Kategoria BISAC: History >> Historiography

The popularity of amateur genealogy and family history has soared in recent times. Genealogy, Psychology and Identity explores this popular international pastime and offers reasons why it informs our sense of who we are, and our place in both contemporary culture and historical context. We will never know any of the people we discover from our histories in person, but for several reasons we recognize that their lives shaped ours. Paula Nicolson draws on her experiences tracing her own family history to show how people can connect with archival material, using documents and texts to...

The popularity of amateur genealogy and family history has soared in recent times. Genealogy, Psychology and Identity explores this popular international pastime and offers reasons why it informs our sense of who we are, and our place in both contemporary culture and historical context. We will never know any of the people we discover from our histories in person, but for several reasons we recognize that their lives shaped ours. Paula Nicolson draws on her experiences tracing her own family history to show how people can connect with archival material, using documents and texts to...

One of the darkest passages in German history is examined in this book (originally published in 1986) by five leading German historians of the Third Reich. The authors establish that a direct link existed between the widespread deaths of Soviet prisoners of war and the extermination of Jews and implicate the German army in the policies of genocide to a far greater degree than was previously thought. The situation of the inmates of camps is analysed and evidence provided of resistance action even among those facing death.

Although war memoirs constitute a rich, varied literary form, they are often dismissed by historians as unreliable. This collection of essays is one of the first to explore the modern war memoir, revealing the genre's surprising capacity for breadth and sophistication while remaining sensitive to the challenges it poses for scholars. Covering conflicts from the Napoleonic era to today, the studies gathered here consider how memoirs have been used to transmit particular views of war even as they have emerged within specific social and political contexts.

Though still a relatively young field, memory studies has undergone significant transformations since it first coalesced as an area of inquiry. Increasingly, scholars understand memory to be a fluid, dynamic, unbound phenomenon-a process rather than a reified object. Embodying just such an elastic approach, this state-of-the-field collection systematically explores the transcultural, transgenerational, transmedial, and transdisciplinary dimensions of memory-four key dynamics that have sometimes been studied in isolation but never in such an integrated manner. Memory...

Despite the three decades that have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the historical narrative of East Germany is hardly fixed in public memory, as German society continues to grapple with the legacies of the Cold War. This fascinating ethnography looks at two very different types of local institutions in one eastern German state that take divergent approaches to those legacies: while publicly funded organizations reliably cast the GDR as a dictatorship, a main regional newspaper offers a more ambivalent perspective colored by the experiences and concerns of its readers. As author...

The papers brought together in this volume bear witness to the growing vigour and diversity of eighteenth-century studies. The seminar at which they were presented was held to honour the memory of a literary scholar, David Nichol Smith. It is therefore understandable and fitting that the majority of the contributions should be concerned primarily with literature. History, art, and philosophy, however, are also dealt with; and the collection as a whole offers a widely ranging and illuminating survey of the period.

The ashes of Herbert Norman now lie in the British cemetery at Rome, near those of Shelley and Keats. His distinguished life and tragic death, in April 1957, are recalled and examined in this book by scholars and diplomats from four countries--the United States, Japan, Canada, and Britain.

Born in rural Japan the son of a Canadian missionary, Herbert Norman studied at the University of Toronto and went in 1933 to Cambridge University on a scholarship. There, in that intellectual hothouse where it seemed one had to choose politically between communism and fascism as the future of the...