History Commons^™

Who Was Albert Luthuli?, Robert T. Vinson

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

In an excellent addition to the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series, Robert Trent Vinson recovers the important but largely forgotten story of Albert Luthuli, Africa’s first Nobel Peace Prize winner and president of the African National Congress from 1952 to 1967. One of the most respected African leaders, Luthuli linked South African antiapartheid politics with other movements, becoming South Africa’s leading advocate of Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent civil disobedience techniques. He also framed apartheid as a crime against humanity and thus linked South African antiapartheid struggles with international human rights campaigns.

Unlike previous studies, this book places Luthuli and the …

Introduction To "A Genealogy Of Terror In Eighteenth-Century France", Ronald Schechter

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

In contemporary political discourse, it is common to denounce violent acts as “terroristic.” But this reflexive denunciation is a surprisingly recent development. In A Genealogy of Terror in Eighteenth-Century France, Ronald Schechter tells the story of the term’s evolution in Western thought, examining a neglected yet crucial chapter of our complicated romance with terror.

For centuries prior to the French Revolution, the word “terror” had largely positive connotations. Subjects flattered monarchs with the label “terror of his enemies.” Lawyers invoked the “terror of the laws.” Theater critics praised tragedies that imparted terror and pity. By August 1794, however, terror had …

Introduction To "Citizens Of Memory: Affect, Representation, And Human Rights In Postdictatorship Argentina", Silvia Tandeciarz

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

Citizens of Memory explores efforts at recollection in post-dictatorship Argentina and the hoped-for futures they set in motion. The material, visual, narrative, and pedagogical interventions it analyzes address the dark years of state repression (1976-1983) while engaging ongoing debates about how this traumatic past should be transmitted to future generations. Two theoretical principles structure the book’s approach to cultural recall: the first follows from an understanding of memory as a social construct that is always as much about the past as it is of the present; the second from the observation that what distinguishes memory from history is affect. These …

The Trial Of Jacob Benjamin, Supplier To The French Army, 1792-93, Ronald Schechter

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Santiago De Compostela, George Greenia

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

This collaborative literary history of Europe, the first yet attempted, unfolds through ten sequences of places linked by trade, travel, topography, language, pilgrimage, alliance, disease, and artistic exchange. The period covered, 1348-1418, provides deep context for understanding current developments in Europe, particularly as initiated by the destruction and disasters of World War II. We begin with the greatest of all European catastrophes: the 1348 bubonic plague, which killed one person in three. Literary cultures helped speed recovery from this unprecedented "ground zero" experience, providing solace, distraction, and new ideals to live by. Questions of where Europe begins and ends, then …

Terror, Vengeance And Martyrdom In The French Revolution: The Case Of The Shades, Ronald Schechter

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

In recent years, terrorism has become closely associated with martyrdom in the minds of many terrorists and in the view of nations around the world. In Islam, martyrdom is mostly conceived as "bearing witness" to faith and God. Martyrdom is also central to the Christian tradition, not only in the form of Christ's Passion or saints faced with persecution and death, but in the duty to lead a good and charitable life. In both religions, the association of religious martyrdom with political terror has a long and difficult history. The essays of this volume illuminate this history--following, for example, Christian …

The Making Of A Boxer, Ronald Schechter, Liz Clarke

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

Inspired by the resounding success of Abina and the Important Men (OUP, 2011), Mendoza the Jew combines a graphic history with primary documentation and contextual information to explore issues of nationalism, identity, culture, and historical methodology through the life story of Daniel Mendoza. Mendoza was a poor Sephardic Jew from East London who became the boxing champion of Britain in 1789. As a Jew with limited means and a foreign-sounding name, Mendoza was an unlikely symbol of what many Britons considered to be their very own "national" sport. Whereas their adversaries across the Channel reputedly settled private quarrels by dueling …

Introduction To "The Americans Are Coming! Dreams Of African American Liberation In Segregationist South Africa", Robert T. Vinson

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

For more than half a century before World War II, black South Africans and “American Negroes”—a group that included African Americans and black West Indians—established close institutional and personal relationships that laid the necessary groundwork for the successful South African and American antiapartheid movements. Though African Americans suffered under Jim Crow racial discrimination, oppressed Africans saw African Americans as free people who had risen from slavery to success and were role models and potential liberators.

Many African Americans, regarded initially by the South African government as “honorary whites” exempt from segregation, also saw their activities in South Africa as a …

Catinka Heinefetter. A Jewish Prima Donna In Nineteenth-Century France, Ronald Schechter

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Providential Design: American Negroes And Garveyism In South Africa, Robert T. Vinson

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

Transcending geographic and cultural lines, From Toussaint to Tupac is an ambitious collection of essays exploring black internationalism and its implications for a black consciousness. At its core, black internationalism is a struggle against oppression, whether manifested in slavery, colonialism, or racism. The ten essays in this volume offer a comprehensive overview of the global movements that define black internationalism, from its origins in the colonial period to the present. From Toussaint to Tupac focuses on three moments in global black history: the American and Haitian revolutions, the Garvey movement and the Communist International following World War I, and the …

Introduction To "Terror In The Heart Of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, And The Meaning Of Race In The Postemancipation South, Hannah Rosen

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

The meaning of race in the antebellum southern United States was anchored in the racial exclusivity of slavery (coded as black) and full citizenship (coded as white as well as male). These traditional definitions of race were radically disrupted after emancipation, when citizenship was granted to all persons born in the United States and suffrage was extended to all men. Hannah Rosen persuasively argues that in this critical moment of Reconstruction, contests over the future meaning of race were often fought on the terrain of gender.

Sexual violence--specifically, white-on-black rape--emerged as a critical arena in postemancipation struggles over African American …

A Festival Of The Law: Napoleon's Jewish Assemblies, Ronald Schechter

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

This book reconsiders the transition from the French Revolution to Napoleon, a period often described in terms of social chaos, ineffectual government, and democratic disappointment.

Conceptualizing The French Revolution: Problems And Methods, Ronald Schechter

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

Excerpt from the book chapter: "In France, for roughly half a century, Marxist historians enjoyed a virtual monopoly over the academic historiography of the French Revolution. Beginning in 1928 the Sorbonne's prestigious chair in the History of the French Revolution was reserved for historians with a demonstrable commitment to socialism. The combination of a rigid hierarchy in French academia and a leftist orientation among French intellectuals more generally - -particularly during the quarter century after World War II, when the fabled anti-fascist record of communism provided it with moral authority - made it nearly impossible to challenge he reigning orthodoxy..."

Impression Management, Cultural Performance And Jewish Self-Presentation In Napoleonic France, Ronald Schechter

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Competing Proposals For The Regeneration Of The Jews, Ronald Schechter

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

No abstract provided.