During the first centuries of the Roman Empire, Greek intellectuals wrote a great many texts modeled on the dialect and literature of Classical Athens, some 500 years prior. Among the most successful of these literary figures were sophists, whose highly influential display oratory has been the prevailing focus of scholarship on Roman Greece over the past fifty years. Often overlooked are the period’s historians, who spurned sophistic oral performance in favor of written accounts. One such author is Arrian of Nicomedia. Daniel W. Leon examines the works of Arrian to show how the era's historians responded to their sophistic peers’ claims of authority and played a crucial role in theorizing the past at a time when knowledge of history was central to defining Greek cultural identity. Best known for his history of Alexander the Great, Arrian articulated a methodical approach to the study of the past and a notion of historical progress that established a continuous line of human activity leading to his present and imparting moral and political lessons. Using Arrian as a case study in Greek historiography, Leon demonstrates how the genre functioned during the Imperial Period and what it brings to the study of the Roman world in the second century.

We are arguably living in a 'postideological' era. However, when we tune into the TV news we can hear political leaders talk about 'advanced' societies, geopolitical experts suggest 'humanitarian' interventions, and sober events presenters qualify a murder as 'barbaric'. What does this mean? In this comprehensive book, Rolf Petri reveals how our everyday political language is full of ideological representations of the world, and places them in an accessible historical narration. From the secularization of Europe and the Enlightenment project of 'civilization' to the contemporary preoccupation with ecological catastrophes or the end of history, A Short History of Western Ideology carves out the central elements of western ideology. It focuses on a wide variety of issues including religion, colonialism, race and gender, which are essential for how we conceive of the modern world. By creating an awareness of the ideological character of the western worldview, its limits and its flaws, this book warns us of the dangers that derive from a self-righteous mindset. It is stimulating and important reading for history and politics students seeking to understand the ideology of the western world.

Robes and Honor is a fascinating exploration of the possible common origin and subsequent developments of investiture across medieval Christianity and medieval Islam. The ceremony in all of its cultural variety was much more than the public adoption of a high-value textile as symbol of office; within a culture, robing established a personal link "from the hand" of the giver--king, pope, head of a sect, ambassador--to the receiver--noble, general, official, nun, or acolyte. This volume challenges current thinking on religious and regional boundaries of "cultures," raises semiotic issues about imagined communities, and addresses problems of kingship.

This volume offers a stimulating new perspective on the history of historical studies. Through the prism of 'scholarly personae', it explores why historians care about attitudes or dispositions that they consider necessary for studying the past, yet often disagree about what virtues, skills, or competencies are most important. More specifically, the volume explains why models of virtue known as 'personae' have always been contested, yet also can prove remarkably stable, especially with regard to their race, class, and gender assumptions. Covering historical studies across Europe, North America, Africa, and East Asia, How to be a historian will appeal not only to historians of historiography, but to all historians who occasionally wonder: What kind of a historian do I want to be? -- .

This book shows how the study of the evolving discourse employed during a political process spanning more than a decade can provide insights for critical discourse analysis on the one hand, and understanding of a real world political process on the other, thereby demonstrating the potential role for critical discourse analysis in historiography.

How and why did Indians move within and across the West? What effects did this have on their identities? Despite the burgeoning scholarship on the postcolonial South Asian Diaspora, histories and geographies of colonial Indian mobility have received much less scrutiny. Focusing on a range of individuals who moved within and across Europe and North America, including a champion of London's female poor, a tourist and a war-time spy, this book addresses that gap by examining the production of Indian mobility within the West over the course of the first half of the twentieth century. By analyzing the lives of individual Indian men and, in particular, women it articulates new perspectives on transnational histories and geographies of mobility, gender, performance, and embodiment.

Series Information:
CultureWork: A Book Series from the Center for Literacy and Cultural Studies at Harvard

This collection of the best new and recent work on historical consciousness and practice in late Imperial Russia assembles the building blocks for a fundamental reconceptualization of Russian history and history writing.

England is remarkable for the wealth and variety of its archival heritage - the records created and preserved by institutions, organisations and individuals. This is the first book to treat the history of English records creation and record-keeping from the perspective of the archives themselves. Beginning in the early Middle Ages and ending in modern times, it draws on the author's extensive knowledge and experience as both archivist and historian, and presents the subject in a very readable and lively way. Some archives, notably those of government and the Established Church, have remarkably continuous histories. But all have suffered over time from periods of neglect and decay, and some have come to sudden and violent ends. Among the destructive episodes discussed in the book are the Viking raids of the Anglo-Saxon period, the Norman Conquest, the Peasants' Revolt, the dissolution of the monasteries and the bombing raids of the Second World War. Archivists and historians have a shared interest in the protection and study of the country's surviving records. This book has been written for members of both professions, but also for every reader who cares about the preservation of England's past.

Few of the major campaigns of World War II aroused as much controversy as the War in North Africa, 1940-1943. Figures such as Rommel, Montgomery, and Eisenhower would become world famous because of the fighting in North Africa. This book opens with seven historiographical essays that evaluate and critically assess the major contributions to the literature on the War in North Africa. It then includes an alphabetically arranged bibliography of the 504 entries cited in the essays. The material is easily accessible, with cross-references between the text and the bibliography and a full index.

The volume includes chapters on the Desert War, 1940-42; the Axis Powers in North Africa; Montgomery, Alam Halfa and El Alamein; TORCH: the Landings in French North Africa, and the Tunisian Campaign. Full attention is given to questions and issues historians have raised on such controversies as the Auchinleck-Montgomery dispute, the debate over Operation TORCH, and the Darlan affair. Emphasis is on English-language works, but the most significant Italian, German, and French works are cited and assessed. The book has been written for use in public, college, university, and institutional libraries, and to serve general readers and military historians.

Adam Smith (1723-1790) is widely regarded as one of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment period. Best-known for his founding work of economics, The Wealth of Nations, Smith engaged equally with the nature of morality in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. He also gave lectures on literature and jurisprudence, and wrote papers on art and science. In this outstanding philosophical introduction Samuel Fleischacker argues that Smith is a superb example of the broadly curious thinkers who flourished in the Enlightenment-for whom morality, politics, law, and economics were just a few of the many fascinating subjects that could be illuminated by naturalistic modes of investigation. After a helpful overview of his life and work, Fleischacker examines the full range of Smith's thought, on such subjects as: epistemology, philosophy of science, and aesthetics the nature of sympathy moral approval and moral judgement virtue religion justice and jurisprudence governmental policy economic principles liberalism. Including chapter summaries, suggestions for further reading, and a glossary, Adam Smith is essential reading for those studying ethics, political philosophy, the history of philosophy, and the Enlightenment, as well as those reading Smith in related disciplines such as economics, law, and religion.

This book examines authority in discourse from ancient to modern historians, while also presenting instances of current subversions of the classical rhetorical ethos. Ancient rhetoric set out the rules of authority in discourse, and directly affected the claims of Greek and Roman historians to truth. These working principles were consolidated in modern tradition, but not without modifications. The contemporary world, in its turn, subverts in many new ways the weight of the author's claim to legitimacy and truth, through the active role of the audiences. How have the ancient claims to authority worked and changed from their own times to our post-modern, digital world? Online uses and outreach displays of the classical past, especially through social media, have altered the balance of the authority traditionally bestowed upon the ancients, demonstrating what the linguistic turn has shown: the role of the reader is as important as that of the writer.

More than 90 percent of all scientific history has been made during the last half century. So far, however, only a fraction of historical scholarship has dealt with this period. Merely a decade ago, most scientific historians considered recent science - the scientific culture created, lived and remembered by contemporary scientists - an area of study best left to the historical actors themselves. Today, an increasing number of historians are turning to the study of contemporary science. When doing so, they are confronted with new and unfamiliar methodological and theoretical problems. How to handle the huge amounts of published and unpublished source materials? What level of scientific training is necessary to understand contemporary science? Does the lack of historical perspective prevent good scholarship? Can (and will) historians of recent science share the turf with other professional groups, such as active scientists, scholars of science and technology studies, and science journalists? This volume aims to provide answers to these questions. The thirteen contributors are active researchers in what has been called "the last frontier" in the history of science. The book itself is

The core of the book is Oliver's account of his research travels throughout tropical Africa from the 1940s to the 1980s; his efforts to train and foster African graduate students to teach in African universities; his role in establishing conferences and journals to bring together the work of historians and archaeologists from Europe and Africa; his encounters with political and religious leaders, scholars, soldiers, and storytellers; and the political and economic upheavals of the continent that he witnessed.

In the English-speaking world the Great War maintains a tenacious grip on the public imagination, and also continues to draw historians to an event which has been interpreted variously as a symbol of modernity, the midwife to the twentieth century and an agent of social change. Although much 'common knowledge' about the war and its aftermath has included myth, simplification and generalisation, this has often been accepted uncritically by popular and academic writers alike. While Britain may have suffered a surfeit of war books, many telling much the same story, there is far less written about the impact of the Great War in other combatant nations. Its history was long suppressed in both fascist Italy and the communist Soviet Union: only recently have historians of Russia begun to examine a conflict which killed, maimed and displaced so many millions. Even in France and Germany the experience of 1914-18 has often been overshadowed by the Second World War. The war's social history is now ripe for reassessment and revision. The essays in this volume incorporate a European perspective, engage with the historiography of the war, and consider how the primary textural, oral and pictorial evidence has been used - or abused. Subjects include the politics of shellshock, the impact of war on women, the plight of refugees, food distribution in Berlin and portrait photography, all of which illuminate key debates in war history.

This book explores cases of decapitation found in sources on the reign of Alexander the Great. Despite the enormous literature on the career of Alexander the Great, this is the first study on the characterisation of violent deaths during his hectic reign. This historiographical omission has involved the tacit and blind acceptance of the details found in the ancient sources. Therefore, this book seeks to illustrate how cultural expectations, literary models, and ideological taboos shaped these accounts and argues for a close and critical reading of the sources. Given the different cultural considerations surrounding decapitation in Greek and Roman cultures, this book illustrates how those biases could have differently shaped certain episodes depending on the ultimate writer. This book, therefore, can be especially interesting for scholars focused on the career of Alexander the Great, but also valuable for other Classicists, philologists, and even for anthropologists because it represents a good case of study of cultural symbolism of violent death, semantics of power, imperial domination and the confrontation between opposite cultural appreciations of a practice.

This book explores and explains the reasons why the idea of universal history, a form of teleological history which holds that all peoples are travelling along the same path and destined to end at the same point, persists in political thought. Prominent in Western political thought since the middle of the eighteenth century, the idea of universal history holds that all peoples can be situated in the narrative of history on a continuum between a start and an end point, between the savage state of nature and civilized modernity. Despite various critiques, the underlying teleological principle still prevails in much contemporary thinking and policy planning, including post-conflict peace-building and development theory and practice. Anathema to contemporary ideals of pluralism and multiculturalism, universal history means that not everyone gets to write their own story, only a privileged few. For the rest, history and future are taken out of their hands, subsumed and assimilated into other people's narrative.

Alongside Gibbon and Hume, William Robertson was the most popular British historian of the 18th century. A key figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, Robertson was both leader of the Moderate Party in the Church of Scotland and principal of the University of Edinburgh. A prominent debater, Robertson's importance has emerged again in the light of original research 200 years after his death in 1793. This 12-volume set incorporates Robertson's final corrections and revisions for each of the four histories and the published sermon. Besides the major works, the set includes miscellaneous writings and speeches by Robertson and several biographical and critical works about him taken from scarce pamphlets and periodicals. With new introductions, including one on Robertson as historian, and the other providing a biographical and bibliographical commentary, this set should be useful to scholars of historiography and the social, ecclesiastical and intellectual history of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Modern Italian historiography has undergone a substantial revision in the last quarter of a century. From an almost exclusive focus on the process of nation-building, the attention of historians has shifted. The most innovative research is now devoted to assessing to what extent the cosmopolitan attitude that was evident in the late eighteenth century morphed, but did not disappear, in the ensuing two centuries. The essays in this volume make the case that the age of nations had a profound impact on Italian history and contributed to the creation of an Italian identity within the framework of well-functioning imperial and global networks. They also acknowledge that the process of national individualization carried with it a variety of aspects that reconnected Italian history to the foreign cultures that were undergoing constant self-fashioning. Cosmopolitan Italy in the Age of Nations: Transnational Visions from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century will be of interest to scholars throughout the world and intellectual and transnational historians.

This open access book addresses the protection of privacy and personality rights in public records, records management, historical sources, and archives; and historical and current access to them in a broad international comparative perspective. Considering the question "can archiving pose a security risk to the protection of sensitive data and human rights?", it analyses data security and presents several significant cases of the misuse of sensitive personal data, such as census data or medical records. It examines archival inflation and the minimisation and reduction of data in public records and archives, including data anonymisation and pseudonymisation, and the risks of deanonymisation and reidentification of persons. The book looks at post-mortem privacy protection, the relationship of the right to know and the right to be forgotten and introduces a specific model of four categories of the right to be forgotten. In its conclusion, the book presents a set of recommendations for archives and records management.

The first part of this volume deals with the changes and continuities in historical approaches over the last fifty years, with three further sections focusing on initial contacts, formal presences, and informal presences. Emphasis has been placed on the major European players in Asia and Africa before 1800 - the Portuguese, Dutch and English, without neglecting the role played by the French, Spanish, Scandinavians and others.

This is an enquiry into the historiographical quality of Shakespeare's histories. The main assumption is that Shakespeare's staging of English history helped to shape a new historiographical outlook. In particular, multi-perspectivism in the treatment of political issues produced a problem-oriented kind of historical perspective. This explored the opportunities offered by the theatrical medium, and inaugurated a perspective which considered history as critical outlook on a world of problems and retrospective possibilities rather than as unconditional belief in, or even worship of, a world of facts.

This volume reproduces key historical texts concerning `colonial knowledges'. The use of the adjective 'colonial' indicates that knowledge is shaped by power relationships, while the use of the plural form, 'knowledges' indicates the emphasis in this collection is on an interplay between different, often competing, cognitive systems. George Balandier's notion of the colonial situation is an organising principle that runs throughout the volume, and there are four sub-themes: language and texts, categorical knowledge, the circulation of knowledge and indigenous knowledge. The volume is designed to introduce students to a range of important interventions which speak to each other today, even if they were not intended to do so when first published. An introductory essay links the themes together and explains the significance of the individual articles.

This book tells the story of how information evolved since the mid-nineteenth century. It argues that information increased in quantity, became more specialized by discipline (e.g., mathematics, science, political science), and more organized. Information increased in volume due to a series of innovations, such as the electrification of communications and the development of computers, but also due to the organization of facts and knowledge by discipline, making it easier to manage and access. I do this by looking at what major disciplines have done to shape the nature of modern information, devoting chapters to the most obvious ones. I argue that understanding how some features of information evolved is useful for those who work in subjects that deal with their very construct and application, such as computer scientists and those exploring social media and, most recently, history. The book continues my more than twenty years of studying how information became a central feature of modern society, building on prior books I have written, most notably as a sequel to All the Facts: A History of Information in the United States since 1870 (OUP, 2016) and Building Blocks of Society: History, Information Ecosystems, and Infrastructures (R&L, 2021).