Suchergebnisse

This offers a comprehensive coverage of ethnic and national identities in the British world in the era which immediately preceded the onset of modern racialist and nationalist thinking. Ranging across the political cultures of England, Scotland, Ireland and revolutionary America, it also considers European influences and comparisons

As we approach what might be the crescendo of a decade of politically loaded centenaries, Colin Kidd considers how the foundational events of 1912‐1922 affected the development of Ireland's politics and its relationship with the UK, and finds lessons there for the British left on how to engage with nationalism as a live and legitimate political sentiment.

A founding editor of Modern Intellectual History (MIH), an acclaimed biographer of Adam Smith and a prolific essayist on all aspects of the Scottish Enlightenment, from its origins to its aftermath, Nicholas Phillipson needs little introduction to the readers of this journal. However, Phillipson's recent retirement from his editorial duties on MIH provides a suitable moment to celebrate one of the pioneers in our field. When the current editors set out to commission a historiographical overview of Phillipson's oeuvre and career, I was honoured to be asked and delighted to accept.

With a referendum on Scottish independence planned for autumn 2014, leading historian Colin Kidd makes the positive case for preserving the 300‐year‐old union between England and Scotland. Unionism – a Scottish idea in the first place – is, he argues, as authentically Scottish as nationalism.

Distortion in intellectual history is not a direct function of distance from the present. The recent past can create its own problems of perspective. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is a case in point. Is the controversy surrounding the assassination a worthy subject for an intellectual historian? After all, there is now little serious debate as to what happened in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Mainstream historians regard the case as closed, an issue settled by the exhaustive and fair-minded deliberations of the Warren Commission, whose report, issued in the autumn of 1964, concluded that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, a sad and unsettled individual from a dysfunctional background, had killed the president. However, as we know, the topic remains, almost half a century later, a matter of huge fascination, but only outside the gates of the academy. The study of Kennedy's assassination is now best known to academics as a counterculture, which grossly caricatures the best practices of the academy and where extravagant theories tend to trump sound scholarship, plausibility and common sense. Indeed, this disjunction between the obsessions of amateur historians, known as buffs, and the reluctance of academic historians to lose caste by exploring subjects such as the Kennedy assassination which the wider public—but only the wider public—seems to find worthy of further research and explanation is, as Professor W. D. Rubinstein notes, an interesting sociological and historiographical phenomenon in its own right. Writing in 1994, Max Holland, the journalist and intelligence historian, noted that the history of the Kennedy era was "bifurcated". For academic historian writing on the Kennedy presidency the assassination is "treated as a footnote or afterthought if it is addressed at all", while "very few of the more than 450 books and tens of thousands of articles that compose the vast assassination literature published since 1964 have been written by historians."