Oswald Spengler was one of the most important thinkers of the Weimar Republic. In Oswald Spengler and the Politics of Decline, Ben Lewis completely transforms our understanding of Spengler by showing how well-connected this philosopher was and how, at every stage of his career, he attempted to intervene politically in the very real-life events unfolding around him. The volume explains Spengler's politics as the outcome of a dynamic interplay between his meta-historical considerations on world history on the one hand, and the practical demands and considerations of Realpolitik on the other hand.

While there is an growing body of work on space and place in many disciplines, less attention has been paid to how a spatial approach illuminates the societies and cultures of the past. Here, leading experts explore the uses of space in two respects: how space can be applied to the study of history, and how space was used at specific times.

This volume brings together cutting-edge research by some of the most innovative scholars of early modern Britain. Inspired in part by recent studies of the early modern 'public sphere', the twelve chapters collected here reveal an array of political and religious practices that can serve as a foundation for new narratives of the period. The practices considered range from deliberation and inscription to publication and profanity. The narratives under construction range from secularisation to the rise of majority rule. Many of the authors also examine ways British developments were affected by and in turn influenced the world outside of Britain. These chapter will be essential reading for students of early modern Britain, early modern Europe and the Atlantic World. They will also appeal to those interested in the religious and political history of other regions and periods. -- .

Between c.250 and c.650, the way the past was seen, recorded and interpreted for a contemporary audience changed fundamentally. Only since the 1970s have the key elements of this historiographical revolution become clear, with the recasting of the period, across both east and west, as 'late antiquity'. Historiography, however, has struggled to find its place in this new scholarly world. No longer is decline and fall the natural explanatory model for cultural and literary developments, but continuity and transformation. In addition, the emergence of 'late antiquity' coincided with a methodological challenge arising from the 'linguistic turn' which impacted on history writing in all eras. This book is focussed on the development of modern understanding of how the ways of seeing and recording the past changed in the course of adjusting to emerging social, religious and cultural developments over the period from c.250 to c.650. Its overriding theme is how modern historiography has adapted over the past half century to engaging with the past between c.250 and c.650. Now, as explained in this book, the newly dominant historiographical genres (chronicles, epitomes, church histories) are seen as the preferred modes of telling the story of the past, rather than being considered rudimentary and naive.

Shows how and why history has been made from loss around the world, challenging the oft-received view that history is written by the 'victors', showing readers how diverse the writing of history can be. All students of history have to study historiography, and this volume offers a new lens through which to investigate that historiography as well as forming part of the cannon that students will study in these courses. There are lots of historiography books out there, but few that engage properly with the idea of history written from loss, from exile, from imprisonment as History From Loss does.

Shows how and why history has been made from loss around the world, challenging the oft-received view that history is written by the 'victors', showing readers how diverse the writing of history can be. All students of history have to study historiography, and this volume offers a new lens through which to investigate that historiography as well as forming part of the cannon that students will study in these courses. There are lots of historiography books out there, but few that engage properly with the idea of history written from loss, from exile, from imprisonment as History From Loss does.

Sources for Studying the Holocaust provides a pathway for readers to engage with questions about what sources can be used to study the Holocaust. For many historians, the challenge has been how to rescue the story from oblivion when oft-used sources for other periods of history introduce even more issues around authenticity and reliability. What can be learned of what transpired in villages and towns numbering several thousand people, when all its Jewish inhabitants were totally obliterated through Nazi action? Who can furnish eyewitness testimony, if all the eyewitnesses were killed? How does one examine written records preserving knowledge of facts or events, where none were kept or survived the onslaught? And what weight do we put upon such resources which did manage to endure the destruction wrought by the Holocaust? Each chapter looks at one of a diverse range of source materials from which scholars have rescued the history, including survivor testimony, diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, photographs, trial documents, artefacts, digital resources, memorials, films, literature, and art. Each chapter shows how different types of records can be utilised as accurate sources for the writing of Holocaust history. Collectively, they highlight the ways in which all material, even the most fragmentary, can be employed to recreate a reliable record of what happened during the Holocaust and show how all sources considered can be employed to find meaning and understanding by exploring a range of sources deeply. This book is a unique analysis of the types of sources that can be used to access the history of Holocaust. It will be of invaluable interest to readers, students, and researchers of the Holocaust.

What if researchers interested in ‘the past’ used their noses? This open access book makes the case for a more imaginatively interdisciplinary approach to sensory heritage and history, arguing that we can and should engage our noses as a research tool for articulating the past. Assessing how both we and our ancestors approach, understand and conceptualise smell, Tullett shows how archives can be ‘re-odorized’ to uncover narratives that are only implicit in or obscured by the historical record. From perfume libraries to organic compounds emitted by historical objects, this book acts as a guide for employing our olfactory senses when researching and studying history in order to understand and communicate the past more fully. Employing ‘olfactory figures’ examples, Smell and the Past shows how historical narratives and arguments can be found through a structured olfactory experience, and demonstrates how our understanding of the past and its relationship with the present is enriched by opening our minds and using our noses. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program project ODEUROPA under grant agreement number 101004469.

This book expands on established doctrine in legal history and sets out a challenge for legal philosophers. The English medieval village community offers a historical and philosophical lens on the concept of custom, which challenges accepted notions of what law is. The book traces the study of the medieval village community from early historical works in the nineteenth century through to current research. It demonstrates that some law-making can and has been 'bottom-up' in English law, with community-led decision-making having a particularly important role in the early common law. The detailed consideration of law in the English village community reveals alternative ways of making and conceiving of law which are not dependent on state authority, particularly in relation to customary and communal property rights. Acknowledging this poses challenges for legal theory: the legal positivism that dominates Western legal philosophy tends to reject custom as a source of law. However, this book argues that medieval customary law ought to be considered 'law' if we are ever going to fully understand law - both then and now. The book will be a valuable resource for researchers and academics working in the areas of Legal History, Legal Theory, and Jurisprudence.

This book explores how recent Colombian historical memories are informed by cultural diversity and how some of the country's citizens remember the brutalities committed by the Army, guerrillas, and paramilitaries during the internal war (1980-2016). Its chapters delve into four case studies. The first highlights the selections of what not to remember and what not to represent at the National Museum of the country. The second focuses on the well-received memories at the same institution by examining a display made to commemorate the assassination of a demobilized guerrilla fighter. The third discusses how a rural marginal community decided to vividly remember the attacks they experienced by creating a display hall to aid in their collective and individual healing. Lastly, the fourth case study, also about a rural peripheric community, discusses their way of remembering, which emphasizes peasant oral traditions through a traveling venue. By bringing violence, memory, and museum studies together, this text contributes to our understanding of how social groups severely impacted by atrocities recreate and remember their violent experiences. By drawing on displays, newspapers, interviews, catalogs, and oral histories, Jimena Perry shows how museums and exhibitions in Colombia become politically active subjects in the acts of reflection and mourning, and how they foster new relationships between the state and society. This volume is of great use to students and scholars interested in Latin American and public history.

This book explores how recent Colombian historical memories are informed by cultural diversity and how some of the country's citizens remember the brutalities committed by the Army, guerrillas, and paramilitaries during the internal war (1980-2016). Its chapters delve into four case studies. The first highlights the selections of what not to remember and what not to represent at the National Museum of the country. The second focuses on the well-received memories at the same institution by examining a display made to commemorate the assassination of a demobilized guerrilla fighter. The third discusses how a rural marginal community decided to vividly remember the attacks they experienced by creating a display hall to aid in their collective and individual healing. Lastly, the fourth case study, also about a rural peripheric community, discusses their way of remembering, which emphasizes peasant oral traditions through a traveling venue. By bringing violence, memory, and museum studies together, this text contributes to our understanding of how social groups severely impacted by atrocities recreate and remember their violent experiences. By drawing on displays, newspapers, interviews, catalogs, and oral histories, Jimena Perry shows how museums and exhibitions in Colombia become politically active subjects in the acts of reflection and mourning, and how they foster new relationships between the state and society. This volume is of great use to students and scholars interested in Latin American and public history.

This book scrutinizes the emergence of historians participating as expert witnesses in historical forensic contribution in some of the most important national and international legal ventures of the last century. It aims to advance the debate from discussions on whether historians should testify or not toward nuanced understanding of the history of the practice and making the best out of its performance in the future.

Sources for Studying the Holocaust provides a pathway for readers to engage with questions about what sources can be used to study the Holocaust. For many historians, the challenge has been how to rescue the story from oblivion when oft-used sources for other periods of history introduce even more issues around authenticity and reliability. What can be learned of what transpired in villages and towns numbering several thousand people, when all its Jewish inhabitants were totally obliterated through Nazi action? Who can furnish eyewitness testimony, if all the eyewitnesses were killed? How does one examine written records preserving knowledge of facts or events, where none were kept or survived the onslaught? And what weight do we put upon such resources which did manage to endure the destruction wrought by the Holocaust? Each chapter looks at one of a diverse range of source materials from which scholars have rescued the history, including survivor testimony, diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, photographs, trial documents, artefacts, digital resources, memorials, films, literature, and art. Each chapter shows how different types of records can be utilised as accurate sources for the writing of Holocaust history. Collectively, they highlight the ways in which all material, even the most fragmentary, can be employed to recreate a reliable record of what happened during the Holocaust and show how all sources considered can be employed to find meaning and understanding by exploring a range of sources deeply. This book is a unique analysis of the types of sources that can be used to access the history of Holocaust. It will be of invaluable interest to readers, students, and researchers of the Holocaust.

Record-Making and Record-Keeping in Early Societies provides a concise and up-to-date survey of early record-making and record-keeping practices across the world. It investigates the ways in which human activities have been recorded in different settings using different methods and technologies. Based on an in-depth analysis of literature from a wide range of disciplines, including prehistory, archaeology, Assyriology, Egyptology, and Chinese and Mesoamerican studies, the book reflects the latest and most relevant historical scholarship. Drawing upon the author's experience as a practitioner and scholar of records and archives and his extensive knowledge of archival theory and practice, the book embeds its account of the beginnings of recording practices in a conceptual framework largely derived from archival science. Unique both in its breadth of coverage and in its distinctive perspective on early record-making and record-keeping, the book provides the only updated and synoptic overview of early recording practices available worldwide. Record-Making and Record-Keeping in Early Societies will be of interest to academics, researchers, and students engaged in the study of archival science, archival history, and the early history of human culture. The book will also appeal to practitioners of archives and records management interested in learning more about the origins of their profession.

The volume takes a historical approach to examine how biography has been used throughout history. It gives readers a real sense of the history of the relationship between history and biography. Useful for historians and students as it looks at different, emerging Schools of biography in the present day, allowing the complexity of the practice in the present day to be easily understood by the reader. It covers a large range of issues that historians have faced over time when using biography - such as used the problems of evidence, the subject matter, the methodological robustness and inclusiveness of biographical practice, pluralism and non-Western biographical principles and representativeness which allows the reader to get a sense of the wide range of issues that are addressed when thinking about history and biography.

The book describes humanism in a systematic and historical perspective. It analyzes its manifestation and function in cultural studies and its role in the present. Within the book, special attention is given to the intention of contemporary humanism to overcome ethno-centric elements in the cultural orientation of contemporary living conditions and to develop humane dimensions of this orientation. This is linked to a fundamental critique of the current post-human self-understanding of the humanities. Furthermore, the intercultural aspect in the understanding of humanism is emphasized; for non-Western cultures also have their own humanistic traditions. Two further aspects are also addressed: the Holocaust as the most radical challenge to humanistic thinking and the relationship of humanism to nature. Sitting at the intersection of history and philosophy, the book is perfect for those exploring humanism from an historical perspective.

This book shows how a multidisciplinary approach combining conceptual and methodological tools from political history and political science can help to develop a deeper understanding of contemporary political phenomena including democracy, populism, war, and forced migrations, among others. Throughout the eleven chapters, the volume brings together senior academics and early-career scholars to explore this innovative approach through a broad range of case studies which are not specific to any particular nation but are characteristic of contemporaneity worldwide. Both the international character and the interdisciplinary appeal of this book are reinforced by the fact that the editors and contributors come from different countries and diverse academic traditions. This book is aimed at scholars, researchers and postgraduate students interested in interdisciplinary approaches and working on politics and global phenomena in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The study of these letters is particularly valuable in highlighting the relationship between society and the intimate life of an individual, but also in underlining the active role that Prisco an individual was able to play / This volume will be of great use to upper-level graduates, postgraduates and experienced scholars interested in microhistory, history of migrations, history of Self, and in the develop of theoretical approaches and methodologies when using letters as sources in inter-disciplinary historical research.

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 defence 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.

This Handbook is the first systematic effort to map the fast-growing phenomenon of memory activism and to delineate a new field of research that lies at the intersection of memory and social movement studies. From Charlottesville to Cape Town, from Santiago to Sydney, we have recently witnessed protesters demanding that symbols of racist or colonial pasts be dismantled and that we talk about histories that have long been silenced. But such events are only the most visible instances of grassroots efforts to influence the meaning of the past in the present. Made up of more than 80 chapters that encapsulate the rich diversity of scholarship and practice of memory activism by assembling different disciplinary traditions, methodological approaches, and empirical evidence from across the globe, this Handbook establishes important questions and their theoretical implications arising from the social, political, and economic reality of memory activism. Memory activism is multi-faceted, takes place in a variety of settings, and has diverse outcomes - but it is always crucial to understanding the constitution and transformation of our societies, past and present. This volume will serve as a guide and establish new analytic frameworks for scholars, students, policymakers, journalists, and activists alike.

Respectability, Bankruptcy and Bigamy in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Britain explores the vexed question of middle-class respectability in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. It focuses upon the life of London solicitor Hamilton Pawley (1860-1936), who was barred from working by the Law Society, twice declared bankrupt, and in 1919 was sentenced to eighteen months' imprisonment with hard labour for bigamously marrying a woman practically forty years his junior. If Pawley did not suffer the revenge of respectable society, it is difficult to think who would. Drawing upon the fact that the disgraced and the disreputable have always tended to attract a disproportionate amount of attention, the book ranges widely, exploring such important issues as middle-class education, career choices, the dynamics of family life, and the workings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century legal system. It shows that Pawley was able to hold on to his professional - and even gentlemanly - status for far longer than seemed likely. This all suggests, the book concludes, that although respectability was as important to the middle class as we have always been told, it was both easier to acquire and easier to retain than we have generally been led to believe. This book will appeal to all those interested in British society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The book brings together many recent trends in writing history under a common framework: thinking history globally. By thinking history globally, the book explains, applies, and exemplifies the four basic strategies of analysis, the big C's: comparing, connecting, conceptualizing, and contextualizing, using twelve different branches of history.

Guides the reader through the process of sourcing a relevant oral history archive for linguistic analysis, constructing a representative corpus out of this archive and analysing this using corpus tools Shows how corpus linguistics can illuminate themes worthy of investigation that may otherwise remain hidden Shows what readers can gain from blending linguistic tools and competencies with oral history data

This is the first volume that examines dangerous gift-giving across centuries and disciplines. Bringing to the fore the subject that features as an aside in gift studies, it offers new insights into the ambivalent and troubled history of gift-giving. Dangerous, violent, and self-destructive gift-giving remains an alluring challenge for scholars almost a hundred years after Marcel Mauss's landmark work on the gift. Globally, the notion of toxic and fateful gifts has haunted mythologies, folklores, and literatures for millennia. This book problematizes what stands behind the notion of the 'dangerous gift' and demonstrates how this operational term may help us to better understand the role and place of gift-giving from antiquity to the present through a series of case studies ranging from ancient Zoroastrianism to modern digital dating. The book develops a complex historical, cross-cultural, and multi-disciplinary approach to gift-giving that invites comparisons between various facets of this phenomenon through time and across societies. The book will interest a wide range of scholars working in anthropology, history, literary criticism, religious studies, and contemporary digital culture. It will primarily appeal to university educators and researchers of political culture, pre-modern religion, social relations, and the relationship between commerce and gifts.

More scholars are showing interest in Disney research, especially for the theme parks and their cultural messages Will benefit researchers and students of all levels exploring this topic, has a clear historical approach and the written level is clear and appropriate to a college level Utilising the author's knowledge of the topic and upcoming exhibition, this volume takes a public history approach to the theme parks and their cultural messages.