Teaching history well is not just a matter of knowing history - it is a set of skills that can be developed and honed through practice. In this theoretically informed but eminently practical volume, Mary Jo Festle examines the recent explosion of research on the teaching and learning of history. Illuminated by her own work, Festle applies the concept of "backward design" as an organizing framework to the history classroom. She provides concrete strategies for setting up an environment that is inclusive and welcoming but still challenging and engaging. Instructors will improve their own conceptual understandings of teaching and learning issues, as well as receive guidance on designing courses and implementing pedagogies consistent with what research tells us about how students learn. The book offers practical illustrations of assignments, goals, questions, grading rubrics, unit plans, and formats for peer observation that are adaptable for courses on any subject and of any size. Transforming History is a critical guide for higher and secondary education faculty - neophytes and longtime professionals alike - working to improve student learning.

In this introduction to history, a historian helps students understand what it means to study the past from a distinctly Christian perspective.

To what extent do we and can we understand others-other peoples, species, times, and places? What is the role of others within ourselves, epitomized in the notion of unconscious forces? Can we come to terms with our internalized others in ways that foster mutual understanding and counteract the tendency to scapegoat, project, victimize, and indulge in prejudicial and narcissistic impulses? How do various fields or disciplines address or avoid such questions? And have these questions become particularly pressing and not in the least confined to other peoples, times, and places? Making selective and critical use of the thought of such important figures as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, and Mikhail Bakhtin, in Understanding Others Dominick LaCapra investigates a series of crucial topics from the current state of deconstruction, trauma studies, and the humanities to newer fields such as animal studies and posthumanist scholarship. LaCapra adroitly brings critical historical thought into a provocative engagement with politics and our current political climate. This is LaCapra at his best, critically rethinking major currents and exploring the old and the new in combination, often suggesting what this means in the age of Trump.

How, as historians, should we 'read' a film? Histories on Screen answers this and other questions in a crucial volume for any history student keen to master source use. The book begins with a theoretical 'Thinking about Film' section that explores the ways in which films can be analyzed and interrogated as either primary sources, secondary sources or indeed as both. The much larger 'Using Film' segment of the book then offers engaging case studies which put this theory into practice. Topics including gender, class, race, war, propaganda, national identity and memory all receive good coverage in what is an eclectic multi-contributor volume. Documentaries, films and television from Britain and the United States are examined and there is a jargon-free emphasis on the skills and methods needed to analyze films in historical study featuring prominently throughout the text. Histories on Screen is a vital resource for all history students as it enables them to understand film as a source and empowers them with the analytical tools needed to use that knowledge in their own work.

Ivan Jablonka's History Is a Contemporary Literature offers highly innovative perspectives on the writing of history, the relationship between literature and the social sciences, and the way that both social-scientific inquiry and literary explorations contribute to our understanding of the world. Jablonka argues that the act and art of writing, far from being an afterthought in the social sciences, should play a vital role in the production of knowledge in all stages of the researcher's work and embody or even constitute the understanding obtained. History (along with sociology and anthropology) can, he contends, achieve both greater rigor and wider audiences by creating a literary experience through a broad spectrum of narrative modes. Challenging scholars to adopt investigative, testimonial, and other experimental writing techniques as a way of creating and sharing knowledge, Jablonka envisions a social science literature that will inspire readers to become actively engaged in understanding their own pasts and to relate their histories to the present day. Lamenting the specialization that has isolated the academy from the rest of society, History Is a Contemporary Literature aims to bring imagination and audacity into the practice of scholarship, drawing on the techniques of literature to strengthen the methods of the social sciences.

The Idea of History is the best-known work of the great Oxford philosopher, historian, and archaeologist R. G. Collingwood. Published posthumously in 1946, having been mainly reconstructed from his manuscripts (many of which are now lost), it examines how the idea of history has evolved from the time of Herodotus to the twentieth century, and offers Collingwood's own view of what history is. This revised edition has a substantial new introduction which discusses how scholars have responded to Collingwood's classic over the last fifty years. It also makes available for the first time some of Collingwood's lectures on the philosophy of history - essential for a fuller understanding of his thought, and in particular for the interpretation of The Idea of History itself.

Injustices of the past cast a shadow on the present. They are the root cause of much harm, the source of enmity, and increasingly in recent times, the focus of demands for reparation. In this groundbreaking philosophical investigation, Janna Thompson examines the problems raised by reparative demands and puts forward a theory of reparation for historical injustices.

The book argues that the problems posed by historical injustices are best resolved by a reconciliatory view of reparative justice and an approach that explains how people acquire intergenerational responsibilities and entitlements. It ranges in its subject matter from the claims of indigenous people to land stolen from their ancestors to the growing movement for reparations for slavery. The book provides an original and convincing answer to the questions of how citizens can have reparative responsibilities for wrongs committed before they were born, and why descendants of victims may be entitled to compensation for historical injustices such as slavery. It also explains how members of nations can make recompense for injustices of the past without ignoring the inequities of the present."Taking Responsibility for the Past" is a significant contribution to philosophical and legal debates about reparative justice, and at the same time an accessible and thought-provoking book for general readers.

Interest in local history just continues to grow. For the professional and amateur alike, in the context of the local experience the past becomes real and immediate, as the stories of individuals, families and communities emerge from our research. And now more than ever, a wealth of primary and secondary source material is within everyone's reach. This invaluable book, written by one of our most eminent and experienced local historians, and now completely updated, provides clear, wise and always practical advice about the process of research and writing. It gives essential guidance on a wide range of key topics, including finding sources; transcribing, analysing and interpreting evidence; writing; historical perspectives and methods; and ways to present and publish the finished product. Using examples and exercises the author guides the reader through the whole process. Written with humour and understanding, and attractively illustrated, this book is an enjoyable and fascinating introduction to the subject, especially useful to those who enjoy local history but wish to write and possibly publish, and to students on local history courses who want authoritative guidance on the preparation of dissertations and theses.

Key Issues in Historical Theory is a fresh, clear and well-grounded introduction to this vibrant field of inquiry, incorporating many examples from novels, paintings, music, and political debates. The book expertly engages the reader in discussions of what history is, how people relate to the past and how they are formed by the past. Over 11 thematically-based chapters, Herman Paul discusses subjects such as: history, memory and trauma historical experience and narrative moral and political dimensions of history historical reasoning and explanation truth, plausibility and objectivity. Key Issues in Historical Theory convincingly shows that historical theory is not limited to reflection on professional historical studies, but offers valuable tools for understanding autobiographical writing, cultural heritage and political controversies about the past. With textboxes providing additional focus on a range of key topics, this is an attractive, accessible and up-to-date guide to the field of historical theory.

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.

This is a book for anyone interested in history, what it is and where it comes from. Engaging and challenging, it confronts us with the many 'histories' that exist and have existed around the world, from the Zulu kingdoms to Communist China. The Use and Abuse of History takes as its starting point the way history is taught to children. The different narratives that constitute the histories of countries as diverse as India, Iran, Trinidad and the United States make for fascinating reading in their own right. What makes this book so valuable, though, is what these narratives tell us about the societies which created them - how much is history distorted in order to condition the minds of those who are taught it? A pioneer in its field that has become a key text of contemporary historiography, this is a book that poses fundamental and disturbing questions about the use and abuse of history.

Introduction to Public History: Interpreting the Past, Engaging Audiences is a brief foundational textbook for public history. It is organized around the questions and ethical dilemmas that drive public history in a variety of settings, from local community-based projects to international case studies. This book is designed for use in undergraduate and graduate classrooms with future public historians, teachers, and consumers of history in mind. The authors are practicing public historians who teach history and public history to a mix of undergraduate and graduate students at universities across the United States and in international contexts. This book is based on original research and the authors' first-hand experiences, offering a fresh perspective on the dynamic field of public history based on a decade of consultation with public history educators about what they needed in an introductory textbook. Each chapter introduces a concept or common practice to students, highlighting key terms for student review and for instructor assessment of student learning. The body of each chapter introduces theories, and basic conceptual building blocks intermixed with case studies to illustrate these points. Footnotes credit sources but also serve as breadcrumbs for instructors who might like to assign more in-depth reading for more advanced students or for the purposes of lecture development. Each chapter ends with suggestions for activities that the authors have tried with their own students and suggested readings, books, and websites that can deepen student exposure to the topic.

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.

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.

Believe it or not, the 1990s are history. As historians turn to study this period and beyond, they will encounter a historical record that is radically different from what has ever existed before. Old websites, social media, blogs, photographs, and videos are all part of the massive quantities of digital information that technologists, librarians, archivists, and organizations such as the Internet Archive have been collecting for the past three decades. In History in the Age of Abundance? Ian Milligan argues that web-based historical sources and their archives present extraordinary opportunities as well as daunting technical and ethical challenges for historians. Through case studies, he outlines the approaches, methods, tools, and search functions that can help a historian turn web documents into historical sources. He also considers the implications of the size and scale of digital sources, which amount to more information than historians have ever had at their fingertips, and many of which are by and about people who have traditionally been absent from the historical record. Scrutinizing the concept of the web and the mechanics of its archives, Milligan explains how these new media challenge, reshape, and enrich both the historical profession and the historical record. A wake-up call for historians of the twenty-first century, History in the Age of Abundance? is an essential introduction to the way web archives work, what possibilities they open up, what risks they entail, and what the shift to digital information means for historians, their professional training and organization, and society as a whole.

"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 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.

The book analyses the ideological and philosophical basis of Zionism, i.e. how Zionism solved the most important problems of Jews in the last decades of the 19th century: the problem of assimilation, the philosophical principles of national identity, the idea of self-liberation and the conception of the Jewish state. Another problem discussed in this book is how the religious idea of "Return to Zion" became both philosophical and political goals. All considerations are based on the analysis of the source texts of the protagonists and founders of Zionism (Hess, Pinsker, Herzl and Nordau). Zionism is also shown in the perspective of its strength and weakness, as well as its importance for Jewishness in general.

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.

The surge of evolutionary and neurological analyses of art and its effects raises questions of how art, culture, and the biological sciences influence one another, and what we gain in applying scientific methods to the interpretation of artwork. In this insightful book, Matthew Rampley addresses these questions by exploring key areas where Darwinism, neuroscience, and art history intersect. Taking a scientific approach to understanding art has led to novel and provocative ideas about its origins, the basis of aesthetic experience, and the nature of research into art and the humanities. Rampley’s inquiry examines models of artistic development, the theories and development of aesthetic response, and ideas about brain processes underlying creative work. He considers the validity of the arguments put forward by advocates of evolutionary and neuroscientific analysis, as well as its value as a way of understanding art and culture. With the goal of bridging the divide between science and culture, Rampley advocates for wider recognition of the human motivations that drive inquiry of all types, and he argues that our engagement with art can never be encapsulated in a single notion of scientific knowledge. Engaging and compelling, The Seductions of Darwin is a rewarding look at the identity and development of art history and its complicated ties to the world of scientific thought.

The book is an investigation of the evidence for King Arthur based on the earliest written sources rather than later myths and legends. The evidence is laid out in a chronological order starting from Roman Britain and shows how the legend evolved and at what point concepts such as Camelot, excalibur and Merlin were added. It covers the historical records from the end of Roman Britain using contemporary sources such as they are, from 400-800, including Gallic Chronicles, Gildas and Bede. It details the first written reference to Arthur in the Historia Brittonum c800 and the later Annales Cambriae in the tenth century showing the evolution of the legend in in later Welsh and French stories. The work differs from other books on the subject in not starting from or aiming at a specific person. It compares the possibility of Arthur being purely fictional with an historical figure alongside a list of possible suspects. The evidence is presented and the reader is invited to make up their own mind before a discussion of the Author's own assessment.

'Caste is Race in Ancient Times, Race is Caste in Modern Times, Untouchability is an Aryan Construct. They said God has not created Untouchables.' Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd goes on to say, 'Many people from the Brahmin-Baniya castes have written about their own greatness in their autobiographies, in English and in the regional languages. But I have not seen even a single autobiography of a person born and brought up in the shepherd community'. He adds that it is in writing about themselves that people gain a sense of self-respect. Shepherd's evocative memoirs reveal the struggle for education and dignity that a great majority of Indians undergo. As a little boy herding sheep and goats, he and his brother were the first to go to school. The author writes of his long and often interrupted journey to becoming a writer and an intellectual, without support and having to overcome adversities.