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Books > History > Theory & methods > Historiography
The field of American history has undergone remarkable expansion in
the past century, all of it reflecting a broadening of the
historical enterprise and democratization of its coverage. Today,
the shape of the field takes into account the interests,
identities, and narratives of more Americans than at any time in
its past. Much of this change can be seen through the history of
the Organization of American Historians, which, as its mission
states, "promotes excellence in the scholarship, teaching, and
presentation of American history, and encourages wide discussion of
historical questions and equitable treatment of all practitioners
of history."
This century-long history of the Organization of American
Historians-and its predecessor, the Mississippi Valley Historical
Association-explores the thinking and writing by professional
historians on the history of the United States. It looks at the
organization itself, its founding and dynamic growth, the changing
composition of its membership and leadership, the emphasis over the
years on teaching and public history, and pedagogical approaches
and critical interpretations as played out in association
publications, annual conferences, and advocacy efforts. The
majority of the book emphasizes the writing of the American story
by offering a panorama of the fields of history and their
development, moving from long-established ones such as political
history and diplomatic history to more recent ones, including
environmental history and the history of sexuality
The history of sexuality has progressed from its earlier marginal
status to a central place in historiography. Not only are its foci
of research intriguing, but the field has initiated important
theoretical advances for the discipline as a whole, especially
through the work of Michel Foucault. The editors of this new
four-volume Routledge collection define sexuality in a broader
sense than sexual identity, to include sexual emotions, desires,
acts, representations, and relationships. And while the history of
sexuality began in the American and European spheres, the volumes
also integrate studies of Asian, African, and other sexual
cultures. Similarly, the collection integrates studies from early
periods (such as classical Greece and Rome and the medieval era)
with modern histories of sexuality. The editors of this new
four-volume Routledge collection define sexuality in a broader
sense than sexual identity, to include sexual emotions, desires,
acts, representations, and relationships. And while the history of
sexuality began in the American and European spheres, the volumes
also integrate studies of Asian, African, and other sexual
cultures. Similarly, the collection integrates studies from early
periods (such as classical Greece and Rome and the medieval era)
with modern histories of sexuality.
After three years in his own time, Chris Lennox is again thrown
back to Georgian England where wars are raging against the Danes
and the French. His life is on the line at home and abroad as he
fights to live another day. Ed Lane is a former member of the
Parachute Regiment T.A. In civilian life he ran his own graphic
design business where he honed his writing skills working for
multi-national companies. He lives in the tranquil Lincolnshire
Wolds with his wife Barb. To Live Another Day is his tenth novel.
A much needed reference aid for the academic and national defense
communities, this book provides a framework for the historical and
comparative study of the military culture of Arab society. In
sections considering warfare in Arab traditions, military roles in
medieval Islam, and Arab armies in the modern age, each chapter's
bibliography is preceded by a background essay, designed to assist
researchers who are unfamiliar with the general outline of Arab
history or the thematic bent of Arabic historiography. The work
also includes a glossary and tables of Islamic dynasties. Written
primarily for professors and students of comparative military
history, national and service intelligence analysts, and students
of Arab-Islamic or Middle Eastern history, this work will also be
of use to the generalist historian.
In interviews with Amin Maalouf, Thierry Hentsch, Sara Suleri,
Marlene Nourbese Philip and Ackbar Abbas, history is discussed from
a non-European perspective. "What's remarkable is the scope Samuel
allows his interview subjects."--"Now""There is no shortage of
thought-provoking material here."--"Books in Canada"
This is the first book on the genesis, impact and reception of the
most-widely read History of England of the early 18th century: Paul
Rapin Thoyras' Histoire d'Angleterre (1724-27). The Histoire and
complementary works (Extraits des Actes de Rymer, 1710-1724;
Dissertation sur les Whigs et les Torys, 1717) gave practical
expression to theorizations of history against Pyrrhonian
postulations by foregrounding an empirical form of history-writing.
Rapin's unprecedented standards of historiographical accuracy
triggered both politically-informed reinterpretations of the
Histoire in partisan newspapers and a multitude of adaptations that
catered to an ever-growing number of readers. Despite a
long-standing assessment as a "standard Whig historian", Rapin
fashioned the impartial persona of a judge-historian, in compliance
with the expectations of the Republic of Letters. His personal
trajectory illuminates how scholars pursued trustworthy knowledge
and how they reconsidered the boundaries of their community in the
face of the booming printing industry and the interconnected growth
of general readership. Rapin's oeuvre provided significant raw
material for Voltaire's and Hume's Enlightenment historiographical
narratives. A comparative foray into their respective different
approaches to history and authorship cautions us against assuming a
direct transition from the Republic of Letters into an
Enlightenment Republic of Letters. To study the diffusion and the
impact of Rapin's works is to understand that empirical
history-writing, defined by its commitment to erudition in the
service of impartiality, coexisted with the histoire philosophique.
How did the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution affect everyone's
lives? Why did people re/negotiate their identities to adopt
revolutionary roles and duties? How did people, who lived with
different self-understandings and social relations, inevitably
acquire and practice revolutionary identities, each in their own
light?This book plunges into the contexts of these concerns to seek
different relations that reveal the Revolution's different
meanings. Furthermore, this book shows that scholars of the
Cultural Revolution encountered emotional and intellectual
challenges as they cared about the real people who owned an
identity resource that could trigger an imagined thread of
solidarity in their minds.The authors believe that the Revolution's
magnitude and pervasive scope always resulted in individualized
engagements that have significant and differing consequences for
those struggling in their micro-context. It has impacted a future
with unpredictable collective implications in terms of ethnicity,
gender, memory, scholarship, or career. The Cultural Revolution is,
therefore, an evolving relation beneath the rise of China that will
neither fade away nor sanction integrative paths.
Why have the influences of the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution (roughly 1966-1976) in contemporary China been so
pervasive, profound, and long-lasting? This book posits that the
Revolution challenged everyone to decide how they can and should be
themselves.Even scholars who study the Cultural Revolution from a
presumably external vantage point must end up with an ideological
position relative to whom they study. This amounts to a focused
curiosity toward the Maoist agenda rivaling its alternatives. As a
result, the political lives after the Cultural Revolution remain,
ulteriorly and ironically, Maoist to a ubiquitous extent.How then
can we cleanse, forget, neutralize, rediscover, contextualize,
realign, revitalize, or renovate Maoism? The authors contend that
all must appropriate ideologies for political and analytical
purposes and adapt to how others use ideological discourses. This
book then invites its readers to re-examine ideology contexts for
people to appreciate how they acquire their roles and duties. Those
more practiced can even reversely give new meanings to reform,
nationalism, foreign policy, or scholarship by shifting between
Atheism, Maoism, Confucianism, and Marxism, incurring alternative
ideological lenses to de-/legitimize their subject matter.
"Ty Seidule scorches us with the truth and rivets us with his
fierce sense of moral urgency." --Ron Chernow In a forceful but
humane narrative, former soldier and head of the West Point history
department Ty Seidule's Robert E. Lee and Me challenges the myths
and lies of the Confederate legacy--and explores why some of this
country's oldest wounds have never healed. Ty Seidule grew up
revering Robert E. Lee. From his southern childhood to his service
in the U.S. Army, every part of his life reinforced the Lost Cause
myth: that Lee was the greatest man who ever lived, and that the
Confederates were underdogs who lost the Civil War with honor. Now,
as a retired brigadier general and Professor Emeritus of History at
West Point, his view has radically changed. From a soldier, a
scholar, and a southerner, Ty Seidule believes that American
history demands a reckoning. In a unique blend of history and
reflection, Seidule deconstructs the truth about the
Confederacy--that its undisputed primary goal was the subjugation
and enslavement of Black Americans--and directly challenges the
idea of honoring those who labored to preserve that system and
committed treason in their failed attempt to achieve it. Through
the arc of Seidule's own life, as well as the culture that formed
him, he seeks a path to understanding why the facts of the Civil
War have remained buried beneath layers of myth and even outright
lies--and how they embody a cultural gulf that separates millions
of Americans to this day. Part history lecture, part meditation on
the Civil War and its fallout, and part memoir, Robert E. Lee and
Me challenges the deeply-held legends and myths of the
Confederacy--and provides a surprising interpretation of essential
truths that our country still has a difficult time articulating and
accepting.
'A groundbreaking and important book that will surely reframe our
understanding of the Great War' David Lammy'A genuinely
groundbreaking piece of research' BBC History 'Meticulously
researched and beautifully written' Military History Monthly In a
sweeping narrative, David Olusoga describes how Europe's Great War
became the World's War - a multi-racial, multi-national struggle,
fought in Africa and Asia as well as in Europe, which pulled in men
and resources from across the globe. Throughout, he exposes the
complex, shocking paraphernalia of the era's racial obsessions,
which dictated which men would serve, how they would serve, and to
what degree they would suffer. As vivid and moving as it is
revelatory and authoritative, The World's War explores the
experiences and sacrifices of four million non-European, non-white
people whose stories have remained too long in the shadows.
Throughout the twentieth century, scholars, artists and politicians
have accused each other of "historicism." But what exactly did this
mean? Judging by existing scholarship, the answers varied
enormously. Like many other "isms," historicism could mean nearly
everything, to the point of becoming meaningless. Yet the questions
remain: What made generations of scholars throughout the humanities
and social sciences worry about historicism? Why did even musicians
and members of parliament warn against historicism? And what
explains this remarkable career of the term across generations,
fields, regions, and languages? Focusing on the "travels" that
historicism made, this volume uses historicism as a prism for
exploring connections between disciplines and intellectual
traditions usually studied in isolation from each other. It shows
how generations of sociologists, theologians, and historians tried
to avoid pitfalls associated with historicism and explains why the
term was heavily charged with emotions like anxiety, anger, and
worry. While offering fresh interpretations of classic authors such
as Friedrich Meinecke, Karl Loewith, and Leo Strauss, this volume
highlights how historicism took on new meanings, connotations, and
emotional baggage in the course of its travels through time and
place.
This volume approaches the broad topic of wonder in the works of
Tacitus, encompassing paradox, the marvellous and the admirable.
Recent scholarship on these themes in Roman literature has tended
to focus on poetic genres, with comparatively little attention paid
to historiography: Tacitus, whose own judgments on what is worthy
of note have often differed in interesting ways from the
preoccupations of his readers, is a fascinating focal point for
this complementary perspective. Scholarship on Tacitus has to date
remained largely marked by a divide between the search for veracity
- as validated by modern historiographical standards - and literary
approaches, and as a result wonders have either been ignored as
unfit for an account of history or have been deprived of their
force by being interpreted as valid only within the text. While the
modern ideal of historiographical objectivity tends to result in
striving for consistent heuristic and methodological frameworks,
works as varied as Tacitus' Histories, Annals and opera minora can
hardly be prefaced with a statement of methodology broad enough to
escape misrepresenting their diversity. In our age of
specialization a streamlined methodological framework is a virtue,
but it should not be assumed that Tacitus had similar priorities,
and indeed the Histories and Annals deserve to be approached with
openness towards the variety of perspectives that a tradition as
rich as Latin historiographical prose can include within its scope.
This collection proposes ways to reconcile the divide between
history and historiography by exploring contestable moments in the
text that challenge readers to judge and interpret for themselves,
with individual chapters drawing on a range of interpretive
approaches that mirror the wealth of authorial and reader-specific
responses in play.
What is it to practice history in an age in which photographs
exist? What is the impact of photographs on the core
historiographical practices which define the discipline and shape
its enquiry and methods? In Photographs and the Practice of
History, Elizabeth Edwards proposes a new approach to historical
thinking which explores these questions and redefines the practices
at the heart of this discipline. Structured around key concepts in
historical methodology which are recognisable to all
undergraduates, the book shows that from the mid-19th century
onward, photographs have influenced historical enquiry. Exposure to
these mass-distributed cultural artefacts is enough to change our
historical frameworks even when research is textually-based.
Conceptualised as a series of 'sensibilities' rather than a
methodology as such, it is intended as a companion to 'how to'
approaches to visual research and visual sources. Photographs and
the Practice of History not only builds on existing literature by
leading scholars: it also offers a highly original approach to
historiographical thinking that gives readers a foundation on which
to build their own historical practices.
The application of digital technologies to historical newspapers
have changed the research landscape historians were used to. An
Eldorado? Despite undeniable advantages, the new digital affordance
of historical newspapers also transforms research practices and
confronts historians with new challenges. Drawing on a growing
community of practices, the impresso project invited scholars
experienced with digitised newspaper collections with the aim of
encouraging a discussion on heuristics, source criticism and
interpretation of digitized newspapers. This volume provides a
snapshot of current research on the subject and offers three
perspectives: how digitisation is transforming access to and
exploration of historical newspaper collections; how automatic
content processing allows for the creation of new layers of
information; and, finally, what analyses this enhanced material
opens up. 'impresso - Media Monitoring of the Past' is an
interdisciplinary research project that applies text mining tools
to digitised historical newspapers and integrates the resulting
data into historical research workflows by means of a newly
developed user interface. The question of how best to adapt text
mining tools and their use by humanities researchers is at the
heart of the impresso enterprise.
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