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Beginning with the hypothesis that adult education in a region is shaped by its dominant social philosophy or culture, the history and trends of adult education in two Canadian provinces, Alberta and Quebec, are contrasted. ... Read more

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Eleven years have passed since the end of World War II and the collapse of Nazi Germany. But in those years Martin Bormann and Mengele, safe in their hideouts in the jungles of South America, have been planning the birth of the Fourth Reich. Now they are planning to launch their evil plan. ... Read more

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If a house divided against itself cannot stand, does it help to declare it a condominium? This book examines why the common Yugoslav and Bosnian houses came to be divided, and how international diplomatic activities to resolve the conflicts have been misconceived.
Through an analysis that combines cultural examination and constitutional study, Robert Hayden argues that almost everything that has happened in the former Yugoslavia since 1989 is congruent with the logic of the politicians who won election in the free and fair elections of 1990 and with the constitutional structures that these politicians have created. Once the idea of a common state for all of the Yugoslav peoples lost electorally, the conflicts that followed were so logical as to be inescapable.
Throughout, the analysis relies almost exclusively on materials from the former Yugoslavia itself and on what participants said to each other in their own languages rather than in English to the world community. Drawing on the work of Max Weber and Tzvetan Todorov, this book also discusses the ethical and moral dangers of ignoring the probable consequences of actions that might be desirable in the abstract. A major conclusion is that the actions of the international community were never likely to achieve their stated goals, because they were based on premises unrelated to those driving the Yugoslav peoples themselves.
This book addresses issues of interest in anthropology, political science, international relations, law, ethics, East European studies, and policy making.
Robert M. Hayden is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Associate Professor of Law, and Director, Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Pittsburgh.
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Customer Reviews (5)

Outstanding
Outstanding for public law scholars. Shows how the unskillful management of conflict in a constitutional system leads to dissolution.

Good analysis of constitutional nationalism
"Blueprints" is an extensive analysis of a largely overlooked and insufficiently studied aspect of Yugoslavia's break-up: the actual changes made to the legal order of the separate republics and the federation as a whole, and their consequences. One of the most important initial points made by Hayden is that the Yugoslav Constitution of 1974, which was effective until the country's demise, established a very complicated, decentralized and hard-to-govern federation. The ambiguities contained in many of this constitution's provisions facilitated later moves by various federal units (the republics) to justify as constitutonal their moves for greater sovereignty at the federation's expense. Hayden's consideration of the various constitutional structures established in the various republics after Yugoslavia's break-up forms the heart of this book. He argues that countries like Slovenia, Croatia, etc. can be characterized as exhibiting `constitutional nationalism,' since the predominance in the state of one ethnic nation is embedded in the very constitutional and legal order. Also interesting is his sharp critique of the constitutional fiction in place in Bosnia-Herzegovina and its `entities.' Perhaps the book's main weakness is that it fails to sufficiently emphasize that the constitutional disputes occurring in Yugoslavia just before the country's break-up were not occurring in a political vacuum; Hayden's argument seems to be that the Slovenes bear most of the initial responsibility for Yugoslavia's collapse because of the amendments to their republic constitution amounted to a unilateral derogation of the federal constitution. This fails to take into account Serbia's less than constitutional abrogation of autonomy in its provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo, and even the federal republic of Montenegro. In the book's preface and introduction, Hayden attempts - rather unconvincingly - to explain away his lack of focus on Serbia, but this remains the primary weakness in his overall argument. Nevertheless, this is still a very important contribution to understanding Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav political and legal problems.

Yugoslav Logic - An Oxymoron?
Robert Hayden is uniquely qualified to examine the Yugoslav mess - as a legal scholar who is deeply familiar with the families, clans, tribes and nations who made up the first and second Yugoslavias and as ananthropologist who can find his way through the constitutional junglesthose peoples created. This is essential reading for anyone who wants tounderstand how the Bosnian civil war developed out of competing competingconstitutional interpretations.

Yugoslav Logic - An Oxymoron?
Robert Hayden is uniquely qualified to examine the Yugoslav mess - as a legal scholar who is deeply familiar with the families, clans, tribes and nations who made up the first and second Yugoslavias and as ananthropologist who can find his way through the constitutional junglesthose peoples created. This is essential reading for anyone who wants tounderstand how the Bosnian civil war developed out of competing competingconstitutional interpretations.

Yugoslav Logic - An Oxymoron?
Robert Hayden is uniquely qualified to examine the Yugoslav mess - as a legal scholar who is deeply familiar with the families, clans, tribes and nations who made up the first and second Yugoslavias and as ananthropologist who can find his way through the constitutional junglesthose peoples created. This is essential reading for anyone who wants tounderstand how the Bosnian civil war developed out of competing competingconstitutional interpretations. ... Read more

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This book provides the first detailed analysis of a traditional Indian legal institution, a caste panchayat. It discusses the organization of the panchayat, the cases handled by it and the rationale behind its decisions and also the reasons why such institutions are not compatible with the Indian democracy. ... Read more

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A collection of essays on poetry and the experiences that influenced this poet
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Biographical sketches of nine Afro-Americans who have made significant contributions to medicine. ... Read more

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A three ring binder from the Sierra Reloading Club, filled with information on reloading all types of ammo.A must for a collector or anyone interested in reloading their own ammunition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

I read it for tech info.It's probably more useful to a reloader.
I'd buy a newer version next time.Some calibers weren't available at the publication of this version. ... Read more

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Hayden White is celebrated as one of the great minds in the humanities. Since the publication of his groundbreaking monograph, Metahistory, in 1973, White's work has been crucial to disciplines where narrative is of primary concern, including history, literary studies, anthropology, philosophy, art history, and film and media studies.

This volume, deftly introduced by Robert Doran, gathers in one place White's important -- and often hard-to-find -- essays exploring his revolutionary theories of historical writing and narrative. These texts find White at his most essayistic, engaging a wide range of topics and thinkers with characteristic insight and elegance.

The Fiction of Narrative traces the arc and evolution of White's field-defining thought and will become standard reading for students and scholars of historiography, the theory of history, and literary studies.

Praise for Hayden White

"No other historian appears to be at the frontier of so many developments or so skillful at integrating them into traditional American scholarship in the history of ideas." -- Journal of Modern History

"White is a master of critical and provocative thought." -- H-Net Reviews

"White has arguably changed the course of historiography in the past twenty years... Any serious historian will need to engage the issues and answers that White raises." -- Religious Studies Review

"White lays out his arguments with a clarity and rigor that few can match." -- Choice

Customer Reviews (1)

Enjoyable but very deep
The Fiction of Narrative, Hayden White, essays
Essays on History, Literature, and Theory 1957-2007


This book was hard. Really. That's the first thing to say. Some of the concepts were so over my head I didn't even know where to begin. So I put it down, and did some research on Hayden White, the author of this collection of essays. Turns out he's a rock star in the world of narrative theory and literature. Born in 1928, he produced these essays independently, before Robert Doran, the editor, compiled them as one unit for Johns Hopkins Press.


I needed to learn a few things first. "Tropes", for one. These are figures of speech that allow for metaphors, irony, and allegory to fit in with a narrative. For example, saying that a policeman is "the long arm of the law" is a trope. Get it? When a news outlet says, "The White House reports that..." we know that they mean a representative of the White House stated something, not that the building itself spoke. White discusses these tropes at length, and it appears that he asserts that you can identify a period in history by the tropes used to describe the time. I'm way too dumb to analyze that.

However, I did continue with the book and I have what I hope is a basic grasp of White's theories on literature and history. He takes to task those who say a history book is a neutral text, and that history can be described without any political leanings or personal slant. And the use of tropes is just one way to reveal the subtle motives an author may have within his text.

In terms of history, the editor Robert Doran noted, after discussing the literary technique of foreshadowing, that "and so with history: to confer meaning retrospectively, to see one event in light of another as narrativistically connected (if not constructed), is precisely what history does. Obviously, the French Revolution would have a very different significance if the Axis powers had prevailed during World War II...And how could the election of the first black president of a nation founded by slave owners not be regarded as the figural and ultimately ironic fulfillment of the national ideals as set forth in this nation's constitution." So in viewing a past via present knowledge surely changes how that past is interpreted, and how it is explained.

Of the essays included, my favorite was "The Structure of Historical Narrative" that White wrote in 1972. Partly because of recent research on de Tocqueville and partly because of how he explains literary conventions in a historical setting, I found this essay fascinating. He takes two iconic works of history and contrasts their styles. One is de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (remember Parrot & Olivier?) and the other is Leopold von Ranke's History of Germany during the Age of the Reformation (other works are mentioned as well). White states that Ranke's work "tells a story with a beginning, a middle, and end....its subject is an entity that is undergoing a process of change from one condition to another while remaining identifiably what it was all along...it "explains" what happened during the process of change."

Contrasting this is Democracy in America, which has an indeterminate style that lacks the framework of Ranke's book. Instead "it can be said to have a kind of beginning, consisting of a background sketch of how democracy was born in Europe" and then goes on to give "an account of the institutions and forces in play in American democracy at the time of the writing of the book." So it doesn't fit the story model that Ranke uses, and instead leaves the conclusion to be drawn from what the reader knows. This of course, changes by who the reader is, as well as the fact that future readers in succeeding generations will be able to apply to it what they've seen occur in history since.

What I took from this, both as a reader and a wannabe author, is that structuring a narrative is far more than throwing in a few twists, some clues, some memorable characters, and a stunning denouement. Instead, leaving options open for the reader to insert their own perceptions would likely lead to a more appealing and insightful novel.

Additionally, in researching White I found a remarkable story about a legal battle he had with the Los Angeles Police Department in 1975, one that went all the way to the California Supreme Court. In it, he asserted as a professor at UCLA that the LAPD were posing as students to gather information on campus about teachers and other students. Tax money was being spent to support this illegal surveillance. He won the case, where the Supreme Court determined that without a specific crime to investigate, the police couldn't simply troll for information on the UCLA campus** White is now retired, having taught at UCSC and Stanford. ... Read more

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