This volume deals with the manifold ways in which histories are debated and indeed historicity and historiography themselves are interrogated via the narrative modes of the truth commissions. It traces the various medial responses (memoirs, fiction, poetry, film, art) which have emerged in the wake of the truth commissions. The 1990s and the 2000s saw a spate of so-called truth commissions across the Global South. From the inaugural truth commissions in post-juntas 1980s Latin America, to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up by the incoming post-apartheid government in South Africa and the twinned gacaca courts and National Unity and Reconciliation Commission in Rwanda and that in indigenous Australia, various truth commissions have sought to lay bare human rights abuses. The chapters in this volume explore how truth commissions crystallized a long tradition of dissenting and resisting cultures of memorialization in the public sphere across the Global South and provided a significant template for contemporary attempts to work through episodes of violence and oppression across the region. Drawing on studies from Latin America, Africa, Asia and Australia, this book illuminates the modes in which societies remember and negotiate with traumatic pasts. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of human rights, popular culture and art, literature, media, politics and history.

The first major study of the historical writings of religious dissenters in England between the 1690s and the 1790s, this book redefines the way we understand religious and political identities in the eighteenth century.Dissenting Histories provides a synoptic overview of the development of religious dissent in England between the Restoration and the early nineteenth century, using Dissenters' writings to open up new and different perspectives on how the past was perceived in this period. These writings are located within the wider political culture and the author explores how the long shadow of 'the Great Rebellion' of the 1640s stretched across the division between Church and Dissent.The author is not simply concerned with history as a representation of the past, but history also as part of the bitterly divided collective memory of the present. Focusing on the relationship between the history that historians wrote, and the history that men and women experienced, John Seed provides the reader with new perspectives on eighteenth-century England.

This book explores how popular cultural artifacts, literary texts, commemorative practices and other forms of remembrances are used to convey, transmit and contest memories of mass atrocities in the Global South. Some of these historical atrocities took place during the Cold war. As such, this book unpacks the influence or role of the global powers in conflict in the Global South. Contributors are grappling with a number of issues such as the politics of memorialization, memory conflicts, exhumations, reburials, historical dialogue, peacebuilding and social healing, memory activism, visual representation, transgenerational transmission of memories, and identity politics.

This collection of essays addresses the ongoing problem of dissent from a broad range of disciplinary perspectives: political philosophy, intellectual history, literary studies, aesthetics, architectural history and conceptualizations of the political past. Taking a global perspective, the volume examines the history of dissent both inside and outside the West, through events in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries both nearer to our own times as well as more distant, and through a range of styles reflecting how contested and pressing the problem of dissent in fact is. Drawing on a range of authors and international problematics, the contributions discuss the multiple ways in which we refract memories of dissent in cultural, historical and aesthetic context. It also discusses the diverse ideas, images and phenomena we use to do so.

Religious dissenters and their literary and social heritage are the principal subjects of this book. At its heart is a group of English men whose activities were local, transcontinental and circum-Atlantic. Drawing on letters, lecture notes, manuscript accounts of academies, and a range of printed texts and paratexts The Textual Culture of English Protestant Dissent 1720-1800 explores the connections between dissent, education, and publishing in the eighteenth century. By considering Isaac Watts and Philip Doddridge in relation to their mentors, students, friends, and readers it emphasizes the importance they and their associates attached to personal relationships in their private interactions and in print. It argues that this contributed to a distinctive literary style as well as particular modes of textual production for moderate, orthodox dissenters which reached beyond their own community to address and influence global discourses about education, enlightenment, and history. The book's focus on 'textual culture' foregrounds relationships between forms as well as considering texts as they existed in one form or another. In examining textual culture, this book emphasises adaptation, transformation, fluidity and communality: it approaches the human relationships that make texts (including friendships, reading communities, intellectual exchange and business arrangements) with as much care as the content of the texts themselves. The book demonstrates that models of family and social authorship among Romantic-era dissenters advanced by Michelle Levy, Daniel White and Felicity James were rooted in the domestic culture at earlier academies and in the example of members of the Watts-Doddridge circle.

The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I traces the emergence of Anglophone Protestant Dissent in the post-Reformation era between the Act of Uniformity (1559) and the Act of Toleration (1689). It reassesses the relationship between establishment and Dissent, emphasising that Presbyterians and Congregationalists were serious contenders in the struggle for religious hegemony. Under Elizabeth I and the early Stuarts, separatists were few in number, and Dissent was largely contained within the Church of England, as nonconformists sought to reform the national Church from within. During the English Revolution (1640-60), Puritan reformers seized control of the state but splintered into rival factions with competing programmes of ecclesiastical reform. Only after the Restoration, following the ejection of two thousand Puritan clergy from the Church, did most Puritans become Dissenters, often with great reluctance. Dissent was not the inevitable terminus of Puritanism, but the contingent and unintended consequence of the Puritan drive for further reformation. The story of Dissent is thus bound up with the contest for the established Church, not simply a heroic tale of persecuted minorities contending for religious toleration. Nevertheless, in the half century after 1640, religious pluralism became a fact of English life, as denominations formed and toleration was widely advocated. The volume explores how Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers began to forge distinct identities as the four major denominational traditions of English Dissent. It tracks the proliferation of Anglophone Protestant Dissent beyond England—in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the Dutch Republic, New England, Pennsylvania, and the Caribbean. And it presents the latest research on the culture of Dissenting congregations, including their relations with the parish, their worship, preaching, gender relations, and lay experience.

For early modern Europeans, the past was a measure of most things, good and bad. For that reason it was also hotly contested, manipulated, and far too important to be left to historians alone. Memory in Early Modern Europe offers a lively and accessible introduction to the many ways in which Europeans engaged with the past and 'practised' memory in the three centuries between 1500 and 1800. From childhood memories and local customs to war traumas and peacekeeping , it analyses how Europeans tried to control, mobilize and reconfigure memories of the past. Challenging the long-standing view that memory cultures transformed around 1800, it argues for the continued relevance of early modern memory practices in modern societies.