How the Past was Used

Peter Lambert is Lecturer in Modern European History at Aberystwyth University. He works on historical culture in Nazi Germany, and the professionalization of History in the twentieth century. Publications include Mass Dictatorship as Ever-Present Past (2013), Historikerdialoge (2004), and Making History (2003). He is currently completing a study on the reception of Widukind and Charlemagne in the Third Reich.Björn Weiler is Professor in History at Aberystwyth University. A historian of high medieval Europe, he has held visiting fellowships in Bergen, Cambridge (UK), Freiburg im Breisgau, and at Harvard. Publications include England and Europe in the Reign of Henry III (with Ifor Rowlands, 2002), King Henry III of England and the Staufen Empire (2006), Kingship, Rebellion and Political Culture (2007), and Representations of Power in Medieval Germany (with Simon MacLean, 2006). He is working on a book on the experience of the past in high medieval Europe.

• IntroductionI. What is Historical Culture?II. Themes in Historical Culture1: Dimitris Krallis: Imagining Rome in Medieval Constantinople: Memory, Politics, and the Past in the Middle Byzantine Period2: Haki Antonsson: The Present and the Past in the Sagas of Icelanders3: Björn Weiler: Monastic Historical Culture and the Utility of a Remote Past: The Case of Matthew Paris4: Dimitri Kastritsis: Legend and Historical Experience in Fifteenth-Century Ottoman Narratives of the Past5: Richard Kagan: The Chronicler and the Count: Law, Libel, and History in the Early Modern Atlantic World6: Allison Busch: The Poetry of History in Early Modern India7: Peter Lambert: The Immediacy of a Remote Past: The Saxon Wars of 772-804 in the 'Cultural Struggles' of the Third Reich8: Matthew Phillips: Ancient Past, Modern Ceremony: Thailand's Royal Barge Procession in Historical Context9: Joanne Rappaport: La Rosca de Investigación y Acción Social: Reimagining History as Collaborative Exchange in 1970s Colombia10: T.H. Barrett: Chinese History as a Constructed Continuity: The Work of Rao Zongyi11: Richard Rathbone: Memory as Theatre: Using a Ghanaian Ritual to Recall Past Greatness and to Redress Recent ReversesConclusion: Future Directions?

Even when focusing on non-European or pre-1700 history, the authors question what makes America great, how war and warriors should be remembered, and what place women, minority cultures, and the Other hold... Recommended