scholarly journals Η ΕΝΝΟΙΑ TOΥ ΙΣΤΟΡΙΚΟΥ ΧΡΟΝΟΥ ΚΑΙ ΟΙ ΠΡΟΣΕΓΓΙΣΕΙΣ ΤΗΣ ΙΣΤΟΡΙΑΣ ΤΟΥ ΕΜΦΥΛΙΟΥ ΠΟΛΕΜΟΥ. ΖΗΤΗΜΑΤΑ ΜΕΘΟΔΟΛΟΓΙΑΣ

Μνήμων ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 181
Author(s):  
ΜΙΧΑΛΗΣ Π. ΛΥΜΠΕΡΑΤΟΣ

<p>Michalis P. Liberatos, Historical Time and the interpretations of the history of the Greek Civil War: the methodological problems</p><p>The idea of historical time is crucial from a methodological point of view as far as the study of political and social history are concerned. Especially about the history of the Greek Civil War, a period that convulsed public opinion and caused scientific interpretations overwhelmed by ideological and epistemological «burdens». The most important of them is the idea of a time constant, continual, without turnovers and breaks, that is time in the «common sense». This «time», according to its origins, self-determines its evolution, its «determination» explains all of the aspects and the historical stages and facts. This is the traditional assumption that change has always to be explained in terms of something fixed and unchangeable. As for the policy of the Greek Communist Party this notion of time provokes some historians to an explanation that associates this policy with the origins of its philosophical program and not with the «real history». This approach avoids to enquiry into the adaptation of this program to the demands of political relations in time, to counter policies and as a specification of social representations. It is mainly an unaltered policy that arises as the outcome of an assemblage of antecedent events that compose a passage of identities. Because of this domination of this notion of the «continuity» of time, the study of Greek Civil War reproduced the ideological configurations of the past. Therefore it has degraded very important aspects of historical reality, without giving adequate answers about them. These are the question of the deepest tasks of KKE and its strategy, the causes of the unscheduled creation of Democratic Army (ΔΣΕ) in the mountains, the role of the rival political powers, the extent of the possibilities of a negotiation, the relation between Greeks and the Great Powers. As the recent historical enquiries has showed —the edition of a book of Ph. Iliou signalled a new era in the interpretation of this period— a different methodological attitude is perhaps primarily useful on account of the errors it enables one to avoid, in particular in constructing the historical object. This article presents the implication between the dominant notion of «time», the difficulties in explanations and with the ability to overcome the epistemological «burdens» if is to be called into question the idea of historical time. This is important in order to break away from some presuppositions that are tacitly accepted by some historians. This new notion of time sweeps away the naively idealistic view of continuity, that traditional approaches have raised. Because it is history and the internal dynamic which carries evolution and not the historical unchanged «purposes».</p>

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (04-1) ◽  
pp. 4-39
Author(s):  
Olga Konovalova ◽  
Vera Fedorova ◽  
Anna Dvoretskaya

In the publication, O.V. Konovalova, V.I. Fedorova, A.P. Dvoretskaya presented letters 1931-1932 of the leader and theoretician of the party of socialists-revolutionaries V.M. Chernov to a prominent figure of the party O.S. Minor and a representative of Harbin socialists-revolutionaries organization M. I. Klyaver regarding the split of the Foreign delegation of the socialists-revolutionaries. They are preserved in the collection of VM. Chernov of the International Archives and Collections at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. The presented letters help to clarify VM. Chernov’s position on the key issues of the history of the SR party during the Russian revolution, Civil War, and emigration of the 1920s, and also shed light on the deep reasons for the split of the ZD AKP.


2012 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 103-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fikru Negash Gebrekidan

Abstract:This article examines the early history of disability rights activism in Kenya. The transitional years from colonialism to independence were a period of great expectations. For persons with disabilities in particular, decolonization held additional possibilities and potential. National independence promised not just majority rule but also an all-inclusive citizenship and the commitment to social justice. Among the visually impaired of Kenya, such collective aspirations led to the birth of the Kenya Union of the Blind in 1959. In 1964, after years of futile correspondence with government officials, the Union organized a street march to the prime minister's office to attract attention to its grievances. The result was a government panel, the Mwendwa Committee for the Care and Rehabilitation of the Disabled, whose published report became the blueprint for social and rehabilitation programs. The government possessed limited resources, and the reforms that ensued were long overdue. Yet the sociohistorical dynamics behind the march are of particular significance. From the social historian's point of view, they affirm not only the historical agency of persons with disabilities, but also the need to recast and broaden the scope of African social history.


ARTMargins ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 69-86
Author(s):  
Ghalya Saadawi

Chad Elias' 2018 book Posthumous Images: Contemporary Art and Memory Politics in Post-Civil War Lebanon attempts to deal with the question of post-civil war representation, image-making and contemporary art from the perspective of memory studies in Lebanon. Dealing with a particular group of artists working since the 1990's in installation, video, film, and performance, the book attempts to create a relation between their artistic propositions and narratives on the one hand, and the post-war reckoning with the missing and disappeared, the history of former Leftist combatants, neglected space programs, reconstruction and urban space, on the other. The book has a series of shortcomings and structural, theoretical blind spots that this review essay attempts to redress. For instance, Posthumous Images has no framework for the notions of communities of witnessing, collective memory, or post-war amnesia that seems to underpin its claims, as they seem to figure only nominally. In these theoretical omissions, the essay argues, the book adopts and furthers the ideology human rights as this relates to the politics of remembrance, as well as to Lebanon's neoliberal post-war realities. Moreover, it lacks a rigorous art historical frame to study the given artworks formally, or theoretically, leaving the book open to a post-historical method that disavows a critical, social history of art needed for an analysis of post-civil war and post-Cold war art forms in Lebanon and beyond.


1946 ◽  
Vol 8 (03) ◽  
pp. 166-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Dale

I have been asked to speak about the history of the experimental method in medicine, with particular reference to the nineteenth century. This indication, though I do not propose to regard it as setting a limit, seems to have a special fitness, since it is to the nineteenth century, and especially to its latter half, that we must look for the effective beginning and astonishingly rapid development, the veritable outburst, indeed, of activity in the application of the experimental method to medicine, which opened the new era of medical progress in which we are living today. It is curious, perhaps, that this should have come so late in the history of science. For medicine had figured early in man's attempts to understand nature and his relation to it, and many departments of science which have long ago achieved recognition as independent bodies of knowledge originated as aspects of the physician's equipment—botany, for example, zoology and chemistry, as well as human anatomy and physiology, which still retain their attachment to the medical group of the scientific disciplines. From this point of view, then, it is not surprising to find two physicians, William Gilbert and William Harvey, as the leaders in this country of the scientific revolution which had begun in Europe in 1543 with the publication, within a few weeks of one another, of two books—one by Copernicus of Cracow,De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, and the other by Vesalius of Padua,De Humani Corporis Fabrica. Both Gilbert and Harvey, we may be proud to remember, studied and first graduated in Medicine here, in Cambridge.


1996 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 401-426 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick L. Mckitrick

On 10 July 1950, at the celebrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Wiesbaden Chamber of Artisans (Handwerkskammer), its president Karl Schöppler announced: ‘Today industry is in no way the enemy of Handwerk. Handwerk is not the enemy of industry.…’ These words, which accurately reflected the predominant point of view of the post-war chamber membership, and certainly of its politically influential leadership, marked a new era in the social, economic and political history of German artisans and, it is not too much to say, in the history of class relations in (West) Germany in general. Schöppler's immediate frame of reference was the long-standing and extremely consequential antipathy on the part of artisans towards industrial capitalism, an antipathy of which his listeners were well aware.


1976 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith J. Hurwich

Puritanism has long fascinated students of the relationship between religion and society. Indeed, the social history of Puritanism has probably been studied more intensively than that of any other religious movement in modern history. However, most studies of Puritanism in England end either at the beginning of the Civil Wars or at the Restoration. The history of those Puritans who became Dissenters after 1660 has been left to denominational historians, who are understandably more concerned with the ecclesiastical and theological history of their own particular groups than with the broader question of the place of Dissent in English society.This neglect of post-Restoration Nonconformity is unfortunate for the study of the social history of Puritanism, both from a theoretical and from a practical point of view. When English Puritans are cited as the classical practitioners of the “Protestant ethic,” reference is often made to the success of Nonconformists in finance and industry after 1660. Tawney's application of the Weber thesis to England relies heavily on the writings of such post-Restoration divines as Baxter and Steele, and on the rise of Nonconformist capitalists in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Tawney's hypotheses cannot be evaluated unless we have more information about the social background of Dissent: not merely a few exceptional individuals, but the group as a whole. From the practical point of view, quantitative studies of the social structure — both of the religious group and of the larger society—are more easily undertaken for the period after 1660 than for the period before that date.


2001 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-418
Author(s):  
Andreas Suter

My study of the Swiss Peasants' War of 1653 has received four reviews in the United States. I am grateful to Hermann Rebel for supplying another, most unusual review to Central European History. It is unusual not only in length but also in judgment. Where the other reviews wrote positively about the book, Rebel rejects it completely.If I read Rebel correctly, his criticism covers four main points. First, he criticizes the book's theoretical point of view, alleging that the call for a “return to historical events in social history” means a return to “histoire événementielle” and would lead to “high antiquarianism.” Second, Rebel criticizes my methodological inferences from this theoretical point: systematic attention to the cultural dimension of human action; the expansion of social history's traditional methods of analysis and perspectives on time (longue durée, temps sociale) to include cultural and anthropological insights (from, i.e., Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, and Clifford Geertz); and the introduction of a “slow-motion” perspective.


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