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Diplomats and Dreamers
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 378

Diplomats and Dreamers

This book chronicles a family of diplomats who experienced the world in transition. Subjects of capricious fate, they forged a destiny as a family that overcame some of the most cataclysmic events of the twentieth century. Diplomats and Dreamers is a family biography that begins with the careers of the parents in 1887 and ends with the death of Nadejda Stancioff, their eldest child, in 1957. The context of historical developments in an uncertain period of European history highlights their lives. Members of the haute bourgeoisie, this accomplished family is noteworthy for an unflagging ability to survive and persist with success and grace. Furthermore, this book addresses issues of gender by using the careers of the Stancioff women as exemplars of how a woman could develop her life in an atmosphere of strict gender divisions in labor. The Stancioff women's way of fitting into the mainstream of elite society is yet another model of a new generation of women who stepped beyond the narrow expectations of what their gender could achieve. Based on unexplored, unpublished primary materials, this book enriches both women's history and European history.

The Forest Traveler
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 194

The Forest Traveler

The Forest Traveler is a penetrating inquiry into the life and activities of one of the most important national heroes of Bulgarian history. Georgi Stoikov Rakovski's life (1821-1867) mirrored a period of turbulent events in Southeast Europe. This in-depth biography unfolds against the backdrop of the declining Ottoman empire as Bulgaria underwent a period of national renaissance in the nineteenth century. The activists who spearheaded attempts to liberate their country from Ottoman rule were romantic idealists who borrowed their theories of nation building and national rights from abroad. As a literary figure and a revolutionary, Rakovski's image colors most Bulgarians' perception of their modern history. This work aims to strip away much of the mythological aura that surrounds Rakovski's life and to present this revered revolutionary as a more realistic figure.

Remaking Identities
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 319

Remaking Identities

For centuries conquerors, missionaries, and political movements acting in the name of a single god, nation, or race have sought to remake human identities. Tracing the rise of exclusive forms of identity over the past 1500 years, this innovative book explores both the creation and destruction of exclusive identities, including those based on nationalism and monotheistic religion. Benjamin Lieberman focuses on two critical phases of world history: the age of holy war and conversion, and the age of nationalism and racism. His cases include the rise of Islam, the expansion of medieval Christianity, Spanish conquests in the Americas, Muslim expansion in India, settler expansion in North America, nationalist cleansing in modern Europe and Asia, and Nazi Germany’s efforts to build a racial empire. He convincingly shows that efforts to transplant and expand new identities have paradoxically generated long periods of both stability and explosive violence that remade the human landscape around the world.

Matters of Spirit
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 197

Matters of Spirit

This book offers a radically new interpretation of the entire philosophy of J. G. Fichte by showing the impact of nineteenth-century psychological techniques and technologies on the formation of his theory of the imagination—the very centerpiece of his philosophical system. By situating Fichte’s philosophy within the context of nineteenth-century German science and culture, the book establishes a new genealogy, one that shows the extent to which German idealism’s transcendental account of the social remains dependent upon the scientific origins of psychoanalysis in the material techniques of Mesmerism. The book makes it clear that the rational, transcendental account of spirit, imagination, and the social has its source in the psychological phenomena of affective rapport. Specifically, the imagination undergoes a double displacement in which it is ultimately subject to external influence, the influence of a material technique, or, in short, a technology.

State, Faith, and Nation in Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Lands
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 345

State, Faith, and Nation in Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Lands

This book argues that religious affiliation was the most influential shaper of communal identity in the Ottoman era.

Balkan Smoke
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 321

Balkan Smoke

In Balkan Smoke, Mary Neuburger leads readers along the Bulgarian-Ottoman caravan routes and into the coffeehouses of Istanbul and Sofia. She reveals how a remote country was drawn into global economic networks through tobacco production and consumption and in the process became modern. In writing the life of tobacco in Bulgaria from the late Ottoman period through the years of Communist rule, Neuburger gives us much more than the cultural history of a commodity; she provides a fresh perspective on the genesis of modern Bulgaria itself. The tobacco trade comes to shape most of Bulgaria's international relations; it drew Bulgaria into its fateful alliance with Nazi Germany and in the postwar ...

People of Faith, People of Jeong (Qing)
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 239

People of Faith, People of Jeong (Qing)

This book, People of Faith, People of Jeong (Qing), seeks to reveal and understand the current state and the future prospective of Asian Canadian immigrant churches (ACIC), including Chinese, Taiwanese, and Korean churches. Starting with a brief chronicle of ACIC history, this book shares the journeys and the stories of current members of lay and clergy from various ACIC. The chapters attempt to explain the influence and the impact that jeong and faith have on these churches, to envisage the future of ACIC, and to draw relevant implications for the betterment of these churches going into the future. This book reflects the real voices and sentiments of the first- and the second-generation mem...

Byzantium after the Nation
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 411

Byzantium after the Nation

Dimitris Stamatopoulos undertakes the first systematic comparison of the dominant ethnic historiographic models and divergences elaborated by Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, Albanian, Romanian, Turkish, and Russian intellectuals with reference to the ambiguous inheritance of Byzantium. The title alludes to the seminal work of Nicolae Iorga in the 1930s, Byzantium after Byzantium, that argued for the continuity between the Byzantine and the Ottoman empires. The idea of the continuity of empires became a kind of touchstone for national historiographies. Rival Balkan nationalisms engaged in a "war of interpretation" as to the nature of Byzantium, assuming different positions of adoption or rejection...

The Making of a Nation in the Balkans
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 291

The Making of a Nation in the Balkans

The nineteenth century was the epoch of nation building for the Bulgarians under Ottoman rule. In this book, comparisons and analogies are made between the Bulgarian Revival and other regions, epochs, ideological trends, and events. These latter are taken from two major areas—Western Europe ("Renaissance," "Enlightenment," "Romanticism," the French Revolution, and national liberation movements), and Russia (the "agrarian question," "populism" and "utopian socialism," "revolutionary democrats," and the Russian Revolution of 1905). Historical facts about the Revival were instrumentalized for political purposes, such as the fostering of national and state loyalties through the reproduction of identities, or, directly, as the legitimating/contesting of a current political regime under the guise of disputes over historical legacy. Ideological mobilization took place in the form of nationalism, right-wing authoritarianism (shading into fascism), and communism. The author sets in relief some of the mechanisms and logic of the two grand narratives under the sign of nationalism, and of Marxism.

The Balkans
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 400

The Balkans

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2011-02-17
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  • Publisher: OUP Oxford

The Balkans has long been a place of encounter among different peoples, religions, and civilizations, resulting in a rich cultural tapestry and mosaic of nationalities. But it has also been burdened by a traumatic post-colonial experience. The transition from traditional multinational empires to modern nation-states has been accompanied by large-scale political violence that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the permanent displacement of millions more. Mark Biondich examines the origins of these conflicts, while treating the region as an integral part of modern European history, shaped by much the same forces and intellectual impulses. It reminds us that political viole...