After Nationalism? Urban History and East European History

2011 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 774-778
Author(s):  
Chad Bryant

Urban history in our field has taken many different forms in the past few decades. Many such works, no doubt, have drawn great inspiration from scholars outside our area specialization. Many, however, have looked within our area specialization for inspiration, thus giving urban histories of our region several peculiar characteristics. The first part of this article discusses how urban historians have provided new perspectives on a topic long dear to Eastern Europeanist hearts—nationalism. Here the article looks at the ways in which Gary Cohen’s Politics of Ethnic Survival has influenced how historians have studied nationalism and the city. The second part will briefly survey other forms of urban history that have predominated within the field, many of which recall the questions and approaches first found in Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-siècle Vienna. The final part concludes with some thoughts about what the rise of urban history among Eastern Europeanists might mean for the future our field.

Author(s):  
Myrto Drizou

In this chapter, Drizou argues that Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie (1900) questions the rationalization of modern progress by depicting the turn of the century as a moment that wavers between the urgent incalculability of the future and the conventional knowledge of the past, embodied in the two main plotlines of the novel: Carrie’s hasty anticipation of the future and Hurstwood’s steady retreat to the past. For many scholars, the intersecting plotlines of Sister Carrie suggest the contrasting narratives of progress and decline that confirm the irreversibility of fate in turn-of-the-century naturalist texts. Dreiser complicates the teleology of this model, however, by dramatizing the temporal unpredictability of evolutionary tropes (change, adaptability, and chance) to illustrate wavering as a mode that allows his characters to measure their options and remain open to the future. This wavering mode furnishes a new paradigm of thinking about the fin de siècle as an incalculably open jangle that welcomes (and embodies) the resistance to rationalized discourses of modernity. In this sense, Dreiser’s novel prompts us to question and rethink our contemporary processes of rationalization, such as the standardization of knowledge through period-based models of teaching and temporally restrictive paradigms of scholarship.


Author(s):  
M. Şükrü Hanioğlu

This chapter discusses Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's childhood in the ancient Macedonian capital of Salonica. The future founder of the Turkish Republic was born one winter, either in 1880 or in 1881. His upbringing was more liberal than that of most lower-class Muslims. No one in his family's circle of friends and relatives, for instance, practiced polygamy. Likewise, his father reportedly drank alcohol, which was abhorred by conservatives. The confusing dualism produced in Ottoman society by the reforms of the nineteenth century had its first imprint on Mustafa when his parents entered into a heated argument about his education. There is little doubt that Mustafa Kemal's deep-seated predilection for new institutions and practices owed much to his years as one of a handful of students in the empire who had their primary education at a private elementary school devoid of a strong religious focus.


Belleten ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 76 (276) ◽  
pp. 385-402
Author(s):  
Murat Kılıç

The origins of the imperial cult in Smyrna date back to the Hellenistic period. It is a fact that political concerns were effective in the generation of such cults. Predicting the super power of the future and proving to be a loyal ally whilst acting in satisfactory behaviors were essential factors. The right preference made between two fighting or contending powers ensured that a city would benefit from various privileges in the future. For example, Symrna, which had established a cult in the city previously on behalf of Stratonice, the mother of Antiochus II of Seleucid dynasty, would do the same by building a temple in the name of the dty of Rome for the first time in Asia in 195 BC, after recognizing the rising power. Later on, while giving permission to the provinces that wanted to establish an imperial cult, the Roman emperors and the Senate would consider first, their relationships with Rome in the past and second, their origins. Smyrna, building its relationships with the Roman state on a solid basis, was granted the title of neokoros three times by the Roman Emperors Tiberius, Hadrianus and Caracalla, respectively. In this essay, the development of the Roman imperial cult in Smyrna is discussed within the historical process outlined above. An attempt has been made to put forth new opinions about the issue by discussing the academicians' evaluations on the imperial cult, which apparently was effectively executed in Smyrna between the first and third centuries AD, with the support of epigraphic and numismatic evidences.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nazanin Sepehry-Rad

Built environments inevitably serve as grand mnemonic elements that contain and transmit layers of culture and history. Failing to acknowledge the significance of difficult memories in the identity and culture of cities induces the gradual erosion of history as well as preventing movement toward a better future. In order to preserve the latent value in the identity of the city, architectural strategies should be implemented by which forgotten memories and hidden traces could be recalled to conscious narration. Recalling a story from the past, intentionally or unconsciously forgotten as a form of amnesia, can help re-contextualize memory images that awaken within us a new avenue to the future. This thesis intends to refine the dynamics of remembrance, illuminating the power of architecture as a medium for providing frames of perception and horizons of understanding of past experiences.


1979 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fredrick Koenig

A sample of college undergraduates and a sample of residents in the city in which the college is located were asked to draw three circles representing the past, present, and future. Among the college students, 52% indicated future dominance by drawing the future circle largest, while only 44% of the residents of the city did so. Relatedness was indicated by 54% of the students who drew circles that were touching, overlapping, or concentric, while only 11% of the city residents did so. A segment of 14% of the metropolitan sample could not respond to the test at all, but all of the college students were able to.


Author(s):  
Nick Freeman

This Chapter surveys the range of writing about the city, and particularly about London at the time. It explains why the metropolis became such an important subject for writers, as well as showing how it consistently eluded and challenged perception, except in partial or fragmentary ways. Attention is given to the variety of writing about the city, there being, it is argued, no single or dominant urban vision.


Author(s):  
Sam Wiseman

This chapter explores the ways in which London is established as the central site of Gothic modernity in literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It examines this literature in terms of broad movements or dynamics: the invasion of the metropolitan centre (as in Stoker’s Dracula); the conceptualization of the city as divided between dangerous and secure spaces (as in Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde); the pollution of those spaces by the Gothic threat (as in Machen’s The Great God Pan); and a centrifugal movement towards the suburbs (as in Machen’s The Hill of Dreams). Fin de siècle London, this chapter argues, should not be seen as an end but a beginning: it is a cultural moment in which the evolving relations between the Gothic and modernity manifest themselves in new ways of representing place.


Author(s):  
Louisa Yee-Sum Lee ◽  
Philip L. Pearce

Abstract This chapter considers tourism development in Bangkok from the past to the present, and then ventures on to examine the city's future. The analysis introduces how the evolution of the city, its urbanization and the overall growth of Thai tourism more generally have shaped the present state of Bangkok. The chapter draws on existing literature augmented by in-depth interviews; specifically, six significant and influential interviewees from both the private and public sectors of Bangkok help reveal how the past and present are shaping the future of tourism in the city.


‘City of Gold’, ‘Urbs Prima in Indis’, ‘Maximum City’: no Indian metropolis has captivated the public imagination quite like Mumbai. The past decade has seen an explosion of historical writing on the city that was once Bombay. This book, featuring new essays by its finest historians, presents a rich sample of Bombay’s palimpsestic pasts. It considers the making of urban communities and spaces, the workings of power and the nationalist makeover of the colonial city. In addressing these themes, the contributors to this volume engage critically with the scholarship of a distinguished historian of this frenetic metropolis. For over five decades, Jim Masselos has brought to life with skill and empathy Bombay’s hidden histories. His books and essays have traversed an extraordinarily diverse range of subjects, from the actions of the city’s elites to the struggles of its most humble denizens. His pioneering research has opened up new perspectives and inspired those who have followed in his wake. Bombay Before Mumbai is a fitting tribute to Masselos’ enduring contribution to South Asian urban history


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