This study analyzes how public bereavement became cemented into the broad geography of Russian culture with the appearance of experiential and local memorials in the 1960s after a half century of instability, contestation, and absence. The author shows how monument builders responded to a need from the population to share an accessible war experience apart from the exclusive Bolshevik memorial culture. He argues that this development of war commemoration has amplified the role of war hero memorialization as an anchor of public stability and social solidarity in Putin’s Russia, where there is little consensus about the past, present, or future.

While historians have acknowledged that the issues of race, slavery, and emancipation were not unique to the American Civil War, they have less frequently recognized the conflict’s similarities to other global events. As renowned historian Carl Degler pointed out, the Civil War was “one among many” such conflicts during the mid-nineteenth century. Understanding the Civil War’s place in world history requires placing it within a global context of other mid-nineteenth-century political, social, and cultural issues and events. In The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism, Niels Eichhorn and Duncan A. Campbell explore the conflict from this perspective, taking a transnational and comparative approach, with a particular focus on the period from the 1830s to the 1870s. Eichhorn and Campbell examine the development of nationalism and its frequent manifestation, secession, by comparing the American experience with that of several other nations, including Germany, Hungary, and Brazil. They compare the Civil War to the Crimean and Franco-German wars to determine whether the American conflict was the first modern war. To gauge the potential of foreign intervention in the Civil War, they look to the time’s developing international debate on the legality of intercession and mediation in other nations’ insurgencies. Using the experiences of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa, and the Antipodes, Eichhorn and Campbell suggest the extent to which the United States was an imperial project. To examine realpolitik, they study four vastly different practitioners—Otto von Bismarck, Louis Napoleon, Count Cavour, and Abraham Lincoln. Finally, they compare emancipation in the United States to that in Peru and the end of forced servitude in Russia, closing with a comparison of the memorialization of the Civil War with the experiences of other post-emancipation societies and an examination of how other nations mythologized their past conflicts and ignored uncomfortable truths in the pursuit of reconciliation. The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism avoids the limitations of American exceptionalism, making it the first genuine comparative and transnational study of the Civil War in an international context.

Monuments for Posterity challenges the common assumption that Stalinist monuments were constructed with an immediate, propagandistic function, arguing instead that they were designed to memorialize the present for an imagined posterity. In this respect, even while pursuing its monument-building program with a singular ruthlessness and on an unprecedented scale, the Stalinist regime was broadly in step with transnational monument-building trends of the era and their undergirding cultural dynamics. By integrating approaches from cultural history, art criticism, and memory studies, along with previously unexplored archival material, Antony Kalashnikov examines the origin and implementation of the Stalinist monument-building program from the perspective of its goal to "immortalize the memory" of the era. He analyzes how this objective affected the design and composition of Stalinist monuments, what cultural factors prompted the sudden and powerful yearning to be remembered, and most importantly, what the culture of self-commemoration revealed about changing outlooks on the future—both in the Soviet Union and beyond its borders. Monuments for Posterity shifts the perspective from monuments' political-ideological content to the desire to be remembered and prompts a much-needed reconsideration of the supposed uniqueness of both Stalinist aesthetics and the temporal culture that they expressed. Many Stalinist monuments still stand prominently in postsocialist cityscapes and remain the subject of continual heated political controversy. Kalashnikov makes manifest monuments' intentional attempts to seduce us—the "posterity" for whom they were built.

Provides a bold new interpretation of the Soviet myth of World War II from its Stalinist origins to its emergence as arguably the supreme myth of state under Brezhnev. Jonathan Brunstedt offers a timely historical investigation into the roots of the revival of the war's memory in Russia today.

This book explores how societies deal with the effects of war on the historic environment. Written by historians, archaeologists, and conservation professionals, it offers a dramatic perspective on the war in Ukraine. It reveals the truth behind the Kremlin’s ‘just war’ narrative and touches on the complex relationship between war, society and the historic environment with examples of heritage conservation, archaeology and political expediency from Europe to Namibia. Prompted by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the first section ‘Frontline Ukraine’ examines the manipulation of history, the use of propaganda, and the decolonisation of Russian memorials in former Soviet states. It highlights how illegal archaeological excavations, looting and the removal of museum collections beginning from seizure of Crimea in 2014 until the present day have contributed to an increasingly implausible Russian narrative which attempts to represent an imperial land grab as a ‘just war’. In the second section ‘Aspects of War’, the authors provide a wider perspective, with chapters on the influence of film, the effect of war on conservation, forensic archaeology, the reconstruction of damaged or destroyed museums as well as the relationship between America and the Hague Convention. Topical and lucid, this volume will be beneficial to students and researchers of history, archaeology, politics and international relations. The chapters in this book were originally published in The Historic Environment: Policy & Practice and are accompanied by an updated introduction and a new conclusion.

"The first biography of sculptor Chana Orloff, and the first to include stories from her unpublished "memoir," which focus on the artist's early life in Ukraine, her family's move to Palestine and Orloff's life there (1905-1910), and her subsequent years between Paris and Tel Aviv"--