Suchergebnisse

My current research concerns the politics in Russian History education. In this paper I discuss some of the issues raised by the study of national History textbooks. I analyze the normative implications of sentences and statements about the past and try to define contrary ideological assumptions. How do the authors construct the aim of historical education? In what kind of activities do the typical patterns of textbook questions and instructions try to engage pupils? How do the different Textbooks construct the political subject? The article aims to explore the media construction of political actions in Russian School History Textbooks.

This article analyzes Chineseness in premodern Vietnam and its influence on Vietnam's foreign policy toward China and Southeast Asia both past and present. The term Chineseness refers to the practice and preservation of Confucian ideas and values in Vietnam, which arguably consists of the Mandate of Heaven and Confucian Orthodoxy concepts and their subsequent orthodox lineage issue. Being considered culturally closer to China than Korea and Japan, Vietnam, throughout history, has relied on these concepts to position itself strategically and navigate its relations vis-à-vis China and other smaller countries in Southeast Asia. Vietnamese courts used to question the legitimacy and orthodox lineage of the Manchu-led Qing dynasty because they imagined themselves as part of the Sinic world. The sense of superiority over Manchus and of being the guardian of Sinic civilization reached a climax during the Nguyen dynasty, in part shaping Vietnam's foreign policy toward China and other Southeast Asian countries at that time. In addition, this deep-seated Chineseness also helps Vietnam's decision-makers to understand contemporary China, and subtly guides the creation of Vietnam's foreign policy today.

Political historians traditionally privileged the political activities of men and masculine political institutions. This vision of political history was revised from the early 1970s, first by "women's history" and later due to the influence of the "gender turn". The latter encompassed a recognition that conceptions of masculinity and femininity contribute to the shaping of political power. Both developments challenged but ultimately reinvigorated political history. However, as this article will argue, political history and feminist history remain to an extent quarantined from one another, despite the radical potential for feminist scholarship to change the way politics is conceived.

[First paragraph]Shaping the Stuart World 1603-1714: The Atlantic Connection. Allan I. Macinnes & Arthur H. Williamson (eds.). Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2006. xiv + 389 pp. (Cloth US$ 135.00)Slavery and the British Empire: From Africa to America. Kenneth Morgan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. x + 221 pp. (Paper US$ 32.00)Although an important debate continues about the concept itself, the use of "the Atlantic" has embedded itself in scholarly vernacular. The scholarly output directly spawned by an engagement with the concept continues apace. That ocean, and the peoples who lived and traded along its edges, and who finally moved across it, have provided an important geographical focus for some major reconsiderations of modern history. Prompted by the Macinnes/Williamson volume, I returned to my own undergraduate and graduate notes and essays from courses on Stuart Britain: the Atlantic was totally absent – not even present as a distant speck on our intellectual map. We studied, and debated, the formal histories of migrations to the Americas (i.e. Europeanmigrations) but there was no mention of Africa or Africans. And no sense was conveyed that the European engagement with the Americas (in their totality – as opposed to North America) was a two-way, mutual force: that the European world was influenced, indeed shaped in many critical regards,by the Americas: by the land, the products, the peoples, and by the markets of that hemisphere. At its most obvious in the ebb and flow of peoples, even that eluded the historians I encountered as a student. It was as if we were talking about a different cosmos; few moved beyond the conventions of European migrations westwards and little attention was paid to that most dominant of migrations – the enforced African migrations to the Americas.