The Stakes Of History

Download or read book The Stakes of History written by David N. Myers and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading scholar of Jewish history’s bracing and challenging case for the role of the historian today Why do we study history? What is the role of the historian in the contemporary world? These questions prompted David N. Myers’s illuminating and poignant call for the relevance of historical research and writing. His inquiry identifies a number of key themes around which modern Jewish historians have wrapped their labors: liberation, consolation, and witnessing. Through these portraits, Myers revisits the chasm between history and memory, revealing the middle space occupied by modern Jewish historians as they work between the poles of empathic storytelling and the critical sifting of sources. History, properly applied, can both destroy ideologically rooted myths that breed group hatred and create new memories that are sustaining of life. Alive in these investigations is Myers’s belief that the historian today can and should attend to questions of political and moral urgency. Historical knowledge is not a luxury to society but an essential requirement for informed civic engagement, as well as a vital tool in policy making, conflict resolution, and restorative justice.

Download or read book The Ends of History written by Amy Swiffen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ends of History? considers how, despite the fact that events in the past 20 years have called Francis Fukuyama’s infamous announcement of the end of history into question, the issue of the end of history is now a matter of renewed interest and debate. Two decades ago we were confronted by the end of the Soviet Union and collapse of the geo-political divisions that had defined much of the twentieth century. From this particular end, the ‘end of history’ was proclaimed. But is it still possible to argue that liberal democracy and free market capitalism are the final form of law and mode of production in human history? Recent events have called this thesis into question: from 9/11 and the War on Terror, to the current global economic collapse and looming ecological crises, it seems that history if far from over. And yet, oddly enough, the question of ‘the end’ has returned. For example, in the often predicted, but still uncertain, establishment of either a new international American Empire or a new era of International Law, and the global resurgence of religion as a dominant source of political identification. On the other hand, perhaps the ‘end’ is still yet to come, slowly accumulating, mustering at the periphery of the geo-political landscape and outside the productive sphere. Responses taking up these questions range from a return to Universalism, political theology, Messianism, and even the old specter of communism. This volume assesses these responses, exploring what is at stake in proclaiming ‘the end’ in the current historical moment. Is it a matter of reading the writing on the wall? Or is the proclamation itself a political act? Furthermore is there a desire for the ‘end’? In addressing these questions, the contributors to The Ends of History? confront the various ‘ends’ that we now live, and in so doing they open new lines of sight into the future.

Download or read book The Stakes written by Michael Anton and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AMERICA AT THE POINT OF NO RETURN The next election is the most important one America has faced in more than a century. That’s not campaign hype. America is divided as almost never before—with contesting political factions regarding themselves not as rivals but as enemies. And the frightening thing is that, in large part, they’re right. The Democratic Party has become the party of “identity politics”—and every one of those identities is defined against a unifying national heritage of patriotism, pride in America’s past, and hope for a shared future. Offering only antagonism based on group identity—whether race, sex, or something else—the Democrats look forward to imposing nationally what they have achieved in California: one-party rule in a lockdown nation, where the ruling class makes every decision and doles out benefits to favored groups. Against them is a divided Republican Party. Gravely misunderstanding the opposition, old-style Republicans still seek bipartisanship and accommodation, wrongly assuming that Democrats care about playing by the tiresome old rules laid down in the Constitution and other fundamental charters of American liberty. The new core of the Republican Party is the populists and nationalists, who are tired of losing. The party’s only hope of victory, they are all that stand between the United States as we have traditionally understood it and a revolution—less dramatic in appearance but just as consequential as the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Michael Anton, the author of the most scathing, memorable, and quoted essay of the 2016 campaign season, “The Flight 93 Election”—which Rush Limbaugh called “one of the greatest columns ever written”—now explains in depth why the stakes have risen even higher. Ranging across every hot-button political topic of our time—from immigration to nationalism to war—and informed by a profound understanding of classical and American political philosophy, The Stakes will transform the way you view politics and America’s future.

Download or read book Zakhor written by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and published by UBS Publishers' Distributors. This book was released on 1996 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the nature of Jewish historical memory which traditionally concentrated on the religious meaning of history rather than on the events themselves. Medieval Jewish historians focused either on the ancient past or on recent persecutions, tending to identify them with biblical patterns of oppression. For example, the Hebrew chronicles of the Crusader massacres show awareness of a deterioration in Christian-Jewish relations, using the "binding of Isaac" as a pattern for Jewish martyrdom. Although the chronicles were forgotten, the memory of the persecutions was preserved in halakhic and liturgical works. The expulsion from Spain in 1492 stimulated a minor resurgence in Jewish historiography. However, the kabbalistic myth proved more influential than history. Modern Jewish historiography is based on the secular concept of historical science and, especially since the Holocaust, cannot take the place of group memory.--Publisher description.

Download or read book Gardena Poker Clubs: A High-stakes History written by Max Votolato and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2017 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Poker capital of the world"--Page [4] of cover.

Download or read book Museum of the Missing written by Simon Houpt and published by Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.. This book was released on 2006 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description

Download or read book Stakes Is High written by Mychal Denzel Smith and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brave, clear-eyed, and passionate, Stakes Is High is the book we need to guide us past crisis mode and through an uncertain future. The events of the past decade have forced us to reckon with who we are and who we want to be. We have been invested in a set of beliefs about our American identity: our exceptionalism, the inevitable rightness of our path, the promise that hard work and determination will carry us to freedom. But in Stakes Is High, Mychal Denzel Smith confronts the shortcomings of these stories -- and with the American Dream itself -- and calls on us to live up to the principles we profess but fail to realize. In a series of incisive essays, Smith exposes the stark contradictions at the heart of American life, holding all of us, individually and as a nation, to account. We've gotten used to looking away, but the fissures and casual violence of institutional oppression are ever-present. There is a future that is not as grim as our past. In this profound work, Smith helps us envision it with care, honesty, and imagination.