The seventeenth century is considered the Dutch Golden Age, a time when the Dutch were at the forefront of social change, economics, the sciences, and art. In Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, eminent historian J. L. Price goes beyond the standard descriptions of the cultural achievements of the Dutch during this time by placing these many achievements within their social context. Price’s central argument is that alongside the innovative tendencies in Dutch society and culture there were powerful conservative and reactionary forces at work—and that it was the tension between these contradictory impulses that gave the period its unique and powerful dynamic.
Dutch Culture in the Golden Age is distinctive in its broad scope, examing art, literature, religion, political ideology, theology, and scientific and intellectual trends, while also attending to the high and popular culture of the times. Price’s new interpretation of Dutch history places an emphasis on the paradox of the Dutch resistance to change as well as their general acceptance of innovation.
This comprehensive look at the Dutch Golden Age provides a fascinating new way to understand Dutch culture at the height of its historic and global influence.
Imagining Global Amsterdambrings together new essays on the image of Amsterdam as articulated in film, literature, art, and urban discourse, considered within the context of globalization and its impact on urban culture. Subjects include: Amsterdam’s place in global cultural memory; expressions of global consciousness in Amsterdam in the ‘Golden Age’; articulations of Amsterdam as a tolerant, multicultural, and permissive ‘global village’; and globalization’s impact ‘on the ground’ through city branding, the cultural heritage industry, and cultural production in the city.
Written by an interdisciplinary team of scholars, and united by a broad humanities approach, this collection forms a multifaceted inquiry into the dynamic relationship between Amsterdam, globalization, and the urban imaginary.
Every year hundreds of students from all over the world come to study in Utrecht. On the occasion of the 375th anniversary of the founding of Utrecht University, foreign students and alumni were invited to reflect on Dutch culture as they had experienced it in their university years there. This book collects the best of the essays they wrote; the result is a unique and fascinating contribution to the study of Dutch culture. These essays offer not only an intimate portrait of the students’ experiences, but also a fresh perspective on the remarkable, frustrating, and fascinating features of Dutch culture.
This volume presents work from an international group of writers who explore conceptualizations of what defined “East” and “West” in Eastern Europe, imperial Russia, and the Soviet Union. The contributors analyze the effects of transnational interactions on ideology, politics, and cultural production. They reveal that the roots of an East/West cultural divide were present many years prior to the rise of socialism and the cold war.
The chapters offer insights into the complex stages of adoption and rejection of Western ideals in areas such as architecture, travel writings, film, music, health care, consumer products, political propaganda, and human rights. They describe a process of mental mapping whereby individuals “captured and possessed” Western identity through cultural encounters and developed their own interpretations from these experiences. Despite these imaginaries, political and intellectual elites devised responses of resistance, defiance, and counterattack to defy Western impositions.
Socialists believed that their cultural forms and collectivist strategies offered morally and materially better lives for the masses and the true path to a modern society. Their sentiments toward the West, however, fluctuated between superiority and inferiority. But in material terms, Western products, industry, and technology, became the ever-present yardstick by which progress was measured. The contributors conclude that the commodification of the necessities of modern life and the rise of consumerism in the twentieth century made it impossible for communist states to meet the demands of their citizens. The West eventually won the battle of supply and demand, and thus the battle for cultural influence.
The first book in English to blend history and archaeology for a period of history currently receiving much scholarly attention, East Central and Eastern Europe in the Early Middle Ages examines key problems of the early medieval history of Eastern Europe, with particular reference to society, state, and the conversion to Christianity, and the diverse ways in which these aspects have been approached in the historiography of the region. The included essays examine the documentary and archaeological evidence of early medieval Europe in an attempt to assess its importance in understanding the construction of cultural identity and the process of political mobilization for the rise of the states. The book addresses an audience of historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and linguists with an interest in the history of Eastern Europe.
Stanislaw Baranczak, a Polish writer in exile, turns to his colleagues and their plights, in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Soviet Union, to explain why oppressive regimes could not succeed in their attempts to transform the Eastern European into Homo sovieticus.
These superb essays focus on the role that culture, and particularly literature, has played in keeping the spirit of intellectual independence alive in Eastern and Central Europe. Exploring a variety of issues from censorship to underground poetry, Baranczak shows why, in societies where people struggle to survive under totalitarian rule, art is believed to have the power to make things happen.
He brings into sharp relief the works and personalities of many legendary figures of recent Eastern European political and cultural history from Lech Walesa and Pope John Paul II to Václav Havel and Adam Michnik to Czeslaw Milosz, Witold Gombrowicz, Bruno Schulz, and Joseph Brodsky--and makes vivid the context from which they spring. Some of the essays probe the sense of inarticulateness experienced by writers in exile; many represent the literary essay at its best; all reveal that Baranczak is a sophisticated, often savagely funny writer on whom nothing is lost.
This refreshing and provocative book guides us toward a clearer understanding of what has led to the present moment, in which the nations of Eastern and Central Europe, tired of striving to "breathe under water," are finally "coming up for air." It is rewarding reading for anyone interested in art's confrontation with an intractable political reality--wherever it occurs in the world.
"Brown has been a close observer of the region for decades, and the breadth of his knowledge and the acuity of his judgments are evident throughout."—Michael Bernhard, Political Science Quarterly
"There is no surer guide than Brown to an understanding of these events, and no one better qualified to describe the complex and daunting problems facing the new non-communist governments."—John C. Campbell, Foreign Affairs
In 1989, from East Berlin to Budapest and Bucharest to Moscow, communism was falling. The walls were coming down and the world was being changed in ways that seemed entirely new. The conflict of ideas and ideals that began with the French Revolution of 1789 culminated in these revolutions, which raised the prospects of the "return to Europe" of East and Central European nations, the "restarting of their history," even, for some, the "end of history." What such assertions and aspirations meant, and what the larger events that inspired them mean-not just for the world of history and politics, but for our very understanding of that world-are the questions Krishan Kumar explores in 1989.
A well-known and widely respected scholar, Kumar places these revolutions of 1989 in the broadest framework of political and social thought, helping us see how certain ideas, traditions, and ideological developments influenced or accompanied these movements-and how they might continue to play out. Asking questions about some of the central dilemmas facing modern society in the new century, Kumar offers critical insight into how these questions might be answered and how political, social, and historical ideas and ideals can shape our destiny.
Contradictions Series, volume 12
No nation is a stranger to war, but for Russians war is a central part of who they are. Their “motherland” has been the battlefield where some of the largest armies have clashed, the most savage battles have been fought, the highest death tolls paid. Having prevailed over Mongol hordes and vanquished Napoleon and Hitler, many Russians believe no other nation has sacrificed so much for the world. In Russia: The Story of War Gregory Carleton explores how this belief has produced a myth of exceptionalism that pervades Russian culture and politics and has helped forge a national identity rooted in war.
While outsiders view Russia as an aggressor, Russians themselves see a country surrounded by enemies, poised in a permanent defensive crouch as it fights one invader after another. Time and again, history has called upon Russia to play the savior—of Europe, of Christianity, of civilization itself—and its victories, especially over the Nazis in World War II, have come at immense cost. In this telling, even defeats lose their sting. Isolation becomes a virtuous destiny and the whole of its bloody history a point of pride.
War is the unifying thread of Russia’s national epic, one that transcends its wrenching ideological transformations from the archconservative empire to the radical-totalitarian Soviet Union to the resurgent nationalism of the country today. As Putin’s Russia asserts itself in ever bolder ways, knowing how the story of its war-torn past shapes the present is essential to understanding its self-image and worldview.
Illustrated with maps, paintings, photographs, posters, and cartoons, The Russia Reader incorporates song lyrics, jokes, anecdotes, and folktales, as well as poems, essays, and fiction by writers including Akhmatova, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, and Tolstoi. Transcripts from the show trials of major Party figures and an account of how staff at the Lenin Library in Moscow were instructed to interact with foreigners are among the many selections based on personal memoirs and archival materials only recently made available to the public. From a tenth-century emissary’s description of his encounters in Kyivan Rus’, to a scientist’s recollections of her life in a new research city built from scratch in Siberia during the 1950s, to a novelist’s depiction of the decadence of the “New Russians” in the 2000s, The Russia Reader is an extraordinary introduction to a vast and varied country.
As the dust clears from the fall of Communism, will Western eyes see Russia, the unclaimed orphan of Western history or Russia as she truly is, a perplexing but undeniable member of the European family? A dazzling work of intellectual history by a world-renowned scholar, spanning the years from Peter the Great to the fall of the Soviet Union, this book gives us a clear and sweeping view of Russia not as an eternal barbarian menace but as an outermost, if laggard, member in the continuum of European nations.
The Russian troika hurtles through these pages. The Spectre, modernity's belief in salvation by revolutionary ideology, haunts them. Alice's looking glass greets us at this turn and that. Throughout, Martin Malia's inspired use of these devices aptly conveys the surreality of the whole Soviet Russian phenomenon and the West's unbalanced perception of it. He shows us the usually distorted images and stereotypes that have dominated Western ideas about Russia since the eighteenth century. And once these emerge as projections of the West's own internal anxieties, he shifts his focus to the institutional structures and cultural forms Russia shares with her neighbors.
Here modern Europe is depicted as an East-West cultural gradient in which the central and eastern portions respond to the Atlantic West's challenge in delayed and generally skewed fashion. Thus Russia, after two centuries of building then painfully liberalizing its Old Regime, in 1917 tried to leap to a socialism that would be more advanced and democratic than European capitalism. The result was a cruel caricature of European civilization, which mesmerized and polarized the West for most of this century. As the old East-West gradient reappears in genuinely modern guise, this brilliantly imaginative work shows us the reality that has for so long tantalized--and eluded--Western eyes.
In a book of keen perception and vast sweep, a foremost scholar examines one hundred years of Russian revolutionary thought and the men who shaped and were caught up in it. Adam Ulam displays an unusual ability to penetrate the core of the Soviet mind as it evolved and was encapsulated in history.
Why did the Russians sign a treaty with Hitler? Why did they build a Berlin Wall, rattle missiles, and then sign a nuclear-test-ban treaty with President Kennedy? Why do they fear Titoism? Why was detente fostered when Nixon was president? By reflecting on the psychology, ideology, and frenetic activity of revolutionary Russians, Ulam leads us to answers.
Ulam's ability to explain events by tracing the continuities in the Russian mentality makes this work a special achievement in Soviet studies and intellectual history.
A world-renowned anthropologist, Anatoly M. Khazanov offers a witty, insightful, and cautionary analysis of ethnic nationalism and its pivotal role in the collapse of the Soviet empire.
“Khazanov’s encyclopedic knowledge of the history and culture of post-Soviet societies, combined with field research there since the 1960s, informs the case studies with a singular authoritative voice. This volume is destined to be an absolutely necessary reference for the understanding of ethnic relations and the politics of minorities in the ex-USSR into the next century.”—Leonard Plotnicov, editor of Ethnology
First Paperback Edition
Contributors. Edward Allworth, Hans Bräker, Marie Broxup, Georg Brunner, Bert G. Fragner, Uwe Halbach, Wolfgang Höpken, Andreas Kappeler, Edward J. Lazzerini, Richard Lorenz, Alexandre Popovi´c, Sabrina Petra Ramet, Azade-Ayse Rorlich, Gerhard Simon, Tadeusz Swietochowski
In this compelling study of the treatment of "enemy" minorities in the Russian Empire during the First World War, Eric Lohr uncovers a dramatic story of mass deportations, purges, expropriations, and popular violence.A campaign initially aimed at restricting foreign citizens rapidly spun out of control. It swept up Russian subjects of German, Jewish, and Muslim backgrounds and drove roughly a million civilians from one part of the empire to another, resulting in one of the largest cases of forced migration in history to that time. Because foreigners and diaspora minorities were prominent among entrepreneurial and landowning elites, the campaign against them also became an explosive element in class and national tensions on the eve of the 1917 revolutions.
During the war, the imperial regime dropped its ambivalence about Russian nationalism and embraced unprecedented and radical policies that "nationalized" the economy, the land, and even the population. The core idea of the campaign--that the country needed to free itself from the domination of foreigners, internal enemies, and the exploitative world economic system--later became a central feature of the Soviet revolutionary model.
Based on extensive archival research, much in newly available sources, Nationalizing the Russian Empire is an important contribution to the study of empire and nationalism, the Russian Revolution, and ethnic cleansing.
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