Seems you have not registered as a member of localhost.saystem.shop!
You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Memory and Religion from a Postsecular Perspective
The book argues that religion is a system of significant meanings that have an impact on other systems and spheres of social life, including cultural memory. The editors call for a postsecular turn in memory studies which would provide a more reflective and meaningful approach to the constant interplay between the religious and the secular. This opens up new perspectives on the intersection of memory and religion and helps memory scholars become more aware of the religious roots of the language they are using in their studies of memory. By drawing on examples from different parts of the world, the contributors to this volume explain how the interactions between the religious and the secular ...
Apocalyptic Cartography
In Apocalyptic Cartography: Thematic Maps and the End of the World in a Fifteenth-Century Manuscript, Chet Van Duzer and Ilya Dines analyse Huntington Library HM 83, an unstudied manuscript produced in Lübeck, Germany. The manuscript contains a rich collection of world maps produced by an anonymous but strikingly original cartographer. These include one of the earliest programs of thematic maps, and a remarkable series of maps that illustrate the transformations that the world was supposed to undergo during the Apocalypse. The authors supply detailed discussion of the maps and transcriptions and translations of the Latin texts that explain the maps. Copies of the maps in a fifteenth-century manuscript in Wolfenbüttel prove that this unusual work did circulate. A brief article about this book on the website of National Geographic can be found here.
Imagined Empires
The Balkans offer classic examples of how empires imagine they can transform themselves into national states (Ottomanism) and how nation-states project themselves into future empires (as with the Greek “Great Idea” and the Serbian “Načertaniye”). By examining the interaction between these two aspirations this volume sheds light on the ideological prerequisites for the emergence of Balkan nationalisms. With a balance between historical and literary contributions, the focus is on the ideological hybridity of the new national identities and on the effects of “imperial nationalisms” on the emerging Balkan nationalisms. The authors of the twelve essays reveal the relation between empire and nation-state, proceeding from the observation that many of the new nation-states acquired some imperial features and behaved as empires. This original and stimulating approach reveals the imperialistic nature of so-called ethnic or cultural nationalism.
Map Men
More than just colorful clickbait or pragmatic city grids, maps are often deeply emotional tales: of political projects gone wrong, budding relationships that failed, and countries that vanished. In Map Men, Steven Seegel takes us through some of these historical dramas with a detailed look at the maps that made and unmade the world of East Central Europe through a long continuum of world war and revolution. As a collective biography of five prominent geographers between 1870 and 1950—Albrecht Penck, Eugeniusz Romer, Stepan Rudnyts’kyi, Isaiah Bowman, and Count Pál Teleki—Map Men reexamines the deep emotions, textures of friendship, and multigenerational sagas behind these influential...
Ukraine and Russian Neo-Imperialism
This book first proves that the rationale behind Russia’s aggressive actions in its neighborhood resides in its goal of achieving certain geostrategic objectives which are largely predefined by the state’s imperial traditions, memories, and fears that the Kremlin may irretrievably lose control over lands which were once Russian. In other words, Russia constantly remains an expansion-oriented and centralized state regardless of epochs and political regimes ruling over it. That is its geopolitical modus operandi successfully tested throughout history. This book also scrutinizes Ukraine as a young post-colonial and post-communist state which, unlike Russia, is more prone to democratize and ...
Cross Purposes
No other symbol is as omnipresent in Poland as the cross. This multilayered and contradictory icon features prominently in public spaces and state institutions. It is anchored in the country's visual history, inspires protest culture, and dominates urban and rural landscapes. The cross recalls Poland's historic struggles for independence and anti-Communist dissent, but it also encapsulates the country's current position in Europe as a self-avowed bulwark of Christianity and a champion of conservative values. It is both a national symbol – defining the boundaries of Polishness in opposition to a changing constellation of the country's Others – and a key object of contestation in the creative arts and political culture. Despite its long history, the cross has never been systematically studied as a political symbol in its capacity to mobilize for action and solidify power structures. Cross Purposes is the first cultural history of the cross in modern Poland, deconstructing this key symbol and exploring how it has been deployed in different political battles.
Europe and the East
This volume investigates competing ideas, images, and stereotypes of a European ‘East’, exploring its role in defining European and national conceptions of self and other since the eighteenth century. Through a set of original case studies, this collection explores the intersection between discourses about a more distant, exotic, or colonial ‘Orient’ with a more immediate ‘East’. The book considers this shifting, imaginary border from different points of view and demonstrates that the location, definition, and character of the ‘East’, often associated with socio-economic backwardness and other unfavourable attributes, depended on historical circumstances, political preferences, cultural assumptions, and geography. Spanning two centuries, this study analyses the ways that changing ideals and persistent clichéd attitudes have shaped the conversation about and interpretations of Eastern Europe. Europe and the East will be essential reading for anyone interested in images and ideas of Europe, European identity, and conceptions of the ‘East’ in intellectual and cultural history.
Contested Interpretations of the Past in Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian Film
Questions of collective identity and nationhood dominate the memory debate in both the high and popular cultures of postsocialist Russia, Poland and Ukraine. Often the ‘Soviet’ and ‘Russian’ identity are reconstructed as identical; others remember the Soviet regime as an anonymous supranational ‘Empire’, in which both Russian and non-Russian national cultures were destroyed. At the heart of this ‘empire talk’ is a series of questions pivoting on the opposition between constructed ‘ethnic’ and ‘imperial’ identities. Did ethnic Russians constitute the core group who implemented the Soviet Terror, e.g. the mass murders of the Poles in Katyn and the Ukrainians in the Holodomor? Or were Russians themselves victims of a faceless totalitarianism? The papers in this volume explore the divergent and conflicting ways in which the Soviet regime is remembered and re-imagined in contemporary Russian, Polish and Ukrainian cinema and media.
The Science of State Power in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1790-1880
The formation of modern European states during the long 19th century was a complicated process, challenged by the integration of widely different territories and populations. The Science of State Power in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1790-1880 builds on recent research to investigate the history of statistics as an overlooked part of the sciences of the state in Habsburg legal education as well as within the broader public sphere. By exploring the practices and social spaces of statistics, author Borbála Zsuzsanna Török uncovers its central role in imagining the composite Habsburg Monarchy as a modern and unified administrative space.
