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This volume presents various aspects of public history practices in Poland, alongside their historical development and theoretical reflections on public history. Despite a long tradition and variety of forms of public history, the very term "public history", or literally speaking "history in the public sphere", has been in use in Poland only since the 2010s. This edited collection contains chapters that focus on numerous practices and media forms in public history including historical memory, heritage tourism, historical re-enactments, memes and graphic novels, films, archives, archaeology and oral history. As such, the volume brings together the Polish experiences to wider international aud...
This book presents a survey of approaches to dealing with ‘rival histories’ in the classroom, arguing that approaching this problem requires great sensitivity to differing national, educational and narrative contexts. Contested narratives and disputed histories have long been an important issue in history-teaching all over the world, and have even been described as the ‘history’ or ‘culture’ wars. In this book, authors from across the globe ponder the question “what can teachers do (and what are they doing) to address conflicting narratives of the same past?”, and puts an epistemological issue at the heart of the discussion: what does it mean for the epistemology of history, ...
This book analyses the role of history education in conflict and post-conflict societies, describing common history textbook projects in Europe, the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Far East and the Middle East. Ever since the emergence of the modern school system and the implementation of compulsory education, textbooks have been seen as privileged media. The knowledge they convey is relatively persistent and moreover highly selective: every textbook author must choose and omit, condense, structure, reduce, and generalize information. Within this context, history textbooks are often at the centre of interest. There are unquestionably significant differences regarding homogeneity or plurality of i...
An authoritative overview of the developing field of public history reflecting theory and practice around the globe This unique reference guides readers through this relatively new field of historical inquiry, exploring the varieties and forms of public history, its relationship with popular history, and the ways in which the field has evolved internationally over the past thirty years. Comprised of thirty-four essays written by a group of leading international scholars and public history practitioners, the work not only introduces readers to the latest scholarly academic research, but also to the practice and pedagogy of public history. It pays equal attention to the emergence of public his...
This Handbook provides a systematic and analytical approach to the various dimensions of international, ethnic and domestic conflict over the uses of national history in education since the end of the Cold War. With an upsurge in political, social and cultural upheaval, particularly since the fall of state socialism in Europe, the importance of history textbooks and curricula as tools for influencing the outlooks of entire generations is thrown into sharp relief. Using case studies from 58 countries, this book explores how history education has had the potential to shape political allegiances and collective identities. The contributors highlight the key issues over which conflict has emerged – including the legacies of socialism and communism, war, dictatorships and genocide – issues which frequently point to tensions between adhering to and challenging the idea of a cohesive national identity and historical narrative. Global in scope, the Handbook will appeal to a diverse academic audience, including historians, political scientists, educationists, psychologists, sociologists and scholars working in the field of cultural and media studies.
Sinn und Zweck der Geschichte werden immer wieder neu hinterfragt, weil sich Gesellschaften ständig neu verorten. Davon ist der Geschichtsunterricht direkt betroffen: "Warum Geschichtsunterricht?" Autor*innen aus 18 Ländern und vier Kontinenten fragen daher nach der Bedeutung des Geschichtsunterrichts aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven: mit theoretischen Überlegungen und Modellen, mit Bezügen aus der Unterrichtspraxis und Erkenntnissen aus der Forschung. Die Publikation präsentiert eine ganze Reihe von Gründen, warum Geschichte heute unbedingt unterrichtet werden muss. Sie liest sich als Plädoyer für einen kompetenten Umgang mit Geschichte in heutigen Gesellschaften.
The story of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk epitomizes one of the most important and dramatic clashes in the European culture of memory and public history in last decades. The museum became the arch-enemy for the nationalist right-wing as “cosmopolitan”, “pseudo-universalistic”, “pacifistic” and “not Polish enough”. Paweł Machcewicz, historian and museum`s founding director, was removed from his position by the Law and Justice government immediately after opening the museum to the public. In his book he presents this story as a part of cultural wars that tear apart not only Poland but also many countries in Europe and on other continents.
This volume analyzes US policy toward communist-ruled Poland in the fields of diplomacy, economy, culture, and public diplomacy. It highlights the limitations in developing cooperation between democratic and nondemocratic countries resulting from the Cold War conflict. No comprehensive account of US policy toward Poland from 1956 to 1968 has emerged in historiography. This book aims to answer why, since the political changes of the Polish October 1956, Washington ceased to see Polish affairs as “Soviet-related matters.” Instead, it recognized communist-ruled Poland as a separate political entity among other Kremlin-dependent states in Eastern Europe. This policy, introduced by the Dwight...
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book explores how the socially disputed period of the Cold War is remembered in today’s history classroom. Applying a diverse set of methodological strategies, the authors map the dividing lines in and between memory cultures across the globe, paying special attention to the impact the crisis-driven age of our present has on images of the past. Authors analysing educational media point to ambivalence, vagueness and contradictions in textbook narratives understood to be echoes of societal and academic controversies. Others focus on teachers and the history classroom, showing how unresolved political issues create tensions in history education. They render visible how teachers struggle to handle these challenges by pretending that what they do is ‘just history’. The contributions to this book unveil how teachers, backgrounding the political inherent in all memory practices, often nourish the illusion that the history in which they are engaged is all about addressing the past with a reflexive and disciplined approach.
This book examines the life of the Townsend family and the events that occurred during the period of 1856–1926 that shaped an expanding American West. Bryant and Julia (Riley) Townsend and their three children were born into an age of rapid change and competing cultures. Witnesses to a century of events that shaped a nation, their lives define the complexities and challenges of incomers who arrived in an expanding American West. From the Gold Rush to the California oil boom, from slavery to female suffrage, from Indian Wars to World Wars, the Townsends lived through violent upheavals, outlasting cities, societal beliefs and entire ways of life. Married in a mining camp in Nevada and reloca...