Improving Western Historiography of Texcoco

2014 ◽  
pp. 25-61
Author(s):  
Jerome A. Offner
Keyword(s):  
Western Historiography

Gli anni di Mao: storia e politica del presente

2009 ◽  
pp. 5-26
Author(s):  
Stephen A. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Republic Of China ◽  
Great Leap Forward ◽  
History Of ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Collapse Of Communism ◽  
The Great Leap Forward ◽  
Western Historiography ◽  
The Way ◽  
Negative Representation ◽  
Mao Era

- Reflects on how political changes that have taken place in the People's Republic of China (Prc) during the era of economic reform, together with changes that have taken place in the world at large since 1989, especially those following the collapse of Communism in Europe, have shaped the way in which historians inside and outside the Prc have written the history of the Mao era (1949 to 1976). The article examines both Chinese and western historiography of four key issues relating to the Mao era: the idea of the 1950s as a "golden age"; the Great Leap Forward (1958-61); the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and the view of Mao himself. The more negative representation of these issues derives, in part, from the fact that scholars now have much greater access to sources than was true prior to the 1980s. At the same time, the more negative representation it is bound up with political changes that have occurred inside and outside the Prc. For that reason, the historiography of the Mao may be said to represent an almost textbook example of the way in which historical writing is implicated in the politics of the present. Keywords: China, Communism, Mao, Economy, Historiography, History. Parole chiave: Cina, Comunismo, Mao, Economia, Storiografia, Storia.

A Leonidas for the Golden Age of Superhero Films: The Thermopylae Tradition in 300 (2006)

2018 ◽  
pp. 83-100
Author(s):  
Eric Ross
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
Western Historiography

In the second of two chapters investigating the role of Homeric epic in fabricating golden ages, Ross proposes the current golden age of superhero movies as an effective lens for viewing the modern idealization of the Spartan king Leonidas as portrayed in 300 (2006). He cites several criteria: the superhero’s origin story; the threats posed by a tyrannical enemy and by civic bureaucracy; and the superhero’s tragic alienation from loved ones and society he protects. Leonidas’ superhero status resonates with Herodotus’ fifth-century BCE account of the Battle of Thermopylae, a “golden” moment in Western historiography, when Leonidas led his 300 Spartan warriors into Homeric “doomed combat” by standing their ground against the massive invasion of the Greek mainland by the army of Xerxes, Great King of Persia. Herodotus’ account has long been recognized as assimilating the Spartan warriors, especially Leonidas, to Homer’s depiction of mythical heroes, who were themselves the bases for twentieth-century superheroes. Ross demonstrates the political ramifications of the film’s use of storytelling to mobilize nostalgia for this golden age into contemporary re-enactment – despite director Zack Snyder’s (in)famous denials of political engagement.

Regionalism or Clientelism?

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 50-71
Author(s):  
Clayton Black
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Soviet Power ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Western Historiography

Abstract This article examines the Leningrad Opposition of 1925 not so much as a regionally based schism in the party opposed to Stalin’s increasing monopoly of power, but rather as a cohesive expression of the city’s frustration with NEP and the economic hardships it imposed on the most industrialized city in the Soviet Union in the first seven years of Soviet power. Contrary to Western historiography on the Opposition, Zinoviev did not so much lead as align with the city’s leaders.

“Silk Road, Cotton Road or . . . . Indo-Chinese Trade in Pre-European Times”

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEPHEN F. DALE
Keyword(s):  
Social Factors ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Cotton Cloth ◽  
Silk Cloth ◽  
Silk Production ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Chinese Trade ◽  
Common Era ◽  
Western Historiography ◽  
India And China

AbstractIndia and China were the most important producers of textiles in the world prior to the industrial revolution. However, whereas the Western historiography usually discusses Indian cotton and Chinese silk in connection with European imports, or with their sales in the Indian Ocean and the Middle East, cotton and silk were also exchanged between India and China. Indeed, Indian cotton and Chinese silk were probably the principal manufactured goods exchanged between these civilizations. Although Indian records are fragmentary, especially when compared with the voluminous Chinese sources, Indian cotton goods are known to have reached the Indianized states in Xinjiang in the early Common Era (CE), and may have been produced there, in Khotan and the neighbouring states, by the time that indigenous silk production was known to exist in India in the fourth and fifth centuries CE. Yet, while in later centuries large amounts of cotton cloth were produced in China while indigenous centres of silk production developed in India, exchanges of the finest types of cotton and silk cloth continued, usually driven by cultural and social factors in each civilization.

Land Reform and Serbian Colonization

2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-103
Author(s):  
Vladan Jovanović
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
Agrarian Reform ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Demographic Shifts ◽  
Western Historiography

The disintegration of the Ottoman Empire caused major demographic shifts in the Balkans. After the forced exchange of Greek and Turkish populations, the experience of the new Yugoslav state has received the greatest historical attention. Western historiography has emphasized the statements and efforts of a Serbian-led government to replace Muslim Albanians and Turks with Serbs. This paper, based on relevant historiography and unpublished archival material, reexamines the process of Serb colonization in Macedonia and Kosovo between the Two World Wars, including the Muslim migration from Yugoslavia to Turkey. It acknowledges the Serbian rationale for repopulating Kosovo, in particular, but goes on to emphasize the problems of an agrarian reform intended to favor smallholders across all of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, but also to facilitate the colonization project. Overseen by a new Belgrade Ministry for Agrarian Reform that was unable to fund the support needed for the colonists or to prevent local corruption, the reform failed to keep enough settlers in place to reverse the balance of population.

NO OBVIOUS HOME: THE FLIGHT OF THE PORTUGUESE “TRIBE” FROM MAKASSAR TO AYUTTHAYA AND CAMBODIA DURING THE 1660s

2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Stefan Halikowski Smith
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Racial Composition ◽  
South East Asia ◽  
Portuguese Population ◽  
Native Populations ◽  
The Military ◽  
Western Historiography

Western historiography has both turned its back on the Portuguese in the East after their ascendancy during the sixteenth century, and largely misunderstood the changed seventeenth-century realities of that presence. While scholars recognize how the missionary blueprint overtook the military one, the Portuguese population, particularly in areas outside official Crown control, in fact had very little to do with Europe, nowhere more so than in its racial composition. One might think of this entity as a “clan” or “tribe”. The internal social structure of this entity, and the reasons it was able to gain mass allegiance on the part of native populations, remains to be ascertained. This article examines how the “tribe” responded to two successive displacements as a result of the Dutch conquests of Melaka in 1641 and Makassar in the 1660s, considering why it moved to mainland South-East Asia and what this movement tells us about the group's dynamics.

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