- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226763880
- eISBN:
- 9780226763910
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226763910.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, Military History
Largely forgotten today, the Suez Crisis of 1956 should be remembered not only as one of the most significant and perplexing events in the cold war but also as an object lesson in genre politics. The ...
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Largely forgotten today, the Suez Crisis of 1956 should be remembered not only as one of the most significant and perplexing events in the cold war but also as an object lesson in genre politics. The unexpected outcomes and paradoxes of the episode graphically demonstrate how interpretative frameworks influence policy choices and systems of accountability. Some kind of story is required in order to set the ball rolling, to introduce the historical sequence, and to allow the narrative accounts more endemic to events to be subsequently played off one another. So this chapter offers a brief history. It attempts to sit squarely in the low mimetic genre, providing some relatively uncontroversial facts and event information to allow readers to make sense of the diverse native interpretations in the rest of the text.Less
Largely forgotten today, the Suez Crisis of 1956 should be remembered not only as one of the most significant and perplexing events in the cold war but also as an object lesson in genre politics. The unexpected outcomes and paradoxes of the episode graphically demonstrate how interpretative frameworks influence policy choices and systems of accountability. Some kind of story is required in order to set the ball rolling, to introduce the historical sequence, and to allow the narrative accounts more endemic to events to be subsequently played off one another. So this chapter offers a brief history. It attempts to sit squarely in the low mimetic genre, providing some relatively uncontroversial facts and event information to allow readers to make sense of the diverse native interpretations in the rest of the text.
