Ideological Tensions (ideological + tension)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


The appropriation of the Phoenicians in British imperial ideology

NATIONS AND NATIONALISM, Issue 4 2001
Timothy Champion
The Phoenicians played ambivalent roles in Western historical imagination. One such role was as a valued predecessor and prototype for the industrial and maritime enterprise of nineteenth-century imperial Britain. Explicit parallels were drawn in historical representations and more popular culture. It was widely believed that the Phoenicians had been present in Britain, especially in Cornwall, despite a lack of convincing historical evidence, and much importance was placed on supposed archaeological evidence. Ideological tensions arose from the need to reconcile ancient and modern Britain, and from the Semitic origin of the Phoenicians. This example shows the power of archaeological objects to provide material support for national and imperial constructions of the past. [source]


The "Trial" of Lee Benson: Communism, White Chauvinism, and The Foundations of the "New Political History" in the United States

HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 3 2003
Gerald Zahavi
Lee Benson was one of the first American political historians to suggest a "systematic" revision of traditional political history with its emphasis on narrow economic class analysis, narrative arguments, and over-reliance on qualitative research methodologies. This essay presents Benson's contributions to the "new political history",an attempt to apply social-science methods, concepts, and theories to American political history,as a social, cultural, and political narrative of Cold War-era American history. Benson belonged to a generation of ex-Communist American historians and political scientists whose scholarship and intellectual projects flowed,in part,out of Marxist social and political debates, agendas, and paradigmatic frameworks, even as they rejected and revised them. The main focus of the essay is the genesis of Benson's pioneering study of nineteenth-century New York state political culture, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, with its emphasis on intra-class versus inter-class conflict, sensitivity to ethnocultural determinants of political and social behavior, and reliance on explicit social-science theory and methodology. In what follows, I argue that The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy has its roots in Benson's Popular Front Marxist beliefs, and his decade-long engagement and subsequent disenchantment with American left-wing politics. Benson's growing alienation from Progressive historical paradigms and traditional Marxist analysis, and his attempts to formulate a neo-Marxism attentive to unique American class and political realities, are linked to his involvement with 1940s radical factional politics and his disturbing encounter with internal Communist party racial and ideological tensions in the late 1940s at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. [source]


The Trickle-down Effect: Ideology and the Development of Premium Water Networks in China's Cities

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH, Issue 1 2007
ALANA BOLAND
This article examines the relationship between networked infrastructure and uneven development in transitional cities through a study of premium water networks in China. Beginning in the mid-1990s, select buildings and housing enclaves began to bypass municipal tap water supply systems through the construction of small-scale secondary pipe networks for purified drinking water. I focus on the early development of these premium water networks to highlight the ideological interplay between a new more market-based approach to networked supply and the existing model characterized by relatively universal and uniform access within cities. I illustrate how this dual water supply model was well suited to the ideological conditions and contradictions associated with China's economic liberalization in the 1990s. While the emergence of premium water networks can be linked to ascendant forms of market reasoning in the environmental and social spheres, I also argue that they were enabled by unresolved ideological tensions associated with China's transitional program. Rather than providing a basis for resistance in the early development of premium water supply, the socialist legacy in urban water supply left its mark more in the noticeable absence of debate regarding the distributional outcomes. By examining premium water networks in relation to the politics of ideology in China's transitional period, my analysis highlights the complex and sometimes unexpected ways that ideologies can influence the development of new infrastructural spaces and processes of splintering urbanism. [source]


Who's Afraid of Eliza Haywood?

LITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 4 2007
Margaret Case Croskery
Haywood's status within academic circles is still undergoing the type of canonical redistricting that makes more transparent the ideological tensions within competing standards of literary value. The curious patterns within her reception history, both in her own day and in the present, suggest both how much and how little has changed within commodity politics since the 1700s , when Haywood's publications helped to define the novel as a literary form , and today, when the definition of the ,literary' is once again in productive flux. [source]


Teaching Peace: Lessons from a Peace Studies Curriculum of the Progressive Era

PEACE & CHANGE, Issue 1 2000
Susan Zeiger
The historical roots of peace education as a school reform movement can be traced to the progressive era in the United States. This essay offers a content analysis of the first comprehensive peace education curriculum, published in 1914 by the American School Peace League, under the direction of Fannie Fern Andrews. Examining the curriculum raises fundamental questions about the teacher's role in social change; it also reveals ideological tensions within the peace movement of the WorldWar I period. [source]