Paul E . Michelson
Huntington University, History, Emeritus
- Dr. Paul E. Michelson is Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at Huntington University, where he began teachin... moreDr. Paul E. Michelson is Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at Huntington University, where he began teaching in 1974. He has been three times a Fulbright fellow in Romania (1971-1973, 1982-1983, 1989-1990). His book, Romanian Politics, 1859-1871: From Prince Cuza to Prince Carol (1998) was awarded the 2000 Bălcescu Prize for History by the Romanian Academy.He is the author, editor, or co-editor of six books and over 150 articles.He is past President and Secretary of the Society for Romanian Studies and served as the Secretary of the Conference on Faith and History.
My eMail address is pmichelson@huntington.edu, My web page is www.pmichelson.com.
MY KIDNEY TRANSPLANT was June 24, 2020. For subsequent updates, see my blog on my home page at www.pmichelson.com.(Dr. Paul E. Michelson is Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at Huntington University, where he began teaching in 1974. He has been three times a Fulbright fellow in Romania (1971-1973, 1982-1983, 1989-1990). His book, Romanian Politics, 1859-1871: From Prince Cuza to Prince Carol (1998) was awarded the 2000 Bălcescu Prize for History by the Romanian Academy.He is the author, editor, or co-editor of six books and over 150 articles.He is past President and Secretary of the Society for Romanian Studies and served as the Secretary of the Conference on Faith and History. <br /><br />My eMail address is pmichelson@huntington.edu, My web page is www.pmichelson.com.<br /><br />MY KIDNEY TRANSPLANT was June 24, 2020. For subsequent updates, see my blog on my home page at www.pmichelson.com.)edit - I studied with Glenn E. Torrey at Emporia State and Barbara and Charles Jelavich at Indiana University.edit
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
The Nationalities Problem in Transylvania, 1867-1940: A Social History of the Romanian Minority under Hungarian Rule, 1867-1918, and of the Hungarian Minority under Romanian Rule, 1918-1940. By Sándor Bíró. Trans. Mario D. Fenyo. Boulder: Social Science Monographs, 1992. xix, 744 pp. Index. $33.0...more
Research Interests:
... 319, quoted in Stelian Neagoe, Ion Nistor cel mai de seamă istoric şi om politic al Bucovinei [Ion Nistor, Foremost Historian and Politician of Bucovina], in Ion Nistor, Istoria Bucovinei [History of Bucovina], edited by Stelian... more
... 319, quoted in Stelian Neagoe, Ion Nistor cel mai de seamă istoric şi om politic al Bucovinei [Ion Nistor, Foremost Historian and Politician of Bucovina], in Ion Nistor, Istoria Bucovinei [History of Bucovina], edited by Stelian Neagoe, Humanitas Editure, 1991, pp. xviii-xix. Page 3. ...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests: History()
()
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Vol. 31, No. 1 ♦ 2012 in A Thousand Darknesses, but among those that stand out is her extended analysis of Schindler’s Ark/Schindler’s List. Franklin tracks the history of the book and the film, explaining how the changes that Keneally... more
Vol. 31, No. 1 ♦ 2012 in A Thousand Darknesses, but among those that stand out is her extended analysis of Schindler’s Ark/Schindler’s List. Franklin tracks the history of the book and the film, explaining how the changes that Keneally and Spielberg made were appropriate for their respective media; in doing so, she keeps her readers aware of both the power and cost of the application of imagination to historical fact. In this chapter, she raises the issue of the moral quandary inherent in Holocaust representation to a new level: imaginative treatments educate an otherwise unfamiliar audience to the subject and simultaneously risk oversimplifying and fictionalizing an extremely complex event to the point of making it fodder for Holocaust deniers, a risk Franklin dismisses as ridiculous. Franklin’s meticulous research is reflected in the rest of the book as she shows how memoirs and other supposedly authentic works have benefitted from imaginative literary editing while, at the same time, she exposes survivor imposters. However, her brilliant, thoroughly accessible interpretations notwithstanding, A Thousand Darknesses frustrates serious students because it is not documented, nor is there even a rudimentary bibliography, most probably because most of the chapters began life as articles in The New Republic, where Franklin is a senior editor and literary critic. Moreover, Franklin’s readers would assume that only men wrote “significant” (Oxford University Press touts the book as an investigation of the “most significant” works) memoirs or novels; except for a brief discussion of the imposter survivor Carl Friedman— a non-Jewish Dutch writer whose real name is Carolina Klop—and a couple of passing references to Cynthia Ozick, we have no analyses of major women survivor authors, Ida Fink or Charlotte Delbo, for example. And my discomfort with Franklin’s use of the word perished where murdered is more accurate is a minor quibble. A Thousand Darknesses is a welcome addition to the growing but not crowded shelf of Holocaust literary criticism. Myrna Goldenberg Professor Emerita Montgomery College, Maryland
Research Interests: Philosophy, Population, Nazism, Eugenics, Romanian, and 2 moreEthnic Cleansing and Shofar(Ethnic Cleansing and Shofar)
(Ethnic Cleansing and Shofar)
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
The book gives some insight into how people who had the means to play an active role in shaping post-1990 memory politics in Hungary viewed the events of 1956. Yet the full picture is yet to be seen, as is the final outcome of the memory... more
The book gives some insight into how people who had the means to play an active role in shaping post-1990 memory politics in Hungary viewed the events of 1956. Yet the full picture is yet to be seen, as is the final outcome of the memory politics struggle itself. The approaching fiftieth anniversary of the revolution will provide a suitable opportunity for James to return for further observation before creating a new, extended, and rewritten version.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Taken from the Romanian viewpoint, this is a critical analysis of the different and often conflicting Allied interests - frequently unrelated to Romania itself - which brought about Romania's absorption into the Soviet orbit after... more
Taken from the Romanian viewpoint, this is a critical analysis of the different and often conflicting Allied interests - frequently unrelated to Romania itself - which brought about Romania's absorption into the Soviet orbit after World War II. The book also explores the potential of Romanian moderate forces, the rift within the Romanian Communist Party itself, and the difficult relationship between the Romanian Party and the Kremlin.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Book review
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
vantageous role in regional trade relations. Yet he elaborates only briefly on his primary contentions and presents scanty evidence to support them. Like Malecki's discussion, Ingomar Bog's (Marburg an derLahn) examination of army... more
vantageous role in regional trade relations. Yet he elaborates only briefly on his primary contentions and presents scanty evidence to support them. Like Malecki's discussion, Ingomar Bog's (Marburg an derLahn) examination of army provisioning and war financing would have benefited from a fuller treatment, for his subject raises the extremely important issue of relations between the court at Vienna and the provincial estates. On the other hand, the editor's own contribution, focusing upon trade connections between Hungary and Italy, runs to almost sixty pages, and while it represents a magnificent piece of scholarship, its length seems out of proportion to its relative importance for the symposium's overall theme. Nevertheless, despite these imbalances and inevitable gaps in coverage, the first International Graz Symposium has contributed substantially to a subject upon which relatively little research has hitherto been completed. If the publication of this volume—which provokes as many questions as it actually answers— stimulates other scholars to investigate the economic repercussions of the Turkish wars, then the symposium's ultimate objectives will have been fulfilled.
Research Interests:
acceptable to discuss the Great Terror and to criticize the secret police, had come to an end’ (p. 30). Fedor’s most fascinating chapters describe the results of her research into the Khrushchev-era making of films about the secret... more
acceptable to discuss the Great Terror and to criticize the secret police, had come to an end’ (p. 30). Fedor’s most fascinating chapters describe the results of her research into the Khrushchev-era making of films about the secret police. Chapter Three describes how The Chekist (1963) had been initially planned as a film with clear ‘anti-Stalinist’ lines. From 1962, however, the producers ran into difficulties as Khrushchev supported an illiberal crack-down on literature and art (p. 84). Consequently, the final version of the screenplay bore ‘hardly any trace of the initial ambitions to use the film as a vehicle for condemning those original chekists who abused their positions and went on to perpetrate the atrocities of the Great Terror’ (p. 86). Chapter Four describes how, in the making of the film A Shot in the Fog (1964), the impact of KGB ‘consultants’ made an initial version of the screenplay virtually unrecognisable: Ivan Pyr’ev, chair of the Artistic Council and a key figure at Mosfilm, was driven to exclaim: ‘Where’s the fog and where’s the shot?’ (p. 91). Yet somewhat bizarrely the KGB consultants themselves lacked a clear understanding of what was permissible in depicting the secret police (p. 101). As a result, the mythmakers again took refuge in pseudo-religiosity. Chekists were depicted ‘not as the enforcers and monitors of state secrecy’, but rather like priests, ‘benevolent figures with a privileged, higher perspective and insight’ into the troubles of mere mortals (p. 106). Chapter Five turns to the post-Soviet reinvigoration of the secret police under Yel’tsin and Putin which began following the December 1994 invasion of Chechnya, accompanied by a revival of the chekists’ ‘glorious traditions’ (p. 121). In December 1997 Yel’tsin signalled this change when he commented in a radio address: ‘We might have bent the stick a little too far in exposing the crimes of the security organs. After all, their history includes not only black periods, but also glorious pages, of which one can indeed be proud’ (p. 127). Amongst other things, this permitted, as Fedor outlines inChapter Six, the rehabilitation of Andropovas a political leader, symbolisedby thenprimeministerPutin’s 1999 restoration of theAndropov plaque outside the Lubyanka. Chapter Seven considers how an initial tendency to develop a nationalistic, secularised secret police mythology soon gave way to the forging of an ideological alliance between the secret police and the Orthodox Church (tellingly reminiscent of the way in which Soviet-era myth had tended to give way to pseudo-religious rhetoric). This close relationship between the secret police and the Russian Orthodox Church was commemorated with the 2002 consecration of a new church at the Lubyanka. On the one hand, the Moscow Patriarchate sought to use the Federal Security Service (FSB) to ‘legitimize its claims that non-Orthodox religions pose a threat not to the Orthodox Church, but to the security of Russian society and culture as a whole’ (p. 168). On the other hand, Putin’s chekist mythology now adeptly added a ‘spiritual dimension’ to security, and the spiritual or religious sphere underwent a process of ‘securitization’ (p. 164). As the FSB assiduously worked ‘on the religious front’, ‘harassing and on occasion persecuting alternative religious organizations’, in the process the distinction between religious sects and foreign intelligence services became blurred (p. 168). Moreover, the notion of ‘spiritual security’ was extended to justify a ‘gradual restoration of old Soviet-era alliances between the security apparatus and state psychiatry’ (p. 176), as well as the ‘reinstatement of censorship and increased state control over the media’ (p. 179). In the process not only religious minorities, but also human rights defenders and civic activists were demonised as spies (p. 173).
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
The paper is an analysis of how Tolkien's thought on fairy-stories evolved between his 1939 St. Andrews Andrew Lang Lecture Fairy Stories, through his contribution On Fairy-Stories to the 1947 Essays Presented to Charles Williams, and... more
The paper is an analysis of how Tolkien's thought on fairy-stories evolved between his 1939 St. Andrews Andrew Lang Lecture Fairy Stories, through his contribution On Fairy-Stories to the 1947 Essays Presented to Charles Williams, and concluding with his 1967 essay on the nature of Faërie.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Book review
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
The paper is an exposition and synthesis of C. S. Lewis’s ideas on story as elaborated in his essay “On Stories” in the Charles Williams festschrift (1947). The purpose of Lewis’s essay was to flush out of the underbrush of literature... more
The paper is an exposition and synthesis of C. S. Lewis’s ideas on story as elaborated in his essay “On Stories” in the Charles Williams festschrift (1947). The purpose of Lewis’s essay was to flush out of the underbrush of literature what distinguishes true Story (with a capital letter “S”) from story as mere entertainment. The paper concludes that a key to Lewis’s essay on stories is to be found in his initial vocation as a poet and his ideas about poetic imagination.
Research Interests:
The paper develops the idea that post-communist societies are dysfunctional societies and applies this analysis to a study of contemporary Romania, 1989-2011. It looks at how the historical experiences of Romania both before and during... more
The paper develops the idea that post-communist societies are dysfunctional societies and applies this analysis to a study of contemporary Romania, 1989-2011. It looks at how the historical experiences of Romania both before and during communist rule created such a society, the development of Romania as a dysfunctional society between 1989 and 2002, and assesses the progress Romania has made in dealing with its legacy between 2002 and 2011 on the basis of several international indices