Writing The Nation Into History

This article considers the fruits of an elaborate multi‐year European Science Foundation (ESF)‐sponsored research project on the reciprocal dynamics joining nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century historiography to the varying trajectories of European state‐formation. It reads the culminating volume in the eight‐book series sponsored by this ESF project against the wider associated discussions and the larger context of the contemporary historiography of nationalism. It seeks to draw out the defining features of the approach involved (conceptually, methodologically, intellectually, politically), while pointing to a number of the entailments and lacunae. In particular, it considers some of the attenuations and omissions resulting from the adoption of an overly institutional and “top‐down” approach to the chosen thematic of “nation and narration.”Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145534/1/hith12077.pd

Terror and Toleration: The Habsburg Empire Confronts Islam, 1526–1850 – By Paula Sutter Fichtner

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113688/1/j.1540-6563.2011.00301_1.x.pd

Creativity and commerce: Michael Klinger and new film history

The crisis in film studies and history concerning their legitimacy and objectives has provoked a reinvigoration of scholarly energy in historical enquiry. 'New film history' attempts to address the concerns of historians and film scholars by working self-reflexively with an expanded range of sources and a wider conception of 'film' as a dynamic set of processes rather than a series of texts. The practice of new film history is here exemplified through a detailed case study of the independent British producer Michael Klinger (active 1961-87) with a specific focus on his unsuccessful attempt to produce a war film, Green Beach, based on a memoir of the Dieppe raid (August 1942). This case study demonstrates the importance of analysing the producer's role in understanding the complexities of film-making, the continual struggle to balance the competing demands of creativity and commerce. In addition, its subject matter - an undercover raid and a Jewish hero - disturbed the dominant myths concerning the Second World War, creating what turned out to be intractable ideological as well as financial problems. The paper concludes that the concerns of film historians need to engage with broader cultural and social histories. © 2010 Taylor & Francis

Introduction to special issue:New Times Revisited: Britain in the 1980s

The authors in this volume are collectively engaged with a historical puzzle: What happens if we examine the decade once we step out of the shadows cast by Thatcher? That is, does the decade of the 1980s as a significant and meaningful periodisation (equivalent to that of the 1960s) still work if Thatcher becomes but one part of the story rather than the story itself? The essays in this collection suggest that the 1980s only makes sense as a political period. They situate the 1980s within various longer term trajectories that show the events of the decade to be as much the consequence as the cause of bigger, long-term historical processes. This introduction contextualises the collection within the wider literature, before explaining the collective and individual contributions made