Foreword

Recent political statements have revitalized the debate over Fascist antisemitism and the response by Italians to Benito Mussolini’s anti-Jewish campaign. Luconi offers an overview of the current reassessment of the attitude of Italians towards Jews during Il Duce’s rule in English- and Italian-language scholarship. Contrary to previous findings that have tended to emphasize the Italian people’s effective contribution to efforts to help Jews under the Fascist regime and the Nazi occupation of their country, more recent research has stressed that, notwithstanding remarkable exceptions, Italians—both inside and outside the Fascist hierarchy—were far from being immune to antisemitism and, therefore, did not refrain from actively participating in the discrimination, persecution and deportation of Jews in the pre-war and war years.     

Fordism: a review essay

ABSTRACT

Fordism is a central concept in American labour history. This essay, the first survey of the range of historiographical and sociological approaches deployed to understand Fordism, suggests that Fordism and Americanism are inseparably intertwined. Previous scholarship has emphasised that the technological and managerial efficiency of Fordist practice were a hallmark of twentieth-century Americanism. Historians of labour have demonstrated that these aspects manifested as a relentless system of control in the workplace that paradoxically helped to unify worker resistance. Historians of capitalism have tended to used Fordism to refer to an ethos underpinning mid-twentieth-century capitalist development marked by a balance between mass production and mass consumption. They identify increased social provisions and class compromise between labour and management as features that made Fordism attractive to states rebuilding their economies following the Second World War. New transnational histories of Fordism have begun to bridge the gap between these two main interpretations to show how Fordist practice and ethos were exported together internationally as part of an ideological project to modernise nations in America’s image. This essay concludes by assessing the usefulness of Fordism to historians and suggesting avenues for future research.     

江户时代日本史学中的早期民族主义

本文对江户时代日本史学著作的文本进行解读,分析存在于日本史学中的早期民族主义,将其归为华夷观变化滋生民族主体意识、神国思想、尊皇意识三种形态,力图证明日本的早期民族主义源自其思想内部,而非外来殖民危机。     

谈迁及其《国榷》新探

谈迁较早地放弃了科考,转而全心治史。谈迁立志写作《国榷》,是在天启元年。修史的直接动因,是不满意晚明的当代史纂修事业。第一稿前后用了6年时间,原稿称《国榷》,全书下迄天启,共百卷。以后,续有补写。顺治四年稿子失窃,顺治十年重新成稿。北京几年的反复修改与补充,使《国榷》第二稿更趋完善。在《明实录》尚存的时候,应理性地看待《国榷》,须从第二位角度来思考《国榷》的价值与地位。《国榷》优于《明实录》之处,有以下几点：写出了《明实录》没有写的真相,补充、纠正了《明实录》存在的失误,可补明末三朝记录不足之缺,且有《明实录》的史料信息检索功能。     

中国史学的革新思潮与李大钊的变革主张

20世纪初期,在中国史学的革新思潮中,李大钊提出了以马克思主义唯物史观为指导实现中国史学根本变革的主张.这些主张所形成的变革方案具有可行性,其对理论研究的强调具有前瞻性,而其史学革新的"持续论"则具有普适性.由变革的理论和方法等层面组成的新的史学"范式",为当时处于探索中的中国史学提供了一个重要的选择,也为中国马克思主义史学的创建奠定了基础,并在很大程度上影响了中国史学的进程.     

The Soviet study of the Barefooted Flight of the Kazakhs

The defeat, devastation and exile of the Kazakhs in the early eighteenth century, commonly known as the Barefooted Flight, was the nation's most distressing pre-Soviet calamity. Kazakh nation-building and official remembrance projects – commemorated in state ceremonies, public education and popular culture – portray an uninterrupted, centuries-old practice of tribute to local heroes who challenged the foreign aggressors. Twentieth-century Kazakh and Russian intellectuals in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras studied and enshrined these events based on published, secondary sources, rarely giving attention to the thin trail of documents preserved in state archives. The historiography of the Barefooted Flight exposed a trend in how politically convenient historical lessons shaped the interpretation of events. By the end of the Soviet Union, some archival material was introduced, it was but misquoted so as not to challenge the current interpretation.     

The Battle of Gökdepe in the Turkmen post-Soviet historical discourse

The Battle of Gökdepe (1881) is considered to be a turning point in Turkmenistan's contemporary historiography. It led to the then independent Turkmen (Akhal Tekke in this case) tribes coming under Russian control. Almost immediately after the event the battle became a controversial point of interpretation starting from Turkmen sources (rarely known to us), an immense number of Russian (mostly military) sources, up to the Soviet historians. The post-Soviet official Turkmen historiography of the event came from these foundations, but used its own mythological approach. As a result, the contemporary narrative of the Gökdepe defeat turned into a victory for the Akhal Tekke (and broadly Turkmen) nation. Additionally, this paper argues that the first and partly the second presidents of Turkmenistan incorporated the battle into their own personality cults, a fact which is still specific to the Central Asian context, albeit not unique in world history. In particular, the first president usurped the myth and connected it with his own historical narrative. The second president continues this in the frames of the already settled political culture in the country, adapting the Gökdepe myth to create his own ideological story. Therefore, the appropriation of the historical event in Turkmenistan represents a specific (albeit not unique) case of this kind and shows the way of thinking about the leader in current Turkmenistan.     

Government Policy and Economic Dualism in South Africa

This article offers a critical reflection on the field of Sudan Studies in light of the partition of Sudan into two states in 2011. It charts the emergence of Sudan Studies as a distinct research field, emphasising the temporal gap between the beginning of scholarly writing on Sudan and the moment when the labels “Sudan Studies” and “dirāsāt sūdāniyya” appeared. The current relevance of a “transnational” field of Sudan Studies is questioned, leading the author to suggest various criteria that may legitimise the existence of a distinct -if not unified- “Sudanist” field. Finally, the article envisions the future evolution of the historical scholarship on the two Sudans, both in the new political and ideological context that has been taking shape since 2011, and from a more specifically historiographical perspective.     

The colony of the colonized: the Duchy of Courland's Tobago colony and contemporary Latvian national identity

This paper examines the legacy of the Duchy of Courland's overseas colony of Tobago as it relates to present-day Latvian national identity using the ethno-symbolist approach of Anthony D. Smith and comparative cases. As Latvia is a small nation that has been an independent nation-state for only two short periods, national legitimacy and pride pose particular problems for Latvians. To this end, Latvian historians have worked to reinterpret the Baltic German-dominated Duchy of Courland as a positive period of Latvian national history and have sought to emphasize ethnic Latvian involvement in the Duchy's colonial endeavors, especially on the island of Tobago. Their efforts have then filtered into the general Latvian consciousness through books, film, plays, and place names. Since Latvia's independence from the USSR, the former colony of Tobago has gained renewed importance for Latvians who are experiencing a widely perceived notion of postcolonialism. This paper concludes that the appropriated colony of Tobago will continue to rise in importance as a component of Latvian national identity.     

Nazi race ideologues

ABSTRACT

Stone argues that we need to disaggregate Nazi race ideologues since they do not form one undifferentiated mass. Ultimately, all the Nazis were race ideologues and chief among them were Hitler, Himmler and the other leading figures. All of the leading Nazis, whether they dealt specifically with ‘racial policy’ or not, put forward a racialized ideology, but those who made a name for themselves specifically as race theorists did not therefore all share the same views, nor did they all contribute in equal measure to the regime's crimes. Nor did race science, however deeply it threw its lot in with Nazism, drive the regime as much as did a kind of racial mysticism, or ‘thinking with the blood’. Here Stone suggests how we might evaluate the relative contributions made to the development of the Third Reich and its crimes by race scientists of different stripes, on the one hand, and theorists of racial-political conspiracies on the other.