The Franks of Outremer and their Western Brethren: examining the conflict through Roman Expansion in the Principality of Antioch and County of Tripoli (1230’s—1280’s)

Статья посвящена одной из главных тем и концептов в историографии крестовых походов – конфликту между западными крестоносцами «первого поколения» и франками Заморской земли (Outremer), т.е. теми, кто был рожден на Ближнем Востоке и не знал иного дома, кроме городов и долин Леванта. Автор критически анализирует концептуальные воззрения на суть данного конфликта в историографии XIX-XXI вв. и рассматривает полувековой опыт экспансии римской знати в княжестве Антиохийском и графстве Триполийском (инициированной браком князя Боэмунда V со знатной римлянкой, Люсьен де Сеньи). В отличие от широко-известного конфликта между братьями Лузиньянами и палестинскими баронами в 1180-х гг., экспансия римлян в Триполи и Антиохии действительно может служить редким и полноценным примером острого конфликта между притязаниями западных нобилей и интересами местных, левантийских элит на Латинском Востоке. The article deals with one of the main themes and concepts in the historiography of the Crusades – the conflict between the western, «first generation» Crusaders and pilgrims with the Franks of Outremer, those who were born and knew no home outside of the Middle East. The author critically examines the perception of the conflict in the 19th—21st century historiography, and proceeds with a study of the 50-year period of Roman aristocratic expansion in the Principality of Antioch and County of Tripoli (made possible through the marriage of Prince Bohemond V with the Roman noblewoman Lucien de Segni). This expansion – unlike the infamous clash between the Lusignan brothers and the Palestinian nobility in the 1180’s – was perhaps the purest manifestation of the conflict between consolidated western expansion and the local Levantine elites in the Crusader States.

“A Long and Mighty Race of Heroic Men”

The chapter scrutinizes the efforts of the DAR in the Midwest and West to commemorate western expansion during the antebellum period. It reveals that the organization used the memory of Western pioneers and explorers to maintain strict racial boundaries of national inclusion, while simultaneously upholding traditional gender binaries within white America. Most of the DAR’s activism in the Midwest and West revolved around marking the trails that pioneer families and explorers had used to reach the region prior to the Civil War. But in stark contrast to the remembrance of the American Revolution, women were conspicuously absent from the tales the Daughters offered prior to the 1920s. Western Daughters highlighted primarily the heroic accomplishments of pioneer men, whom they regarded as masculine warriors for their violent resistance against Native Americans. Only the organization’s post-World War I Madonna of the Trail campaign focused on the memory of pioneer mothers, but as in the case of the Revolution, female pioneers’ heroic determination was interpreted as part and parcel of women’s natural instincts as wives and mothers.

Re-Viewing Western U.S. Rephotography in the Anthropocene

In this paper, documentary and artistic pairings of nineteenth-century survey photographs with rephotographs from the 1970s-2000s of identical views of western U.S. sites are read within divergent temporal and historiographical paradigms about historical and geological change. Viewed and interpreted within the legacy of American technocratic “progress” and of debates about the “old” and “new” western histories, this juxtaposed work across a century speaks to shifts in historians’ paradigms about the meaning of western expansion, from optimism to tragedy, and to whether geologic and human history are continuous or discontinuous. The ecological rupture of the Anthropocene returns us to nineteenth-century debates, which in part motivated survey photographs, about whether changes in geological and life forms are gradual or catastrophic—or some uneasy combination of the two. What haunts these photographs today is both a lost ideological past and a precarious, humanly viable future that the Anthropocene exposes.

Proust And The Ollendorff’s Method

The first part of the paper discusses the meanders of collaboration between Marcel Proust and Paris-based publisher Paul Ollendorff that spanned over twenty years (1893-1913). Further on, Western expansion of the Ollendorff family from Rawicz, Poland, is briefly sketched. Another passage concerns a Maeterlinck pastiche by Proust (Echo, 1911), seen in the context of Ollendorff’s conversation-based method of learning foreign languages. The author suggests Proust was using this method to learn English himself. The paper ends with a survey of several references to the Ollendorff method in the twentieth century Polish prose.

Nebraska

This chapter discusses the discovery of the South Pass through the Rocky Mountains and its impact on western expansion. It also looks at the growing sectional divisions over slavery’s expansion, the congressional debate over the route for the first transcontinental railroad, and Stephen Douglas’ efforts to organize the Nebraska territory. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the political feud between Missouri’s two senators, David Rice Atchison and Thomas Hart Benton, and its impact on the future organization of Nebraska.