scholarly journals On Noble and Inherited Virtues: Discussions of the Semitic Race in the Levant and Egypt, 1876–1918

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 88
Author(s):  
Orit Bashkin
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
World War ◽  
Literature And Linguistics ◽  
Cultural Revival ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
Rational Explanation ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
And Linguistics

This article examines new notions about race, ethnicity and language current in modern movements of Arabic literary and cultural revival. I argue that the Arab print market before World War I adopted the racial category of the Semite as highly relevant to Arab ethnicity and language, but the philological and literary significations of the term subverted the negative constructions affiliated with the Semitic races in Western race theories. Combining elements from the study of linguistics, religion, and political philosophy, Arabic journals, books, and works of historical fiction, created a Semitic and Arab universe, populated by grand historical figures and mesmerizing literary and cultural artifacts. Such publications advanced the notion that the Arab races belonged to Semitic cultures and civilizations whose achievements should be a source of pride and rejuvenation. These printed products also conveyed the idea that the Arabic language and Arab ethnicity can create ecumenical and pluralistic conversations. Motivated by the desire to find a rational explanation to phenomena they identified with cultural and literary decline, Arab authors also hoped to reconstruct the modes with which their Semitic and Arab ancestors dealt with questions relating to community and civilization. By publishing scientific articles on philology, literature, and linguistics, the print media illustrated that Arabic itself was a language capable of expressing complex scientific concepts and arguments.

scholarly journals Anger, Irony, and the Formal Rationality of Professionalism

2010 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 241-248
Author(s):  
Ajay K. Mehrotra
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
American Law ◽  
History Of ◽  
Formal Rationality

One of the challenges in writing about the history of American law and political economy is determining the proper amount of historical context necessary to make sense of past institutional and organizational change. Where to begin and end a historical narrative and how much to include about the broader social, cultural, political, and economic conditions of a particular place and time are, of course, questions that accompany any attempt to reconstruct the past. How one addresses these issues invariably shapes the motives and intentions that can be ascribed to historical figures. In their eloquent and thoughtful comments, Christopher Capozzola and Michael Bernstein have urged me to think more carefully about these issues, about where my story begins and ends, about the broader social, political, and material circumstances that animated World War I state-building, and about the seemingly apolitical ideas and actions of the Treasury lawyers who are the center of “Lawyers, Guns, and Public Moneys.”

“Be a Roman Soldier”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheila Murnaghan ◽  
Deborah H. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Roman History ◽  
Rudyard Kipling ◽  
World War ◽  
Roman Britain ◽  
British Identity ◽  
American Novels ◽  
American Children ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines historical fiction for children set in antiquity, taking note of the genre’s intermediate status as a source of historical information that also shares the fictionality of myth and solicits the modern reader’s identification with characters from a different era. The relationship between historical fiction and national identity is explored through American novels set in the Roman world. Compared to works by British authors like Rudyard Kipling, which use Roman Britain as a context for themes of British identity and imperialism, works for American children by Reuben Wells, Paul Anderson, and Caroline Dale Snedeker make the scenes of Roman history into versions of such American settings as the new world of colonial exploration, the frontier, and the homeland of World War I.

reception in historical novels

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
World War I ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Scientific Progress ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Source Analysis ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
World War ◽  
Academic History ◽  
The 19Th Century

Reception in historical novels set in ancient Greece and Rome differs fundamentally between the 19th and the 20th/21st centuries. In the 19th century, reception was governed heavily by imperial attitudes and religious controversies, particularly in regard to claims about the true Christian faith under the Roman Empire. Hence, novels set in Rome or the Roman Empire dominated the field. In the 20th century, attitudes to empire and religion were drastically revised in the wake of World War I. The growing authority of academic history in an age of scientific progress was another factor which helped to produce a decline in the reputation of historical fiction. Other changes, however, were more stimulating in nature, including the use of ancient Greece as a setting, more impressive source analysis, the rise of female novelists, different subjects and perspectives, and new social and sexual attitudes. These and other developments lifted the reputation of historical fiction once more.

Through the prism of Spain. Socio-economic causes of different outcomes of Russian and Spanish civil wars

2017 ◽  
pp. 142-155
Author(s):  
I. Rozinskiy ◽  
N. Rozinskaya
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Russian Civil War ◽  
World War ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Economic Well Being

The article examines the socio-economic causes of the outcome of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1936), which, as opposed to the Russian Civil War, resulted in the victory of the “Whites”. Choice of Spain as the object of comparison with Russia is justified not only by similarity of civil wars occurred in the two countries in the XX century, but also by a large number of common features in their history. Based on statistical data on the changes in economic well-being of different strata of Spanish population during several decades before the civil war, the authors formulate the hypothesis according to which the increase of real incomes of Spaniards engaged in agriculture is “responsible” for their conservative political sympathies. As a result, contrary to the situation in Russia, where the peasantry did not support the Whites, in Spain the peasants’ position predetermined the outcome of the confrontation resulting in the victory of the Spanish analogue of the Whites. According to the authors, the possibility of stable increase of Spanish peasants’ incomes was caused by the nation’s non-involvement in World War I and also by more limited, compared to Russia and some other countries, spending on creation of heavy (primarily military-related) industry in Spain.

‘Grey Dawn’ in the British Pacific: Race, Security and Colonial Sovereignty on the Eve of World War I

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
World War ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Cooperative Security ◽  
Strategic Defense ◽  
Racial Discourses ◽  
The Way

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.

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