#MuseumWeek 2015

Museum Week is international: more than 800 museums, galleries and cultural institutions from across the UK, Europe, the Americas, Asia and Oceania — 29 countries in total — are officially participating in this, the first ever international Museum Week on twitter, March 23-29. ‪#‎MuseumWeek‬ 2015!

Happy Museum Week from Berghahn! Read a FREE virtual issue on Museums from Berghahn Journalshttp://bit.ly/P0ugcB  

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Berghahn is delighted to present some of the latest Museum Studies titles:

 

Museums and Collections Series: This series explores the potential of museum collections to transform our knowledge of the world, and for exhibitions to influence the way in which we view and inhabit that world. It offers essential reading for those involved in all aspects of the museum sphere: curators, researchers, collectors, students and the visiting public.

 

Forthcoming! Volume 8

MUSEUM WEBSITES AND SOCIAL MEDIA
Issues of Participation, Sustainability, Trust and Diversity
Ana Luisa Sánchez Laws

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In History: Churchill delivers Iron Curtain speech

On March 5th 1946, in one of the most famous orations of the Cold War period, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill condemned the Soviet Union’s policies in Europe and declared, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” Churchill’s speech is considered one of the opening volleys announcing the beginning of the Cold War. Read More

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Berghahn presents a selection of relevant Cold War titles:

 

COLD WAR CULTURES
Perspectives on Eastern and Western European Societies
Edited by Annette Vowinckel, Marcus M. Payk, and Thomas Lindenberger

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International Holocaust Remembrance Day

International Holocaust Remembrance Day, established by the United Nations General Assembly, is an international memorial day on 27 January commemorating the victims of the Holocaust. It commemorates the genocide that resulted in the death of an estimated 6 million Jews, 1 million Gypsies, 250,000 mentally and physically disabled people, and 9,000 homosexual men by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.

 

January 27th, 2015 also marks the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazis’ most notorious concentration camp, Auschwitz, also known as Auschwitz-Birkenau. Most of about 1.1 million people that passed through the gates between 1940 and 1945 never left, many of them murdered in the camp’s gas chambers. Only some 200,000 are believed to have survived that fate. No one knows how many of the survivors remain alive today, but it’s a group that is dwindling as age takes its toll. To mark the liberation’s anniversary, about 300 former Auschwitz prisoners are travelling to Oświęcim, Poland, to pay tribute on Jan. 27 at Birkenau’s Gate of Death, the unloading ramp at the camp’s rail entrance.

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In honor of the UN’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, Berghahn has made several relevant journal articles freely available through a special virtual issue. You may access the issue through this link: bit.ly/Holocaust-Remembrance-Day

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Berhahn Books would also like to present a selection of relevant titles on the history of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

 

JEWISH HISTORIES OF THE HOLOCAUST
New Transnational Approaches
Edited by Norman J. W. Goda

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Today in History

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, alias Lenin (Russian: Ле́нин) died of a brain hemorrhage on January 21st, 1924 at the age of 54. Lenin was one of the Russian leading political figures and revolutionary thinkers of the 20th century. He masterminded the Bolshevik take-over of power in Russia in 1917 serving as head of government of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, and of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death. Under his administration, the Russian Empire was replaced by the Soviet Union and all wealth including land, industry and business was nationalized.

Lenin had a significant influence not only on the history of Russia but on the international Communist movement and was one of the most influential and controversial figures of the 20th century. Following the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, reverence for Lenin declined among the post-Soviet generations, yet he remains an important historical figure for the Soviet-era generations.

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Berghahn Books presents a selection of titles on Russian & Soviet history and culture:

 

Forthcoming in Paperback!

RUSSIAN POSTMODERNISM
New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture
Mikhail N. Epstein, Alexander A. Genis, and Slobodanka M. Vladiv-Glover
With an Introduction by Thomas Epstein

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Space and Place

Unlike a painting or a sculpture, architectural sites cannot be work of a single artist. They arise from collaborations among historical figures, architects, engineers, bankers, and many more. Some structures become much more than just a place to live, work, worship or be entertained, instead they become symbols embedded with cultural knowledge, history and social value.

 

Berghahn is delighted to bring Space and Place Series to your attention. This series provides ethnographically rich analyses of the cultural organization and meanings of these sites of space, architecture, landscape, and places of the body. Contributions examine the symbolic meanings of space and place, the cultural and historical processes involved in their construction and contestation, and how they communicate with wider political, religious, social, and economic institutions.

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Volume 15 Forthcoming! 

NARRATING THE CITY
Histories, Space and the Everyday
Edited by Wladimir Fischer-Nebmaier, Matthew P. Berg, and Anastasia Christou

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Simulated Shelves: Browse December’s New Books

We are delighted to present a selection of our newly published December titles from our core subjects of Cultural Studies, History and Politics, along with a selection of our New in Paperback titles.

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CLAUSEWITZ IN HIS TIME
Essays in the Cultural and Intellectual History of Thinking about War
Peter Paret

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Simulated Shelves: Browse November’s New Books

We are delighted to present a selection of our newly published November titles from our core subjects of History, Media Studies, Medical Anthropology, Sociology and Urban Studies, along with a selection of our New in Paperback titles.

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U.S. FOREIGN POLICY AND THE OTHER
Edited by Michael Patrick Cullinane and David Ryan

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25th Anniversary of the Fall of the Wall

From 1961 to 1989, the city of Berlin was divided by the most visible sign of the Cold War: a wall more than 140km (87 miles) long. On 9 November 1989, East German authorities announced they would allow free access between east and west Berlin. Crowds of euphoric East Germans crossed and climbed on to the wall, leading to a reunited Germany.

 

Berlin is marking the 25th anniversary of the fall of the wall by “rebuilding” it with glowing white balloons. Some 8,000 illuminated helium balloons will trace a 15km-long section of the wall, snaking around the city, for just one weekend (7 to 9 November). The installation will come to an end on the evening of 9 November, when volunteers will release the balloons and set them free, soaring into the night sky to the strains of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, played by the European Youth Orchestra. The balloons are made out of a biodegradable material so will not harm the environment. For a full story and more information on the event please visit ibtimes.co.uk

 

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Browse Berghahn relevant titles:

 

THE PATH TO THE BERLIN WALL
Critical Stages in the History of Divided Germany
Manfred Wilke
Translated from the German by Sophie Perl

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If Monuments Could Talk

War memorials are more than a simple, objective way to commemorate the past; they can also, as a visual message, guide the memory of a society in certain political and ideological directions. Author Elisabetta Viggiani looks at and into war memorials in Northern Ireland — and what these say about the broader culture — in her just-published Talking Stones: The Politics of Memorialization in Post-Conflict Northern IrelandBelow, the author gives an introduction to her work, followed by an excerpt from the volume.

 

 

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If memory was simply about the past, why would governments and public authorities be prepared to put their ever-shrinking budgets at its service? The answer is because memory is seldom about the past, rather it is about the present moment; as Pierre Nora puts it, ‘through the past, we venerate above all ourselves’. Talking Stones investigates how collective memory and material culture are used to support present political and ideological needs in contemporary society.

 

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Simulated Shelves: Browse August’s New Books

We are delighted to present a selection of our newly published, and soon to be published, August titles from our core subjects of Anthropology, Environmental Studies, Film Studies, History and Politics, along with a selection of our New in Paperback titles.

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BLOOD AND FIRE
Toward a Global Anthropology of Labor
Edited by Sharryn Kasmir and August Carbonella

Volume 13, Dislocations Series

 

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