Christopher Dyer. Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain 850–1520. (The New Economic History of Britain.) New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. 2002. Pp. x, 403. $35.00. ISBN 0-300-09060-9.

WRITING NATIONAL HISTORY AFTER MODERNISM: THE HISTORY OF PEOPLEHOOD IN LIGHT OF EUROPEAN GRAND NARRATIVES | The purpose of the article is to refute the recent claim that Danish history cannot be written on the assumption of the existence of a Danish people prior to 19th-century nationalism. The article argues that, over the past twenty years, scholars in pre-modern European history have highlighted the limitations of the modernist paradigm in the study of nationalism and the history of nations. For example, modernists have difficulties explaining why a Medieval chronicle such as Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum was translated in the mid-1600s, and why it could be used for new purposes in the 1800s, if there had not been a continuity in notions of peoplehood between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age. Of course, the claim of continuity should not be seen as an argument for an identity between the “Danes” of Saxo’s time and the Danes of the 19th-century Danish nation-state. Rather, the modern Danishness should be understood as the product of a historical process, in which a number of European cultural narratives and state building played a significant role. The four most important narratives of the Middle Ages were derived from the Bible, which was a rich treasure of images and stories of ‘people’, ‘tribe’, ‘God’, King, ‘justice’ and ‘kingdom’ (state). While keeping the basic structures, the meanings of these narratives were re-interpreted and placed in new hierarchical positions in the course of time under the impact of the Reformation, 16th-century English Puritanism, Enlightenment patriotism, the French Revolution and 19th-century romantic nationalism. The article concludes that it is still possible to write national histories featuring ‘the people’ as one of the actors. But the historian should keep in mind that ‘the people’ did not always play the main role, nor did they play the same role as in previous periods. And even though there is a need to form syntheses when writing national history, national identities have always developed within a context of competing and hierarchical narratives. In Denmark, the ‘patriotist narrative’ seems to be in ascendancy in the social and cultural elites, but has only partly replaced the ‘ethno-national’ narrative which is widespread in other parts of the population. The ‘compact narrative’ has so far survived due the continued love of the people for their monarch. It may even prove to provide social glue for a sense of peoplehood uniting ‘old’ and ‘new’ Danes.

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The General History of the Middle Ages at the V. Babeş University of Cluj (1951-1952)

Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Historia ◽

10.24193/subbhist.2020.2.01 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 65 (2) ◽

pp. 3-20

Author(s):

Ionuț Costea

Keyword(s):

Education Reform ◽

Middle Ages ◽

Cultural Revolution ◽

Teaching Staff ◽

Political Transformations ◽

The People ◽

Socialist Realist ◽

History Of ◽

The One ◽

The Middle Ages

"The General History of the Middle Ages at the V. Babeş University of Cluj (1951-1952). The 1948 education reform represented, besides a new institutional architecture transposed in accordance with the model of the soviet universities, a process of recycling professors. The process of changing the teaching staff was carried out on at least two levels – the definitive or temporary elimination (sometimes accompanied by incarceration) from the education system on the one hand, and the exertion of severe surveillance and intimidation, thus remodelling the discourse and the behaviour in the spirit of the socialist realist “cultural revolution” on the other hand. The study shed light on a method that led to the expulsion of the professors was the public defamation, the accusation of immorality and of their lack of understanding of the new political transformations of the country, thus labelling the professors as “enemies of the people”. The atmosphere of fear and humiliation was sustained through press campaigns of defamation. Especially the younger university professors were instructed to attack, in the press, the more professionally well reputed and publicly well-known professors. These articles contained not only analyses of the professors’ works and ideas, but also their dismantling, their “exposé” and their human undermining. This paper is a case study on a professor from medieval department of Cluj university, Francisc Pall at the beginning of 1950s years. Keywords: Communism, Romania, education reform, cultural revolution, violence, surveillance. "

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Cuba Through A New Lens

New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids ◽

10.1163/13822373-90002484 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 81 (3-4) ◽

pp. 265-270

Author(s):

Jean Stubbs

Keyword(s):

North Carolina ◽

National Identity ◽

Cultural History ◽

Economic History ◽

Cuban Revolution ◽

New Haven ◽

Yale University ◽

Chapel Hill ◽

History Of ◽

The City

[First paragraph]The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered. Samuel Farber. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. x + 212 pp. (Paper US$ 19.95)Cuba: A New History. Ric hard Gott . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. xii + 384 pp. (Paper US$ 17.00)Havana: The Making of Cuban Culture. Antoni Kapcia. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2005. xx + 236 pp. (Paper US$ 24.95) Richard Gott, Antoni Kapcia, and Samuel Farber each approach Cuba through a new lens. Gott does so by providing a broad-sweep history of Cuba, which is epic in scope, attaches importance to social as much as political and economic history, and blends scholarship with flair. Kapcia homes in on Havana as the locus for Cuban culture, whereby cultural history becomes the trope for exploring not only the city but also Cuban national identity. Farber revisits his own and others’ interpretations of the origins of the Cuban Revolution.

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