Amateur history for (a) future historian(s)
I’m still under a pile of work with no real material to share from my coursework and not much time to write anything else. For shits and giggles, here’s a book review I wrote for a class at Edinburgh a few years back. ===== Mayer, Arno J. Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final …
Continue reading “Book Review: Mayer’s ‘Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?’”
Thirty years ago, the Institute of Jewish Studies at University College London (UCL) hosted an international conference in memory of its former director, Joseph G. Weiss, who had been an important scholar of Hasidism – the Jewish religious movement that began in Poland in the eighteenth century and quickly came to dominate significant segments of …
Continue reading “Histories of Early Hasidism: The Last Three Decades in Research”
One of my goals as a future historian is to be an expert on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. As a result, I’m already better read than most people on the latter topic, while on the former topic, I’m probably at the level of an interested history buff. After having read most of the single-volume …
Back to school! Here’s my first discussion post for my Modern Russia class. ==== Having read the textbook chapters for the week and the readings by Alice Gomstyn and Richard Pipes, as well as having very recently read J. Arch Getty‘s two books on the Great Purges, I have come to the conclusion that both …
Continue reading “Russian Historiography: Totalitarianism vs Revisionism”
Inevitable Historicity