One of the major intellectual debates at the beginning of the new century concerns the status of accounts of the past. Do historians discover or invent, construct or reconstruct the objects they study? The discussion has been particularly lively in France and in the USA, and it is therefore appropriate that a group of distinguished historians from Britain should now engage with this subject. These ten essays present a historical and critical overview of British historical thought and writing since 1900, focusing on selected periods, regions, disciplines, and themes. This challenging volume will intrigue anyone interested in the process of history writing.

Science in the Changing World, first published in 1933, contains a series of broadcasted presentations on the relationship between science and the development of European civilisation in the first half of the 20th century. Specifically, each talk attempts to reflect the crisis through which the world seemed to be passing at the time, and to make an analysis of those forces of transformation in science, art, economics, and social life which were associated most closely with the advent of the 'scientific' century. Included among the presenters are such eminent and diverse thinkers as Julian Huxley, Bertrand Russell and Hilaire Belloc. Science at Your Service: First published in 1945, this collection of twelve BBC broadcasts focuses on the influence of science in everyday life, and demonstrates that not all science is remote and theoretical. Each speaker deals with some aspect of mid-20th century scientific advance as it related to subjects of practical importance, from textiles and tunnels to fishing and ship design. Offering a glimpse into the attitudes towards science current in the middle of the Second World War, this brief and accessible collection will be of interest to cultural historians as well as to the general science enthusiast.

The Special Theory of Relativity: Based on a short course of lectures delivered in the late 1930s, this short book presents the theory of Special Relativity by formulating a redefinition of the measurement of length, and thus will appeal to students of physics who wish to think through Einstein's thought without the encumbrance of quasi-scientific concepts and language. Relativity: A Very Elementary Exposition: This brief lecture, delivered in October 1921 and published for the first time in 1925, offers an explanation of Einstein's theory of Special Relativity for the non-scientist, giving a general overview that does justice both to the actual physics involved, and the wider implications of this revolutionary discovery of the 20th century.

This book offers an overview of a huge range of scientific achievements in the 20th century, specifically in the field of applied science. The majority of the essays originally appeared in papers and journals such as the Daily Worker, New Statesman and Nation, Science and Society and Nature. Insofar as one theme runs through them, it is the application of scientific knowledge for the benefit of human society. The author is unashamed to present his perspective on some of the topics discussed in the context of his commitment to Marxism. This collection of essays, first published in 1947, thus offers an intriguing glimpse of mid-20th century attitudes towards science, and specifically to the possibilities of a scientific approach to the full spectrum of human endeavour as they were perceived in the aftermath of the Second World War, at a time when the Soviet Union and its creed still seemed ascendant.

This volume, first published in 1921, presents a series of portraits of Einstein, thus offering glimpses in the character and private reflections of the man who changed the course of modern science. Intended neither as a biography, nor as a resume of Einsteinian physics, Einstein: The Searcher instead focusses on Einstein's relationship with the scientific project as he himself conceived it, and so is still of contemporary significance for those puzzled by the spirit of scientific enquiry.

First published in 1934, Artists in Uniform confronts what the author describes as 'two of the worst features of the Soviet experiment' following Lenin's death - bigotry and bureaucratism - and shows how they have functioned in the sphere of arts and letters. It is divided into three parts: The Artist's International; A Literary Inquisition; and Art and the Marxian Philosophy.

Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture: Biology and the Bildungsroman draws on work by Kinji Imanishi, Frans de Waal, and other biologists to create an interdisciplinary, materialist notion of culture for ecocritical analysis. In this timely intervention, Feder examines the humanist idea of culture by taking a fresh look at the stories it explicitly tells about itself. These stories fall into the genre of the Bildungsroman, the tale of individual acculturation that participates in the myth of its complete separation from and opposition to nature which, Feder argues, is culture's own origin story. Moving from Voltaire's Candide to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and from Virginia Woolf's Orlando to Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy, the book dramatizes humanism's own awareness of the fallacy of this foundational binary. In the final chapters, Feder examines the discourse of animality at work in this narrative as a humanist fantasy about empathy, one that paradoxically excludes other animals from the ethical community to justify the continued domination of both human and nonhuman others.

Much traditional historiography consciously and unconsciously glosses over certain discourses, narratives, and practices. This book examines silences or omissions in Middle Eastern history at the turn of the twenty-first century, to give a fuller account of the society, culture and politics. With a particular focus on the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, Egypt, Iran and Palestine, the contributors consider how and why such silences occur, as well as the timing and motivation for breaking them. Introducing unexpected, sometimes counter-intuitive, issues in history, chapters examine: women and children survivors of the Armenian massacres in 1915 Greek-Orthodox subjects who supported the Ottoman empire and the formation of the Turkish republic the conflicts among Palestinians during the revolt of 1936-39 pre-marital sex in modern Egypt Arab authors writing about the Balkans the economic, not national or racial, origins of anti-Armenian violence the European women who married Muslim Egyptians Drawing on a wide range of sources and methodologies, such as interviews; newly-discovered archives; fictional accounts; and memoirs, each chapter analyses a story and its suppression, considering how their absences have affected our previous understandings of the history of the Middle East.

Historians base their claims to insight and authenticity on preserved traces of the past, but the past is continuously reinterpreted in the light of new scholarship and contemporary agendas. The articles in this issue represent competing claims to some familiar topics, such as shaping of civil society and the state in Britain; a reappraisal of hunger marches of the 1930s; and different perspectives on the relationship between fascism and gender.

This book examines the Conservative party's responses to the problems of fascism from 1935 - 1940.
Crowson provides the historical context for the foreign policy of the period and examines the historiography of the Conservative party. He offers a new perspective on its policies and the reaction of its various elements to the deepening international crisis.

Science in the Forest, Science in the Past: Further Interdisciplinary Explorations comprises of papers from the second of two workshops involving a group of scholars united in the conviction that the great diversity of knowledge claims and practices for which we have evidence must be taken seriously in their own terms rather than by the yardstick of Western modernity. Bringing to bear social anthropology, history and philosophy of science, computer science, classics and sinology among other fields, they argue that the use of such dismissive labels as 'magic', 'superstition' and the 'irrational' masks rather than solves the problem and reject counsels of despair which assume or argue that radically alien beliefs are strictly unintelligible to outsiders and can be understood only from within the system in question. At the same time, they accept that how to proceed to a better understanding of the data in question poses a formidable challenge. Key problems identified in the inaugural workshop, whose proceedings were published in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory (2019) and in HAU Books (2020), provided the basis for asking how obvious pitfalls might be avoided and a new or revised framework within which to pursue these problems proposed. The chapters in this book were originally published in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews.

This innovative work offers the first comprehensive transcultural history of historiography. The contributors transcend a Eurocentric approach not only in terms of the individual historiographies they assess, but also in the methodologies they use for comparative analysis. Moving beyond the traditional national focus of historiography, the book offers a genuinely comparative consideration of the commonalities and differences in writing history. Distinguishing among distinct cultural identities, the contributors consider the ways and means of intellectual transfers and assess the strength of local historiographical traditions as they are challenged from outside. The essays explore the question of the utility and the limits of conceptions of modernism that apply Western theories of development to non-Western cultures. Warning against the dominant tendency in recent historiographies of non-Western societies to define these predominantly in relation to Western thought, the authors show the extent to which indigenous traditions have been overlooked. The key question is how the triad of industrialization, modernization, and the historicization process, which was decisive in the development of modern academic historiography, also is valid beyond Europe. Illustrating just how deeply suffused history writing is with European models, the book offers a broad theoretical platform for exploring the value and necessity of a world historiography beyond Eurocentrism.

Facsimile edition of an important witness to the impact of the Normans on the ecclesiastical culture of England. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, MS F [London, British Library, Cotton Domitian A.viii, folios 30-70] is unique in presenting a sustainedly bilingual [Latin and Old English] text. Palaeographicalevidence dates the manuscript to caAD1100; from its script it is clear that it was written at Canterbury. It is a witness - in language and script - to the impact of the Norman regime on the ecclesiastical culture of England and particularly its most important church. The evidence which it provides for the history of the Kentish dialect attests at the same time to the breakdown at Canterbury of the late West Saxon literary standard. In view of its importance in various contexts,the publisher and general editors now issue, as a supplementary volume to the collaborative edition, a complete facsimile of this interesting book as a preliminary to a new edition in the series, with an introduction outlining theproblems posed by the manuscript. Professor DAVID DUMVILLE is Professor of History and Palaeography at the University of Aberdeen.

First published in 1955 to wide acclaim, James Joll's introduction to the history and development of International Socialism before the First World War is of crucial importance for understanding the development of Left-wing movements in the 20th century: the difficulties posed by prominent anarchist groups, the ambiguities of the scope of revolutionary activity, and the challenges posed by the rise of nationalism. Incorporating insightful research into the international links and the ideological structure of socialism, as well as on the structure of individual parties and the actual nature of their working-class support, The Second International 1889-1914 is a valuable resource for political historians and students of socialist thought alike.

This book breaks new ground by combining work about marginalized figures from within Britain as well as counterparts in the colonies, ranging from published sources such as indigenous newspapers to ordinary and everyday writings including diaries, letters, petitions, ballads, suicide notes, and more. Showcasing remarkable historical research by leading historians working with an impressive array of original material from around the globe, the chapters in this collection bring to light largely hitherto unknown histories of subalternity. Critical Perspectives on Colonialism explores the extent to which writing can serve as a weapon of the powerless, focuses on the entangled, interactive and dynamic character of the relationships between the spoken and the written word, and illustrates the significance of fragments on our understandings and definitions of 'the archive' and how we write history from and about the margins. Each chapter engages with the methodological implications of working with everyday scribblings and asks what these alternate modernities and histories mean for the larger critique of the 'imperial archive' that has shaped much of the most interesting writing on empire in the past decade.

Herodotus has shaped our knowledge of life, religion, war and politics in ancient Greece immeasurably, as well as being one of the most entertaining of all Classical Greek authors: fascinating, perceptive, accessible and not at all pretentious. Herodotus and Greek History, first published in 1982, examines the themes and preoccupations which form the basis for Herodotus' style of history. The Athenian nobility, important protagonists in the context of what we know of his sources; the human and divine forces, which Herodotus understood as influencing the course of history; and the concepts of character and motivation are all discussed. Herodotus' treatment of religious belief and oracles, politics and war, and his portrayal of certain prominent individuals are specifically investigated. The final chapter situates Herodotus in his historical context. John Hart's lucid, well-informed and lively discussion of Herodotus will be value to A-level candidates, school teachers, undergraduates, lecturers and curious non-classicists alike.

A Companion to Tacitus brings much needed clarity and accessibility to the notoriously difficult language and yet indispensable historical accounts of Tacitus. The companion provides both a broad introduction and showcases new theoretical approaches that enrich our understanding of this complex author. * Tacitus is one of the most important Roman historians of his time, as well as a great literary stylist, whose work is characterized by his philosophy of human nature * Encourages interdisciplinary discussion intended to engage scholars beyond Classics including philosophy, cultural studies, political science, and literature * Showcases new theoretical approaches that enrich our understanding of this complex author * Clarifies and explains the notoriously difficult language of Tacitus * Written and designed to prepare a new generation of scholars to examine for themselves the richness of Tacitean thought * Includes contributions from a broad range of established international scholars and rising stars in the field

The Cultural History Reader is the first volume to collect together the distinctive contributions made by cultural historians across the spectrum of historiographical methods. It offers a unique view into the insights to be gained from examining how cultural factors have shaped people's experiences of the world and guided their actions.

Featuring eleven thematic sections, covering everything from childhood to technology and war to popular culture, this book bridges disparate themes, periods, nationalities and religions to present detailed analyses of a variety of cultural responses and interpretations in diverse historical contexts. Peter McCaffery and Ben Marsden use their wealth of experience in teaching and researching cultural history to identify key topics and to provide the most telling extracts, illustrating how different social and cultural factors intersect and link together to give a richer picture of the past in all its surprising complexity. They also provide authoritative and clearly written introductions that contextualize each section and show the ways in which the themes have been handled by different cultural historians.

The book provides a detailed and accessible introduction to cultural history as a discipline, outlining how it has developed since the eighteenth century and where it differs from related disciplines such as sociology, anthropology and archaeology. "The Cultural History Reader" is a perfect resource for all students of cultural history and all those interested in how focusing on cultural factors has shaped our understanding of the past.

This volume marks fifty years of an innovative approach to writing economic history often called "The Cliometrics Revolution." The book presents memoirs of personal development, intellectual lives and influences, new lines of historical research, long-standing debates, a growing international scholarly community, and the contingencies that guide and re-direct academic careers. In conversation with cliometricians of the next generation, 25 pioneering scholars reflect on changes in the practice of economic history they have observed and have helped to bring about, examining the rise of Western economies and their economic interrelationships, and the impact of modern economic growth on human health, mortality and even happiness. The conversations presented here are engaging, informative and - more often than one might expect - humorous. Together with a framework provided by the editors, they tell a tale of how cliometricians, their allies and their critics, have helped to transform what we know about the economic past.

The work of Herodotos of Halikarnassos, 'the father of history', differs in many ways from that of modern historians, and it poses special problems to the student. Herodotos' history of the Persian Wars, written in the second half of the fifth century BC, was both the first attempt at a comprehensive history and the first lengthy prose narrative in the Western cultural tradition. There was an almost total lack of written historical evidence in Greece at the time, and the audiences who paid to hear Herodotos' lectures also expected historical dramatizations, and enjoyed descriptive material and anecdotes that today would be relegated to notes. In Herodotus the Historian, first published in 1985, K.H. Waters offers a comprehensive introduction to Herodotus' background, aims, and methods. In a lively, informative style, this work offers a level-headed approach to an historian who has excited some extreme reactions and incited controversy among modern readers.

Focusing on Algernon Charles Swinburne's poems on Apollo, Yisrael Levin calls for a re-examination of the poet's place in Victorian studies in light of his contributions to nineteenth-century intellectual history. Swinburne's Apollonian poetry, Levin argues, shows the poet's active participation in late-Victorian debates about the nature and function of faith in an age of changing religious attitudes. Levin traces the shifts that took place in Swinburne's conception of Apollo over a period of four decades, from Swinburne's attempt to define Apollo as an alternative to the Judeo-Christian deity to Swinburne's formation of a theological system revolving around Apollo and finally to the ways in which Swinburne's view of Apollo led to his agnostic view of spirituality. Even though Swinburne had lost his faith and rejected institutional religion by his early twenties, he retained a distinct interest in spiritual issues and paid careful attention to developments in religious thought. Levin persuasively shows that Swinburne was not simply a poet provocateur who enjoyed controversy but failed to provide valid cultural commentary, but was rather a profound thinker whose insights into nineteenth-century spirituality are expressed throughout his Apollonian poetry.

This visionary and thoroughly accessible book examines how digital environments and virtual reality have altered the ways historians think and communicate ideas and how the new language of visualization transforms our understanding of the past. Drawing on familiar graphic models--maps, flow charts, museum displays, films--the author shows how images can often convey ideas and information more efficiently and accurately than words. With emerging digital technology, these images will become more sophisticated, manipulable, and multidimensional, and provide historians with new tools and environments to construct historical narratives. Moving beyond the traditional book based on linear narrative, digital scholarship based on visualization and hypertext will offer multiple perspectives, dimensions, and experiences that transform the ways historians work and people imagine and learn about history. This second edition of Computers, Visualization, and History features expanded coverage of such topics as sequential narratives, 3-D modeling, simulation, and video games, as well as our theoretical understanding of space and immersive experience. The author has also added "Guidelines for Visual Composition in History" for history and social studies teachers who wish to use technology for student assignments. Also new to the second edition is a web link feature that users of the digital edition can use to enhance visualization within the text.

In nineteenth-century Britain, the effects of democracy in America were seen to spread from Congress all the way down to the personal habits of its citizens. Bringing together political theorists, historians, and literary scholars, this volume explores the idea of American democracy in nineteenth-century Britain. The essays span the period from Independence to the First World War and trace an intellectual history of Anglo-American relations during that period. Leading scholars trace the hopes and fears inspired by the American model of democracy in the works of commentators, including Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Alexis de Tocqueville, Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill, Richard Cobden, Charles Dilke, Matthew Arnold, Henry James and W. T. Stead. By examining the context of debates about American democracy and notions of 'culture', citizenship, and race, the collection sheds fresh light on well-documented moments of British political history, such as the Reform Acts, the Abolition of Slavery Act, and the Anti-Corn Law agitation. The volume also explores the ways in which British Liberalism was shaped by the American example and draws attention to the importance of print culture in furthering radical political dialogue between the two nations. As the comprehensive introduction makes clear, this collection makes an important contribution to transatlantic studies and our growing sense of a nineteenth-century modernity shaped by an Atlantic exchange. It is an essential reference point for all interested in the history of the idea of democracy, its political evolution, and its perceived cultural consequences.

The Cultural History Reader is the first volume to collect together the distinctive contributions made by cultural historians across the spectrum of historiographical methods. It offers a unique view into the insights to be gained from examining how cultural factors have shaped people's experiences of the world and guided their actions.

Featuring eleven thematic sections, covering everything from childhood to technology and war to popular culture, this book bridges disparate themes, periods, nationalities and religions to present detailed analyses of a variety of cultural responses and interpretations in diverse historical contexts. Peter McCaffery and Ben Marsden use their wealth of experience in teaching and researching cultural history to identify key topics and to provide the most telling extracts, illustrating how different social and cultural factors intersect and link together to give a richer picture of the past in all its surprising complexity. They also provide authoritative and clearly written introductions that contextualize each section and show the ways in which the themes have been handled by different cultural historians.

The book provides a detailed and accessible introduction to cultural history as a discipline, outlining how it has developed since the eighteenth century and where it differs from related disciplines such as sociology, anthropology and archaeology. "The Cultural History Reader" is a perfect resource for all students of cultural history and all those interested in how focusing on cultural factors has shaped our understanding of the past.

This volume brings together 25 defining texts in global history. These pieces cover approaches to the subject from antiquity to the present century and, taken together, show the development of the discipline, providing a solid historiographical, theoretical and methodological overview that will be invaluable for students. The collection gives a unique sense of how, at different times, in different cultural circumstances, students of the past have approached the problems of encompassing the world in a single narrative or theory. This is a reader with an implicit story to unfold. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto tracks how a global understanding of history originated in prophetic writings, how the "Renaissance discovery of the world" multiplied the opportunities for historians to think about history globally, how scientific investigations of change came to exert influence and inspire new thinking among global historians, how "culture wars" ensued between advocates of scientistic and culturalist models and how changing contexts in the 20th century produced new thematic approaches to the world as a whole. Each part is introduced, setting it in context and explaining the impact of its subject matter on the discipline, as well as the relations between the texts and their place in the overall development of global history.