Archaeology, most of us learned in school, consists in the painstaking digging up and sifting of relics from extinct cultures; hardly an exciting or indeed interesting activity - for most of us. Archaeologists and anthropologists, professional and otherwise, know better. In the buried structures and detritus of ancient cultures can be found a world of knowledge and insight - empirical and theoretical - into their cultures as well as our own. This fascinating volume brings these worlds to life, by integrating recent developments in anthropological and sociological theory with a series of detailed studies of prehistoric material culture. It is an exploration of the manner in which semiotic, hermeneutic, Marxist, and post-structuralist approaches radically alter our understanding of the past, and provides a series of innovative studies of key areas of interest to archaeologists and anthropologists.

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, Europeans embarked on a new way of classifying the world, devising genealogies that determined degrees of relatedness by tracing heritage through common ancestry. This methodology organized historical systems into family trees, transforming the closest contemporaneous terms on trees of languages, religions, races, nations, species, or individuals into siblings. Encompassing political fraternity, sister languages, racial discourse on brotherhood, evolutionary sibling species, and intense, often incestuously inclined brother-sister bonds in literature, siblinghood stands out as a ubiquitous-yet unacknowledged-conceptual touchstone across the European long nineteenth century. In all such systems the sibling term, not-quite-same and not-quite-other, serves as an active fault line, necessary for and yet continuously destabilizing definition and classification. In her provocative book, Stefani Engelstein explores the pervasive significance of sibling structures and their essential role in the modern organization of knowledge and identity. Sibling Action argues that this relational paradigm came to structure the modern subject, life sciences, human sciences, and collective identities such as race, religion, and gender. Engelstein considers theoretical constructions of subjectivity through Sophocles' Antigone; fraternal equality and its exclusion of sisters in political rhetoric; the intertwining of economic and kinship theory by Friedrich Engels and Claude Levi-Strauss; Darwin and his contemporaries' accounts of speciation; anthropological and philological depictions of Muslims and Jews at the margins of Europe; and evolutionary psychology's theorizing around the incest taboo. Integrating close readings across the disciplines with panoramic intellectual history and arresting literary interpretations, Sibling Action presents a compelling new understanding of systems of knowledge and provides the foundation for less confrontational formulations of belonging, identity, and agency.

How did people learn to distinguish between past and present? How did they come to see the past as existing in its own distinctive context? In The Birth of the Past, Zachary Sayre Schiffman explores these questions in his sweeping survey of historical thinking in the Western world. Today we automatically distinguish between past and present, labeling things that appear out of place as "anachronisms." Schiffman shows how this tendency did not always exist and how the past as such was born of a perceived difference between past and present. Schiffman takes readers on a grand tour of historical thinking from antiquity to modernity. He shows how ancient historians could not distinguish between past and present because they conceived of multiple pasts. Christian theologians coalesced these multiple pasts into a single temporal space where past merged with present and future. Renaissance humanists began to disentangle these temporal states in their desire to resurrect classical culture, creating a "living past." French enlighteners killed off this living past when they engendered a form of social scientific thinking that measured the relations between historical entities, thus sustaining the distance between past and present and relegating each culture to its own distinctive context. Featuring a foreword by the eminent historian Anthony Grafton, this fascinating book draws upon a diverse range of sources-ancient histories, medieval theology, Renaissance art, literature, legal thought, and early modern mathematics and social science-to uncover the meaning of the past and its relationship to the present.

This book argues that popular culture has been transformed in a silent revolution from emphasising history's heroes to its victims. While city squares and stations were named in the nineteenth century after military victories, now the equivalent airports are named after the victims of violence. Where war reports used to focus on the leadership of the generals and the bravery of the troops, now they are mostly about casualties, refugees and destruction. History, Empathy and Conflict examines the diplomatic consequences of such a revolution in sensibility. Many governments have responded by apologising for their country's historic actions. History teaching in schools has sometimes been revised to reflect the new emphasis and to build confidence between nations and respect for domestic minorities. Not least of the reasons for these changes is the difficulty or impossibility of making restitution for past wrongs. But history can also be used by the media and governments to justify intervention to protect victims of civil wars only to come to be seen as victimisers themselves. The past is always difficult to interpret but is the basis of all our decisions and all institutions try to twist it to their own convenience. Sympathy with history's victims is a great moral advance but it can be used by dissatisfied nations to justify their revisionist policies and with the election of President Trump in 2016, all the Great Powers claim to be history's victims.

Goldthorpe reveals the genealogy of present-day sociological science through studies of the key contributions made by seventeen pioneers in the field, ranging from John Graunt and Edmond Halley in the mid-seventeenth century to Otis Dudley Duncan, James Coleman and Raymond Boudon in the late twentieth. Goldthorpe's biographies of these figures and analyses of their work reveal clear lines of intellectual descent, building towards the author's model of sociology as the study of human populations across time and place, previously outlined in his book Sociology as a Population Science (Cambridge, 2015). The extent to which recent developments such as computational sociology and analytical sociology are in continuation with the efforts of these influential thinkers is also critically examined. Pioneers of Sociological Science will appeal to students and scholars of sociology and to anyone engaged in social science research, from statisticians to social historians.

Goldthorpe reveals the genealogy of present-day sociological science through studies of the key contributions made by seventeen pioneers in the field, ranging from John Graunt and Edmond Halley in the mid-seventeenth century to Otis Dudley Duncan, James Coleman and Raymond Boudon in the late twentieth. Goldthorpe's biographies of these figures and analyses of their work reveal clear lines of intellectual descent, building towards the author's model of sociology as the study of human populations across time and place, previously outlined in his book Sociology as a Population Science (Cambridge, 2015). The extent to which recent developments such as computational sociology and analytical sociology are in continuation with the efforts of these influential thinkers is also critically examined. Pioneers of Sociological Science will appeal to students and scholars of sociology and to anyone engaged in social science research, from statisticians to social historians.

The Muqaddimah, often translated as "Introduction" or "Prolegomenon," is the most important Islamic history of the premodern world. Written by the great fourteenth-century Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), this monumental work established the foundations of several fields of knowledge, including the philosophy of history, sociology, ethnography, and economics. The first complete English translation, by the eminent Islamicist and interpreter of Arabic literature Franz Rosenthal, was published in three volumes in 1958 as part of the Bollingen Series and received immediate acclaim in the United States and abroad. A one-volume abridged version of Rosenthal's masterful translation first appeared in 1969. This Princeton Classics edition of the abridged version includes Rosenthal's original introduction as well as a contemporary introduction by Bruce B. Lawrence. This volume makes available a seminal work of Islam and medieval and ancient history to twenty-first century audiences.

"What Rousseau's Contrat Social was for the eighteenth century and Karl marx's Das Kapital was for the nineteenth, Señor Ortega's Revolt of the Masses should be for the twentieth century.—Atlantic Monthly

Social upheaval in early twentieth-century Europe is the historical setting for this seminal study by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset of the "mass man"—the phenomenon of mass culture that more than any other factor stamps the character of modern life.

Continuously in print since 1932, Ortega's analysis of Western culture as sinking to its lowest common denomenator and drifting toward chaos brought its author international fame and has remained one of the most influential books of our time.

A fresh, daring, and genuine alternative to the traditional story of scientific progress. Explaining the world around us, and the life within it, is one of the most uniquely human drives, and the most celebrated activity of science. Good explanations are what provide accurate causal accounts of the things we wonder at, but explanation's earthly origins haven't grounded it: we have used it to account for the grandest and most wondrous mysteries in the natural world. Explanations give us a sense of understanding, but an explanation that feels right doesn't mean it is true. For every true explanation, there is a false one that feels just as good. A good theory's explanations, though, have a much easier path to truth. This push for good explanations elevated science from medieval alchemy to electro-chemistry, or a pre-inertial physics to the forces underlying nanoparticles. And though the attempt to explain has existed as long as we have been able to wonder, a science timeline from pre-history to the present will reveal a steep curve of theoretical discovery that explodes around 1600, primarily in the West. Ranging over neuroscience, psychology, history, and policy, Wondrous Truths answers two fundamental questions - Why did science progress in the West? And why so quickly? J.D. Trout's answers are surprising. His central idea is that Western science rose above all others because it hit upon successive theories that were approximately true through an awkward assortment of accident and luck, geography and personal idiosyncrasy. Of course, intellectual ingenuity partially accounts for this persistent drive forward. But so too does the persistence of the objects of wonder. Wondrous Truths recovers the majesty of science, and provides a startling new look at the grand sweep of its biggest ideas.

The workings of royal and ecclesiastical authority in Anglo-Saxon England can only be understood on the basis of direct engagement with original texts and material artefacts. This book, written by leading experts, brings together new research that represents the best of the current scholarship on the nexus between authority and written sources from Anglo-Saxon England. Ranging from the seventh to the eleventh century, the chapters in this volume offer fresh approaches to a wide range of linguistic, historical, legal, diplomatic and palaeographical evidence. Central themes include the formation of power in early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms during the age of Bede (d. 735) and Offa of Mercia (757-96), authority and its articulation in the century from Edgar (959-75) to 1066, and the significance of books and texts in expressing power across the period. Writing, Kingship and Power in Anglo-Saxon England represents a critical resource for students and scholars alike with an interest in early medieval history from political, institutional and cultural perspectives.

In this collection of richly documented case studies, experts in many textual traditions examine the ways in which important texts were preserved, explicated, corrected, and used for a variety of purposes. The authors describe the multiple ways in which scholars in different cultures have addressed some of the same tasks, revealing both radical differences and striking similarities in textual practices across space, time and linguistic borders. This volume shows how much is learned when historians of scholarship, like contemporary historians of science, focus on earlier scholars' practices, and when Western scholarly traditions are treated as part of a much larger, cross-cultural inquiry.

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

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.

Oral history is increasingly acknowledged as a key tool for anyone studying the history of the recent past, and Oral History Theory provides a comprehensive, systematic and accessible overview of this important field. Combining the study of theories drawn from disciplines ranging from linguistics to psychoanalysis with the observations of practitioners and including extensive examples of oral history practice from around the world, this book constitutes the first integrated discussion of oral history theory. Structured around key themes such as the peculiarities of oral history, the study of the self, subjectivity and intersubjectivity, memory, narrative, performance, power and trauma, each chapter provides a clear and user-friendly explanation of the various theoretical approaches, illustrating these with examples from the rich field of published oral history and making suggestions for the practicing oral historian. This second edition includes a new chapter on trauma and ethics, a preface discussing new developments in the field and updated glossary and further reading sections. Supplemented by a new companion website (www.routledge.com/cw/abrams) containing a comprehensive range of case studies, audio material and further resources, this book will be invaluable to experienced and novice oral historians, professionals, and students who are new to the discipline.

Some of the most exciting and innovative legal scholarship has been driven by historical curiosity. Legal history today comes in a fascinating array of shapes and sizes, from microhistory to global intellectual history. Legal history has expanded beyond traditional parochial boundaries to become increasingly international and comparative in scope and orientation. Drawing on scholarship from around the world, and representing a variety of methodological approaches, areas of expertise, and research agendas, this timely compendium takes stock of legal history and methodology and reflects on the various modes of the historical analysis of law, past, present, and future. Part I explores the relationship between legal history and other disciplinary perspectives including economic, philosophical, comparative, literary, and rhetorical analysis of law. Part II considers various approaches to legal history, including legal history as doctrinal, intellectual, or social history. Part III focuses on the interrelation between legal history and jurisprudence by investigating the role and conception of historical inquiry in various models, schools, and movements of legal thought. Part IV traces the place and pursuit of historical analysis in various legal systems and traditions across time, cultures, and space. Finally, Part V narrows the Handbooks focus to explore several examples of legal history in action, including its use in various legal doctrinal contexts.

This classic introduction to the study of history invites the reader to stand back and consider some of its most fundamental questions – what is the point of studying history? How do we know about the past? Does an objective historical truth exist and can we ever access it?

In answering these central questions, John Tosh argues that, despite the impression of fragmentation created by Postmodernism in recent years, history is a coherent discipline which still bears the imprint of its nineteenth-century origins. Consistently clear-sighted, he provides a lively and compelling guide to a complex and sometimes controversial subject, while making his readers vividly aware of just how far our historical knowledge is conditioned by the character of the sources and the methods of the historians who work on them.

History does not stand still, and this updated seventh edition deals with complex and wide-ranging material in a clear and accessible way that is up-to-date with current historiographical trends. A fuller treatment is given to the importance of digitization both in the section on source criticism and in relation to public history, reflecting its growing importance within historical study. Both the text and references have been expanded to include a fuller range of both American and global scholarship, and the book concludes with a forthright reminder that historical perspective illuminates major problems in the present.

Lucid and engaging, this edition retains the user-friendly features that make it a favourite with both students and lecturers, including marginal glosses, illustrations and suggestions for further reading. Along with its companion website, this is an essential guide to the theory and practice of history.

Table of Contents

1. Historical Awareness

2. The Uses of History

3. Mapping the Field

4. The Raw Materials

5. Using the Sources

6. Writing and Interpretation

7. The Limits of Historical Knowledge

8. History and Social Theory

9. Cultural Evidence and the Cultural Turn

10. Gender History and Postcolonial History

11. Memory and the Spoken Word

12. History Beyond Academia

13. Conclusion: The Topicality of History

In this highly original study Joseph Mali explores how four attentive and inventive readers of Giambattista Vico's New Science (1744) the French historian Jules Michelet (1798 1874), the Irish writer James Joyce (1882 1941), the German literary scholar Erich Auerbach (1892 1957) and the English philosopher Isaiah Berlin (1909 1997) came to find in Vico's work the inspiration for their own modern theories (or, in the case of Joyce, stories) of human life and history. Mali's reconstruction of the specific biographical and historical occasions in which these influential men of letters encountered Vico reveals how their initial impressions and interpretations of his theory of history were decisive both for their intellectual development and their major achievements in literature and thought. This new interpretation of the legacy of Vico's New Science is essential reading for all those engaged in the history of ideas and modern cultural history.

This book tells the story of monuments in two cities that share a parallel and turbulent history: Strasbourg and Poznan. With the Franco-Prussian War begins the well-known story of the destruction and erection of memorials. This book not only explains the mechanisms related to how memorials have functioned in the past, but also contributes to our understanding of current modes of their perception. It analyzes their material shape, the problem of affect, and their meaning, not only in relation to the political context and the work of memory. This book shows how the form of monuments reflects the social understanding of such basic questions as the perception of nature, gender issues and the image of those who are in power, and how, and in which aspects, those kind of objects actually change the city space we live in.

Offering insights on the wide range of sources that are available from across the globe and throughout history for the study of the history of emotions, this book provides students with a handbook for beginning their own research within the field. Divided into three parts, Sources for the History of Emotions begins by giving key starting points into the ethical, methodological and theoretical issues in the field. Part II shows how emotions historians have proved imaginative in their discovering and use of varied materials, considering such sources as rituals, relics and religious rhetoric, prescriptive literature, medicine, science and psychology, and fiction, while Part III offers introductions to some of the big or emerging topics in the field, including embodied emotions, comparative emotions, and intersectionality and emotion. Written by key scholars of emotions history, the book shows readers the ways in which different sources can be used to extract information about the history of emotions, highlighting the kind of data available and how it can be used in a field for which there is no convenient archive of sources. The focused discussion of sources offered in this book, which not only builds on existing research, but encourages further efforts, makes it ideal reading and a key resource for all students of emotions history.

Oral history gives history back to the people in their own words. And in giving a past, it also helps them towards a future of their own making. Oral history and life stories help to create a truer picture of the past and the changing present, documenting the lives and feelings of all kinds of people, many otherwise hidden from history. It explores personal and family relationships and uncovers the secret cultures of work. It connects public and private experience, and it highlights the experiences of migrating between cultures. At the same time it can bring courage to the old, meaning to communities, and contact between generations. Sometimes it can offer a path for healing divided communities and those with traumatic memories. Without it the history and sociology of our time would be poor and narrow. In this fourth edition of his pioneering work, fully revised with Joanna Bornat, Paul Thompson challenges the accepted myths of historical scholarship. He discusses the reliability of oral evidence in comparison with other sources and considers the social context of its development. He looks at the relationship between memory, the self and identity. He traces oral history through its own past and weighs up the recent achievements of a movement which has become international, with notably strong developments in North America, Europe, Australia, Latin America, South Africa and the Far East, despite resistance from more conservative academics. This new edition combines the classic text of The Voice of the Past with many new sections, including especially the worldwide development of different forms of oral history and the parallel memory boom, as well as discussions of theory in oral history and of memory, trauma and reconciliation. It offers a deep social and historical interpretation along with succinct practical advice on designing and carrying out a project, The Voice of the Past remains an invaluable tool for anyone setting out to use oral history and life stories to construct a more authentic and balanced record of the past and the present.

In Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History: Alt/Histories, historians, sociologists, neuroscientists, lawyers, cultural critics, and literary and media scholars come together to offer an interconnected and comparative collection for understanding how contemporary far-right, neo-fascist, Alt-Right, Identitarian and New Right movements have proposed revisions and counter-narratives to accepted understandings of history, fact and narrative. The innovative essays found here bring forward urgent questions to diverse public, academic, and politically minded audiences interested in how historical understandings of race, gender, class, nationalism, religion, law, technology and the sciences have been distorted by these far-right movements. If scholars of the last twenty years, like Francis Fukuyama, believed that neoliberalism marked an 'end of history', this volume shows how the far right is effectively threatening democracy and its institutions through the dissemination of alt-facts and histories.

This sixth and final volume in John Pocock's acclaimed sequence of works on Barbarism and Religion examines Volumes II and III of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, carrying Gibbon's narrative to the end of empire in the west. It makes two general assertions: first, that this is in reality a mosaic of narratives, written on diverse premises and never fully synthesized with one another; and second, that these chapters assert a progress of both barbarism and religion from east to west, leaving much history behind as they do so. The magnitude of Barbarism and Religion is already apparent. Barbarism: Triumph in the West represents the culmination of a remarkable attempt to discover and present what Gibbon was saying, what he meant by it, and why he said it in the ways that he did, as well as an unparalleled contribution to the historiography of Enlightened Europe.

Narratives of War considers the way war and battle are remembered and narrated across space and time in Europe in the twentieth century. The book reflects on how narratives are generated and deployed, and on their function as coping mechanisms, means of survival, commemorative gestures, historical records and evidence. The contributions address such issues as the tension and discrepancy between memory and the official chronicling of war, the relationship between various individuals' versions of war narratives and the ways in which events are brought together to serve varied functions for the narrators and their audiences. Drawing upon the two World Wars, the Spanish Civil War and the ex-Yugoslav wars, and considering narrative genres that include film, schoolbooks, novels, oral history, archives, official documents, personal testimony and memoirs, readers are introduced to a range of narrative forms and examples that highlight the complexity of narrative in relation to war. Approached from a multidisciplinary perspective, and taken together, analysis of these narratives contributes to our understanding of the causes, experience, dynamics and consequences of war, making it the ideal book for those interested in twentieth-century war history and the history of memory and narrative.

The workings of royal and ecclesiastical authority in Anglo-Saxon England can only be understood on the basis of direct engagement with original texts and material artefacts. This book, written by leading experts, brings together new research that represents the best of the current scholarship on the nexus between authority and written sources from Anglo-Saxon England. Ranging from the seventh to the eleventh century, the chapters in this volume offer fresh approaches to a wide range of linguistic, historical, legal, diplomatic and palaeographical evidence. Central themes include the formation of power in early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms during the age of Bede (d. 735) and Offa of Mercia (757-96), authority and its articulation in the century from Edgar (959-75) to 1066, and the significance of books and texts in expressing power across the period. Writing, Kingship and Power in Anglo-Saxon England represents a critical resource for students and scholars alike with an interest in early medieval history from political, institutional and cultural perspectives.