Making History

2004 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry J. Elam Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
Theatrical Production ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
The Past ◽  
Dramatic Criticism ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
American Theatre History

These three quotes will serve as a starting point as I enter into this discussion of the import and role of theatre history. While I make a case for theatre history generally, my examples and thesis are drawn from African American theatre history most specifically. My argument is for a critical historicism, a process that recognizes the need to historicize and situate dramatic criticism as well as the need to theorize history or, as Walter Benjamin suggests, to “rub history against the grain.” Rubbing history against the grain means that we must interrogate the past in order to inform the present, remaining cognizant of the material conditions that not only shape theatrical production but the historical interpretations of production. It implies a need to work against conventional historical narratives and the ways in which history has been told in the past.

The Perils and Promises of Disability Biography

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim E. Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
Cultural Discourses ◽  
The Past ◽  
Helen Keller ◽  
Rigorous Study ◽  
Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Biographical scholarship provides a means by which to understand the past. Disability biography writes disabled people into historical narratives and cultural discourses, acknowledging power, action, and consequence. Disability biography also analyzes the role of ableism in shaping relationships, systems of power, and societal ideals. When written with skilled storytelling, rigorous study, nuance, and insight, disability biography enriches analyses of people living in the past. Disability biography makes clear the multiple ways by which individuals and communities labor, make kinship, persevere, and both resist and create social change. When using a disability analysis, biographies of disabled people (particularly people famous for their disability, such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Helen Keller) reveal the relationality and historically embedded nature of disability. In an ableist world, such acts can be revolutionary.

The Achievements of the Douglass Company in North America: 1758–1774

1982 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
David D. Mays
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
North America ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
The West ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Theatre History ◽  
A Company

On Monday, October 16, 1758., Hugh Gaine reported a novelty. “Friday last,” he told his readers in the New-York Mercury, “arrived here from the West Indies, a Company of Comedians; some Part of which were here in the Year 1753.” This brief notice, which went on to assure its readers that the company had “an ample Certificate of their Private as well as publick Qualifications,” marks the beginning of the most significant event in American theatre history: the establishment of the professional theatre on this continent. The achievements of the Company of Comedians during its sixteen-year residence in North America are virtually without parallel in the history of the theatre, and have not received sufficient recognition by historians and scholars.

Contesting the past on the Chinese Internet: Han-centrism and mnemonic practices

2019 ◽  
pp. 175069801987599
Author(s):  
Yi Wang
Keyword(s):  
Digital Technology ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Nationalist Movement ◽  
Online Groups ◽  
Authoritarian State ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Truth ◽  
Historical Accounts

Digital technology has brought critical changes to mnemonic practices in China, such as the empowerment of social groups to discover previously underrepresented historical accounts and produce alternative historical narratives. This article examines the mnemonic practices of Han-centrism, a type of ethnic and cultural nationalist movement based on the Chinese Internet. It analyzes how Han-centrist netizens reinterpret national history through their efforts to rediscover forgotten historical narratives of glory and trauma. It suggests that digital technology in China facilitates the emergence of online groups that are dedicated to the struggle for “historical truth” and social-cultural changes, motivated by a crisis of identity. Their mnemonic practices may be partly tolerated by the authoritarian state under some conditions. However, given China’s complicated and conflictual history, such online groups can easily turn the Internet into a battlefield of nationalism. This article highlights the confusion and contestation of memory and identity in contemporary China and the role of digital technology in the long battle.

History Repeating Itself. The function of turning points and continuity in three historical narratives on operetta

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 102
Author(s):  
Mikael Strömberg
Keyword(s):  
Turning Points ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Narrative Strategy ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

The article’s primary aim is to discuss the function of turning points and continuity within historiography. That a historical narrative, produced at a certain time and place, influence the way the historian shapes and develops the argument is problematized by an emphasis on the complex relationship between turning points and continuity as colligatory concepts within an argumentative framework. Aided by a number of examples from three historical narratives on operetta, the article stresses the importance of creating new narratives about the past. Two specific examples from the history of operetta, the birth of the genre and the role of music, are used to illustrate the need to revise not only the use of source material and the narrative strategy used, but also how the argument proposed by the historian gathers strength. The interpretation of turning points and continuity as colligatory concepts illustrate the need to revise earlier historical narratives when trying to counteract the repetitiveness of history.

scholarly journals “A turn to ontology” in neo-kantianism (P. Natorp and E. Lask)

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 51-65
Author(s):  
Leonid Yu. Kornilaev ◽  
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Total Domination ◽  
The Past ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
General Logic ◽  
Ontological Turn ◽  
The Way

In the late 1910s and early 1920s, the intellectual situation within neo-Kantianism began to change: there were philosophical projects attempting to overcome the total domination of epistemology in Neo-Kantian doctrines and making place for ontology. Ontological tendencies are typical mainly for P. Natorps’s projects of general logic and E. Lask’s logic of philosophy. I analyze the continuity of Natorp’s early epistemological ideas, developed in the spirit of the Marburg interpretation of Kant’s transcendentalism, and his later ideas, focused on speculative ontological constructions. In particular, I investigate the methodo­logical relationship between the characteristics of knowledge in his early and late philo­sophy: dynamism, creativity, categoriality, unity of the starting point and the goal. The ba­sic structure of Natorps’s project of general logic is reconstructed. Lask’s main texts re­veal the provisions that open the way to an ontological turn. These factors include a cri­tique of the identification of the realm of value and that of the extrasensory in the meta­physics of the past, the postulation of a prereflexive stage of knowledge, interpreting the doctrine of judgment as a doctrine of immanent sense, and treating truth as a con­stitutive-aleteological phenomenon. Both Neo-Kantian philosophers build their systems on an on­tological foundation, making subjectivity dependent on objectivity in cognition, which can be interpreted as a kind of retreat from Kantian criticism. The ontological basis is ex­pressed in the postulation of a universal character of the logical expressed in Natorp’s idea of “poiesis” and Lask’s idea of “panarchy of the Logos”. The analysis of Natorp’s and Lask’s onto-epistemological projects allows us to clarify and reveal the role of Neo-Kantianism in the formation of the new ontologies of the 20th century a.k.a. the “ontologi­cal turn”.

“Of the New-World a new discoverie”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Bross
Keyword(s):  
New Spain ◽  
New World ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
National Archives ◽  
Oliver Cromwell ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Gift Book

Chapter 2 analyzes Thomas Gage’s The English-American (1648), which urges Oliver Cromwell to invade New Spain (the “Western Design”). Gage, an English Catholic, lived in New Spain for twelve years, apostasized and returned to England as a Protestant minister, and published accounts of his travels. Gage’s works imagine an alternative history in which England, not Spain, backed Columbus’s explorations and prognosticates a worldwide English empire. He presents himself as a latter-day Columbus, offering the discovery of America to Cromwell in the role of King Henry VII. The coda takes a 1628 document preserved in the British National Archives as a starting point to consider how the Victorian Calendar of State Papers and especially one of its editors (and author of the children’s gift-book Hearts of Oak), W. Noel Sainsbury, made meaning of such materials, establishing “what the past will have meant” in the late nineteenth century and beyond.

ROLE OF EMOTIONAL LAYER IN MUSEUM EXPERIENCE. NARRATION ON THE HOLOCAUST IN CONTEMPORARY HISTORICAL MUSEUM

2012 ◽  
Vol 165 (3) ◽  
pp. 171-185
Author(s):  
Elżbieta NIEROBA
Keyword(s):  
State Of The Art ◽  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Museum Experience ◽  
Mechanisms Of Memory

The starting point for the discussion are the concepts of Pierre Nora and Alison Landsberg. According to P. Nora, the passing away of eyewitnesses to history transfers the obligation to store the traces of the past onto archiving institutions (including museums). A. Landsberg, in turn, reveals the process in which the mechanisms of memory shaping in the contemporary society become dependent on the state-of-the-art technologies and pop-culture products. Museums of the Holocaust are searching for an appropriate language to talk about the Holocaust in a situation where, like other museum institutions, they have to adjust to the new expectations of the audience, and tailor their space and ways of exhibition to the current cultural conditions and new means of learning. Empirical investigations have proven that nowadays receivers do not merely expect to approach the past intellectually, but also to cross the passive boundary of observation, and desire to have sensual experience of history. From this perspective, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum as a physical trace of the past, in accordance with Aleida Assmann’s concept of “a memory of place”, provides the visitors with sensual and emotional experience. In its further part, the article presents strategies for using the products of popular culture for processing and describing historical events, the ways of organizing museum space which affects the emotions and the imagination of receivers and invites them to discover history for themselves. Also, it discusses the resulting concerns about the potential trivialization of the communicated message.

A History of African American Theatre. By Errol G. Hill and James V. Hatch. Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; pp. 608. $130 cloth.

2005 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-129
Author(s):  
Harry Elam
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Black Theatre ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
American Theatre History ◽  
Daunting Challenge

Over the more than twenty years since the publication of two profoundly influential collections—Errol Hill's two-volume anthology of critical essays The Theatre of Black Americans (1980) and James V. Hatch's first edition of the play anthology Black Theatre USA (1974)—there has been considerable activity in African American theatre scholarship. Yet even as scholars have produced new collections of historical and critical essays that cover a wide range of African American theatre history, book-length studies that document particular moments in the historical continuum such as the Harlem Renaissance, and Samuel Hay's broader study African American Theatre: An Historical and Critical Analysis (1994), no one until now has written a comprehensive study of African American theatre history. Into this void have stepped two of the aforementioned distinguished scholars of African American theatre, Errol G. Hill and James V. Hatch. To be certain, writing a comprehensive history of African American theatre poses a daunting challenge for anyone hearty enough to undertake it. Where to begin? What to include and exclude? With their study, A History of African American Theatre, Hill and Hatch show themselves indeed worthy of the challenge. They explore the evolution of African American theatre across time and space, documenting the particular efforts of artists, writers, scholars, and practitioners, from inside as well as outside the United States, that have had an impact on our understanding of African American theatre. The authors make clear that the definition of African American theatre from the beginning has been in constant flux and that it has been affected by the changing social times in American as much as it has influenced those times.

‘Experts in truth?’: the politics of retribution in Italy and the role of historians

Modern Italy ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 349-363 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Pezzino
Keyword(s):  
War Crimes ◽  
Professional Skills ◽  
The Past ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
War Crimes Trials ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Expert Consultant ◽  
The One ◽  
Judicial Procedure

There have been many reflections on the relations between the judge and the historian which have concentrated on the differences between these two figures: but what happens in cases where an historian collaborates openly with a judge as an expert consultant? What happens when an investigative office, or a court, asks an historian to reconstruct an event which is subject to a judicial procedure, or when he or she has to pronounce the ‘last word’ on an event or a document? Or, in another possible scenario, what happens when a community asks an historian to pronounce on what happened in the past, in order to ascertain which, between two contesting memories of the representation of an event, is the one which corresponds to what ‘really happened’? In these cases historians are sought out to establish the truth–their professional skills as ‘truth experts’ are called upon. And there is an extraordinary faith that the truth will be discovered. The author reflects on these issues, using as a starting point his own personal experiences as a consultant in some recent Italian war-crimes trials.

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