Historiography

Presenting a new departure on Holocaust testimony, this book combines analytical reflections by scholars from different backgrounds on the post-war memories of one survivor, Helen “Zippi” Tichauer. Born in Bratislava in 1918, she came to Auschwitz in spring 1942 in the second transport of Jewish women from Slovakia, and was one of the few early arrivals who survived Auschwitz and its evacuation. Against the background of Zippi's early post-war and later memories, this book raises key questions on the meaning and usages of survivor testimony. What do we know and how much can we understand, sixty years after the end of the Nazi era, about the workings of a Nazi death camp and the life of its inmates? How willing are scholars, students and the public to listen to and learn from the fascinating, yet often unwieldy, confusing, and discomforting experiences of a Holocaust survivor? How can those experiences be communicated to teach and educate without undue simplification and glossing over of problematic aspects inherent in both, the life stories and their current rendering? Written by expert Holocaust scholars, this book presents a new, multi-faceted approach toward Zippi's unique story combined with the analysis of key aspects of Holocaust memory, its forms and functions.

This book tells the story of Jewish survivors who pioneered Holocaust research in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Just liberated from Nazi terror, amidst political turmoil and privation, physically exhausted and traumatized women and men founded historical commissions and documentation centers throughout Europe to chronicle the Nazi Final Solution. By comparing the cases of France, Poland, and the Displaced Persons camps in Allied-occupied Germany, Austria, and Italy, the book explores the motivations and methods which guided survivors in compiling archives of tens of thousands of Nazi documents, eyewitness accounts and questionnaires, ghetto and camp literature, wartime diaries, and artifacts, and in publishing dozens of historical works. Its comparative method illuminates the transnational dimension of Jewish Holocaust research and its place within the larger context of twentieth-century Jewish historiography. It argues that these documentation initiatives not only perpetuated certain Jewish cultural traditions of history writing and memory that predated the Holocaust but that collecting, recording, and researching the Jewish catastrophe had a vital function in survivors’ posttraumatic recovery. In their use of victim and perpetrator sources and social-science-oriented research methods and their focus on the history of the everyday life and death of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, the Jewish historical commissions and documentation centers anticipated methodological questions and debates over the use of victim testimony and the writing of history “from below” which entered academic Holocaust historiography only toward the end of the twentieth century. It also takes issue with the widespread misconception that all Holocaust testimony was belated, due to survivors’ decades-long silence, and that systematic Holocaust historiography began only with the 1960s.

This book provides an insight to the teaching and writing of history in postcolonial India. It traces the different events that shaped postcolonial Indian historiography like the textbook controversies from 1970s to the present day; the historical perspectives surrounding the Babri Masjid; flaring up of religious sentiments over ‘beef-eating’; and the debate over the existence of Ram Sethu. The book also explores how Indian historians attempted to decolonize history and ‘reclaim’ Indian history from its colonial past. It outlines how history is used as means to forge national identity and shape notions of citizenship in independent India. Discussing diverse areas — such as methodological research and the public use of history; nationalism and communalism; cultural identity and diversity; social movements; and the role of women, Adivasis, and Dalits in a multicultural society — this book explores how politics and history have shaped each other in independent India.

History and historians in India have gained prominence in the public sphere in recent years. The undisputed ascendancy of history in modern India may be briefly gauged by two developments. The first was Amartya Sen's keynote address at the annual meeting of the Indian History Congress in early January 2001. Sen warned against the manipulation of history in the service of sectarian political interests, and the diminishing of India's ‘magnificently multireligious and heterodox history’ at the hands of bigots. The second was the controversy over the overt politicization of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), a national body created to promote historical thinking and research. In its public aspect, the study of Indian history appears to revolve mainly around the polarity of Hindutva history and the history associated with left, secular historians. This book explores the politics of history-writing in modern India, narrativizing the engagement of a civilization with historical sensibility and modality. It examines how the discipline of history began to assume importance in colonial and independent India. It offers an account of the nationalist obsession with history in the nineteenth century, the relationship between nation-building and the making of Indian history, the effort to render Hinduism into a faith akin to the monotheistic religions, an interpretive history and critique of the subaltern school, and Indian history in cyberspace.

Providing an interdisciplinary and global perspective on immigration to the United States, this book represents an important step forward in the development of immigration studies. The book aims to help redirect thinking on the subject of immigration by giving a summary of the current state of immigration studies and a coherent new perspective that emphasizes the international dimensions of the immigrant experience from the time of the slave trade to present-day movements of Asian and Latin American peoples. This book challenges ethnocentric American or European perspectives on immigration, disputes the classical assimilation model of a linear progression of immigrant cultures toward a dominant American national character, questions human capital theory as an explanation of ethnic group achievement, reveals conflicting ethnic and racial attitudes toward immigration restriction, and examines the revival of interest in oral history, immigrant autobiographies, and other subjective documents.

This book presents a view of the history of the American West at the end of the 20th century. It is a systematic assessment of the current state of Western history. The book covers major new areas of emphasis. The debate over the history of the American West has become as energetic as the older debate over the meaning of the frontier in American history. Contrived confrontations are tedious, but legitimate intellectual inquiry can be exciting. Other voices need to be included in this intellectual conversation. For this reason, scholars of diverse backgrounds and interests have written shorter chapters that respond to one of the seven major chapters. Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Asia and Asian Americans, gender, the natural environment, human perception, and the role of the West itself in America's history are all vital subjects.

The worlds of historians and archivists used to converge around shared understandings of “authoritative” history. This book explores the dramatic changes that have split them apart. Written by an archivist and a historian for the general reader as well as specialists, it shows how shared notions of historical authority and the evidentiary power of archival documentation have given way to radically different approaches to processing the past. New historical thinking, new conceptions of archives, changing notions of historical authority, modifications in archival practices, and new information technologies have opened an “archival divide.” This book situates archives as subjects rather than places of study. It explores how active archivists have long shaped historical knowledge through processes of appraisal, description, and access that have become increasingly contingent and problematic. For historians and those interested in history, the book explains the challenges archivists face in managing both traditional and digital documentation. It examines how archives have traditionally acquired and processed materials deemed “archival” and the changes wrought by the explosive growth of documents of all sorts. For archivists and others, it explores the demands of contemporary historical enquiry, including those relating to social memory, identity politics, and changing conceptions of historical “truth,” and their implications for archival research. For all readers this volume raises the worrisome question of what future historical archives might be like if scholars and archivists no longer understand each other, and indeed, whether their now different notions of what is properly archival and historical will ever again be joined.

As India emerges as an important global player, a serious question arises: how to relate to the existing descriptions of India that are centuries old? This question presents itself as a task for the current and future generations of intelligentsia in the twenty-first century, whether Indian or Western. This task will consist of reconceptualizing India Studies because most studies on India have been carried out using theories and concepts drawn primarily from the western culture. It also consists of reacquiring the insight that neither knowledge nor truth is a matter of majority decision or based on the strength of common-sense prejudice. Questioning inherited beliefs requires an intellectual courage that is on par with the bold nature of the challenge. Responding to this challenge in any meaningful way requires that we identify the scientific weakness of the current theories about the Indian culture and society. In this book, a first step is taken towards this end. It not only looks at debates about the concept of culture in anthropology and into the merits of critiques of Orientalism but also scrutinizes Studies on Hinduism, the nature of Inter-cultural dialogues, and their implications to normative political philosophy. It also outlines the methodology for a comparative study of cultures. Cutting across disciplinary boundaries, this book brings home the basic truth that understanding cultures and societies straddles multiple intellectual domains. By initiating a process of comparative study of cultures, this work is bound to challenge many uncritical assumptions made by students and scholars of Indian society and culture.