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These three volumes are the first titles in an ambitious new series from I.B.Tauris.
The human, the person as a category, may become a historical subject. To take this step, however, is to begin to destabilise the basic terms with which to think about experience and agency. Hence the need for recourse to a portmanteau term, which does not have to be and perhaps could not be clearly defined, like ‘the psyche’.
The author’s statement that he proposes to present a history of modern Poland which goes beyond martyrdom is dynamite. The very suggestion that martyrdom is something that a nation can and furthermore should transcend is not an idea with which many Poles, notably present day politicians, would like to advocate.
The last century and a half of Ottoman history was marked by forced displacement into the empire on a huge scale. Between the Russian conquest of the Crimea in 1783 and the second Balkan war in 1913, five to seven million Muslims entered the Ottoman domains. Some were already subjects of the Sultan, leaving – or expelled from – areas that had broken away from the empire under Christian rule.
As Frevert says in introducing this volume, modern-day society is starting to pay increasing attention to emotions and how to manage or understand them. This collected volume reports how emotions have been documented historically in encyclopaedias and reference sources over the period 1700–2000.
In The Brothers Karamazov, the great novelist Fedor Dostoevsky has the defence counsel Fetiukovich assert in court the perceived essential characteristic – and superiority – of Russian justice: ‘Let other nations think of retribution and the letter of the law, we will cling to the spirit and the meaning – the salvation and reformation of the lost’ (quoted on p.134).
Jonathan Daly’s massive book will serve as a tonic for those anxious that the western world is slipping. It will serve as a red flag for specialists in the history of just about everywhere else, in the unlikely event they read beyond chapter one. As a story of innovation and achievement in the history of the West, this is a fine book, with many insightful passages and interesting details.
‘Making is thinking’, according to the sociologist and philosopher Richard Sennett.(1) It has long been recognised that the humblest of craft objects, often (though not exclusively) produced using materials and methods which differ from those used in industrial production, have the potential to offer alternatives to the dominant culture and to challenge conventional wa
Four years ago I published a review in this journal of a book on The Origins of Racism in the West.(1) I would like to begin the analysis of the volume by Bethencourt in the same way in which I began my piece on The Origins of Racism in the West, i.e.
Dr Chris A Williams undertakes an ambitious project in attempting to analytically discuss aspects of the development of a public institution over a 200-year period, within a publication limited to 242 pages.