美国史学界关于内战记忆研究述评

书写内战史有助于美国人内战记忆的形成,记忆的调整又推动着内战叙事的演变。通过南部老兵与妇女的努力,“失去的事业”从一种地方记忆上升为民族记忆。从20世纪开始,这种南部记忆主导了美国史学界对内战史的书写。直到越战后期,学界才从社会文化与政治需要的角度剖析“失去的事业”记忆的兴起及其影响,其研究对象主要为群体记忆、英雄记忆,以战场旧址、军事公墓及其纪念碑为中心的有形记忆场。因服务于国家重聚与民族和解之需,存在多种面相的“联邦事业”记忆被美国人长时期遗忘。直到20世纪80年代末,为突出黑人对美国历史的贡献,学界开始重新评析这一强调联邦统一与解放黑人的内战记忆。总之,美国学界对内战记忆的探究总体遵循“失去的事业”与“联邦事业”这两种叙事路径,但其研究并未完全摆脱意识形态的干扰。从21世纪开始,内战记忆史的研究逐步走向了多元社会化的发展方向。     

The shadow of the civil war: A historiography of civil war memory

The memory of the Civil War has become one of the most vibrant and contested subjects in nineteenth-century American history over the past two decades. Studies of Civil War memory potentially can reveal much about the cultural, political, and intellectual world of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age. Whereas the Civil War has often been studied in historical isolation, histories of memory thrust off the standard constraints of periodization to emphatically link the Civil War with late nineteenthcentury history. David W Blight's award-winning synthesis Race and Reunion (2001) both indicates the topic's rapid maturation and heightens the need for a historiographical excursion to assess the collective strengths and weaknesses of this burgeoning subfield. The following essay explores the convergence of factors, both within and outside of the historical profession, which have encouraged the boom in memory studies. In addition, it traces the emerging historiography to examine both the creative diversity of the field as well as its common assumptions, insights, and strategic limits.     

The trauma of war rape: A comparative view on the Bosnian conflict and the Greek civil war

This paper explores the practice and the political context of war rapes in the former Yugoslavia (1992-1995) and in the Greek Civil War (1946-1949). It argues that conceptions about accountability and expected gender roles may lead social actors to commit atrocities that transgress the moral codes of their own society, while condemning their victims to silence. On the other hand, a change in the political context may undermine the impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators and ultimately lead war rape victims to break their silence and bear witness. This argument is illustrated by a detailed analysis of one particular interview, in which a woman raped during the Greek Civil War decided to break her silence fifty years after the event. The interview material offers the opportunity to explore the effects of trauma and the multiple ways in which war rape victims may try to cope with past trauma and give meaning to a shattered life.     

Making things public: Archaeologies of the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

The archaeology of recent traumatic events, such as genocides, mass political killings and armed conflict, is inevitably controversial. This is also the case for the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), where the incipient archaeology of the confrontation is marked by bitter debates: Should this conflicting past be remembered or forgotten? Which version of the past is going to be remembered? What are the best politics of memory for a healthy democracy? The archaeologies of the war face manifold problems: the lack of interest in academia, which fosters amateurism; the great divide between public and scientific practice; the narrow perspectives of some undertakings; the lack of coordination among practitioners, and the threats to the material remains of the war. An integrated archaeology of the conflict, which helps to make things public, is defended here.     

The Trials Of Theology

Abstract

Theology experiences many trials of practice and interpretation as it charts a course through contemporary society's political and cultural challenges. September 11 has generated more such trials, some of which are concerned with the historic issues surrounding the ‘War on America’ and its defence in terms of Christian rhetoric and belief. This article begins with a consideration of some of the background to this defence in the language and events of the American Civil War, particularly Stonewall Jackson's dying words and their juxtaposition with Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. It then considers the validity of such notions as freedom and justice in contemporary debate, and challenges an understanding of Christian political thought that views it as responsible for defending a particular form of western society. It ends with some trenchant conclusions about a theologian's responsibilities in the present and future world.     

A ‘Murderous Affair in Lincoln County’: Politics,Violence, and Memory in a Civil War Era Kentucky Community

The 1867 assassination of Unionist James H. Bridgewater typified politically motivated community violence in central Kentucky during the Civil War Era. His assassins, members of a band of ‘regulators,’ viewed Bridgewater as representative of ongoing federal interference in the Commonwealth and thus a hindrance to their local agenda. Regulators used terror tactics both to stymie political competition for the building blocks of state power, including the offices of sheriff and magistrate, and to impose a white supremacist social order after the formal abolition of slavery. Like‐minded partisan editors sought to legitimize both the actions of these night riders and of state and local elected officials by arguing that ‘outlaws’ such as Bridgewater had to die so that law and order might be restored, while assuring readers that such things did not happen to ‘good citizens.’ In so doing, these editors laid the foundation for a usable memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction in Kentucky.     

Coming to Terms with Violence: Sacrifice,collective memory and reconciliation in inter-war Finland

This article connects notions of collective memory to the notion of cultural memory. Special interest is given to the role of national myths and other cultural reservoirs in organizing Finnish collective memories during the period from the Civil War of 1918 until the beginning of the Second World War. First the author seeks to uncover the ways both sides of the conflict utilized cultural reservoirs in their memory cultures. Then the author looks into ways in which the Social Democrats especially tried in the late 1930s to transform divisive and even traumatic experiences resulting from the Civil War into socially productive narratives. The transformation of the memory of the internal and reciprocal violence into unifying self-sacrifices proved to be the most crucial act in Finnish memory culture during the first half of the 20th century. This interpretation dates the first acts of public reconciliation to the late 1930s, or the time before the Winter War.     

Civil War heritage as American diplomacy, 1957–1965

This paper explores the role of Civil War heritage in U.S. public diplomacy during the Cold War era. Especially during the celebration of the Civil War’s centennial, between 1961 and 1965, the Americans endeavoured to harness the conflict’s heritage to promote U.S. interests in Europe. How they intended to do this is demonstrated primarily through an examination of Colonel Sidney Morgan’s mission to Europe to find how the commemoration of the Civil War could be used for public diplomacy. Additionally, by exploring how Civil War heritage was spread and used in the British public sphere, the paper examines and underlines the key role saved to unofficial cultural agents, such as Civil War re-enactment clubs and private people, in heritage diplomacy. The focus on unofficial agents and networks enable this study to show how heritage diplomacy works at the un-institutionalised level and to explore the interaction between the official and unofficial level in heritage diplomacy. The historical perspective and methodology cast new light on the use of history, historical memory and heritage for diplomatic ends and introduces both historians and heritage scholars with new avenues to explore, such as the role of memory and historical consciousness in shaping international relations.     

Guerra civile: experience,memory and contrasting histories of the Resistance in Italy

This article examines the disagreement between two partisans turned historians, Nuto Revelli and Claudio Pavone, on the legitimacy of the term ‘civil war’ to describe the Italian Resistance of 1943–1945. ‘Civil war’ is a controversial term in Italian and European discussions of World War II. Accordingly, ‘civil war’ provokes a study of the intersection of ideology and ethics, experiential memory and history in postwar Europe. But why should Revelli and Pavone, two men who had been on the same side during the Resistance, see things so differently? This article demonstrates that each historian’s experience before and during World War II shaped their participation in the Resistance and their subsequent representation of it. Consequently, their divergent experiences offer an explanation as to why Pavone argues that the Resistance was a civil war and Revelli argues that it was not, without relativizing in political and ethical analysis.     

The Republican Discourse on Religious Liberty during the Exclusion Crisis

Summary

Much recent historiography assumes that republican calls for religious liberty in seventeenth-century England were limited to Protestant dissenters. Nevertheless there is evidence that some radical voices during the Civil War and Interregnum period were willing to extend this toleration even to ‘false religions’, including Catholicism, provided their members promised loyalty and allegiance to the government. Using the case study of the republican Henry Neville, this article will argue that toleration for Catholics was still an option during the Exclusion Crisis of the late seventeenth century despite new fears of a growth of ‘popery and arbitrary government’. Neville's tolerationist approach, it will be shown, was driven by his Civil War and Interregnum experience, as well as by political pragmatism and very personal circumstances which shaped his attitude towards Catholics in his own country and abroad.     

Archaeology of a Naval Battlefield: H. L. Hunley and USS Housatonic

The American Civil War shipwrecks H. L. Hunley and USS Housatonic have been the focus of intensive archaeological investigations since the discovery of Hunley in 1995. H. L. Hunley , the world's first successful combat submarine, sank the Union blockader USS Housatonic in 1864, but sank immediately afterwards. In work done prior to the recovery of Hunley in 2000, site-formation processes for both vessels were a primary research focus—a necessary precursor to identifying battlefield behaviour. This paper presents research on the Hunley / Housatonic Naval Engagement Site, where both wrecks are treated as complementary components of a single battlefield site.
© 2006 The Authors     

Constructing a national identity from a created literary past: Giosuè Carducci and the development of a national literature

Giosuè Carducci's conception of Italian literature differed from those of Francesco de Sanctis and Benedetto Croce. He argued that Italian literature, together with a concomitant cultural identity and political mission, developed along a continuous, progressive and evolutionary path. This study analyzes Carducci's creation of an Italian cultural and political identity through literary history and his construction of a plausible model for its historical development by incorporating literary,scientific and political theories. Carducci gave Italians a past of which they could be proud, proof of Italy's leading role in Europe's civilizing mission, and a strategy to accomplish it. Carducci's conception of italianitÀ, defined in terms of a historic mission of grandezza , was one of several brands of Italian nationalism. His linking of literary history to aspirations of national unity and aggrandizement implied that the mantle of the Risorgimento now belonged to the educated elite. This linkage of literature and national identity to aspirations of cultural and political hegemony explains why Carducci was so popular with the Nationalist Party whose leaders invoked his literary history to legitimize their political program and to discredit their political opponents prior to World War I and under Fascism.     

The legacy of Atatürk: Turkish political structures and policy-making

Turkey occupies a peculiar position in both international relations and economic policy-making. On the international front, the country is still in many senses a frontier state defining a major part of its policy outlook in terms of a political metaphor that has as much to do with the Cold War of the past as the east/west divide of the present. In the economic arena, Turkey is still one of the increasingly rare emerging markets which has never really broken free from the high growth/high inflation spiral. This article seeks to explain these apparent anomalies in terms of political structures within Turkey. The problems facing Turkish policy-makers and their inability to triumph over them is related to the weakness of political institutions within Turkey itself. Turkish political parties lack the legitimacy, policy coherence or firm base of public support easily to embrace programmes which might be perceived to threaten either the historic international position of the state or the well-being of the clients of the large state-controlled part of the economy. This weakness derives from the manner in which modern Turkey was created in the first half of the last century, a process that produced flaws in political structures which the following fifty years of democratic experience has not entirely erased.     

Spanish Civil War caves of Asturias in archaeology and memory

As the Spanish Civil War drew to a close, retreating Republican troops in the northern region of Asturias took refuge in caves in the mountains from the brutal victor’s justice of the Francoist forces. In this paper we examine three of these caves in the context of the Civil War experiences of the rural municipality of Santo Adriano, based on a combination of archaeological recording and oral history interviews. The paper focuses on the role of the La Ponte-Ecomuseum, a grassroots heritage organisation that has worked to preserve and communicate the tangible and intangible heritage of the district. The Civil War heritage presents cultural, political and practical challenges for the museum: nonetheless it has succeeded in establishing an ongoing programme for its communication and protection.     

Confronting a history of war loss in a Spanish family archive

The article discusses how relatives of left-wing Republicans killed and buried in mass graves by Francoist groups during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) recompose the stories of violent death of their ancestors in connection to documentary evidence that emerges during the search for their human remains. Mass grave searches have taken place in the midst of a process of historical investigation that has brought families, historians, activists and archaeologists together in order to document and seek official recognition for these extrajudicial executions. In so doing, they have also prompted the circulation of personal papers and official Francoist files that bear poignant information about the victims. Both sets of documents converge in the family archive, eliciting different re-readings and acts of memory. The article considers how familial interactions with these material sources attempt to grasp and recreate a history of loss marked by rupture and filled with absences. It also explores how such historical and familial uncertainties marks the experience of disappearance in the Spanish context.     

Heritage and ethnic identity: preserving Chinese cemeteries in the United States

This paper critically examines the role of ethnic community in the process of heritage management and preservation. Drawing on two heritage projects dedicated to historic Chinese American cemeteries – the nineteenth-century Chinese Memorial Shrine in Los Angeles, California and Concordia Chinese Cemetery located in El Paso, Texas – this study examines how heritage serves as a central referent in constructing a collective identity that gives continuity and political unity to an ethnic community. Heritage preservation, as a practice connecting the past and present, provides us with insight not only into the historic meanings attached to heritage, but also the contemporary values and ideologies of communities with regard to their efforts in interpreting the past. This paper highlights the relationship between identity politics and heritage, suggesting that heritage becomes a vital means of identity formation which helps articulate cultural traditions in the face of a dominant national culture that essentialises ethnic pasts.     

Manipulating the metonymic: the politics of civic identity and the Bristol Cenotaph, 1919–1932

The city of Bristol was one of the last major cities in Great Britain to unveil a civic memorial to commemorate the Great War 1914–1918. After Leicester (1925), Coventry (1927) and Liverpool (1930), Bristol's Cenotaph was unveiled in 1932, 14 years after the Armistice. During that lapse, its location, source of funding, and commemorative function were the focus of widespread disagreement and division in the city. This paper examines the nature of these disputes. The authors suggest that the tensions in locating a war memorial may have their origins in historic enmities between political and religious factions in the city. By examining in detail the source and manifestations of these disputes, the authors offer a detailed exemplar of how memory is shaped and controlled in British urban spaces.     

Narrative Trauma and Civil War History Painting,or Why Are These Pictures So Terrible?

The Civil War generated hundreds of history paintings. Yet, as this essay argues, painters failed to create any iconic, lasting images of the Civil War using the conventions of grand manner history painting, despite the expectations of many that they would and should. This essay first examines the terms by which I am evaluating this failure, then moves on to a consideration of the American history painting tradition. I next examine several history paintings of Civil War scenes in light of this tradition and argue that their "failure" to capture the meaning and essence of the war resulted from a breakdown of the narrative conventions of history painting. Finally, I glance briefly at Winslow Homer's Civil War scenes, arguably the only ones which have become canonical, and suggest that the success of these images comes from their abandonment of old conventions and the invention of new ones.     

Why Do We Ask “What If?” Reflections on the Function of Alternate History

The new prominence of alternate history in Western popular culture has increasingly prompted scholars to historicize it as a broader phenomenon. What has largely escaped notice until now, however, has been the question of the underlying function of alternate history as a genre of speculative narrative representation. In this essay, I argue that writers and scholars have long produced "allohistorical narratives" out of fundamentally presentist motives. Allohistorical tales have assumed different typological forms depending upon how their authors have viewed the present. Nightmare scenarios, for example, have depicted the alternate past as worse than the real historical record in order to vindicate the present, while fantasy scenarios have portrayed the alternate past as superior to the real historical record in order to express dissatisfaction with the present. The presentist character of alternate histories allows them to shed light upon the evolving place of various historical events in the collective memory of a given society. In this essay, I examine American alternate histories of three popular themes—the Nazis winning World War II, the South winning the Civil War, and the American Revolution failing to occur—in order to show how present–day concerns have influenced how these events have been remembered. In the process, I hope to demonstrate that alternate histories lend themselves quite well to being studied as documents of memory. By examining accounts of what never happened, we can better understand the memory of what did.