Rewriting the Past


Book Description

Patrick Modiano (1945-) has published seventeen novels over the past twenty-seven years and is considered one of France's foremost writers. His first three works, dealing principally with the German occupation of France during World War II, are generally considered to have led to a reconsideration of the Gaullist myth which endured for twenty-five years after the war. Along with Marcel Ophuls's film, The Sorrow and the Pity, Modiano's novels opened French eyes to the more ambiguous role played during the occupation by the average French citizen. His subsequent novels have continued to probe the relationship between history, memory and fiction. This study will be of interest to readers of French fiction and history as it looks at their relation-ship to memory and shows that the three are inextricably linked in a way that enriches our understanding of our past, whether it be collective or personal. Modiano, while seemingly obsessed with his own past, in fact indicates an opening toward the future by attempting to put the past to rest in his fiction.




Rewriting History


Book Description

Now, for the first time, Fox News political analyst and former Clinton adviser Dick Morris turns his sharp-eyed gaze on Hillary, the longtime First Lady, current New York senator, and bestselling author. For, as he argues, no politician in America today is better aligned to become president in 2008—and none would bring more baggage to the White House—than Mrs. Clinton. In Rewriting History, Morris draws on his own long working relationship with the Clintons, as well as his trademark deep research and candid, nonpartisan analysis, to create a rebuttal to Hillary's bestselling autobiography, Living History. Morris documents how Hillary hides her true self behind a "Hillary" brand that is chatty, charming, giggly, and warm—but is far from her true personality. In Rewriting History, Morris pierces the mask to get at the truth behind the distortions and omissions of Hillary's memoir. Here we meet the real Hillary, both good and bad: the manager who makes the trains run on time, but also the paranoid who sees all those who disagree with her as personal enemies; the idealist, but also the "advice addict" easily misled by the guru of the moment. Morris describes Hillary's sense of entitlement, and warns that it may lead deep into financial scandal. And he demonstrates how Hillary dodges criticism by pretending that every attack is directed not just at her, but at every working woman in America. Ultimately, Morris argues, the Hillary Clinton of today is marketing a false front, obscuring both her wants and her assets behind the phony facade of a domestic Everywoman. But as she pursues higher office, she also faces a choice. Will she, like Bobby Kennedy, see the error of her ruthless ways, and embrace the sincere idealism she professes? Or, like Richard Nixon, will she allow the darker angels of her nature to overcome her, jeopardizing herself and the country in the process? As Rewriting History suggests, we can only hope that Hillary Clinton's past performance is no guarantee of future results.




The American Yawp


Book Description

"I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable / I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world."—Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself," Leaves of Grass The American Yawp is a free, online, collaboratively built American history textbook. Over 300 historians joined together to create the book they wanted for their own students—an accessible, synthetic narrative that reflects the best of recent historical scholarship and provides a jumping-off point for discussions in the U.S. history classroom and beyond. Long before Whitman and long after, Americans have sung something collectively amid the deafening roar of their many individual voices. The Yawp highlights the dynamism and conflict inherent in the history of the United States, while also looking for the common threads that help us make sense of the past. Without losing sight of politics and power, The American Yawp incorporates transnational perspectives, integrates diverse voices, recovers narratives of resistance, and explores the complex process of cultural creation. It looks for America in crowded slave cabins, bustling markets, congested tenements, and marbled halls. It navigates between maternity wards, prisons, streets, bars, and boardrooms. The fully peer-reviewed edition of The American Yawp will be available in two print volumes designed for the U.S. history survey. Volume I begins with the indigenous people who called the Americas home before chronicling the collision of Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans.The American Yawp traces the development of colonial society in the context of the larger Atlantic World and investigates the origins and ruptures of slavery, the American Revolution, and the new nation's development and rebirth through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Rather than asserting a fixed narrative of American progress, The American Yawp gives students a starting point for asking their own questions about how the past informs the problems and opportunities that we confront today.




Rewriting the Self


Book Description

Originally published in 1993. This book explores the process by which individuals reconstruct the meaning and significance of past experience. Drawing on the lives of such notable figures as St Augustine, Helen Keller and Philip Roth as well as on the combined insights of psychology, philosophy and literary theory, the book sheds light on the intricacies and dilemmas of self-interpretation in particular and interpretive psychological enquiry more generally. The author draws upon selected, mainly autobiographical, literary texts in order to examine concretely the process of rewriting the self. Among the issues addressed are the relationship of rewriting the self to the concept of development, the place of language in the construction of selfhood, the difference between living and telling about it, the problem of facts in life history narrative, the significance of the unconscious in interpreting the personal past, and the freedom of the narrative imagination. Alpha Sigma Nu National Book Award winner in 1994




Past in the Making


Book Description

Historical revisionism, far from being restricted to small groups of ‘negationists,’ has galvanized debates in the realm of recent history. The studies in this book range from general accounts of the background of recent historical revisionism to focused analyses of particular debates or social-cultural phenomena in individual Central European countries, from Germany to Ukraine and Estonia. Where is the borderline between legitimate re-examination of historical interpretations and attempts to rewrite history in a politically motivated way that downgrades or denies essential historical facts? How do the traditional ‘national historical narratives’ react to the ‘spill-over’ of international and political controversies into their ‘sphere of influence’? Technological progress, along with the overall social and cultural decentralization shatters the old hierarchies of academic historical knowledge under the banner of culture of memory, and breeds an unequalled democratization in historical representation. This book offers a unique approach based on the provocative and instigating intersection of scholarly research, its political appropriations, and social reflection from a representative sample of Central and East European countries.




Rewriting History in Manga


Book Description

This book analyzes the role of manga in contemporary Japanese political expression and debate, and explores its role in propagating new perceptions regarding Japanese history.




The War on History


Book Description

The War on Our History Confederate memorials toppled . . . Columbus statues attacked with red paint. They started with slave-owning Confederate generals, but they’re not stopping there. The vandals are only pretending to care about the character of particular American heroes. In reality, they hate what those heroes represent: the truths asserted in the Declaration of Independence and embodied in the Constitution. And they are bent on taking America down and replacing our free society with a socialist utopia. All that stands in their way is Americans’ reverence for our history of freedom. Which is why that history simply has to go. Now, Jarrett Stepman, editor at The Daily Signal and host of Right Side of History, exposes the true aims of the war on our history: The war on America: World history is full of conquests and suffering indigenous peoples. Why target Christopher Columbus? What they really want to tear down is America. The war on Thanksgiving: World history is full of colonists. Why target the Pilgrims? What they really want to tear down is American freedom and prosperity. The war on the Founding: World history is full of slavery. Why target Thomas Jefferson? What they really want to tear down are the rights endowed by our Creator. The war on the common man: World history is full of victorious generals and populist politicians. Why target Andrew Jackson? What they really want to tear down is democracy. The war on the South: World history is full of civil strife. Why target Confederate heroes like Robert E. Lee? What they really want to tear down is respect for America’s past and the reconciliation that renewed our Union. The war on patriotism: World history is full of national pride. Why target Teddy Roosevelt? What they really want to tear down is the idea of American greatness. The war on the American century: World history is full of bloody wars. What they really want to tear down is America’s defeat of totalitarianism. If America is to survive this assault, we must rally to the defense of our illustrious history. The War on History is the battle plan.




Rewriting the History of School Mathematics in North America 1607-1861


Book Description

The focus of this book is the fundamental influence of the cyphering tradition on mathematics education in North American colleges, schools, and apprenticeship training classes between 1607 and 1861. It is the first book on the history of North American mathematics education to be written from that perspective. The principal data source is a set of 207 handwritten cyphering books that have never previously been subjected to careful historical analysis.




Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future


Book Description

Located at the juncture of literature, history, and anthropology, Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future charts a strategy of how one might read a traditional text of non-Western historical literature in order to generate, with it, an opening for the future. This book does so by taking seriously a haunting work of historical prophecy inscribed in the nineteenth century by a royal Javanese exile--working through this writing of a colonized past to suggest the reconfiguration of the postcolonial future that this history itself apparently intends. After introducing the colonial and postcolonial orientalist projects that would fix the meaning of traditional writing in Java, Nancy K. Florida provides a nuanced translation of this particular traditional history, a history composed in poetry as the dream of a mysterious exile. She then undertakes a richly textured reading of the poem that discloses how it manages to escape the fixing of "tradition." Adopting a dialogic strategy of reading, Florida writes to extend--as the work's Javanese author demands--this history's prophetic potential into a more global register. Babad Jaka Tingkir, the historical prophecy that Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future translates and reads, is uniquely suited for such a study. Composing an engaging history of the emergence of Islamic power in central Java around the turn of the sixteenth century, Babad Jaka Tingkir was written from the vantage of colonial exile to contest the more dominant dynastic historical traditions of nineteenth-century court literature. Florida reveals how this history's episodic form and focus on characters at the margins of the social order work to disrupt the genealogical claims of conventional royal historiography--thus prophetically to open the possibility of an alternative future.




Rewriting Indian History


Book Description

In this examination of Indian history, the case is made that India's greatness is not only a lingering memory of the pre-Muslim conquest golden age, but has never diminished and continues today. Evidence for the argument includes recent archaeological research, linguistic discoveries, and new satellite imagery. The political, spiritual, cultural, and social importance of India is affirmed, throughout its history and into the future.