September 11 and the Mourning After: Reflections on Collecting and Interpreting the History of Tragedy

2002 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 37-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
James B. Gardner ◽  
Sarah M. Henry
Keyword(s):  
September 11 ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
Sense Of Obligation

In the aftermath of September 11, public historians working in museums have faced new challenges to our sense of our work and ourselves as professionals. In addressing our collecting and interpretive responsibilities, we have had to grapple with the tension between our sense of obligation to the historic nature of the events and their aftermath and our concern that we are still too close to them to be able to judge clearly what is truly historically important. Our goal has been to respond to those challenges thoughtfully and positively, embracing the opportunity to help our visitors understand these tragic events and to contribute to the nation's healing, while remaining true to our obligation to enrich the historical record.

Variable Heroism

2019 ◽  
pp. 15-31
Author(s):  
Lukas Milevski
Keyword(s):  
September 11 ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
President Obama ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Challenges

The history of US landpower since September 11, 2001, has been a history of change as policy-makers sought to impose alterations on landpower, only to be forced to adapt to new conditions. The spirit of post-heroic warfare, stemming from the 1990s, influenced American understanding of landpower during the initial invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, leading to transformation and the practice of post-heroic landpower. This interpretation and employment of landpower did not survive the rising challenges of insurgency, forcing landpower to return to its heroic roots. With the election of President Obama, US strategy returned to a post-heroic phase, with landpower largely excluded as a major instrument for the pursuit of US grand strategy, only for new challenges to rise, such as Russia, which seem to demand yet another return to the classical heroism of landpower.

You Say You Want a Reformation? Parsing the Ubiquitous Rhetoric of an “Islamic Reformation”

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 37-73
Author(s):  
Paul R. Powers
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Political Change ◽  
September 11 ◽  
Terrorist Attacks ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
History Of

The ideas of an “Islamic Reformation” and a “Muslim Luther” have been much discussed, especially since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. This “Reformation” rhetoric, however, displays little consistency, encompassing moderate, liberalizing trends as well as their putative opposite, Islamist “fundamentalism.” The rhetoric and the diverse phenomena to which it refers have provoked both enthusiastic endorsement and vigorous rejection. After briefly surveying the history of “Islamic Reformation” rhetoric, the present article argues for a four-part typology to account for most recent instances of such rhetoric. The analysis reveals that few who employ the terminology of an “Islamic Reformation” consider the specific details of its implicit analogy to the Protestant Reformation, but rather use this language to add emotional weight to various prescriptive agendas. However, some examples demonstrate the potential power of the analogy to illuminate important aspects of religious, social, and political change in the modern Islamic world.

Consortium of European Research Libraries 2008: New Challenges

2009 ◽  
pp. 80-84
Author(s):  
Nailya F. Verbina ◽  
Andrei C. Masevich
Keyword(s):  
International Organizations ◽  
International Research ◽  
Book History ◽  
Bibliographic Database ◽  
European Research ◽  
Research Libraries ◽  
International Research Institute ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
History Of Culture

On the activities of one of the most significant international organizations connected with research of book history - Consortium of European Research Libraries. The creation of a bibliographic database of the printed book from 1452 to 1830, which was supposed to collect materials from libraries of Europe, was the goal of Consortium since the beginning of its foundation. The authors of the article write that today the activities of the Consortium is much broader, it turns into international research institute on the history of culture.

‘The greatest irregular’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Scurr
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Thomas Carlyle ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dramatic Narrative ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Thomas Carlyle claimed that his history of the French Revolution was ‘a wild savage book, itself a kind of French Revolution …’. This chapter considers his stylistic approaches to creating the illusion of immediacy: his presentation of seemingly unmediated fact through the transformation of memoir and other kinds of historical record into a compelling dramatic narrative. Closely examining the ways in which he worked biographical anecdote into the fabric of his text raises questions about Carlyle’s wider historical purposes. Pressing the question of what it means to think through style, or to distinguish expressive emotive writing from abstract understanding, is an opportunity to reconsider Carlyle’s relation to his predecessors and contemporaries writing on the Revolution in English.

‘Importunity Which Mocked All Denial’: The Amherst Charity Fund and the Foundation of Amherst College

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl I Hammer
Keyword(s):  
Early Growth ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Williams College ◽  
Education Society ◽  
Amherst College ◽  
History Of ◽  
Noah Webster

This chapter discusses the complex history of the Amherst Charity Fund and Amherst College, located in western Massachusetts. The story of the Charity Fund, an independent fund which financed the foundation and early growth of Amherst College through designated scholarships and loans, incorporates many elements of the larger American myth. This chapter offers an alternative story based on the surviving historical record. In particular, it draws on the accounts of Noah Webster and Rufus Graves. It also cites the founding in 1815 of the Hampshire Education Society, whose aims contrast sharply with those embraced by the trustees of Amherst Academy, and how Amherst’s history was intertwined with that of Williams College. Finally, it highlights the important roles played by such men as Pastor David Parsons and Samuel F. Dickinson.

The Oxford Handbook of American Women's and Gender History

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Women Of Color ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Gender History ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Free Women

The Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History boldly interprets the history of diverse women and how ideas about gender shaped their access to political and cultural power in North America over six centuries. In twenty-nine chapters, the Handbook showcases women’s and gender history as an integrated field with its own interpretation of the past, focused on how gender influenced people’s lives as they participated in migration, colonialism, trade, warfare, artistic production, and community building. Organized chronologically and thematically, the Handbook’s six sections allow readers to consider historical continuities of gendered power as well as individual innovations and ruptures in gender systems. Theoretically cutting edge, each chapter bursts with fascinating historical characters, from young Chicanas transforming urban culture, to free women of color forging abolitionist doctrines, to Asian migrant women defending the legitimacy of their marriages, to working-class activists mobilizing international movements, to transwomen fleeing incarceration. Together, their lives constitute the history of a continent. Leading scholars from multiple generations demonstrate the power of innovative research to excavate a history hidden in plain sight. Scrutinizing silences in the historical record, from the inattention to enslaved women’s opinions to the suppression of Indian women’s involvement in border diplomacy, the authors challenge the nature of historical evidence and remap what counts in our interpretation of the past. They demonstrate a way to extend this more capacious vision of history forward, setting an intellectual agenda informed by intersectionality and transnationalism, and new understandings of sexuality.

Arthropod Terrestriality

1990 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 214-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Conrad C. Labandeira ◽  
Bret S. Beall
Keyword(s):  
Historical Record ◽  
Early History ◽  
Late Paleozoic ◽  
Diverse Group ◽  
Arthropod Diversity ◽  
Terrestrial Arthropods ◽  
Terrestrial Habitats ◽  
History Of

Since the late Paleozoic, insects and arachnids have diversified in the terrestrial world so spectacularly that they have become unquestionably the most diverse group of organisms to ever inhabit the planet. In fact, this 300 million year interval may appropriately be referred to as the age of arthropods. What is the origin and history of terrestrial arthropods? How is arthropod diversity maintained on land? In this rhetorical context we will discuss (1) the degree to which terrestriality is found in arthropods, (2) the physiological barriers to terrestrialization that arthropod clades confronted, (3) the historical record of arthropod diversity on land based on paleobiological, comparative physiological and zoogeographical evidence, and (4) some tentative answers to the “why” of terrestrial arthropod success. We are providing a geochronologic scope to terrestriality that includes not only the early history of terrestrial arthropods, but also the subsequent expansion of arthropods into major terrestrial habitats.

Madhouse

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-363
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Tilley ◽  
Paul Christian ◽  
Susan Ledger ◽  
Jan Walmsley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Learning Disability ◽  
Social History ◽  
Learning Difficulties ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Immersive Theatre ◽  
Disability Research ◽  
History Of Institutions

Until the very end of the twentieth century the history of learning difficulties was subsumed into other histories, of psychiatry, of special education and, indeed, of disability. Initiatives to enable people with learning difficulties and their families to record their own histories and contribute to the historical record are both recent and powerful. Much of this work has been led or supported by The Open University’s Social History of Learning Disability Research (SHLD) group and its commitment to developing “inclusive history.” The article tells the story of the Madhouse Project in which actors with learning difficulties, stimulated by the story of historian activist Mabel Cooper and supported by the SHLD group, learned about and then offered their own interpretations of that history, including its present-day resonances. Through a museum exhibition they curated, and through an immersive theatre performance, the actors used the history of institutions to alert a wider public to the abuses of the past, and the continuing marginalization and exclusion of people with learning difficulties. This is an outstanding example of history’s potential to stimulate activism.

Reproductive Citizens

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nimisha Barton
Keyword(s):  
Historical Record ◽  
Child Rearing ◽  
Social Citizenship ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Foreign Born ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
Shared Goal ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
French Nation

In the familiar tale of mass migration to France from 1880 onward, we know very little about the hundreds of thousands of women who formed a critical part of those migration waves. This book argues that their relative absence in the historical record hints at a larger and more problematic oversight — the role of sex and gender in shaping the experiences of migrants to France before the Second World War. This compelling history of social citizenship demonstrates how, through the routine application of social policies, state and social actors worked separately toward a shared goal: repopulating France with immigrant families. Filled with voices gleaned from census reports, municipal statistics, naturalization dossiers, court cases, police files, and social worker registers, the book shows how France welcomed foreign-born men and women — mobilizing naturalization, family law, social policy, and welfare assistance to ensure they would procreate, bearing French-assimilated children. Immigrants often embraced these policies because they, too, stood to gain from pensions, family allowances, unemployment benefits, and French nationality. By striking this bargain, they were also guaranteed safety and stability on a tumultuous continent. The book concludes that, in return for generous social provisions and refuge in dark times, immigrants joined the French nation through marriage and reproduction, breadwinning and child-rearing — in short, through families and family-making — which made them more French than even formal citizenship status could.

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