Historical Study as Ethical and Political Action

2007 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pat J. Gehrke
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
Historical Study

The Politics of Interpretation: Tel Hai in Israel's Collective Memory

AJS Review ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 133-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yael Zerubavel
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Israeli Society ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
National Myth ◽  
National Values ◽  
Jewish Settlement ◽  
New Nation ◽  
Hebrew Culture

In 1920, a brief but fatal battle between Arabs and Jews took place at the Jewish settlement of Tel Hai in the northern Galilee. The defense of Tel Hai soon became a landmark in the history of Israeli society. The story of Tel Hai was regarded as a major symbolic text of the pioneering ethos and an important step toward the development of a new national Hebrew culture. Highlighting the theme of collective death and rebirth, Tel Hai offered a modern, secular text that sanctified the new nation and dramatized the emergence of a new type of Jew. For the Jewish pioneers in Palestine, Tel Hai embodied the ideals of settlement and defense, providing a concrete example of their resolute determination to hold on to new settlements at all costs.The present study examines the role of Tel Hai as a national myth, name-ly, a symbolic narrative relating to an important event in the nation's past that embodies sacred national values and is used as a charter for political action.1 Following Halbwachs's pioneering approach to the study of collective memory,2 this article explores the meaning of Tel Hai as it was constructed in public discourse, focusing upon two periods of conflict within Israeli society. Thus it is not a historical study of the event that took place at Tel Hai in 1920, but a study of how this event has been remembered and reinterpreted in Israeli culture.

Liberty, Property and Popular Politics

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
British History ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Parliamentary History ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
The University

Few scholars can claim to have shaped the historical study of the long eighteenth century more profoundly than Professor H. T. Dickinson, who, until his retirement in 2006, held the Sir Richard Lodge Chair of British History at the University of Edinburgh. This volume, based on contributions from Dickinson's students, friends and colleagues from around the world, offers a range of perspectives on eighteenth-century Britain and provides a tribute to a remarkable scholarly career. Dickinson's work and career provides the ideal lens through which to take a detailed snapshot of current research in a number of areas. The book includes contributions from scholars working in intellectual history, political and parliamentary history, ecclesiastical and naval history; discussions of major themes such as Jacobitism, the French Revolution, popular radicalism and conservatism; and essays on prominent individuals in English and Scottish history, including Edmund Burke, Thomas Muir, Thomas Paine and Thomas Spence. The result is a uniquely rich and detailed collection with an impressive breadth of coverage.

Migration and Modernities

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Racial Categories ◽  
Geographic Boundaries ◽  
The Us ◽  
Technological Developments ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

Migration and Modernities recovers a comparative literary history of migration by bringing together scholars from the US and Europe to explore the connections between migrant experiences and the uneven emergence of modernity. The collection initiates transnational, transcultural and interdisciplinary conversations about migration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, demonstrating how mobility unsettles the geographic boundaries, temporal periodization, and racial categories we often use to organize literary and historical study. Migrants are by definition liminal, and many have existed historically in the spaces between nations, regions or ethnicities. In exploring these spaces, Migration and Modernities also investigates the origins of current debates about belonging, rights, and citizenship. Its chapters traverse the globe, revealing the experiences — real or imagined — of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century migrants, from dispossessed Native Americans to soldiers in South America, Turkish refugees to Scottish settlers. They explore the aesthetic and rhetorical frameworks used to represent migrant experiences during a time when imperial expansion and technological developments made the fortunes of some migrants and made exiles out of others. These frameworks continue to influence the narratives we tell ourselves about migration today and were crucial in producing a distinctively modern subjectivity in which mobility and rootlessness have become normative.

Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James McElvenny
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Vienna Circle ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Personal Connection ◽  
International Language ◽  
Academic Philosophy ◽  
Significant Figures ◽  
Basic English ◽  
And Linguistics

This book is a historical study of influential currents in the philosophy of language and linguistics of the first half of the twentieth century, explored from the perspective of the English scholar C. K. Ogden (1889–1957). Although no ‘Great Man’ in his own right, Ogden had a personal connection, reflected in his work, to several of the most significant figures of the age. The background to the ideas espoused in Ogden’s book The Meaning of Meaning, co-authored with I.A. Richards (1893–1979), is examined in detail, along with the application of these ideas in his international language project Basic English. A richly interlaced network of connections is revealed between early analytic philosophy, semiotics and linguistics, all inevitably shaped by the contemporary cultural and political environment. In particular, significant interaction is shown between Ogden’s ideas, the varying versions of ‘logical atomism’ of Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) and Ludwig Wittgensten (1889–1951), Victoria Lady Welby’s (1837–1912) ‘significs’, and the philosophy and political activism of Otto Neurath (1882–1945) and Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) of the Vienna Circle. Amid these interactions emerges a previously little known mutual exchange between the academic philosophy and linguistics of the period and the practically oriented efforts of the international language movement.

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