Index to Volume VIII 1961

In recent decades in Spanish literature, a series of stories have emerged that attempt, with varying degrees of zeal, revisionist reinterpretations of recent historical events, especially those related to the Civil War, the postwar crisis, and exile. This is demonstrated by novels like La voz dormida by Dulce Chacón (2002), La desbandá by Luis Melero (2005), Los años del miedo by Juan Eslava Galán (2008), and El corazón helado by Almudena Grandes (2007, awarded the Premio al Libro del año by the Guild of Booksellers in Madrid and the Premio Fundación José Manuel Lara). With her novel, Almudena Grandes initiates a dangerous and conflicted way of retrieving this historical memory. This essay aims to analyze the identity conflict of the children of the Spanish Republican exile in Grandes's novel.     

“We knew no North,no South”: U.S.–Mexican War Veterans and the Construction of Public Memory in the Post-Civil War United States, 1874–1897

In 1874, American veterans of the U.S.–Mexican War 1846–1848 formed the National Association of Veterans of the Mexican War (NAVMW). Until the organization’s demise in 1897, NAVMW members crafted and celebrated a vision of their war with Mexico as a national triumph which had united Americans from all sections of the Union in a common cause. This article examines how, by promoting this particular memory of the war to the American public, NAVMW members sought to remind their countrymen of their shared national history, and so aid the process of reconciliation between North and South in the post-Civil War era.     

Second world war as a trigger for transcultural changes among Sámi people in Finland

One of the characteristics of the cultural landscape of Svalbard is the abundance of remnants of Russian hunting stations, in the form of house ruins, graves, and large erected crosses. These are traces from Russian Pomors from the areas along the White Sea, who were hunting here over a long period of time - a period which the author will make an attempt to delimit in this article. It is known that the last Russian hunting expeditions to Svalbard were equipped from Archangel in 1851-1852. Far more controversial is the issue of the actual start of hunting by Pomors in Svalbard. This issue has been hotly debated among historians and archaeologists ever since the end of the nineteenth century.     

Exploitation,fascist violence and social cleansing: a study of Franco's concentration camps from a comparative perspective

One of the most noticeable topics within recent Spanish historiography is the analysis of processes of mass violence. Salient among these were the Franco concentration camps, a violent re-educational system made up of more than 180 camps, 104 of which were permanent. The camps operated from 1936 until 1947, under the control of Franco's army, with its corresponding regime of forced labour and exploitation of prisoners of war. Half a million Spaniards and Europeans experienced first hand the Spanish version of the fascist concentration-camp system. This article offers an analysis of the inside history of Franco's concentration camps and then locates them comparatively within a theoretical and empirical Fascist model of internment, exploitation and violence.     

Liquid Assets: Madeira Wine and Cultural Capital among Lowcountry Planters, 1735–1900

This article explores the history of the South Carolina and Georgia elites’ passion for madeira wine. It describes the nature of madeira and the characteristics that made the wine unique. By historical accidents, planters and merchants developed an ardent taste for madeira and over time this fondness became elevated to a tradition for collecting. Employing Bourdieu’s concepts of multiple forms of capital, the article demonstrates that madeira became an important form of cultural capital as an elite consumer good. However, reduced circumstances resulting from the economic disruptions of the Civil War brought an end to madeira culture by 1900.     

“The ideal home of the South”: The Robert E. Lee Camp Confederate soldiers' home and the institutionalization of Confederate veterans in Virginia

For more than half a century, the Robert E. Lee Camp Soldiers' Home in Richmond, Virginia, provided shelter, food, and medical care to some of the South's neediest Confederate veterans. Applications to the Lee Camp home offer valuable insight into the post-war experiences of a substantial number of Confederate veterans and highlight the enduring effects of the Civil War upon those who fought in it. For such men, the long-term physical and economic ramifications of the conflict largely exceeded the capabilities of existing avenues of social assistance and necessitated the augmentation of state-based welfare efforts. Moreover, applications to the Lee Camp soldiers' home indicate some of the cultural assumptions which informed the home's application process and demonstrate the duality of purpose that has often been regarded by historians as a key characteristic of Confederate veterans' welfare.     

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.     

地方传奇、集体记忆与国家认同——以黄埔军校旧址及其参观者为中心的研究

文章在探讨地方、地方传奇、集体记忆、国家认同等概念的基础上,梳理了西方学者从地理学视角对国家认同的相关研究。用参与式观察、文本分析等方法,以黄埔军校旧址及其游客为研究对象,探讨了地方、地方传奇与游客的集体记忆与国家认同的关系,研究表明,地方及地方传奇唤起了游客的集体记忆,增强了爱国情感。而这种爱国情感正是国家认同的一部分。研究尝试把地方传奇(placemyth)作为概念引入记忆地理研究领域,作为对该领域\"传奇\"(myth)这一概念的拓展,以期对人文地理学研究内容的丰富、文化地理研究的发展有所裨益。     

A Review of “Henri Lefebvre and the Spanish Urban Experience: Reading the Mobile City”

In this article, the author analyzes how Salvador Espriu in La pell de brau (re)builds the myth of Sepharad that refers to the Hebrew name of the assembly of the medieval Hispanic kingdoms. La pell de brau is a work that opens the "collective cycle" toward a "we" framed within a specific historical context. The poet criticizes the unified vision of the Spanish nation and of the Catholic religion. The (re)construction of the myth of Sepharad not only reflects the crisis of the subject in search of an identity in an intolerant Spain after the civil war but also subverts the myth of the Spanish nation as created by the doctrine of National Catholicism under Franco.     

Settling Accounts: Retribution,Emotion and Memory during the Fall of Mussolini

Abstract

The fall of Mussolini on 25 July 1943, and the concomitant collapse of the Fascist regime, have long been recognized as a pivotal moment in the Second World War and, indeed, contemporary Italian history. To date, however, these events have been viewed almost exclusively ‘from above’, in terms of elite politics, international diplomacy, and military strategy. Drawing on the analytical frameworks of Alltagsgeschichte (‘everyday history’), the present contribution examines the experiences, reactions and behaviors of ordinary Italians during the fall of Fascism. In particular, it explores incidents of retributive and symbolic violence, political denunciation, and popular demonstration, in order to understand how individuals and communities expressed emotions and memories, negotiated relationships, and sought to redress grievances and antipathies developed over more than twenty years of ‘totalitarian’ dictatorship.     

The Tannenberg myth in history and literature, 1914–1945

ABSTRACT

The Battle of Tannenberg in late August 1914 has been described as the ‘most powerful German myth’ of the First World War. This essay analyses the role of the battle in German collective memory up to the end of the Third Reich. During the war, the victory in East Prussia was celebrated widely and greatly contributed to the personality cult surrounding Paul von Hindenburg. After 1918, Tannenberg served right-wing circles as a political argument against the post-war order, evoked to underscore the notion of German victimhood against Slav ‘encirclement’, the ‘war guilt lie’ and the territorial provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. However, it never really captured the attention or imagination of writers and artists. Linked primarily to national-conservative groups and ideals, Tannenberg was also of no major significance in National Socialist propaganda.     

The Tenco effect. Suicide,San Remo,and the social construction of the canzone d'autore

Abstract

Canzone d'autore is an indigenous expression that has no precise equivalent in other languages. Its social use identifies a genre of popular song that presuppose the existence of an ‘autore’ taken in its most vigorous sense, meaning a ‘creator’, an ‘artist’– but how did this claim to artistry originate? How did it insinuate itself into the world of song, a genre that by definition belongs to the realm of what is traditionally called in Italian ‘musica leggera,’ with unmistakably pejorative connotations? In this essay, I will put forward a sociological interpretation of the genesis of the canzone d'autore, using as a strategic conceptual device the idea of cultural trauma. The traumatic event that I propose to explore, making use of this concept and its analytical machinery, is the suicide of the singer-songwriter Luigi Tenco during the seventeenth San Remo ‘Festival della Canzone’ (‘song festival’) – that is the best-known, most controversial, and most influential single event in the field of Italian ‘musica leggera’, an annual event regularly attended every year – via radio, television, or audience participation – by millions of Italians. Through a reconstruction of that suicide and above all of the public and dramatic events that followed in response to it, the paper examines the social process that transformed an individual tragedy into a collective, social drama, a process that not only produced a new musical classification, but also a new cultural and aesthetic category.     

论盘古神话的演变及其文化意义

盘古神话从原始产生到形成相对丰满完善的创世神话,是南北文化、汉民族与少数民族文化互相渗透融合的结果。它在后世的流传情况是丰富多样的,它主要在南方少数民族和汉民族民间流传,形式上各民族有各民族的特色,内容上或融合于各自的民族神话系统而赋予了新的文化内核。另外,道教的神仙传说也是盘古神话流传演变的一个途径。盘古神话体现出五个方面的文化意义。