Showing papers in "The American Historical Review in 1988"

Politics in hard times : comparative responses to international economic crises

Abstract: In Politics in Hard Times, Peter Gourevitch explores the common political factors that shape economic policy choices. He focuses on three periods of economic crisis-1873-1896, 1929-1949, and 1971 to the present-and compares policy choices made in Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, and the United States.

The invention of Athens : the funeral oration in the classical city

Abstract: How does the funeral oration relate to democracy in ancient Greece? How did the death of an individual citizen-soldier become the occasion to praise the city of Athens? In The Invention of Athens, Nicole Loraux traces the different rhetoric, politics, and ideology of funeral orations--epitaphioi--from Thucidydes, Gorgias, Lysias, and Demosthenes to Plato Arguing that the ceremony of public burial began circa 508-460 BCE, Loraux demonstrates that the institution of the funeral oration developed under Athenian democracy A secular, not a religious phenomenon, a literary genre with fixed rhetoric effects, the funeral oration was inextricably linked to the epainos--praise of the city--rather than to a ritualized lament for the dead as is commonly assumed Above all, the funeral oration celebrated the city of Athens and the Athenian citizenLoraux interprets the speeches from literary, anthropological, and political perspectives She explains how these acts of secular speech invented an image of Athens often at odds with the presumed ideals of democracy To die in battle for the city was presented as an act of civic choice--the "fine" death that defined the citizen-soldier's noble, aristocratic ethos At the same time, the funeral oration cultivated an image of democracy at a time when there was, for example, no formal theory of a respect for law and liberty, the supremacy of the collective and public over the individual and the private, or freedom of speechThis new edition of The Invention of Athens includes significant revisions made by Nicole Loraux in 1993 Her aim in editing the original text was to render this groundbreaking work accessible to nonspecialists Loraux's introduction to this revised volume, as well as important revisions to the 1986 English translation, make this publication an important addition to scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences

Historiography and Historiophoty

Abstract: ROBERT ROSENSTONE'S ESSAY RAISES AT LEAST TWO QUESTIONS that should be of eminent concern to professional historians. The first is that of the relative adequacy of what we might call "historiophoty" (the representation of history and our thought about it in visual images and filmic discourse) to the criteria of truth and accuracy presumed to govern the professional practice of historiography (the representation of history in verbal images and written discourse). Here the issue is whether it is possible to "translate" a given written account of history into a visual-auditory equivalent without significant loss of content. The second question has to do with what Rosenstone calls the "challenge" presented by historiophoty to historiography. It is obvious that cinema (and video) are better suited than written discourse to the actual representation of certain kinds of historical phenomena-landscape, scene, atmosphere, complex events such as wars, battles, crowds, and emotions. But, Rosenstone asks, can historiophoty adequately convey the complex, qualified, and critical dimensions of historical thinking about events, which, according to Ian Jarvie, at least, is what makes any given representation of the past a distinctly "historical" account? In many ways, the second question is more radical than the first in its implications for the way we might conceptualize the tasks of professional historiography in our age. The historical evidence produced by our epoch is often as much visual as it is oral and written in nature. Also, the communicative conventions of the human sciences are increasingly as much pictorial as verbal in their predominant modes of representation. Modern historians ought to be aware that the analysis of visual images requires a manner of "reading" quite different from that developed for the study of written documents. They should also recognize that the representation of historical events, agents, and processes in visual images presupposes the mastery of a lexicon, grammar, and syntax-in other words, a language and a discursive mode-quite different from that conventionally used for their representation in verbal discourse alone. All too often, historians treat photographic, cinematic, and video data as if they could be read in the same way as a written document. We are inclined to treat the imagistic evidence as if it were at best a complement of verbal evidence, rather than as a supplement, which is to say, a discourse in its own right and one capable of telling us things about its referents that are both different from what can be told in verbal discourse and also of a kind that can only be told by means of visual images.

The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon

Abstract: This prizewinning book is the first in-depth history of American strategic bombing. Michael S. Sherry explores the growing appeal of air power in America before World War II, the ideas, techniques, personalities, and organizations that guided air attacks during the war, and the devastating effects of American and British "conventional" bombing. He also traces the origins of the dangerous illusion that the bombing of cities would be so horrific that nations would not dare let it occur - an illusion that has sanctioned the growth of nuclear arsenals.

Ordered to care : the dilemma of American nursing, 1850-1945

Abstract: List of tables and figures Acknowledgments Introduction: the dilemma of caring Part I. The Nurse and the Hospital Before Training: 1. 'Professed' nursing: from duty to trade 2. Chaos and order in hospital nursing Part II. The Trained Nurse: An Apprentice to Duty: 3. Character as skill: the ideology of discipline 4. Training as work: the pupil nurse as hospital machine 5. 'Strangers to Boston': who becomes a nurse 6. Nursing as work: divisions in the occupation Part III. The 'Re-Forming' of Nursing: 7. Professionalization and its discontents 8. Nursing efficiency as the link between service and science 9. The limits of 'collaborative relationships' 10. Great transformation, small change Conclusion Appendix Notes Note on sources Select bibliography of primary sources Index.

Capitalism and antislavery : British mobilization in comparative perspective

Abstract: Foreword Christine Bolt - Preface - A Chronology of Emancipation, 1772-1888 - The Foundations of Slavery and Antislavery - Border Skirmish: Neither Wages nor the Whip - The Distinctiveness of British Abolitionist Mobilization - The Breakthrough, 1787-1792 - The Impact of Popular Mobilization in Britain and the Caribbean - Gods Work: Antislavery and Religious Mobilization - Class Conflict, Hegemony and the Cost of Antislavery - Antislavery and Capitalism - Notes - Bibliography - Index

New immigrants in New York

Abstract: Thoroughly updated to reflect changes in the composition of New York City's immigrant population, this book brings together contributions from leaders in their respective fields to show how new immigrants are transforming the city -- and how New York, in turn, has affected the newcomers' lives. The contributors consider the four largest groups -- Dominicans, former Soviets, Chinese, and Jamaicans -- as well as Mexicans, Koreans, and West Africans. An introduction highlights the groups' commonalities and differences. The book also includes an analysis of the city's altered demographic structure and its labor market.

The rise of English nationalism : a cultural history, 1740-1830

Abstract: "The Rise of English Nationalism" is a tour de force reinterpretation of English history and culture in the era of King George III. Where historians have often seen England as having been bypassed by the phenomenom of nationalism, Newman, equally at home with history and literature, shows instead that England was probably the first modern country to experience it, and reveals its vibrations throughout English cultural, social, literary and political life. The result is a remarkable synthesis from a comprehensive new angle of vision, lucidly and often wittily written. Both armchair historian and serious scholar will enjoy "The Rise of English Nationalism."

History in Images/History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film

Abstract: FOR AN ACADEMIC HISTORIAN TO BECOME INVOLVED IN THE WORLD OF motion pictures is at once an exhilarating and disturbing experience. Exhilarating for all the obvious reasons: the power of the visual media; the opportunity to emerge from the lonely depths of the library tojoin with other human beings in a common enterprise; the delicious thought of a potentially large audience for the fruits of one's research, analysis, and writing. Disturbing for equally obvious reasons: no matter how serious or honest the filmmakers, and no matter how deeply committed they are to rendering the subject faithfully, the history that finally appears on the screen can never fully satisfy the historian as historian (although it may satisfy the historian as filmgoer). Inevitably, something happens on the way from the page to the screen that changes the meaning of the past as it is understood by those of us who work in words. The disturbance caused by working on a film lingers long after the exhilaration has vanished. Like all such disturbances, this one can provoke a search for ideas to help restore one's sense of intellectual equilibrium. In my case, the search may have been particularly intense because I had a double dose of this experiencetwo of my major written works have been put onto film, and both times I have been to some extent involved in the process. The two films were almost as different as films can be. One was a dramatic feature and the other a documentary; one was a fifty-million-dollar Hollywood project and the other a quarter-million-dollar work funded largely with public money; one was pitched at the largest of mass audiences and the other at the more elite audience of public television and art houses. Despite these differences, vast and similar changes happened to the history in each production, changes that have led me to a new appreciation of the problems of putting history onto film. After these experiences, I no longer find it possible to blame the shortcomings of historical films either on the evils of Hollywood or the woeful effects of low budgets, on the limits of the dramatic genre or those of the documentary format. The most serious problems the historian has with the past on the screen arise out of the nature and demands of the visual medium itself. The two films are Reds (1982), the story of the last five years in the life of American poet, journalist, and revolutionary, John Reed; and The Good Fight

Disabled policy : America's programs for the handicapped

Abstract: Combining history and an analysis of policy today, this book exposes the contradictions in America's disability policy and suggests means of remedying them. Based on careful archival research and interviews with policymakers, the book illustrates the dilemmas that public policies pose for the handicapped: the present system forces too many people with physical impairments into retirement, despite the availability of constructive alternatives.

The Investiture Controversy: Church and Monarchy from the Ninth to the Twelfth Century

Abstract: "This book describes the roots of a set of ideals that effected a radical transformation of eleventh-century European society that led to the confrontation between church and monarchy known as the investiture struggle or Gregorian reform. Ideas cannot be divorced from reality, especially not in the Middle Ages. I present them, therefore, in their contemporary political, social, and cultural context."--from the Preface

The Nobility's Reform of the Medieval Church

Abstract: THE FIRST "REFORMATION" BEGAN IN THE MID-ELEVENTH CENTURY. A small group of clergymen, whose ranks included the future Pope Gregory VII (1073-85), decided that reform of the church required not only interior changes in individuals, a shifting of hearts toward God, but also external changes in corporate structure, a return to the early church, or at least to selected Constantinian and Carolingian practices. They sought to recover ecclesiastical property, to restore religious discipline, and to establish a purified priesthood free from the buying and selling of church offices (simony) and clerical marriage (nicolaitism), a goal that ultimately led to attacks on lay investiture and lay involvement in episcopal elections. These reformers never completely achieved a renewed, liberated church in a just society. Nevertheless, their calls for right order in the world had momentous consequences: papal power and prestige were vastly increased, kingship in the style of the Old Testament received a severe blow, cathedral chapters began to choose their own bishops, simony and nicolaitism became far less acceptable, the Benedictine ascetical monopoly was broken, and revived legal and theological debate brought rational enquiry and dispute back to the center of Western thought.'

Long-Term Silver Mining Trends in Spanish America: A Comparative Analysis of Peru and Mexico

Abstract: WHEN SPAIN CONQUERED THE AZTEC AND INCA EMPIRES, it acquired territories so rich in silver that Spanish America became the world's leading supplier. From the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the colonial era, it produced between 3 and 3.5 billion ounces, or a hundred thousand tons, of silver. Scholarly opinion has long held that silver mining had a profound impact on the development of the colonial economies and, because so much silver was exported, on the development of the economies of Spain and Europe. But scholars have been handicapped in testing hypotheses about economic development from American treasure because they have lacked long series of data on silver production in Peru and Mexico. In the last two decades, that void has been filled.\" It is possible now to determine when

Trade between Western Africa and the Atlantic World in the Pre-Colonial Era

Abstract: IN 1728, PtRE LABAT, A FRENCH MISSIONARY and enthusiastic imperialist, advocated the introduction into Africa of a wide range of manufactured goods. Africans, he believed, would become "hooked on French goods in the same manner as Europeans developed a dependency on tobacco." This dependency would induce them to offer "all their labor, their trade and their industry."' Labat was neither the first nor the last European to articulate this view, although his religious credentials make him one of the more interesting advocates. The conviction that fostering wants among domestic wage earners would create both a marketoriented supply of labor and a demand for goods and services was widely held by contemporary observers of European industrialization. This same conviction, it has been argued, was a cornerstone of British policy toward Africa in the mid-nineteenth century.2 Most modern commentators accept the view that Europeans were at least partially successful in imposing this policy on Africa. If historians concede that Africa was thus pulled into the Atlantic economy, it is not such a large step to the view-also widely held-that Africa made indispensable contributions to the development of the pre-colonial, or pre-1870, international economy.3

A History of thought and practice in educational administration

Abstract: Feel lonely? What about reading books? Book is one of the greatest friends to accompany while in your lonely time. When you have no friends and activities somewhere and sometimes, reading book can be a great choice. This is not only for spending the time, it will increase the knowledge. Of course the b=benefits to take will relate to what kind of book that you are reading. And now, we will concern you to try reading a history of thought and practice in educational administration as one of the reading material to finish quickly.