Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country

Abstract

Yugoslavia as History is the first general history of Yugoslavia to appear in English since that country's bloody end in 1991. Its author, John R. Lampe, has written or co-authored a number of previous works on Yugoslav and Balkan history, including the prize-winning Balkan Economic History, 1550-1950.[1] A former foreign service officer stationed in Belgrade in the mid-1960s, and an academically trained historian specializing in economic history, he is now Professor of History at the University of Maryland and Director of East European Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. He belongs to the second academic generation of American scholars to study Yugoslavia and the South Slavs, after the pioneering group that in-

World War II and the Theme of Genocide in the Public Memory of Socialist Yugoslavia

“…In spite of political reforms and ideological changes, this struggle was to remain the central theme of Yugoslav historiography until the 1980s. 53 This continuity was particularly visible within the field of education, where the ideological introduction to the Partisan narrative and its ethos happened both on the practical level in Pioneer training, that is, regular sessions engaging pupils in ideologically invested quasi-military exercises, and in the classrooms in the form of actual text-based learning. Studies of teaching materials from the early years of Yugoslav communism show that history textbooks were strongly ideologised, teaching the students patriotism, glorifying the communists and the Partisans and expecting the students to eagerly study the history of the National Liberation Struggle.…”