Usable Past Research Articles

Soviet Memories as Part of Regional Repertoires of Usable Past in Contemporary Russia

This article reveals how the official patterns of commemorating the Soviet historical past in Russia match its local projections. Based on interviews with experts from 27 regions and some other field materials, the article maps the diversity of commemorative agendas across Russia. Focusing on the violent aspects of Soviet history, it outlines current configurations of the usable past important for local identity and notably used by regional authorities and other mnemonic actors over time. These repertoires of the usable past depend on the cultural infrastructure that was formed over time, but also on the efforts of mnemonic actors, who promote specific memories. This article argues that although regional approaches to commemorating the historical past are evidently dominated by the official federal narrative, local visions of common history are far from being uniform. The aspects that are downplayed or silenced at the federal level might be indispensable to regional and local identities. Expert interviews suggest that collisions between the narratives circulating at different levels typically do not escalate to open conflicts. The commemorative projects supported by regional authorities tend to conform to the federal-level framing, which is flexible enough to tolerate some local peculiarities. However, in many regions there are also non-state mnemonic actors who promote a commemorative agenda that deviates from the official state discourse. While being short of resources for developing memory hardware, they affect public discussions raising awareness about the downplayed aspects of the local past.

The use of the civil wars in Colchester's tourist image

This article explores the relationship between useable pasts and tourism to show how towns reinvented themselves using their local and unique histories throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To achieve this, the article focuses its attention on the growing influence and importance that tourism had on Colchester's development. It shows how important visible landmarks and mythical stories are in ensuring a past's usability. Alongside this it highlights the importance of local stakeholders and businesses in owning the past and marketing the town as a historic location. In doing so it demonstrates the ways in which Colchester reinvented itself from an old Market town to become an Historic town. Focusing on the controversial history of the Siege of 1648, it will show how towns dealt with tragic narratives as they began using the past to sell themselves to the nation.

Memorial Landscape in Petrozavodsk: Narratives and Practices

The article is devoted to the main historical narratives and practices that form in the memory infrastructure of Petrozavodsk. Based on the actor-oriented approach to memory politics, we show the diversity of mnemonic actors and their strategies of commemoration of historical events and persons. The research has shown that the expansion of the usable past in the memorial landscape of Petrozavodsk is connected with both the process of national identity formation and the commodization of history, i.e. the use of the past as an attractive commodity for tourists. The lack of a unified strategy of commemorative politics doesn’t allow to formulate a hegemonic historical narrative linking most of the existing memorials. At the same time, all mnemonic actors tend to shape the image of the city as an important part of Russian history, and the narratives they form are aimed at overcoming the city’s provincial position.

“Basically, it’s a History of the Russian State”: Russocentrism, Etatism, and the Ukrainian Question in Stalin’s Editing of the 1937 Short History of the USSR

Abstract Joseph Stalin and the Soviet party leadership launched a major propaganda campaign in 1931 that called for a new approach to Soviet history, not only for scholars and pedagogues but for society as a whole. A veritable “search for a usable past,” this initiative was to bolster the authority and legitimacy of the state and rally the population together in patriotic unity by connecting the prerevolutionary past to the Stalinist present. When this new historical line was finally unveiled in 1937, it challenged earlier Soviet sloganeering on subjects like nationalism, imperialism, and colonialism. This article examines how Stalin attempted to reconcile his new “usable past” with these other ideological priorities, focusing on a case study of the so-called Ukrainian question within the context of the USSR’s broader reevaluation of tsarist-era imperialism and colonial policy.

We Need Social Archaeology to Understand Resilience and Build Usable Pasts

We Need Social Archaeology to Understand Resilience and Build Usable Pasts

Halakha vs. Capitalism

Abstract: Medieval Jewish economic law was in many ways fundamentally inhospitable to early capitalism. Practice ultimately changed, and law with it, but not without bitter dissent from some towering rabbinic authorities, or poskim . To be clear, these protagonists are by no stretch of the imagination leftist; their views on society and gender often run against the grain of progressive sensibilities, to put it mildly. But they do express with passion and clarity the stakes of capitalism's growth, and hold out the hope of another way. The goal here is not to restore the premodern ghetto, but to salvage a usable past from it for the daunting political road ahead.

Time-worn pebbles or unpolished gemstones? (Un)usable pasts and possible futures of comparative education

ABSTRACT This article draws on the contributions to this special issue to highlight the urgent need to restore checks and balances in our evaluation of ‘usable pasts’ in comparative education. Considering that our reading of the field’s history not only moulds our understanding of comparative education now but also shapes our imagination of its potential futures, reflecting our implicit biases and the way we construct and narrate its history becomes imperative. This article unveils the persistence of silences and exclusions concerning specific histories, countries, and topics, and highlights the possible influence of evolving geopolitical power dynamics on the future of comparative education. Consequently, it urges critical examination of the field’s positionality amid shifting geopolitical tensions and calls for a thorough scrutiny of entrenched silences and the reductionist use of sweeping policy signifiers such as globalisation, decolonisation, excellence, and the notion of ‘future’ as explanatory concepts.

Injustice, deindustrialisation and the 1984–1985 Miners’ Strike in Scotland

ABSTRACT The transition out of coal production in Scotland was managed carefully in the 1960s and 1970s, prioritising workforce voice and communal security. Under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative governments in the 1980s, the position changed abruptly. Colliery closures and redundancies accelerated; miners and coal communities were subject to political attack. The criminalisation and victimisation of union officials and activists during the 1984–1985 strike against pit closures was disproportionately greater in Scotland than in England and Wales. The oral history testimony of strike veterans provides a powerful narrative of historical unfairness, imposed by a hostile anti-union government, National Coal Board officials, police officers and sheriffs. Their stories of injustice on picket lines and in communities nevertheless qualify a tendency in oral histories of deindustrialisation to pessimism and loss. Strike veterans spoke positively about the strike and its political meaning. Their memories constitute a usable past, present in subsequent campaigning. The Miners’ Strike (Pardons) Act, passed by the Scottish Parliament in 2022, was an important outcome, making provision for the collective and posthumous pardon of people with strike-related convictions from 1984–1985.

Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reconstruction and Its Meanings 150 Years Later ed. by Adam H. Domby and Simon Lewis

Reviewed by: Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reconstruction and Its Meanings 150 Years Later ed. by Adam H. Domby and Simon Lewis Robert D. Bland (bio) Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reconstruction and Its Meanings 150 Years Later. Edited by Adam H. Domby and Simon Lewis. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. Pp. 272. Cloth, $125.00; paper, $35.00.) Freedoms Gained and Lost enters a rich and robust public conversation over the current meaning of the Reconstruction era. Edited by Adam H. Domby and Simon Lewis, the collection of essays emerged from the 2018 Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World conference that commemorated the 150th anniversary of South Carolina’s 1868 constitution—a powerful document that expressed a deep faith in the promise of multiracial democracy in the United States. Covering a wide geographical and chronological terrain, the essays in Freedoms Gained and Lost, read together, offer a shift away from the “splendid failure” narrative that has largely defined the field of Reconstruction studies for the last three decades. Far from a story of incremental progress or heroic struggle, Freedoms Gained and Lost highlights the “limits to [the] radical experiment” (2), as well as the “uniquely baleful influences” that doomed the effort (5). In the book’s introduction, Domby and Lewis see the uneven and harrowing nature of the road to freedom as the unifying theme of the Reconstruction era. “Focusing solely on the serial expansion of freedom obscures the way freedoms have been gained and lost repeatedly in American history—and the complex struggles [End Page 271] to maintain them,” they lament. The essays in this volume were written in the shadow of the 2015 Charleston Mother Emanuel AME Church shooting and the violent 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, and a well-earned weariness permeates the collection and informs the skepticism toward the previous generation’s more hopeful historiographical synthesis. Speaking to both historiographical debates and Reconstruction’s place in U.S. public history, Bruce E. Baker’s thoughtful “Whom Is Reconstruction For?” seeks to tackle the longer history of Reconstruction’s usable past. “The emergence of a ‘Third Reconstruction’ can be seen as an abandonment of the hopes of the ‘Second Reconstruction,’” Baker argues, “but it is equally a hopeful marker of the beginning of something” (22). Reflecting on the polyphonic nature of Reconstruction’s memory and the varying interpretations in family lore, local communities, textbooks, digital history projects, and the elite press, the essay turns to the critical question: did any of these usable pasts have a stable center? Drawing from the work of southern labor historians, Baker suggests that Reconstruction’s usable past—especially in its “Second Reconstruction” and “Third Reconstruction” iterations—calls upon working-class people to work across barriers of race and age to build a better world. Most of the essays in the collection diverge from Baker’s hopeful synthesis and, when read in total, present the Reconstruction era as a moment of mixed promise and Pyrrhic victory. Hilary N. Green’s essay on Alabama’s postbellum education system dampens the usual optimism around the rise of Black schools in the South by highlighting the distance between imagined policy and the difficult work of implementation. Michael W. Fitzgerald’s essay on Black militias in Alabama’s western Black Belt finds a culture of Black armed resistance that bolstered local chapters of the Republican Party against recalcitrant Ku Klux Klan violence—albeit in a larger political landscape wherein the statewide Republican Party lost control of the statehouse. Holly A. Pinheiro Jr.’s essay on northern-born soldiers serving in the United States Colored Troops demonstrates that, for many veterans, the homecoming experience was fraught with lingering trauma, discriminatory labor markets, and difficulty securing federal pensions at the same rates as their white peers. Examining postbellum infanticide cases in the North and the South, Felicity Turner finds a discriminatory and racist legal system, which demonstrated that the much-heralded new civil rights protections “proved messy and complicated for Black women across the nation” (137). In addition to shifting away from stories that champion the push for civil rights and the imaginative and flexible nature of grassroots democracy, [End Page 272] Freedoms Gained and Lost points to...

A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice

A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice

Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

Little Grey Men? Animals and Alien Kinship

Abstract This essay confronts the lack of vernacular, indigenous or local knowledge in human-animal history and pushes it back into Deep History. It analyses the shifting meanings of the occult baboon and the alien 'other' in South Africa's syncretic and synchronic cosmologies. It asks why it is the baboon - out of all the animals - who came to be a witch's familiar? It asks why the tokoloshe, a supernatural sprite, became baboon-esque? In answering these questions, it uses Freud's notion of 'alien kinship' - the ancient attraction and anxiety induced by baboon as the uncanny, the alien, the changeling, the shape-shifter - or the 'Other within' us. It examines not only the changing role this understanding of the supernatural baboon has played in human societies historically (including a new role created by the tabloids) but the concomitant consequences for baboons themselves - to show that 'animal history' can advance a 'usable past'.

Georg Dannenberg and the ’Usable Past’: Archiving and Re-Use of National Socialist Recordings in East German Radio Features

ABSTRACT For broadcasters in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the National Socialist period represented two kinds of “usable past.” Firstly, the inherited radio infrastructure - including extensive sound archives - provided them with physical remnants of the past usable for broadcasting. Secondly, the Nazi period and its recordings provided ideological material for GDR propagandists condemning West Germany by association with the Nazi regime. However, as this article shows, administrative and logistical problems within GDR Radio archives forced program-makers like Georg Dannenberg to act as archivists themselves, creating their own collections of clips to use in their propaganda war against the West.

Queer Sex and the Crisis of Capital

Queer Sex and the Crisis of Capital

Whites Only: Race and Mobility in Kym Ragusa's The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging and Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric

Whites Only: Race and Mobility in Kym Ragusa's <i>The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging</i> and Claudia Rankine's <i>Citizen: An American Lyric</i>

Toward Collective Memory Reconstruction as Epistemic Activism

The United States, alongside other Western democracies, is in search of a usable past. Collective memory in the United States has persistently distorted or whitewashed its past, resulting in a distinct kind of (socially sanctioned) ignorance of the present. Collective memory reconstruction can thus be understood as “epistemic activism,” targeting an “epistemology of ignorance,” borrowing and expanding key concepts from the work of Charles Mills and José Medina. In this article I begin to defend an ethical practice of collective memory reconstruction as epistemic activism. I first outline a qualified understanding of “collective memory” that survives philosophical skepticism. I then draw on Paul Ricœur’s critical phenomenology of abuses of memory and analyze collective memory distortions of the US Civil War and the US struggle for civil rights. I suggest that a reconstructed democratic collective memory will be a set of plural and dynamic collective memories, rather than a homogeneous and static memory. I end by outlining some consequences that follow from this conclusion.

The Orthodox Church of Ukraine: An Ancient Infant

Abstract This paper analyzes four formative periods of Ukrainian Church life: the first Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church of 1921; the evolution of Ukrainian Orthodox identity in the diaspora; the late and post-Soviet autocephalous Orthodox Churches; and the contribution of the Maidan to Ukrainian Orthodox identity. The presentation concludes by posing a crucial question to the young Orthodox Church of Ukraine: Will the Orthodox Church of Ukraine rely solely on its past in shaping its mission? If so, is this a useable past or nostalgia, an attempt to recreate a past that contains no yeast for the present? The question of identity is crucial because it is at the core of a sense of community self-awareness that forms and shapes its activity. In the Church, identity is inexorably connected with mission.

Review: Boyle Heights: How a Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy, by George J. Sánchez

Nearly three decades after exploring the history of Los Angeles’ Boyle Heights neighborhood through the lens of twentieth-century Mexican migration and settlement, George J. Sánchez has invited us to revisit those same streets and their residents through the lenses of world history and U.S. immigration and civil rights history writ large. The result is a coherent, sweeping, dazzling array of new understandings: of the ways Los Angeles urban policies pushed multiple marginalized groups into a shared space; of how political and economic transformations around the globe intersected in one specific place through human relationships; and of how those relationships, in turn, shaped major social movements in ways we had not previously appreciated.The first half of the book, which spans the early nineteenth century through the 1950s, recovers and recasts the neighborhood’s multi-ethnic past. Popular accounts imagine a simple story of “ethnic succession,” from a predominantly Jewish to an entirely Mexican neighborhood. Indeed, a leading historian of L.A. Jewry had earlier concluded that, “[Jewish] Boyle Heights evoked little nostalgia upon its demise.”1 Sánchez convincingly argues the opposite as he recounts the specific dynamics of warmth and tensions in relationships amongst Boyle Heights’ Jewish, Mexican, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Black residents—each in their own way refugees from violence and economic convulsion around the world. Through Sánchez’s eyes and exhaustive archival work, we come to understand Boyle Heights as a major center of Black community life; see Japanese American internment as a transformative experience in American Jewish history because it pushed Los Angeles’ Jewish residents and institutions to connect their struggle to others’; and appreciate the ways that Mexican and Jewish labor activists played formative roles in each other’s early political empowerment. Drawing on his 2004 article, Sánchez shows that the Jewish exodus from the neighborhood in the 1950s was shaped by the relentless forces of state-sponsored segregation yet was at once a site of internal community struggle about the nature of Jewish identity and its relationship to radical politics and to other neighboring communities.Sánchez’s work on the Civil Rights period and beyond revisits the highlights of Los Angeles Chicano history with an emphasis on the role of contingency and lived experience in a multi-racial city. We now see the East L.A. student walkouts of 1968 as inspired more by student leaders’ interest in the Watts Riots than Chicano nationalism. We learn, in detail for the first time, about daily life during this iconic neighborhood’s shift from majority Mexican American to majority undocumented immigrant, and how the former came to embrace the latter’s cause. And we gain a window into recent struggles over “gentefication” as college-educated Latinos faced rejection from some local activists when they returned to the neighborhood to start businesses.As an historian of the Mexican American past, I am grateful for this endlessly rich social history to inform ongoing struggles and give deeper meaning to present-day political coalitions. As the granddaughter of Beverly Millman, a Jewish American teen who moved to Boyle Heights with her parents in the early 1940s but joined her community’s “exodus” to other neighborhoods just a few years later, I am grateful for this chance to place my own family in America’s story anew. It is fitting that Sánchez, who has transformed the field of Chicano History through graduate mentorship, would now perfect its promise of offering usable pasts for both families and communities to construct more humane futures.

From Pioneer Historiography to Patriotic History: Constructing Usable Pasts in Zimbabwe (1890–2018)

AbstractDifferent political projects and ideological positions are founded upon distinct accounts of the past, each with their own emphases, silences, and omissions. The case of Zimbabwe illustrates this connection between power and history. Whereas the myths of colonial historiography provided legitimization frameworks for settler colonialism, “patriotic history” became a key element of the legitimation strategy implemented by the post-independence regime. Pinto analyses how history and historiography were incorporated into narratives of power legitimization in both pre- and post-independence Zimbabwe and how, in the late 90s, history and historiography became critical sites of political polarization and contestation.

DU FU 杜甫 ON THE HAN DYNASTY: A MEDIEVAL VIEW OF THE CLASSICAL CHINESE EMPIRE

AbstractDu Fu, one of the two most celebrated poets of the Tang, was very much a product of his era in the way that he found a usable past in Han-dynasty verse, episodes, and people. From 750 on, his writings were replete with allusions to the Han, some subtle and others more forthright. Taken together, these allusions suggest his firm beliefs in the course of history determined by human moral agency, in morality as “a man's own charge”; also in the role of fate determining the succession of dynasties, even as he deplored the workings of capricious fate on individual lives. Such beliefs are unremarkable in content, being much closer to conventional Tang concepts of the individual than most commentaries on Du Fu allow.