Lloyd Kramer

INTELLECTUAL HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY

Donald R. Kelley, The Descent of Ideas: The History of Intellectual History (Aldershot, England/Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002)Mark Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge, England/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999)

Paris and the Transnational History of Modern American Identities

Many Americans love to complain about France, and yet the criticisms have never weakened an enduring American fascination with Paris that reappears constantly in popular films, novels, history books, and youthful dreams. Like other complex relationships, the French-American connection has carried ambivalent combinations of respect and hostility along with recurring anxieties about the superiority or inferiority of each partner’s distinctive traits and past experiences. America’s interactions with France have thus shaped evolving identities and fantasies on both sides of the Atlantic, as Brooke L. Blower argues in her wide-ranging, well-written book about Americans who lived in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. Among the various eras of American expatriation in France, the decades after the First World War stand out as perhaps the most romanticized period of liberated literary lives and cultural creativity. The “Lost Generation” remains a legendary example of how American writers and artists could migrate from small-town social constraints to the boulevards and cafés of Paris, where they found the personal freedom and avant-garde cultural movements that helped them produce their most innovative literary or artistic work. Blower understands the attraction of this familiar story, but she wants to demythologize the American expatriate experience and give new attention to Parisian critics who believed that boorish American tourism, rampant commercialism, or Bohemian immorality threatened traditional French values. The city that Ernest Hemingway famously called “a moveable feast” was actually a highly politicized place where (as Blower rightly describes it) people denounced American capitalism, protested the executions of Italian-American anarchists, argued about Bolshevism and fascism, and fled from oppressive regimes in Russia, Italy, and much of central Europe. Emphasizing the cross-currents in this polyglot Parisian caldron, Blower argues that Americans developed a new national identity as they encountered

The Language of Historical Education

James F. Voss and Mario Carretero, (eds.) Learning and Reasoning in History. International Review of History Education

The Rhetoric of Historical Representation: Three Narrative Histories of the French Revolution.

Preface Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Historical representation and discursive context 2. The narrative configuration of historical events 3. The configuration of actors I 4. The configuration of actors II Conclusion References Index.

The Rights of Man: Lafayette and the Polish National Revolution, 1830-1834

Although the critics and supporters of the marquis de Lafayette from his time to our own have rarely agreed on politics, ideology, or Lafayettes significance in European history, they almost all share the judgment that his long military and political career gave expression to an unchanging liberal political creed. Critics have always charged that Lafayettes adherence to this creed blinded him to political and economic realities and assured his political failure in the complex, changing conditions of French and European society. Supporters, on the other hand, have always praised his resolute advocacy of liberal principles throughout the extraordinary events of revolution and reaction and his mediating position between the extremes of postrevolutionary ideologies. Whatever else one might say about Lafayette from the left or from the right, almost everyone concedes that his liberalism gave exceptional coherence to a political life that extended from the Enlightenment of the 1770s to the Romanticism of the 1830s. No other prominent figure of his generation lived through so many revolutionary events or participated so extensively in the sequence of national revolutions that moved from North America (1770s) to France (1789) to South America (1820s) to Greece (1820s) to Spain (1820s) to France again (1830) to Belgium (1830) and finally to Poland (1830-1831)-not to mention other national movements in Ireland, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany. Lafayette