Video: Nationalism and Time, by Benedict Anderson

 
               

A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust, by Mary Fulbrook

"The Silesian town of Bedzin lies a mere twenty-five miles from Auschwitz; through the linked ghettos of Bedzin and its neighbouring town, some 85,000 Jews passed on their way to slave labour or the gas chambers. 

The principal civilian administrator of Bedzin, Udo Klausa, was a happily married family man. He was also responsible for implementing Nazi policies towards the Jews in his area - inhumane processes that were the precursors of genocide. Yet he later claimed, like so many other Germans after the war, that he had 'known nothing about it'; and that he had personally tried to save a Jew before he himself managed to leave for military service. A Small Town Near Auschwitz re-creates Udo Klausa's story. Using a wealth of personal letters, memoirs, testimonies, interviews and other sources, Mary Fulbrook pieces together his role in the unfolding stigmatization and degradation of the Jews under his authoritiy, as well as the heroic attempts at resistance on the part of some of his victims. She also gives us a fascinating insight into the inner conflicts of a Nazi functionary who, throughout, considered himself a 'decent' man. And she explores the conflicting memories and evasions of his life after the war. 

But the book is much more than a portrayal of an individual man. Udo Klausa's case is so important because it is in many ways so typical. Behind Klausa's story is the larger story of how countless local functionaries across the Third Reich facilitated the murderous plans of a relatively small number among the Nazi elite - and of how those plans could never have been realized, on the same scale, without the diligent cooperation of these generally very ordinary administrators. As Fulbrook shows, men like Klausa 'knew' and yet mostly suppressed this knowledge, performing their day jobs without apparent recognition of their own role in the system, or any sense of personal wrongdoing or remorse - either before or after 1945. 

This account is no ordinary historical reconstruction. For Fulbrook did not discover Udo Klausa amongst the archives. She has known the Klausa family all her life. She had no inkling of her subject's true role in the Third Reich until a few years ago, a discovery that led directly to this inescapably personal professional history."

Source: Amazon

Also, read the article at The Guardian: Historian uncovers her family link to secret Nazi's role in the Holocaust

Finally, you can see the videos:








Click here to buy A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust.

Video: Re-Mapping the Italian Renaissance, by Stephen J. Campbell

                  

 

Video: Thucydides in the Modern World, by Neville Morley

          

Breaking up Time: Negotiating the Borders Between Present, Past and Future, edited by Chris Lorenz and Berber Bevernage

"Thirteen expert historians and philosophers address basic questions on historical time and on the distinctions between past, present and future. Their contributions are organised around four themes: the relation between time and modernity; the issue of ruptures in time and the influence of catastrophic events such as revolutions and wars on temporal distinctions; the philosophical analysis of historical time and temporal distinctions; and the construction of time outside Europe through processes of colonialism, imperialism, and globalisation."

Source: Amazon

See the table of contents here.
Click here to buy Breaking up Time: Negotiating the Borders Between Present, Past and Future.

Judith Butler: Benjamin and The Philosophy of History

                     

Companions to Michael Oakeshott

  

Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present, by Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail

Book description from Amazon:

Humans have always been interested in their origins, but historians have been reluctant to write about the long stretches of time before the invention of writing. In fact, the deep past was left out of most historical writing almost as soon as it was discovered. This breakthrough book, as important for readers interested in the present as in the past,brings science into history to offer a dazzling new vision of humanity across time. Team-written by leading experts in a variety of fields, it maps events, cultures, and eras across millions of years to present a new scale for understanding the human body, energy and ecosystems, language, food, kinship, migration, and more. Combining cutting-edge social and evolutionary theory with the latest discoveries about human genes, brains, and material culture, Deep History invites scholars and general readers alike to explore the dynamic of connectedness that spans all of human history.
With Timothy Earle, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Clive Gamble, April McMahon, John C. Mitani, Hendrik Poinar, Mary C. Stiner, and Thomas R. Trautmann.

You can also see the abstract of the review written by Fredrik Albritton Jonsson to the forthcoming edition of History and Theory by clicking here.

Click here to buy Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present.

Michael Bentley: The West: Reflections on the Making of a Past

2014 International Conference on Narrative

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology will be holding the 2014 International Conference on Narrative between March 27-30, 2014. All participants must join the International Society for the Study of Narrative and send the proposals prior to October 15, 2013.

More info on the links below:
http://narrative.georgetown.edu/conferences/
http://web.mit.edu/narrative/docs/2014_Narrative_Conference_cfp.pdf

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Carlo Ginzburg: History in the Google Era

The British Aesthetic Tradition: From Shaftesbury to Wittgenstein, by Timothy M. Costelloe

Book description from Amazon:

The British Aesthetic Tradition: From Shaftesbury to Wittgenstein is the first single volume to offer readers a comprehensive and systematic history of aesthetics in Britain and the United States from its inception in the early eighteenth century to major developments in the late twentieth century. The book consists of an introduction and eight chapters, and is divided into three parts. The first part, The Age of Taste, covers the eighteenth-century approaches of internal sense theorists, imagination theorists, and associationists. The second, The Age of Romanticism, takes readers from debates over the picturesque through British Romanticism to late Victorian criticism. The third, The Age of Analysis, covers early twentieth-century theories of Formalism and Expressionism to conclude with Wittgenstein and a number of views inspired by his thought.

"Costelloe's fine book splendidly refutes the alleged 'dreariness' of aesthetics. Uniquely, it welds the reflections of both artists and philosophers into a single continuous narrative, incorporating figures as diverse as Wordsworth and Wittgenstein." 
- Gordon Graham, Princeton Theological Seminary

"Timothy Costelloe's The British Aesthetic Tradition does what no other book I can think of does with respect to the history of aesthetics: it constructs a plausible and reliable context for reading works by Shaftesbury or Kames, say, alongside works by Frank Sibley or Ludwig Wittgenstein - Although the book is aware of a wider tradition outside the borders of Anglophone writing on the arts, it turns out that Costelloe's close focus on the British tradition yields considerable rewards - This book is set to become standard reading for courses on aesthetics." 
- Peter de Bolla, University of Cambridge

"The British Aesthetic Tradition by Timothy Costelloe is an important new study of the development of the discipline of aesthetics in the English-speaking world, forging connections hitherto unacknowledged, such as the relation between the eighteenth-century philosophers of taste and the Romantics - Tracing the story of aesthetics through Wittgenstein, Costelloe has constructed a narrative that will be admired and debated for decades - A singular achievement." 

- Noel Carroll, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Click here to buy The British Aesthetic Tradition: From Shaftesbury to Wittgenstein.

Nietzsche's Philosophy of History, by Anthony K. Jensen

Book description from Amazon:

Nietzsche, the so-called herald of the 'philosophy of the future', nevertheless dealt with the past on nearly every page of his writing. Not only was he concerned with how past values, cultural practices, and institutions influence the present - he was plainly aware that any attempt to understand that influence encounters many meta-historical problems. This comprehensive and lucid exposition of the development of Nietzsche's philosophy of history explores how Nietzsche thought about history and historiography throughout his life and how it affected his most fundamental ideas. Discussion of the whole span of Nietzsche's writings, from his earliest publications as a classical philologist to his later genealogical and autobiographical projects, is interwoven with careful analysis of his own forms of writing history, the nineteenth-century paradigms which he critiqued, and the twentieth-century views which he anticipated. The book will be of much interest to scholars of Nietzsche and of nineteenth-century philosophy.

Click here to buy Nietzsche's Philosophy of History.

See also Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas.

History, Heritage & Tradition in Contemporary British Politics, by Emily Robinson

Book description from Amazon:

History, heritage and tradition in contemporary British politics explores the use of the past in modern British politics. It examines party political perspectives on British history and the historical process and also looks at the ways in which memory is instituted within the parties in practice, through archives, written histories and commemorations. It focuses in particular on a number of explicit negotiations over historical narratives: the creation of the National Curriculum for History, Conservative attempts to re-assess their historical role in 1997, the assertion of a 'lost' social democratic tradition by the SDP and New Labour and the collapse of the Communist Party of Great Britain's narrative memory in 1988-91. These episodes are examined as a process of negotiation between grassroots members and party leaders in which understandings of the past determined the options for the future. This book fuses scholarship on British political parties' collective memory, historical theory and heritage studies. It traces the decline of ideologically distinct approaches to history and argues that although the political past is no longer seen to make demands on the present- either of conservative duty or radical obligation- this is in line with wider social attitudes which see the past as an affirmation of the present, rather than as a legacy which can be honoured or betrayed. It shows how history, heritage and tradition are used to present parliamentary politics as intrinsically 'historic' and suggests that the disappearance of active political pasts leaves contemporary politicians unable to speak of radically different futures.

Click here to buy History, Heritage and Tradition in Contemporary British Politics.