AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
As they looked for the keys to American growth in the nineteenth century, these economic historians questioned whether the Civil War - with its enormous destruction and disruption of society - could have been a stimulus to industrialization. In the years after World War II, a new group of economic historians - many of them trained in economics departments - focused their energies on the explanation of economic growth and development in the United States. Harold Faulkner devoted two chapters to a discussion of the causes and consequences of the war in his 1943 textbook American Economic History (which was then in its fifth edition), claiming that “its effects upon our industrial, financial, and commercial history were profound” (1943: 340). The “Beard-Hacker Thesis” had become the most widely accepted interpretation of the economic impact of the Civil War. By the time of the Second World War, Louis Hacker could sum up Beard’s position by simply stating that the war’s “striking achievement was the triumph of industrial capitalism” (Hacker 1940: 373). Charles Beard labeled it “Second American Revolution,” claiming that “at bottom the so-called Civil War – was a social war, ending in the unquestioned establishment of a new power in the government, making vast changes – in the course of industrial development, and in the constitution inherited from the Fathers” (Beard and Beard 1927: 53). During the first half of the twentieth century, historians viewed the war as a major turning point in American economic history. The Civil War has been something of an enigma for scholars studying American history. Ransom, University of California, Riverside So long as the core ingredients of victory – Stalin’s leadership, party guidance, the Soviet system, the unwavering heroism of the Red Army and citizenry – remained in place, the myth’s articulators were free to promote a range of competing narratives, from accounts emphasizing a homogenous collection of Soviet people bound latterly in “friendship” to those stressing Russian “elder brotherhood" and ethnic diversity.Roger L. As Stalin’s toast was eliciting mixed reactions, party ideologues shaped a divergent set of postwar narratives geared toward mobilizing local populations along contrasting ideological planes. Rather, it allowed an “internationalist” paradigm to coexist with its Russocentric counterpart in discursive tension throughout the era. Far from a consistent Russocentric ideological rubric, this chapter shows that the Stalinist leadership refused to commit to an exclusively Russocentric understanding of the war. Specifically, the chapter pursues the afterlife of Stalin’s oft-cited toast to the Russian people in both Russian and non-Russian contexts to tease out its rather inconsistent and ambiguous connection to the official war narrative. This chapter explores ideological production and commemoration in the late Stalinist era through the lens of the fledgling myth of victory in World War II.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |