Written in a lively and accessible style, the book will provoke debate among students and scholars alike. Throughout, Terence Ball shows just how exciting and important political theory can be.
Thirteen essays by scholars from seven countries discuss the political use and abuse of history in the recent decades with particular focus on Central and Eastern Europe (Hungary, Poland, Estonia, Moldova, Ukraine, Russia as case studies), but also includes articles on Germany, Japan and Turkey, which provide a much needed comparative dimension. The main focus is on new conditions of political utilization of history in post-communist context, which is characterized by lack of censorship and political pluralism. The phenomenon of history politics became extremely visible in Central and Eastern Europe in the past decade, and remains central for political agenda in many countries of the regions. Each essay is a case study contributing to the knowledge about collective memory and political use of history, offering a new theoretical twist. The studies look at actors (from political parties to individual historians), institutions (museums, Institutes of National remembrance, special political commissions), methods, political rationale and motivations behind this phenomenon.
The ensuing debates and disagreements over the recent past, examined by the author, open up a window into the wider development of German memory, identity, and politics after the end of the Cold War."--BOOK JACKET.
Turning his distinctive analytical lens to the politics of American education, Joel Spring looks at contemporary educational policy issues from theoretical, practical, and historical perspectives. This comprehensive overview documents and explains who influences educational policy and how, bringing to life the realities of schooling in the 21st century and revealing the ongoing ideological struggles at play. Coverage includes the influence of global organizations on American school policies and the impact of emerging open source and other forms of electronic textbooks. Thought-provoking, lucid, original in its conceptual framework and rich with engaging examples from the real world, this text is timely and useful for understanding the big picture and the micro-level intricacies of the multiple forces at work in controlling U.S. public schools . It is the text of choice for any course that covers or addresses the politics of American education. Companion Website: The interactive Companion Website accompanying this text includes relevant data, public domain documents, YouTube links, and links to websites representing political organizations and interest groups involved in education.
A new way of looking at international relations from a leading expert in the field What makes for war or for a stable international system? Are there general principles that should govern foreign policy? In The Cold War and After, Marc Trachtenberg, a leading historian of international relations, explores how historical work can throw light on these questions. The essays in this book deal with specific problems—with such matters as nuclear strategy and U.S.-European relations. But Trachtenberg's main goal is to show how in practice a certain type of scholarly work can be done. He demonstrates how, in studying international politics, the conceptual and empirical sides of the analysis can be made to connect with each other, and how historical, theoretical, and even policy issues can be tied together in an intellectually respectable way. These essays address a wide variety of topics, from theoretical and policy issues, such as the question of preventive war and the problem of international order, to more historical subjects—for example, American policy on Eastern Europe in 1945 and Franco-American relations during the Nixon-Pompidou period. But in each case the aim is to show how a theoretical perspective can be brought to bear on the analysis of historical issues, and how historical analysis can shed light on basic conceptual problems.
Compact, timely, well-researched, and balanced, this institutional history of Social Security's seventy years shows how the past still influences ongoing reform debates, helping the reader both to understand and evaluate the current partisan arguments on both sides.
This collection of studies in the history of political thought from late antiquity to the early-eighteenth century ranges broadly across themes of kingship, political theology, constitutional ideas, natural-law thinking and consent theory. The studies are linked together by three shared characteristics. First, all of them explore the continuities that existed during those centuries between legal/political thinking and theology. Second, nearly all of them transgress the sharp dividing line traditionally drawn between the medieval" and the " modern" which did so much in the past to distort our understanding of intellectual developments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Third, all of them raise historiographic questions or probe the metahistorical/methodological questions which have troubled the field for the past quarter-century and more."
On the surface, historical scholarship might seem thoroughly incompatible with political engagement: the ideal historian, many imagine, is a disinterested observer focused exclusively on the past. In truth, however, political action and historical research have been deeply intertwined for as long as the historical profession has existed. In this insightful collection, practicing historians analyze, reflect on, and share their experiences of this complex relationship. From the influence of historical scholarship on world political leaders to the present-day participation of researchers in post-conflict societies and the Occupy movement, these studies afford distinctive, humane, and stimulating views on historical practice and practitioners
In 2012, Chicago's school year began with the city's first teachers' strike in a quarter century and ended with the largest mass closure of public schools in U.S. history. On one side, a union leader and veteran black woman educator drew upon organizing strategies from black and Latinx communities to demand increased school resources. On the other side, the mayor, backed by the Obama administration, argued that only corporate-style education reform could set the struggling school system aright. The stark differences in positions resonated nationally, challenging the long-standing alliance between teachers' unions and the Democratic Party. Elizabeth Todd-Breland recovers the hidden history underlying this battle. She tells the story of black education reformers' community-based strategies to improve education beginning during the 1960s, as support for desegregation transformed into community control, experimental schooling models that pre-dated charter schools, and black teachers' challenges to a newly assertive teachers' union. This book reveals how these strategies collided with the burgeoning neoliberal educational apparatus during the late twentieth century, laying bare ruptures and enduring tensions between the politics of black achievement, urban inequality, and U.S. democracy.