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Writing Russia offers the first systematic analysis of Anglophone national histories of Russia. By deconstructing preeminent historical works on the history of Russia, this book provides insight into the hidden ideological underpinnings of the texts and their representations of Russia in the West. It demonstrates that historians employ a range of literary techniques to smooth over contradictions in their narratives of Russia, generating a seemingly cohesive depiction of Russia as a liminal, Other nation. This is a process that this book theorises as "discordus", representing an original conceptual framework for examining national history texts. It identifies patterns in the language and emplotment of Anglophone Russian histories across several defining historical epochs from the Mongol conquests to the Putin presidency, revealing the extent to which historians wield the narrative power to "make or break" nations. Postmodern in approach, the work pushes the boundaries of historiography and calls into question the nature of history.
This book offers an interdisciplinary insight into the key debates around information warfare in the digital age and argues that transnational cooperation can mitigate the threat. States and societies are increasingly vulnerable to cyber-enabled information operations. From efforts to divide nations, undermine public policy, manipulate elections, and generate social discord, malign actors use the online realm to wreak havoc on our offline lives. The book explores the digital disinformation dilemma that confronts liberal democracies, reflecting on shared socio-political challenges and solutions to contemporary information operations amongst the Five Eyes states and beyond. The work aims to ge...
Clarifying the Past provides a comprehensive analysis of state-sponsored historical commissions operating in conflicted and divided societies, developing a theoretical and methodological framework within the historical dialogue paradigm, key to understanding the work of such commissions. The theoretical and methodological framework is complemented with an extensive empirical analysis of 27 historical commissions that operated in different social and political contexts from 1990s to the present. The detailed examination of these cases gives a broad perspective into the potential capacities of historical commissions in different settings. Although only sampling the most recent cases, this volu...
This book investigates the increasing circulation and transfer of public policy ideas between the UK, US and Australia since the 1990s. It argues that the upsurge in policy transfer amongst and between these states can be explained by a structural and shared commitment between these states to a distinctive institutional ideology of policy-making. This ideology, it is claimed, is partly a product of the historical proximity of ‘Anglosphere’ states, and in recent years can be traced through the evolution of New Public Management principles through to Third Way communitarianism.
This book shows how a multidisciplinary approach combining conceptual and methodological tools from political history and political science can help to develop a deeper understanding of contemporary political phenomena including democracy, populism, war, and forced migrations, among others. Throughout the eleven chapters, the volume brings together senior academics and early-career scholars to explore this innovative approach through a broad range of case studies which are not specific to any particular nation but are characteristic of contemporaneity worldwide. Both the international character and the interdisciplinary appeal of this book are reinforced by the fact that the editors and contributors come from different countries and diverse academic traditions. This book is aimed at scholars, researchers and postgraduate students interested in interdisciplinary approaches and working on politics and global phenomena in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Nation and the Writing of History in China and Britain explores, through a comparative approach, the reception of the nationalist worldview and its effects on the practice of history in China and Britain. This book proposes that nationalism, rather than a political doctrine, is a way of making sense of the world which results from the combination of a set of definite assumptions. The work analyzes how each one of these premises was accepted and negotiated by literati, intellectuals, historians, and other scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The results of this research showcase how the reception of the new nationalist worldview crucially affected images of the past, the present, and the future in both societies and decisively framed cultural, social, and political debate. In addition, they likewise evidence the fundamental role that historical narratives play in the crystallization of national identities. This book is perfect for readers interested in China and Britain during this time period, but also to anyone attracted to new ways of conceiving nationalism and its role in our world.
This book explores the versatile nature of historical methodology and its use in interdisciplinary research. Based on the historical overview of the appearance of one sort of historical ideas and disappearance of another, the book aims to demonstrate a wide range of possibilities of research in the field and to show how the pursuit of historical truth may facilitate the formation of collective memory and how the application of research tools can explain events in the contemporary world.
National history has once again become a battlefield. In internal political conflicts, which are fought on the terrain of popular culture, museums, schoolbooks, and memorial politics, it has taken on a newly important and contested role. Irrespective of national specifics, the narratives of new nationalism are quite similar everywhere. National history is said to stretch back many centuries, expressesing the historical continuity of a homogeneous people and its timeless character. This people struggles for independence, guided by towering leaders and inspired by the sacrifice of martyrs. Unlike earlier forms of nationalism, the main enemies are no longer neighbouring states, but internationa...
How to Write About the Holocaust is a contribution to ongoing debates in historiography and Holocaust studies. More specifically, it combines the theoretical framework that has developed in historiography in the last half a century with the demands of Holocaust representation. The first part of the book analyzes the newest trends in theory of history, focusing especially on postmodernism, starting from the works of the American historian and theorist Hayden White and tracing the genealogy of the postmodern influence in history both from an epistemological and from a political perspective. The second part continues by incorporating these theoretical developments into specific written examples on the Holocaust. By analyzing major works about it, including Saul Friedländer’s and Dan Stone’s histories of the Holocaust, the book attempts to answer questions like: what is the most appropriate way to write about the Holocaust and what can theory teach us about the practice of history? To conclude, the volume explores the connection between history and literature and asks if the distinction between fact and fiction has become outdated.
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, family history is the place where two great oceans of research are meeting: family historians outside the academy, with traditionally trained, often university-employed historians. This collection is both a testament to dialogue and an analysis of the dynamics of recent family history that derives from the confluence of professional historians with family historians, their common causes and conversations. It brings together leading and emerging Australian and New Zealand scholars to consider the relationship between family history and the discipline of history, and the potential of family history to extend the scope of historical inquiry, even to revitalise the discipline. In Anglo-Western culture, the roots of the discipline’s professionalisation lay in efforts to reconstruct history as objective knowledge, to extend its subject matter and to enlarge the scale of historical enquiry. Family history, almost by definition, is often inescapably personal and localised. How, then, have historians responded to this resurgence of interest in the personal and the local, and how has it influenced the thought and practice of historical enquiry?