American historical writing has traditionally been one of our primary forms of moral reflection. However, David Harlan argues that in the disillusionment following the 1960s, history abandoned its redemptive potential and took up the methodology of the social sciences. In this provocative new book, Harlan describes the reasons for this turn to objectivity and professionalism, explains why it failed, and examines the emergence of a New Traditionalism in American historical writing.
Part One, "The Legacy of the Sixties," describes the impact of literary theory in the 1970s and beyond, the rise of women's history, the various forms of ideological analysis developed by historians on the left, and the crippling obsession with professionalism in the 1980s. Part Two, "The Renewal of American Historical Writing," focuses on the contributions of John Patrick Diggins, Hayden White, Richard Rorty, Elaine Showalter, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and others. Harlan argues that at the end of the twentieth century American historical writing is perfectly poised to become what it once was: not one of the social sciences in historical costume, but a form of moral reflection that speaks to all Americans.
"[A] wholly admirable work. This book will be talked about for years."--"Library Journal"

In this collection of essays, of which four are published here for the first time, Peter Burke explores the theory and practice of what is called "new cultural history". He focuses on the varieties of cultural history which have emerged since the writings of Jacob Burckhardt and John Huizinga. No new orthodoxy has emerged to replace the classic model, Burke suggests, despite the importance of innovative approaches inspired by social and cultural anthropology.

After discussing the origins and identity of cultural history, Burke explores the social history of dreams and the relation between history and social memory. He presents five case studies addressing topics in the history of early modern Italy. Each is located on the frontiers of cultural history -- between learned and popular culture, between the public and the private spheres, and between the serious and the comic. Burke then turns to the encounter between Europe and the New World and to the phenomenon of cultural translation in the etymological, literal, and metaphorical senses of the term. He concludes with two theoretical investigations: one on the history of mentalities and one which asks why cultural history seems doomed to fragmentation.

As the end of the century approaches, many predict our fin de siecle will mirror the nineteenth-century decline into decadence. But a better model for the 1990s is to be found, according to Joan DeJean, in the culture wars of France in the 1690s--the time of a battle of the books known as the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns.
DeJean brilliantly reassesses our current culture wars from the perspective of that earlier fin de siecle (the first to think of itself as such), and rereads the seventeenth-century Quarrel from the vantage of our own warring "ancients" and "moderns." In so doing, DeJean shows that a fin de siecle taking place in the shadow of culture wars can be more a source of constructive cultural revolution than of apocalyptic gloom and doom. Just as the first fin de siecle's battle of the books served as the spark that set off the Enlightenment, introducing radically new sexual and social politics that laid the groundwork for modernity, so can our current culture wars result in radical, liberating changes--if we take an active stand against our own "ancients" who seek to stifle such reforms.

Examines the first principles of the perennial philosophy or ancient wisdom tradition as expressed in the writings of its great exponents, Rene Guenon and Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, and offers a critique of the West from the standpoint of traditional principles.

The Only Tradition examines the first principles of the perennial philosophy or ancient wisdom tradition as expressed in the writings of Rene Guenon and Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, and the current breakdown of value, meaning, and culture in the West due to the decline of these principles since the thirteenth century. The book further focuses on the relationship or reciprocity between the first principles and Western and Eastern culture, and discusses the future development of a homogenous, worldwide system of belief that would restore value and meaning to people's lives.

Quinn argues for a return to the first principles inherent in the perennial philosophy, which constitute the sacred primordial Tradition and which inform all the world's greatest religious traditions. His book makes an excellent introduction to this powerful current of European esoteric thought -- Traditionalism.

"I cannot recall reading as clear a statement of the perennial philosophy, nor one as solidly based on empirical research, as I have read in this book. The topic of 'primordial tradition' or 'perennial philosophy' is important in the area of the history of religions, and there are precious few books that deal with it in a sympathetic and yet critical way.

Coomaraswamy is mentioned often and honorably in religious studies literature without telling us much about why. Guenon usually is idolized or vilified, if he is acknowledged at all. Book such asQuinn's, that treat these influential figures honestly and fairly but with an open and critical eye, fill a real need". -- James Burnell Robinson, University of Northern Iowa

Employing the approaches of Gramsci and Foucault, Gran proposes a re-conceptualisation of world history. He challenges the convention of relying on totalitarian or democratic functions of a particular state to explain relationships of authority and resistance in a number of national contexts.

Extremely influential cultural analysis by Uruguayan author published posthumously in 1984. Chasteen's very good English translation includes entire text with original notes, along with useful locating introduction and index. Important contribution to the literature and an excellent volume for classroom use"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

This fascinating book examines how the past pervades French public life, how the French both commemorate their past triumphs, heroes, and martyrs and attempt to erase the more violent events in their history. The book surveys the ways that various political communities in France during the past two centuries have manufactured different versions of the past in order to define their identities and legitimate their goals. Beginning with a discussion of the bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989, Robert Gildea moves backward in time to show how rival factions have used various elements of French political culture-from the grandeur of the ancien regime to Catholicism, Jacobinism, Anarchism, and Bonapartism-to further their ends. Gildea shows how proponents of revolution and counterrevolution, church and state, centralism and regionalism, and national identity and nationalism campaigned to achieve the widest possible acceptance of their own view of the past. He describes the continuing battle between Left and Right for association with national heroes such as Joan of Arc and Napoleon. He exposes the reworking of collective views of the past by political communities, in order to increase or recover political legitimacy. Written in clear and trenchant prose, the book offers a new perspective on French history and political culture.

How we make history - and what we then make of it - is engagingly dramatized in T. H. Breen's portrait of a 350-year-old American community faced with the costs of its progress. In the particulars of one town's struggle to check development and save its natural environment, Breen shows how our sense of history reflects our ever-changing self-perceptions and hopes for the future. Breen first went to East Hampton, the celebrated Long Island resort town, to write about the Mulford Farmstead, a picturesque saltbox dating from the 1680s. Through his research, he came across a fascinating cast of local characters, past and present, who contributed to, invented, and reinvented the town's history. Breen's work also drew him into contemporary local affairs: factionalism among residents, zoning disputes, and debates over resource management. Driving these heated issues, Breen found, were some dearly held notions about a harmonious, agrarian past that conflicted with what he had come to know about the divisiveness and opportunism of East Hampton's early days. Imagining the Past is about the interplay between some of the East Hampton histories Breen encountered: the official histories of many generations, the myths and oral traditions, and the curious stories that Breen, as an outsider, discerned in the town's rich holdings of artifacts and documents. With a warm yet wry regard for human nature, Breen obliges us to confront our pasts in all their complexities and ironies, no matter how unsettling or inconvenient the experience.

'Building upon four decades of his own scholarly work in the field of history, Frykenberg presents a notable achievement for clarifying the rich overlap between facts and theory, evidence and belief, history and religion, East and West. He deserves to be commended.'--Lamin Sanneh, Yale Divinity School

"Developing a dialogue between historians and economists is a crucially important task if we are to improve our understanding of the past. Economists have the tools to be able to provide in-depth analysis, the historians have the meat and substance which is necessary, and a blending of the two is terribly important. "Economics and the Historian is a valuable resource for this interchange."--Nobel Laureate Douglass C. North, author of "Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance

"This is a superlative collection of essays for historians who would like to learn about economic history but lack much formal training in mathematics and economic theory. The essays present fundamental concepts of economic analysis in a clear and concise manner, and they show how these concepts can be applied to a variety of historical problems."--Ted W. Margadant, author of "Urban Rivalries in the French Revolution

"This book is must reading for historians who want to know what there is in economics that might be useful for their fields."--Nobel Laureate Robert W. Fogel, author of "Time on the Cross

"Introduces historians and history students to the concepts, models, and logic of economic theory and shows how economic analysis can be applied to solving historical puzzles and problems. Each of the essays illuminates a different subfield of economics with numerous examples drawn from a quarter century of cliometrics. This book will make basic tools of economic historical analysis accessible and at times even entertaining to students (and colleagues) who have little or no background in economics. And it is guaranteed to enliven any course or seminar, as it did mine."--John H. Coatsworth,author of "Central America and the United States

In a rich, thought-provoking work, Roth explores central questions in the philosophy of history. "The Ironist's Cage" asks why we are interested in having a past, why we try to recollect it, and what desires we hope to satisfy through this recollection.

"A Companion to the Study of History" guides students through all the historical concepts, theories, methods and problems confronting those engaged in the serious study of history. It distinguishes between history as action and history as narrative and illuminates the vital interplay between understanding and doing in a lively and accessible manner.

The author covers the nature of history, questions about action and meaning, views of the past, history as discourse, narrative and knowledge, the use of evidence, causation and event, theories of history and also a wide variety of recent theoretical perspectives and schools of thought.

The essays assembled here represent forty years of reflection about the European cultural past by an eminent historian. The volume concentrates on the Renaissance and Reformation, while providing a lens through which to view problems of perennial interest. "A Usable Past" is a book of unusual scope, touching on such topics as political thought and historiography, metaphysical and practical conceptions of order, the relevance of Renaissance humanism to Protestant thought, the secularization of European culture, the contributions of particular professional groups to European civilization, and the teaching of history.The essays in "A Usable Past" are unified by a set of common concerns. William Bouwsma has always resisted the pretensions to science that have shaped much recent historical scholarship and made the work of historians increasingly specialized and inaccessible to lay readers. Following Friedrich Nietzsche, he argues that since history is a kind of public utility, historical research should contribute to the self-understanding of society.

. . . eminently readable . . . admirably picks up the spirit of what Hegel is saying. . . . more readable and accurate than Hartmann's, and it trans lates a more readable text than does Nisbet's. It includes (as Hartmann's does not) an excerpt, which serves as chapter five, from 'The Geo graphical Basis of History' (particularly interesting for what it says of America), and a brief chapter six, entitled 'The Division of History.' The volume closes with an appendix, translating 341--360 of Hegel's Philosophy of Right and deals directly with the very concept of 'World History.' It constitutes a big help in coming to grips with what Hegel means by 'Spirit.' --Quentin Lauer, SJ, Fordham University, in International Philosophical Quarterly

Two distinguished historians, one an advocate of the new scientific or "cliometric" history and the other a traditional historian, debate the validity of their respective methods of studying the past. While they differ sharply on many issues, in the end they agree that history is a vigorous, evolving discipline able to absorb the best of both scientific and humanistic thought. "Fogel asserts persuasively that cliometrics is best characterized by the explicit use of social science theory, and only secondly by its use of quantification.... Elton elegantly defends the traditional virtues of catholicity of method, skepticism toward sources, and informed scholarship. The two scholars' evident respect for each other enriches the debates as well as humanizes it." -David Keymer, Library Journal "Both scholars are leading representatives of their modi operandi, and both have laid down path-breaking, interpretations of their subjects of study, leaving controversy and new methodology in their wake. It is therefore an event unto itself that two such professors of history should pause for a moment to meet at the fork in the road and debate the roads to the past." -Mark R. Horowitz, History Today "Anyone interested in historiography will find [this book] useful." -Vincent A. Lapomarda, America

John William Miller (1895-1978) taught at Williams College, where from 1945 to 1960 he was Mark Hopkins Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy. His extraordinary teaching is described in Masters: Portraits of Great Teachers, edited by Joseph Epstein. While deeply indebted to Plato, Kant, and Hegel, Miller arrived at a strikingly original reinterpretation of the history of philosophy, which, he believed, resolved long-standing epistemological and moral problems generated by that history.

The Philosophy of History criticizes all attempts to interpret history on premises not themselves historical. Miller holds that "to view history philosophically is to consider it as a constitutional mode of experience, a way of organization no less fundamental than physics or logic".

In The Definition of the Thing, an unusually provocative and original essay, Miller had already worked out a number of the basic contentions of his mature philosophy.

A classic volume by a noted philosopher, available again. John William Miller (1895-1978) taught at Williams College, where from 1945 to 1960 he was Mark Hopkins Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy. His extraordinary teaching is described in Masters: Portraits of Great Teachers, edited by Joseph Epstein. While deeply indebted to Plato, Kant, and Hegel, Miller arrived at a strikingly original reinterpretation of the history of philosophy, which, he believed, resolved long-standing epistemological and moral problems generated by that history. In The Definition of the Thing, an unusually provocative and original essay, Miller had works out a number of the basic contentions of his mature philosophy.

Thanks to digitisation, newspapers from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century have become an indispensable and accessible source for researchers. Through their pages, historians with a passion for a person or a place or a time or a topic can rediscover forgotten details and gain new insights into the society and values of bygone ages.Historical Research Using British Newspapers provides plenty of practical advice for anyone intending to use old newspapers by: * outlining the strengths of newspapers as source material * revealing the drawbacks of newspapers as sources and giving ways to guard against them * tracing the development of the British newspaper industry * showing the type of information that can be found in newspapers and how it can be used * identifying the best newspapers to start with when researching a particular topic * suggesting methods to locate the most relevant articles available * demonstrating techniques for collating, analysing and interpreting information * showing how to place newspaper reports in their wider context In addition nine case studies are included, showing how researchers have already made productive use of newspapers to gain insights that were not available from elsewhere.

Georg Lukacs' early Marxist philosophy of the 1920s laid the foundations of Critical Theory. However the evaluation of Lukacs' philosophical contribution has been largely determined by one-sided readings of eminent theorists like Adorno, Habermas, Honneth or even Lukacs himself. This book offers a new reconstruction of Lukacs' early Marxist work, capable of restoring its dialectical complexity by highlighting its roots in his neo-Kantian, 'pre-Marxist' period. In his pre-Marxist work Lukacs sought to articulate a critique of formalism from the standpoint of a dubious mystical ethics of revolutionary praxis. Consequently, Lukacs discovered a more coherent and realistic answer to his philosophical dilemmas in Marxism. At the same time, he retained his neo-Kantian reservations about idealist dialectics. In his reading of historical materialism he combined non-idealist, non-systematic historical dialectics with an emphasis on conscious, collective, transformative praxis. Reformulated in this way Lukacs' classical argument plays a central role within a radical Critical Theory.

"Every working historian, from the novice to the veteran, from the untrained amateur to the professionally prepared, can profit immeasurably from this important work. . . . The Rhetoric of History belongs on the shelf of all those who aspire to effective historical authorship." Choice The sole purpose of this book, said author Savoie Lottinville, is "to help the person committed to history to become an effective writer in that inviting field." Lottinville emphasizes that writing must be practiced as a discipline, as exacting as research and as elusive as achievement in any other art. As every historian discovers, it is one thing to learn historical method and amass data and quite another to write effectively about any period or episode. Research is an absorbing means to an end, but writing is often baffling, especially to the beginner. The Rhetoric of History analyzes techniques historians need to employ and includes examples of the writing styles of many of the most notable historians of the United States and Europe. Covering topics like conceptualization in history, constructing scenes, narrative structures, analytical historical writing and editing, The Rhetoric of History will prove to be indispensable to historians-both professional and amateur. Savoie Lottinville, was director of the University of Oklahoma Press for thirty years and editor of Life of George Bent: Written from His Letters and A Journal of Travels into the Arkansas Territory During the Year 1819, both published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

"Professor Hughes offers an earnest warning: 'Unless there is some emotional tie, some elective affinity linking the student to his subject of study, the results will be pedantic and perfunctory.' In other words, it is only a step from the sublime to the meticulous. Those eager to guard against that sad descent will find "History as Art and as Science" a guide, a tonic, and an inspiration. Its short, electrifying essays are so magnificently sane and persuasive they should be required reading for every student who contemplates a major in history."--Geoffrey Bruun, "Saturday Review"

The prospectus that announced the creation of The Institute of the Humanities promised an inaugural course of twelve lectures, to be given by its founder and entitled, "Concerning a New Interpretation of International History. (Exposition and Examination of A. J. Toynbee's work, A Study of History.)" But the course as given (in 1948-49) went much farther than that announcement, for the "examination" consisted principally of a critique of Toynbee's work from the point of view of Ortega's own doctrines, together with the unfolding of his personal ideas about the science of history and the progress of peoples-in particular the Romans-with frequent side excursions, meant to be systematic, into the crisis of the present time. The central theme of these pages becomes "the analysis of life established in illegitimacy . . . of which the two gigantic examples are the declining days of the Roman Empire and the period in which we ourselves are living." To the modern crisis, Ortega brings a basic analysis and a program of reform for intelligence by which contemporary life might emerge from the confusion it now suffers.

Richard Drake presents a new interpretation of Charles Austin Beard's life and work. The foremost American historian and a leading public intellectual in the first half of the twentieth century, Beard participated actively in the debates about American politics and foreign policy surrounding the two world wars. In a radical change of critical focus, Charles Austin Beard places the European dimension of Beard's thought at the center, correcting previous biographers' oversights and presenting a far more nuanced appreciation for Beard's life. Drake analyzes the stages of Beard's development as a historian and critic: his role as an intellectual leader in the Progressive movement, the support that he gave to the cause of American intervention in World War I, and his subsequent revisionist repudiation of Wilsonian ideals and embrace of non-interventionism in the lead-up to World War II. Charles Austin Beard shows that, as Americans tally the ruinous costs—both financial and moral—of nation-building and informal empire, the life and work of this prophet of history merit a thorough reexamination.