February 2012
5 posts
3 tags
On Nationalist Historiography
Nationalist historiography is a way of looking at or studying history with the preconceived notion that a modern nation exists as a result of history, or, with the preconceived notion that history has being leading up to the existence of a modern nation. So if you are French, this means that you read and/or teach French history with the perspective that everything which occurred in the geographic...
6 tags
Artifact Profile: the Guennol Lioness
Before you read this post, you should know that I refer to myself as an “antiquities Communist,” meaning that I do not believe any private person has the right to own historical artifacts, capitalism be damned. Further, I believe that cases like the one below—aided by institutions such as Sotheby’s—are the lifeblood of the black market in antiquities; a market which, through the...
2 tags
oodlyenough asked: Okay this question is similar to what I asked before but maybe/hopefully a little different. If you could hop in a TARDIS to go witness something first-hand to ~solve~ a historical mystery/know the ~truth of what happened in some event or behind closed doors or whatever, what would it be?
5 tags
“A guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world.”
In this post, I talked at length about the definition of a “World War” and argued that, though large level global conflict can still happen, a “World War III” cannot happen because we have been operating within in a post-imperial context since about 1989; I also argued that if there was going to be a WWIII, it would have happened during the Cold War. There’s a bit more on this here.
So this is a...
Shameless moment of using this blog to my personal...
For those of you who are undergrads at universities large enough to have TAs, what do you like and what don’t you like in a TA—especially in discussion centered section meetings?