scholarly journals Why Study History

2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 61
Author(s):  
Bhupendra Yadav

The rich and famous have looked down upon history for most of the 20th century. In 1916, the pioneer car manufacturer, Henry Ford, declared „History is bunk‟ because it‟s an unwanted vestige of tradition. On the other hand, in 2005, Thomas Friedman, thought the past was overloaded with memories, these remembrances were the assassins of dreams and any society with more memories than dreams was destined to decay. Contrary to this, we argue here that history has four distinct uses, it is an aesthetic guide and moral teacher like biographies, it has a utilitarian value as a rear view mirror, it is a political device to legitimise nations and it is one epistemological tool to understand society.KeywHistoriography; Historical ords: History; thinking

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 391-398
Author(s):  
Kirill A. Solovyov

The article is devoted to the political views of F.D. Samarin, his conception of the political system in Russia before 1905, constitutional reforms of 1905–1906 and Stolypin’s reforms. The author demonstrates how Samarin tried to adopt the Slavophile doctrine to the situation of the beginning of the 20th century. At that he had to carry on polemics both with the opponents of the Slavophilism and its supporters. On the one hand, this fact stresses Slavophilism diversity and its inner heterogeneity. On the other hand, it shows the nature of the Slavophile doctrine itself that resembled more the historiographic approach to researching the past than a well-structured political conception. Giving meaningful political content to Slavophile ideas depended fully on every single representative of the Slavophile intellectual heritage.


Author(s):  
Laura Hengehold

Most studies of Simone de Beauvoir situate her with respect to Hegel and the tradition of 20th-century phenomenology begun by Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. This book analyzes The Second Sex in light of the concepts of becoming, problematization, and the Other found in Gilles Deleuze. Reading Beauvoir through a Deleuzian lens allows more emphasis to be placed on Beauvoir's early interest in Bergson and Leibniz, and on the individuation of consciousness, a puzzle of continuing interest to both phenomenologists and Deleuzians. By engaging with the philosophical issues in her novels and student diaries, this book rethinks Beauvoir’s focus on recognition in The Second Sex in terms of women’s struggle to individuate themselves despite sexist forms of representation. It shows how specific forms of women’s “lived experience” can be understood as the result of habits conforming to and resisting this sexist “sense.” Later feminists put forward important criticisms regarding Beauvoir’s claims not to be a philosopher, as well as the value of sexual difference and the supposedly Eurocentric universalism of her thought. Deleuzians, on the other hand, might well object to her ideas about recognition. This book attempts to address those criticisms, while challenging the historicist assumptions behind many efforts to establish Beauvoir’s significance as a philosopher and feminist thinker. As a result, readers can establish a productive relationship between Beauvoir’s “problems” and those of women around the world who read her work under very different circumstances.


2010 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 215-224
Author(s):  
Alexander Carpenter

This paper explores Arnold Schoenberg’s curious ambivalence towards Haydn. Schoenberg recognized Haydn as an important figure in the German serious music tradition, but never closely examined or clearly articulated Haydn’s influence and import on his own musical style and ethos, as he did with many other major composers. This paper argues that Schoenberg failed to explicitly recognize Haydn as a major influence because he saw Haydn as he saw himself, namely as a somewhat ungainly, paradoxical figure, with one foot in the past and one in the future. In his voluminous writings on music, Haydn is mentioned by Schoenberg far less frequently than Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven, and his music appears rarely as examples in Schoenberg’s theoretical texts. When Schoenberg does talk about Haydn’s music, he invokes — with tacit negativity — its accessibility, counterpoising it with more recondite music, such as Beethoven’s, or his own. On the other hand, Schoenberg also praises Haydn for his complex, irregular phrasing and harmonic exploration. Haydn thus appears in Schoenberg’s writings as a figure invested with ambivalence: a key member of the First Viennese triumvirate, but at the same time he is curiously phantasmal, and is accorded a peripheral place in Schoenberg’s version of the canon and his own musical genealogy.


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kempe Ronald Hope

Countries with positive per capita real growth are characterised by positive national savings—including government savings, increases in government investment, and strong increases in private savings and investment. On the other hand, countries with negative per capita real growth tend to be characterised by declines in savings and investment. During the past several decades, Kenya’s emerging economy has undergone many changes and economic performance has been epitomised by periods of stability, decline, or unevenness. This article discusses and analyses the record of economic performance and public finance in Kenya during the period 1960‒2010, as well as policies and other factors that have influenced that record in this emerging economy. 


2000 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 171-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben A. LePage ◽  
Hermann W. Pfefferkorn

When one hears the term “ground cover,” one immediately thinks of “grasses.” This perception is so deep-seated that paleobotanists even have been overheard to proclaim that “there was no ground cover before grasses.” Today grasses are so predominant in many environments that this perception is perpetuated easily. On the other hand, it is difficult to imagine the absence or lack of ground cover prior to the mid-Tertiary. We tested the hypothesis that different forms of ground cover existed in the past against examples from the Recent and the fossil record (Table 1). The Recent data were obtained from a large number of sources including those in the ecological, horticultural, and microbiological literature. Other data were derived from our knowledge of Precambrian life, sedimentology and paleosols, and the plant fossil record, especially in situ floras and fossil “monocultures.” Some of the data are original observations, but many others are from the literature. A detailed account of these results will be presented elsewhere (Pfefferkorn and LePage, in preparation).


1943 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-34
Author(s):  
Kenneth Scott Latourette

A strange contrast exists in the status of the Christian Church in the past seventy years. On the one hand the Church has clearly lost some of the ground which once appeared to be safely within its possession. On the other hand it has become more widely spread geographically and, when all mankind is taken into consideration, more influential in shaping human affairs than ever before in its history. In a paper as brief as this must of necessity be, space can be had only for the sketching of the broad outlines of this paradox and for suggesting a reason for it. If details were to be given, a large volume would be required. Perhaps, however, we can hope to do enough to point out one of the most provocative and important set of movements in recent history.


2008 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristian Kristiansen

When I agreed to present the article as a vehicle for discussion at a session at the EAA's annual meeting in Zadar, Croatia, I decided to approach the question of a European archaeology from what I considered to be the three organizing pillars of archaeological practice: heritage, theory and publications. Heritage is the dominant organizational/legislative framework for archaeological practice, and it is where most of the money is spent. Theory, on the other hand, organizes most of our interpretations of the past, while publications are still the most common way of presenting the results of both heritage work (mostly excavations) and interpretations of that work. In this way I hoped to have encircled the dominant parameters for a diagnosis of the archaeological landscapes in Europe. I assumed that there might be some correlation between the three, and that such observed common trends within two or more variables would strengthen the argument, to paraphrase processual jargon.


2021 ◽  
Vol 90 ◽  
pp. 105-123
Author(s):  
Thaddeus Metz

AbstractOn the rise over the past 20 years has been ‘moderate supernaturalism’, the view that while a meaningful life is possible in a world without God or a soul, a much greater meaning would be possible only in a world with them. William Lane Craig can be read as providing an important argument for a version of this view, according to which only with God and a soul could our lives have an eternal, as opposed to temporally limited, significance since we would then be held accountable for our decisions affecting others’ lives. I present two major objections to this position. On the one hand, I contend that if God existed and we had souls that lived forever, then, in fact, all our lives would turn out the same. On the other hand, I maintain that, if this objection is wrong, so that our moral choices would indeed make an ultimate difference and thereby confer an eternal significance on our lives (only) in a supernatural realm, then Craig could not capture the view, aptly held by moderate supernaturalists, that a meaningful life is possible in a purely natural world.


Author(s):  
Rimma M. Khaninova ◽  

The article discusses ballads of the Kalmyk poets Tseren Ledzhinov “Бальчгин туск баллад” (“A Ballad about the Mud”, 1941) and Sanzhar Baidyev «Башмгудин туск баллад» (“A Ballad about Boots”, 1967). The analysis of the two ballads in the original showed that neither the content nor the form of Ledzhinov’s poem fits the announced genre. The poem by Baidyev, on the other hand, is one of the interesting ballads of the Kalmyk poetry of the past century, it is experimental in terms of the plot and the characters. The original text of S. Badyev’s work is compared to its Russian translation “Boots” translated by D. Dolinsky and V. Strelkov. The comparison revealed that the author’s conception and manifestation were altered by the translators in the aspect of semantic context and genre identity.


1956 ◽  
Vol 60 (547) ◽  
pp. 459-475 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. G. Broadbent

SummaryA review is given of developments in the field of aeroelasticity during the past ten years. The effect of steadily increasing Mach number has been two-fold: on the one hand the aerodynamic derivatives have changed, and in some cases brought new problems, and on the other hand the design for higher Mach numbers has led to thinner aerofoils and more slender fuselages for which the required stiffness is more difficult to provide. Both these aspects are discussed, and various methods of attack on the problems are considered. The relative merits of stiffness, damping and massbalance for the prevention of control surface flutter are discussed. A brief mention is made of the recent problems of damage from jet efflux and of the possible aeroelastic effects of kinetic heating.


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