Search results for "National history"
showing 10 items of 16 documents
Dating Late Paleolithic Harpoons from Lake Lubāns, Latvia
2014
Over 3000 prehistoric bone and antler artifacts, collected in the late 1930s from the former lakebed of Lake Lubāns, are held by the National History Museum of Latvia. This collection is remarkable not only as one of the largest known assemblages of bone implements in northern Europe, but also in terms of diversity of forms. The most elaborately worked objects include harpoons, often with two rows of barbs and spade-shaped bases, which are believed to date to the Late Paleolithic, and to be among the oldest organic artifacts ever found in Latvia. Four broken specimens were sampled in 2011 for accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dating, stable isotope analysis, and taxonomic attribution by Z…
Ideas and lives across the Atlantic. The American Anarchism in the Galician libertarian press
2019
In this article we will analyse, from a transnational history point of view, the presence of American anarchism in the Galician libertarian press until 1936. In the 19th and 20h centuries, the transatlantic migrations contributed to develop a dense network of contacts and relationships between Galicia and American countries. This network involves anarchist militants on both sides of the Ocean. The Galician anarchists have a close collaboration with her Americans libertarian comrades; and many Galician militants are actively committed in the labour movement of their host countries. The Galician libertarian press shows this relationship and this participation in different ways (articles, cont…
National days between commemoration and celebration: remembering 1947 and 1960 in Madagascar
2013
Today Madagascar officially celebrates two national holidays. 29 March is dedicated to the memory of anticolonial resistance in 1947, the commemoration of the dead and the decoration of surviving combatants. 26 June in contrast is celebrated as Madagascar's return to independence in 1960 with parades, cultural performances, singing and dancing. But consecutive governments have altered state politics of commemoration and non-state actors have influenced the way in which 1947 and 1960 are remembered.This study of national days in Madagascar offers an interpretation of the different ways the two key events of national history have been remembered within the fifty years since Independence. Look…
Integrating a Nexus: the history of political discourse and language policy research
2019
Historians of political discourse and language policy researchers should join forces to develop methods of textual analysis that help to integrate political and intellectual history. They could do so by focusing their analysis on interconnections between material realities, human physical action, practices and structures, as well as institutions and ideologies as discursive constructs. Such a version of soft constructivism underscoring the discursive nature of much of politics encourages historians to analyse past political discourses more systematically. Concepts such as nexus, historical body, mobility and discursive transfers borrowed from language research deepen our analytical understa…
The fragility of Finnish parliamentary democracy at the moment when Prussianism fell
2019
The Finnish case is in many ways illustrative of the complexities of democratisation after World War I. Finland found itself at the nexus of a Swedish constitutional tradition, legalism and ideological controversies adopted from Imperial Germany, the radicalised Russian Revolution, and Western parliamentary democracy. After having been a model for reformers demanding women’s suffrage, for instance, the country found itself in autumn 1918 going in the opposite direction to almost all other European countries. This article analyses the fragility of Finnish parliamentary democracy then, contrasting it with longer-term trends supportive of democratisation. ‘Democracy’ had been the goal for mos…
Un Medioevo «globale»? A proposito della Storia mondiale dell’Italia
2018
Medieval studies often deal with transnational history, although this trend is not recognized by the scholars who defined the features of the “World history”, being this usually related with “modernity”. Middle Ages are the times of widespread phenomena like the making of the Western Christendom, the circulation of noble and merchant elites, the building of supranational monarchies. The essays that deal with medieval subjects included in the volume Storia mondiale dell’Italia partially reflect these leanings, showing the issues of the historical question of an Italian unitary identity.
Losing Monarchs: The Legacy of German and English National Historiography
2017
During the nineteenth century, Leopold von Ranke, Johann Gustav Droysen, Alfred von Arneth, and other German-speaking historians established an alleged ‘scientific’ approach to history, based on the so-called historiographic method. They interpreted history as determined by ‘great’ ideas, such as nation, state, and religion. Similarly, the British Whig interpretation of history—represented, for example, by Henry Hallam and Thomas Macaulay—conceptualized history as a continuously ascending process, in which Great Britain established a civilised modern empire spanning territories on all continents. This chapter shows how monarchs became lost—that is, not considered noteworthy—when their rule …
The 2010 independence jubilees: the politics and aesthetics of national commemoration in Africa
2013
In 2010, as many as seventeen African states celebrated their independence jubilees. The debates surrounding the organisation of these celebrations, and the imagery and performances they employed, reflect the fault lines with which African nation-building has to contend, such as competing political orientations as well as religious, regional and ethnic diversity. The celebrations represented constitutive and cathartic moments of nation-building, aiming to enhance citizens' emotional attachments to the country and inviting to remember, re-enact and re-redefine national history. They became a forum of debate about what should constitute the norms and values that make-up national identity and,…
Early modern state formation in the margins? A review of early modern popular politics and limited royal power in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth …
2017
The traditional historiography of early modern state-building has usually followed the western European paradigm of historiography, the usual models being France, England, Brandenburg-Prussia and Sweden. Regions that do not follow this paradigm have simply been left out and labeled “backward” or as “lagging behind”. In this literary review, our focus is on two different and rather surprising cases of early modern state formation: the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Spanish colonial empire in Latin America. By following the scholarship on these two large conglomerates, we focus on two scholarly concepts: the idea of early modern realms as composite/conglomerate states, and state forma…
Transnational Constructors of Parliamentary Democracy in Swedish and Finnish Constitutional Controversies, 1917–1919
2019
During the First World War, the legitimacy of established polities was challenged everywhere in Europe. Not only the combatant great powers but also smaller states witnessed a resurgence of constitutional disputes and competing ideological conceptualizations of revolution and reform, the will of the people, democracy, and parliamentarism. While these controversies primarily focused on the future of the national polities concerned, historical experiences and discourses accelerated by the war and the Russian Revolution were transnationally interconnected and contributed to discursive transfers between political cultures. Swedish and Finnish socialists were linked by their internationals, libe…