Search results

An original history of Russia's thousand-year past, tracing the forces and the myths that have shaped Putin's politics and rekindled the Cold War.Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine has reshaped history. In the decades after the collapse of Soviet communism, the West convinced itself that liberal democracy would henceforth be the dominant, ultimately unique, system of governance - a hubris that shaped how the West would treat Russia for the next two decades. But history wasn't over. Putin is a paradox. In the early years of his presidency, he appeared to commit himself to friendship with the West, suggesting that Russia could join the European Union or even NATO. He said he supported free-market democracy and civil rights. But the Putin of those years is unrecognisable today. The Putin of the 2020s is an autocratic nationalist, dedicated to repression at home and anti-Western militarism abroad. So, what happened? Was he lying when he proclaimed his support for freedom, democracy and friendship with the West? Or, was he sincere? Did he change his views at some stage between then and now? And if that is the case, what happened to change him?Putin and the Return of History examines these questions in the context of Russia's thousand-year past, tracing the forces and the myths that have shaped Putin's politics of aggression: the enduring terror of encirclement by outsiders, the subjugation of the individual to the cause of the state, the collectivist values that allow the sacrifice of human lives in battle, the willingness to lie and deceive, the co-opting of religion and the belief in Great Russia's mission to change the world

In his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (circa 731 CE), Bede says that he will write his account of the past of the English following only vera lex historiae (the true law of history). Whether explicitly or implicitly, historians narrate the past according to conceptions of what constitutes historical truth that emerge in the use of narrative strategies, formulae, and other textual forms, in establishing one's ideological authority or that of one's informants, and in faithfulness to a cultural, narrative, or poetic tradition. But what if we extend the scope of what we understand by history (especially in premodern settings) to include not just the writings of historians legitimated by the Latinate matrix of Christianized classical history writing, but also collective narratives, practices, rituals, oral poetry, liturgy, artistic representations, and acts of identity? In these genres of re-enacting the past as, or as representation of, the present, we find a plethora of modes of constructions of historical truth, narrative authority, and reliability.

Vera Lex Historiae? comprises contributions that reveal the variety of evental strategies by which historical truth was constructed in late antiquity and the earlier Middle Ages, and the range of procedures by which such narratives were first established as being historical and then as "true" histories. This is not only a matter of narrative strategies, but also of habitus — ways of living and acting in the world that are deeply imbricated with the commemoration and re-enactment of the past by communities and by individuals. In doing this, Vera Lex Historiae? aims to recover something of the plurality of modes of preserving and reenacting the past available in late antiquity and the earlier middle ages which we often overlook because of preconceived notions of what constitutes history writing.

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Introduction -- Why Me? -- The Book's Goals -- What This Book Covers -- Part I How Humanity Got into This Mess -- Chapter 1 Capitalism: The Cult of Self-Sufficiency -- A Quick History of Capitalism -- Where We Are Now -- Advantages of Capitalism -- The Unintended or Willfully Ignored Negative Consequences of Capitalism in the Technology Sector -- How to Mitigate UCOTs and Reimagine Capitalism -- The Future of Capitalism -- References -- Chapter 2 Tech-States: Are Nation-States Obsolete? -- A Quick Look at the Nation-State -- A Quick Look at a Tech-State -- Advantages of the Tech-State -- The Unintended or Willfully Ignored Negative Consequences of a Tech-State -- References -- Part II Technologies and Trends with Lots of Promise but Also Uncertainty -- Chapter 3 Data: What Is the Data Industrial Complex? -- The History of Data -- The World of Big Data -- Positive Use Cases for Big Data -- Unintended Consequences of Big Data -- How to Mitigate UCOTs of Big Data -- Resetting Big Data -- References -- Chapter 4 Artificial Intelligence Will Humans Soon Be Irrelevant? -- What Is AI? -- Why Should You Care About AI? -- A Quick History of AI -- Positive Use Cases for AI -- The Negative Unintended Consequences of AI -- The Future of AI -- References -- Chapter 5 Blockchain: Can Trust Be Decentralized? -- How Does Blockchain Work? -- Why Should You Care About Blockchain? -- Blockchain Use Cases -- The Unintended Consequences of Blockchain -- What's Being Done to Address These UCOTs? -- The Future of Blockchain -- References -- Chapter 6 Conditioning: From Human to User to an Addicted "Drug" User? -- A Quick History of Media -- Advantages of Mass Digital Media -- The Unintended or Willfully Ignored Negative Consequences of Mass Media -- How to Mitigate the UCOTs of Mass Media.

"Sitting in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture is a rough cotton bag, called "Ashley's Sack," embroidered with just a handful of words that evoke a sweeping family story of loss and of love passed down through generations. In 1850s South Carolina, just before nine-year-old Ashley was sold, her mother, Rose, gave her a sack filled with just a few things as a token of her love. Decades later, Ashley's granddaughter, Ruth, embroidered this history on the bag--including Rose's message that "It be filled with my Love always." Historian Tiya Miles carefully follows faint archival traces back to Charleston to find Rose in the kitchen where she may have packed the sack for Ashley. From Rose's last resourceful gift to her daughter, Miles then follows the paths their lives and the lives of so many like them took to write a unique, innovative history of the lived experience of slavery in the United States. The contents of the sack--a tattered dress, handfuls of pecans, a braid of hair, "my Love always"--speak volumes and open up a window on Rose and Ashley's world. As she follows Ashley's journey, Miles metaphorically "unpacks" the sack, deepening its emotional resonance and revealing the meanings and significance of everything it contained. These include the story of enslaved labor's role in the cotton trade and apparel crafts and the rougher cotton "negro cloth" that was left for enslaved people to wear; the role of the pecan in nutrition, survival, and southern culture; the significance of hair to Black women and of locks of hair in the nineteenth century; and an exploration of Black mothers' love and the place of emotion in history"--

"The idea that the digital age has revolutionized our day-to-day experience of the world is nothing new, and has been amply recognized by cultural historians. In contrast, Stephen Robertson's BC: Before Computers is a work which questions the idea that the mid-twentieth century saw a single moment of rupture. It is about all the things that we had to learn, invent, and understand – all the ways we had to evolve our thinking – before we could enter the information technology revolution of the second half of the twentieth century. Its focus ranges from the beginnings of data processing, right back to such originary forms of human technology as the development of writing systems, gathering a whole history of revolutionary moments in the development of information technologies into a single, although not linear narrative.

Treading the line between philosophy and technical history, Robertson draws on his extensive technical knowledge to produce a text which is both thought-provoking and accessible to a wide range of readers. The book is wide in scope, exploring the development of technologies in such diverse areas as cryptography, visual art and music, and the postal system. Through all this, it does not simply aim to tell the story of computer developments but to show that those developments rely on a long history of humans creating technologies for increasingly sophisticated methods of manipulating information.

Through a clear structure and engaging style, it brings together a wealth of informative and conceptual explorations into the history of human technologies, and avoids assumptions about any prior knowledge on the part of the reader. As such, it has the potential to be of interest to the expert and the general reader alike."

"Open access to this title is possible thanks to the generous support of Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.
Renaissance Futurities considers the intersections between artistic rebirth, the new science, and European imperialism in the global early modern world. Charlene Villaseñor Black and Mari-Tere Álvarez reconsider the work of Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), prolific artist and inventor, and other polymaths such as philosopher Giulio "Delminio" Camillo (1480–1544), physician and naturalist Francisco Hernández de Toledo (1514–1587), and writer Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616). This concern with futurity is inspired by the Renaissance itself, a period defined by visions of the future, as well as by recent theorizing of temporality in Renaissance, queer, and ethnic studies. This transdisciplinary collection is at the cutting edge of the humanities, the sciences, and the arts with contributions in history, art history, literature, media studies, mathematics, and medicine.
"A superb provocation, asking us to reimagine the Renaissance in both space and time, resituating it at the crossroads of Europe and its early modern empires; of art, technology, and science; and of alternative pasts and futures." TARA NUMMEDAL, author of Anna Zieglerin and the Lion's Blood: Alchemy and End Times in Reformation Germany
"This volume approaches the field through the unique lens of futurity, bringing together an eclectic transdisciplinary group of scholars who focus on ingenuity and futuristic thinking in various Renaissance contexts." PAULA DeVOS, Professor of History, San Diego State University
CHARLENE VILLASEÑOR BLACK is Professor of Art History and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. MARI-TERE ÁLVAREZ is Associate Director of the University of Southern California's International Museum Institute."

Cover -- Half Title -- Title page -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Introduction. Straying from the Well-Trod Path -- Part 1. Poseurs and Prophets -- 1. A Letter to Paul Wolfowitz: Occasioned by the Tenth Anniversary of the Iraq War (2013) -- 2. David Brooks: Angst in the Church of America the Redeemer (2017) -- 3. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and the Decline of American Liberalism (2017) -- 4. George Kennan: Kennan Kvetches (2014) -- 5. Tom Clancy: Military Man (2014) -- 6. Robert Kagan: The Duplicity of the Ideologues (2014) -- 7. Boykinism: Joe McCarthy Would Understand (2012) -- 8. Henry Luce: The Elusive American Century (2012) -- 9. Donald Rumsfeld: Known and Unknown (2011) -- 10. Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter: Tailors to the Emperor (2011) -- 11. Fault Lines: Inside Rumsfeld's Pentagon (2008) -- 12. Tommy Franks: A Modern Major General (2004) -- 13. Selling Our Souls: Of Idolatry and iPhones (2011) -- 14. Christopher Lasch: Family Man (2010) -- 15. Randolph Bourne: The Man in the Black Cape (2009) -- 16. William Appleman Williams: Tragedy Renewed (2009) -- 17. Reinhold Niebuhr: Illusions of Managing History (2007) -- Part 2. History and Myth -- 18. Saving "America First" (2017) -- 19. Kissing the Specious Present Goodbye (2017) -- 20. The Age of Great Expectations (2017) -- 21. American Imperium (2016) -- 22. History That Makes Us Stupid (2015) -- 23. Always and Everywhere (2013) -- 24. The Ugly American Telegram (2013) -- 25. The Revisionist Imperative (2012) -- 26. The End of (Military) History? (2010) -- 27. Twilight of the Republic? (2006) -- 28. What Happened at Bud Dajo (2006) -- 29. The Folly of Albion (2005) -- 30. The Real World War IV (2005) -- Part 3. War and Empire -- 31. Save Us From Washington's Visionaries (2015) -- 32. A War of Ambition (2014) -- 33. Naming Our Nameless War (2013) -- 34. How We Became Israel (2012)

A history of the wide range of general and specialist hospitals associated with the University of Birmingham Medical School, set in the broader context of health care in Birmingham. In the middle of the eighteenth century, hospitals were unfamiliar institutions to the inhabitants of most English towns and cities. As early as the late nineteenth century, however, hospitals had become central to both the provision of health care and medical education in most large urban population centres. Drawing on hospital records, the publications of associated medical staff and a wealth of other local documents, Health Care in Birmingham carefully maps the evolution of nine voluntary hospitals, and their associated medical specialities in Birmingham, England over the century and a half before the introduction of the National Health Service, a period that witnessed significant social, economic and cultural change. From the emergence of the town's first General Hospital in 1779, the wealth of this key industrial centre in particular encouraged the development of a full range of medical institutions, including those established to treat afflictions of the bones and joints, eye, ear, teeth and skin, as well as ailments peculiar to women and children. Besides charting the local development of a wide range of specialist fields, Health Care in Birmingham firmly situates each hospital in its local and national contexts. Though greatly reorganised on the eve of the Second World War, these institutions influenced considerably the history and landscape of the city, and continue to do so today. This is the first time their history has been considered collectively in a single volume. Jonathan Reinarz is Director of the Centre for the History of Medicine at the University of Birmingham.

Abstract
Territory is a distinctive feature of modern international politics, but there is little consensus over what about it is distinctively modern. Recent scholarship in historical international relations (IR) takes modern territoriality to be defined by the practice of creating and enforcing borders. Scholarship therefore dismisses the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, once thought to be the origin of the sovereign territorial state, because it did not change border practices. However, this approach ignores legal history. I argue that territory is a legal concept, and a history of modern territoriality must explain under what conditions rulers expressed their authority as territorial in nature. This article explains why the legal evolution of territorial rights (landeshoheit, iure territorii) in early modern Europe was distinctive of the Holy Roman Empire (HRE). While national monarchies asserted their "sovereignty" as non-territorial in order to capture overseas empires, the HRE developed a legal doctrine of territorially circumscribed jurisdiction within the imperial hierarchy. The Peace of Westphalia was a culminating event in which diverse privileges were recast as a single territorial right. Territorial autonomy was not only consistent with the hierarchy of the HRE but was fundamental to preserving it. This article has two contributions. First, it adds to recent scholarship on modern territoriality by explaining how legal history furnished the preconditions for ruling territory. Second, it places Westphalia and the empire's legal history within the recent turn toward empire in historical IR. An important source for the development of international law was the internal constitution of the HRE. This prompts us to reconsider the notion that international law assumes a world of sovereign territorial states. On the contrary, early international law concerned territorial states nested within imperial hierarchy, not the anarchy of sovereignty.

AbstractThis article delineates a hitherto eclipsed labor history of the Northwest Borneo oilfields. In 2018, Brunei Shell Petroleum (BSP) in an unprecedented move, released to Brunei's national archive two labor registers of the British Malayan Petroleum Company (BMPC-renamed BSP in 1958), with entries dating between the 1940s and 1950s. These registers provided a rare glimpse of the workers who were recruited to the Brunei oilfields as labor, a category distinct from staff. As BMPC labor they worked to rehabilitate the company town and the oilfields that were destroyed during the Second World War by the Japanese army and allied bombing in the British protectorate of Brunei. Like colonial records that amassed information for the control and rule of colonized subjects, each entry in BMPC's ledger meticulously noted the date of engagement, place of employment, wages, work history, as well as some biographical information about its workers. Inadvertently, these entries also revealed modes of worker resistance and assertions of agency, thus providing a glimpse of the hidden transcripts of a labor history shaped by the policies of BMPC in this colonial outpost. My article draws on these two BMPC labor registers to trace a micro-spatial history of "Dayak" labor in the emergent Borneo oilfields. Often obscured in historical records, the registers made visible the ways in which Indigenous workers negotiated and resisted the company's control of its labor force. I explore Dayak labor recruitment within the context of the 1880s-1941 when state borders irrevocably shifted and regional economies were increasingly drawn into a global market. In doing so, I chart migrant labor routes across varied regional economies in Northwest Borneo, BMPC's management of a multiethnic labor force, and company workers' agency.

The article examines the source value of the Soviet popular magazines "Ural Pathfinder" and "Seeker". First of all, the author considers the social and moral-political conditions in which these magazines were created. It is emphasized that both publications appeared at about the same time, at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, at the beginning of the so-called "Golden age" of Soviet science fiction, when a galaxy of young and active science fiction writers entered the arena of literary life. The appearance of magazines was a response to the request of Soviet readers, first of all, the intelligentsia, who needed new publications of science fiction and adventure themes. The content of these publications was also analyzed. There were differences between the magazines. The "Ural Pathfinder" was not only a literary and artistic publication, but also a popular scientific, historical, geographical, and local history publication. "Seeker" was a literary supplement to "Around the world". Also, over time, by the 1980s, magazines acquired different ideological colors in the eyes of the Soviet intelligentsia, which, however, did not affect their popularity. At the end, the research results are summarized. In relation to the history of the intelligentsia, the source potential of magazines is limited by a number of factors. Among them, censorship restrictions and ideological divisions among the Soviet intelligentsia occupy an important place. However, the analyzed publications can serve as sources on the following aspects: the history of the Soviet press, primarily popular publications; the development of regional journalism; coverage of local history and environmental issues, issues of youth education (based on the materials of the "Ural Pathfinder"); the composition of the authors of fantasy and adventure works, their plot component.

Im Beitrag wurde die Erinnerung an das Zwangsarbeitslager in Tiszalök (Oberen Theißgebiet, Ungarn) im gesellschaftlichen, historischen und ethnischen Kontext dargestellt. Als erster Schritt wird die Frage gestellt, ob man von Kulturerbe oder einfach von Kriegsspuren sprechen kann, wenn man die mit dem Krieg zusammenhängenden Gegebenheiten erforscht. Nach dem theoretischen Einleitung über Begriffe Erinnerung, Vergessen und Patrimonisierung gibt die Autorin eine kurze historische Überblick über die Zeit nach der Auflösung von Zwangsarbeitslagern. Dann wurde das Zwangsarbeitslager in der Gemeinde Tiszalök nicht nur aus der Perspektive der ungarndeutschen Erinnerungs­kultur in den Blick nehmen, sonder auch aus der Perspektive einer Frau, die nicht zur imaginierten/erfundenen ungarndeutschen Gemein­schaft gehörte, dargestellt wurde. Durch einen Erinnerungsstück aus Tiszalök und durch die Lebensgeschichte dieser Frau wurde Vergessenheit als Fähigkeit zum Überleben, und Gegenstände aus dem Lager als Teil der Patrimonisierung interpretiert. ; The paper explores the memory of the internment camp in Tiszalök (Upper Tisza region, Hungary) in selected social, historical, and ethnic contexts. After a brief theoretical overview of key concepts such as heritagization, the author highlights some significant facts and events from the history of the camp. This camp was established after the Second World War, and deportees of German origin, who could not go home to their families after returning to Hungary from Russian captivity, were held there. Furthermore, the paper outlines how the history of the camp was first concealed in public, then gradually discovered by scholars and memorialized through commemorative events and a monument which was erected by the local community and former inmates. Subsequently, the author presents the case study of a deceased Hungarian woman who used to work in the camp's kitchen. Based on several interviews with her relatives and after the careful examination of a wooden box from her estate, the author demonstrates that her family history and the history of the interned members of the German minority are closely intertwined in a way, which had been unknown to her family. Finally, the author argues that similar personal objects may reveal further untold stories and entangled memories from the postwar years.

Ancient Rome is the only society in the history of the western world whose legal profession evolved autonomously, distinct and separate from institutions of political and religious power. Roman legal thought has left behind an enduring legacy and exerted enormous influence on the shaping of modern legal frameworks and systems, but its own genesis and context pose their own explanatory problems. The economic analysis of Roman law has enormous untapped potential in this regard: by exploring the intersecting perspectives of legal history, economic history, and the economic analysis of law, the two volumes of Roman Law and Economics are able to offer a uniquely interdisciplinary examination of the origins of Roman legal institutions, their functions, and their evolution over a period of more than 1000 years, in response to changes in the underlying economic activities that those institutions regulated. Volume I explores these legal institutions and organizations in detail, from the constitution of the Roman Republic to the management of business in the Empire, while Volume II covers the concepts of exchange, ownership, and disputes, analysing the detailed workings of credit, property, and slavery, among others. Throughout each volume, contributions from specialists in legal and economic history, law, and legal theory are underpinned by rigorous analysis drawing on modern empirical and theoretical techniques and methodologies borrowed from economics. In demonstrating how these can be fruitfully applied to the study of ancient societies, with due deference to the historical context, Roman Law and Economics opens up a host of new avenues of research for scholars and students in each of these fields and in the social sciences more broadly, offering new ways in which different modes of enquiry can connect with and inform each other. ; https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1246/thumbnail.jpg

Ancient Rome is the only society in the history of the western world whose legal profession evolved autonomously, distinct and separate from institutions of political and religious power. Roman legal thought has left behind an enduring legacy and exerted enormous influence on the shaping of modern legal frameworks and systems, but its own genesis and context pose their own explanatory problems. The economic analysis of Roman law has enormous untapped potential in this regard: by exploring the intersecting perspectives of legal history, economic history, and the economic analysis of law, the two volumes of Roman Law and Economics are able to offer a uniquely interdisciplinary examination of the origins of Roman legal institutions, their functions, and their evolution over a period of more than 1000 years, in response to changes in the underlying economic activities that those institutions regulated. Volume II covers the concepts of exchange, ownership, and disputes, analysing the detailed workings of credit, property, and slavery, among others, while Volume I explores Roman legal institutions and organizations in detail, from the constitution of the Republic to the management of business in the Empire. Throughout each volume, contributions from specialists in legal and economic history, law, and legal theory are underpinned by rigorous analysis drawing on modern empirical and theoretical techniques and methodologies borrowed from economics. In demonstrating how these can be fruitfully applied to the study of ancient societies, with due deference to the historical context, Roman Law and Economics opens up a host of new avenues of research for scholars and students in each of these fields and in the social sciences more broadly, offering new ways in which different modes of enquiry can connect with and inform each other. ; https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1247/thumbnail.jpg

The article deals with the correlation of transformations of social processes and their reflection in the social theory of philosophy. Comparative analysis of the classical form of Marxism and the concept of G.V. Plekhanov as a representative of 'Russian' Marxism reveals differences in the interpretation of the main methodological principle — the principle of materialistic understanding of history. According to the research hypothesis, there are existential characteristics found in G.V. Plekhanov's Marxism in the interpretation of the essence of social subject. The paper reveals the intersubjective nature of social subject, which is considered in the concept of G.V. Plekhanov as the main driving force in history. It is shown that «Russian» Marxism is always demarcated from the position of economic determinism. In this context, an attempt is made to minimize the risk of social analysis losing its effectiveness in the existing philosophical directions of thought. The paper proves the leading role of the principle of materialistic understanding of history in modern social analysis. The analysis of modern social relations allows us to note high relevance of studying the essence of social subject. The author emphasizes the contradictory nature of human inclusion in society, which, in the context of the difficult geopolitical situation in the world and globalization of communication flows, acquires the status of a problem of individual peoples' culture security. In this context, the importance of analyzing the existential characteristics of social subject is noted. The main characteristics of the productive forces of society as a source of social stability are formulated in order to minimize the risk of massization of social subject. The research results can be applied both in the subsequent analysis of the specifics of Russian philosophical thought and in the theoretical consideration of the social relations dynamics and the logic of history.