History on Stage: News from History Theater

 

English

History is booming – this platitude has been around for nearly 30 years. But although movies and television, exhibitions and memorial sites, reenactments and living history, history magazines and computer games have increasingly become objects of research in popular and popularized representations of history, one particular field has, until now, been omitted: history theater. Here, the simulation of the past encounters its deconstruction–therefore it should become a field of research for public history.

 

In the Third Wave

The term history theater is not used as an umbrella term for various kinds of reenactments and living history, as profoundly introduced by Wolfgang Hochbruck in his monograph, “Geschichtstheater”. Here it is understood as a specific kind of documentary theater,[1] that Hochbruck has not dealt with until now.[2] History and not “fictitious” stories have been conquering the stage since a decade in manifold ways.

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Quelle: http://public-history-weekly.oldenbourg-verlag.de/4-2016-26/history-on-stage/

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Eco was right. Ironical understanding as a goal

 

 

English

Umberto Eco passed away recently, on 19 February, 2016. His contributions to philosophy and semiology, as well as his literary productions, have played a very influential role in our contemporary culture. On this occasion, his ideas about the importance of irony, which had a key role in his famous novel, Il nome della Rosa, are analyzed in relation to current problems in history education. This note intends, also, to be a modest homage to his deep and extensive work on the development of both culture and values.

National Narratives and Identities

History education powerfully influences the construction of national identities through so-called myths of origin that are taught and then subsequently appropriated by students, and which play an important role in most educational systems and practices. Therefore, researchers today generally agree that the history curricula from diverse countries are still full of nationalist contents, which do not coincide with historiographical research on nations and their origins.

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Quelle: http://public-history-weekly.oldenbourg-verlag.de/4-2016-26/eco-was-right-ironical-understanding-as-a-goal/

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