Failure haunts Mexico's historical imagination. Mexican intellectuals express a negative view of their country's history--especially vis-à-vis its nineteenth-century founding--and this negativity spills over into contemporary political and social discourse. To be sure, they have much to lament about the nineteenth century: multiple foreign invasions, rampant political instability and cronyism, excessive foreign debt, heavy-handed military leaders, and lest we forget, the loss of half the national territory. My dissertation analyzes narratives of failure in five historical novels, written between 1982 and 2005: Jorge Ibargüengoitia's Los pasos de López (1982), Rosa Beltrán's La corte de los ilusos (1995), Ignacio Solares' La invasión (2005), Fernando del Paso's Noticias del imperio (1987), and Enrique Serna's El seductor de la patria (1999). I define narratives of failure as discursive strategies that highlight--and often poeticize--perceived cultural, political, and social shortcomings. They are historical arguments that attempt to explain, justify, embellish, expose, or reinterpret contemporary problems as the atavistic result of prior shortcomings. They mediate between lofty aspirations and unsatisfied goals. They seek to ameliorate the psychological trauma resulting from loss. And despite apparent pessimism, these narratives tend to be fiercely nationalistic. It might be said that the transmission of failure narratives from one generation of intellectuals to the next has concretized their existence. Once in place, narratives of failure inform debates about nationhood, democracy, stability, and autonomy. Inertia propels these ideas forward. Despite the prevalence of these narratives in most genres, nowhere does failure manifest itself more clearly than in historical novels that recreate the nineteenth century. Furthermore these narratives are intimately tied up with the nation's guiding fictions. As authors employ narratives of failure, they reinterpret the nation's foundational moments. At times this serves to challenge official stories and dogmas or to liberate enduring symbols for reinterpretation. Narratives of failure challenge citizens to rethink their nation, their history, and themselves.

Intresset för historiedidaktik ledde mig till Skolverkets Kommentarmaterial till kursplanen i historia där begreppet historisk empati återkom i relevanta sammanhang utan en närmare definiering. Jag bestämde mig för att ta reda på det vilket ledde till att syftet blev att se hur svensk historiedidaktisk forskning definierar begreppet historisk empati samt vad som aktiverar och utvecklar begreppet historisk empati enligt nationell forskning. För att ta reda på syftet och besvara mina frågeställningar användes en systematisk litteraturstudie med en induktiv ansats. Utifrån svensk historiedidaktisk forskning med internationell referenslitteratur som språngbräda insåg jag genom den induktiva metoden hur tre kategorier bildades utifrån forskares definitioner samt metoder för hur begreppet historisk empati kunde utvecklas hos individen. Forskare närmade sig begreppet genom att hänvisa till att begreppet historisk empati utvecklades antingen av en kognitiv förmåga eller ur en kontextuell förståelse men begreppet historisk empati kunde även utvecklas genom att en individ blev känslomässigt engagerad och därför motiverad till att lära vilket i sig kunde utveckla begreppet historisk empati. Mina slutsatser är att kategorierna tillsammans leder till att historisk empati utvecklas hos individen. Vad forskare menar utvecklar historisk empati hos individen är däremot olika då skillnaden är att forskare tillåter olika metoder till att utveckla begreppet historisk empati. De forskare som menar att det enbart krävs en kognitiv förmåga till att utveckla begreppet historisk empati ser inte att motivationen av att bli emotionellt engagerad som en del i att utveckla en historisk empatisk förmåga. Ytterligare finns de forskare som anser att en emotionell känsla kan fungera som motivation vilket leder till att en nyfikenhet skapas som leder till att en kognitiv förmåga byggs upp och att begreppet historisk empati utvecklas.

This historical sociolinguistic study investigates the language of English seamen in the seventeenth century. Built on language data compiled from log books (Matthews 1935) and a survey of the maritime population from 1582, the author argues that the seafaring community had developed its own sociolect, which was based on the dialects of Southern England. Writers (e.g. Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe) and historians describe this “Ship English”: [S]ailors stood out from landsmen in a variety of ways. In the first place by their dress [...] Sailors were also recognisable by their speech, in which technical terms, slang and oaths had thickened to produce a private language. (Burke 1996:44-45) Following Ross and Bailey (1988), the author argues that this sociolect emerged from dialect contact (Trudgill 2004) aboard ship, with Southern dialects as the major input varieties: Several phonological features of Southern Early Modern English (e.g. diphthongization of Middle English /u:/ and /a:/, split of /u/ into /ʌ/ and /ʊ/, /w/-/v/ interchange) are pervasive in the data. Apart from being a interesting case study in itself, the results might be of importance for research on pidgins and creoles and colonial dialects: it has been argued (Hancock 1976) that nautical English has had a profound impact on the emergence of anglophone creoles because it – rather than some kind of Standard English – was the actual “superstrate” variety for most creoles. For the same reason, it might have influenced the emergence of the overseas varieties of English. / text

published_or_final_version / English Studies / Master / Master of Arts

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In establishing the range of an Historical Geography it is often wise, for the sake of clarity, to outline those things which are not within the scope of a particular work as well as its actual aim. It is not the aim of this thesis to present a complete historical geography of Brome Countyr nor is it intended to examine selected aspects of the history of the country, simply placing them in their geographical setting in order to show the influence of environment. Rather,its role is to reconstruct the economie landscape of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at meaningful points of cross-section and to ·show how that landscape evolved in its many facets from a virgin wilderness to its present condition. Its purpose is furthermore to provide a source from which can be learned how the present-day problems which face Brome County arose and, with this knowledge as background, how these problems might be overcome. [...]

During the Second World War, more than 22,000 Japanese Canadians were interned to various locations throughout Canada. While more than 60 years have passed since these events, there remains limited research on the impact that this event had on this group of people. Using McCubbin and Patterson’s (1983) Double ABCX model of family stress and adaptation as a framework, this study used historical narratives of 69 Japanese Canadians to gain insight into a) how Japanese Canadians coped with the challenges associated with their internment, and b) what resources they used during this same time period. The analysis of the coping strategies was done using a modified version of existing measures of coping strategies (Folkman, Lazarus, Dunkel-Schetter, DeLongis, & Gruen, 1986; Suedfeld, Krell, Wiebe, & Steel, 1997), and the analysis of resources was done using an adjusted version of Rettig’s (1995) and Tucker and Rice’s (1985) resource classification list. There were no statistically significant differences between Japanese Canadian men and women in their coping strategy use, but that there were differences between the Issei (first generation) and Nisei (second generation). The Issei used Self Control, Positive Reappraisal, and Denail more than the Nisei, while the Nisei used Seeking Social Support more than the Issei. A strong relationship between coping and resources was found; a relationship that has often been assumed, but never tested. The findings from this study also provided additional support for the usefulness of using both narratives and the Double ABCX model in research.

Not for the first time, Marxism is considered to be in a state of 'crisis'. This thesis seeks to 'underlabour' on behalf of a particular version of Marxism, a version articulated with force, coherence and great originality for over two decades within human geography: what David Harvey (1985a: xii), in a paradigmatic formulation, has called 'historicalgeographical materialism'. A research programme, rather than the work of any one individual, historical-geographical materialism has in various ways and at various levels creatively extended the classical Marxist canon in a geographical direction. Yet today it is considered increasingly passe by critics on the Left as well as the Right of human geography, reflecting the wider ennui with Marxism outside the discipline. In particular, it is seen as being too 'modern' - too foundationalist, totalising and authoritative in its cognitive and normative claims - to contribute effectively to a critical human geography for the 1990s. Against this, this thesis seeks to develop an alternative reading of the core claims of this research programme by offering a novel reinterpretation of Marx's mature political-economy. Rewriting Marx's account of what Postone (1996: 1) calls "the fundamental core of capitalism", the thesis puts this reinterpretation of the explanatorydiagnostic basis of Marx's critique to work on three major themes of historicalgeographical materialism: the production of space, the production pf nature and the production of subjectivity. It does so in order to illustrate the explanatory power, thematic reach and theoretical coherence of this reinterpretation, as well as its relevance to the late capitalist world. In closing, the normative or anticipatory-utopian basis of this reinterpreted historical-geographical materialism is considered and its political implications for today thereby scrutinised.