Churchill’s Wars

2021 ◽  
pp. 56-91
Author(s):  
Ian Ward
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The State ◽  
Radical Politics ◽  
History Plays ◽  
Contemporary Theatre ◽  
Caryl Churchill ◽  
And Gender

This is the first of three chapters which focus, in their different ways, on the writing of history in contemporary theatre. This chapter concentrates on two ‘history’ plays written by Caryl Churchill during the 1970s; Light Shining in Buckinghamshire and Vinegar Tom. Churchill emerged as one of the most influential voices in radical British theatre during the closing decades of the last century. Both plays were set in the mid-seventeenth-century, but were written to resonate with themes familiar in modern legal and political thought. The title of the first play is taken from a Leveller tract published in the second part of the 1640s. Churchill uses it to explore the state of radical politics in later twentieth-century Britain. The second play, Vinegar Tom, is a contribution to a distinctive sub-genre of ‘witchcraft’ plays, which use the ‘crime’ of witchcraft as a vehicle for revisiting the relation of law and gender in modern society.

Rewriting the Narrative

2019 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. 54-77
Author(s):  
Nicolas G. Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
American Indian ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Mixed Media ◽  
The State ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Art Scene ◽  
The 1960S

A vibrant American Indian art scene developed in California from the 1960s to the 1980s, with links to a broader indigenous arts movement. Native American artists working in the state produced and exhibited paintings, prints, sculptures, mixed media, and other art forms that validated and documented their cultures, interpreted their history, asserted their survival, and explored their experiences in modern society. Building on recent scholarship that examines American Indian migration, urbanization, and activism in the twentieth century, this article charts these developments and argues that American Indian artists in California challenged and rewrote dominant historical narratives by foregrounding Native American perspectives in their work.

Collective Memory: Between Values and Historical Knowledge

2020 ◽  
pp. 124-142
Author(s):  
VICTOR BURLACHUK
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The State ◽  
Main Element ◽  
Rapid Decline ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future

At the end of the twentieth century, questions of a secondary nature suddenly became topical: what do we remember and who owns the memory? Memory as one of the mental characteristics of an individual’s activity is complemented by the concept of collective memory, which requires a different method of analysis than the activity of a separate individual. In the 1970s, a situation arose that gave rise to the so-called "historical politics" or "memory politics." If philosophical studies of memory problems of the 30’s and 40’s of the twentieth century were focused mainly on the peculiarities of perception of the past in the individual and collective consciousness and did not go beyond scientific discussions, then half a century later the situation has changed dramatically. The problem of memory has found its political sound: historians and sociologists, politicians and representatives of the media have entered the discourse on memory. Modern society, including all social, ethnic and family groups, has undergone a profound change in the traditional attitude towards the past, which has been associated with changes in the structure of government. In connection with the discrediting of the Soviet Union, the rapid decline of the Communist Party and its ideology, there was a collapse of Marxism, which provided for a certain model of time and history. The end of the revolutionary idea, a powerful vector that indicated the direction of historical time into the future, inevitably led to a rapid change in perception of the past. Three models of the future, which, according to Pierre Nora, defined the face of the past (the future as a restoration of the past, the future as progress and the future as a revolution) that existed until recently, have now lost their relevance. Today, absolute uncertainty hangs over the future. The inability to predict the future poses certain challenges to the present. The end of any teleology of history imposes on the present a debt of memory. Features of the life of memory, the specifics of its state and functioning directly affect the state of identity, both personal and collective. Distortion of memory, its incorrect work, and its ideological manipulation can give rise to an identity crisis. The memorial phenomenon is a certain political resource in a situation of severe socio-political breaks and changes. In the conditions of the economic crisis and in the absence of a real and clear program for future development, the state often seeks to turn memory into the main element of national consolidation.

Ruler and state, state and society in Ottoman political thought

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marinos Sariyannis
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The State ◽  
Modern State ◽  
State Apparatus ◽  
State And Society

It can be argued that the late seventeenth century marks the transition of the Ottoman entity into an early modern state, with one of its main features identified as the distinction between the ruler and the state apparatus. The paper aims to explore whether, when and how such a process reflected in contemporary political thought. It analyzes the ways Ottoman elite authors represented society vis-à-vis the sultan; also, the development of the notion of “state” in the same authors and how it came to be considered different from that of the “ruler”.

The Populist Theory of the State in Early American Political Thought

2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Peel
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Final Section ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Imagination ◽  
American Political Thought ◽  
Early American ◽  
The People ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Deep Reservoir

That the “state” and the “people” are antonyms of American political thought is a widely held assumption. This essay argues that it is a mistake—Americans early in their thinking about politics distinguished the state from government and defined the state as the people themselves. Building on a deep reservoir of political thought pioneered by seventeenth-century theorists, Americans believed that to raise questions about the state was to inquire about the legitimacy of governmental action. The essay has three parts. It begins by explicating Quentin Skinner’s recent research on the concept of the state, supplemented by the work of other scholars, to apply that research to the American context. The essay then turns to a discussion of the concept of “the people” in the American context to orient the final section of the paper. Finally, the paper explicates James Wilson and St. George Tucker’s influential and rival populist theories of the American state. The overall aim of the essay is to stretch our political imagination and thus help us begin to reimagine the concept of the democratic state in more fruitful ways.

The Concept of the State in British and French Political Thought

2000 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 540-557 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cécile Laborde
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The State ◽  
Critical Moment ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Intellectual Traditions ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Way

The importance of the concept of state in British political thought has recently been re-assessed, and Dyson's contrast between a continental ‘state tradition’ and an Anglo-American ‘stateless tradition’ has been put into question. Yet this paper argues that there remain crucial differences in the way in which French and British political thinkers have understood the concept of state. Focusing on a critical moment in the crystallization of the meaning of ‘state’, the turn of the twentieth century, and in particular on the anti-statist pluralist school, it analyses how state critics were influenced by national intellectual traditions. French thought has been permeated by the idea of the autonomy of the state vis-à-vis society at large, while British thought has remained committed to an ideal of fluidity between state and society.

Beyond the Steppe Frontier

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sören Urbansky
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Local Population ◽  
The State ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Physical Force ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
Global Flows ◽  
Scant Attention

The Sino-Russian border, once the world's longest land border, has received scant attention in histories about the margins of empires. This book rectifies this by exploring the demarcation's remarkable transformation—from a vaguely marked frontier in the seventeenth century to its twentieth-century incarnation as a tightly patrolled barrier girded by watchtowers, barbed wire, and border guards. The book explores the daily life of communities and their entanglements with transnational and global flows of people, commodities, and ideas. It challenges top-down interpretations by stressing the significance of the local population in supporting, and undermining, border making. Because Russian, Chinese, and native worlds are intricately interwoven, national separations largely remained invisible at the border between the two largest Eurasian empires. This overlapping and mingling came to an end only when the border gained geopolitical significance during the twentieth century. The book demonstrates how states succeeded in suppressing traditional borderland cultures by cutting kin, cultural, economic, and religious connections across the state perimeter, through laws, physical force, deportation, reeducation, forced assimilation, and propaganda. It sheds critical new light on a pivotal geographical periphery and expands our understanding of how borders are determined.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dawn Rae Flood
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
United States Today ◽  
Criminal Jurisprudence ◽  
Rape Trials ◽  
And Gender

This introductory chapter examines the scope of sexual violence, rape trials, and criminal jurisprudence in an Anglo context through the familiar adage that rape is “an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved and harder to be defended against by the party accused, tho [sic] never so innocent.” This statement, attributed to seventeenth-century British jurist Matthew Hale, speaks to the prevailing conceptions of rape in the United States today, at the same time that it captures myriad assumptions about sex and gender relations in modern society. This chapter is thus a brief exploration of what it means to be victimized or accused of rape, albeit updated to include more recent social justice concerns such as racism and feminism.

On the Trail of the Bush King: A Dahomean Lesson in the Use of Evidence

1979 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edna G. Bay
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Source Material ◽  
The State ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Long Period ◽  
Close Observation ◽  
Court Life ◽  
Major Cycle

Twentieth-century historians of the Fon kingdom of Dahomey have been blessed with an unusually rich and accessible body of primary source material. Published in English and French by a succession of visitors to the kingdom, this literature includes references to Dahomean affairs beginning as early as the seventeenth century and continuing with regularity through its conquest in 1892/93 by the French. The accounts, however, are fullest in number of writers and in detail of observation for the period of the reigns of kings Gezo (1818-58) and Glele (1858-89).European observers of the Dahomean polity approached the state for a variety of commercial, religious, and political reasons, but typically they were permitted to visit the capital, Abomey, only in conjunction with the major cycle of annual ceremonies, Xwetanu. Because Xwetanu -- or Customs, as the ceremonies were dubbed by the Europeans -- ranged in duration from several weeks to several months, travelers drew their information about the kingdom from the advantageous point of a relatively long period of time spent in close observation of the court at what was unquestionably the most important period of the year. Fascinated and sometimes repelled by the sights they witnessed, they set down their own observations, describing land forms and economic activities, court life and ceremonial, and officers and institutions of the state.

Martyred Patriarchs, Institutionalized Virtues, and the Gendered Republic of Twentieth-Century China

Modern China ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 009770041988746
Author(s):  
Linh D. Vu
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Chinese Women ◽  
The State ◽  
Republican China ◽  
Legal Regime ◽  
Political Roles ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Moral Qualities ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Family State

This article draws attention to the cultural and social specificities of women’s agency in Republican China and suggests a way to rethink the polarizing impacts of revolution- and war-related deaths on women’s lives. Analyzing a number of petitions submitted by widows of martyrs, this article explores the transformation in family-state and gender relations during the Republican era. I argue that the Nationalist martyr compensation law perpetuated the imperial-era standards for the feminine virtues of chastity and sacrifice, circumscribing women’s social and political roles in twentieth-century China. Under the new equality-promoting legal regime and in the absence of familial patriarchs, women had new opportunities to venture outside their domestic quarters and to engage with the state. Yet, the Republican state often made exceptions to the law based on petitioners’ display of feminine virtues. By entering into this negotiation of virtue with the state, Chinese women defined themselves primarily through their performance of moral qualities.

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