The Latest Catastrophe: History, the Present, the Contemporary

The writing of recent history tends to be deeply marked by conflict, by personal and collective struggles rooted in horrific traumas and bitter controversies. Frequently, today’s historians can find themselves researching the same events that they themselves lived through. This book reflects on the concept and practices of what is called “contemporary history,” a history of the present time, and identifies special tensions in the field between knowledge and experience, distance and proximity, and objectivity and subjectivity. Henry Rousso addresses the rise of contemporary history and the relations of present-day societies to their past, especially their legacies of political violence. Focusing on France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, he shows that for contemporary historians, the recent past has become a problem to be solved. No longer unfolding as a series of traditions to be respected or a set of knowledge to be transmitted and built upon, history today is treated as a constant act of mourning or memory, an attempt to atone. Historians must also negotiate with strife within this field, as older scholars who may have lived through events clash with younger historians who also claim to understand the experiences. Ultimately, The Latest Catastrophe shows how historians, at times against their will, have themselves become actors in a history still being made.

History

Rousso, Henry

Europe

University of Chicago Press

Americas

BRAND NEW FIRST EDITION First Printing dust jacket hardcover, clean text, solid binding, NO remainders NOT ex-library slight shelfwear / storage-wear; WE SHIP FAST. Carefully packed and quickly sent. 201601618 From the Liberation purges to the Barbie trial, France has struggled with the memory of the Vichy experience: a vivid memory of defeat, occupation, and repression. How has this proud nation dealt with les annees noires? What is the collective memory of those few years: what have the French chosen to remember, what have they chosen to conceal? In this book a French scholar examines France's war and postwar years as cycles of purposeful memory. For ten years after the Allied victory, rival myths were constructed to help France forget the devastating realites of the Nazi Occupation. In the late 1960s the mirror finally cracked with the burgeoning of iconoclastic cultural works, scandals, trials of former collaborators, and political dissent; the ensuing obsession with wartime crimes continues in France today. This is not a book about the history of Vichy itself but about the legacy of a regime the French would like to see as the creation of a few wicked men. The myth of a people united in Gaullist resistance obscured the harsh facts of widespread collaboration, antisemitism, and evil deeds. In truth, Petain's Vichy was not a German import - it had deep roots in prewar France. But the contrary, darker myth is equally misleading: France was by no means merely a nation of obedient collaborators. "The Vichy Syndrome" is aimed at specialists in European history and should appeal to Francophiles and anyone seeking to understand France's place in a newly unifying Europe. We recommend selecting Priority Mail wherever available. (No shipping to Mexico, Brazil or Italy.) 3

The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944

Harvard University Press

Vichy: An Ever-Present Past

Conan, Éric

Dartmouth

Les années noires: Vivre sous l'Occupation

Gallimard]

Vichy, L Evene Memo L His (Collection Folio/Histoire) (French Edition)

Military

Gallimard Education

Les Annees Noires (The Dark Years)

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

La hantise du passé (Conversations pour demain) (French Edition)

Reference

Foreign Language Study & Reference

TEXTUEL

Frankreich und die »dunklen Jahre«: Das Regime von Vichy in Geschichte und Gegenwart

Wallstein Verlag GmbH

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