The Contested Past: The Boxers as History and Myth

1992 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul A. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American History ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Complex Case ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Pattern ◽  
High Degree ◽  
History And Myth ◽  
Martin Luther King

The mythologized past is the past that predominates in the minds of most people. Therefore, even as historians strive to counter it, it behooves us to study it with care. Although any aspect of the past has the potential to live on as myth in the present, certain events and persons, because they resonate with themes of broader historical scope and importance, have this potential to an especially high degree. Thus, in American history, where racism has been such a pervasive historical pattern, figures like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King who helped to ameliorate the condition of blacks are often treated in larger-than-life terms. To take a more complex case, in China in the twentieth century, where the West has been by turns hated as an imperialist aggressor and admired for its mastery of the secrets of wealth and power, the Boxers, because they attacked both the West and its modern secrets, have been alternately praised and reviled.

The Palestinian Debate

Worldview ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 25 (6) ◽  
pp. 7-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry W. Roeder ◽  
Franklin C. Marcus ◽  
Henry S. Sizer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
West Bank ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
The West ◽  
Independent State ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
West Bank And Gaza ◽  
Palestinian Question

People seeking a settlement of the Palestinian question have focused on several options during the past few years. These proposals cover a wide range of choices from annexation by Israel of the West Bank and Gaza, to a Palestinian semiautonomy in the same territories, to some kind of union with Jordan. However, the only viable proposal is an arrangement that satisfies the population most directly involved; i.e., the Palestinians. And they will be satisfied with nothing less than true independence from both Israel and Jordan for the territories occupied by Israel since 1967. Just as other “peoples” have done before them, the Palestinians today are struggling for one thing above all else: the powerful idea of “self-determination” or “sovereignty.” In the twentieth century that means an independent state.

Future Impossible Communities

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-102
Author(s):  
Jossianna Arroyo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Special Section ◽  
The West ◽  
Spanish Caribbean ◽  
The Past ◽  
Critical Intervention ◽  
Key Interventions

This response essay reviews the six contributions to the special section “Con-Federating the Archipelago: The Confederación Antillana and the West Indies Federation.” These key interventions on the Spanish Caribbean Confederation projects in the nineteenth century and the West Indies Federation in the twentieth century provoke the following questions: Could we call these two Caribbean confederation projects failures if their centrality in Caribbean political imaginaries suggests otherwise? What are some of the insights that these two projects could offer to Caribbean sociohistorical processes, culture, and political developments? Even though these two projects seem to share a similar political goal, they are also radically different. The author reviews the contributions to the special section in dialogue with examples from Puerto Rico in order to assess the critical intervention in theories of nationalism produced by the past projects of federation and the possible futures they give rise to.

The Perpetuation of War in U. S. History Textbooks

2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth B. Scott
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
American History ◽  
History Textbooks ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Insight Into

American history textbooks, for the better part of the twentieth century, have focused on war as the primary actor. This article investigates the pervasiveness of war in textbooks and considers the e ect of such on students and their role as future policymakers. In the past decade, history textbooks have undergone a total transition toward an emphasis on social history. An examination of what this entails, and what impacts this may have on schoolchildren and society as a whole, lends insight into the e ects the study of history can have. Finally, I argue that a historian must not only choose events that illustrate the past, but also determine how those choices may a ect the future.

Performing the Past in the Present

2021 ◽  
pp. 704-720
Author(s):  
Rowan McLelland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
Global North ◽  
The Creation

This chapter explores the conscious adoption, reformation, and indigenization of ballet in China in the mid-twentieth century to foreground how this historical development has contributed to the creation of a new genre of ballet unique to China in the contemporary period. Using The Red Detachment of Women (1964, [红色娘子军]) and the more recent Eight Heroines (2015, [八女投江]), the chapter highlights ballet’s contemporaneity in China at the convergence of the unique legacy of the sociopolitical reimagining of the form with tangible links to both the past and the present in ballet in the Global North as a modern transnational practice. It concludes that it is in its very divergence from the style of contemporary ballet more commonly performed in the West that Chinese contemporary ballet embodies the pluralistic cosmopolitan values that contemporary ballet adopts.

China and “Modernity”: the Uses of the Study of Chinese History in the Past and the Present

1997 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 461-485 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harriet Zurndorfer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Data ◽  
Central Focus ◽  
The Past

AbstractThe central focus of this paper is the lack of impact Euro-centric theories of development have made on twentieth century historical writing by leading Chinese and Japanese scholars. The author reviews publications by three important historians, Naitō Konan, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, and Yü Ying-shih, all of whom attempt to locate China's first experience with “modernity” prior to nineteenth or twentieth century encounters with the West. Although all three historians differ in their interpretation of the concept “modernity,” they find Chinese culture a central feature in the identification of this concept. Furthermore, all three writers rely upon historical evidence, in particular economic and social data, to counter claims of China's history as a process of linear development.

scholarly journals Introduction: Urban History, Arnold Hirsch, and the Second Ghetto Thesis Redux

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 471-477
Author(s):  
Timothy J. Gilfoyle
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Urban History ◽  
American History ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
American Historian ◽  
Twentieth Anniversary ◽  
New Generation ◽  
Past Half

The death of American historian Arnold Hirsch, in 2018, generated multiple reexaminations of his profoundly influential “second ghetto thesis.” Hirsch’s landmark Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940 - 1960 (1983) is considered among the most important books on twentieth-century American history published in the past half century. In 2003, contributors to a special issue of the Journal of Urban History reflected on the twentieth anniversary of Hirsch’s second ghetto thesis. More recently, a new generation of urbanists have emerged who build upon and challenge Hirsch’s work. This forum highlights this new generation.

scholarly journals WINCKELMANN’S APOLLO AND THE PHYSIOGNOMY OF RACE

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (59) ◽  
pp. 6-35
Author(s):  
Lasse Hodne
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
White Male ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Male Body ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
Different Types

The taste for classical art that induced museums in the West to acquire masterpieces from ancient Greece and Rome for their collections was stimulated largely by the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann. In the past decade, a number of articles have claimed that Winckelmann’s glorification of marble statues representing the white, male body promotes notions of white supremacy. The present article challenges this view by examining theories prevalent in the eighteenth century (especially climate theory) that affected Winckelmann’s views on race. Through an examination of different types of classicism, the article also seeks to demonstrate that Winckelmann’s aesthetics were opposed to the eclectic use of ancient models typical of the fascist regimes of the twentieth century.

GOD'S IMAGE AND EGALITARIAN POLITICS

2004 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 310-321
Author(s):  
George P. Fletcher
Keyword(s):  
Church And State ◽  
Political Rhetoric ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Leaders ◽  
God's Image ◽  
American Society ◽  
Political Oratory ◽  
Biblical Sources ◽  
Martin Luther King

These days, American politicians are loath to cite biblical passages for fear of being charged with breaching the wall between church and state. There was a time when a presidential candidate could claim that a certain monetary policy would “crucify us on a cross of gold.” This kind of rhetoric is now taboo. America's national leaders even avoid quoting the religious phrases from the Declaration of Independence, particularly its references to the “Creator” or “Nature's God.” Although in the past some of the greatest American political oratory—Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg (1863) or Martin Luther King, Jr., at the Lincoln Memorial (1963)—relied unashamedly on biblical sources and imagery, it is no longer considered acceptable to argue publicly in the language of either the Hebrew or Christian Bibles. However religious American society might still be today, political rhetoric is noticeably nonreligious.

Concealment and Revelation: The Pola Casket and the Visuality of Early Christian Relics

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaś Elsner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Asia Minor ◽  
The West ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The Past ◽  
Multiple Processes ◽  
Archaeological Artefact ◽  
The City

The archaeological artefact is typically unearthed. It comes to us marked by the depredations of time, tarnished by burial, reclaimed from loss. Yet the perspective of excavation, according to which all objects are disinterred and salvaged for the collection or the museum, with more or less of a contextual history arising from their unearthing, may risk simplifying or ignoring the conditions of their original interment. The differences between the kinds of burial, between the multiple processes at stake in the loss of objects to the earth in the past—insofar as they can be reconstructed—are interesting. For example, the amazingly well-preserved statue of Flavius Palmatus, Consular Governor of Caria and acting Vicar of Asiana at some point before 536 CE, was discovered toppled beside its inscribed base at the west colonnade of the square adjoining the theater of the city of Aphrodisias in Asia Minor, in the mid-twentieth century. It fell in the course of time, we have no idea when—probably as the result of an earthquake—in a city virtually abandoned after the seventh century and was subsequently covered by debris and soil until its excavation in modernity. By contrast, the Meroe head, an over-life-size bronze head of Augustus, which was excavated by the British in Sudan in the teens of the twentieth century, was probably cut from the statue of which it was part and buried by barbarian tribesmen beneath steps leading to the native temple of Victory in the Kushite capital of Meroe in the Sudan. Far from falling where it stood, it was the victim of deliberate iconoclasm and burial by the enemies of the Roman empire, probably shortly after its erection when the Kushites invaded Roman Egypt in 25 BCE. In its buried form it lay as a hidden trophy permanently trampled by the Kushites—a sign of independence from Rome, autonomy, and hatred of the Roman emperor even when the tribesmen had forgotten that it was hidden there. Other kinds of deliberate burial, however, were made by those who owned the objects interred, rather than thieves or rampagers.

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