Dutch Queen Wilhelmina. More recently, Exploring the Dutch Empire (ed. Antunes and Gommans, 2015) held out further early promise in that direction, but important work by historians writing in Dutch (as largely dictated by their funding bodies) on the imperial agents central to the Cultivation System, Governor-General Johannes van den Bosch (Sens 2019) and the state-backed Netherlands Trading Society of NHM (De Graaf 2012), has remained untranslated and hence unavailable to the academic community in general. In short, Schrauwers is filling an important gap for Anglophone readers, but he is doing much more than that. The organic connection that he sets out to demonstrate—one between metropole and colony—begins with Van den Bosch...

The unified history of the viscous accelerating universe and phase transitions

We propose the unified description of the early acceleration (cosmological inflation) and the present epoch of so called “dark energy”. The inflation can be described by cosmic fluid with van der Waals equation of state and with viscosity term. Viscosity leads to slow-roll inflation with the parameters such as the spectral index, and the tensor-to-scalar ratio in concordance with observational data. Our next step is to modify this equation of state (EoS) to describe the present accelerated expansion. One can add the term into EoS so that the contribution of which is small for inflation but crucial for late-time acceleration. The key point of the model is possible phase transition which leads to decrease of the viscosity. We show that proposed model describes observational data about standard “candles” and correct dependence of Hubble parameter from redshift. Moreover, we propose the possible scenario to resolve dark matter problem.

History Textbooks as Social Contract: Educational Reform, the Unified History Textbooks and Patriotism in Contemporary Russia

This article examines uniform standardized history education in Russia. It focuses primarily on the process of designing unified national history textbooks in 2013-2017, and also examines the educational reform that followed this process, along with the role of Russian society in the formulation of the textbook’s content. The new historical-cultural criteria—and the Unified textbooks based on them—are considered as a product of social contract as it was revised and approved by the different levels of Russian society: academics, parents, teachers, and government. In essence, the new textbooks are the first joint project made by the government, academics and society in the history of the Russian state. The new history textbooks are regarded as an attempt by the state and society to link Russian history with world history; previously, each discipline was studied separately. It is also an attempt to acknowledge and accept all of Russian history as one historical process of the evolution of Russian statehood, including all successes and achievements as well as black spots and wrongdoings. Although the unified textbooks are the most prudent revision of history in contemporary Russia, however there are several improvements required to redirect textbooks from being simply a tool for the construction of patriotism in schools to also being a mechanism of development of the younger generation’s critical thinking.

Design of an Architecture Contributing to the Protection and Privacy of the Data Associated with the Electronic Health Record

The Electronic Health Record (EHR) has brought numerous challenges since its inception that have prevented a unified implementation from being carried out in Colombia. Within these challenges, we find a lack of security, auditability, and interoperability. Moreover, there is no general vision of the patient’s history throughout its life since different systems store the information separately. This lack of unified history leads to multiple risks for patients’ lives and the leakage of private data because each system has different mechanisms to safeguard and protect the information, and in several cases, these mechanisms do not exist. Many researchers tried to build multiple information systems attempting to solve this problem. However, these systems do not have a formal and rigorous architectural design to analyze and obtain health needs through architectural drivers to construct robust systems to solve these problems. This article describes the process of designing a software architecture that provides security to the information that makes up the Electronic Health Record in Colombia (EHR). Once we obtained the architectural drivers, we proposed Blockchain mainly due to its immutable distributed ledger, consensus algorithms, and smart contracts that securely transport this sensitive information. With this design decision, we carried out the construction of structures and necessary architectural documentation. We also develop a Proof of Concept (POC) using Hyperledger Fabric according to the literature analysis review in order to build a primary health network, in addition to a Smart Contract (Chaincode) using the Go programming language to perform a performance evaluation and do a safety analysis that demonstrates that the proposed design is reliable. The proposed design allows us to conclude that it is possible to build a secure architecture that protects patient health data privacy, facilitating the EHR’s construction in Colombia.

Locating St Cuthbert in Post-Conquest Northumbria: Symeon, Durham Cathedral Priory, and the Sacred Topography of an Anglo-Norman Cult

In 1083, a priory of Benedictine monks was founded at Durham Cathedral, in the process displacing a college of secular canons that originated with the cathedral’s foundation in 995. In the process, the new priory took possession of the body and cult of St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne. In the early 12th century, an ambitious ideological project to legitimise the new priory and their claims to both Cuthbert’s power and his historical legacy were underway, foregrounded by Symeon of Durham, blending and reinterpreting the ancient past and the near present to present a unified history that was realised in the landscape of Northern England, including Cuthbert’s own Lindisfarne. This paper will examine the historical and archaeological evidence for the priory’s activities in the late 11th to early 12th century, and how they represent an alternative model for cult promotion and institutional legitimisation to the shrine and its corporeal remains.

История Осетии — взгляд юриста

The article analyzes the monograph of Professor A.M. Tsaliyev “State and Law of Ossetia: A Comparative-Historical Study” published as part of the project of Professor D. J. Shhapsugov on the creation of historical essays on the development of the institutions of the state and rights of the peoples of the North Caucasus who joined Russia in the 13th century. The authors note that the study is based on the relevance and importance of regional components of the unified history of the state and the law of a multi-ethnic Russian state, which throughout its existence was not a “prison of peoples” as it is it has been considered in the recent past, I have shown the world a model of the peaceful existence of many peoples who have practiced various religious teachings. The Russian administration acted as a guarantor of peace and carried out a great creative work to raise the level of the legal culture of the country’s population.

Formation of the concept of history of Belarus in the second half of the 1930s

The article is devoted to the actual problem of formation of Belarus history concept in the second half of the 1930s in the Belarusian SSR. The article highlights the methodological turn in historical knowledge observed in the first half of the 1930s, focuses on the processes of creating a textbook on the history of Belarus for students of secondary schools and development of a textbook for students of higher educational institutions of the Republic. The place of the history of Belarus in the unified history concept of the USSR, the contribution of individual researchers in the development of historiography of national history is determined. By the end of the 1930s, draft sketches of a new concept of the history of Belarus based on the Marxist-Leninist methodology and organically inscribed in the General course of the history of the Soviet Union were prepared.

Moving Towards a Blockchain-Based Healthcare Information System.

One of the major problems that a national health system face is the lack of a unified clinical data management. In Greece, the critical and sensitive medical data generated during a patient lifetime are fragmented in one or more hospitals and healthcare services are not characterized by a 'continuity' factor. There is not the appropriate technological and administrative infrastructure for a unified patient medical history, prescriptions, laboratory tests or therapeutic plan. Technological, administrative and economic factors have led to this situation. We propose the integration and implementation of a blockchain network as a complementary technology to the existing information systems, so reliable and effective information management could be provided by a healthcare organization or the national healthcare system. Blockchain technology could be implemented as a bridge that can provide information systems interoperability within a hospital or between different hospitals.

Robert Bothwell, Your Country, My Country: A Unified History of the United States and Canada

Robert Bothwell, Your Country, My Country: A Unified History of the United States and Canada Oxford University Press, 2015. 420 pp. Art Redding, York University We Canadians might have cause to feel slighted by the current President of the United States. Why don’t we merit a wall? Our border is undoubtedly as “insecure” as that with Mexico. After all, as Robert Bothwell reminds us, Canada, like Mexico, has “since 1999 . . . been regarded as a potential source of terrorists slipping into the ...

A Pakistani Homeland for Buddhism: Displaying a National History for Pakistan beyond Islam, 1950–1969

This article explores the surprising role of the ancient Buddhist past in the construction of Pakistani national histories in museum exhibits and archaeological guides from 1950 to 1969. Although Pakistan was created as a homeland for Indian Muslims during the 1947 Partition of British India, Pakistani historians struggled to forge a unifying history for the new Muslim nation-state through Islam. In response, Pakistani museum curators co-opted and reframed Buddhist sculptures from before the arrival of Islam to differentiate Pakistan from India and to make sense of Pakistan’s recently drawn borders. They creatively retold the history of ancient Gandhara (first century BCE to fifth century CE), a Buddhist kingdom in northwest Pakistan and Afghanistan, to provide deep historical logic for Pakistan’s existence as a religious homeland in the mid twentieth century and to build global cultural connections to Southeast Asia and to Europe.

Heidegger’s History of Being and the Phenomenology of ‘Other’ Cultural Traditions

Heidegger’s movement away from his project of Dasein analytic of Being and Timeto Being-centeredness in the middle period of his writings allows Being to give itself in appearing or clearing in its manifoldness. In the later years, Heidegger goes on to say that Being lies in the openness, luminosity or clearing (Lichtung) and determines the truth of beings. For Heidegger, it is in Being’s revealing-withdrawing inter-play that historical people come and ground their own cultural history. In this paper, I shall argue that Heidegger’s thinking of the history of Being is useful for establishing the phenomenological ground for a philosophical defense of ‘other’ cultural traditions in the background of their increasing questionableness in the planetary phase of the western understanding of Being. I show Heidegger’s attempt to overcome ontotheology and what according to Heidegger happens to the history of ontology in western metaphysics with the specific meaning of Being it has inherited since Plato. Destruktion of the history of Being is an unrelenting, ever-ongoing process in Heidegger’s writings. It has developed much earlier than Being and Time in the 1920s as a fiercely critical approach to the western philosophical tradition. The second section discusses Heidegger’s turn (die Kehre) towards the history of Being. It is through the history of Being, Heidegger attempts to overcome the history of western ontology. Heidegger contends that the history of Being unveils the truth of Being in a particular manner to the historical people in each metaphysical epoch. Hence, there is no single revelation of Being once and for all. This is an important notion that I shall emphasize in support of my conception of ‘other’ cultural traditions. The third section is on the history of Being of the Greeks and the late moderns. While Heidegger emphasizes six such metaphysical epochs, I have chosen two important ones for our analysis; the original Greek understanding of Being or Phusis and the late modern technological understanding of Being or Gestell (enframing) as Heidegger sees it from the point of view of the history of Being. In the concluding section, I argue that Heidegger’s attack on a reified and unified history of philosophy and his emphasis on a divergent history of Being clear the way for my attempt to draw up a phenomenology of other cultural traditions.

Counterfactuality as a Polyphonic Assemblage. Entangled Human and Nonhuman Stories of Early Modern Sciences in Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle

Summary In recent science-fiction literature, we can witness a proliferation of new counterfactual narratives which take the 17th century as their point of departure. Unlike steampunk narratives, however, their aim is not to criticise the socio-political effects caused by contemporary technological development. Such authors as Neal Stephenson or Ian Tregillis, among others, are interested in revisiting the model of development in Western societies, routing around the logic of progress. Moreover, they demonstrate that modernity is but an effect of manifold contingent and indeterminate encounters of humans and nonhumans and their distinct temporalities. Even the slightest modification of their ways of being could have changed Western societies and cultures. Thus, they necessitate a rather non-anthropocentric model of counterfactuality which is not tantamount to the traditional alternative histories which depart from official narratives of the past. By drawing on contemporary multispecies ethnography, I put forward a new understanding of counter-factuality which aims to reveal multiple entangled human and nonhuman stories already embedded in the seemingly unified history of the West. In this context, the concept of “polyphonic assemblage” (Lowenhaupt-Tsing) is employed to conceptualize the contingent and open-ended encounters of human and nonhuman historical actors which cut across different discourses and practices. I analyse Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle to show the entangled stories of humans and nonhumans in 17th century sciences, hardly present in traditional historiographies. In particular, Stephenson’s depiction of quicksilver and coffeehouse as nonhuman historical actors is scrutinized to show their vital role in the production of knowledge at the dawn of modernity.

Discovery of India(s): Resisting the National Biography

ABSTRACTThe four essays in this special issue focus their attention on excavating particular strands within Indian historiography that look askance at the existing schools of thought be they nationalist, Marxist, or subaltern. However, this is not a project of recovering the forgotten or arranging these events into a long shelf of fragments that disrupt the unified history of the nation-state; rather it is a project of discovering various moments that went into the making of India-projects that were elite but forgotten; projects that were for the forgotten peoples of India, but ironically remembered only by a handful elites, projects that speak of the European, but not the colonial, entanglements in the making of the thirties and forties and, finally, these projects unearth some of the conservative energies and impetus locked within our master- and counter-narratives of state-formation, liberalism, nationalism and democratic republic. The essays return to the biography of the nation, to resist not simply its homogenising impulses, but to ask critical questions about acts of remembering, commemorating and excising that go into the narration of the nation's biography.

斉木美知世・鷲尾龍一著, 『日本文法の系譜学-国語学史と言語学史の接点-』, 2012年6月26日発行, 開拓社刊, 四六判, 272ページ, 2,000円+税

斉木美知世・鷲尾龍一著, 『日本文法の系譜学-国語学史と言語学史の接点-』, 2012年6月26日発行, 開拓社刊, 四六判, 272ページ, 2,000円+税

Your Country, My Country A: Unified History of the United States and Canada

In January 1942 Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King issued orders for the removal of all persons of Japanese origin from a designated protected area one hundred miles inland from the British Columbia coast. Those removed were sent to internment camps in Alberta. Significantly, U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt issued his infamous Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942—after the Canadian orders. This was a moment that reflects the promise of Robert Bothwell's Your Country, My Country. Unfortunately, Japanese internment is not mentioned in the book. Rather than a true “unified history of the United States and Canada,” Bothwell has produced a straightforward, well-written survey of Canadian-American relations since the eighteenth century. From the first sentence Bothwell makes clear that the volume will address relations between Canada and the United States; indeed, the phrase “Canadian-American relations” appears three times on the first page. Along the way, however, are also promises to address “comparisons of Canadian-American values, and discussions of Canadian-American differences,” but such references are spotty (p. 3). In the last chapter, “Back to the Future?,” Bothwell attempts to assess Canadian and American similarities and differences in the twenty-first century, but inevitably he comes back to Canadian-American relations. In the free-flowing conclusion to the book Bothwell contemplates points of convergence and divergence between the two countries, coming to the predictable conclusion that both countries have some transnational characteristics yet remain unique sovereign entities.

Your Country, My Country: A Unified History of the United States and Canada, by Robert Bothwell

Your Country, My Country: A Unified History of the United States and Canada, by Robert Bothwell

Your Country, My Country: A Unified History of the United States and Canada by Robert Bothwell

"Your Country, My Country: A Unified History of the United States and Canada by Robert Bothwell." Canadian Historical Review, 98(2), pp. 440–441

Your Country, My Country: A Unified History of the United States and Canada by Robert Bothwell, and: Entangling Migration History: Borderlands and Transnationalism in the United States and Canada eds. by Benjamin Bryce and Alexander Freund

Your Country, My Country: A Unified History of the United States and Canada by Robert Bothwell, and: Entangling Migration History: Borderlands and Transnationalism in the United States and Canada eds. by Benjamin Bryce and Alexander Freund