The construction of British national identity among British South Asians
National Identities, Volume 15, Issue 2, Page 157-175, June 2013.
Archiv für Mai 2013
Becoming Indian: The unfinished revolution of culture and identity / Ashoka and the making of modern India
National Identities, Volume 15, Issue 2, Page 213-216, June 2013.
Explicit and implicit attitudes of Scottish and Maltese children to national identity
National Identities, Volume 15, Issue 2, Page 177-211, June 2013.
Warlands: population resettlement and state reconstruction in the Soviet-East European borderlands, 1945-50
National Identities, Volume 15, Issue 2, Page 216-218, June 2013.
‘We Lay Claim to Him!’ Berlin, Rothko, Eisenstein, and the Reorientation of Latvian National Identity
National Identities, Volume 15, Issue 2, Page 125-137, June 2013.
Irish nationalism and European integration: the official redefinition of the island of Ireland
National Identities, Volume 15, Issue 2, Page 220-222, June 2013.
Veil: mirror of identity
National Identities, Volume 15, Issue 2, Page 218-220, June 2013.
BOOKS IN SUMMARY
Books reviewed in this issue.
Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal. By Arie Dubnov.
Remembering Katyn. By Alexander Etkind, Rory Finnin, et al.
Thucydides and Herodotus. Edited by Edith Foster and Donald Lateiner.
Tolstoy on War: Narrative A…
PINKER AND PROGRESS
Condorcet’s classical Enlightenment statement of human progress became an essential element of nineteenth- and twentieth-century consciousness, but by the millennium grand narratives had fallen victim to a disillusioned cultural climate. Now Steven Pinker, like Condorcet drawing on a wide range of contemporary “knowledges,” has reasserted a sweeping narrative of human progress in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Mapping a spectacular long-term decline in person-on-person violence and reduction in deaths due to war, Pinker celebrates the spread of a cultural pattern of self-restraint, sensitivity to human suffering, and recent regard for human rights, due to the modern state and gentle commerce capitalism.
For Pinker the human condition has gotten steadily better, the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savor and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible. Why then are so many so negative about modernity? Citing the psychology of temporal proximity to horrific events and the bad-news predilection of the media, Pinker ignores the specifically modern and less directly brutal institutionalized forms of violence as well as the profound ambivalence of progress. He decisively demonstrates the drop in certain kinds of violence, but his account becomes strangely ideological, recapitulating key Cold-War themes—the individual against totalitarianism, the Enlightenment against the counter-Enlightenment, rationalism and freedom against murderous utopianism—distorting his study in the name of gentle commerce, Marxism, and anti-Communism.
HISTORIOGRAPHY: A FIELD IN SEARCH OF A HISTORIAN?
Richard Kirkendall’s collection of essays, The Organization of American Historians and the Writing and Teaching of American History, examines the history of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) from its founding to the present, using that history to illuminate how the writing of American history has changed over the last hundred years. The book provides coverage of all the major dimensions of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association’s (MVHA) and the OAH’s activities, ranging from the work of its scholarly publications, the Mississippi Historical Valley Review and the Journal of American History, to its role in promoting the teaching of American history. Overall, the essays in the volume tell a story of the organization’s progress toward greater inclusion and democracy, falling prey to a Whig interpretation of historiography. In doing so, the book is part of a larger tendency in the way that historians have approached historiography, which in turn reflects their ambivalence about their relationship to the historical process. Thus, even as the very enterprise of historiography is premised on the recognition of how historians are themselves the products of the historical process, historians have revealed the limits to that recognition in their approach to the subject. This essay shows how deeply rooted this duality has been in the study of American historiography and illuminates some of its sources by placing Kirkendall’s book in the context of how the MVHA and the OAH have treated historiography over the course of the organization’s history.