Böcker i Routledge Studies in Cultural History-serien

This volume deals with the historical memory of the communist movement in Central and Eastern Europe when it was in power, with the memory of communism as a part of post-1989 left identity, and with state-socialist and post-socialist memorial landscapes.

This book sketches the history of higher education, in parallel with the development of science. Its goal is to draw attention to the historical tensions between the aims of higher education and those of science, in the hope of contributing to improving the contemporary university. A helpful tool in analyzing these intellectual and social tensions is Karl Popper''s philosophy of science demarcating science and its social context. Popper defines a society that encourages criticism as "open," and argues convincingly that an open society is the most appropriate one for the growth of science. A "closed society," on the other hand, is a tribal and dogmatic society. Despite being the universal home of science today, the university, as an institution that is thousands of years old, carries traces of different past cultural, social, and educational traditions. The book argues that, by and large, the university was, and still is, a closed society and does not serve the best interests of the development of science and of students'' education.

This book maintains that it was not passive reception but active participation of readers-including those who listened to fiction read out loud-that fostered the Enlightenment. The decision to engage in intellectual debates, grounded in ideas often first found in fiction, allowed everyday people to participate in the questioning, and eventually the decision-making, of their own states.

Language is the most essential medium of scientific activity. Many historians, sociologists and science studies scholars have investigated scientific language for this reason, but only few have examined those cases where language itself has become an object of scientific discussion. Over the centuries scientists have sought to control, refine and engineer language for various epistemological, communicative and nationalistic purposes. This book seeks to explore cases in the history of science in which questions or concerns with language have bubbled to the surface in scientific discourse. This opens a window into the particular ways in which scientists have conceived of and construed language as the central medium of their activity across different cultural contexts and places, and the clashes and tensions that have manifested their many attempts to engineer it to both preserve and enrich its function. The subject of language draws out many topics that have mostly been neglected in the history of science, such as the connection between the emergence of national languages and the development of science within national settings, and allows us to connect together historical episodes from many understudied cultural and linguistic venues such as Eastern European and medieval Hebrew science.

New Perspectives on Russian-American Relations includes seventeen articles on Russian-American relations from an international roster of leading historians. Covering topics such as trade, diplomacy, art, war, public opinion, race, culture and more, the essays show how the two nations related to one another across time from their first interactions as nations in the 18th century to now. Instead of being dominated by the narrative of the Cold War, New Perspectives on Russian-American Relations models the exciting new scholarship that covers more than the political and diplomatic worlds of the later twentieth century, and provides scholars with a wide array of the newest research in the field.

Time and again scientists and other intellectuals have claimed their endeavors to be neutral, elevated above the world of partisan conflict and power politics. This volume studies the resonances between neutrality in science and culture and neutrality in politics. By analyzing the activities of scientists, intellectuals, and politicians (sometimes overlapping categories) of mostly neutral nations in the First World War and after, it traces how an ideology of neutralism was developed that soon was embraced by international organizations. This book explores how the notion of neutrality has been used and how a neutralist discourse developed in history. As such, Neutrality in Twentieth-Century Europe presents a different perspective on the century than the story of the great belligerent powers, and one in which science, culture, and politics are inextricably mixed.

This interdisciplinary volume illuminates the shadowy history of the disadvantaged, sick and those who did not conform to the accepted norms of society. It explores how marginal identity was formed, perceived and represented in Britain and Europe during the medieval and early modern periods. It illustrates that the identities of marginal groups were shaped by their place within primarily urban communities, both in terms of their socio-economic status and the spaces in which they lived and worked. Some of these groups ΓÇô such as executioners, prostitutes, pedlars and slaves ΓÇô performed a significant social and economic function but on the basis of this were stigmatized by other townspeople. Language was used to control and limit the activities of others within society such as single women and foreigners, as well as the victims of sexual crimes. For many, such as lepers and the disabled, marginal status could be ambiguous, cyclical or short-lived and affected by key religious, political and economic events. Traditional histories have often considered these groups in isolation. Based on new research, a series of case studies from Britain and across Europe illustrate and provide important insights into the problems faced by these marginal groups and the ways in which medieval and early modern communities were shaped and developed.

Americans Experience Russia analyzes how American scholars, journalists, and artists experienced and interpreted Russia/the Soviet Union over the last century. It critically engages with postcolonial theories which posit that a self-valorizing, unmediated west dictated the colonial encounter. In examining the fiction, film, journalism, treatises, and histories Americans produced out of their `Russian experience,¿ this volume closely analyzes these texts, locates them in their sociopolitical context, and gauges how their producers¿ profession, politics, gender, class, and interaction with native Russian interpreters conditioned their authored responses to Russian/Soviet reality.

Donations, Strategies and Relations in the Latin West and Nordic Countries presents, for the first time, a longue durée perspective on the dynamics of donations and the interplay between individual motivations, strategic behaviour and the legal setting of inheritance law. This collection places donations to ecclesiastical, charitable and cultural institutions in the Nordic region within a European context. The book pinpoints the socio-legal challenges that societies faced in guaranteeing that fortunes were passed on in a way that did not impoverish children or kinsmen and thereby created social problems, but also ensured that the social rules and legal practices were upheld.

This volume locates and explores historical and contemporary sites of contested meanings of Holocaust memory across a range of geographical, geo-political, and disciplinary contexts, identifying and critically engaging with the nature and expression of these meanings within their relevant contexts, elucidating the political, social, and cultural underpinnings and consequences of these meanings, and offering interventions in the contemporary debates of Holocaust memory that suggest ways forward for the future.

The notions of culture and civilization are at the heart of European self-image. This book focuses on how space and spatiality contributed to defining these concepts and, conversely, what kind of spatial ramifications "culture" and "civilization" entailed. The volume offers a new perspective on the formative period of modern Europe.

This book sketches the history, from ancient times to the present, of higher education in parallel to the development of science. It explores the historical tensions between the aims of higher education and those of science, arguing that the university, although today the universal home of science, carries traces of different past cultural, social, and didactical traditions that make it not the ideal place for the development of science.

Anarchism and syndicalism can be studied as templates for processes of political and cultural globalisation. This volume, however, argues that anarchism and syndicalism cannot be fully understood with reference only to transnationalism. With implications beyond the field of anarchist studies and the history of anarchism, the book treats anarchism as one example of transnational social networking while challenging the status of transnationalism as academic orthodoxy, highlighting the gray areas between national and transnational, global and local, national social field and transnational network.

This book conceives the role of the modern town as a crucial place for material and cultural circulations of luxury. It concentrates on a critical period of historical change, the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that was marked by the passage from a society of scarcity to one of expenditure and accumulation, from ranks and orders to greater social mobility, from traditional aristocratic luxury to a new bourgeois and even democratic form of luxury. This volume recognizes the notion that luxury operated as a mechanism of social separation, but also that all classes aspired to engage in consumption at some level, thus extending the idea of what constituted luxury and blurring the boundaries of class and status, often in unsettling ways. It moves beyond the moral aspects of luxury and the luxury debates to analyze how the production, distribution, purchase or display of luxury goods could participate in the creation of autonomous selves and thus challenge gender roles.

Expeditionary journeys have shaped our world, but the expedition as a cultural form is rarely scrutinized. This book is the first major investigation of the conventions and social practices embedded in team-based exploration. In probing the politics of expedition making, this volume is itself a pioneering journey through the cultures of empire. With contributions from established and emerging scholars, Expedition into Empire plots the rise and transformation of expeditionary journeys from the eighteenth century until the present. Conceived as a series of spotlights on imperial travel and colonial expansion, it roves widely: from the metropolitan centers to the ends of the earth. This collection is both rigorous and accessible, containing lively case studies from writers long immersed in exploration, travel literature, and the dynamics of cross-cultural encounter.

Using the concept of "recycling" as a means to revisit the economic, social, cultural, scientific, and artistic processes that characterized the eighteenth century, this volume investigates how practices of salvaging and repurposing shed new light on a century where novelty and innovation are often thought to prevail, returning to such apparently well-known notions as consumption, the new science, or novel writing to cast them in a new light where the waste of some becomes the luxury of others, clothes worn to rags are turned into paper and into books, and scientific breakthroughs are made using old kitchen pans.

This edited collection explores the complex formation and performance of "race" from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. It features contributions from many disciplines, including history, sociology, disability studies, literary studies, and anthropology.

Where Europeans have been considered "cosmopolitan," the mobility of Indigenous people has either been overlooked or understood only as a consequence of the oppressive expansion of European empires. This volume brings together prominent and emerging scholars who have begun to explore Indigenous networks and "transnational" encounters to consider the broader significance of "extra-local" networks, exchanges, and mobility for Indigenous peoples. It examines a range of analytic scales, including global, regional and intra-Indigenous networks, histories of ideas and cultural forms, and biography, as well as contemporary legacies.

Disease and crime are increasingly conflated in the contemporary world. News reports proclaim "epidemics" of crime, politicians denounce terrorism as a lethal pathological threat, and "epidemiological criminology" merges public health with criminal justice to provide analytical tools for criminal justice practitioners and health care professionals. This volume explores the discursive construction of crime and disease across a range of geographical and historical settings, as well as the historical continuities and discontinuities between contemporary invocations of crime as disease and the emergence of criminology, epidemiology, and public health in the second half of the nineteenth century.

This collection brings much-needed focus to the vibrancy and vitality of minority and marginal writing about empire, and to their implications as expressions of embodied contact between imperial power and those negotiating its consequences from "below." The chapters explore how less powerful and less privileged actors in metropolitan and colonial societies within the British Empire have made use of the written word and of the power of speech, public performance, and street politics. This book breaks new ground by combining work about marginalized figures from within Britain as well as counterparts in the colonies, ranging from published sources such as indigenous newspapers to ordinary and everyday writings including diaries, letters, petitions, ballads, suicide notes, and more. Each chapter engages with the methodological implications of working with everyday scribblings and asks what these alternate modernities and histories mean for the larger critique of the "imperial archive" that has shaped much of the most interesting writing on empire in the past decade.

This new book investigates the relationship of film to history, power, memory, and cultural citizenship and considers ways in which cultural expression and identity expressed through film serve to create notions of belonging, group identity, and entitlement within modern societies

Americans Experience Russia analyzes how American scholars, journalists, and artists experienced and interpreted Russia/the Soviet Union over the last century. It critically engages with postcolonial theories which posit that a self-valorizing, unmediated west dictated the colonial encounter. In examining the fiction, film, journalism, treatises, and histories Americans produced out of their `Russian experience,¿ this volume closely analyzes these texts, locates them in their sociopolitical context, and gauges how their producers¿ profession, politics, gender, class, and interaction with native Russian interpreters conditioned their authored responses to Russian/Soviet reality.

Takes a critical look at Irish and Irish-related cinema through the lens of genre theory and criticism. This book aims to cover key genres and sub-genres and account for their popularity.

Histories of Postmodernism reexamines the history of the constellation of ideas and thinkers associated with postmodernism. As postmodern ideas traveled from mid-twentieth century France and on to the contemporary United States, so the relevant theorists transformed that heritage within the context of particular intellectual traditions and specific political and aesthetic issues.

This impressive volume takes a broad critical look at Irish and Irish-related cinema through the lens of genre theory and criticism. Secondary and related objectives of the book are to cover key genres and sub-genres and account for their popularity. The result offers new ways of looking at Irish cinema.

This edited volume examines the recent transnational emergence of the public memory of slavery, shedding light on the work of memory produced by groups of individuals who are descendants of slaves. The chapters in this book explore how the memory of the enslaved and slavers is shaped and displayed in the public space not only in the former slave societies but also in the regions that provided captives to the former American colonies and European metropoles. Through the analysis of exhibitions, museums, monuments, accounts, and public performances, the volume makes sense of the political stakes involved in the phenomenon of memorialization of slavery and the slave trade in the public sphere.