This book is the first cognitive literary analysis in the field of medieval French literature. As such, it focuses on the question of audience in the Old French epic poems known as "chansons de geste." Bringing to bear evidence from historical, literary, and manuscript sources, from the perspective of cognitive theory, Leverage demonstrates that there were multiple, complex audiences of the poems, and that common to each was a more personal, engaged, emotive relationship with the poems than has been recognized previously. Central to the audience's experience of the poems and to the aesthetic of the genre, is memory, both in the sense of a cognitive process and as a theory that has occupied the interest of rhetoricians and philosophers from Antiquity to the present. The book is of interest to medievalists, cognitive theorists, and cognitive scientists working in memory-based text processing.

Peter Carey is one of the most richly awarded and critically acclaimed novelists of the present day. Most of his fictions relate to questions of Australian history and identity. "Rewriting History" argues that taken together Carey's novels make up a fictional biography of Australia. The reading proposed here considers both key events in the life of the subject of Carey's biography (such as the exploration of the interior of the continent, the dispossession of the Aborigines, the convict experience, the process of Australia's coming of age as a postcolonial country) as well as its identity. "Rewriting History" demonstrates how Carey exposes the lies and deceptions that make up the traditional representations of Australian history and supplants them with a new national story - one that because of its fictional status is not bound to the rigidities of traditional historical discourse. At a time of momentous cultural change, when Australia is being transformed from a "New Britannia in another world" to a nation not merely in, but actually of the Asia-Pacific region, Carey's fiction, this book argues, calls for the construction of a postcolonial national identity that acknowledges the wrongs of the past and gives Australians a sense of cultural orientation between their British past and their multicultural present.

"Of Love and War: The Political Voice in the Early Plays of Aphra Behn "is a study which situates Behn's early plays within their historical and political context. Behn (c.1640-1689), the first professional female playwright in England, is a fascinating study, having traveled to Surinam as a young woman, served as a spy for Charles II, and evidently supported her family through her writing, including plays, poetry, fiction, and translation. Her early plays have often been dismissed as romances, largely because they treat such social and/or gender issues as forced marriage and female desire. This study argues that these same social issues frequently serve as tropes for political commentary and propaganda in support of foreign and domestic policies. Behn's plays clearly demonstrate staunch loyalist support of the Stuart government, yet within the dramatic construction, she-like her contemporary male colleagues, offers fascinating covert political criticism.

This volume presents the thinking and the activities of some of the most serious and successful practitioners of world history. The fifteen contributors are experience historians from ten countries dispersed across five continents. Their essays confirm the experience of an emerging worldwide discourse on the past of our planet, but they also reveal the distinctive conditions and local innovations of global historians in different parts of the world. They give particularly attention to the emergence of formal institutions for study of world history. University departments, research institutes, international conferences, and the leaders of museums are now demonstrably involved in full-scale study of the human past at a global level. Work in these institutions will surely reveal new patterns, dispel some old beliefs, provoke debates, and demonstrate the need for still more research.The book begins with the official report of the World History Research Agenda Symposium. This unusual conference (held in Nov 2006 in Boston) launched the formal discussion of priorities in world-historical research. In seven further chapters, the authors describe university level study of world history at undergraduate and especially graduate levels, conveying some remarkable advances in conceptualization of the global past and explaining the curricula they have implemented for directing students in world historical research. The final four chapters turn to the other institutions that support the development of advanced study in world history: journals, museums, and research institutes. Here the authors document the organizational innovations that have brought discussion of world-historical issues to wider audiences.This is the second volume in a series on research in world history, produced by the World History Network Inc. The previous volume, ""World History: Global and Local Interactions"" displayed the accomplishments of PhD students and graduates whose research focuses on topics in world history.

Subtitled "Hungarian noble residences and their social context from the thirteenth through to the sixteenth century: an outline for methodology." This work aims to set up a research agenda to show how archaeology can contribute to an interdisciplinary study of society in the later Middle Ages, in this case in terms of a survey of the possibilities of using archaeology to study Hungarian nobility from the point of view of their living conditions and the functions of their residences. The author, drawn to this theme through an excavation in Pomaz (west of Budapest) in 1995, investigates the co-existence of various settlement types from the point of view of manorial buildings.

Growing unease with grand theories of modernization and global integration brought twelve scholars from four disciplines to the School for Advanced Research for an experiment with the research genre known as microhistory. These authors now call for a return to narrative, detailed analysis on a small scale, and the search for unforeseen meanings embedded in cases. The essential feature of this perspective is a search for significance in the microcosm, the large lessons discovered in small worlds. Urging the recognition of potential commonalities among archaeology, history, sociology, and anthropology, the authors propose that historical interpretation should move freely across disciplines, historical study should be held up to the present, and individual lives should be understood as the intersection of biography and history. The authors develop these themes in a kaleidoscope of places and periods--West Africa, the Yucatan peninsula, Italy, Argentina, California, Brazil, Virginia, and Boston, among others. They illuminate discrete places, people, and processes through which both the intimacy of lived experience and the more distant forces that shaped their days can be viewed simultaneously.

The middle ages, the age of Charlemagne, Chaucer and Dante, had an indelible effect on European culture. "In Search of the Holy Grail" is a survey of the influence of the middle ages, and of medieval attitudes and values, on later periods and on the modern world. Many artistic, political and literary movements have drawn inspiration and sought their roots in the thousand years between 500 and 1500 AD. Medieval Christianity, and its rich legacy, has been the essential background to European culture as a whole. Gothic architecture and chivalry were two keys to Romanticism, while nationalists, including the Nazis, looked back to the middle ages to find emerging signs of national character. In literature few myths have been as durable or popular as those of King Arthur, stretching from the Dark Ages to Hollywood. "In Search of the Holy Grail" is a vivid account of how later ages learnt about and interpreted the middle ages. Veronica Ortenberg shows how medieval ideas and legacies surround us still in the twenty-first century.

The past has long fingers into the present, but they are not just the fingers of fact. How we remember the past is at least as important as the objective facts of that past. The memories used by a people to define itself have to be understood not just as (sometimes) bad history but also as historical artifacts themselves. Texas' pasts are examined in this groundbreaking volume, featuring chapters by a wide range of scholars. Current historians' views of Texas in the nineteenth century and especially the significance of the Alamo as a site of memory in architecture, art, and film across the years comprise a major element of this volume. Other nineteenth-century historical events are also examined through their memorializations in the twentieth century: the construction of Civil War monuments by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, public and private Juneteenth celebrations, and the Tejano memorial on the Capitol grounds commemorating the history of Mexicans in Texas. Twentieth-century chapters include collective memories and meaning attached to the Ku Klux Klan, the significance of the civil rights movement in the eyes of different generations of Texans, and the lasting (or fading) Texan memories of Lyndon Baines Johnson. The volume editors offer these studies as a model of how Texas historians can begin to incorporate memory into their work, as historians of other regions have done. In the process, they offer a more nuanced and even a more applied version of Texas history than many of us learned in school. GREGG CANTRELL is the Erma and Ralph Lowe Professor of History at Texas Christian University and the author of Stephen F. Austin: Empresario of Texas. ELIZABETH HAYES TURNER, an associate professor at the University of North Texas, is the author of Women, Culture, and Community: Religion and Reform in Galveston, 1880-1920.

The first book to examine in detail Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History Benjamin's collection of fragments, Theses on the Philosophy of History, play a determining role in how Benjamin's thought is understood, as well as in the debate about the interplay between politics, history and time. Walter Benjamin and History is the first volume to give access to the themes and problems raised by the Theses, providing valuable exegetical and historical work on the text. The essays collected here are all the work of noted Benjamin scholars, and pursue the themes central to the Theses.

'This book caused quite a stir when it appeared in 1991 and has now attained Routledge Classics status ... Jenkins packs a lot into a short space and his explanations of "history theory" are impressively concise.' - The Guardian

'A startlingly clear and thought-provoking introduction to current central debates in history and historiography. It is accessible to history students, students in subjects that draw on historical past and to the general reader. Already, a classic text book.' - Robert Eaglestone, Royal Holloway, University of London

'Far and away the best introduction to the state of the question currently available.' - Hayden White, University of California at Santa Cruz

Historians know about the past because they examine the evidence. But what exactly is "evidence," how do historians know what it means--and how can we trust them to get it right? Historian David Henige tackles such questions of historical reliability head-on in his skeptical, unsparing, and acerbically witty "Historical Evidence and Argument." "Systematic doubt" is his watchword, and he practices what he preaches through a variety of insightful assessments of historical controversies--for example, over the dating of artifacts and the textual analysis of translated documents. Skepticism, Henige contends, forces us to recognize the limits of our knowledge, but is also a positive force that stimulates new scholarship to counter it.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web provides for the first time a plainspoken and thorough introduction to the web for historians-teachers and students, archivists and museum curators, professors as well as amateur enthusiasts-who wish to produce online historical work or to build upon and improve the projects they have already started in this important new medium. The book takes the reader step by step through planning a project, understanding the technologies involved and how to choose the appropriate ones, designing a site that is both easy to use and scholarly, digitizing materials in a way that makes them web-friendly while preserving their historical integrity, and reaching and responding to an intended audience effectively. It also explores the repercussions of copyright law and fair use for scholars in a digital age and examines more cutting-edge web techniques involving interactivity, such as sites that use the medium to solicit and collect historical artifacts. Finally, the book provides basic guidance for ensuring that the digital history the reader creates will not disappear in a few years. Throughout, Digital History maintains a realistic sense of the advantages and disadvantages of putting historical documents, interpretations, and discussions online. The authors write in a tone that makes Digital History accessible to those with little knowledge of computers, while including a host of details that more technically savvy readers will find helpful. And although the book focuses particularly on historians, those working in related fields in the humanities and social sciences will also find this to be a useful introduction. Digital History builds upon more than a decade of experience and expertise in creating pioneering and award-winning work by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

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

At the End of an Age isa deeply informed and rewarding reflection on the nature of historical and scientific knowledge. Of extraordinary philosophical, religious, and historical scope, it is the product of a great historian's lifetime of thought on the subject of his discipline and the human condition. While running counter to most of the accepted ideas and doctrines of our time, it offers a compelling framework for understanding history, science, and man's capacity for self-knowledge. In this work, John Lukacs describes how we in the Western world have now been living through the ending of an entire historical age that began in Western Europe about five hundred years ago. Unlike people during the ending of the Middle Ages or the Roman empire, we can know where we are. But how and what is it that we know? In John Lukacs's view, there is no science apart from scientists, and all of "Science," including our view of the universe, is a human creation, imagined and defined by fallible human beings in a historical continuum. This radical and reactionary assertion-in its way a summa ofthe author's thinking, expressed here and there in many of his previous twenty-odd books-leads to his fundamental assertion that, contrary to all existing cosmological doctrines and theories, it is this earth which is the very center of the universe-the only universe we know and can know.

"A great resource for students and scholars. Chock-full of up-to-date, reliable information, this book has practically everything you need to know about contemporary Colombia all in one package." --Herbert Braun, author of Our Guerrillas, Our Sidewalks: A Journey into the Violence of Colombia The South American nation of Colombia has seen more than forty years of unrest, conflict, and civil war. It is a country in which social violence and warfare are intricately intertwined. Colombia is also notorious for its drug trade, being one of the leading producers of cocaine in the world, and for its central role as a staging ground for the U.S. "war on drugs." Since 9/11 the Bush administration has sought to draw political links between the Colombian drug trade, guerrilla organizations, and terrorism. Inside Colombia offers a valuable introduction and quick reference guide to this complex nation. With chapters devoted to history, human rights issues, the economy, drugs, the controversial antidrug intervention known as Plan Colombia, and relations with the United States, the book offers an easily accessible and comprehensive overview. Readers will learn about the major players in the conflicts, significant political figures, how Colombia's economy has fared in the twentieth century, how the country's geography influences its politics and economy, and how U.S. intervention shapes Colombia's political scene. Grace Livingstone is a journalist who regularly contributes to a range of publications on Latin American current affairs and has reported for the BBC World Service. She is currently based in Venezuela where she is a correspondent for The Guardian. Jenny Pearce is the coauthor of Civil Society and Development: A Critical Exploration.

Few topics in modern history draw the attention that the Holocaust does. The Shoah has become synonymous with unspeakable atrocity and unbearable suffering. Yet it has also been used to teach tolerance, empathy, resistance, and hope. Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust provides a starting point for teachers in many disciplines to illuminate this crucial event in world history for students. Using a vast array of source materials-from literature and film to survivor testimonies and interviews-the contributors demonstrate how to guide students through these sensitive and painful subjects within their specific historical and social contexts. Each chapter provides pedagogical case studies for teaching content such as antisemitism, resistance and rescue, and the postwar lives of displaced persons. It will transform how students learn about the Holocaust and the circumstances surrounding it.

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.""

History casts a spell on our minds more powerful than science or religion. It does not root us in the past at all. It rather flatters us with the belief in our ability to recreate the world in our image. It is a form of self-assertion that brooks no opposition or dissent and shelters us from the experience of time.
So argues Constantin Fasolt in "The Limits of History," an ambitious and pathbreaking study that conquers history's power by carrying the fight into the center of its domain. Fasolt considers the work of Hermann Conring (1606-81) and Bartolus of Sassoferrato (1313/14-57), two antipodes in early modern battles over the principles of European thought and action that ended with the triumph of historical consciousness. Proceeding according to the rules of normal historical analysis--gathering evidence, putting it in context, and analyzing its meaning--Fasolt uncovers limits that no kind of history can cross. He concludes that history is a ritual designed to maintain the modern faith in the autonomy of states and individuals. God wants it, the old crusaders would have said. The truth, Fasolt insists, only begins where that illusion ends.
With its probing look at the ideological underpinnings of historical practice, "The Limits of History" demonstrates that history presupposes highly political assumptions about free will, responsibility, and the relationship between the past and the present. A work of both intellectual history and historiography, it will prove invaluable to students of historical method, philosophy, political theory, and early modern European culture.

With the end of the Cold War, the American political establishment perceived Islam as the new enemy. The 1993 explosion at the World Trade Center, the 1998 bombing of the American embassies in Africa, and the events of 9/11 - all culminated in substantiating this perception.

The War on Terrorism has raised several complicated issues surrounding the relationship between the United States and Islam. With America's increasing involvement in the Middle East, it is imperative for Muslims to understand America; but at the same time, Americans must learn to understand Islam. The progress of civilization hangs on the ability for cooperation and understanding between these cultures.

Although this challenge of removing the "clash" between these two cultures is indeed pressing, it is not new. Negative images of Islam have persisted in the United States throughout its history.

This volume of "The Annals" reflects on how damaging images of Islam have endured in the United States and how Americans' perceptions and misconceptions about Islam is inexorably linked to United States' policy in the Middle East.

The articles in this special issue will spark intriguing debate and discussion as well as shed light on the complex concerns engulfing Americans' ideas about Islam and Muslim states and how this relationship influences global politics.

With the end of the Cold War, the American political establishment perceived Islam as the new enemy. The 1993 explosion at the World Trade Center, the 1998 bombing of the American embassies in Africa, and the events of 9/11 - all culminated in substantiating this perception.

The War on Terrorism has raised several complicated issues surrounding the relationship between the United States and Islam. With America's increasing involvement in the Middle East, it is imperative for Muslims to understand America; but at the same time, Americans must learn to understand Islam. The progress of civilization hangs on the ability for cooperation and understanding between these cultures.

Although this challenge of removing the "clash" between these two cultures is indeed pressing, it is not new. Negative images of Islam have persisted in the United States throughout its history.

This volume of "The Annals" reflects on how damaging images of Islam have endured in the United States and how Americans' perceptions and misconceptions about Islam is inexorably linked to United States' policy in the Middle East.

The articles in this special issue will spark intriguing debate and discussion as well as shed light on the complex concerns engulfing Americans' ideas about Islam and Muslim states and how this relationship influences global politics.

Anthropologist Neil L. Whitehead presents a collection of recent fieldwork and the latest theoretical perspectives that illuminate how a range of Native communities in the Amazon River basin, and those they encounter, use the past to make sense of their world and themselves. In recent decades, scholars have become increasingly aware of the role the past plays in the construction of culture and identity. Not only can the past be represented and codified overtly in various ways and media as a "history," it also operates more fundamentally and pervasively in cultures as a mode of consciousness or way of thinking about the world, a "historicity." In addition to examining the particular foundations and significance of history and historicity in such communities as the Guaja, Wapishana, Dekuana, and Patamuna, the contributors to this volume consider more broadly how different natural and cultural features can help shape historical consciousness: landscape and territory; rituals such as feasting; genealogy and kinship; and even the practice of archaeology. Also of interest are activist uses of historicity to promote and legitimize the cultural integrity and political agendas of Native communities, especially in contact situations past and present where multiple and often competing forms of history and historicity play important political roles in articulating relations between colonizers and the colonized. As this volume makes clear, understanding the powerful cultural role of the past helps scholars better appreciate the inherent dynamic quality of all cultures and recognize a rich resource of agency that can be used both to comprehend and to transform the present

In this lucid and probing study, Robert C. Miner argues that Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) was the architect of a subversive, genealogical approach to modernity. Miner documents the genesis of Vico's stance toward modernity in the first phase of his thought. Through close examination of his early writings, centering on Vico's critique of Descartes and his elaboration of the 'verum-factum' principle, Vico, Genealogist of Modernity reveals that Vico strives to acknowledge the technical advances of modernity while unmasking its origins in human pride.

Miner's careful analysis of the often neglected Universal Law shows how Vico uses Augustine to articulate a new conception of natural law that mediates between the idealism of Plato and Aristotle and the realism of Tacitus and Machiavelli. Vico emerges as a penetrating reader of traditional philosophy and philology, as well as a radical pioneer of modern historical consciousness.

Miner also traces important connections between Vico's magnum opus, the New Science, and his earlier writings, arguing that the New Science is not merely a work of scientific history. Miner contends that this work is more fundamentally a genealogy that enacts Nietzsche's desire to treat etymology and language as signposts for understanding the development of moral concepts. Miner shows how Vico's genealogy attempts to disclose hidden continuities between the culture of secular modernity and the pagan institutions of idolatry, divination, and sacrifice.

Throughout this engaging work, Miner portrays Vico's genealogy as expressly Augustinian and Catholic, yet sufficiently complex to resist assimilation to reactionary anti-modernism. According to Miner, the goal ofVico's genealogy is to encompass the best of ancient and medieval traditions within an "encyclopedic" fusion of history and philosophy that is both modern and Christian. Although Vico sees the "age of man" as moving toward the "barbarism of reflection, " his trust in divine providence saves him from nihilistic despair. Miner concludes that Vico's thought not only anticipates later efforts to infuse philosophy with historical consciousness, but also contains the seeds of a coherent alternative to the program of postmodern genealogy.

Geillustreerde verslae van mense wat die tweede Vryheidsoorlog deurleef het. Dit gee 'n goeie beeld van wat die mense moes deurmaak en wat in die kampe aangegaan het. 'n Audio-band is ingesluit by die prys van die boekie.