Beyond the Bourgeoisie: Rethinking Nation, Culture, and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Central Europ

1998 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl F. Baham

The historyof Central Europe at the end of the nineteenth century (as indeed at the end of the twentieth) is to a large extent the history of the furies of nationalism. The attempt to understand that fact has for a long time been dominated by understandings of nationalism and the mobilization of national identity that are rooted in conceptions of a particularly modern social and political crisis. In this paradigm the rise of nationalism is associated—as it was for many critical observers at the time—with the failure of liberal politics and the general breakdown of an elite-dominated, rational-liberal society in the face of mass politics and the clamor for cultural and political participation by the lower classes. Nationalism in this view is a rejection of the whole liberal paradigm—a turn to a militant, populist “politics in a new key,” to use Carl Schorske's evocative phrase; or, following another imagery, the revenge of the traditionalist, irrational “dark gods” against the rationalism, secular optimism, and elitism of Enlightenment society.

1924 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baron S. A. Korff

For a long time writers on international law took it for granted that the subject of their studies was a relatively recent product of modern civilization, and that the ancient world did not know any system of international law. If we go back to the literature of the nineteenth century, we can find a certain feeling of pride among internationalists that international law was one of the best fruits of our civilization and that it was a system which distinguished us from the ancient barbarians. Some of these writers paid special attention to this question of origins and endeavored to explain why the ancient world never could have had any international law.


Author(s):  
Seth Perry

This concluding chapter discusses the consequences of biblicism in the early national period for subsequent American religious history. It considers bible culture in the later nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on how the corporatization of religious printing amplifed the Bible's status as an abstract commodity. Responding to the arguments put forward by W. P. Strickland in his 1849 History of the American Bible Society, the chapter argues that attaching the Bible's importance to American national identity could not leave the Bible unchanged, because that is not how scripturalization works. It also explains how the Bible's availability for citation and re-citation fundamentally changed the desire, effectiveness, and circumstances of its citation. Finally, it uses the abandoned quarry—empty because it has flled other places—as a figure for the themes of citation, performance, and identity explored in this book.


Author(s):  
Rob van de Schoor

Various aspects of branding can be recognized in the Dutch nineteenthcentury literary book trade, even though for a long time publishers and booksellers shied away from the explicit commercialization of what was considered to be merchandize of superior cultural value. A search for examples of branding reveals that branding studies seem to lack their own heuristic methodology: what can be described as branding is often a relabelling of the findings of ‘old school’ literary studies. Moreover, the history of important nineteenth-century printing houses has yet to be written. Research into branding strategies therefore might be somewhat premature, although the branding concept might be useful for book historians in describing the relations between publisher (printer), author, and reader.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Serge Noiret

AbstractThis article traces the origins and development of public history in Italy, a field not anymore without this name today. Public history in Italy has its roots in historical institutions born in the nineteenth century and in the post WW2 first Italian Republic. The concept of “public use of history” (1993), the important role played by memory issues in post-war society, local and national identity issues, the birth of public archaeology (2015) before public history, the emergence of history festivals in the new millennium are all important moments shaping the history of the field and described in this essay. The foundation of the “Italian Association of Public History” (AIPH) in 2016/2017, and the promotion of an Italian Public History Manifesto (2018) together with the creation of Public History masters in universities, are all concrete signs of a vital development of the field in the Peninsula.


2012 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dehn Gilmore

This essay suggests that conservation debates occasioned by the democratization of the nineteenth-century museum had an important impact on William Makepeace Thackeray’s reimagination of the historical novel. Both the museum and the historical novel had traditionally made it their mission to present the past to an ever-widening public, and thus necessarily to preserve it. But in the middle of the nineteenth century, the museum and the novel also shared the experience of seeming to endanger precisely what they sought to protect, and as they tried to choose how aggressive to be in their conserving measures, they had to deliberate about the costs and benefits of going after the full reconstruction (the novel) or restoration (the museum) of what once had been. The first part of this essay shows how people fretted about the relation of conservation, destruction, and national identity at the museum, in The Times and in special Parliamentary sessions alike; the second part of the essay traces how Thackeray drew on the resulting debates in novels including The Newcomes (1853–55) and The History of Henry Esmond (1852), as he looked for a way to revivify the historical novel after it had gone out of fashion. He invoked broken statues and badly restored pictures as he navigated his own worries that he might be doing history all wrong, and damaging its shape in the process.


PMLA ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elliot L. Gilbert

AbstractSophisticated readers of A Christmas Carol, moved though they may be by the dramatic reformation of Scrooge, are frequently inclined to question the psychological validity of the old man's change of heart. Far from being a sign of the story's inadequacy, however, this divided reaction is the key to its effectiveness. Dickens' chief target in A Christmas Carol is Scrooge's nineteenth-century rationalism, and the reader's skepticism about the old man's moral and spiritual recovery is an exact analogue of that rationalism. What the reader's delight, in the face of his skepticism, suggests, therefore, is that there is a level of the story on which Scrooge's regeneration is entirely authentic; that if A Christmas Carol is less than convincing as a psychological case history of an elderly neurotic temporarily reformed by Christmas sentimentality, it is certainly a success as the metaphysical study of a human being's rediscovery of his own innocence.


2021 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 63-78
Author(s):  
Dabagyan Emil ◽  

The article analyzes the most important period in the historical development of Venezuela. Under the dictator Juan Vicente Gomez, who reigned uncontrollably for a long time, the “Generation of the 28th” emerged. It contributed notably to the democratic development of the country. The participants of named movement were mainly the representatives of student youth; they were the first to openly oppose the tyranny. "The Generation of the 28th" went through a complex evolutionary path eradicating their own mistakes. A representative democracy functioned in Venezuela for forty years. It modified the face of Venezuelan society: the adopted Constitution guaranteed to all citizens the right to elect and be elected. The regular shifts in all the government agencies, a freedom of assembly and the media were practiced. The democratic institutions worked securily while serious socio-economic reforms were carried out throughout the country.


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