Browsing by Subject "Historiography"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Howard Zinn and the Struggle for the Microphone: History, Objectivity, and Citizenship
    (2009) Kelly, Jason M.
    Every year, historians in the United States attend the American Historical Association (AHA), a conference that has met annually since 1884. The AHA draws scholars from all specializations, and it is the primary organization through which the profession is represented. In 1969, the conference met at the Sheraton Park Hotel in Washington, D.C. At the business meeting on the evening of 28 December, the radicals sought to take control of the organization. The minutes demonstrate the dangers of trusting narratives--even (or especially) those proffered as neutral accounts. They do not document the moment entirely, nor do they capture the participants' experiences of it. On the central event, the records are silent. What actually happened speaks to the issues of power, neutrality, and knowledge that were central themes in Howard Zinn's career. In those moments, Zinn, representing the Radical Historians' Caucus, sought to present a resolution to the members of the AHA. He grabbed a microphone and attempted to introduce it before the meeting's close. It denounced the twin evils of "the physical and cultural destruction of the Vietnamese people" and the "Black community at home". Before he had a chance to speak, John K. Fairbank intervened by wrestling the microphone out of Zinn's hands. The episode became known as the "Struggle for the Mike". In this article, the author talks about this episode and focuses on history of the profession, notions of objectivity, and citizenship.
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    Religion and International Relations Theory: The Case of “New” Historiography of Human Rights
    (MDPI, 2022) Williams, Andrew Lloyd; Lilly Family School of Philanthropy
    International relations theory (IRT) often ignores or has difficulty accounting for religion. Thus, the choice of “new” historians of human rights to focus on religious actors in the lead-up to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a noteworthy development. One important finding of this stream of scholarship is the crucial role played by Christian personalists in the cultivation of “human rights” discourse in the 1930s and 1940s. However, new school historiography carries assumptions consistent with IRT liberalism that weaken its analysis of religion in the origins of human rights. Most problematic is its dichotomous framework that pits liberal secularism against reactionary religion, which tends to minimize interpretive possibilities. By contrast, IRT constructivism is attuned to the emergence and socialization of norms as different cultures, religious traditions, and value systems interact. Various actors and social networks create, inter-subjectively, pragmatic consensus from positions of fundamental ideological difference. As such, this paper, following a constructivist impulse, uses the case of new school historiography of human rights to better understand the weakness and the promise of IRT in explaining the role of religion in international relations.
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    Scorched Earth or Fertile Ground? Indiana in the Civil War, 1861-1865
    (Indiana Historical Society, 2001) Towne, Stephen E., 1961-