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.

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.

The digital age is affecting all aspects of historical study, but much of the existing literature about history in the digital age can be alienating to the traditional historian who does not necessarily value or wish to embrace digital resources. History in the Digital Age takes a more conceptual look at how the digital age is affecting the field of history for both scholars and students. The printed copy, the traditional archive, and analogue research remain key constitute parts for most historians and for many will remain precious and esteemed over digital copies, but there is a real need for historians and students of history to seriously consider some of the conceptual and methodological challenges facing the field of historical enquiry as we enter the twenty-first century.

Including international contributors from a variety of disciplines - History, English, Information Studies and Archivists this book does not seek either to applaud or condemn digital technologies, but takes a more conceptual view of how the field of history is being changed by the digital age. Essential reading for all historians.

Roman Tales: A Reader's Guide to the Art of Microhistory explores both the social and cultural life of Renaissance Rome and the mind-set and methods of microhistory. This book draws the reader deep into eight stories: a Christian-Jewish picnic plus an ill-aimed stone fight, an embassy-driven attack on Rome's police, a magic prophetic mirror, an immured mad hermit, a stolen dwarf, and the bizarre misadventures of a stolen roll of velvet, a truly odd elopement, and a thieving child who treats his cronies to dinner at the inn. It meditates on the resources and lacunae that shape the telling of these stories and, through them, it models an historical method that contrives to turn the limits of our knowledge into an advantage by writing honestly and movingly, to bring a dead past back to life, exemplifying and stretching the genre of microhistory. It also discusses strategies for teaching through intensive use of old documents, with a particular focus on criminal tribunal papers. Engagingly written, Roman Tales outlines the main principles of microhistorical research and draws the reader outwards towards a wider exploration and discovery of sixteenth-century Rome. It is ideal for researchers of microhistory, and of medieval and early modern Italy.

This book sets out to explore the questions how democracies decide which lives should be protected, how these lives are defended, and how they are distinguished from the lives that can be lost without mourning. The author analyzes through a range of political and philosophical issues the contemporary just war literature. She emphasizes the problem of human rights, the biopolitics of democratic welfare regimes, and the relationship between the aesthetic value of the visual world and the discursive value of democratic politics. In doing so, the book questions standard conventions about the right to kill in warfare, and challenges some of our basic assumptions about the justice of democratic welfare regimes.

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.

Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World examines the ways material things-objects and pictures-were used to reason about issues of morality, race, citizenship, and capitalism, as well as reality and representation, in the nineteenth-century United States. For modern scholars, an "object lesson" is simply a timeworn metaphor used to describe any sort of reasoning from concrete to abstract. But in the 1860s, object lessons were classroom exercises popular across the country. Object lessons helped children to learn about the world through their senses-touching and seeing rather than memorizing and repeating-leading to new modes of classifying and comprehending material evidence drawn from the close study of objects, pictures, and even people. In this book, Sarah Carter argues that object lessons taught Americans how to find and comprehend the information in things-from a type-metal fragment to a whalebone sample. Featuring over fifty images and a full-color insert, this book offers the object lesson as a new tool for contemporary scholars to interpret the meanings of nineteenth-century material, cultural, and intellectual life.

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.

Robert Rosenstone was among the first 'postmodern' historians, and remains one of the most renowned. In this honest, revealing and often funny memoir, he shows us how he got there and why. Adventures of a Postmodern Historian chronicles Rosenstone's research journeys over half a century. Beginning in the 1960s, his offbeat trajectory took him on adventures through the police states of Franco Spain and the Soviet Union, to the Shinto shrines and Zen temples of Japan and ultimately to Hollywood. Alongside his own memoirs, Rosenstone reflects upon developments and changes within the realm of professional history, which in turn reflect the social, cultural, and intellectual shifts of the late 20th century. A pioneer of experimental and creative history, he suggests how the experience of the historian can inflect the written history, and provides a defence of innovation in historical writing that is both intellectually rigorous and entertaining. In doing so he offers a window into the state of history today - and points to exciting new ways of writing the past. This is a book about the craft of history, about both doing research and writing it. It should be required reading for all historians.

In this book, originally published in 1964, Peter Carpenter discusses the 'era approach' to teaching history, where short and unrelated periods are chosen for special study, and the students are encouraged to investigate them actively. He also supplies a specimen curriculum for use in secondary schools. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the history of education.

This book centers on two inquisitorial investigations, both of which began in the 1540s. One involved relations of Europeans and Native Americans in the Oaxacan town of Yanhuitlan (in New Spain, today's Mexico). The other involved relations of Moriscos (recent Muslim converts to Catholicism) and Old Christians (people with deep Catholic ancestries) in the Mediterranean kingdom of Valencia (in the "old" Spain). Although separated by an ocean, the social worlds preserved in these inquisitorial files share many things. By bringing the two inquisitions together, Hamann reveals how very local practices and debates had long-distance parallels, parallels that reveal larger entanglements of the early modern world. Through a dialogue of two microhistories, he presents a macrohistory of large-scale social transformation. We see how attempts in both places to turn old worlds into new ones were centered on struggles over materiality and temporality. By paying close attention to theories (and practices) of reduction and conversion, Hamann suggests we can move beyond anachronistic models of social change as colonization, and place early modern concepts of time and history at the center of our understandings of the sixteenth-century past. Overall, this project intervenes in major debates from both history and anthropology: about the writing of global histories, our conceptualizations of the colonial, the nature of religious and cultural change, and the roles of material things in social life and the imagination of time.

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.

How can we use visual and material culture to shed light on the past? Ludmilla Jordanova offers a fascinating and thoughtful introduction to the role of images, objects and buildings in the study of past times. Through a combination of thematic chapters and essays on specific artefacts - a building, a piece of sculpture, a photographic exhibition and a painted portrait - she shows how to analyse the agency and visual intelligence of artists, makers and craftsmen and make sense of changes in visual experience over time. Generously illustrated and drawing on numerous examples of images and objects from 1600 to the present, this is an essential guide to the skills that students need in order to describe, analyse and contextualise visual evidence. The Look of the Past will encourage readers to think afresh about how they, like people in the past, see and interpret the world around them.

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.

Sources are the raw material of History, but whereas the written word has traditionally been seen as the principal source, historians now recognize the value of sources beyond text. In this new edition of History and Material Culture, contributors consider a range of objects - from an eighteenth-century bed curtain to a twenty-first-century shopping trolley - which can help historians develop new interpretations and new knowledge about the past. Containing two new chapters on healing objects in East Africa and the shopping trolley in the social world, this book examines a variety of material sources from around the globe and across centuries to assess how such sources can be used to study the distant and the recent past. In a revised introduction, Karen Harvey discusses some of the principal issues raised when historians use material culture, particularly in the context of 'the material turn', and suggests some initial steps for those unfamiliar with these kinds of sources. While the sources are discussed from interdisciplinary perspectives, the emphasis of the book is on what historians stand to gain from using material culture, as well as what historians have to offer the broader study of material culture. Clearly written and accessible, this book is the ideal introduction to the opportunities and challenges of researching material culture, and is essential reading for all students of historical theory and method.

Drawing together leading legal historians from a range of jurisdictions and cultures, this collection of essays addresses the fundamental methodological underpinning of legal history research. Via a broad chronological span and a wide range of topics, the contributors explore the approaches, methods and sources that together form the basis of their research and shed light on the complexities of researching into the history of the law. By exploring the challenges posed by visual, unwritten and quasi-legal sources, the difficulties posed by traditional archival material and the novelty of exploring the development of legal culture and comparative perspectives, the book reveals the richness and dynamism of legal history research.

Creative Historical Thinking offers innovative approaches to thinking and writing about history. Author Michael J. Douma makes the case that history should be recognized as a subject intimately related to individual experience and positions its practice as an inherently creative endeavor. Douma describes the nature of creativity in historical thought, illustrates his points with case studies and examples. He asserts history's position as a collective and community-building exercise and argues for the importance of metaphor and other creative tools in communicating about history with people who may view the past in fundamentally different ways. A practical guide and an inspiring affirmation of the personal and communal value of history, Creative Historical Thinking has much to offer to both current and aspiring historians.

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.

Described by his biographer as the author of 'monumental and supreme' histories, Edward Gibbon (1737-94) is widely acknowledged as a major figure of the Enlightenment and the father of modern historical scholarship. However, despite these epithets, the personal life of one of the eighteenth century's most successful authors remains unknown to many of his readers. Published in the first series of English Men of Letters in 1878 (and going into a second edition in the same year), this biography by James Cotter Morison (1832-88) provides a learned but accessible account of the man who wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Starting with a childhood plagued by ill health and infirmity, and covering Gibbon's time in the militia and travelling on the Grand Tour, Morison leads readers through a life which was apparently unremarkable, but in fact resulted in a work of enduring scholarly achievement.

The public enjoys considering questions like, did aliens visit ancient civilizations? Could Jesus have fathered a dynasty? Did people of the ancient world visit the Americas centuries before Columbus? Such wonderings have spawned countless books, movies and television series, but very often missing is any actual evidence behind the claims. According to many writers and TV hosts, evidence for ancient astronauts or early transatlantic voyages can be found in ancient texts. But too often sources remain obscure and some writers have altered or fabricated texts to make their case for extraterrestrials and lost civilizations. This book examines more than 130 primary sources texts used to make the case for Atlantis, aliens, fallen angels, the Great Flood, giants, transatlantic voyagers, ancient high technology and many other mysteries. The texts covered reach as far back as ancient Egypt and come from cultures as diverse as Greece, Mexico and China. English translations are presented with explanatory notes showing how these texts have been used and abused to make entertaining claims about prehistory.

This book is proposed as a contribution to postcolonial critiques of the colonial and postcolonial exotic. It investigates the exotic as a representation of colonial cultural difference in colonial discourse, culture and history, and its oppositional rewritings in postcolonial thought and literature. Its analyses of the exotic include classical Arabo-Islamic ethnographic texts, Marco Polo's and Mandeville's travel accounts, Shakespeare's The Tempest, Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes, and a variety of colonial and postcolonial texts. Its Deconstructive approach to the exotic breaks new grounds of analysis beyond the Saidian problematic of "Orientalism", Homi Bhabha's intervention on the exotic, Hegel's Master/Slave dialectic, Michel Foucault's archaeology of Western cultural history, and Sartre's theorization of the "gaze" and its underlying Phenomenological subject. The scope of critical discussions of the exotic in this book includes - apart from Western cultural history - postmodern and postcolonial critiques of the colonial Other and exotic, and anthropological and philosophical discussions of the exotic. While tracing the divided inscription of the exotic as a colonial subject with reference to Shakespeare's The Tempest, the author throws into question l'Exote and the exotic Other as problematic subject positions for reading and rewriting the exotic in cultural history, and the double binds of counter-Exoticist discourses.

The civil rights movement transformed the United States in such fundamental ways that exploring it in the classroom can pose real challenges for instructors and students alike. Speaking to the critical pedagogical need to teach civil rights history accurately and effectively, this volume goes beyond the usual focus on iconic leaders of the 1950s and 1960s to examine the broadly configured origins, evolution, and outcomes of African Americans' struggle for freedom. Essays provide strategies for teaching famous and forgotten civil rights people and places, suggestions for using music and movies, frameworks for teaching self-defense and activism outside the South, a curriculum guide for examining the Black Panther Party, and more. Books in the popular Harvey Goldberg Series provide high school and introductory college-level instructors with ample resources and strategies for better engaging students in critical, thought-provoking topics. By allowing for the implementation of a more nuanced curriculum, this is history instruction at its best. Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement will transform how the United States civil rights movement is taught.

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 Rationalities in History the distinguished historian David d'Avray writes a new comparative history in the spirit of Max Weber. In a strikingly original reassessment of seminal Weberian ideas, d'Avray applies value rationality to the comparative history of religion and the philosophy of law. Integrating theories of rational choice, anthropological reflections on relativism, and the recent philosophy of rationality with Weber's conceptual framework, d'Avray seeks to disengage 'rationalisation' from its enduring association with Western 'modernity'. This mode of analysis is contextualised through the examples of Buddhism, Imperial China and sixteenth-century Catholicism - in the latter case building upon unpublished archival research. This ambitious synthesis of social theory and comparative history will engage social scientists and historians from advanced undergraduate level upwards, stimulating interdisciplinary discourse, and making a significant contribution to the methodology of history. D'Avray explores the potential of this new Weberian analysis further in his companion volume, Medieval Religious Rationalities.

This comparative analysis argues that there were four or, more likely, five major turning points of world history, whose lasting effects are being felt to this day. These turning points show striking resemblances to each other: An apparently coherent community of shared convictions and a shared way of life splits unexpectedly in two, with one section swerving off on the road to a radically new set of values. This has probably been true of the rise of monotheism in opposition to the existing polytheistic norms of Oriental cultures. It has been true of the primitive Christian Church breaking away from Judaism. It was true of the Protestants breaking away from Rome. It also has been true for two secular revolutions: the independence of the United States of America inventing the republican order of representative democracy, and the Russian Revolution, when the revolutionaries decided to give up on peaceful socialism and resort to violence.