The narratives of disease, hygiene, developments in medicine and the growth of urban environments are fundamental to the discipline of modern history. Here, the eminent urban historian Bill Luckin re-introduces a body of work which, published together for the first time, along with new material and contextualizing notes, marks the beginning of this important strand of historiography. Luckin charts the spread of cholera, fever and the 'everyday' (but frequently deadly) infections that afflicted the inhabitants of London and its 'new manufacturing districts' between the 1830s and the end of the nineteenth century. A second part - 'Pollution and the Ills of Urban-Industrialism' - concentrates on the water and 'smoke' problems and the ways in which they came to be perceived, defined and finally brought under a degree of control. Death and Survival in Urban Britain explores the layered and interacting narratives within the framework of the urban revolution that transformed British society between 1800 and 1950.

Cameralism and the Enlightenment reassesses the relationship between two key phenomena of European history often disconnected from each other. It builds on recent insights from global history, transnational history and Enlightenment studies to reflect on the dynamic interactions of cameralism, an early modern set of practices and discourses of statecraft prominent in central Europe, with the broader political, intellectual and cultural developments of the Enlightenment world. Through contributions from prominent scholars across the field of Enlightenment studies, the volume analyzes eighteenth-century cameralist authors' engagements with commerce, colonialism and natural law. Challenging the caricature of cameralism as a German, land-locked version of mercantilism, the volume reframes its importance for scholars of the Enlightenment broadly conceived. This volume goes beyond the typical focus on Britain and France in studies of political economy, widening perspectives about the dissemination of ideas of governance, happiness and reform to focus on multidirectional exchanges across continental Europe and beyond during the eighteenth century. Emphasizing the practice of theory, it proposes the study of the porosity of ideas in their exchange, transmission and mediation between spaces and discourses as a key dimension of cultural and intellectual history.

Is there something important to learn from the history of science about knowledge and the mind? Do habits and emotions play a significant role in science? To what extent do present concerns and knowledge distort our understanding of past texts and practices? These are crucial questions in current debates, but they are not new. This monograph evaluates the answers to these and other questions that Helene Metzger (1889-1944) provided. Metzger, who was the leading historian of chemistry of her generation, left us unparalleled reflections on the theory, practice and aims of history writing. Despite her influence on subsequent generations of thinkers, including Thomas Kuhn, this is the first full-length monograph on her. Beginning with an overview of her life, and the challenges faced by a Jewish woman working within academia, the book goes on to discuss the most important themes of her historiography, and her engagement with other disciplines, notably general history, philosophy, ethnology and religious studies. The book also explores both Metzger's immediate legacy and the relevance of her ideas for a host of current debates in science studies. The Appendices include four of her historiographical papers, translated into English for the first time.

The first comprehensive intellectual history of alphabet studies. Inventing the Alphabet provides the first account of two-and-a-half millennia of scholarship on the alphabet. Drawing on decades of research, Johanna Drucker dives into sometimes obscure and esoteric references, dispelling myths and identifying a pantheon of little-known scholars who contributed to our modern understandings of the alphabet, one of the most important inventions in human history. Beginning with Biblical tales and accounts from antiquity, Drucker traces the transmission of ancient Greek thinking about the alphabet's origin and debates about how Moses learned to read. The book moves through the centuries, finishing with contemporary concepts of the letters in alpha-numeric code used for global communication systems. Along the way, we learn about magical and angelic alphabets, antique inscriptions on coins and artifacts, and the comparative tables of scripts that continue through the development of modern fields of archaeology and paleography. This is the first book to chronicle the story of the intellectual history through which the alphabet has been "invented" as an object of scholarship.

Islamic civilization flourished in the Middle Ages across a vast geographical area that spans today's Middle and Near East. First published in 2006, Medieval Islamic Civilization examines the socio-cultural history of the regions where Islam took hold between the 7th and 16th centuries. This important two-volume work contains over 700 alphabetically arranged entries, contributed and signed by international scholars and experts in fields such as Arabic languages, Arabic literature, architecture, history of science, Islamic arts, Islamic studies, Middle Eastern studies, Near Eastern studies, politics, religion, Semitic studies, theology, and more. Entries also explore the importance of interfaith relations and the permeation of persons, ideas, and objects across geographical and intellectual boundaries between Europe and the Islamic world. This reference work provides an exhaustive and vivid portrait of Islamic civilization and brings together in one authoritative text all aspects of Islamic civilization during the Middle Ages. Accessible to scholars, students and non-specialists, this resource will be of great use in research and understanding of the roots of today's Islamic society as well as the rich and vivid culture of medieval Islamic civilization.

Islamic civilization flourished in the Middle Ages across a vast geographical area that spans today's Middle and Near East. First published in 2006, Medieval Islamic Civilization examines the socio-cultural history of the regions where Islam took hold between the 7th and 16th centuries. This important two-volume work contains over 700 alphabetically arranged entries, contributed and signed by international scholars and experts in fields such as Arabic languages, Arabic literature, architecture, history of science, Islamic arts, Islamic studies, Middle Eastern studies, Near Eastern studies, politics, religion, Semitic studies, theology, and more. Entries also explore the importance of interfaith relations and the permeation of persons, ideas, and objects across geographical and intellectual boundaries between Europe and the Islamic world. This reference work provides an exhaustive and vivid portrait of Islamic civilization and brings together in one authoritative text all aspects of Islamic civilization during the Middle Ages. Accessible to scholars, students and non-specialists, this resource will be of great use in research and understanding of the roots of today's Islamic society as well as the rich and vivid culture of medieval Islamic civilization.

The meaning of the American Revolution has always been a much-contested question, and asking it is particularly important today: the standard, easily digested narrative puts the Founding Fathers at the head of a unified movement, failing to acknowledge the deep divisions in Revolutionary-era society and the many different historical interpretations that have followed. Whose American Revolution Was It? speaks both to the ways diverse groups of Americans who lived through the Revolution might have answered that question and to the different ways historians through the decades have interpreted the Revolution for our own time. As the only volume to offer an accessible and sweeping discussion of the period's historiography and its historians, Whose American Revolution Was It? is an essential reference for anyone studying early American history. The first section, by Alfred F. Young, begins in 1925 with historian J. Franklin Jameson and takes the reader through the successive schools of interpretation up to the 1990s. The second section, by Gregory H. Nobles, focuses primarily on the ways present-day historians have expanded our understanding of the broader social history of the Revolution, bringing onto the stage farmers and artisans, who made up the majority of white men, as well as African Americans, Native Americans, and women of all social classes.

For over thirty years, Carol Kammen's On Doing Local History has been a valuable guide to professional and "amateur" historians alike. First published in 1986, revised in 2003, this book offers not only discussion of practical matters, but also a deeper reflection on local, public history, what it means, and why it is done. It is used in classrooms and found on the shelves of local historians across the U.S. The third edition features: *Updates to chapters that focus on the current concerns and situation of local historians *A new chapter on how the field of history cooperates with other arts *A new chapter on writing a congregational history *Updated references With the same passion (and now even more experience) that drove her to write the first edition, Kammen has brought her seminal work into today's context for the next generation of local historians. The new edition ensures that this classic will continue to move anyone interested in public history towards a better understanding of why they do what they do and how it benefits their communities.

James Steuart published An Inquiry into the Principles of Political OEconomy in 1767, the first systematic treatise on economics, nine years before Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Traditional historiography has tended to disregard and even deny Steuart's oeuvre, categorizing him as the last, outdated advocate of mercantilist policies in Britain. A clear portrait of a modernizing and enlightened Steuart emerges from this book, opening up an alternative approach to many key developments in economic theory. This book brings together a diverse international team of experts to overturn the "advocate of mercantilism" myth and explore different interpretations of Steuart's work within the context of the writings of other contemporary authors. A diverse range of specialists - historians, economists, political scientist, and sociologists - reflecting the diversity of James Steuart's work explore various aspects of the life, works, and influence of James Steuart, including his links to other authors who conceive - as Steuart did - the economic system of "natural liberty" as an artificial creation. The portrait of a demarginalized, modernizing, and enlightened Steuart emerges clearly in this book. This book is not reduced to old authors whose ideas would be at the Museum of Dead Ideas, it has a very contemporary resonance. The subjects and the way Steuart tackles them could have a big influence on future authors who recognized some advantages of an alternative approach to many key developments in economic theory. This will also be of interest to scholars of history of economic thought, intellectual history, and 18th century history.

Examining two state-sponsored history writing projects in Indonesia and the Philippines in the 1970s, this book illuminates the contents and contexts of the two projects and, more importantly, provides a nuanced characterization of the relationship between embodiments of power (state, dictators, government officials) and knowledge (intellectuals, historians, history). Known respectively as Sejarah Nasional Indonesia (SNI) and the Tadhana project, these projects were initiated by the Suharto and Marcos authoritarian regimes against the backdrop of rising and competing nationalisms, as well as the regimes' efforts at political consolidation. The dialectics between actors and the politico-academic contexts determine whether scholarship and politics would clash, mutually support, or co-exist parallel with one another. Rather than one side manipulating or co-opting the other, this study shows the mutual need or partnership between scholars and political actors in these projects. This book proposes the need to embrace rather than deny or transcend the entwined power/knowledge if the idea is for scholarship to realize its truly progressive visions. Analyzing the dynamics of state-scholar relations in the two countries, the book will be of interest to academics in the fields on Southeast Asian history and politics, nationalism, historiography, intellectual history, postocolonial studies, cultural studies, and the sociology of knowledge.

Patrick Aidan Heelan's The Observable offers the reader a completely articulated development of his 1965 philosophy of quantum physics, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity. In this previously unpublished study dating back more than a half a century, Heelan brings his background as both a physicist and a philosopher to his reflections on Werner Heisenberg's physical philosophy. Including considerably broader connections to the contributions of Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, and Albert Einstein, this study also reflects Heelan's experience in Eugene Wigner's laboratory at Princeton along with his reflections on working with Erwin Schroedinger dating from Heelan's years at the Institute for Advanced Cosmology in Dublin. A contribution to continental philosophy of science, the phenomenological and hermeneutic resources applied in this book to the physical and ontological paradoxes of quantum physics, especially in connection with laboratory science and measurement, theory and model making, will enrich students of the history of science as well as those interested in different approaches to the historiography of science. University courses in the philosophy of physics will find this book indispensable as a resource and invaluable for courses in the history of science.

This book offers an understanding and analysis of the aesthetics of historying through the specific concepts and process of the fabricated, factitious, factional, factious, factitive, factive, factualist, fictitious, fictive and the figurative. These concepts create the(ir) connection(s) between "the past" and 'history" hitherto rethink the nature of "the historical past." There are many different available 'forms' of histories that shape the minds of historians when they deploy their historical imaginations through "the past(s) via their preferred history creations." For every historian and every history reader, there is a different experience of "the history past aesthetic."

First published in 1998, this valuable reference work offers concise, expert answers to questions on all aspects of life and culture in Medieval England, including art, architecture, law, literature, kings, women, music, commerce, technology, warfare and religion. This wide-ranging text encompasses English social, cultural, and political life from the Anglo-Saxon invasions in the fifth century to the turn of the sixteenth century, as well as its ties to the Celtic world of Wales, Scotland and Ireland, the French and Anglo-Norman world of the Continent and the Viking and Scandinavian world of the North Sea. A range of topics are discussed from Sedulius to Skelton, from Wulfstan of York to Reginald Pecock, from Pictish art to Gothic sculpture and from the Vikings to the Black Death. A subject and name index makes it easy to locate information and bibliographies direct users to essential primary and secondary sources as well as key scholarship. With more than 700 entries by over 300 international scholars, this work provides a detailed portrait of the English Middle Ages and will be of great value to students and scholars studying Medieval history in England and Europe, as well as non-specialist readers.

Although there is a rich historiography on Enlightenment Tuscany in Italian as well as French and German, the principle Anglophone works are Eric Cochrane's Tradition and Enlightenment in the Tuscan Academies (1961) and his Enlightenment Florence in the Forgotten Centuries (1973). It is high time to revisit the Tuscan Enlightenment. This volume brings together an international group of scholars with the goal of putting to rest the idea that Florence ceased to be interesting after the Renaissance. Indeed, it is partly the explicit dialogue between Renaissance and Enlightenment that makes eighteenth-century Tuscany so interesting. This enlightened age looked to the past. It began the Herculean project of collecting, editing, and publishing many of the manuscripts that today form the bedrock of any serious study of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Vasari, Galileo, and other Tuscan writers. This was an age of public libraries, projects of cultural restoration, and the emergence of the Uffizi as a public art gallery, complemented by a science museum in Peter Leopold's reign whose relics can still be visited in the Museo Galileo and La Specola.

A companion to History of Oral History, Thinking about Oral History presents parts III and IV of Handbook of Oral History, an essential resource for scholars and students. Guided by Charlton, Myers, and Sharpless, the prominent authors capture the current state-of-the-art in oral history and predict key directions for future growth in theory and application.

" ... the student of the Great War and gender is well served, and Braybon's introduction provides an excellent overview of the various historiographical themes, whilst her footnotes provide a useful guide to further reading."? - History "Readers will not be disappointed by this scholarly, yet accessible, collection of essays."? - Centre for First World War Studies 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. Gail Braybon is an independent historian. She is the author of Women Workers in the First World War and also wrote, with Penny Summerfield, Out of the Cage: Women's Experiences in Two World Wars.

Studies on gender and sexuality have proliferated in the last decades, covering a wide spectrum of disciplines. This collection of essays offers a metanarrative of sexuality as it has been recently embedded in the art historical discourse of the European Renaissance. It revisits 'canonical' forms of visual culture, such as painting, sculpture and a number of emblematic manuscripts. The contributors focus on one image-either actual or thematic-and examine it against its historiographic assumptions. Through the use of interdisciplinary approaches, the essays propose to unmask the ideology(ies) of representation of sexuality and suggest a richer image of the ever-shifting identities of gender. The collection focuses on the Italian Renaissance, but also includes case studies from Germany and France.

For over thirty years, Carol Kammen's On Doing Local History has been a valuable guide to professional and "amateur" historians alike. First published in 1986, revised in 2003, this book offers not only discussion of practical matters, but also a deeper reflection on local, public history, what it means, and why it is done. It is used in classrooms and found on the shelves of local historians across the U.S. The third edition features: *Updates to chapters that focus on the current concerns and situation of local historians *A new chapter on how the field of history cooperates with other arts *A new chapter on writing a congregational history *Updated references With the same passion (and now even more experience) that drove her to write the first edition, Kammen has brought her seminal work into today's context for the next generation of local historians. The new edition ensures that this classic will continue to move anyone interested in public history towards a better understanding of why they do what they do and how it benefits their communities.

The essays in this volume address central problems in the development of Roman imperialism in the third and second century BC. Published in honour of the distinguished Oxford academic Peter Derow, they follow some of his main interests: the author Polybius, the characteristics of Roman power and imperial ambition, and the mechanisms used by Rome in creating and sustaining an empire in the east. Written by a distinguished group of international historians, all of whom were taught by Derow, the volume constitutes a new and distinctive contribution to the history of this centrally important period, as well as a major advance in the study of Polybius as a writer. In addition, the volume looks at the way Rome absorbed religions from the east, and at Hellenistic artistic culture. It also sheds new light on the important region of Illyria on the Adriatic Coast, which played a key part in Rome's rise to power. Archaeological, epigraphic, and textual evidence are brought together to create a sustained argument for Rome's determined and systematic pursuit of power.

Li Zehou is widely regarded as one of China's most influential contemporary thinkers. He has produced influential theories of the development of Chinese thought and the place of aesthetics in Chinese ethics and value theory. This book is the first English-language translation of Li Zehou's work on classical Chinese thought. It includes chapters on the classical Chinese thinkers, including Confucius, Mozi, Laozi, Sunzi, Xunzi and Zhuangzi, and also on later eras and thinkers such as Dong Zhongshu in the Han Dynasty and the Song-Ming Neo-Confucians. The essays in this book not only discuss these historical figures and their ideas, but also consider their historical significance, and how key themes from these early schools reappeared in and shaped later periods and thinkers. Taken together, they highlight the breadth of Li Zehou's scholarship and his syncretic approach-his explanations of prominent thinkers and key periods in Chinese intellectual history blend ideas from both the Chinese and Western canons, while also drawing on contemporary thinkers in both traditions. The book also includes an introduction written by the translator that helpfully explains the significance of Li Zehou's work and its prospects for fostering cross-cultural dialogue with Western philosophy. A History of Chinese Classical Thought will be of interest to advanced students and scholars interested in Chinese philosophy, comparative philosophy, and Chinese intellectual and social history.

Bringing sophisticated philosophy to bear on real-life historiography, Values, Objectivity, and Explanation in Historiography rekindles and invigorates the debate on two perennials in the theory and methodology of history. One is the tension between historians' values and the ideal-or illusion-of objective historiography. The other is historical explanation. The point of departure for the treatment of values and objectivity is an exceptionally heated debate on Cold War historiography in Denmark, involving not only historians but also the political parties, the national newspapers, and the courts. The in-depth analysis that follows concludes that historians can produce accounts that deserve the label "objective," even though their descriptions are tinged by ineluctable epistemic instability. A separate chapter dissects the postmodern notion of situated truths. The second part of the book proffers a new take on historical explanation. It is based on the notion of the ideal explanatory text, which allows for not only causal-including intentional-but also nomological, structural, and functional explanations. The approach, which can accommodate narrative explanations driven by causal plots, is ecumenical but not all-encompassing. Emergent social properties and supernatural entities are excluded from the ideal explanatory text, making scientific historiography methodologically individualistic-albeit with room for explanations at higher levels when pragmatically justified-and atheist.

This book explores national attitudes to remembering colonialism in Britain and France. By comparing these two former colonial powers, the author tells two distinct stories about coming to terms with the legacies of colonialism, the role of silence and the breaking thereof. Examining memory through the stories of people who incited public conversation on colonialism: activists; politicians; journalists; and professional historians, this book argues that these actors mobilised the colonial past to make sense of national identity, race and belonging in the present. In focusing on memory as an ongoing, politicised public debate, the book examines the afterlife of colonial history as an element of political and social discourse that depends on actors' goals and priorities. A thought-provoking and powerful read that explores the divisive legacies of colonialism through oral history, this book will appeal to those researching imperialism, collective memory and cultural identity.

For a good part of the 20th century, the classic Pragmatists-Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey-and pragmatism in general were largely ignored by analytic philosophers. They were said to hold such untenable views as whatever best satisfies our needs is true and that the end justifies the means. Despite a recent revival of interest in these figures, spurred largely by the work of Richard Rorty, it is not uncommon to continue to hear claims that pragmatism is a subjectivist, anti-realist position that denies that there is a mind-independent world, and fails to place objective constraints on inquiry. In this book, Robert Schwartz dispels these traditional views by examining the empiricist and constructivist orientation of the classic pragmatists. Based on updated and expanded versions of his influential papers, as well as a number of previously unpublished essays, in this book Schwartz demonstrates the relevance of pragmatic thought to a wide range of issues beyond concerns over truth and realism that currently dominate discussions. The individual essays elaborate and defend pragmatic, instrumentalist, and constructivist conceptions of truth and inquiry, moral discourse and ethical statements, perception, art, and worldmaking. Pragmatic Perspectives will appeal to scholars interested in the history of American philosophy and pragmatic approaches to contemporary issues in analytic philosophy.

What is the reason for the American university's global preeminence? How did the American university succeed where the development of the German university, from which it took so much, stalled? In this closely-argued book, Meyer suggests that the key to the American university's success is its institutional design of self-government. Where other university systems are dependent on the patronage of state, church, or market, the American university is the first to achieve true autonomy, which it attained through an intricate system of engagements with societal actors and institutions that simultaneously act as amplifiers of its impact and as checks on the university's ever-present corrosive tendencies. Built on a searching analysis of the design thinking of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Adam Smith and closely tracing the learning process by which Americans adapted the German model, The Design of the University dismisses efforts to copy superficial features of the American university in order to achieve world-class rank. Calling attention to the design details of the university and the particulars of its institutional environment, this volume identifies the practices and choices that produced the gold standard for today's world class higher education.

How History Works assesses the social function of academic knowledge in the humanities, exemplified by history, and offers a critique of the validity of historical knowledge. The book focusses on history's academic, disciplinary ethos to offer a reconception of the discipline of history, arguing that it is an existential liability: if critical analysis reveals the sense that history offers to the world to be illusory, what stops historical scholarship from becoming a disguise for pessimism or nihilism? History is routinely invoked in all kinds of cultural, political, economic, psychological situations to provide a reliable account or justification of what is happening. Moreover, it addresses a world already receptive to comprehensive historical explanations: since everyone has some knowledge of history, everyone can be manipulated by it. This book analyses the relationship between specialized knowledge and everyday experience, taking phenomenology (Husserl) and pragmatism (James) as methodological guides. It is informed by a wide literature sceptical of the sense academic historical expertise produces and of the work history does, represented by thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Valery, Anders and Cioran. How History Works discusses how history makes sense of the world even if what happens is senseless, arguing that behind the smoke-screen of historical scholarship looms a chaotic world-dynamic indifferent to human existence. It is valuable reading for anyone interested in historiography and historical theory.