I have always felt like an outsider and so have been preoccupied by questions of identity and belonging. In my youth, I became fascinated by the great Irish writers W. B. Yeats and James Joyce and their struggles with such questions after my family moved from Ulster to Scotland. As a young academic in Brisbane, I encountered fierce debates about Australian national identity as it shifted from a British heritage to a multicultural society. In the flux of the modern world, our identities are always under challenge and often require painful renovation.
This is the major book of my teacher, Anthony D. Smith, which seeks to explain why nationalism has become the dominant ideology of much of humanity.
In it, he argues that nationalism seeks to answer profound questions of identity arising from the crises generated by the global secular, political, and economic revolutions of modernity. Although nationalism is a predominantly modern phenomenon, its power rests on its ability to evoke and renovate the myths, symbols, and memories of older ethnic communities to legitimise political demands for autonomy.
Smith takes the symbolic world of nationalists seriously, particularly their preoccupation with national golden ages that are evoked to inspire a drive for a glorious future.
This book is an excellent, comprehensive account of the ways in which nations and nationhood have evolved over time. Successful in hardback, it is now available in paperback for a student audience.
I became fascinated by the history of the period from 900 to 1250 as an undergraduate at the University of Exeter where I was supervised for a doctorate by Professor Frank Barlow. The subject of my thesis was Odo, bishop of Bayeux (1049/50-1097), a biography that introduced me to a multitude of subjects. That time stimulated a fascination with France and with the place of English history, British history, and the history of the Normans in a European context, as well as an interest in biography and individual lives.
This is a remarkable collection of essays by a scholar who, along with the likes of Rees Davies, Robert Bartlett, Ian Short, and Hugh Thomas, has brought about a revolution in the way we think about the English people and their identities during what we should call the long twelfth century. The consequences for the way in which we think about British history and the place of the British Isles within continental Europe have been profound. The debates continue!
Six of the greatest twelfth-century historians - William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Geoffrey Gaimar, Roger of Howden, and Gerald of Wales - are analysed in this collection of essays, focusing on their attitudes to three inter-related aspects of English history. The first theme is the rise of the new and condescending perception which regarded the Irish, Scots and Welsh as barbarians; set against the background of socio-economic and cultural change in England, it is argued that this imperialist perception created a fundamental divide in the history of the British Isles, one to which Geoffrey of Monmouth…
Since I was old enough to get around under my own power, I wanted to be a pilot, a result of idol-worshiping my mother’s brother, Orvis M. Nelson, president of Transocean Airlines. His influence led to my being named a Distinguished Military Graduate in Air Force ROTC, navigator school (sadly, my eyes were slightly myopic), bombardier school (145 Vietnam War combat missions); then later a civilian private & commercial pilot with instrument and multi-engine ratings, and Certificated Flight Instructor (CFI). After settling for a business career rather than airline pilot, I now vicariously pursue my first love through writing.
As a bomber guy to the core, I approached this book with a silent groan—ugh, another Tom Cruise tale. Was I ever wrong! ‘Forty-Second Boyd’ (maximum time it took him to defeat all challengers) was not only a great fighter pilot, his combat tactic discoveries changed the way every air force in the world flies and fights today. Many consider him the father of the legendary F-15 and F-16 fighters.
Coram’s knowledge and writing style are superb. Boyd was a complicated man; absolutely brilliant with insight and slide rule, a poor father and worse husband—loud, abrasive, and profane. He rarely met a general he couldn’t offend. Despite these drawbacks, Coram skillfully shows how Boyd somehow overcame all professional obstacles, though in the end at great personal cost.
A detailed portrait of American fighter pilot John Boyd examines his distinguished military career during the Korean War and his postwar efforts as a military theorist who took on the entrenched Pentagon bureaucracy to transform the art of modern warfare and the American military with his revolution
I have always felt like an outsider and so have been preoccupied by questions of identity and belonging. In my youth, I became fascinated by the great Irish writers W. B. Yeats and James Joyce and their struggles with such questions after my family moved from Ulster to Scotland. As a young academic in Brisbane, I encountered fierce debates about Australian national identity as it shifted from a British heritage to a multicultural society. In the flux of the modern world, our identities are always under challenge and often require painful renovation.
Gellner is, for me, one of the most original social thinkers of our time and shocks you out of your assumptions.
In this book, among much else, he offers the most incisive version of his theory of nationalism. Turning Kedourie on his head just as Marx did to Hegel, he argues that nationalist ideas are so much froth and are a product of larger structural forces. They arise in the transition from agro-literate to industrial societies.
Nationalism’s real significance is not a return to a folk past, but its creation of high cultures in the language of the people propagated in national educational systems that provide the basis of scientific modernity. So far from being a cause of war, nationalism makes a liberal international order possible.
Brilliantly written, this is an iconoclastic counter to both Smith and Kedourie.
I am a historian and a social geographer whose main interest is in examining why some of us are embraced (legally, politically, economically, culturally) by the society we live in while some others are excluded. Probably due to my status as someone who is an immigrant to Canada and also a person with a disability, the topic of belonging and exclusion fascinates me.
This is an exceptionally well-written and meaningful study that has greatly helped me understand how the national subject is conceptualized in Canada. As an immigrant to this country who became a citizen through a challenging and demoralizing process, this book has enabled me to see how some of us are framed as belonging while others are excluded from the Canadian nation. I have also learned how (above and beyond the national mythology surrounding it) multiculturalism has been deployed to boost Canada’s profile as a liberalizing nation while, at the same time, operating as a tool to control ethnic and religious minorities.
Questions of national identity, indigenous rights, citizenship, and migration have acquired unprecedented relevance in this age of globalization. In Exalted Subjects, noted feminist scholar Sunera Thobani examines the meanings and complexities of these questions in a Canadian context. Based in the theoretical traditions of political economy and cultural / post-colonial studies, this book examines how the national subject has been conceptualized in Canada at particular historical junctures, and how state policies and popular practices have exalted certain subjects over others. Foregrounding the concept of 'race' as a critical relation of power, Thobani examines how processes of racialization contribute to sustaining…
I accidentally fell in love with Latin America, a love that has lasted my lifetime. When I was young, I lived in a Dominican neighborhood in New York, learning Spanish from my neighbors. After I graduated from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism I got a job covering the Cuban community in New Jersey because I spoke Spanish. Eventually I ended up living in Colombia and then Managua as a foreign correspondent. Now I edit a magazine at Harvard about Latin America. It's not just the news that interests me; I love the cadence of the language, the smell and taste of its varied cuisine, the warmth of the people, the culture, and, yes, soccer.
Greg Grandin is a historian's historian, a brilliant researcher, a captivating writer. It's honestly hard to pick which of his books to feature here. But since The End of the Myth won the Pultizer Prize, I'll choose it as my favorite. What I loved about this book is that it gives me a new perspective about the history of my own country—about which, frankly, I do not know that much—and the region I have reported on for most of my life, Latin America. He makes connections and does so in a compelling fashion.
The book focuses on the United States and the border, but it sheds much light on how the myth of manifest destiny has shaped the way we think of ourselves and our relationship with our southern neighbors.
A new and eye-opening interpretation of the meaning of the frontier, from early westward expansion to Trump’s border wall.
Ever since this nation’s inception, the idea of an open and ever-expanding frontier has been central to American identity. Symbolizing a future of endless promise, it was the foundation of the United States’ belief in itself as an exceptional nation – democratic, individualistic, forward-looking. Today, though, America hasa new symbol: the border wall.
In The End of the Myth, acclaimed historian Greg Grandin explores the meaning of the frontier throughout the full sweep of U.S. history…
Appealing to my inner foodie, this is a brilliant deconstruction of a number of different countries’ supposed national dishes and the truth behind their real nature. I especially enjoyed the debunking of pizza!
As someone who has travelled and eaten widely, I loved the descriptions of both national character and food origins covered in the bookand found the authorial style both wry and highly readable.
Travelling from Paris to Tokyo, from Seville, Oaxaca and Naples to Istanbul, she investigates the rapid decline of France's pot-au-feu, the misconstrued beginnings of pizza, the meeting of indigenous and European lineages in mole, and the complex legacy of multi-culturalism in a meze potluck.
"Never have we been more cosmopolitan about what we eat - and yet more essentialist, locavore, and particularist." With a witty mix of anecdote and research, Anya von Bremzen reassess the fascinating role that food can play in our cultural heritage, and uncovers how as a nation's political and social identity are called into question, so…
As an undergraduate at the University of Leeds in the 1960s the principal influence on my life and thinking was Trevor Ling an Anglican Priest and Buddhist who eventually became a Professor of comparative religion at the University of Manchester. He was the start of my research on Islam and Asia and my peripatetic career having lived in Scotland, Germany, Holland, America, Australia and Singapore. I became a professor of the sociology of religion in the Asia Research Center at the National University of Singapore. I have published two books on Singapore, a handbook of religions in Asia, and several works on the body, medicine, ageing and human vulnerability.
For me book covers are part of the joy of owning books. My choices are all partly connected to the message conveyed by their covers. On this cover there are the objects associated with the ritual of tea drinking. In my view, we (in the West) have lost too many everyday rituals that make life meaningful. Surak shows the historical connections between the rituals that surround Japanese tea making and the making of society itself.
The tea ceremony persists as one of the most evocative symbols of Japan. Originally a pastime of elite warriors in premodern society, it was later recast as an emblem of the modern Japanese state, only to be transformed again into its current incarnation, largely the hobby of middle-class housewives. How does the cultural practice of a few come to represent a nation as a whole?
Although few non-Japanese scholars have peered behind the walls of a tea room, sociologist Kristin Surak came to know the inner workings of the tea world over the course of ten years of tea training.…
I graduated from Oxford University in 1975 at a time of social and economic crisis for Great Britain. My country has since unraveled from being a world imperial power to a petty nationalist rump on the western fringes of Europe. In addition to England I’ve taught at universities in North East Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, areas of the world where the British Empire once held sway. And I’ve also participated in conferences on various Middle Eastern topics in venues in the United States, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Morocco to name but a few. Hence my fascination with the Middle East and how the Western empires have impacted upon it.
The pressures modernity and European governments (Great Britain especially), brought upon peoples of the Middle East in the late imperial age are here re-presented. In this revisionary study Lorenzo Kamel, Associate Professor of History at the University of Turin, "demonstrates how the heterogeneous identities of Middle Eastern peoples were sealed into a standardized and uniform version that persists today." Extensively researched and full of new material, Kamel’s book shows how the region transitioned from empire into nation-states, and how the modern ethnically-conceived countries of Israel and modern Turkey, and embattled ones like Lebanon and Iraq, came into being.
This compelling analysis of the modern Middle East - based on research in 19 archives and numerous languages - shows the transition from an internal history characterised by local realities that were plural and multidimensional, and where identities were flexible and hybrid, to a simplified history largely imagined and imposed by external actors. This version of history is distinguished by the politicisation of these identities with the aim of better grasping and, ultimately, controlling them. The author shows - mainly through a study of key moments, including the germs of competing ethno-religious visions in the 1830s, the Ottoman Tanzimat, the…
I have been fascinated by the relationship between Christianity and the United States for decades. Much of my work in the area of Christian nationalism is the result of my personal religious history and experiences, as well as my work as a social scientist. I’ve always been fascinated by how religion influences and is influenced by its social context. Christian nationalism in the US is a clear example of how influential religious ideologies can be in our social world.
While history is important for showing us how we got to where we are, social science is indispensable in helping us understand what exactly is going on around us today.
This book is a must-read for those who want to know how Christian nationalism threatens democracy. The authors conclusively demonstrate the various anti-democratic beliefs and values held by Americans who strongly embrace Christian nationalism.
January 6th wasn’t an aberration, and this book helps us understand the threat we still face.
A bracing examination of a force that imperils American democracy
Most Americans were shocked by the violence they witnessed at the nation's Capital on January 6th, 2021. And many were bewildered by the images displayed by the insurrectionists: a wooden cross and wooden gallows; "Jesus saves" and "Don't Tread on Me;" Christian flags and Confederate Flags; even a prayer in Jesus' name after storming the Senate chamber. Where some saw a confusing jumble, Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry saw a familiar ideology: white Christian nationalism.
In this short primer, Gorski and Perry explain what white Christian nationalism is…
