Tag Archives: history

January 27 marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day. This annual date serves not only as an official commemoration of the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and the millions of other victims of Nazism, but to promote Holocaust education throughout the world.

For more than a decade, UVic has played a leading role in Holocaust studies. Home to the I-witness Holocaust Field School (the first of its kind for undergraduate students at a Canadian university when it launched in 2010), the Faculty of Humanities also offers a master’s stream in Holocaust studies (the only one of its kind in Canada).

In the ongoing SSHRC-funded work led by UVic Professor of Germanic and Slavic Studies Charlotte Schallié, our Head of Advanced Research Services, Matt Huculak, is part of an international team of researchers for the Narrative Art & Visual Storytelling in Holocaust and Human Rights Education interdisciplinary project. As stated on their website, their mission is a “multiperspectival, participatory, arts-and-human-rights-based collaboration among academics, educators, Holocaust survivors, and artists for teaching & learning about the Holocaust in diverse, international public contexts.”

As part of this mission, they offer free and accessible visual storytelling resources in order to engage in dialogue-based teaching & learning processes for newer generations, including a podcast series. The latest conversation about Pedagogy and Narrative Art in Human Rights and Education is now available here. Relatedly, our University Archives is home to the Holocaust and World War II Memory Collection and we also have a Holocaust LibGuide.

These resources reflect the focus of both UVic and UVic Libraries’ commitment to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, specifically UN SDG Goal 16 on peace and justice, as the UVic community continues to tackle contemporary issues of hatred, racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, ethnic conflict and genocide.

(on behalf of the Communications, Events, and Community Engagement Operational Group (CECE-OG): Christine Walde, Emily Garry, Inba Kehoe, Jennifer Wells, Lara Wilson, and Lisa Abram)

Featured Thesis: Traitors, Harlots and Monsters, The Anti-Aristocratic Caricatures of the French Revolution

By Stephen A. W. Chapco

https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/6669

An M.A. thesis in the Department of History.

Abstract:

The opening of the Estates General in 1789 came at a time of momentous national crisis. France’s separate Three Estates were summoned to meet and collectively decide about how best to remedy France’s many ills. However, the initial collegial spirit between the privileged First and Second Estates and the assertive Third Estate quickly evaporated. Antipathy towards certain nobles, particularly those perceived as corrupt and debauched, quickly crystalized in 1789 into hostile attacks on the entire Second Estate, who were all labeled dangerous “aristocrats”. The rapid disempowerment of one of Europe’s strongest élites is difficult to interpret without discussing the important role of widely produced anti-noble caricatures that targeted France’s nobility. Anti-noble caricatures, ranging from the malicious to the comical, were an essential component in the rapid sidelining and demonization of the nobility. From approximately 1789-1793 anti-noble caricatures constantly degraded and demonized their targets, in unrelenting and accessible imagery, marking them out as traitorous enemies. Caricatures not only helped convince the public that nobles were not only inhuman, but so dangerous in fact, that persecution and violence became options in order to purge France of its alleged aristocratic fifth columnists.

To read more, visit UVicSpace

*UVic’s open access repository, UVicspace, makes worldwide knowledge mobilization possible. Through this platform, researchers at any institution have access to dissertations (and theses and graduate projects) published by our graduate students. This also makes works available to the interested layperson, who may be engaged in learning more about the research being done at UVic, with no paywall. UVic’s graduate students are doing valuable research every day – but sometimes it goes unsung. Our goal with this series is to shine a light on our students by featuring excellence, one achievement at a time.

The UVic LIbraries ePublishing Services Team

Featured Thesis: Deliciously detailed narratives – the use of food in stories of British war brides’ experiences

by Kendra Horosko

https://dspace.library.uvic.ca:8443/handle/1828/3038
Today’s featured thesis was submitted as part of a Master of Arts in the Department of History.

Abstract (excerpt):

During the Second World War, tens of thousands of Canadian soldiers stationed in Britain met and married British women. The majority of these British war brides and their husbands settled in Canada, where these women had to quickly adjust to Canadian customs. Based on interviews with fifteen British war brides currently living in the Victoria area, this thesis analyzes the way in which these women recount stories of their lives and experiences as war brides through recollections of food-centred narratives. Their recollections of the pre-war years, the war years and the post-war years often revolved around memories of food. This thesis will show how war brides make use of such food-centred narratives as a comfortable medium through which to express their emotions regarding the past and to relate their stories, be they joyful, traumatic, nostalgic, somber or elegiac.

To read more, visit UVicSpace

*UVic’s open access repository, UVicspace, makes worldwide knowledge mobilization possible. Through this platform, researchers at any institution have access to dissertations (and theses and graduate projects) published by our graduate students. This also makes works available to the interested layperson, who may be engaged in learning more about the research being done at UVic, with no paywall. UVic’s graduate students are doing valuable research every day – but sometimes it goes unsung. Our goal with this series is to shine a light on our students by featuring excellence, one achievement at a time.

The UVic LIbraries ePublishing Services Team

Featured Dissertation – A City Goes to War: Victoria in the Great War 1914-1918

Dissertation of the Day*

A City Goes to War: Victoria in the Great War 1914-1918, by James S. Kempling (History)

Abstract:

This dissertation is a combined digital history-narrative history project. It takes advantage of newly digitized historical newspapers and soldier files to explore how the people of Victoria B.C. Canada, over 8000 kilometers from the front, experienced the Great War 1914-1918. Although that experience was similar to other Canadian cities in many ways, in other respects it was quite different. Victoria’s geographical location on the very fringe of the Empire sets it apart. Demographic and ethnic differences from the rest of Canada and a very different history of indigenous-settler relations had a dramatic effect on who went to war, who resisted and how war was commemorated in Victoria. This study of Victoria will also provide an opportunity to examine several important thematic areas that may impact the broader understanding of Canada in the Great War not covered in earlier works. These themes include the recruiting of under-age soldiers, the response to the naval threat in the Pacific, resistance by indigenous peoples, and the highly effective response to the threat of influenza at the end of the war. As the project manager for the City Goes to War web-site, I directed the development of an extensive on-line archive of supporting documents and articles about Victoria during the Great War that supports this work (http://acitygoestowar.ca/). Once reviewed by the committee, this paper will be converted to web format and added to that project.

To read more, visit UVicSpace https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/10987

 

*UVic’s open access repository, UVicspace, makes worldwide knowledge mobilization possible. Through this platform, researchers at any institution have access to dissertations (and theses and graduate projects) published by our graduate students. This also makes works available to the interested layperson, who may be engaged in learning more about the research being done at UVic, with no paywall. UVic’s graduate students are doing valuable research every day – but sometimes it goes unsung. Our goal with this series is to shine a light on our students by featuring excellence, one achievement at a time.

The UVic LIbraries ePublishing Services Team

The Conflict in Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know by Serhy Yekelchyk

Each year UVic faculty, staff, students, alumni, and retirees produce an incredible amount of intellectual content reflecting their breadth and diversity of research, teaching, personal, and professional interests. A list of these works is available here.

The Conflict in Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know is a recent title by UVic History and Germanic and Slavic Studies faculty member Serhy Yekelchyk.

About the Book

The Conflict in Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know explores Ukraine’s contemporary conflict and complicated history of ethnic identity, and it does do so by weaving questions of the country’s fraught relations with its former imperial master, Russia, throughout the narrative. In denying Ukraine’s existence as a separate nation, Putin has adopted a stance similar to that of the last Russian tsars, who banned the Ukrainian language in print and on stage. Ukraine emerged as a nation-state as a result of the imperial collapse in 1917, but it was subsequently absorbed into the USSR. When the former Soviet republics became independent states in 1991, the Ukrainian authorities sought to assert their country’s national distinctiveness, but they failed to reform the economy or eradicate corruption. As Serhy Yekelchyk explains, for the last 150 years recognition of Ukraine as a separate nation has been a litmus test of Russian democracy, and the Russian threat to Ukraine will remain in place for as long as the Putinist regime is in power. In this concise and penetrating book, Yekelchyk describes the current crisis in Ukraine, the country’s ethnic composition, and the Ukrainian national identity. He takes readers through the history of Ukraine’s emergence as a sovereign nation, the after-effects of communism, the Orange Revolution, the EuroMaidan, the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, the war in the Donbas, and the West’s attempts at peace making. The Conflict in Ukraine is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the forces that have shaped contemporary politics in this increasingly important part of Europe.

About the Author

Dr. Serhy Yekelchyk received his BA from Kyiv University and an MA from the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Following a research fellowship in Australia in 1993–94, he came to Canada in 1995 to pursue a Ph.D. in Russian and Eastern European History at the University of Alberta. His dissertation analyzed representations of the past in Stalinist culture, with special emphasis on Soviet Ukraine. After graduating, he taught for a year at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) before coming to Victoria in 2001.

Dr. Yekelchyk’s research interests evolved since then to include the social and political history of the Stalin period, as well as the formation of a modern Ukrainian nation from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. His Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation (Oxford University Press, 2007) was the first Western history of Ukraine to include the coverage of the Orange Revolution and was translated into five languages. His monograph on late-Stalinist political rituals appeared in 2014 and a book about the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict is coming out in 2015.

Dr. Yekelchyk is cross-appointed between the departments of Germanic and Slavic Studies and History and teaches a variety of courses on Russian history, Stalinism, Modern Ukraine, and Cold-War cinema. He supervises graduate and Honours students working on various aspects of Russian and Eastern European history and culture.

Praise for the Book

“Excellent… a succinct, lucid text that is ideal for newcomers to recent Ukrainian events.” – The Financial Times

“Yekelchyk masterfully presents the history, politics, culture, background, and motivations for the Ukrainian crisis.  It would take years of study to appreciate the intricacy of the Ukraine-Russia relationship from the time of Volodymyr the Saint (~ 988) to the present, and it would require dozen visits to Ukraine to understand the land and its people. Yet, in only 166 to-the-point but deeply researched pages, Professor Yekelchyk presents and discusses an incredible amount of detail and provides the reader with a clear, both-sides-of-the-story analysis of Ukraine, Russia, and the Black Sea region.” – Rudy L. Hightower II, Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective. 9 (7) Apr. 2016

China’s Party Congress by Guoguang Wu

Each year UVic faculty, staff, students, alumni, and retirees produce an incredible amount of intellectual content reflecting their breadth and diversity of research, teaching, personal, and professional interests. A list of these works is available here.

China’s Party Congress: Power, Legitimacy, and Institutional Manipulation is a recent title by UVic History and Political Science faculty member Guoguang Wu.

About the Book

Nominally the highest decision-making body in the Chinese Communist Party, the Party Congress is responsible for determining party policy and the selection of China’s leaders. Guoguang Wu provides the first analysis of how the Party Congress operates to elect Party leadership and decide Party policy, and explores why such a formal performance of congress meetings, delegate discussions, and non-democratic elections is significant for authoritarian politics more broadly. Taking institutional inconsistency as the central research question, this study presents a new theory of ‘mutual contextualization’ to reveal how informal politics and formal institutions interact with each other. Wu argues that despite the prevalence of informal politics behind the scenes, authoritarian politics seeks legitimization through a combination of political manipulation and the ritual mobilization of formal institutions. This ambitious book is essential reading for all those interested in understanding contemporary China, and an innovative theoretical contribution to the study of comparative politics.

About the Author

Guoguang Wu holds a faculty position in both the Departments of History and Political Science at UVic. He is also the Chair in China and Asia-Pacific Relations at the Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives (CAPI). His research interests include comparative politics and international relations with an emphasis on East Asia, particularly China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Thematically, his research interests cover institutional transition from communism, the political economy of globalization, liberalization and democratization, the politics of authoritarian mass media, and foreign-domestic linkages in foreign policy and regional security. He is author, co-author, and editor of twenty books and his research articles have appeared in journals such as Asian Survey, China Quarterly, Comparative Political Studies,Journal of Contemporary China, The Pacific Review, and Third World Quarterly.

Praise for the Book

“Why has China had such high popular legitimacy (according to the best available indicators) when its citizenry have had so little to say about how they are governed? In this brilliant, pioneering study of the National Party Congress, Guoguang Wu shows how by shrewdly using ‘institutional manipulation’ the CCP can present a democratic showcase while keeping the levers of power hidden. Thus the ‘hollow’ but ‘holy’ Party Congress actually proves more effective at building popular consensus than the representative legislatures after which it was modeled.” – Lowell Dittmer, University of California, Berkeley

“The book is insightful about the actual operations of the Congress and is filled with useful information on its evolution as an institution, especially since the seventh Party Congress in 1945. It is a good reference for students of Chinese politics.” – Zhiyue Bo, The China Journal