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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.
This study of six historians from the edges of the Roman world at
the end of the Republic--the author of I Maccabees, Posidonius,
Diodorus Siculus, Pompeius Trogus, Nicolaus of Damascus, and Memnon
of Heraclea--combines discussion of their biographical details, the
intellectual and elite< br> culture in which they composed,
and the methodological difficulties of interpreting fragmentary
texts, with textual analysis of their representations of Rome.
These authors show remarkable unity in their acceptance of Roman
hegemony. Nevertheless, their interpretations of Roman rule assume
political< br> significance in the light of their intentions
in writing and the audiences whom they addressed. They therefore
provide a unique insight into the minds of the conquered peoples
and the intellectual culture which allowed them to influence their
conquerors.
From the headlines of local newspapers to the coverage of major
media outlets, scenes of war, natural disaster, political
revolution and ethnic repression greet readers and viewers at every
turn. What we often fail to grasp, however, despite numerous
treatments of events is the deep meaning and broader significance
of crisis and disaster. The complexity and texture of these
situations are most evident in the broader personal stories of
those whom the events impact most intimately. Oral history, with
its focus on listening and collaborative creation with
participants, has emerged as a forceful approach to exploring the
human experience of crisis. Despite the recent growth of crisis
oral history fieldwork, there has been little formal discussion of
the process and meaning of utilizing oral history in these
environments. Oral history research takes on special dimensions
when working in highly charged situations often in close proximity
to traumatic events. The emergent inclination for oral historians
to respond to document crisis calls for a shared conversation among
scholars as to what we have learned from crisis work so far. This
dialogue, at the heart of this collection of oral history excerpts
and essays, reveals new layers of the work of the oral historian.
From the perspective of crisis and disaster oral history, the book
addresses both the ways in which we think about the craft of oral
hsitory, and the manner in which we use it. The book presents
excerpts from oral histories done after twelve world crises,
followed by critical analyses by the interviewers. Additional
analytical chapters set the interviews in the contexts of
pyschoanalysis and oral history methodology.
Doing Oral History: A Practical Guide is considered the premier
guidebook to oral history, used by professional oral historians,
public historians, archivists, and genealogists as a core text in
college courses and throughout the public history community. Over
the past decades, the development of digital audio and video
recording technology has continued to alter the practice of oral
history, making it even easier to produce quality recordings and to
disseminate them on the Internet. This basic manual offers detailed
advice on setting up an oral history project, conducting
interviews, making video recordings, preserving oral history
collections in archives and libraries, and teaching and presenting
oral history. Using the existing Q&A format, the third edition
asks new questions and augments previous answers with new material,
particularly in these areas: 1. Technology: As before, the book
avoids recommending specific equipment, but weighs the merits of
the types of technology available for audio and video recording,
transcription, preservation, and dissemination. Information about
web sites is expanded, and more discussion is provided about how
other oral history projects have posted their interviews online. 2.
Teaching: The new edition addresses the use of oral history in
online teaching. It also expands the discussion of Institutional
Review Boards (IRBs) with the latest information about compliance
issues. 3. Presentation: Once interviews have been conducted, there
are many opportunities for creative presentation. There is much new
material available on innovative forms of presentation developed
over the last decade, including interpretive dance and other public
performances. 4. Legal considerations: The recent Boston College
case, in which the courts have ruled that Irish police should have
access to sealed oral history transcripts, has re-focused attention
on the problems of protecting donor restrictions. The new edition
offers case studies from the past decade. 5. Theory and Memory: As
a beginner's manual, Doing Oral History has not dealt extensively
with theoretical issues, on the grounds that these emerge best from
practice. But the third edition includes the latest thinking about
memory and provides a sample of some of the theoretical issues
surrounding oral sources. It will include examples of increased
studies into catastrophe and trauma, and the special considerations
these have generated for interviewers. 6. Internationalism: Perhaps
the biggest development in the past decade has been the spreading
of oral history around the world, facilitated in part by the
International Oral History Association. New oral history projects
have developed in areas that have undergone social and political
upheavals, where the traditional archives reflect the old regimes,
particularly in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and
Latin America. The third edition includes many more references to
non-U.S. projects that will still be relevant to an American
audience. These changes make the third edition of Doing Oral
History an even more useful tool for beginners, teachers,
archivists, and all those oral history managers who have inherited
older collections that must be converted to the latest technology.
The decades since the 1980s have witnessed an unprecedented surge
in research about Latin American history. This much-needed volume
brings together original essays by renowned scholars to provide the
first comprehensive assessment of this burgeoning literature.
The seventeen original essays in The Oxford Handbook of Latin
American History survey the recent historiography of the colonial
era, independence movements, and postcolonial periods and span
Mexico, Spanish South America, and Brazil. They begin by
questioning the limitations and meaning of Latin America as a
conceptual organization of space within the Americas and how the
region became excluded from broader studies of the Western
hemisphere. Subsequent essays address indigenous peoples of the
region, rural and urban history, slavery and race, African,
European and Asian immigration, labor, gender and sexuality,
religion, family and childhood, economics, politics, and disease
and medicine. In so doing, they bring together traditional
approaches to politics and power, while examining the quotidian
concerns of workers, women and children, peasants, and racial and
ethnic minorities.
This volume provides the most complete state of the field and is an
indispensible resource for scholars and students of Latin America.
Volume III of The Oxford History of Historical Writing contains
essays by leading scholars on the writing of history globally
during the early modern era, from 1400 to 1800. The volume proceeds
in geographic order from east to west, beginning in Asia and ending
in the Americas. It aims at once to provide a selective but
authoritative survey of the field and, where opportunity allows, to
provoke cross-cultural comparisons. This is the third of five
volumes in a series that explores representations of the past from
the beginning of writing to the present day, and from all over the
world.
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.
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 a particularly vivid biography of a remarkable individual,
an Indonesian historian and public intellectual who was both a
public figure and a multi-minority member, being Dutch-educated,
Indonesian Chinese, gay, alcoholic, irreligious and hedonist, in a
conservative society. This biography delves into its subject's
interior life: the fears, doubts, confusions; the issues of
sexuality, the mental breakdown, the jailing, the later success,
joys and celebrity, as a historian, public intellectual and famous
cook. This biography breaks out of the Indonesian Chinese category.
It is primarily an Indonesian story. In its early chapters this
biography reveals much about the 'sugar king' Chinese aristocracy
of Indonesia, from the inside. In its later chapters this book
shows much about the development of Indonesians writing their own
post-colonial history, and the intellectual influences on this
writing. Onghokham was a senior public intellectual with over 300
writings over 50 years, containing original insights into many
varied Indonesian topics, including colonial history and its
effects on modern politics and society; the Indonesian Chinese;
'outsiders' -- marginal people; the jago or brigand as people's
champion; sexuality in Indonesia past and present; food; the
Oedipus complex; painting; traditional Javanese beliefs from the
palace to the peasant.
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.
The War of the Pacific (1879-1883) looms large in the history of
Peru and Chile. Upending the prevailing historiographical focus on
the history of conflict, Beyond Patriotic Phobias explores points
of connection shared between Peruvians and Chileans despite war.
Through careful archival work, historian Joshua Savala highlights
the overlooked cooperative relationships of workers across borders,
including maritime port workers, doctors, and the police. These
groups, in both countries, were intimately tied together through
different forms of labor: they worked the ships and ports, studied
and treated disease transmission in the face of a cholera outbreak,
and conducted surveillance over port and maritime activities
because of perceived threats like transnational crime and labor
organizing. By following the movement of people, diseases, and
ideas, Savala reconstructs the circulation that created a South
American Pacific world. The resulting story is one in which
communities, classes, and states formed transnationally through
varied, if uneven, forms of cooperation.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which
commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out
and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and
impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes
high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using
print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in
1967.
Al-Maqrizi's (d. 845/1442) last work, al-H abar 'an al-basar, was
completed a year before his death. This volume, edited by Jaakko
Hameen-Anttila, covers the history of pre-Islamic Iran during the
Sasanian period and the conquest. Al-Maqrizi's work shows how Arab
historians integrated Iran into world history and how they
harmonised various currents of historiography (Middle Persian
historiography, Islamic sacred history, Greek and Latin
historiography). This part harmonises the versions of Miskawayh's
Tagarib, al-T abari's Ta'rih , and several other sources, producing
a fluent narrative of Iran from the early 3rd century until 651. It
also includes the complete text of 'Ahd Ardasir, here translated
for the first time into English.
A Primer for Teaching Women, Gender, and Sexuality in World History
is a guide for college and high school teachers who are teaching
women, gender, and sexuality in history for the first time, for
experienced teachers who want to reinvigorate their courses, for
those who are training future teachers to prepare their own
syllabi, and for teachers who want to incorporate these issues into
their world history classes. Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks and Urmi
Engineer Willoughby present possible course topics, themes,
concepts, and approaches while offering practical advice on
materials and strategies helpful for teaching courses from a global
perspective in today's teaching environment for today's students.
In their discussions of pedagogy, syllabus organization, fostering
students' historical empathy, and connecting students with their
community, Wiesner-Hanks and Willoughby draw readers into the
process of strategically designing courses that will enable
students to analyze gender and sexuality in history, whether their
students are new to this process or hold powerful and personal
commitments to the issues it raises.
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.
The ninth-century Chronographia of George the Synkellos and
Theophanes is the most influential historical text ever written in
medieval Constantinople. Yet modern historians have never explained
its popularity and power. This interdisciplinary study draws on new
manuscript evidence to finally animate the Chronographia's promise
to show attentive readers the present meaning of the past. Begun by
one of the Roman emperor's most trusted and powerful officials in
order to justify a failed revolt, the project became a shockingly
ambitious re-writing of time itself-a synthesis of contemporary
history, philosophy, and religious practice into a politicized
retelling of the human story. Even through radical upheavals of the
Byzantine political landscape, the Chronographia's unique
historical vision again and again compelled new readers to chase
after the elusive Ends of Time.
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.
This volume contains the edition and translation of the chapter of
al-Maqrizi's al-H abar 'an al-basar dealing with Greeks, Romans,
Byzantines, Franks, and Goths. This chapter is, for the most part,
an almost exact reproduction of Ibn Haldun's Kitab al-'Ibar, from
which al-Maqrizi derived material from many other sources,
including prominent Christian sources such as Kitab Hurusiyus, Ibn
al-'Amid's History, and works by Muslim historians like Ibn
al-Atir's Kamil. Therefore, this chapter of al-H abar 'an al-basar
is a continuation of the previous Arabic historiographical
tradition, in which European history is integrated into world
history through the combination of Christian and Islamic sources.
In The Arab Thieves, Peter Webb critically explores the classic
tales of pre-Islamic Arabian outlaws in Arabic Literature. A group
of Arabian camel-rustlers became celebrated figures in Muslim
memories of pre-Islam, and much poetry ascribed to them and stories
about their escapades grew into an outlaw tradition cited across
Arabic literature. The ninth/fifteenth-century Egyptian historian
al-Maqrizi arranged biographies of ten outlaws into a chapter on
'Arab Thieves' in his wide-ranging history of the world before
Muhammad. This volume presents the first critical edition of
al-Maqrizi's text with a fully annotated English translation,
alongside a detailed study that interrogates the outlaw lore to
uncover the ways in which Arabic writers constructed outlaw
identities and how al-Maqrizi used the tales to communicate his
vision of pre-Islam. Via an exhaustive survey of early Arabic
sources about the outlaws and comparative readings with outlaw
traditions in other world literatures, The Arab Thieves reveals how
Arabic literature crafted lurid narratives about criminality and
employed them to tell ancient Arab history.
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.
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