How different are we from those in the past? Or, how different do we think we are from those in the past? Medieval people were more dirty and unhygienic than us - as novels, TV, and film would have us believe - but how much truth is there in this notion? This book seeks to challenge some of these preconceptions by examining medieval society through rules of conduct, and specifically through the lens of a medieval Latin text entitled The Book of the Civilised Man - or Urbanus magnus - which is attributed to Daniel of Beccles. Urbanus magnus is a twelfth-century poem of almost 3,000 lines which comprehensively surveys the day-to-day life of medieval society, including issues such as moral behaviour, friendship, marriage, hospitality, table manners, and diet. Currently, it is a neglected source for the social and cultural history of daily life in medieval England, but by incorporating modern ideas of disgust and taboo, and merging anthropology, sociology, and archaeology with history, this book aims to bring it to the fore, and to show that medieval people did have standards of behaviour. Although they may seem remote to modern 'civilised' people, there is both continuity and change in human behaviour throughout the centuries.

The Ancient Near East embraces a vast geographical area, from the borders of Iran and Afghanistan in the east to the Levant and Anatolia, and from the Black Sea in the north to Egypt in the south. It was a region of enormous cultural, political and linguistic diversity.
In this authoritative new study, Amelie Kurht examines its history from the earliest written documents to the conquest of Alexander the Great, c.3000-330 BC. This work dispels many of the misapprehensions which have surrounded the study of the region. It provides a lucid, up-to-date narrative which takes into account the latest archaeological and textual discoveries and deals with the complex problems of interpretation and methodology.
The Ancient Near East is an essential text for all students of history of this region and a valuable introduction for students and scholars working in related subjects.
Winner of the AHS's 1997 James Henry Brested Award.

This book introduces a new way of looking at the writing of history. Rather than as the production of knowledge or the telling of stories, it sees writing history as an ethical, existential and emotional engagement with the people from the past. The conceptual and philosophical basis for this view is provided by the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. In the first part, the view is presented and contrasted with other, competing views, such as those of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Michel Foucault. In the second part, the view is argued for, most importantly by an in-depth discussion of one specific tradition of history-writing (microhistory), and a series of close readings of several classical works from the history of historiography. The third part, finally, explores some of the methodological consequences of this view, and applies it to a non-academic way of dealing with the past, namely historical performance practice in music. The book features a foreword by Frank Ankersmit.

Virtual History examines many of the most popular historical video games released over the last decade and explores their portrayal of history. The book looks at the motives and perspectives of game designers and marketers, as well as the societal expectations addressed, through contingency and determinism, economics, the environment, culture, ethnicity, gender, and violence. Approaching videogames as a compelling art form that can simultaneously inform and mislead, the book considers the historical accuracy of videogames, while also exploring how they depict the underlying processes of history and highlighting their strengths as tools for understanding history. The first survey of the historical content and approach of popular videogames designed with students in mind, it argues that games can depict history and engage players with it in a useful way, encouraging the reader to consider the games they play from a different perspective. Supported by examples and screenshots that contextualize the discussion, Virtual History is a useful resource for students of media and world history as well as those focusing on the portrayal of history through the medium of videogames.

The sibling stands out as a ubiquitous-yet unacknowledged-conceptual touchstone across the European long nineteenth century. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, Europeans embarked on a new way of classifying the world, devising genealogies that determined degrees of relatedness by tracing heritage through common ancestry. This methodology organized historical systems into family trees in a wide array of new disciplines, transforming into siblings the closest contemporaneous terms on trees of languages, religions, races, nations, species, or individuals. In literature, a sudden proliferation of siblings-often incestuously inclined-negotiated this confluence of knowledge and identity. In all genealogical systems the sibling term, not quite same and not quite other, serves as an active fault line, necessary for and yet continuously destabilizing definition and classification. In her provocative book, Stefani Engelstein argues that this pervasive relational paradigm shaped the modern subject, life sciences, human sciences, and collective identities such as race, religion, and gender. The insecurity inherent to the sibling structure renders the systems it underwrites fluid. It therefore offers dynamic potential, but also provokes counterreactions such as isolationist theories of subjectivity, the political exclusion of sisters from fraternal equality, the tyranny of intertwined economic and kinship theories, conflicts over natural kinds and evolutionary speciation, and invidious anthropological and philological classifications of Islam and Judaism. Integrating close readings across the disciplines with panoramic intellectual history and arresting literary interpretations, Sibling Action presents a compelling new understanding of systems of knowledge and provides the foundation for less confrontational formulations of belonging, identity, and agency.

This volume considers the confluence of World History and historical materialism, with the following guiding question in mind: given developments in the field of historical materialism concerned with the intersection of race, gender, labour, and class, why is it that within the field of World History, historical materialism has been marginalized, precisely as World History orients toward transnational socio-cultural phenomenon, micro-studies, or global histories of networks? Answering this question requires thinking, in an inter-related manner, about both the development of World History as a discipline, and the place of economic determinism in historical materialism. This book takes the position that historical materialism (as applied to the field of World History) needs to be more open to the methodological diversity of the materialist tradition and to refuse narrowly deterministic frameworks that have led to marginalization of materialist cultural analysis in studies of global capitalism. At the same time, World History needs to be more self-critical of the methodological diversity it has welcomed through a largely inclusionary framework that allows the material to be considered separately from cultural, social, and intellectual dimensions of global processes.

First published in 1978, this book rapidly established itself as a classic of modern Marxism. Cohen's masterful application of advanced philosophical techniques in an uncompromising defense of historical materialism commanded widespread admiration. In the ensuing twenty years, the book has served as a flagship of a powerful intellectual movement--analytical Marxism. In this expanded edition, Cohen offers his own account of the history, and the further promise, of analytical Marxism. He also expresses reservations about traditional historical materialism, in the light of which he reconstructs the theory, and he studies the implications for historical materialism of the demise of the Soviet Union.

The past decade has witnessed a remarkable resurgence in the intellectual interplay between geography and the humanities in both academic and public circles. The metaphors and concepts of geography now permeate literature, philosophy, and the arts. Concepts such as space, place, landscape, mapping and territory have become pervasive as conceptual frameworks and core metaphors in recent publications by humanities scholars and well-known writers.

Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds contains over 25 contributions from leading scholars who have engaged this vital intellectual project from various perspectives, both inside and outside of the field of geography. The book is divided into four sections representing different modes of examining the depth and complexity of human meaning invested in maps, attached to landscapes, and embedded in the spaces and places of modern life. The topics covered range widely and include interpretations of space, place, and landscape in literature and the visual arts, philosophical reflections on geographical knowledge, cultural imagination in scientific exploration and travel accounts, and expanded geographical understanding through digital and participatory methodologies. The clashing and blending of cultures caused by globalization and the new technologies that profoundly alter human environmental experience suggest new geographical narratives and representations that are explored here by a multidisciplinary group of authors.

This book is essential reading for students, scholars, and interested general readers seeking to understand the new synergies and creative interplay emerging from this broad intellectual engagement with meaning and geographic experience.

This book is a practical introduction to digital history. It offers advice on the scoping of a project, evaluation of existing digital history resources, a detailed introduction to how to work with large text resources, how to manage digital data and how to approach data visualisation. Doing digital history covers the entire life-cycle of a digital project, from conception to digital outputs. It assumes no prior knowledge of digital techniques and shows you how much you can do without writing any code. It will give you the skills to use common formats such as XML. A key message of the book is that data preparation is a central part of most digital history projects, but that work becomes much easier and faster with a few essential tools. -- .

Modernity in the late eighteenth century transformed all domains of European life -intellectual, industrial, and social. Not least affected was the experience of time itself: ever-accelerating change left people with briefer intervals of time in which to gather new experiences and adapt. In this provocative and erudite book Reinhart Koselleck, a distinguished philosopher of history, explores the concept of historical time by posing the question: what kind of experience is opened up by the emergence of modernity? Relying on an extraordinary array of witnesses and texts from politicians, philosophers, theologians, and poets to Renaissance paintings and the dreams of German citizens during the Third Reich, Koselleck shows that, with the advent of modernity, the past and the future became 'relocated' in relation to each other.The promises of modernity -freedom, progress, infinite human improvement -produced a world accelerating toward an unknown and unknowable future within which awaited the possibility of achieving utopian fulfillment. History, Koselleck asserts, emerged in this crucial moment as a new temporality providing distinctly new ways of assimilating experience. In the present context of globalization and its resulting crises, the modern world once again faces a crisis in aligning the experience of past and present. To realize that each present was once an imagined future may help us once again place ourselves within a temporality organized by human thought and humane ends as much as by the contingencies of uncontrolled events.

Historians go to great lengths to avoid confronting discontinuity, searching for explanations as to why such events as the fall of the Berlin Wall, George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, and the introduction of the euro logically develop from what came before. Moved by the Past radically breaks with this tradition of predating the past, incites us to fully acknowledge the discontinuous nature of discontinuities, and proposes to use the fact that history is propelled by unforeseeable leaps and bounds as a starting point for a truly evolutionary conception of history. Integrating research from a variety of disciplines, Eelco Runia identifies two modes of being moved by the past: regressive and revolutionary. In the regressive mode, the past may either overwhelm us -- as in nostalgia -- or provoke us to act out what we believe to be solidly dead. When we are moved by the past in a revolutionary sense, we may be said to embody history: we burn our bridges behind us and create accomplished facts we have no choice but to live up to.It is the final thesis of Moved by the Past: humans energize their own evolution by habitually creating situations (catastrophes or sublime historical events) that put a premium on mutations. Moved by the Past therefore offers an account of how every now and then we chase ourselves away from what we were and force ourselves to become what we are. Proposing a simple yet radical change in perspective, Runia profoundly reorients how we think and theorize about history.

The second edition of Public History: A Textbook of Practice offers an updated guide to the many opportunities and challenges that public history practitioners can encounter in the field. Historians can play a dynamic and essential role in contributing to public understanding of the past, and those who work in historic preservation, in museums and archives, in government agencies, as consultants, as oral historians, or who manage crowdsourcing projects need very specific skills. This book links theory and practice and provides students and practitioners with the tools to do public history in a wide range of settings. This new edition reflects how much the field of public history has changed in the past few years, with public history now being more established and international. New chapters have therefore been added on the definition, history, and international scope of public history, as well as on specific practices and theories such as historical fictions, digital public history, and shared authority. Split into four sections, this textbook provides approaches, methodologies, and tools for historians and other public history practitioners to play a bigger role in public debates and public productions of historical interpretations: Part I focuses on the past, present, and future of public history. Part II explores public history sources, and offers an overview of the creation, collection, management, and preservation of materials (archives, material culture, oral history, or historical sites). Part III deals with the different ways in which public history practitioners can produce historical narratives through different media (including texts, fictions, audio-visual productions, exhibitions, and performances). Part IV discusses the opportunities and challenges that public history practitioners encounter when working with different collaborators. Whether in public history methods courses or as a resource for practicing public historians, this book lays the groundwork for making meaningful connections between historical sources and popular audiences.

This unique and detailed analysis provides the first accessible and comprehensive introduction to the origins, development, methodology of microhistory - one of the most significant innovations in historical scholarship to have emerged in the last few decades. The introduction guides the reader through the best-known example of microstoria, The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg, and explains the benefits of studying an event, place or person in microscopic detail. In Part I, Istvan M. Szijarto examines the historiography of microhistory in the Italian, French, Germanic and the Anglo-Saxon traditions, shedding light on the roots of microhistory and asking where it is headed. In Part II, Sigurdur Gylfi Magnusson uses a carefully selected case study to show the important difference between the disciplines of macro- and microhistory and to offer practical instructions for those historians wishing to undertake micro-level analysis. These parts are tied together by a Postscript in which the status of microhistory within contemporary historiography is examined and its possibilities for the future evaluated. What is Microhistory? surveys the significant characteristics shared by large groups of microhistorians, and how these have now established an acknowledged place within any general discussion of the theory and methodology of history as an academic discipline.

Antoine de Baecque proposes a new historiography of cinema, exploring film as a visual archive of the twentieth century, as well as history's imprint on the cinematic image. Whether portraying events that occurred in the past or stories unfolding before their eyes, certain twentieth-century filmmakers used a particular mise-en-sc?ne to give form to history, becoming in the process historians themselves. Historical events, in turn, irrupted into cinema. This double movement, which de Baecque terms the "cinematographic form of history," disrupts the very material of film, much like historical events disturb the narrative of human progress.

De Baecque defines, locates, and interprets cinematographic forms in seven distinct bodies of cinema: 1950s modern cinema and its conjuring of the morbid trauma of war; French New Wave and its style, which became the negative imprint of the malaise felt by young contemporaries of the Algerian War; post-Communist Russian films, or the "de-modern" works of "catastroika"; contemporary Hollywood films that attach themselves to the master fiction of 9/11; the characteristic "mise en forme" of filmmaker Sacha Guitry, who, in "Si" "Versailles m'?tait cont? (1954), filmed French history from inside its chateau; the work of Jean-Luc Godard, who evoked history through his own museum memory of the twentieth century; and the achievements of Peter Watkins, the British filmmaker who reported on history like a war correspondent. De Baecque's introduction clearly lays out his theoretical framework, a profoundly brilliant conceptualization of the many ways cinema and history relate."

The process of converting the 'past' into 'history' involves engagement with a multitude of different sources and methods, and sports historians inevitably participate in the same debates over approaches and methodologies as their counterparts in other historical disciplines. At its heart, history remains a genre of empirical knowledge that is based upon the remains of the past, and without suitable evidence, there can be no sports history. A burgeoning range of sources has stimulated new ways of thinking and a significant expansion in the sports historian's evidentiary base, as textual sources have been supplemented by photos, films and cartoons, uniforms, architecture, maps and landscapes, and material culture more generally. This book deals with some of these innovations. It is divided into two sections, the first offering chapter-length studies of particular methodologies, and the second, brief responses from experts in their fields to the question 'what can sports historians learn from other disciplines?'

Geschichte - darin sind sich Literaturwissenschaft und Geschichtstheorie einig - ist nichts Gegebenes, sondern bildet sich in spezifischen Denkformen und den Sprachmustern, die diese Denkformen realisieren. Einer derart erschriebenen Geschichte widmet sich dieser neue Band, indem er das breite Spektrum des literarischen Umgangs mit Geschichte von der spaten Aufklarung bis zur Gegenwart untersucht und dessen geschichtstheoretische und historiographische Voraussetzungen eroertert. Einleitend stellt der Band die wichtigsten Methoden und Leitaspekte der aktuellen Debatte im Interferenzenfeld von 'Literatur' und 'Geschichte' zur Diskussion. Im Hauptteil wird dann in einer chronologisch gegliederten Reihe von Fallstudien der Zusammenhang von Geschichtsbild und Textverfahren ebenso beleuchtet wie die gesellschaftliche Funktion unterschiedlicher Formen und Gattungen der Geschichtsreprasentation. Damit liegt ein Kompendium vor, das die seit einigen Jahren expandierende Forschung mit Blick auf deren Ertrage fur Literaturwissenschaft und Geschichtstheorie erstmals systematisch erschliesst und damit auch als Einfuhrung in ein aussergewoehnlich vielfaltiges Forschungsfeld dienen kann.

The first English translation of "Ecrits sur l'histoire"--a collection of essays written over a twenty-year period following publication of Braudel's masterwork, "La, Mediterranee"--"On History" sets forth Braudel's reflections on the intellectual framework of his historical studies. Braudel calls on the historian to penetrate beneath the surface of political events to uncover and measure the forces shaping collective existence. Cycles of production, wages and prices, grids of communication and trade, fluctuations and climate, demographic trends, popular beliefs--all of these phenomena are proper subjects of the historian's investigations. It is only through study of the "longue duree," Braudel argues, that one can discern structure, the supports and obstacles, the limits and his experience cannot escape.
"The great French historian Fernand Braudel has done what only giants can: he has made Western man confront the problem of time--individual time, historical time, relative time, "real" time. . . . Braudel, more than any other historian, has wrestled with man's conception of time "over time," . . What a magnificent fight he has fought."--"Virginia Quarterly Review"

The use of contemporary oral history to improve public policies and programs is a growing, transdisciplinary practice. Indispensable for students and practitioners, Practicing Oral History to Improve Public Policies and Programs is the first book to define the practice, explain how policy-makers use it, show how it relates to other types of oral history, and provide guidance on the ethics and legalities involved. Packed with case studies from disciplines as diverse as medicine, agriculture, and race relations, as well as many examples from the author's own work, this book provides an essential overview of the current state of the field within oral history for public policy and a complete methodology for the process of designing and implementing an oral history project. The comprehensive How To section demonstrates how to use the practice to advance the reader's career, their chosen discipline and the public interest, whether their field is in oral history or in public policy. This book is an important resource for oral historians, fledgling or experienced, who are keen to find new applications and funding for their work, as well as for professionals in the public and not-for-profit sectors who want to learn to use oral history to improve their own policies and programs.

In these pathbreaking essays, Roy Rosenzweig charts the impact of new media on teaching, researching, preserving, presenting, and understanding history. Negotiating between the "cyberenthusiasts" who champion technological breakthroughs and the "digital skeptics" who fear the end of traditional humanistic scholarship, Rosenzweig re-envisions the practices and professional rites of academic historians while analyzing and advocating for the achievements of amateur historians.

While he addresses the perils of "doing history" online, Rosenzweig eloquently identifies the promises of digital work, detailing innovative strategies for powerful searches in primary and secondary sources, the increased opportunities for dialogue and debate, and, most of all, the unprecedented access afforded by the Internet. Rosenzweig draws attention to the opening up of the historical record to new voices, the availability of documents and narratives to new audiences, and the attractions of digital technologies for new and diverse practitioners. Though he celebrates digital history's democratizing influences, Rosenzweig also argues that the future of the past in this digital age can only be ensured through the active resistance to efforts by corporations to control access and profit from the Web.

In Place, Race, and Story, author Ned Kaufman has collected his own essays dedicated to the proposition of giving the next generation of preservationists not only a foundational knowledge of the field of study, but more ideas on where they can take it. Through both big-picture essays considering preservation across time, and descriptions of work on specific sites, the essays in this collection trace the themes of place, race, and story in ways that raise questions, stimulate discussion, and offer a different perspective on these common ideas.

Including unpublished essays as well as established works by the author, Place, Race, and Story provides a new outline for a progressive preservation movement a " the revitalized movement for social progress.

The past remains essential - and inescapable. A quarter-century after the publication of his classic account of man's attitudes to his past, David Lowenthal revisits how we celebrate, expunge, contest and domesticate the past to serve present needs. He shows how nostalgia and heritage now pervade every facet of public and popular culture. History embraces nature and the cosmos as well as humanity. The past is seen and touched and tasted and smelt as well as heard and read about. Empathy, re-enactment, memory and commemoration overwhelm traditional history. A unified past once certified by experts and reliant on written texts has become a fragmented, contested history forged by us all. New insights into history and memory, bias and objectivity, artefacts and monuments, identity and authenticity, and remorse and contrition, make this book once again the essential guide to the past that we inherit, reshape and bequeath to the future.

Digital Storytelling as Public History: A Guidebook for Educators provides a practical methodology for teaching public history in the digital age. Drawing on a long-standing collaboration, Fisanick and Stakeley examine how and why educators in all arenas should adopt digital storytelling as a means for encouraging interest in local and regional history. The book shows readers how to implement the strategies necessary to help storytellers in a variety of settings create short films that showcase the collections at local and regional historical societies and museums. It also teaches storytellers higher executive functions, such as independent project management, peer and self-critique, and rhetorical savviness. By guiding storytellers through this process of creating public history digital stories, the book enables them to become connected to communities, improve their understanding of regional history, and expand their knowledge of the preservation of historical artifacts. Supported by online handouts and offering a comprehensive methodology for educators, this is the ideal guide for those teaching public history in the digital age across a range of educational settings, including the classroom, museum and community.

This volume brings together important articles from the Cambridge historian A. G. Hopkins and reflect the enlargement and evolution of historical studies during the last half century. The essays cover four of the principal historiographical developments of the period: the extraordinary revolution that has led to the writing of non-Western indigenous history; the revitalization of new types of imperial history; the now ubiquitous engagement with global history, including a reinterpretation of American Empire, and the current revival of economic history after several decades of neglect.

What is the use of social theory to historians, and of history to social theorists? In clear and energetic prose, a pre--eminent cultural historian here offers a far--reaching response to these deceptively simple questions. In this classic text, now revised and updated in its second edition, Peter Burke reviews afresh the relationship between the fields of history and the social sciences and their tentative convergence in recent decades. Burke first examines what uses historians have made -- or might make -- of the models, methods, and concepts of the social sciences, and then analyzes some of the intellectual conflicts, such as the opposition between structure and human agency, which are at the heart of the tension between history and social theory. Throughout, he draws from a broad range of cultures and periods to illustrate how history, in turn, has been used to create and validate social theories. This new edition brings the book up to date with the addition of examples and discussions of new topics such as social capital, globalization and post--colonialism. The second edition of History and Social Theory will continue to stimulate both students and scholars across a range of disciplines with its challenging assessment of the roles of history and social science today.

Now in its second edition, Reading Primary Sources explores the varied traditions in source criticism and, through specific examples, illustrates how primary sources can be read and used in historical research. Part I of this two-part volume begins by establishing the reader's understanding of source criticism with an overview of both traditional and new methodological approaches to the use of primary documents. Taking into account the huge expansion in the range of primary sources used by historians, Part II includes chapters on surveillance reports, testimony and court files, in addition to more traditional genres such as letters, memoranda, diaries, novels, newspapers, political speeches and autobiography. For the new edition, each chapter now includes a checklist that suggests an easy-to-follow sequence of steps for interpreting a specific source genre, enabling students to understand how the sources should be read, what they have to offer, and the pitfalls of their interpretation. In addition to new discussions about the availability of digitised source materials, a new chapter on social surveys unlocks the potential of these widely used primary sources. Taking examples of sources from many European countries and the United States, and providing up-to-date information on the most widely used textual sources, this book is the perfect companion for every student of history who wants to engage with primary sources.