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Official History (official + history)
Selected AbstractsNarratives as Cultural Tools in Sociocultural Analysis: Official History in Soviet and Post-Soviet RussiaETHOS, Issue 4 2000Professor James V. Wertsch An approach to sociocultural analysis based on the ideas of Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and others is used to provide the foundation for discussing narratives as "cultural tools." The production of official, state sponsored historical narratives is examined from this perspective, and it is argued that this production process may be shaped as much by dialogic encounters with other narratives as by archival information. These claims are harnessed to examine the production of post-Soviet Russian history textbooks, especially their presentation of the events surrounding the Russian Civil War of 1918,20. [source] Don't kill the messenger: writing history and warCRITICAL QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2005RICHARD TOBIAS This article explores the effort to invert Edmund Burke's Sublime and the Beautiful to talk about the Hell and the Ugly of warfare. Official histories fall into the 'rotted language' (Wallace Stevens) of ancient heroics. Since the actual experience of warfare is beyond language, irony - a dangerous and difficult force - is the recourse. Since no Thucydides can write our history of the thirty-one-year war between August of 1914 and August of 1945, a few participants have sufficient irony to find language to convey the actual horror of our inhumanity. The public, however, prefers to obliterate this message. [source] ,I Saw a Nightmare . . .': Violence and the Construction of Memory (Soweto, June 16, 1976)HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 4 2000Helena Pohlandt-McCormick The protests on June 16, 1976 of black schoolchildren in Soweto against the imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in their schools precipitated one of the most pro-found challenges to the South African apartheid state. These events were experienced in a context of violent social and political conflict. They were almost immediately drawn into a discourse that discredited and silenced them, manipulating meaning for ideological and political reasons with little regard for how language and its absence,silences,further violated those who had experienced the events. Violence, in its physical and discursive shape, forged individual memories that remain torn with pain, anger, distrust, and open questions; collective memories that left few spaces for ambiguity; and official or public histories tarnished by their political agendas or the very structures,and sources,that produced them. Based on oral histories and historical documents, this article discusses the collusion of violence and silence and its consequences. It argues that,while the collusion between violence and silence might appear to disrupt or, worse, destroy the ability of individuals to think historically,the individual historical actor can and does have the will to contest and engage with collective memory and official history. [source] Toward a racial abyss: Eugenics, Wickliffe Draper, and the origins of The Pioneer FundJOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES, Issue 3 2002Michael G. Kenny professor of anthropology The Pioneer Fund was created in 1937 "to conduct or aid in conducting study and research into problems of heredity and eugenics,and problems of race betterment with special reference to the people of the United States." The Fund was endowed by Colonel Wickliffe Preston Draper, a New England textile heir, and perpetuates his legacy through an active program of grants, some of the more controversial in aid of research on racial group differences. Those presently associated with the Fund maintain that it has made a substantial contribution to the behavioral and social sciences, but insider accounts of Pioneer's history oversimplify its past and smooth over its more tendentious elements. This article examines the social context and intellectual background to Pioneer's origins, with a focus on Col. Draper himself, his concerns about racial degeneration, and his relation to the eugenics movement. In conclusion, it evaluates the official history of the fund. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source] | ||||||||||