The book provides a synthesis of the development of the genre of national history writing in Europe. In particular it seeks to illuminate the relationship between history writing and the construction of national identities in modern Europe. Whilst it briefly considers pre-modern forms of national history writing, the focus of the book is firmly on the period after 1750. It ranges widely across Europe, featuring the well-known national historiographies of countries such as Britain, France and Germany as well as the less well-known national historiographies of many of the smaller nation-states and stateless nations in Europe. It thoroughly investigates the institutionalisation and professionalization of national historiographies. It analyses the diverse and contested national master narratives put forward by national historiographies. It pays due attention to the interrelationship of national historiographies with sub- as well as transnational forms of history writing and with potential alternative historiographies of ethnicity/ race, class, religion and gender. And it looks at the impact of borders and bordering in the national historiographies in Europe. It presents an overview of the power of national historiographies over the historical imagination in modern Europe.

Because oral history interviews are personal interactions between human beings, they rarely conform to a methodological ideal. These reflections from oral historians provide honest and rigorous analyses of actual oral history practice that address the complexities of a human-centered methodology.

Is Hitler bigger than Napoleon? Washington bigger than Lincoln? Picasso bigger than Einstein? Quantitative analysts are rapidly finding homes in social and cultural domains, from finance to politics. What about history? In this fascinating book, Steve Skiena and Charles Ward bring quantitative analysis to bear on ranking and comparing historical reputations. They evaluate each person by aggregating the traces of millions of opinions, just as Google ranks webpages. The book includes a technical discussion for readers interested in the details of the methods, but no mathematical or computational background is necessary to understand the rankings or conclusions. Along the way, the authors present the rankings of more than one thousand of history's most significant people in science, politics, entertainment, and all areas of human endeavor. Anyone interested in history or biography can see where their favorite figures place in the grand scheme of things.

Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) is perhaps best known as the author, in 1902, of Aesthetics, a work of enduring influence. "History as the Story of Liberty" was written in 1938 when the Western world had succumbed to the notion that history is a creature of blind force. A reviewer at the time noted the importance of Croce's belief that "the central trend in the evolution of man is the unfolding of new potentialities, and that the task of the historian is to discover and emphasize this trend: the story of liberty." As Croce himself writes, "Even in the darkest and crassest times liberty trembles in the lines of poets and affirms itself in the pages of thinkers and burns, solitary and magnificent, in some men who cannot be assimilated by the world around them." The first edition in English of "History as the Story of Liberty" appeared in London in 1941. The new Liberty Fund edition includes modest improvements to the translation by Folke Leander and arranged by Claes Ryn.Claes G. Ryn is a Professor of Politics at the Catholic University of America.

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.

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.

Historians go to great lengths to avoid confronting discontinuity, searching for explanations as to why such events as the fall of the Berlin Wall, George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, and the introduction of the euro logically develop from what came before. Moved by the Past radically breaks with this tradition of predating the past, incites us to fully acknowledge the discontinuous nature of discontinuities, and proposes to use the fact that history is propelled by unforeseeable leaps and bounds as a starting point for a truly evolutionary conception of history. Integrating research from a variety of disciplines, Eelco Runia identifies two modes of being moved by the past: regressive and revolutionary. In the regressive mode, the past may either overwhelm us -- as in nostalgia -- or provoke us to act out what we believe to be solidly dead. When we are moved by the past in a revolutionary sense, we may be said to embody history: we burn our bridges behind us and create accomplished facts we have no choice but to live up to.It is the final thesis of Moved by the Past: humans energize their own evolution by habitually creating situations (catastrophes or sublime historical events) that put a premium on mutations. Moved by the Past therefore offers an account of how every now and then we chase ourselves away from what we were and force ourselves to become what we are. Proposing a simple yet radical change in perspective, Runia profoundly reorients how we think and theorize about history.

In World-Systems Analysis, Immanuel Wallerstein provides a concise and accessible introduction to the comprehensive approach that he pioneered thirty years ago to understanding the history and development of the modern world. Since Wallerstein first developed world-systems analysis, it has become a widely utilized methodology within the historical social sciences and a common point of reference in discussions of globalization. Now, for the first time in one volume, Wallerstein offers a succinct summary of world-systems analysis and a clear outline of the modern world-system, describing the structures of knowledge upon which it is based, its mechanisms, and its future.Wallerstein explains the defining characteristics of world-systems analysis: its emphasis on world-systems rather than nation-states, on the need to consider historical processes as they unfold over long periods of time, and on combining within a single analytical framework bodies of knowledge usually viewed as distinct from one another-such as history, political science, economics, and sociology. He describes the world-system as a social reality comprised of interconnected nations, firms, households, classes, and identity groups of all kinds. He identifies and highlights the significance of the key moments in the evolution of the modern world-system: the development of a capitalist world-economy in the sixteenth-century, the beginning of two centuries of liberal centrism in the French Revolution of 1789, and the undermining of that centrism in the global revolts of 1968. Intended for general readers, students, and experienced practitioners alike, this book presents a complete overview of world-systems analysis by its original architect.

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.

Since ancient times, the pundits have lamented young people's lack of historical knowledge and warned that ignorance of the past surely condemns humanity to repeating its mistakes. In the contemporary United States, this dire outlook drives a contentious debate about what key events, nations, and people are essential for history students. Sam Wineburg says that we are asking the wrong questions. This book demolishes the conventional notion that there is one true history and one best way to teach it. Although most of us think of history -- and learn it -- as a conglomeration of facts, dates, and key figures, for professional historians it is a way of knowing, a method for developing and understanding about the relationships of peoples and events in the past. A cognitive psychologist, Wineburg has been engaged in studying what is intrinsic to historical thinking, how it might be taught, and why most students still adhere to the \u0022one damned thing after another\u0022 concept of history. Whether he is comparing how students and historians interpret documentary evidence or analyzing children's drawings, Wineburg's essays offer \u0022rough maps of how ordinary people think about the past and use it to understand the present.\u0022 Arguing that we all absorb lessons about history in many settings -- in kitchen table conversations, at the movies, or on the world-wide web, for instance -- these essays acknowledge the role of collective memory in filtering what we learn in school and shaping our historical thinking.

Drawing on theory and practice from five continents, The Public History Reader offers clearly written accessible introductions to debates in public history as it places people, such as practitioners, bloggers, archivists, local historians, curators or those working in education, at the heart of history-making. Hilda Kean and Paul Martin explore public history as an everyday practice rather than simply as an academic discipline - the idea that historical knowledge is discovered and accrued from everyday encounters people have with their environments and the continuing dialogue that the present has with the past. Divided into three parts, Part I looks at who makes history, focusing on the ways in which the past has taken on a heightened popular sense of importance in the present and the ways in which it is used. Accordingly, history, far from being 'fixed' in time, is fluid and is re-made to serve contemporary agendas in the present. Part II addresses the question of materials and approaches to making history. By using material more commonly within the domain of artists, collectors or geographers and archaeologists, public historians have opened up understandings of the past. Part III looks at the way in which presentations of the past change over time and their different forms and emphases. Throughout, the Reader emphasizes the challenges for public historians today. Using their own expertise in constructing and teaching a Public History MA, Hilda Kean and Paul Martin have suggested themes and indicative extracts that draw on their understanding of what works best with students. The Public History Reader is a perfect resource for all students of public history and all those interested in understanding the role of the past in our lives today.

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 collection of essays and articles by Dom David Knowles was presented to him by his colleagues, friends and pupils on his retirement from the Regius Chair of Modern History at Cambridge in the summer of 1963. The collection opens with Dom David's Inaugural Lecture as Regius Professor, 'The Historian and Character', which provides the unifying theme of the book: almost all the studies illustrate the author's interest in human problems and personalities as well as his concern with medieval monasticism and thought and with monastic historians of the modern world. In illustrating his scholarship and his main field of interest, this collection shows Dom David's unique capacity for revealing human personality and his skill in writing history that appeals to the general reader as well as to the historian.

Histories of the Self interrogates historians' work with personal narratives. It introduces students and researchers to scholarly approaches to diaries, letters, oral history and memoirs as sources that give access to intimate aspects of the past. Historians are interested as never before in how people thought and felt about their lives. This turn to the personal has focused attention on the capacity of subjective records to illuminate both individual experiences and the wider world within which narrators lived. However, sources such as letters, diaries, memoirs and oral history have been the subject of intense debate over the last forty years, concerning both their value and the uses to which they can be put. This book traces the engagement of historians of the personal with notions of historical reliability, and with the issue of representativeness, and it explores the ways in which they have overcome the scepticism of earlier practitioners. It celebrates their adventures with the meanings of the past buried in personal narratives and applauds their transformation of historical practice. Supported by case studies from across the globe and spanning the fifteenth to twenty-first centuries, Histories of the Self is essential reading for students and researchers interested in the ways personal testimony has been and can be used by historians.

A collection of fourteen essays in which Professor Postan draws together for the first time his contributions to the debate on historical method, and discusses from a variety of different angles, the inter-relation of history and the social sciences. After making, in his first three essays, a direct statement of his point of view, the author deals with two main aspects of the subject: time sequences and theoretical relevance of facts. He then proceeds to exemplify his point of view more particularly with relation to macro-economics and to certain specific issues within economic history as well as to economic history in general. In the final two chapters, one is on Karl Marx, the other on Hugh Gaitskell, he seeks to describe the intellectual climate in which the debate on methodology was held and in which his opinions on the subject were formed. The essays contained in this book will be of interest to all those involved in the social sciences, economics and history, as well as to those specifically concerned with historical methodology.

Degree-level history is characterized not only by knowledge and understanding of the human past, but by a battery of skills and qualities which are as directly applicable to employment as to professional postgraduate training or academic research. History Skills gives frank and practical help to students throughout their university course with advice on:

research methods

taking notes

participating in class

coursework

examinations

the dissertation.

Designed as a guide to success, the book helps to develop the critical skills that students need to get the most out of their course.

This second edition has been thoroughly updated to take into account digital resources and the benefits and risks associated with online research. New chapters on the first-year experience and employability help students to adjust to the way history is taught at university and explore the opportunities available to them after graduating.

Offering an unrivalled ‘insider’s view’ of what it takes to succeed, History Skills provides the comprehensive toolkit for all history students.

Table of Contents

1. The First Year Experience Sean Lang 2. Benchmarks Mary Abbott 3. Sources and Resources 4. Libraries – Physical and Virtual Penny King 5. Note Making Mary Abbott 6. Classes: Preparation and Participation Susan O'Brien and Tony Kirby 7. Writing Assignments Mary Abbott 8. Examinations Adrian Gregory 9. The Dissertion or Major Project Tony Kirby 10. Employability Mary Abbott. Historical Terms Tony Kirby

The decades between 1970 and the end of the twentieth century saw the disciplines of history and anthropology draw closer together, with historians paying more attention to social and cultural factors and the significance of everyday experience in the study of the past. The people, rather than elite actors, became the focus of their inquiry, and anthropological insights into agriculture, kinship, ritual, and folk customs enabled historians to develop richer and more representative narratives. The intersection of these two disciplines also helped scholars reframe the legacies of empire and the roots of colonial knowledge.

In this collection of essays and lectures, history's turn from high politics and formal intellectual history toward ordinary lives and cultural rhythms is vividly reflected in a scholar's intellectual journey to India. Nicholas B. Dirks recounts his early study of kingship in India, the rise of the caste system, the emergence of English imperial interest in controlling markets and India's political regimes, and the development of a crisis in sovereignty that led to an extraordinary nationalist struggle. He shares his personal encounters with archives that provided the sources and boundaries for research on these subjects, ultimately revealing the limits of colonial knowledge and single disciplinary perspectives. Drawing parallels to the way American universities balance the liberal arts and specialized research today, Dirks, who has occupied senior administrative positions and now leads the University of California at Berkeley, encourages scholars to continue to apply multiple approaches to their research and build a more global and ethical archive.

In these pathbreaking essays, Roy Rosenzweig charts the impact of new media on teaching, researching, preserving, presenting, and understanding history. Negotiating between the "cyberenthusiasts" who champion technological breakthroughs and the "digital skeptics" who fear the end of traditional humanistic scholarship, Rosenzweig re-envisions the practices and professional rites of academic historians while analyzing and advocating for the achievements of amateur historians.

While he addresses the perils of "doing history" online, Rosenzweig eloquently identifies the promises of digital work, detailing innovative strategies for powerful searches in primary and secondary sources, the increased opportunities for dialogue and debate, and, most of all, the unprecedented access afforded by the Internet. Rosenzweig draws attention to the opening up of the historical record to new voices, the availability of documents and narratives to new audiences, and the attractions of digital technologies for new and diverse practitioners. Though he celebrates digital history's democratizing influences, Rosenzweig also argues that the future of the past in this digital age can only be ensured through the active resistance to efforts by corporations to control access and profit from the Web.

This book offers an interpretation of the rise of secular historical thought in nineteenth-century Europe. Instead of characterizing 'historicism' and 'secularization' as fundamental breaks with Europe's religious heritage, they are presented as complex cultural permutations with much continuity; for inherited theological patterns of interpreting experience determined to a large degree the conditions, possibilities and limitations of the forms of historical imagination realizable by nineteenth-century secular intellectuals. This point is made by examining the thought of the German theologian W. M. L. de Wette and that of the Swiss-German historian Jacob Burckhardt. Burckhardt's meeting with de Wette and his subsequent decision to study history over theology are interpreted as revealing moments in nineteenth-century intellectual history. By examining their encounter, its larger historical context, and the thought of both men, the book demonstrates the centrality of theological concerns and forms of knowledge in the emergence of modern, secular historical consciousness.

This book deals with the way historical genres are theorized and practiced in the twenty-first century. In the context of the freedoms inspired by postmodernism and enabled by the development of innovative textual and graphic platforms, new theories of history view genres as flexible living forms that inspire more creative and experimental representations of the past. New ways of articulating history compete with the traditional model of historical prose. Acknowledging the current diversity in theories and practices, and assuming the historicity of historical genres, this book engages the reality of historical genres today and explores new directions in historical practice by examining these new forms of representing the past. Thus, without denying the validity of traditional and conventional forms of history (and arguing that these forms remain valid), this book surveys the production of what might be considered new historical genres practiced today, in which the idea of "practical past" is put in practice. Preceded by the introduction and two theoretical articles on historical genres, some of the new forms of history analysed in this book are: historical re-enactments, gaming history, social media, graphic narratives and first-person narratives of, memoirs of trauma, and film-history. This book was originally published as a special issue of Rethinking History.

Biblical Interpretation beyond Historicity evaluates the new perspectives that have emerged since the crisis over historicity in the 1970s and 80s in the field of biblical scholarship. Several new studies in the field, as well as the 'deconstructive' side of literary criticism that emerged from writers such as Derrida and Wittgenstein, among others, lead biblical scholars today to view the texts of the Bible more as literary narratives than as sources for a history of Israel. Increased interest in archaeological and anthropological studies in writing the history of Palestine and the ancient Near East leads to the need for an evidence-based history of Palestine. This volume analyses the consequences of the question: "If the Bible is not history, what is it then?" The editors, Hjelm and Thompson are members of the Copenhagen School, which was formed in the light of this question and the commitment to a new approach to both the history of Palestine and the Bible's place in ancient history. This volume features essays from a range of highly regarded scholars, and is divided into three sections: "Beyond Historicity", which explores alternative historical roles for the Bible, "Greek Connections", which discusses the Bible's context in the Hellenistic world and "Reception", which explores extra-biblical functions of biblical studies. Offering a unique gathering of scholars and challenging new theories, Biblical Interpretation beyond Historicity is invaluable to students in the field of Biblical and East Mediterranean Studies, and is a crucial resource for anyone working on both the archaeology and history of Palestine and the ancient Near East, and the religious development of Europe and the Near East.

CULTURE AND VALUES: A SURVEY OF THE HUMANITIES, NINTH EDITION, takes you on a tour of some of the world's most interesting and significant examples of art, music, philosophy, and literature, from the beginnings of civilization to today. Chapter previews, timelines, glossaries of key terms, Compare + Contrast, new Connections and Culture & Society features, and "Big Picture" reviews all help make it easy for you to learn the material and study more effectively. Links to full readings and playlists of the music selections discussed in your text are available online in MindTap, where you will also find study resources and such tools as image flashcards, guides to research and writing, practice quizzes and exercises, and more.

Published here in paperback for the first time is much of a final and long-anticipated work by R. G. Collingwood on philosophy of history, of which subject he was the greatest exponent in the English language. The original text of this work was only recently discovered. It is accompanied by shorter unpublished writings by Collingwood on historical knowledge and inquiry. A lengthy editorial introduction sets these writings in their context, and discusses philosophical questions to which they give rise.

This major new book by a prominent academic and an active politician ranges widely across the disciplines of theology, political theory and philosophy. Lord Plant focuses on the role of religious belief in argument about public policy in a pluralistic society. He examines the political implications of Christian belief and its application in political debate. The book discusses the place of religious belief in the formation of policy and asks what issues in modern society might be the legitimate objects of a Christian social and political concern.