Does history matter any more? In an era when both the past and memory seem to be sources of considerable interest and, frequently, lively debate, has the academic discipline of history ceased to offer the connection between past and present experience that it was originally intended to provide? In short, has History become a bridge to nowhere, a structure over a river whose course has been permanently altered? This is the overarching question that the contributors to The River of History : Trans-national and Trans-disciplinary Perspectives on the Immanence of the Past seek to answer. Drawn from a broad spectrum of scholarly disciplines, the authors tackle a wide range of more specific questions touching on this larger one. Does history, as it is practised in universities, provide any useful context for the average Canadian or has the task of historical consciousness-shaping passed to filmmakers and journalists? What can the history of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal conceptions of land and property tell us about contemporary relations between these cultures? Is there a way to own the past that fosters sincere stock-taking without proprietary interest or rigid notions of linearity? And, finally, what does the history of technological change suggest about humanity's ability to manage the process now and in the future? The philosopher Heraclitus once likened history to a river and argued for its otherness by stating that "No man can cross the same river twice, because neither the man nor the river is the same." This collection reconsiders this conceptualization, taking the reader on a journey along the river in an effort to better comprehend the ways in which past, present, and future are interconnected. With Contributions By: Jeffrey Scott Brown A.R. Buck Carol B. Duncan Peter Farrugia James Gerrie Leo Groarke Stephen F.Haller John S. Hill John McLaren M. Carleton Simpson Robert Wright Nancy E. Wright

"What is History For?" is a timely publication that examines the purpose and point of historical studies. Recent debates on the role of the humanities and the ongoing impact of poststructuralist thought on the very nature of historical enquiry, have rendered the question "what is history for?" of utmost importance.
Charting the development of historical studies, Beverley Southgate examines the various uses to which history has been put. While history has often supposedly been studied "for its own sake," Southgate argues that this seemingly innocent approach masks an inherent conservatism and exposes the ways in which history, has, sometimes deliberately, sometimes inadvertently, been used for socio-political purposes. With traditional notions of truth and historical representation now under question, it has become vital to rethink the function of history and renegotiate its uses for the post-modern age. History in the 21st century, Southgate proposes, should adopt a morally therapeutic rolethat seeks to advance human happiness.
This fascinating historicisation of the study of history is unique in its focus on the future of the subject as well as its past. What is History For? provides compulsive reading for the general reader and students alike.

John Vincent has often been accused of political incorrectness, but never in his writings about history. In this controversial and thought-provoking study of history, Professor Vincent goes to the very heart of the complex issues raised by the subject. In 1928 Bernard Shaw wrote his "Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism." Nearly 70 years later, in a simliarly polemical tract, Vincent makes no such concessions to feminist sensibilities or to the politics of the left. The text provides a comprehensive examination of the philosophy and evolution of history. It explores notions of historical evidence, meaning, the concept of historical imagination, morality and history, causality and bias, and hindsight. This is a controversial work by a leading historian. Penetrating, incisive and always provocative, An Intelligent Person's Guide to History will be a vital text for the scholar and a stimulating guide for the general reader.

In World-Systems Analysis, Immanuel Wallerstein provides a concise and accessible introduction to the comprehensive approach that he pioneered thirty years ago to understanding the history and development of the modern world. Since Wallerstein first developed world-systems analysis, it has become a widely utilized methodology within the historical social sciences and a common point of reference in discussions of globalization. Now, for the first time in one volume, Wallerstein offers a succinct summary of world-systems analysis and a clear outline of the modern world-system, describing the structures of knowledge upon which it is based, its mechanisms, and its future.Wallerstein explains the defining characteristics of world-systems analysis: its emphasis on world-systems rather than nation-states, on the need to consider historical processes as they unfold over long periods of time, and on combining within a single analytical framework bodies of knowledge usually viewed as distinct from one another-such as history, political science, economics, and sociology. He describes the world-system as a social reality comprised of interconnected nations, firms, households, classes, and identity groups of all kinds. He identifies and highlights the significance of the key moments in the evolution of the modern world-system: the development of a capitalist world-economy in the sixteenth-century, the beginning of two centuries of liberal centrism in the French Revolution of 1789, and the undermining of that centrism in the global revolts of 1968. Intended for general readers, students, and experienced practitioners alike, this book presents a complete overview of world-systems analysis by its original architect.

At the height of the Algerian war, Jean-Paul Sartre embarked on a fundamental reappraisal of his philosophical and political thought. The result was the Critique of Dialectical Reason, an intellectual masterpiece of the twentieth century, now republished with a major original introduction by Fredric Jameson. In it, Sartre set out the basic categories for the renovated theory of history that he believed was necessary for post-war Marxism. Sartre's formal aim was to establish the dialectical intelligibility of history itself, as what he called 'a totalisation without a totaliser'. But, at the same time, his substantive concern was the structure of class struggle and the fate of mass movements of popular revolt, from the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century to the Russian and Chinese revolutions in the twentieth: their ascent, stabilisation, petrification and decline, in a world still overwhelmingly dominated by scarcity.

A highly readable new collection of almost thirty pieces by Michael Oakeshott, almost all of which are previously unpublished, covering every decade of his intellectual career. The essays were intended mostly for lectures or seminars and retain an informal style that makes them accessible to new readers as well as those already familiar with Oakeshott's work. The book will be indispensable for all Oakeshott's readers, no matter which area of his thought concerns them most.

History in Transit comprises Dominick LaCapra's explorations of relationships he believes have been insufficiently theorized: between experience and identity, between history and various theories of subjectivity, between extreme events and their representation, between institutional structures and the kinds of knowledge produced within them. Taken together, these discussions form a dialogical encounter, positing the links among epistemological questions, historicist ones, and issues pertaining to disciplinary and institutional politics.

Reacting against the antitheoretical bias of some prominent historians, LaCapra presents an alternative model of historiographical practice one in which emphases on plurality and hybridity are combined with the concept of historical experience. For LaCapra experience emerges as a category both theoretically determined and anchored in the facticity of the everyday. LaCapra tests the assumptions and implications of the way one approaches the past by looking to psychoanalysis to render more self-aware the relationship between the historian and his or her material. He offers criticisms of assumptions held by practicing historians and theorists, placing the study of history at the center of a larger argument about the role of the contemporary university.

Contesting both corporatization and claims that the university is in ruins, LaCapra writes, "It is paradoxical that the demand to make the university conform to an ever-increasing extent to a market or business model seems oblivious to the fact that the American university has probably been the most successful of its type in the world, that students from other countries disproportionately desire to study in it.""

In 2001 the Royal Library in Copenhagen launched a digital facsimile on the Internet of the unique manuscript Nueva coronica from 1616 by the ethnic Andean Felipe Guaman Poma. These new technical studies supplement the facsimile with a description and analysis of the manuscript's features, and posits that the Copenhagen manuscript was the work of a single author, writing and drawing in his own hand.

Leni Riefenstahl, now aged 101, achieved fame as a dancer, actress photographer, and director, but her entire career is colored by her association with the Nazi party. This overt tension between the political meaning of her work for National Socialism and its essential aesthetic quality forms the basis of the compelling account. Appointed by Hitler, Leni Riefenstahl directed the Nazi propaganda film Triumph des Willens along with her bestknown work Olympia, a documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. By 1939 Riefenstahl was arguably the most famous women film director in the world; yet, after World War II, she was never again accepted as a filmmaker. Rainer Rother's book is a remarkable account of the fascinating life and work of Germany's most controversial photographer and filmmaker.

Oswald Spengler (1880--1936) is best known for The Decline of the West, in which he propounded his pathbreaking philosophy of world history and penetrating diagnosis of the crisis of modernity. This monumental work launched a seminal attack on the idea of progress and supplanted the outmoded Eurocentric understanding of history. His provocative pessimism seems to be confirmed in retrospect by the twentieth-century horrors of economic depression, totalitarianism, genocide, the dawn of the nuclear age, and the emerging global environmental crisis.

In Prophet of Decline, John Farrenkopf takes advantage of the historical perspective the end of the millennium provides to reassess this visionary thinker and his challenging ideas on world history and politics and modern civilization. Farrenkopf's assessment ranges widely, placing Spengler's philosophy in its intellectual historical context and covering Spengler's ideas on democracy, capitalism, science and technology, cities, Western art, social change, and human exploitation of the environment. He also illuminates the implications of Spengler's thought for contemplating from a fresh perspective the future of the United States, the leading power of the West.

Prophet of Decline is highly relevant today as many take the opportunity at the turn of the century to ponder again the direction in which humankind and our global community are moving and approach with concern the uncertain future amid globalization, hypercomplexity, and accelerating change. An interdisciplinary book about an interdisciplinary thinker, it is a substantial contribution to the literature of historical philosophy, political science, international relations, and German studies.

This provocative book challenges long-held assumptions about the nature of historical consciousness in Germany. Susan A. Crane argues that the ever-more-elaborate preservation of the historical may actually reduce the likelihood that history can be experienced with the freshness and individuality characteristic of the early collectors and preservationists. Her book is both a study of the emergence in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany of a distinctively modern conception of historical consciousness, and a meditation on what was lost as historical thought became institutionalized and professionalized. Public forms of remembering the past which are familiar today, such as historical museums and historical preservation, have surprisingly recent origins. In Germany, caring about the past took on these distinctively new forms after the Napoleonic wars. The Brothers Grimm gathered fairy tales and documented the origins of the German language. Historical preservationists collected documents and artifacts and organized the conservation of cathedrals and other historic buildings. Collectors formed historical societies and created Germany's historical museums. No single national consciousness emerged; instead, many groups used similar means to make different claims about what it meant to have a German past.Although individuals were responsible for stimulating new interest in the past, they chose to band together in voluntary associations to promote collective awareness of German history. In doing so, however, they clashed with academic and political interests and lost control over the very artifacts, collections, and buildings they had saved from ruin. Examining the letters and publications of the amateur collectors, Crane shows how historical consciousness came to be represented in collective terms whether regional or national and in effect robbed everyone of the capacity to experience history individually and spontaneously."

Well-known public historian Robert Archibald's personal exploration of the intersections of history, memory, and community reveals how we participate in the making and sustaining of community as well as how we remember the community that shaped us. Writing in a rich literary narrative, Archibald blends local history, personal reminiscence, and an analysis of the changing meaning of community with a passionate call for more effective public history. A Place to Remember poetically illustrates how we are active participants in the past and the role and importance of history in contemporary life.

Drawing examples from some of the classic works in the discipline, Miles Fairburn examines the nature, varieties, schools and evolution of social history. Intended for advanced students and practising social historians who see social history as a problem solving discipline, the methodological problems examined include the absence of social categories, fragmenting evidence, the appraisal of rival explanations, the use of socially constructed evidence to substantiate claims about realities, how to avoid presentism and when its practice is justifiable, how to distinguish important causes and how to tell similarities from differences.

At once a historical essay and a self-conscious meditation on the writing of history, The Foundation of Rome takes as its starting point a series of accounts of Rome's origins offered over the course of centuries. Alexandre Grandazzi places these accounts in their contemporary contexts and shows how the growing sophistication in methodology gradually changed the accepted views of the city's origins. He looks, for example, at the hypercritical philology of the nineteenth century which cast aside everything that could not be verified. He then explains how the increase in archaeological discoveries and changing archaeological techniques influenced the story of Rome's birth.Grandazzi produces a depiction of Rome's origins that is both up-to-date and provocative. His use of scientific parallels in describing changes in the ways texts were analyzed and his broad familiarity with comparative material make his synthesis particularly illuminating, and he writes with clarity, verve, and wit.

This book considers how nature - in both its biological and environmental manifestations - has been invoked as a dynamic force in human history. It shows how historians, philosophers, geographers, anthropologists and scientists have used ideas of nature to explain the evolution of cultures, to understand cultural difference, and to justify or condemn colonization, slavery and racial superiority. It examines the central part that ideas of environmental and biological determinism have played in theory, and describes how these ideas have served in different ways at different times as instruments of authority, identity and defiance. The book shows how powerful and problematic the invocation of nature can be.

"The Problem of Nature" covers a whole cycle of environmental history and its interpretation, from the Black Death in the fourteenth century, the first European voyages of discovery and the opening of the American frontier through to the imperialism of the nineteenth century and the example of India under colonial rule. David Arnold shows how both the natural environment and ideas about nature have changed radically over the last five centuries.

The author describes the profound influence that historical and social theory and the biological sciences have had upon each other. He shows how the outcomes of their interaction not only informed and shaped the European impact upon the world and on itself, but how crucial they are to American conceptions of the society and history of the United States. He provides provocative answers to the questions of what role the environment should have in the conceptualization of time and place; and of how far societies and their histories can beunderstood from the perspectives of natural and biological sciences.

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.

This book is the first to consider the presence of history and the question of historical practice in Walter Benjamin's work. Benjamin, the critic and philosopher of history, was also the practitioner, the authors contend, and it is in the practice of historical writing that the materialist aspect of his thought is most evident.

Some of the essays analyze Benjamin's writings in cultural history and the philosophy of history. Others connect his historical and theoretical practices to issues in contemporary feminism and post-colonial studies, and to cultural contexts including the United States, Japan, and Hong Kong. In different ways, the authors all find in Benjamin's specific notion of historical materialism a dialectic between textual and cultural analysis which can reinvigorate the relation between literary and historical studies.

Now in paperback! Documenting Localities is the first effort to summarize the past decade of renewed discussion about archival appraisal theory and methodology and to provide a practical guide for the documentation of localities. This book discusses the continuing importance of the locality in American historical research and archival practice, traditional methods archivists have used to document localities, and case studies in documenting localities. These chapters draw on a wide range of writings from archivists, historians, material culture specialists, historic preservationists, librarians, and other professionals in considering why we need to continue to stress the systematic documentation of geographic regions. The heart of the book is the presentation of a practical series of steps and tools archivists and manuscript curators can use in documenting localities. The final part of the book considers the need for the better education of archivists and manuscript curators in appraisal theory and methodology, with a description of the primary writings on new macroappraisal approaches forming the crux of how archivists need to consider documenting localities and regions. Useful to all archivists and manuscript curators grappling with how to contend with the increasing quantity and complexity of local records, recordkeeping systems, and other documentary forms.

The grand historical and social theorizing of early in this century-works that conjure up names like Marx, Spengler, Toynbee, and Sorokin-has been out of favor for many years. Only recently have two new schools of research, comparative civilizational studies and world systems analysis, emerged to examine societies in the broadest possible terms. These two intellectual movements have run on parallel tracks, seldom engaging in each other's work-until now! Sanderson invites the leading figures in these two groups-including Wallerstein, MacNeill, Frank, Wilkinson, Chase-Dunn, and Robertson-to compare and contrast their assumptions and conclusions about broad-scale social and historical change. A mixture of newly commissioned work and recently published articles, this book is unmatched as a useful introduction to current thinking about global historical change.

The collapse of historicism was not merely the demise of an academic tradition but signified a shift in the understanding of hermeneutics and metaphysics. Whereas earlier books have explored the rise and dominance of historicism within academic history, this is the first to trace its collapse and to show how it was shaped by larger philosophical and scientific concerns. Charles R. Bambach's lucid account of the demise of historicism within the context of German metaphysics provides a rich new perspective on the development of the young Heidegger's concept of "historicity" and on the origins of postmodern thought. Bambach reconstructs the methodological debates arising from a pervasive sense of crisis among German philosophers in the late nineteenth century. He details the divergent attempts by the Neo-Kantians, Nietzsche, and Dilthey to overcome the limitations of historical relativism. Heidegger's view of "historicity," Bambach shows, radically transforms the problematic of historicism into a discourse concerning the crisis of philosophical modernity.

What do Madonna, Confucius, and Jackie Robinson have in common? What does it take to go down in history as a great political leader? Why do revolutions occur, riots break out, and lynch mobs assemble? Which events do people find the most shocking or memorable? This path-breaking work offers the first comprehensive examination of the important personalities and events that have influenced the course of history. It discusses whether people who go down in history are different from the rest of us; whether specific personality traits predispose certain people to become world leaders, movie stars, scientific geniuses, and athletes, while others are relegated to ordinary lives. In exploring the psychology of greatness, this volume sheds light on the characteristics that any of us may share with history-making people. Throughout, the book addresses two broad questions: what sorts of people are responsible for historic events and achievements, and what kinds of events are most likely to be seen as history-making at their time of occurrence. Providing a wealth of examples, the text probes the lives of important figures, from charismatic political and military leaders to famous writers, Nobel Prize winners, child prodigies, and Olympic athletes. The book covers history-making events such as international crises, technological innovations and scientific breakthroughs, popular TV shows, natural disasters, and many more. With unerring insight, Simonton examines the full range of phenomena associated with greatness--everything from genetic inheritance, intuition, aesthetic appreciation, and birth order, to formal education, sexual orientation, aging, IQ, and alcohol and drug abuse. The work embeds psychological topics in the larger contexts of science, art, politics, and history to essentially define a new interdisciplinary field of study: the psychology of history. Written in an engaging style, and offering the first in-depth examination of a topic with universal appeal, GREATNESS will be welcomed by everyone interested in the people and events that have made the world what it is today.

In his 1840 lectures on heroes, Thomas Carlyle, Victorian essayist and social critic, championed the importance of the individual in history. Published the following year and eventually translated into fifteen languages, this imaginative work of history, comparative religion, and literature is the most influential statement of a man who came to be thought of as a secular prophet and the 'undoubted head of English letters' (Emerson). His vivid portraits of Muhammad, Dante, Luther, Napoleon - just a few of the individuals Carlyle celebrated for changing the course of world history - made "On Heroes" a challenge to the anonymous social forces threatening to control life during the Industrial Revolution. In eight volumes, "The Strouse Edition" will provide the texts of Carlyle's major works edited for the first time to contemporary scholarly standards. For the general reader, its detailed introductions and annotations will offer insight into the author's thought and a reconstruction of the diverse and often arcane Carlylean sources.

Here is the final volume of Norman O. Brown's trilogy on civilization and its discontents, on humanity's long struggle to master its instincts and the perils that attend that denial of human nature. Following on his famous books "Life Against Death" and "Love's Body", this collection of eleven essays brings Brown's thinking up to 1990 and the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. Brown writes that 'the prophetic tradition is an attempt to give direction to the social structure precipitated by the urban revolution; to resolve its inherent contradictions; to put an end to its injustice, inequality, anomie, the state of war ...that has been its history from start to finish'. Affiliating himself with prophets from Muhammad to Blake and Emerson, Brown offers further meditations on what's wrong with Western civilization and what we might do about it. Thus the duality in his title: crisis and the hope for change. In pieces both poetic and philosophical, Brown's attention ranges over Greek mythology, Islam, Spinoza, and Finnegan's Wake. The collection includes an autobiographical essay musing on Brown's own intellectual development. The final piece, "Dionysus in 1990," draws on Freud and the work of Georges Bataille to link the recent changes in the world's economies with mankind's primordial drive to accumulation, waste, and death.

"Reconstructing Marxism" explores fundamental questions about the structure of Marxist theory and its prospects for the future. The authors maintain that the disintegration of the old theoretical unity of classical Marxism is in part responsible for what is commonly called the "crisis of Marxism." Only a reconstructed Marxism can come to terms with this disintegration.
Addressing a range of problems in historical materialism and class analysis, the authors compare historical materialism with Darwinian evolutionary theory, and identify what is distinctively "historical" in Marx's theory of history. Through an evaluation of G.A. Cohen's defense and Anthony Giddens's critique of historical materialism they suggest what a plausible, yet still Marxist, theory of history might be. They analyze the relationship of micro-analysis to macro theory and the assignment of causal primacy in explanations, and present a general assessment of the current state of Marxist theory and the prospects for its analytical reconstruction.
Distinguished by the clarity of its presentation, the analytical rigor of its argument and its concern with fundamental philosophical and sociological issues, "Reconstructing Marxism" advances, at this critical juncture in the history of Marxism, a challenging new research program.

This first-time translation makes available to English-speaking readers a seminal essay in Latin American thought by one of Latin America's leading intellectuals. Originally published in Mixico in 1957, The Role of the Americas in History explores the meaning of the history of the Americas in relation to universal history. Zea endeavors to reveal the relationships that exist between the particular history of Latin America and the history that has been and is being made by other peoples. An unusual feature of Zea's analysis is that Iberia does not form part of Western consciousness.