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Gondolatok, megjegyzések
The author writes a monograph (Palóc Land) about a strange people, the Palóc, living in the northern part of Hungary and in southern Slovakia. Material poverty and spiritual riches are the main characteristics of the Palóc. They speak a special and interesting dialect. This study is a part of the mentioned monograph. In this study the author presents the meaning of the Palóc and he presents the regions where they live. And he presents also different opinions of these questions.
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This article deals with a period of Serbian rule over the Northern Albanian districts (from November 1912 to April 1913). As Kingdom of Serbia was the only European country, beside Switzerland, with no territorial access to the open sea, one of its main war aims was the annexation of an outlet to the Southern Adriatic. Thus after the First Balkan War victory, Serbian army occupied some territories in Northern Albania which were not populated by ethnic Serbs, but were of utmost importance for the commercial and strategic reasons. In this article the colonial and imperial aspects of short-lived Serbian rule are examined and compared with the experience of colonial powers.
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This article deals with the widespread assumption that a significant collection of texts known as the Bible is inherently ‘deceptive’. That is, the Bible does not – it is assumed – say what was ‘really’ going on in the ancient world. The truth, therefore, must be found by going behind or beneath the text (the spatial metaphors should be noted). Here the real story may found, through archaeology or reading the text against itself. This approach may be described as a modernist ‘depth model’, in which the surface attempts to conceal the truth, while the truth itself must be found by going around the surface text. This remains a dominant approach in biblical criticism. However, it cannot be understood without earlier and indeed, in some quarters, current assumptions concerning the realist nature of the text. In this case, the text reflects in a reasonably trustworthy fashion the context of the text, if not the ideological assumptions and positions of the putative authors. Modernist ‘depth models’ may then be seen as attempts to respond to realist assumptions. A third moment is what could be called postmodern: in this case, the distance between surface and depth is challenged, so that the various possibilities become equal contestants for the dominant position. This entails a shift away from the assumption of a singular truth of the text, characteristic of both realist and modernist assumptions, to the understanding of multiple truth claims – not as relative but as absolutes that permit other absolutes. The argument emphasises that these approaches should be seen as dialectically related to one another, rather that mutually exclusive approaches.
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(South-Eastern European Monetary and Economic Statistics from the Nineteenth Century to World War II. Athens, Sofia, Bucharest and Vienna: Bank of Greece, Bulgarian National Bank, National Bank of Romania and Oesterreichische Nationalbank, 2014, 405
A very precious and useful handbook for economic and monetary historians of the Balkans.
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The principal research question pursued by this work is as follows: How do the Republic of Moldova, Romania, and Ukraine present one another in their history curricula and textbooks? How do the history textbooks of each of these three countries present the relationship between majorities and minorities?This book is thus focused on two main objectives: first, to generate improved understanding of the state of the discipline of history in these countries via discussion of reforms to and debates around history curricula in each country, and second, to shed light on the ways in which history textbooks in each of the three countries represent the other two and their peoples.Curriculum development and textbook production in all three countries still remain centralised. Textbooks are produced by state and private publishing houses. Most textbooks are curriculum-based and developed according to the guidelines issued by the Ministries of Education. Through their textbook publishing policy, these ministries control the content and quality of textbooks. History curricula and textbooks in all three countries have progressed, but we still encounter many problems. Among them are the following:• the content of curricula and history textbooks continues to place too much emphasis on national aspects to the detriment of the world, regional, and local dimensions of history;• it reflects the history of wars and violence instead of giving more space to periods of peaceful coexistence, cooperation and cultural communication, or of mutual enrichment between various social groups as well as between nations;• it neglects regional history and cultural and historical links with neighbouring countries;• as it stands, it causes problems in history education and the development of ethnic identity, as well as the relationship between “Us” and “Others”;• it leads to or accepts poor textbook design.The relationship between national and European history remains a closely debated topic in all three societies. Their shared reality, as evidenced by this study, is that all three countries are currently not presenting one another in any meaningful way in their history textbooks at all educational levels. In all three countries, history education and textbooks are dominated by political history and narratives of victimisation. National histories do not pay attention to their neighbours.History textbooks play an important part in the process of collective identity formation, building a relationship with the past and creating an image of the “other”. The content of textbooks determines, in many cases, students' attitudes to their neighbours. Therefore, in order to improve the situation in history education and to develop a tolerant approach to “others” in history textbooks, there is a great need for joint efforts by politicians, professionals and members of civil society in Moldova, Romania and Ukraine.
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The paper proposes a comparative analysis of the forms of address and greeting as part of the verbal politeness models identified both in Spanish and Romanian, in order to determine some similarities and differences between the two cultural models. This analysis reveals the existence of a tripartite system of hierarchical politeness in the Romanian language, whilst in Spanish there is a bipartite system, oriented towards the horizontal axis of interpersonal relationships.
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The problematic term the Vinča script denotes a number of incised ornaments and signs on the surface of the pottery of the Vinča culture – one of the most important “cultures” of the South Eastern European Neolithic. The modes of use and abuse of this phenomenon and the very term the Vinča script have changed through time, eloquently testifying about the paradigm shifts in the European archaeology, at the same time indicating dangerous contaminations of archaeology by pseudo-archaeological ideas. During the 19th and first half of the 20th century, the idea of a script in the Neolithic cultures of South Eastern Europe surfaced occasionally as an argument for the short „historical“ chronology and Near Eastern influences. During the 1980s the idea of the Vinča script emerges again in Serbia, this time from the pseudo-scholar circles, and is massively supported by the media. The Vinča script becomes the central motif of a much larger pseudo-scholar movement. Unfortunately, over the last years the term the Vinča script – falsely represented by the media as a new and equally valid interpretive paradigm – seeps into the general public discourse, and even into archaeology itself.
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In this article, the author traces how the lessons of the Munich Agreement of September 1938 (on the basis of which Czechoslovakia was forced to cede the predominantly ethnic-German Sudetenland to Nazi Germany) were projected into US foreign policy. In Part One of the essay, based on published sources and unpublished documents from American archives, the topic is covered from the late 1930s to the outbreak of the Korean War (which is discussed in Part Two, to be published in the next issue of Soudobé dějiny). The author looks at immediate American reaction to the North Korean attack on South Korea in June 1950, and then returns to autumn 1938 to test his hypothesis that behind the unusual unity of this reaction was the ingrained negative attitude of the United States to the policy of appeasement. He demonstrates that since the late 1930s the terms ‘Munich’ and ‘appeasement’ have remained forever linked in US policy and US public discourse, and he discusses the transformations of the perception of the two concepts during the Second World War, after the war, and at the beginning of the Cold War. The lessons of Munich, he argues, have drawn on the idealistic as well as the pragmatic sources of US policy, because they stem from the conviction that appeasement is immoral and does not pay. Whereas in Roosevelt’s policy the general lesson was not to allow Hitler’s expansion, Harry S. Truman, Roosevelt’s successor in the White House, had to use the lessons, despite his own self-restraint, to try to counter the steps of a wartime ally, Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Communist take-over in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 and the blockade of the western sectors of Berlin beginning in the summer of that year were important events on this path. The author further considers the infl uence of this factor on the US approach taken in the Korean War in the early 1950s. He seeks to demonstrate that the decision of the Truman Administration to substantially intervene in this confl ict was a direct consequence of the negative attitude to the policy of appeasing an aggressor. This attitude was also shared by the American public, regardless of party affi liation and political sympathies. Arguments based on the rejection of appeasement, however, soon began to be used by the Republicans as ammunition in the election campaign against the incumbent Democrats and the choice of strategy also became a matter of dispute in the choice of strategy on the Korean battlefi eld after China entered the war. Whereas the White House wished to avoid an unlimited confl ict with China, the Commander-in-Chief of the United Nation Command in Korea, General Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964), was in favour of an uncompromising approach and in fact ceased to obey President Harry S. Truman (1884–1972). After being relieved of his command by Truman, MacArthur became the chief critic of his policies and a hero of Truman’s Republican opponents. In spring 1951, the Republicans organized a special Senate committee hearing on the circumstances of MacArthur’s suspension. The author looks in detail at this exceptional clash in post-war US domestic politics, which was meant to be triumphantly used against MacArthur, but gradually changed into a debacle in consequence of, among other things, the compelling testimonies of Secretary of State Dean Acheson (1893–1971) and Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall (1880–1959). In his conclusion, the author seeks to demonstrate how other US presidents returned to the ‘lessons of Munich’, and he argues that these lessons became Truman’s lasting political legacy and as such became fi rmly rooted in American political discourse.
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Purpose of Article. The purposes of the article are to define features of cultural perception of the USA and analyse general tendencies in the development of American studies in modern Belarus. Methodology. The research methodology is based on using descriptive method and the method of system analysis, which allow us to describe and analyse necessary training programs, the contest of materials, publications in mass media, and interviews, conducted by the author. Structural and functional, historical, anthropological, and axiological scientific methods provide a comparison of the American and Belarusian cultural spaces in their integrity. Deduction and induction, abstraction, generalization were also used. Scientific novelty. This article is devoted to the cultural perception of the USA and American Studies development in the contemporary Belarus. Conclusions. In Belarus, the most part of people knows about the USA too little. Negative and positive cultural perceptions of the USA exist among Belarusian citizens in parallel. After intensive development in 1990-s, American Studies in Belarus have been falling since 2000-s. Nowadays, American Studies are only a part of several predominantly culturalogical, historical and literature university courses. There are no any special courses or training programs on American Studies, neither any statistic nor analyses on the issues. To develop constructive Belarusian-American cultural dialogue it is hence necessary to provide more objective information about the U.S.. New American Studies courses and training modules for universities (including regional) can become the serious step in that direction.
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Az utóbbi néhány évtized történetelméletét, mint bármely más akadémiai tevékenysé- get, ambíciók fûtik. Ezek az ambíciók olykor elismerésre méltók, máskor inkább zavarbaejtõk, és értetlenséget szülnek, alkalmasint pedig egyszerre elismerésre méltók és zavarbaejtõk. A történetelmélet a legjobb pillanataiban korábban elképzelhetetlennek tûnõ meglátásokkal és gondolatébresztõ elméleti fejtegetésekkel szolgálhat a történetírói vállalkozás természetérõl, mindeközben azonban hajlamos egyfajta intellektuális dominancia megtestesüléseként tekinteni magára, és alkalmasint megpróbál befolyást gyakorolni a fejtegetései tárgyára, mondván, hogy a gondolatébresztõ elméleti fejtegetései képesek a történetírás gyakorlatának radikális átformálásá- ra – vagy hogy egyenesen éppen arra hivatottak.
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The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople was a critical event in the history of the Balkans, that left its profound imprint on the notions of Bulgarians of their past and of their self-image. Behind the seemingly unambiguous evaluation of this event – a defeat of Christendom that has to do with the fall of the Bulgarian Kingdom – an observer could trace one more complicated, ambivalent picture. The paper marks some of its premises:A) The city was unsuccessfully attacked by Bulgarians several times in the past and they still think themselves through the prism of these wars. B) Byzantines (Greeks) and Ottomans (Turks) are the traditional enemies in the Bulgarian national mythology. Their conflict and their interrelations as a whole generate different reactions, multiple plots.C) In the nineteenth century when the foundations of Bulgarian nationalism were set up, Constantinople (Istanbul) was probably the city with the largest Bulgarian population and the stage for many of the important events in the Bulgarian society.This paper offers а brief review of the main types of Bulgarian texts from the 19th and early 20th centuries dealing with the fall of Constantinople, comparing them with some Byzantine sources, with some Greek and other interpretations of this event and focuses on one not so popular dramatic work, written in verses by Svetoslav Milarov in the early 1870s. Here the ambivalent attitude of a part of Bulgarian society to the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople was more visible.
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Ivaylo Znepolski. "How Things Change. From Incidents to the Big Event. Stories with Philosophers and Historians", Part 1 and 2, Institute for Studies of the Recent Past & Ciela, Sofia 2016, 551 + 398 pages.
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The investigation in question is recorded in a series of thirty-eight register entries on a case of financial malfeasance in recently-conquered Ottoman Egypt that was investigated by officials from Ottoman Syria. This case appears in the oldest existing mühimme defteri, a register of important affairs of the Ottoman Empire, and provides detailed information about how the Ottomans governed their provinces. It lists many of the taxes and revenues collected by the Ottomans and discusses the most important treasury personnel in the province and the documents they created. It also describes how the Ottoman state worked to control those personnel even at a distance and to induce these officials to adhere to concepts of just imperial rule. The article describes the issues in the case and identifies the provincial officials involved in the investigation, the documents they were supposed to collect or create, and the procedures they were commanded to follow. The conclusion examines the implications of the case for our understanding of the place of Syria and Egypt within the wider Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. This episode presents an instance of the Ottoman integration of newly conquered lands in a period when records are fairly plentiful (in contrast to the conquest of Rumeli, where most of our evidence comes from chronicles written at a later date). Beyond that, this case illuminates the whole issue of how an empire operates and challenges the stereotype of general Ottoman oppression of the conquered territories.
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The sub-Carpathian area of Moldavia (Romania) represents the ideal framework to perform extensive ethno-archaeological research as the area harbours over 200 salt springs near which are found remarkable archaeological deposits related to salt exploitation, in particular from Neolithic and Chalcolithic times (6000-3500 BC). Nowadays, these mineral springs are still exploited at an unexpected degree of intensity by members of rural as well as of urban communities. The main research focuses on the identification of all salt springs in sub-Carpathian Moldavia and on the completion of complex ethno-archaeological research (exploitation, uses, distribution networks, trade, social contexts, symbolism, etc.) in order to propose new and more varied models for explaining prehistoric situations.
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