On the judgment of history / Joan Wallach Scott.

See also: In the name of history by Joan Wallach Scott.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preface : History, race, nation -- 1. The nation-state as the telos of history : Nuremberg, 1946 -- 2. The limits of forgiveness : South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 1996 -- 3. Calling history to account : the movement for reparations for slavery in the United States -- Epilogue : Revisioning history.

"After watching the 2017 Charlottesville riots, Joan Wallach Scott began thinking about our standard views of history as progressive, and the culmination of progress in the Western European nation-state since the 18th century. The return of once-discredited ideas-Nazism, white supremacy, nationalism-poses serious threats to democratic institutions and values, and upends our commonly-used adages about "the judgment of history" or being "on the right side of history." The three chapters examine the Nuremberg Tribunal, South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the movement for reparations for slavery in the U.S. Scott examines how our association of these events with the expectation that history moves in an ever-improving linear direction. Instead, Scott forces us to reassess the history of these cases, not as an appeal to how history will ultimately judge these events, but rather as a need to perpetuate the nation-state and its claims to morality"-- Provided by publisher.

Joan Wallach Scott is professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Her Columbia University Press books include Gender and the Politics of History, thirtieth anniversary edition (2018), and Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom (2019).

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