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Books > History > Theory & methods > General
Throughout its history as a social science, demography has been associated with an exclusively quantitative orientation for studying social problems. As a result, demographers tend to analyse population issues scientifically through sets of fixed social categories that are divorced from dynamic relationships and local contexts and processes. This volume questions these fixed categories in two ways. First, it examines the historical and political circumstances in which such categories had their provenance, and, second, it reassesses their uncritical applications over space and time in a diverse range of empirical case studies, encouraging throughout a constructive interdisciplinary dialogue involving anthropologists, demographers, historians, and sociologists. This volume seeks to examine the political complexities that lie at the heart of population studies by focusing on category formation, category use, and category critique. It shows that this takes the form of a dialectic between the needs for clarity of scientific and administrative analysis and the recalcitrant diversity of the social contexts and human processes that generate population change. The critical reflections of each chapter are enriched by meticulous ethnographic fieldwork and historical research drawn from every continent. This volume, therefore, exemplifies a new methodology for research in population studies, one that does not simply accept and re-use the established categories of population science but seeks critically and reflexively to explore, test, and re-evaluate their meanings in diverse contexts. It shows that for demography to realise its full potential it must urgently re-examine and contextualize the social categories used today in population research.
Essays on the post-modern reception and interpretation of the middle ages, with a particular focus on its relationship with business and finance. Academia has never been immune to corporate culture, and despite the persistent association of medievalism with escapism, perhaps never has that been more obvious than at the present moment. The six essays that open the volume explore precisely how financial institutions have promoted, distorted, appropriated, resisted, and repudiated post-medieval interpretations of the middle ages. In the second part of the book, contributors explore medievalism in a variety of areas, juxtaposing specific case studies with broader investigations of the discipline's motives and methods; they include Charles Kingsley's racial Anglo-Saxonism, Jessie L. Weston's Sir Gawain and the treatment of womenin medievalist film. The book also includes a spirited response to previous Studies in Medievalism volumes on the topic neomedievalism. Contributors: Harry Brown, Henrik Aubert, Helen Brookman, Pamela Clements, KellyAnnFitzpatrick, Jil Hanifan, Michael R. Kightley, Felice Lifshitz, Lauren S. Mayer, Brent Moberley, Kevin Moberley, E. L. Risden, Carol L. Robinson, M. J. Toswell, J. Ruben Valdes Miyares
The study of intellectual history might be second only to the novel in the number of mournful obituaries it has received over the years. But--if the vibrancy on display in Thinking in the Past Tense is any indication--reports of the death of intellectual history have been greatly exaggerated. This collection of interviews with leading American and European scholars from such diverse fields as the history of science, classical studies, global philology, and the study of books and material culture positively brims with insights on historical scholarship of the early modern period (ca. 1400-1800). The lively conversations collected here don't simply reveal these scholars' depth and breadth of thought--they also disclose the kind of trade secrets that historians rarely elucidate in print. Thinking in the Past Tense offers students and professionals alike a rare tactile understanding of the practice of intellectual history.
The idea of progress is a product of historical thinking. It is a bold interpretation of history that combines understandings of the past, perceptions of the present and expectations of the future. This Element examines the shifting scale of this past, present and future configuration from antiquity to the present day. It develops five categories that reveal the conceptual features of progress together with the philosophies of history in which they have been enmeshed, from temporal outlooks that held no notion of progress to universal histories that viewed progress as a law of nature, from speculation on the meaning and direction of history to the total rejection of all historical constructions. Global in scope and conversant with present-day debates in the theory and philosophy of history, the argument throughout is that the scale on which we conceive history plays a determining role in how we think about progress.
Modernity is a troubling concept, not only for scholars but for the
general public, for it seems to represent a choice between
oppressive traditions and empty, rootless freedom. Seeking a
broader understanding of modernity, Kolb first considers the views
of Weber and then discusses in detail the pivotal writings of Hegel
and Heidegger. He uses the novel strategy of presenting Heidegger's
critique of Hegel and then suggesting the critique of Heidegger
that Hegel might have made.
Evil is sometimes thought to be incomprehensible and abnormal, falling outside of familiar historical and human processes. And yet the twentieth century was replete with instances of cruelty on a massive scale, including systematic torture, murder, and enslavement of ordinary, innocent human beings. These overwhelming atrocities included genocide, totalitarianism, the Holocaust, and the Holodomor. This Element underlines the importance of careful, truthful historical investigation of the complicated realities of dark periods in human history; the importance of understanding these events in terms that give attention to the human experience of the people who were subject to them and those who perpetrated them; the question of whether the idea of 'evil' helps us to confront these periods honestly; and the possibility of improving our civilization's resilience in the face of the impulses towards cruelty to other human beings that have so often emerged.
with contributions from Neil Bettridge, Jean Cameron, Paul Cavill and Teresa Webber. The White Book of Southwell derives its name from its white vellum cover. Compiled between c.1350 and 1460, with a few later additions, its 500 pages record 620 individual documents from c.1100 onwards. They range widely from papal bulls and royal charters, quo warranto inquiries, privileges granted by many archbishops of York to the Chapter at Southwell,individual canons (or prebendaries) and the parishes where the Minster held lands or controlled livings. The majority date from c.1200-1460 and concern properties which the Chapter owned and administered through its courts, for which some rare proceedings are preserved. Because of their variety, the documents it contains are important not simply for ecclesiastical history but for broader social and economic trends in medieval Nottinghamshire either side of the Black Death. The volume also furnishes a remarkable amount of little-studied onomastic and linguistic evidence in medieval Latin, Anglo-Norman French and Middle English as well as strong traces of earlier Anglo-Scandinavianinfluences on Nottinghamshire. First brought to attention by the pioneering county historian Robert Thoroton (d. 1677), the White Book has been consulted in all subsequent generations. However, while some of its contents havebeen published in their original language or in translation, this is the first systematic, complete scholarly edition. A substantial introduction sets the White Book in context, describing its structure and content. Extensive commentary helps to date many undated individual documents and identify persons and places named, a detailed Fasti provides details on the personnel of the Minster and its appendant churches, while detailed indexes assist consultation.
Did modernity arrive in South Asia with British colonialism? Or was South Asia already modern by then? What might have that modernity looked like? The Early Modern in South Asia engages with these questions. It brings together ten chapters, which collectively trace the contours of South Asia's early modernity between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. They do this by examining the nature of historical change in various domains, including philosophy, warfare, law, environment, politics, violence, religion, and society. The chapters argue that in all these fields, there were noticeable developments during this period, marking a shift from the medieval to the early modern. The introductory chapter contextualizes this by analysing the politics of periodization in history-writing across the world. It discusses the meanings of the relatively new concept of early modernity and the implications of its use for how we understand historical change and continuity in South Asia.
Hegel and the Representative Constitution provides the first comprehensive historical discussion of the institutional dimension of G. W. F. Hegel's political thought. Elias Buchetmann traces this much-neglected aspect in unprecedented contextual detail and makes the case for reading the Philosophy of Right from 1820 as a contribution to the lively and widespread public debate on the constitutional question in contemporary Central Europe. Drawing on a broad range of primary source material, this volume illuminates the wider political discourse in post-Napoleonic Germany, carefully locates Hegel's institutional commitments within their immediate cultural and political context, and reveals him as something closer to a public intellectual. By exploring this indispensable thinker's demand for the constitutional protection of popular participation in government, it contributes beyond Hegel scholarship to shed new light on the history of democratic theory in early nineteenth-century Europe and encourages critical reflection on questions of representation today.
Surveying the history, latest developments and potential future directions of contemporary analytic philosophy, this is an essential one-volume reference guide for all those working in the field. The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Philosophy brings together a team of internationally renowned scholars to explore all the major areas of inquiry, key concepts and most important thinkers in the analytic tradition. Topics covered include: * The history of analytic philosophy, from Frege, Moore and Russell to Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle and beyond * Philosophy of mind and language from early developments to the most recent advances * Perspectives in moral and political philosophy * Contemporary metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of science and mathematics * The latest thinking on perception, free will and personal identity The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Philosophy also includes a historical chronology and a full guide to further reading and available resources, making this an invaluable library or desktop reference guide for anyone working in the discipline today.
Taking the Soviet collapse - the most cataclysmic event of the recent past - as a case study, this text engages students in the exercise of historical analysis, interpretation and explanation. In exploring the question posed by the title, the author introduces and applies such organizing concepts as great power conflict, imperial decline, revolution, ethnic conflict, colonialism, economic development, totalitarian ideology, and transition to democracy in a most accessible way. Questions and controversies, and extracts from documentary and literary sources, anchor the text at key points. This book is intended for use in history and political science courses on the Soviet Union or more generally on the 20th century.
Taking the Soviet collapse - the most cataclysmic event of the recent past - as a case study, this text engages students in the exercise of historical analysis, interpretation and explanation. In exploring the question posed by the title, the author introduces and applies such organizing concepts as great power conflict, imperial decline, revolution, ethnic conflict, colonialism, economic development, totalitarian ideology, and transition to democracy in a most accessible way. Questions and controversies, and extracts from documentary and literary sources, anchor the text at key points. This book is intended for use in history and political science courses on the Soviet Union or more generally on the 20th century.
Why do historians so often talk about objectivity, empathy, and fair-mindedness? What roles do such personal qualities play in historical studies? And why does it make sense to call them virtues rather than skills or habits? Historians' Virtues is the first publication to explore these questions in some depth. With case studies from across the centuries, the Element identifies major discontinuities in how and why historians talked about the marks of a good scholar. At the same time, it draws attention to long-term legacies that last until today. Virtues were, and are, invoked in debates over the historian's task. They reveal how historians position themselves vis-a-vis political regimes, religious traditions, or neoliberal university systems. More importantly, they show that historical study not only requires knowledge and technical skills, but also makes demands on the character of its practitioners. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
A new perspective on political organisation in Hellenistic Rhodes and the ancient Greek citystate The first comprehensive study of Rhodes in more than 20 years and one of the few books dedicated to a single Hellenistic city-state Introduces the reader to Hellenistic Rhodes, an important, but also remarkably understudied, city-state of the ancient Greek and Roman world Challenges traditional assumptions about political organization in the ancient Greek city-state Documents the existence of an alternative conception of the ancient Greek city-state, which will inspire new approaches to the study of the ancient Greek city-state, politics and society. Christian Thomsen offers a study of political institutions on the island state of Rhodes - an important power in the eastern Mediterranean and the first city of the Hellenistic world. Using Aristotle's notion of the polis as an 'association of associations' as its point of departure, Thomsen provides an analysis of political institutions, taking a broader view of what constitutes an institution than traditional studies of the ancient Greek city-state. Among the institutions surveyed are the family, civic subdivisions such as tribes and demes as well as private associations. He argues that these organisations served as important junctions in the networks of political elites and shaped the political landscape of Hellenistic Rhodes.
This Element denaturalises political science, stressing the contestability and contingency of ideas, traditions, subfields, and even the discipline itself. The history of political science is less one of scholars testing and improving theories by reference to data than of their appropriating and transforming ideas, often obscuring or obliterating former meanings, to serve new purposes in shifting political contexts. Political science arose in the late nineteenth century as part of a wider modernism that replaced earlier developmental narratives with more formal explanations. It changed as some scholars yoked together behavioural topics, quantitative techniques, and positivist theory, and as other scholars rejected their doing so. Subfields such as International Relations remained semi-detached and focused on policy as much as theory. Furthermore, the shifting fashions within political science - modernism, behaviouralism, realism, neoliberalism, the new institutionalism - have informed the policies by which governments have tried to tame contingency and govern people.
The sibling stands out as a ubiquitous-yet unacknowledged-conceptual touchstone across the European long nineteenth century. 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 in a wide array of new disciplines, transforming into siblings the closest contemporaneous terms on trees of languages, religions, races, nations, species, or individuals. In literature, a sudden proliferation of siblings-often incestuously inclined-negotiated this confluence of knowledge and identity. In all genealogical 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 argues that this pervasive relational paradigm shaped the modern subject, life sciences, human sciences, and collective identities such as race, religion, and gender. The insecurity inherent to the sibling structure renders the systems it underwrites fluid. It therefore offers dynamic potential, but also provokes counterreactions such as isolationist theories of subjectivity, the political exclusion of sisters from fraternal equality, the tyranny of intertwined economic and kinship theories, conflicts over natural kinds and evolutionary speciation, and invidious anthropological and philological classifications of Islam and Judaism. 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.
In 1953 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage and were subsequently executed for treason. Virginia Carmichael here uses their story to consider the function of narrative in the formation of history. Carmichael argues that the Rosenberg story constituted a social drama (as yet unresolved) that inaugurated the elaboration of many stories serving multiple interests and functions. The story itself was an embedded narrative in the developing Cold War, both required by that Cold War frame narrative and at the same time furthering its construction.
During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries technical chronology, the study of calendars and of dates in ancient and medieval history, was both a fashionable and a controversial discipline. Theologians debated the dates of the Creation, the Flood, and the Crucifixion. Astronomers and historians argued about the identity of the eclipses that could supply absolute dates for events long past. Classical scholars reconstructed the religious beliefs and political practices that had governed the Greek and Roman calendars. Clerics and consultant experts, finally, debated what was to be done to mend the obviously faulty calendar of the western Church. Poliziano and Pico, Luther and Melanchthon, Copernicus and Kepler all studied and wrote about chronology. Late in the 1570s Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609) turned his attention to this field. He had already established himself as an innovative and ingenious editor of Latin texts, as the first volume of this study showed. But he now became one of the most celebrated scholars in Europe. He synthesized the work of dozens of other scholars, many of them now forgotten. He started or took part in many technical debates. And on such central problems as the date and nature of the Last Supper, the reliability of the various Old Testament texts, and the worth of the fragmentary historians of the ancient Near East, he showed remarkable erudition and insight. This book tells the stories of chronology and of Scaliger himself. It describes the scholarly circles in which he moved - above all the University of Leiden, the most innovative in Europe, where he spent the last decade and a half of his life. And it reconstructs his relations with contemporary scholars and scientists - notably Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler - and his remarkable, if wholly unofficial, career as a teacher. It is a sequel to volume I: Textual Criticism and Exegesis, published in 1983.
Dominick LaCapra's History and Its Limits articulates the relations among intellectual history, cultural history, and critical theory, examining the recent rise of "Practice Theory" and probing the limitations of prevalent forms of humanism. LaCapra focuses on the problem of understanding extreme cases, specifically events and experiences involving violence and victimization. He asks how historians treat and are simultaneously implicated in the traumatic processes they attempt to represent. In addressing these questions, he also investigates violence's impact on various types of writing and establishes a distinctive role for critical theory in the face of an insufficiently discriminating aesthetic of the sublime (often unreflectively amalgamated with the uncanny). In History and Its Limits, LaCapra inquires into the related phenomenon of a turn to the "postsecular," even the messianic or the miraculous, in recent theoretical discussions of extreme events by such prominent figures as Giorgio Agamben, Eric L. Santner, and Slavoj Zizek. In a related vein, he discusses Martin Heidegger's evocative, if not enchanting, understanding of "The Origin of the Work of Art." LaCapra subjects to critical scrutiny the sometimes internally divided way in which violence has been valorized in sacrificial, regenerative, or redemptive terms by a series of important modern intellectuals on both the far right and the far left, including Georges Sorel, the early Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, Frantz Fanon, and Ernst Junger. Violence and victimization are prominent in the relation between the human and the animal. LaCapra questions prevalent anthropocentrism (evident even in theorists of the "posthuman") and the long-standing quest for a decisive criterion separating or dividing the human from the animal. LaCapra regards this attempt to fix the difference as misguided and potentially dangerous because it renders insufficiently problematic the manner in which humans treat other animals and interact with the environment. In raising the issue of desirable transformations in modernity, History and Its Limits examines the legitimacy of normative limits necessary for life in common and explores the disconcerting role of transgressive initiatives beyond limits (including limits blocking the recognition that humans are themselves animals)."
The International History of Communication Study maps the growth of media and communication studies around the world. Drawing out transnational flows of ideas, institutions, publications, and people, it offers the most comprehensive picture to date of the global history of communication research and education. This volume reaches into national and regional areas that have not received much attention in the scholarship until now, including Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East alongside Europe and North America. It also covers communication study outside of academic settings: in international organizations like UNESCO, and among commercial and civic groups. It moves beyond the traditional canon to cover work by forgotten figures, including women scholars in the field and those outside of the United States and Europe, and it situates them all within the broader geopolitical, institutional, and intellectual landscapes that have shaped communication study globally. Intended for scholars and graduate students in communication, media studies, and journalism, this volume pushes the history of communication study in new directions by taking an aggressively international and comparative perspective on the historiography of the field. Methodologically and conceptually, the volume breaks new ground in bringing comparative, transnational, and global frames to bear, and puts under the spotlight what has heretofore only lingered in the penumbra of the history of communication study.
"A convincing case that careful analysis of the history, issues, individuals, and institutions can lead to better decisions-in business as well as in government" (BusinessWeek). Two noted professors offer easily remembered rules for using history effectively in day-to-day management of governmental and corporate affairs to avoid costly blunders. "An illuminating guide to the use and abuse of history in affairs of state" (Arthur Schlesinger).
What histories do objects like coins or gems help us to trace? How can we read photographs and paintings? How do fictional tales, imaginative biographies, basic lexicons, or accounts of Sufi masters code intellectual worlds and reveal cultural and religious shifts? What range of sources is available to the historian of medieval and early modern India? How can textual sources illuminate material objects, sites, and practices, and vice versa? What historical methods do the different sources and material objects require? Drawing on the rich scholarship of Simon E. Digby (1932-2010) on South Asian medieval history and culture, the essays in this volume offer method lessons in a wide range of historical fields.
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. |
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