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This book guides readers through 10 pervasive fictions about medieval history, provides them with the sources and analytical tools to critique those fictions, and identifies what really happened in the Middle Ages. This book is the first to present fictions about the medieval world to serious students of history. Instead of merely listing myths and stating they are wrong, this volume promotes critical historical analysis of those myths and how they came to be. Each of the ten chapters outlines a pervasive modern myth about medieval European history, describing "What People Think Happened" and "What Really Happened," and illustrating both trends with primary source documents. The book demonstrates that historical fictions also have a history, and that while we need to replace those fictions with facts about the medieval past, we can also benefit from understanding how a fiction about the Middle Ages developed and what that says about our modern perspectives on the past. Through this innovative presentation, readers are introduced to a wide range of sources, from Roman imperial perspectives on the "Fall of Rome" to songs of chivalry and chronicles of the Crusades, scientific treatises on the shape of the Earth and the creation of the universe and early modern stories and textbooks that developed or perpetuated historical myths.

History --- Civilization, Medieval. --- Middle Ages. --- Errors, inventions, etc.

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James Francis Edward Stuart, the Prince of Wales born in 1688, was not a commoner's child smuggled into the queen's birthing chamber in a warming pan, but many people said he was. In 1708, the same prince did not quite land in Scotland with a force of 5,000 men in order to claim the Scottish crown, but writers busied themselves with exploring what would have happened if he had succeeded. These fictions had as potent an effect on the political culture of late Stuart and early Hanoverian Britain as many events that really did happen. From the alleged "Popish Plot" of Titus Oates to the South Sea Bubble, John McTague draws on a rich variety of sources - popular, archival and literary - to investigate the propagandic and literary exploitation of three kinds of things that did not occur at this time: failures which inspired "what if" narratives, speculative futures which failed to come to pass and "pure" fictions created and disseminated for political gain. Finally, a ground-breaking reading of the various versions of Pope's Dunciad reveals a work that in its exploration of historic causation and agency and its repurposing of the material of contemporary political and literary culture deploys many of the strategies explored in earlier chapters to present Hanoverian reality as if it were counterhistory.

1660-1837. --- Great Britain --- Great Britain --- Great Britain --- Great Britain. --- History --- Errors, inventions, etc. --- History --- History

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It’s tempting to think that we live in an unprecedentedly fertile age for conspiracy theories, with seemingly each churn of the news cycle bringing fresh manifestations of large-scale paranoia. But the sad fact is that these narratives of suspicion—and the delusional psychologies that fuel them—have been a constant presence in American life for nearly as long as there’s been an America. In this sweeping book, Thomas Milan Konda traces the country’s obsession with conspiratorial thought from the early days of the republic to our own anxious moment. Conspiracies of Conspiracies details centuries of sinister speculations—from antisemitism and anti-Catholicism to UFOs and reptilian humanoids—and their often incendiary outcomes. Rather than simply rehashing the surface eccentricities of such theories, Konda draws from his unprecedented assemblage of conspiratorial writing to crack open the mindsets that lead people toward these self-sealing worlds of denial. What is distinctively American about these theories, he argues, is not simply our country’s homegrown obsession with them but their ongoing prevalence and virulence. Konda proves that conspiracy theories are no harmless sideshow. They are instead the dark and secret heart of American political history—one that is poisoning the bloodstream of an increasingly sick body politic.

Conspiracy theories. --- History --- Errors, inventions, etc. --- New World Order. --- belief system. --- conspiracism. --- conspiracy meme. --- conspiracy theory. --- history.

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Ever since the collapse of the Third Reich, anxieties have persisted about Nazism's revival in the form of a Fourth Reich. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld reveals, for the first time, these postwar nightmares of a future that never happened and explains what they tell us about Western political, intellectual, and cultural life. He shows how postwar German history might have been very different without the fear of the Fourth Reich as a mobilizing idea to combat the right-wing forces that genuinely threatened the country's democratic order. He then explores the universalization of the Fourth Reich by left-wing radicals in the 1960s, its transformation into a source of pop culture entertainment in the 1970s, and its embrace by authoritarian populists and neo-Nazis seeking to attack the European Union since the year 2000. This is a timely analysis of a concept that is increasingly relevant in an era of surging right-wing politics.

National socialism --- Nazis --- Right-wing extremists --- Political culture --- Collective memory --- Fear --- Culture --- Political science --- Fright --- Emotions --- Anxiety --- Horror --- Collective remembrance --- Common memory --- Cultural memory --- Emblematic memory --- Historical memory --- National memory --- Public memory --- Social memory --- Memory --- Social psychology --- Group identity --- National characteristics --- National socialists --- Fascists --- Socialists --- Neo-Nazis --- Nazism --- Authoritarianism --- Fascism --- Neo-Nazism --- Totalitarianism --- World War, 1939-1945 --- History. --- Political aspects --- Causes --- Germany --- Alemania --- Ashkenaz --- BRD --- Bu̇gd Naĭramdakh German Uls --- Bundesrepublik Deutschland --- Deutsches Reich --- Deutschland --- Doitsu --- Doitsu Renpō Kyōwakoku --- Federal Republic of Germany --- Federalʹna Respublika Nimechchyny --- FRN --- German Uls --- Germania --- Germanii︠a︡ --- Germanyah --- Gjermani --- Grossdeutsches Reich --- Jirmānīya --- KhBNGU --- Kholboony Bu̇gd Naĭramdakh German Uls --- Nimechchyna --- Repoblika Federalin'i Alemana --- República de Alemania --- República Federal de Alemania --- Republika Federal Alemmana --- Vācijā --- Veĭmarskai︠a︡ Respublika --- Weimar Republic --- Weimarer Republik --- ХБНГУ --- Германия --- جرمانيا --- ドイツ --- ドイツ連邦共和国 --- ドイツ レンポウ キョウワコク --- Germany (East) --- Germany (Territory under Allied occupation, 1945-1955) --- Germany (Territory under Allied occupation, 1945-1955 : British Zone) --- Germany (Territory under Allied occupation, 1945-1955 : French Zone) --- Germany (Territory under Allied occupation, 1945-1955 : Russian Zone) --- Germany (Territory under Allied occupation, 1945-1955 : U.S. Zone) --- Germany (West) --- Holy Roman Empire --- Politics and government --- History --- Errors, inventions, etc. --- Deguo --- 德国 --- Gėrman --- Герман Улс