scholarly journals LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE: POLYBIUS AND THE PROGRESS OF ROME

2017 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Walker Moore
Keyword(s):  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Careful Study ◽  
Learning From Experience ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
The Past ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Relationship

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Polybius’ work is the frequency with which the historian pauses his historical narrative and embarks upon digressions, including entire books devoted to the topics of geography (Book 34), historiography (Book 12) and, most famously, the discussion of the Roman constitution in Book 6. Such digressions have naturally drawn the attention of modern scholars, but in the past the tendency in Polybian scholarship had been to read such digressions in isolation, and even to deny their relevance outside of their immediate context. While it is true that these digressions cannot be regarded as strict blue-prints upon which Polybius’ historical narrative is to be precisely mapped, more recent scholarship has suggested that such passages are not as irrelevant to this narrative as they had for a long time appeared. Moreover, a parallel trend in Polybian scholarship is currently calling for a renewed focus into the composition of his historical narrative in order to apply the level of scrutiny to the text of Polybius previously reserved, for example, for his more famous predecessors, Herodotus and Thucydides. An appropriate recognition of the relationship between the more famous passages of Polybius’ work found in his digressions and the broader narrative of historical events will help to alleviate this deficiency. Careful study of the text of Polybius in this manner will reveal that his historical narrative does not simply represent a bare record of historical facts but is rather composed by the historian in a way that demonstrates and reinforces the principles presented in the more abstract digressions, which have attracted more attention.

Figures of Memory

2019 ◽  
pp. 51-62
Author(s):  
Farriba Schulz
Keyword(s):  
Text And Image ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Holocaust Education ◽  
The Past ◽  
Recent Addition ◽  
Historical Photographs ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Journal Entries ◽  
Graphic Interpretation ◽  
Anne Frank

Artikelbeginn:[English title and abstract below] Als global bekanntes Erinnerungsnarrativ nimmt Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank (erste deutsche Fassung 1950) einen bedeutenden Part in der Holocaust Education ein. Dabei beteiligt sich die grafische Adaption von Ari Folmans und David Polonskys Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank. Graphic Diary (2017) auf zweierlei Art am Fortschreiben des kulturellen Gedächtnisses; einerseits in seiner Geformtheit durch die Publikation selbst und darüber hinaus in seiner Organisiertheit aufgrund der institutionalisierten Kommunikation (vgl. Assmann 1988, S. 12). Figures of MemoryAnne Frank’s Diary between Text and Image, Word and Symbol Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Interpretation by Ari Folman and David Polonsky (2017) is a recent addition to a sequence of editions that have shaped the perception of Anne Frank’s story. At the same time, the ethics and aesthetics of remembrance have been consistently discussed. These discussions have been fueled by discourses on memory as well as by the reimagination of the past by new generations. As Marianne Hirsch states »Postmemory’s connection to the past is [...] actually mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation« (Hirsch 2012). Ari Folman and David Polonsky work with those imaginative approaches and reshape historical events on the visual and the verbal narrative levels. As with Waltz with Bashir (2009), on which Folman and Polonsky collaborated successfully as author and illustrator, Anne Frank’s Diary is also an extraordinary testimony of war based on extensive research. Intermedial references, such as historical photographs, documentaries and journal entries add authenticity to Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Interpretation and lead the reader on a journey back in time. This article discusses the relationship between the visual representation of memory in the Diary and how it goes about narrating the story, and it examines this graphic novel’s potential for shaping and reshaping the reader’s perception of history.

When a historical analogy fails: Current political events and collective memory contestation in the news

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 130-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis LF Lee ◽  
Joseph Man Chan ◽  
Dennis KK Leung
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Historical Analogy ◽  
The Relationship

Collective memory studies have emphasized how people can utilize important historical events as analogies to make sense of current happenings. This article argues that the invocation of historical analogies may, under certain circumstances, become an occasion for people to negotiate and contest the significance of the historical events. Focusing on Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement in 2014, this article analyzes how references to the 1989 Tiananmen Incident emerged in the news as a dominant historical analogy when the movement began, foregrounding the possibility of state violence. But when state violence did not materialize, the authorities, young protesters, and radical activists started to contest the relevance of Tiananmen. The analogy was largely abandoned by the movement’s end. The analysis illustrates the recursive character of the relationship between past and present events: after the past is invoked to aid interpretations of the present, present developments may urge people to reevaluate the past.

scholarly journals Poetic Frameworks and Narrative Procedures of Bosnia and Herzegovina Novels about Kulin Ban

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4(17)) ◽  
pp. 57-72
Author(s):  
Melida Travančić
Keyword(s):  
Past History ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Narrative Texts ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

This paperwork presents the literary constructions of Kulin Ban's personality in contemporary Bosnian literature on the example of three novels: Zlatko Topčić Kulin (1994), Mirsad Sinanović Kulin (2007), and Irfan Hrozović Sokolarov sonnet (2016). The themes of these novels are real historical events and historical figures, and we try to present the way(s) of narration and shape the image of the past and the way the past-history-literature triangle works. Documentary discourse is often involved in the relationship between faction and fiction in the novel. Yet, as can be seen from all three novels, it is a subjective discourse on the perception of Kulin Ban today and the period of his reign, a period that could be characterized as a mimetic time in which great, sudden, and radical changes take place. If the poetic extremes of postmodernist prose are on the one hand flirting with trivia, and on the other sophisticated meta- and intertextual prose, then the Bosnian-Herzegovinian romance of the personality of Kulina Ban fully confirms just such a range of stylistic-narrative tendencies of narrative texts of today's era.

From the Archaeology of Childhood to Modern Children Visiting Archaeological Museums

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Lambrugo
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
General Public ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Interesting Point ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
Long Time ◽  
History Of ◽  
Children And Childhood ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter addresses three interconnected topics, beginning with a short overview of the archaeology of children and childhood in Italy, explaining how and why the Italian contribution to the topic has been very recent. The chapter then moves on to explore the relationship between modern children, Italian scholars of ancient history of art and archaeology, and museums; it notes that for a very long time Italian universities and museums have not been interested in developing didactic archaeology at all, especially when the spectators were children, whether of pre-school or older age. Finally, returning to children in the past, two noteworthy case studies of the presentation of ancient children at exhibitions are illustrated as an interesting point of convergence between current archaeological studies in Italy on childhood in the ancient world, and the newly generated need to communicate to the general public the result of research works.

scholarly journals “A horrific photo of a drowned Syrian child”: Humanitarian photography and NGO media strategies in historical perspective

2015 ◽  
Vol 97 (900) ◽  
pp. 1121-1155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heide Fehrenbach ◽  
Davide Rodogno
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  
Humanitarian Organizations ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Fundraising Strategies ◽  
The Media ◽  
Iconic Status ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Visual Technologies ◽  
Historical Examination

AbstractThis article is a historical examination of the use of photography in the informational and fundraising strategies of humanitarian organizations. Drawing on archival research and recent scholarship, it shows that the figure of the dead or suffering child has been a centrepiece of humanitarian campaigns for over a century and suggests that in earlier eras too, such photos, under certain conditions, could “go viral” and achieve iconic status. Opening with last year's photo campaign involving the case of 3-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, whose body washed up on a Turkish beach near Bodrum in early September 2015, the article draws on select historical examples to explore continuities and ruptures in the narrative framing and emotional address of photos depicting dead or suffering children, and in the ethically and politically charged decisions by NGO actors and the media to publish and distribute such images. We propose that today, as in the past, the relationship between media and humanitarian NGOs remains symbiotic despite contemporary claims about the revolutionary role of new visual technologies and social media.

An Earwitness to History: Street Hawkers and Their Calls in Early 20th-Century Egypt

2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ziad Fahmy
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Middle East ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Five Senses ◽  
Embodied History

Historians have recently started listening to the past, contributing to what David Howes has described as a “sensorial revolution in the humanities and social sciences.” In the same way that all five senses are relevant to our daily understanding of the world around us, they should be vital to our understanding of historical events. Interpreting how peoples of the past sensorially experienced their world makes possible a richer, more comprehensive grasp of historical events. A sensorially grounded historical narrative is an embodied history that is connected to everyday people and lives. Historians of the Middle East, however, with few exceptions, are still largely producing soundproof, devocalized narratives of the past.

scholarly journals “I Long For My Mother’s Bread”: Poetry as Integrative, Historical Practice in the Palestinian Context

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Frederick Eldridge
Keyword(s):  
Poetic Form ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Narrative History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Traumatic History ◽  
Cognitive Faculties ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Historical Practice

This paper is an adaption of a longer investigation of the relationship between politics and poetry in the Palestinian context, focusing on the work of Mahmoud Darwish. For this selection, I have adapted the sections pertaining to the efficacy of poetry in the context of historical events–specifically the traumatic history of the Palestinians. It is my argument that artistic practices like poetry act primarily as a means of narrative creation that skillfully integrate the experiences of the poet and thus negotiate the experiences of the listeners in order to create new meaning. This dialogue between audience and poet creates a persuasive and novel movement within the conceptual field; thinking about something in terms of something else (metaphor). This has the effect of making the poet an intractable source of historical meaning. The questions of the past, a dizzying array of dissonant occurrences, fractured experiences, and selected memory, find cogency within the poetic form. This artistic formation only gains this cogency through a precise system of cognitive faculties, which are shared by both poet and audience. The poetry of Mahmoud Darwish acts as a means of understanding history in the context of the present; creating an integrated narrative-history, which has important implications on experience, implicating present action through a ‘reading’ of the past.

Framing the Qin collapse: redaction and authorship of the Shiji 史記

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chun Fung Tong
Keyword(s):  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sima Qian ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Authorial Voice

Abstract This paper explores the relationship between the Shiji’s authors and their sources by examining how they constructed the historical narrative of the fall of the Qin Empire. While Sima Qian and his father Sima Tan have been traditionally credited as the authors of the Shiji, their authorial voice was recently challenged by scholars. In response to the revisionist view, this paper discerns that the Shiji maintains a consistent narrative of the Qin collapse, which is generated through rigorous source redactions whereby Sima Qian and/or Sima Tan were able to incorporate their ideological agenda and personal opinions in subtle ways that are almost invisible to the reader. With such anonymity, the historiographers succeeded in establishing the authority of their historical narratives. Rather than simply juxtaposing the narratives of their sources, the Simas indeed authored their “patterned past” of the Qin collapse. However, the past constructed in the Shiji comprises various independent narratives whose plausibility is contingent upon the respective epistemic quality of their evidence rather than a harmonious discourse.

The Philosophy of Labor Legislation: Presidential Address, American Association for Labor Legislation

1914 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
William F. Willoughby
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Address ◽  
Great Part ◽  
The Body ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Mass Action ◽  
Careful Study ◽  
The Past ◽  
Labor Legislation ◽  
Current Events ◽  
Concrete Action

Careful study of any period will reveal that back of all the complex happenings marking such period there have been certain fundamental impulses, certain human strivings, of which the happenings themselves have been, in great part, but the manifestations, or expression in concrete action. It is the prime function of the historian to discover, explain the rise, trace the development and make known the results of these forces which have dominated mass action in the past. Only as this is done do the myriad of events going to make up the body of historical data assume a real meaning, and historical narrative become other than a dry tabulation of detail.A distinguished historian, E. A. Freeman, has well said that if history is past politics, politics is present history. If it is of value for the historian to trace out and place in their true light those great movements of the past, how much more important it is that the student of present-day politics should, by a similar examination of current events and efforts, seek to make known, and interpret the forces and aspirations now dictating the collective action of peoples.

The Rise of the ‘Right-Hand House’ in the History and Historiography of the Xhosa

1975 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 113-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.B. Peires
Keyword(s):  
Historical Events ◽  
Historical Explanation ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Right Hand ◽  
Great House ◽  
Privileged Status ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Do So

Among the Xhosa the institution of the ‘Right-Hand House’ acts both as a political charter and as an historical explanation. As a political charter it defines the relationship between the Ngqika Paramount (the Right-Hand House) of the Ciskei ‘Bantu Homeland’ and the Gcaleka Paramount (the Great House) of the Transkei Homeland. As it presently stands, the essence of this relationship is that the Ngqika Paramount recognizes the Gcaleka Paramount as his superior in rank, but without accepting any implications of practical political subordination. This position was defined by J.H. Soga, the standard authority on Xhosa history and customs, and himself an umNgqika, as follows: By courtesy, matters affecting Xosa customs might occasionally be referred to a chief of the older [i.e., Gcaleka] branch especially when a precedent was involved, but this did not prevent the Right-Hand House from following its own line of conduct, irrespective of what that precedent might be, should it choose to do so. Laws promulgated by the court of the Gaikas [Ngqika] were not subject to interference by the Gcaleka chief.In terms of historical explanation, secondary authorities from 1846 to 1975 have singled out the privileged status of the Right-Hand House as the principal cause of Xhosa political fragmentation.Whereas historians of Africa normally agree that institutions and their myths of origin are, at least in part, susceptible to historical interpretation and reconstruction, they may justifiably be more doubtful of an historical approach which seeks to explain historical events by imputing to the past the continuous retrogressive operation of institutions which can be seen to be operating in certain ways in the present. In this regard the present exercise has two aims.

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