Usable Past Research Articles

Cybernetics as a usable past

The Cybernetic Brain is a strange, wonderful, and frustrating book. Beautifully written, passionately argued, and based on a decade’s worth of research, the book presents a detailed, wide-ranging history of British cybernetics as a usable past to challenge how we think about science and modernity. A sociologist of science who has written landmark books on quarks and ‘‘posthumanist’’ science studies, Pickering explains that Cybernetic Brain ‘‘is very much my own history of cybernetics in Britain—not a comprehensive survey, but the story of a set of scientific, technological, and social developments that speak to me for reasons I will explain and that I hope will interest others’’ (4). To create his own history of cybernetics, Pickering follows a strand of research extending from the work of two first-generation British cyberneticists—brain scientists W. Grey Walter and W. Ross Ashby—to that of second-generation researchers Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask, a strand that extends from the late 1940s to the 1970s. The psychiatric research of Gregory Bateson and R. D. Laing is considered with the first group. Along this strand, Pickering studies cybernetics in practice rather than the history of ideas, the performative rather than the representational aspect of British cybernetics. He emphasizes, for example, the unpredictable exploratory movements of Walter’s ‘‘tortoises’’ (small-scale electronic robots), rather than Walter’s attempts to use those movements to understand and represent the functioning of the human brain. In this trajectory of research, British cybernetics was transformed from the ‘‘science of the adaptive brain’’ (8) in the early 1950s, as instantiated in Walter’s tortoises and Ashby’s electromechanical ‘‘homeostat’’ model of the brain, into a ‘‘protean science’’ of the 1960s and 1970s, symbolized by Pask’s design of the Fun Palace, an interactive and adaptive architectural project, and Beer’s Project CyberSyn, an interactive computer system built to run the Chilean economy.

From Histories to Traditions: A Response

From Histories to Traditions:A Response Christopher Shannon In responding to the comments of Professors Weiner, Wickberg, and Lasch-Quinn, I would first like to thank them for sparing me the task of having to restate or reformulate my account of the epistemology and practice of academic history. Though accomplished scholars who have achieved recognition within the standards of the profession as it is, they share my sense of the intellectual and moral limitations of those standards. It is refreshing not to have to mount yet one more critique of common-sense empiricism. Refreshing, but challenging, for it shifts the burden of my response from the critical to the constructive. After stating their sympathies with my critique, each respondent in different ways raises questions about what an alternative, tradition-based history would look like; Wickberg and Lasch-Quinn more pointedly raise the possibility that moving from histories to traditions would leave the delusions of liberal pluralism intact. Serious objections indeed, and ones that deserve a serious response. What would tradition-based history look like? In some aspects it would entail no radical departure from current historical practice. That is, I accept that the analytic techniques developed over the past 200 years of professional history writing stand as a positive advance in human knowledge. I have made use of them in my own work, and I would expect any practitioner of tradition-based history to be held accountable to them as well. The turn to tradition should not entail the abandonment of modern historical reasoning, only a recognition of its limits—and a recognition that we cannot write meaningful history within these limits. That is, our analytic should have a clearly stated purpose beyond analysis itself—a normative purpose integral to the argument, not merely an edifying afterthought. No simple "useable past," [End Page 19] this model shares something with Wickberg's and Lasch-Quinn's notions of meaningful history as inevitably a history of the present. I have tried to integrate the normative orientation of Catholicism in my books on U.S. intellectual history, yet I concede that much of the normative element remains confined to the introductions and conclusions, with the body of the books focused on analysis. I concede also that my books have been focused on the critique of a non-Catholic tradition rather than an engagement with Catholicism itself—certainly not the best model for a history that not only analyzes but also participates in a tradition. In proposing a model for Catholic history, I would defer to the work of Eamon Duffy. A tradition-based Catholic history would synthesize the analytic, "outsider" achievement of Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars with the normative, "insider" voice of his popular essays collected in Faith of Our Fathers and Walking to Emmaus.1 Beyond Catholic history, I welcome Mark Weiner's invocation of Hayden White and the appeal to 19th-century historians as stylists. One may not agree with Macaulay's Whiggery, but no one can doubt his commitment to integrating the normative and analytic dimensions of history. Still, White's insistence on the inescapability of narrative should point us less to models of writing than to models of reading. The recognition that we are always thinking within some narrative structure should call into question the value of "original" research and move the locus of historical practice from an empirical to a more philosophically reflective mode. Tradition-based historians would come to a deeper understanding of their own tradition by engaging the best that has been thought and said about the past by other traditions. Doctoral training and undergraduate teaching alike would of necessity become organized more around historiography—how people have thought about the past—than the conventional division of history into periods and topics. This brings us from the micro to the macro level of historical practice. Let us suppose that the historical profession opens itself to accommodate tradition-based history. Will we then in any way have moved beyond liberal pluralism? Lasch-Quinn's invocation of Philip Rieff raises the possibility that traditions might easily become yet another resource for a therapeutic pursuit of a sense of well-being apart from matters of truth...

Misremembering as Mediated Action: Schematic Narrative Templates and Elementary Students' Narration of the Past

The purpose of this article is to explore three fifth grade students' misremembering of the beginnings of American history as a form of mediated action, active agents using cultural tools provided by a sociocultural setting to represent and interpret the past (Wertsch, 2000). Data come from a 10-month qualitative case study of history instruction in one fourth grade and two fifth grade classrooms, and include student interviews, videotaped observations of lessons, and curricular materials and student work. Drawing on Wertsch's (2002, 2004) distinction between specific narratives and schematic narrative templates, the author argues that three fifth grade students' mistaken narration of the beginnings of American history was informed by their use of a schematic narrative template that was present in the enacted curriculum. The author concludes the article with a discussion of the implications of the presence of this cultural tool and its use by students for the teaching of history and students' development of a usable historical past.

WHICH SOUTHERNERS? WHICH SOUTHERN HISTORIANS? A CENTURY OF TEACHING SOUTHERN HISTORY AT YALE

5 6 Y W H I C H S O U T H E R N E R S ? W H I C H S O U T H E R N H I S T O R I A N S ? A C E N T U R Y O F T E A C H I N G S O U T H E R N H I S T O R Y A T Y A L E G L E N D A E L I Z A B E T H G I L M O R E Not long after I arrived at Yale, I met C. Vann Woodward, the man who for thirty years had been the most acclaimed historian of the South. At a departmental reception, someone unfortunately introduced me to him as ‘‘John Blum’s replacement.’’ I drew in my breath and braced myself. He rightly scowled at the suggestion that anyone could replace the eminent U.S. historian John Blum and asked, ‘‘What else do you do?’’ In a tiny little voice, I answered with a question: ‘‘Southern history?’’ Before his eyes, I had transformed myself from John Blum’s replacement into his own replacement . Woodward’s scowl deepened, and he responded, ‘‘Well, I guess someone has to do it,’’ turned on his heel, and walked away. It would be a year before I saw Vann Woodward again. Of course, he was right: ‘‘someone has to do it’’ – teach southern history, that is. Or was he? Many top universities have never had a position earmarked for a professor of the history of the South. But Yale is di√erent. In the twentieth century, the university was home to several distinguished scholars of the South, a structure that rested on two pillars: Ulrich Bonnell Phillips and Comer Vann Woodward. Phillips’s work upheld the first part of the nineteenth century and Woodward’s work upheld the latter part of the 5 7 R nineteenth century. Just as the scholarship of these two scholars brace the nineteenth century, so too did their lives span the twentieth century. U. B. Phillips published four books in twenty years at the beginning of the century: Plantation and Frontier (1909), The Life of Robert Toombs, 1877–1934 (1913), American Negro Slavery (1918), and Life and Labor in the Old South (1929). He wrote numerous articles, one of which appeared in The Yale Review in 1906. C. Vann Woodward published four books in twenty years in the middle of the century: Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (1938), Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (1951), Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (1951), and The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955). During their lifetimes and since, Phillips and Woodward have been recognized as the leading interpreters of, respectively, the antebellum and the postbellum nineteenth-century South. But Phillips’s and Woodward’s politics – and the political import of their interpretations – sprang from the milieu of their own moments in the twentieth century. (Thanks to Garry Lacy Reeder and to Gaddis Smith for their insights on this subject.) Each man balanced on the cutting edge of the southern politics of his own time. Phillips mounted an enormous e√ort to provide an intellectual justification for the successful white southern political revolution of the 1890s that stripped African Americans of the right to vote, segregated them, and relegated them to the lowest rungs of the economic order. His generation literally rewrote southern history to justify white supremacy not simply in the past but in the present and the future; not simply in the South, but in the rest of the nation as well. Woodward’s project from the 1930s to the 1960s was to demolish the system Phillips had shored up. First, in Origins of the New South, Woodward gave the lie to the myth of white unity in a classless society, and then he gave to black and white southerners a useable past, a time between the Civil War and segregation, when their forebears had lived in a more racially just – and more integrated – world. Both men were prodigious researchers; both were powerful...

"Prologue" to <em>Salviamo l'Italia</em> (Einaudi, 2010)

The Prologue to Salviamo l’Italia reflects on the problems of contemporary Italy through the eyes of the Risorgimento generations to suggest striking similarities and to highlight differences in realities, perceptions, and attitudes. Canova’s sculpture of Italia weeping at the tomb of Alfieri is an icon of the prevailing sense, then and now, of cultural, social, political, and, at bottom, moral decadence and decline. The chief differences lie in today’s resignation about political corruption, the precipitous collapse public morals, and the fixation on the economics of consumption at the expense of shared civic interests and values. Over and against a culture of passivity or complicity, there are neglected or forgotten democratic values in the Risorgimento that may offer a usable past for a progressive future.

The Lasting Echo of the Battle of Grunwald: the Uses of the Past in the Trials between the Armenian Community of Lemberg and the Catholic Patricians in 1578–1631

AbstractThe article deals with the historical imagination in the burgher's milieu in the late Renaissance Polish kingdom. The main aim of the article is the investigation of the changes that occurred in the perception of the remote past. The article focuses on the mechanisms of a usable past construction. In 1578, in order to obtain equal economic rights with the dominant Catholic burghers – mostly of German origin – in Lemberg, local Armenians stated that their ancestors were invited by the Galician prince Daniel and were then settled by his son Lev/Leon (1264-1301) in Lviv at the time of the city's foundation. In 1597, in their complaint, Catholics allowed that the statement of the invitation of the Armenian ancestors was a real fact but accused "Armenian warriors" for participating in the hostile incursions led by Prince Daniel or Lev together with the Tatars in the 1250s-1280s against Poland. In this way, the magistrate won the trial in 1600. I argue that for their pseudo-historical argument Catholic patricians creatively reinterpreted some passages from Marcin Cromer's book "On the origins and deeds of the Poles" (1555, 1558, 1562, 1568, 1589). Then, Armenians changed their tactics and stated in 1631 that their noble ancestors took an active part in the wars between Poland and Teutonic Order in late fourteenth – early fifteenth centuries. Thus Armenians converted their ancestors into good patriots of Poland when the Germans were the main enemies. During the trials townspeople perceived changes in their past. It also reflects a level of historical reading in Polish history and the emergence of the Battle of Grunwald battle as part of a Polish national myth. Thus Renaissance book-printing and book-collecting directly influenced the burgher's historical imagination and their judicial argument. City elites "privatized" a book, which had been sacral property of Church, and made it their tool to use for their practical needs. They also privatized and instrumentalized the based-on-books past. The arguments used by both sides during their conflict correlated with the urban elites' aspirations to acquire noble status. It also reflects the process of transmission of high culture models – Sarmatian Renaissance – to the lower estates of the Kingdom.

Teaching History in the Netherlands: Teachers’ Experiences of a Plurality of Perspectives

Globalisation and the re‐invention of national identities make history teaching seem more challenging than ever before. In the past decade, the teaching of history in the Netherlands has been at the center of public debate. During a period of political turmoil, the history curriculum was subjected to two somewhat competing revisions. One aimed at restoring chronology, the other at making history teaching contribute to a sense of community. This last call for a reformulation of the national historical narrative has met with resistance from those who claim a need for a plurality of perspectives in history education. Within this context an exploratory study with five history teachers was undertaken to gain insight into their goals and beliefs about teaching history. They all have an academic background and teach in multicultural classrooms. Two interview instruments were designed to stimulate the teachers to approach the subject from different angles. I conclude that the history teachers involved share a critical approach to (national) history and an understanding of their students as having multiple identities. The teachers show differences when reflecting on how they create usable pasts with their students for future purposes.

Creating a local black identity in a global context: the French writer Alexandre Dumas as an African Americanlieu de mémoire

AbstractWestern expansion and domination through colonial systems served as a form of globalization, spreading white hegemony across the globe. While whites retained the monopoly on ‘modernity’ as the exclusive writers of historical progress, ‘backward’ African Americans were perceived as ‘outside’ Western culture and history. As a result, there were no African American individuals perceived as succeeding in Western terms in the arts, humanities, and sciences. In response, African American intellectuals forged a counter-global bloc that challenged globalization conceived as hegemonic Western domination. They sought to insert African Americans as a whole into the history of America, (re)creating a local blackAmericanhistory ‘forgotten’ because of slavery and Western power. African American intellectuals thus created a ‘usable past’, or counter-memory, to reconstitute history through the inclusion of African Americans, countering Western myths of black inferiority. The devastating legacy of slavery was posited as the cause of the African Americans’ lack of Western cultural acclivity. Due to the lack of nationally recognized African American figures of Western cultural achievement, intellectuals constructed Dumas as alieu de mémoireas part of wider efforts to appropriate historical individuals of black descent from across the globe within a transnational community produced by the Atlantic slave trade. Since all blacks were perceived as having a uniting ‘essence’, Dumas’ achievements meant that all blacks had the same potential. Such identification efforts demonstrated African Americans’ social and cultural suitability in Western terms and the resulting right to be included in American society. In this process, African Americans expressed a new, local black identity by expanding an ‘African American’ identity to a wider range of individuals than was commonly applied. While constructing a usable past, African Americans redefined ‘America’ beyond the current hegemonic usage (which generally restricted the term geographically to the US) to encompass an ‘Atlantic’ world – a world in which the Dumas of memory was re-imagined as an integral component with strong connections to slavery and colonialism.

26. Semiotic encounters: text, image and trans-nation.

Introduction Theorising Textual and Visual Encounters Mary Orr: Intertextuality: Old Debates in New Contexts Harish Trivedi: Anglophone Transnation, Postcolonial Translation: The Book and the Film as Namesakes Renate Brosch: Migrating Images and Communal Experience Textual Encounters Caroline Lusin: Encountering Darkness: Intertextuality and Polyphony in J.M. Coetzee's Dusklands (1974) and Matthew Kneale's English Passengers (2000) Georgiana Banita: Affect, Kitsch and Transnational Literature: Azar Nafisi's Portable Worlds Walter Gobel: Washington Irving's Rip van Winkle, A Postcolonial Reading or: In Search of a Usable Past Irina Bauder-Begerow: Echoing Dickens: Three Rewritings of Great Expectations Sarah Sackel: What's in a Wodehouse? (Non-) Subversive Shakespearean Intertextualities in P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster Novels Ida M. Samperi: No Text Just Comes out Ex Nihilo, It Always Comes out of Other Texts: Christine Brooke-Rose's Thru Visual Encounters Nicola Glaubitz: Transcribing Images - Reassembling Cultures: Kazuo Ishiguro's Japan Joachim Frenk and Christian Krug: Handovers of Empire: Transatlantic Transmissions in Popular Culture Sonja Fielitz: Fish and Chips with Marshmallows? Possibilities and Limitations of Trans-Cultural Intermediality Susanne Gruss: Shakespeare in Bollywood? Vishal Bhardwaj's Omkara Amira Nowaira: Text and Pretext: Reading Cultural and Ideological Paradigms in the Hollywood and Egyptian Movie Adaptations of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina Noha Hamdy: Revisiting Transmediality: 9/11 Between Spectacle and Narrative Wolfram R. Keller: Long Live the New Flesh? David Cronenberg's Videodrome and the Limits of Ovidian Metamorphosis

To make "We the People": Constitutional founding in postwar Japan and South Korea

This article is a theoretically-informed comparative analysis of the constitution-making processes in Japan and South Korea after the end of the Second World War. Written under the hegemonic influence of the United States and against the backdrop of the dawning Cold War, both constitutions demonstrate the inadequacies of the conventional theoretical account of “We the People” as “constituent power.” We argue that the “constituent people” was forged in the course of a deep constitutional politics—rather than vice versa—in which the role of “externalities” and the resuscitation of “useable pasts” were intrinsically tied to the formation of new constitutional peoplehood in postwar Japan and postcolonial Korea. Going beyond the common presupposition that a well-defined constituent people exists prior to the constitutional moment with a unified political will and robust agency, we suggest that the Japanese and Korean “exception” may actually prove to be the rule for theorizing about constitutional democracy in the age of globalization.

Contours of white ethnicity: popular ethnography and the making of usable pasts in Greek America

Contours of white ethnicity: popular ethnography and the making of usable pasts in Greek America

Towards an African Atlantic: Ama Ata Aidoo's diasporic theater

This essay reads the plays of Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo in dialogue with influential theories of transnationalism to argue that her treatment of colonialism, slavery, gender, and diaspora stretches and reshapes Paul Gilroy's conception of the black Atlantic. Neither Afrocentric nor essentialist, Aidoo is not usually thought of as part of the black diaspora, despite her constant engagement with notions of pan-Africanism, black nationalism, and slavery. By reading two of her plays which specifically engage with the question of black diasporic encounters to explore the links between African Americans and Africans, the author shows how Aidoo's textured representation of tradition and modernity, history and memory, and the local and the global helps define a model of the black Atlantic that can accommodate Africa as a vital participant in transnational exchanges. In showing that traditions are not static, but changing and adapting all the time, Aidoo suggests that the usable past is not a fact to be assumed, but rather a dilemma to be pondered and debated. While The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) reveals the assumptions inherent in the cultural politics of the Black Arts era, including the questions of pan-Africanism, black masculinity, gender, and nation, Anowa (1970) takes up the more difficult task of re-imagining the relationship across the Atlantic by way of a searching exploration of the tensions internal to a so-called traditional African society in light of the controversial subject of African participation in slavery. By providing a densely textured meditation on the meaning of slavery, the workings of gender in a traditional society, and the relationship between communal and individual agency, Aidoo offers a long view of history to invite us to probe the meaning of past and present and to open up temporal possibilities outside of both nationalist and neocolonialist ones.

Rewriting the Grand Narrative of Jewish Music: Abraham Z. Idelsohn in the United States

In 1929, musicologist and composer Abraham Zvi Idelsohn published his major study Jewish Music in its Historical Development. Viewed today as a foundational work in its field, Idelsohn's book attempted for the first time to bring together many fragments of Jewish musical knowledge into a single, grand English language narrative. At the same time, Idelsohn's publication reflected both his time and circumstances: having moved from Jerusalem to a prominent position in Cincinnati's Hebrew Union College. Upon its publication, Jewish Music in its Historical Development received wide coverage, succeeding at least metaphorically in recasting Jewish sound to create a continuous, usable past for musical practice and thought, particularly among Euro-American populations. In this essay, I analyze the history of this work and its author as Idelsohn shifted from his earlier 1924 treatise Toldot ha-neginah ha-ivrit, with particular attention to Idelsohn's arrival in the United States, his dealings with mainline publisher Henry Holt and Company, the book's reception in lay and scholarly Jewish music circles, and finally its subsequent republications and canonization as a comprehensive history of Jewish music. In doing so, I argue that while Jewish Music in its Historical Development helped redefine the borders, and perhaps geographical center, of Jewish music scholarship, the work can also be interpreted as an attempt to codify an agenda of musical activism from within the center of American Reform Jewish life.

A Usable Past for Writing Assessment

Writing program administrators and other composition specialists need to know the history of writing assessment in order to create a rich and responsible culture of it today. In its first fifty years, the field of writing assessment followed educational measurement in general by focusing on issues of reliability, whereas in its next fifty years, it turned its attention to validity. Overall, the field has exhibited a tension between reliability and validity, with the latter increasingly being conceptualized as involving a whole set of considerations that need to be theorized.

Science and Technology Confront Reality

and technology, and people associated with them, are seldom depicted in film as benign. Heavy-laden with potential for salvation or destruction, they are nearly always cast as a potent force in shaping of humanity's well-being, and so, of its history. This Janus-faced nature of science is, of necessity, governed by a pact of mutual obligation with society - one that offers support, intellectual autonomy, and substantial cultural authority to practitioners of science and technology in return for greater control over unknown and intervention in ills that plague humankind. Early cinematic narratives of society's relationship with science and technology typically fell into two categories. The first ranged from unabashedly fantastic tales of promise and possibility - Melies brothers' A Trip to Moon (1902) and William Cameron Menzies' Things to Come (1936) - to celebratory biopics like The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) and earnest documentaries such as Night Mail (1936) and Power and Land (1940). The second category of narratives was cautionary tales, featuring scientists who placed their own hunger for knowledge and power ahead of society's needs. These were cinematic archetypes of misguided and mad science: Dr. Rotwang of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927); James Whale's Dr. Frankenstein (1931); many incarnations of Dr. Jekyll (notably 1920, 1931, and 1941); and unseen designer of machinery that bedevils Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times (1936). Both visions of relationship of science, technology, and society have remained continuously in play on movie screens through present day, with some films continuing to celebrate engagement of science with society, while others caution about dangers of its disengagement. Beginning in 1950s, horrors of Second World War and fears of Atomic Age spawned a third type of narrative: one that questioned whether long-standing pact between science and society was inherently flawed. Films addressing social and human costs of science began to appear immediately after war: as straightforward dramas (The Beginning or End, 1947), as comedies (The Man in White Suit, 1951), as monster epics (Gojira, 1954), and as detective stories (Kiss Me Deadly, 1955). The skepticism and irony given form in these films defy clearly positive and negative poles of earlier portrayals, creating a range of complex, and often contradictory, cinematic depictions of science and technology in latter half of twentieth century. This issue of Film S^History, Science and Technology Confront Reality, is first of two special issues on Representations of and Technology in Film. The five articles featured here explore how science and technology are variously pressed into service across genres to mitigate society's complexities and fears, from civil-defense films, to rubble films, to classic B-movie horror, and from docu- drama to mock- documentary. In our lead article, Good Germans, Humane Automobiles: Redeeming Technological Modernity - In Those Days, Paul Dobryden examines rubble of humanity, and car entrusted with its salvage. Through memories of a battered automobile found amidst ruins of a German city, film seeks to reconstruct an alternative history of Third Reich - one in which ideal of the humane persisted - in order to give hope, and a useable past, to a war-torn nation. …

Good Germans, Humane Automobiles: Redeeming Technological Modernity— In Those Days

Progress literally keeps people apart. . -Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno Dialectic of Enlightenment Helmut Kautner's i? Those Days Qn jenen Tagen, 1947), one of the first German productions of the postwar period, begins as a rubble film. Amid a destroyed German city, two men salvage a ruined automobile for parts. While Willi goes about his work jovially, Karl cannot stop thinking about the past: No human beings... there are no human beings anymore, he complains. Just like there were none in all those damned years. That's why we've hit bottom. What is a human being [Was ist ein Mensch]? Willi asks, somewhat confused. Lost in his nihilism, Karl does not respond. But then something remarkable happens: as the two men continue to work on the car, we hear tremolo strings and a voice that apologizes for intruding into their discussion. Inaudible to the characters onscreen, it is the voice of the very car they are salvaging. After a lengthy monologue the car reveals: I've seen it all-even human beings. And maybe a couple of them were the kind Willi asked about, and about which Karl was silent. The film that follows consists of seven flashback episodes that depict the car's various 'humane' owners throughout the course of its life, from 1933 to 1945. The recuperative project of In Those Days is clear: the film strives to construct an alternative (if fragmentary) history of the Third Reich in which humanity persisted. It very consciously hopes to salvage a usable past from the rubble of the present and thereby establish a humanistic foundation on which Germany might be rebuilt. If this cannot be done, everything that we do is meaningless, as Karl says. Ironically, it is a dead machine (not a human being) that provides an answer to the postwar nihilism embodied by Karl. Good Germans As the title of one review of the film put it, In Those Days focuses on Humans in an inhumane In accordance with the need to construct a usable past, the film again and again refers to historical events or persons of the period from 1933 to 1945 that were important for the rehabilitation of German national identity in the first postwar years. The first flashback, which takes place in 1933, deals with an upper-class woman who decides to emigrate. In postwar Germany, emigres were crucial to the nation's political and cultural reconstruction because of their clean political background. The film points to the 'other' Germany that had been abroad in 'those days' and thus could not be implicated in the inhumanity of the time. In the second episode two years later, the owner of the car is a modernist composer named Grunelius whose music is labeled 'degenerate': am banned... first Hindemith, and now all of us. My music is being burned. They're calling it degenerate, what I do. I am degenerate. In the postwar desire to resuscitate the notion of German Kultur, artists (exiled or not) whose work had been banned under the Nazi regime found renewed interest. Such artists' works were among the first exhibited and performed after the war. The music of Paul Hindemith, banned by the Nazis in 1934, was played widely in concert halls and on the radio as early as 1946. In Those Days thus references an alternative cultural tradition that was forced into hibernation (or exile) under the Nazis4. The third story depicts a case of German-Jewish solidarity against the backdrop of the Kristallnacht (1938). After witnessing the pogrom, two petitbourgeois shopowners - an ethnic German man and his Jewish wife - commit suicide. In the postwar years, stories of solidarity between ethnic Germans and German Jews were recalled as examples of humanity in inhumane times. The most prominent case was that of Joachim Gottschalk, a film actor who committed suicide in 1941 along with his Jewish wife, actress Meta Wolff, and their son. The Gottschalk case was picked up in Hans Schweikart's novella Es wird schon nicht so schlimm (It won't get so bad); Kurt Maetzig's film Ehe im Schatten (Marriage in the Shadows), produced by DEFA in 1947, was based on Schweikart's book. …

The Founders' Second Amendment: Origins of the Right to Bear Arms. By Stephen P. Halbrook. (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008. xii, 425 pp. $28.95, ISBN 978-1-56663-792-3.)

The Founders' Second Amendment is not, strictly speaking, a work of scholarly history; rather, it is an exercise in constitutional advocacy—a work of law office history on steroids. Stephen P. Halbrook, a longtime gun rights advocate and lawyer, has been a tireless champion of the gun rights cause for more than two decades. Much of the material in this book has appeared in earlier law review articles by Halbrook, who has published in such venerable journals as Tennessee Journal of Law and Policy and the Texas Review of Law and Politics. Rather than seek to understand how the Second Amendment emerged out of the complex cultural, social, and political landscape of revolutionary America, Halbrook seeks to find a useable past for modern gun rights advocates and litigators. Although Halbrook moves beyond the cliché list of sources often invoked by participants in this acrimonious debate, his argument rests on a highly questionable reading Pennsylvania Constitution and the letters of Thomas Jefferson.

Comment on Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., “Restoring the Rule of Law to Public Administration: What Frank Goodnow Got Right and Leonard White Didn’t,” and Donald P. Moynihan, “‘Our Usable Past’: A Historical Contextual Approach to Administrative Values,”PAR 69(5)

Comment on Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., “Restoring the Rule of Law to Public Administration: What Frank Goodnow Got Right and Leonard White Didn’t,” and Donald P. Moynihan, “‘Our Usable Past’: A Historical Contextual Approach to Administrative Values,”<i>PAR</i> 69(5)

Muriel Rukeyser, America, and the “Melville Revival”

Whilst Muriel Rukeyser's poetic affinity with Walt Whitman is generally acknowledged, the close relation of her work and poetic sensibility to the thought and writing of Herman Melville has somehow gone relatively unnoticed, and almost wholly unexamined. In 1918, Van Wyck Brooks called for the creation of a usable past that would energize America by recasting its cultural tradition. His plea addressed the need to rebuild a national heritage via the rediscovery of culturally “great” figures. By the late 1930s, many scholars and writers had answered the call, and the new discipline of American studies was beginning to take shape, aided by a reclamation of one of the country's greatest, most neglected, writers – Herman Melville. This was also the period in which Rukeyser “came of age”; a time when political and international conflicts and economic crises generated both the stark, documentary representation of present social realities and the drive to retrieve or reconstruct a more golden age that might mobilize a dislocated nation. The following article examines the importance of Melville to Rukeyser's work, and situates her within the “Melville revival” as an important figure in the movement throughout the first half of the twentieth century to reconstruct an American cultural character.

Menachem Kellner on Maimonides and the Mystics: The Search for a Usable Theological Past

Menachem Kellner on Maimonides and the Mystics: The Search for a Usable Theological Past