History, Memory and Public Life introduces readers to key themes in the study of historical memory and its significance by considering the role of historical expertise and understanding in contemporary public reflection on the past. Divided into two parts, the book addresses both the theoretical and applied aspects of historical memory studies. 'Approaches to history and memory' introduces key methodological and theoretical issues within the field, such as postcolonialism, sites of memory, myths of national origins, and questions raised by memorialisation and museum presentation. 'Difficult pasts' looks at history and memory in practice through a range of case studies on contested, complex or traumatic memories, including the Northern Ireland Troubles, post-apartheid South Africa and the Holocaust. Examining the intersection between history and memory from a wide range of perspectives, and supported by guidance on further reading and online resources, this book is ideal for students of history as well as those working within the broad interdisciplinary field of memory studies.

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Plato's The Republic has influenced Western philosophers for centuries, with its main focus on what makes a well-balanced society and individual.

In this extraordinary analysis of the meaning of the remembered past, Lukacs discusses the evolution of historical consciousness since its first emergence about three centuries ago. Among the diverse subjects he examines are the endurance of national characteristics; the development of language, history, and democracy; public opinion; the problem of religious history; memory and time; history and physics; motives and causes; and the end of the Modern Age. In a new introduction, Lukacs comments on the continual decline of historical knowledge and the teaching of history.

In "History After Lacan, " Teresa Brennan argues that Jacques Lacan was not an ahistorical post-structuralist. She tells the story of a social psychosis, beginning with a discussion of Lacan's neglected theory of history which argued that we are in the grip of a psychotic's era which began in the seventeenth century and climaxes in the present.
By extending and elaborating on Lacan's theory, Brennan develops a general theory of modernity. Contrary to postmodern assumptions, she argues, we need a general historical explanation. An understanding of historical dynamics is essential if we are to make the connections between the outstanding facts of modernity--ethnocentrism, the relation between the sexes, and ecological catastrophe.
A challenging feminist, interdisciplinary study, "History After Lacan" will be essential reading for social, cultural, and political theorists, historians, psychoanalysts, and literary theorists.

The historic long term economic interconnections of the world are now universally accepted. The idea of the economic "world system" advanced by Immanual Wallerstein has set the period of linkage in the early modern period, but Andre Gunder Frank thinks that this date is much too late and denies the much longer run of interconnection going back as much as 5000 years. In "The World System", the authors argue through this issue, in a debate contributed to by William McNeill and Immanuel Wallerstein, among others.

Neo-classical economics is frequently criticized for paying inadequate attention to historical processes. However, it has proved easier to make broad claims that "history matters" than to theorize with any depth about the appropriate role for history in economic analysis. "Historical Analysis in Economics" considers what history can contribute to the science of economics: how would it matter if "history mattered?";Leading economic historians consider both the general aspects of this question and specific examples where long run changes have clearly impacted on the economic landscape, including issues related to employment and retirement and changing attitudes to business culture.

After a decade of historical anthropology, the discipline seems to be thoroughly historicized. This implies not only that the historical dimension of other cultures has become an integrated part of any anthropological inquiry, but also that the different ways of producing history have become important considerations. Using historical and ethnographic material, mainly from Europe, "Other Histories" examines the nature of history and its importance to anthropological study. The apparently Eurocentric perspective of this book actually serves the purpose of dismantling the unity and progress of European history. It aims to demonstrates that history is not linear but highly complex, and often contains several separate local histories.

Over the past decade, historians and sociologists have increasingly used visual materials, in particular photographs, in their work. This volume brings together historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and media and visual scholars to articulate how photography, as a practice and as a visual medium, can provide insights into national memory, collective identities, and the historical imagination. This collection allows the reader to trace parallel conceptual developments occurring in the sociology and anthropology of memory and in the history and theory of photography, and to illustrate the unique "angles of vision" these disciplines offer. Photographic images commonly accompany historical accounts, from documentaries to family scrapbooks, and since the early days of commercial photography, pictures have been viewed as tools to capture memories. Later critical writing has challenged this equation by inverting it: photos, along with other archival practices, were often viewed as falling short of their supposed function as vessels of memory and at times even denounced as devices that distorted memories. How does photography participate in the formation and maintenance of collective identities and shared memory discourses, from the family to the nation? Furthermore, how can we begin to conceptualize photography's effects on the historical imagination of individuals and groups? Double Exposure endeavors to answer these questions by calling attention to the variety of contexts in which images circulate and to the narratives from which they spring and which they, in turn, shape. This is the latest volume in Transaction's Memory and Narrative series.

Over the past 500 years westerners have turned into avid consumers of colonial products and various production systems in the Americas, Africa and Asia have adapted to serve the new markets that opened up in the wake of the "European encounter". The effects of these transformations for the long-term development of these societies are fiercely contested. How can we use historical source material to pinpoint this social change? This volume presents six different examples from countries in which commodities were embedded in existing production systems - tobacco, coffee, sugar and indigo in Indonesia, India and Cuba - to shed light on this key process in human history. To demonstrate the effectiveness of using different types of source material, each contributor presents a micro-study based on a different type of historical source: a diary, a petition, a "mail report", a review, a scientific study and a survey. As a result, the volume offers insights into how historians use their source material to construct narratives about the past and offers introductions to trajectories of agricultural commodity production, as well as much new information about the social struggles surrounding them.

Identity, Attachment and Resilience provides a timely foray into the new field of psychology and genealogy, exploring the relationship between family history and identity. The field encompasses family narratives and researches family history to increase our understanding of cultural and personal identity, as well as our sense of self. It draws on emotional geography and history to provide rich yet personalised contexts for family experience. In this book, Antonia Bifulco researches three generations of her own Czechowski family, beginning in Poland in the late nineteenth century and moving on to post-WWII England. She focuses on key family members and places to describe individual experience against the socio-political backdrop of both World Wars. Utilising letters, journals and handwritten biographies of family members, the book undertakes an analysis of impacts on identity (sense of self ), attachment (family ties) and resilience (coping under adversity), drawing out timely wider themes of immigration and European identity. Representing a novel approach for psychologists, linking family narrative to social context and intergenerational impacts, Identity, Attachment and Resilience describes Eastern European upheaval over the twentieth century to explain why Polish communities have settled in England. With particular relevance for Polish families seeking to understand their cultural heritage and identity, this unique account will be of great interest to any reader interested in family narratives, immigration and identity. It will appeal to students and researchers of psychology, history and social sciences.

Public History and the Food Movement argues that today's broad interest in making food systems fairer, healthier, and more sustainable offers a compelling opportunity for the public history field. Moon and Stanton show how linking heritage institutions' unique skills and resources with contemporary food issues can offer accessible points of entry for the public into broad questions about human and environmental resilience. They argue that this approach can also benefit institutions themselves, by offering potential new audiences, partners, and sources of support at a time when many are struggling to remain relevant and viable. Interviews with innovative practitioners in both the food and history fields offer additional insights. Drawing on both scholarship and practice, Public History and the Food Movement presents a practical toolkit for engagement. Demonstrating how public historians can take on a vital contemporary issue while remaining true to the guiding principles of historical research and interpretation, the book challenges public historians to claim an expanded role in today's food politics. The fresh thinking will also be of interest to public historians looking to engage with other timely issues.

The ability to view recorded moving pictures has had a major impact on human culture since the development of the necessary technologies over a century ago. For most of this time people have gone to the movies to be entertained and perhaps edified, but in the meantime television, the videocassette recorder (VCR), the digital versatile disk (DVD) player, the personal computer (desktop and laptop), the internet and other technologies have made watching moving pictures possible at home, in the classroom and just about anywhere else. Today, moving images are everywhere in our culture. Every day, moving picture cameras record millions of hours of activity, human and otherwise, all over the world: your cell phone makes a little video of your friends at a party; the surveillance camera at the bank keeps on eye on customers; journalists' shoulder-carried cameras record the latest from the war zone; and across the world film artists work on all kinds of movies, from low-budget independent projects to the next big-budget Hollywood blockbuster. Moving pictures have had a great influence on human culture, and this book focuses on using moving images as historical evidence. Studying history means examining evidence from the past to understand, interpret and present what has happened in different times and places. We talk and write about what we have learned, hoping to establish credibility both for what we have determined to be the facts and for whatever meaning or significance we may attach to our reconstruction of the past. Studying history is a scientific process, involving a fairly set methodology. We tend to favor written sources, and we have tended to favor writing as a means of presenting our views of the past. But historians also use all kinds of other documents and artifacts in their work of interpreting the past, including moving pictures.

Represents the state of the art in New Historicism and contains intriguing essays on the emergence of the 'Third World' as a signifier, the relationship of feminism and New Historicism, and the loss of the category 'class' in New Historicism.

The rapid rise in the study of Oral History has been evident across a wide range of academic and community settings. From surgeons in England investigating the embodied memories of half-remembered techniques in no longer practiced operations, to truth and reconciliation projects in countries recovering from civil conflict, including in South Africa, Oral History is as diverse and widespread in practice as it is in application. This four-volume collection of cutting edge and canonical research will be of interest to students and scholars alike.

Collected Studies CS1065 We assume that we have a clear understanding of how people in the Middle Ages thought and which attitudes they struck but in reality this is a subject of enormous complexity of which conclusions can only be drawn via painstaking archival research and decades of study. Giles Constable has spent a career analysing these forces and impulses and this new collection draws together his major findings on a host of topics including frontiers, metaphors, religious life and spirituality, and concepts of political theory.

Through questions such as 'What is power?', 'How are revolutions generated?', 'Does public opinion really exist?', 'What does terrorism mean?' and 'When are generations created?', Words in Time scrutinizes the fundamental concepts by which we confer meaning to the historical and social world and what they actually signify, analysing their formation and use in modern thought within both history and the social sciences. In this volume, Francesco Benigno examines the origins and development of the words we use, critiquing the ways in which they have traditionally been employed in historical thinking and examining their potential usefulness today. Rather than being a general inventory or a specialized dictionary, this book analyses a selection of words particularly relevant not only in the idiom and jargon of the social sciences and history, but also in the discourse of ordinary people. Exploring new trends in the historical field of reflection and representing a call for a new, more conscious, historical approach to the social world, this is valuable reading for all students of historical theory and method.

Why are most famous historians men? How have women changed the writing of history over the last decades? What lives and stories have been hidden from history? Until recently history was predominantly the domain of men. That men were the authors of our past meant that in many cases only half of the story was told. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, the picture changed. Women, and indeed some men as well, started to address gender history. Women had been investigated historically before, but never with such intensity, nor such breadth. The impetus for this writing was both political and academic as feminists were determined to explore lives which until then had been disregarded. Gender and the Historian charts the entry and development of this new history, showing how such considerations furthered postmodernism and ultimately reinvigorated the very core of History..

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.

There is a tremendous concern and interest in the number of chemical dependents with co-existing compulsive behaviors. However, no one has developed a theory that can explain the high prevalence of compulsive behaviors in chemical dependents, and more importantly, describe the treatment and recovery implications. The literature and professionals are divided with the counselors/clinicians on one side and the researchers on the other. The authors try to bridge this obvious gap by writing a book that can bring recent genetic/biochemical research to the counselor/clinician in a way that will help them diagnose and treat their patients. This book is the result of the authors' long interest in and study of chemical dependency and compulsive behaviors. It begins with the observation that chemical dependents experience a much higher prevalence of compulsive behaviors than the general population. Although many have written about the two subjects--generally the relationship of a single compulsive behavior to chemical dependency--none have developed a theory with supporting research that ties the type of chemical dependency to specific compulsive behaviors. The authors describe recent research that connects chemical dependency and compulsive behaviors to the underlying genetic/biochemical mechanisms, and provide detailed examinations of the clinical implications of the model as well as case histories.

Following Clifford Geertz and other cultural anthropologists, the New Historicist critics have evolved a method for describing culture in action. Their "thick descriptions" seize upon an event or anecdote--colonist John Rolfe's conversation with Pocohontas's father, a note found among Nietzsche's papers to the effect that "I have lost my umbrella"--and re-read it to reveal through the analysis of tiny particulars the motive forces controlling a whole society. Contributors: Stephen J. Greenblatt, Louis A. Montrose, Catherine Gallagher, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Gerald Graff, Jean Franco, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Frank Lentricchia, Vincent Pecora, Jane Marcus, Jon Klancher, Jonathan Arac, Hayden White, Stanley Fish, Judith Newton, Joel Fineman, John Schaffer, Richard Terdiman, Donald Pease, Brooks Thomas.

Essential Skills for Historians helps undergraduate students make the transition from general university study to a more in-depth study of history, and to gain the skills and techniques they need to conduct an independent research project or embark on a career as a professional historian. The book begins with an examination of the historical discipline and its relevance to contemporary culture. It then guides readers through the steps of developing a research project, using two sample projects that illustrate the connections between core proficiencies such as critical thinking and effective time management, and professional proficiencies such as source criticism and historical interpretation. By following these source projects as they develop, the book also highlights the importance of sound historical practice and a critical understanding of the past in contemporary society. Finally, the book discusses the outcomes of historical research and reveals the wide array of possibilities for careers built upon the skills gained from studying history. Covering key topics such as research strategies, reading sources, effective writing and professional ethics - and with useful features such as glossaries, guidelines for student projects, hands-on exercises, further reading and a companion website containing extra resources - Essential Skills for Historians equips aspiring historians with everything they need to succeed whilst also demonstrating the value of history in the wider world.

In Rereading German History, first published in 1997, Richard J. Evans draws together his seminal review essays on the political, economic, cultural and social history of Germany through war and reunification. This book provides a study of how and why historians - mainly German, American, British and French - have provided a series of differing and often conflicting readings of the German past. It also presents a reconsideration of German history in the light of the recent decline of the German Democratic Republic, collapse of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany. Rereading German History re-examines major controversies in modern German history, such as the debate over Germany's 'special path' to modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the discussions in the 1980s on the uniqueness or otherwise of Auschwitz. Evans also analyses the arguments over the nature of German national identity. The book offers trenchant and important analytical insights into the history of Germany in the last two centuries, and is ideal reading material for students of modern history and German studies.

This radical analysis of the role and importance of historiography interprets the philosophy and theory of history on the basis of historicity as a human condition. The book examins the norms and methods of historiography from a philosophical point of view, but rejects generalisations tht the philosophy of history can provide all the answers to contemporary problems. Instead it outlines a feasible theory of history which is still radical enough to apply to all social structures.

The recent wave of interest in oral history and return to the active subject as a topic in historical practice raises a number of questions about the status and function of scholarly history in our societies. This articles in this volume, originally pubished in 1990, and which originally appeared in History and Anthropology, Volume 2, Part 2, discuss what contributions, meanings and consequences emerge from scholarly history turning to living memory, and what the relationships are between history and memory.