Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular History of a Rebellion in Ulster by Guy Beiner

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 155-158
Author(s):  
Sean Farrell
Keyword(s):  
History Of ◽  
Vernacular History

The Audiences for English History in the Early Twelfth Century

2020 ◽  
pp. 81-103
Author(s):  
George Garnett
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
English History ◽  
Extensive Discussion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lay Experience ◽  
Vernacular History

Chapter 2 attempts to establish who the audience was for the sudden spate of books on the history of England, and about English saints, which appeared from the beginning of the twelfth century. The audience is shown to have been mainly but not exclusively monastic and clerical. There is extensive discussion of the circumstances in which books were read and listened to. Suggestions are made about lay audiences, particularly in the case of Gaimar’s (French) vernacular history of the English, and also about the influence of the lay experience on clerical authors. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s parody of the new genre of historical writing is considered in depth.

The Kinglists of Buganda

1974 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 129-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
C.C. Wrigley
Keyword(s):  
Prime Minister ◽  
Developmental Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Vernacular History ◽  
Official Status

In 1901 the katikkiro or ‘prime minister’ of Buganda, Apolo Kagwa, published a vernacular history of his country entitled The Book of the Kings of Buganda. Most of this work dealt with the events of his own lifetime, but it also included a circumstantial account of the twenty-nine reigns which, he alleged, had preceded that of King Mutesa, who received the first European visitors and who died in 1884. This version of the Ganda past has not since been challenged in its essentials either by Ganda traditionalists or by European or European-trained commentators. Some of the former have tried to lengthen the history still further by naming ancestors or forerunners of King Kintu, with whom Kagwa began his tale. But these additional kings are plainly legendary, like the dragon Bemba, or abstractions, like ‘King Buganda,’ and have not achieved official status. Scholars, by contrast, have been inclined to shorten the list slightly, holding with Sir Harry Johnston that the first real king of Buganda was Kimera [K3] and relegating the first two of Kagwa's rulers, Kintu and Cwa, to a nebulous prehistory. In other respects they have generally accepted Kagwa's account with only a few amendments and hesitations, and have used it as the basis for quite elaborate chronological and developmental studies.

Identity Politics Revisited: Secular and ‘Dissonant’ Islam in Colonial South Asia

2010 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 709-733 ◽  
Author(s):  
TEENA PUROHIT
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Leader ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
History Of ◽  
Vernacular History

AbstractThis paper analyzes the political project of secular Islam as outlined by the Indian political and religious leader, Muhammad Shah—also known as Aga Khan III (1877–1957). As first president of the All India Muslim League, Muhammad Shah facilitated the installation of separate electorates for Muslims as well as the call for Partition. The reformist notion of Islam he invoked for this separatist programme was informed by the secular and modernizing projects of the colonial public sphere. Simultaneously, however, Muhammad Shah claimed a divine role as Imam of the Ismaili Muslim community—a position validated by Ismaili beliefs and teachings of messianic Islam. The paper engages Muhammad Shah's writings and the devotional texts of the Ismailis to illustrate how the heterogeneous forms of practices peculiar to the vernacular history of Islam in early modern South Asia were displaced by the discourse of religious identity in the colonial period.

The Vernacular History of A. M. Simons

1968 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-81
Author(s):  
Kent Kreuter ◽  
Gretchen Kreuter
Keyword(s):  
American Revolution ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Cultural Experience ◽  
Jacksonian Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
Vernacular History ◽  
Marxist Interpretation ◽  
American Thought

No recent student of American historiography has failed to acquire a passing acquaintance with some of the historical writing of the American Socialist A. M. Simons. No treatment of economic determinism in American thought omits at least a footnote of credit to Social Forces in American History, published in 1911, in which the irascible radical touched upon ideas and interpretations that Charles Beard and others were to develop with less heat and less haste. Simons's treatment of the American Revolution and the Constitutional Convention, of the Jacksonian era, and of the Civil War and Reconstruction periods, sounded themes that became staples of debate within the historical profession. In fact, however, Simons's history has a distinction that goes beyond its role as the first Marxist interpretation of the American past, or as an expression of ‘progressive history’. It is part of a much older, larger and many-sided body of thought that made up an attack upon the genteel tradition in American intellectual and cultural experience. In literature, that attack developed a set of responses that recent scholars have termed the ‘vernacular tradition’. By examining Simons's historical writing in the context of the vernacular tradition, one can see that his history is much more than a Marxist curiosity. His history was shaped both by experience and ideology, and it was intended to be a cultural critique as well as an economic one.

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