Archaeology and contemporaneousness

2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-31
Author(s):  
Laurent Olivier

Gavin Lucas has returned to the theme of archaeological time, which has long interested him, and, in this paper, to contemporaneousness in archaeology. For a historian, contemporaneousness is a straightforward matter. The First World War and the Russian Revolution, for example, are considered contemporaneous because the two events took place during the same period of time. Both significantly influenced the course of 20th-century history and influenced each other as well. But for an archaeologist, the very notion of chronology is fundamentally problematic. We date an archaeological object or feature on the basis of morphological attributes that allow us to estimate the time during which it was created. In other words, a historical date (the actual date when some vestige came to be) corresponds, in archaeology, to a probable length of time. Archaeological time floats.

Author(s):  
Roger D. Markwick ◽  
Nicholas Doumanis

Europe was a continent of nation states by the mid-twentieth century. But it was not always thus. The patchwork quilt of nation states and the nationalism that coloured them in were forged by massive social and political shifts that had been gathering momentum since the late nineteenth century. Viewing nations and nationalism as constructs of modern, global capitalism, often legitimated by national mythologies old and new, this chapter surveys the forces at work: from above and below, from centre and periphery. The First World War raised nationalism to white heat, and as multi-ethnic empires faltered, myriad subaltern nationalisms erupted, demanding ‘self-determination’, the watchword of the post-war peace settlements. But the war also unleashed internationalist class challenges to belligerent nationalism, culminating in the 1917 Russian Revolution. Thereafter, European nationalism assumed its most truculent guise: fascism and military dictatorships warring against class in the name of ethnic, national, and biological purity.


2001 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 193-208
Author(s):  
John Skorupski

The early part of the twentieth century was as revolutionary in the domain of ethical ideas as in other realms. An ethical culture inherited from the preceding century was to all appearance destroyed. This culture, the high-bourgeois culture of the nineteenth century, had emerged gradually from years of revolution and counter-revolution, and seemed then to be developing steadily and expanding its reach towards the end of the century and up to the first world war. Yet what followed it, and in fact overlapped with it, being already presaged well before the war, was quite other: the mainly 20th century phase we call ‘Modernism’, acutely fragmented not only in aesthetic but also in ethical terms, marked in politics by nationalist, collectivist and populist clashes. However, Modernism too, and in particular, many of the ideas in ethics which were characteristic of it, now belongs to history. That much has for some time been clear; the change is complicated, confused, hard to outline; discernibly though, we're in a new period and have been for perhaps a third of a century—quite how long depends on which aspect of change one considers, and on how one interprets its character.


Author(s):  
Mykhailo Gauchman

The article deals with the collective actions of plant workers in Luhans’k (inRussian pronunciation – Lugansk) in labor conflicts during the First Russianrevolution (1905–1907) and the First World War (1914–1918). This town wasone of the main towns of industrial Donbass and the center of Slovianoserbiandistrict of Ekaterinoslavian province.The relationships between administration and workers in Luhans’k areinvestigated on the materials of clerical work of Ekaterinoslavian provinceand memoirs of participators on events. These sources are especially aboutthe behavior of workers from two big industrial enterprises – the Gartmanplant and the Cartridges plant. In the crisis periods, such as revolutions andwars, the social-political relations are sharpened and changeable. And revolutionsand wars left behind enough historical sources for studying workers’history.In the Luhans’k’s enterprises, there were – during the First Russian Revolution– the general town’s strike in February 1905, the attempt of the strike tothe 1st of May 1905 in the Gartman plant, the strike in the Gartman plant inJuly 1905, the mass unrest in December 1905, the attempt of strike to the 1stof May 1906 in the Gartman plant, the lockout in the Gartman plant in March1907 and the general town’s strike in July 1916 in the time of social-economicscrisis during the First World War. The studying of strikes, attempts ofstrikes and mass unrests in 1905–1907 and 1916 allows defining some featuresof collective’s activity of plant’s workers:1) the inconsistent solidarity of workers in the times of strikes. The generalunderstanding of oppressed status and necessity of fighting for their rightsspread among the workers during the strike’s waves, but this solidarity ofworkers didn’t cause to cooperative planned activities;2) the crisis of vertical relationships between administrators and workersin the time of strikes of 1905 and 1916. In Patron plant subordination and paternalismwere saved during the strike in February 1905, unlike in Gartmanplant, but not in the strike in 1916;3) the influence on workers of the revolutionary movement. Revolution ideasand local activists of illegal political parties were impacted of workers’ moods in the crisis times. In 1905 increasing of social-democrats’ activity in Luhans’kwas the aftermath of town’s strikes. But in 1916 the spreading of revolutionideas preceded the emergence in workers’ dissatisfaction with their ownsituation during the social-economics crises, which was the cause of generaltown’s strike;4) the workers’ capacity to spontaneous self-organization during strikesand making the continuous organization forms in the Gartman plant. In thisenterprise in 1906 was formed two workers’ organizations: pawnshop andprofessional association. This association conflicted with plant’s administrationin 1907 and headed the strikes in 1906.


2020 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 386-392
Author(s):  
Alexander Yu. Polunov

The article examines the aspects of the confessional policy in the territory of Galicia in the period of its occupation by the Russian army in the end of 1914 and the beginning of 1915. The author pays attention to the factors of confessional policy development related to the activities of the Russophile (“Moscow-phile”) party in Galicia and the initiatives of Russian social and church circles sympathizing with pro-Russian Galicians. The author believes that Galicia’s place in the public conscience was largely determined by the symbolic significance of that region, - the last part of the East-Slavic area that was not a part of Russia by the beginning of the 20th century. Relying on the attitude of the Galician “Russophiles”, the nationally-oriented Russian church and public circles counted on the quick spreading of the Orthodoxy and Russian culture in the annexed areas. Most of those expectations did not come true, both due to the terroristic campaign against “Russophiles” conducted by the Austrian administration just after the break o the war, and due to the interdepartmental contradictions complicated by the activity of the Russian authorities.


2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 609-613
Author(s):  
John Paul Newman ◽  
Lili Zách

AbstractOur special issue discusses different perspectives on the important changes that took place in the transition from empire to nation-state at the end of the First World War, focusing especially on transnational connections, structural and historical continuities, and marginal voices that have been fully or partially concealed by the emphasis on a radical national awakening in 1918. Specific articles broach topics such as the implications of 1918 on notions of gender and ethnicity, 1918 and the violence of the “Greater War,” and the legacies and memories of 1918 across the 20th century. Our approach treats the “New Europe” of 1918 as a largely coherent geopolitical and cultural space, one which can be studied in an interdisciplinary fashion. We contend that 1918 is not simply a clean break in which one epoch cleanly makes way for another, but rather it is an ambiguous and contradictory pivot, one which created an “Old-New Europe” caught between the forces of the imperial past and those of the national future. Our intention is not to dismiss entirely the importance of the transformations of 1918 but rather to show how there exists a tension between those changes and the many continuities and legacies that cut across the traditional chronology.


Author(s):  
George S. Prokhorov ◽  

Julio Jurenito – a 1924 Modernist novel by Ilya Ehrenburg, written hot on the heels of the 1917 Revolution and is distinguished by both a wide intertextual spectrum and an acute satirical orientation in relation to all ideological trends and factions. The article focuses on references of the novel by Ilya Ehrenburg to the legacy of Dostoevsky – primarily – The Brothers Karamazov. Ilya Ehrenburg resets Dostoevsky’s features – his protagonists and some elements of plot – into the reality of European history of the First World War, Russian Revolution and Civil War. But also, Ehrenburg goes beyond Dostoevsky’s semantic continuum, replacing the author’s sense of History as a process striving for its endpoint with a History in which an end is fundamentally impossible, and there is always at least the potential to put the flow of event on pause and rewrite their mistakes. As well, the idea important for Dostoevsky that of the moral damage of the modern atheist-minded person is transformed into a demonstration of the people’s inclination to create idols and devoutly worship the latter. Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel is grounded on an interpretation of Dostoevsky, perfected through the prism of the traditions of the Jewish Enlightenment.


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