Politics And The Past

Politics and the Past offers an original, multidisciplinary exploration of the growing public controversy over reparations for historical injustices. Demonstrating that 'reparations politics' has become one of the most important features of international politics in recent years, the authors analyze why this is the case and show that reparations politics can be expected to be a major aspect of international affairs in coming years. In addition to broad theoretical and philosophical reflection, the book includes discussions of the politics of reparations in specific countries and regions, including the United States, France, Latin America, Japan, Canada, and Rwanda. The volume presents a nuanced, historically grounded, and critical perspective on the many campaigns for reparations currently afoot in a variety of contexts around the world. All readers working or teaching in the fields of transitional justice, the politics of memory, and social movements will find this book a rich and provocative contribution to this complex debate.

Offering a nuanced, historically grounded, and critical perspective, this book presents a multidisciplinary exploration of the growing public controversy over reparations for historical injustices.

'History is written by the winners' is the received wisdom. This book explains why historical interpretation has to incorporate perspectives from those other than 'winners', and demonstrates archaeology's crucial role in this wide-ranging approach. The book draws more on Africa, Afro-America, Australasia and Oceania than on Europe, the source of the traditionally dominant perspective in archaeology. The four organizing themes of The Politics of the Past are the forms and consequences of the Eurocentric heritage, the conflicting perspectives of rulers and ruled, the significance of administrative and institutional rivalries, and the cleavages that divide professional from popular views of archaeology. Archaeologists, anthropologists, historians and other scholars will find The Politics of the Past illuminating and provocative. It will enrich historical and archaeological inquiry and interpretation, and ramify their relevance for public policy.

History mattered to the political elite in ancient China. Leung explores why it was so important and to what end.

The ensuing debates and disagreements over the recent past, examined by the author, open up a window into the wider development of German memory, identity, and politics after the end of the Cold War."--BOOK JACKET.

Law and the Politics of Memory: Confronting the Past examines law’s role as a tool of memory politics in the efforts of contemporary societies to work through the traumas of their past. Using the examples of French colonialism and Vichy, as well as addressing the politics of memory surrounding the Holocaust, communism and colonialism, this book provides a critical exploration of law’s role in ‘belated’ transitional justice contexts. The book examines how and why law has become so central in processes in which the past is constituted as a series of injustices that need to be rectified and can allegedly be repaired. As such, it explores different legal modalities in processes of working through the past; addressing the implications of regulating history and memory through legal categories and legislative acts, whilst exploring how trials, restitution cases, and memory laws manage to fulfil such varied expectations as clarifying truth, rendering homage to memory and reconciling societies. Legal scholars, historians and political scientists, especially those working with transitional justice, history and memory politics in particular, will find this book a stimulating exploration of the specificity of law as an instrument and forum of the politics of memory.

In cultural and intellectual terms, one of the EU’s most important objectives in pursuing unification has been to develop a common historical narrative of Europe. Across ten compelling case studies, this volume examines the premises underlying such a project to ask: Could such an uncontested history of Europe ever exist? Combining studies of national politics, supranational institutions, and the fraught EU-Mideast periphery with a particular focus on the twentieth century, the contributors to History and Belonging offer a fascinating survey of the attempt to forge a post-national identity politics.

Excerpt from Is History Past Politics? A brief review of Mr. Freeman's Philosophy of History will serve to set our chosen motto in a'clear light. He regarded Greek politics as the beginning of the world's state life. For him the Achaian League of Greek cities was the historic fore runner of the Federal Union of these United States. For him the real life of ancient history lay not in its separation from the affairs of our own time, but in its close connection with them. (office of the Historical Professor, For him the records of Athenian archons and Roman consuls were essential parts of the same living European history as the records of Venetian doges and English kings. It mattered little to this large-hearted, broad-minded historian of Comparative Politics whether he was writing of free Hellas or free England, of Magna Graecia or the United States. He wrote political articles on the Eastern Question and the Danube provinces for the Manchester Guardian or Saturday Review in the same spirit in which he wrote historical essays. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.