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

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

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 How to handle the huge amounts of published and unpublished source materials?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

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

This book will provide a thematic overview of one of European history’s most devastating famines, the Great Finnish Famine of the 1860s. In 1868, the nadir of several years of worsening economic conditions, 137,000 people (approximately 8% of the Finnish population) perished as the result of hunger and disease. The attitudes and policies enacted by Finland’s devolved administration tended to follow European norms, and therefore were often similar to the “colonial� practices seen in other famines at the time. What is distinctive about this catastrophe in a mid-nineteenth-century context, is that despite Finland being a part of the Russian Empire, it was largely responsible for its own governance, and indeed was developing its economic, political and cultural autonomy at the time of the famine. Finland’s Great Famine 1856-68 examines key themes such as the use of emergency foods, domestic and overseas charity, vagrancy and crime, emergency relief works, and emigration.

This book examines the archival aesthetic of mourning and memory developed by Latin American artists and photographers between 1997-2016. Particular attention is paid to how photographs of the assassinated or disappeared political dissident of the 1970s and 1980s, as found in family albums and in official archives, were not only re-imagined as conduits for private mourning, but also became allegories of social trauma and the struggle against socio-political amnesia. Memorials, art installations, photo-essays, street projections, and documentary films are all considered as media for the reframing of these archival images from the era of the Cold War dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, and Uruguay. While the turn of the millennium was supposedly marked by "the end of history" and, with the advent of digital technologies, by "the end of photography," these works served to interrupt and hence, belie the dominant narrative on both counts. Indeed, the book's overarching contention is that the viewer's affective identification with distant suffering when engaging these artworks is equally interrupted: instead, the viewer is invited to apprehend memorial images as emblems of national and international histories of ideological struggle.

This book explores the uses of the past in foreign policy-making. It outlines why and how political leaders refer to historical events in contemporary foreign policy discourses; the goals they hope to achieve; and the sometimes unintended foreign policy consequences of their (ab)use of historical memory. Furthermore, it looks at how political leaders shape domestic collective memories in pursuit of their international agendas, and highlight historical events leaders forget, reinterpret or obscure through selective narratives. The chapters explore a variety of theoretical concepts that shed light on how memory and foreign policy are linked in a complex and reciprocal way. The following mechanisms are discussed: the application of historical analogies; the construction of historical narratives; the creation of memory sites; the marginalisation and forgetting of the past; and the securitisation of historical memory. Through the use of a number of methodological approaches (such as discourse analysis, narrative analysis and content analysis of securitising moves) and a broad range of qualitative and quantitative data (newspaper articles, policy documents, commemorative speeches, interviews with policymakers and the observation of memory sites), the contributions highlight the interdependence of the international, national, regional and local dimensions of memory practices and history writing. Although they mostly focus on national case studies of foreign policy-making, they also reveal how representations of historical events evolve through interaction between political actors at the international level of analysis. The collection originated in the section entitled 'Exploring the Link between Historical Memory and Foreign Policy' at the annual Pan-European Conference of the European International Studies Association (EISA) 2018 held in Prague, the Czech Republic.

This book discusses the issues underlying contemporary Holocaust fiction. Using Gillian Rose's theory of Holocaust piety, it argues that, rather than enhancing our understanding of the Holocaust, contemporary fiction has instead become overly focused on gratuitous representations of bodies in pain. The book begins by discussing the locations and imagery which have come to define our understanding of the Holocaust, before then highlighting how this gradual simplification has led to an increasing sense of emotional distance from the historical past. Holocaust fiction, the book argues, attempts to close this emotional and temporal distance by creating an emotional connection to bodies in pain. Using different concepts relating to embodied experience - from Sonia Kruks' notion of feeling-with to Alison Landsberg's prosthetic memory - the book analyses several key examples of Holocaust literature and film to establish whether fiction still possesses the capacity to approach the Holocaust impiously.

This book discusses the relationship between law and memory and explores the ways in which memory can be thought of as contributing to legal socialization and legal meaning-making. Against a backdrop of critical legal pluralism which examines the distributedness of law(s), this book introduces the notion of mnemonic legality. It emphasises memory as a resource of law rather than an object of law, on the basis of how it substantiates senses of belonging and comes to frame inclusions and exclusions from a national community on the basis of linear-trajectory and growth narratives of nationhood. Overall, it explores the sensorial and affective foundations of law, implicating memory and perceptions of belonging within this process of creating legality and legitimacy. By identifying how memory comes to shape and inform notions of law, it contributes to legal consciousness research and to important questions informing much socio-legal research.

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

The Routledge History of Medieval Magic brings together the work of scholars from across Europe and North America to provide extensive insights into recent developments in the study of medieval magic between c.1100 and c.1500. This book covers a wide range of topics, including the magical texts which circulated in medieval Europe, the attitudes of intellectuals and churchmen to magic, the ways in which magic intersected with other aspects of medieval culture, and the early witch trials of the fifteenth century. In doing so, it offers the reader a detailed look at the impact that magic had within medieval society, such as its relationship to gender roles, natural philosophy, and courtly culture. This is furthered by the book's interdisciplinary approach, containing chapters dedicated to archaeology, literature, music, and visual culture, as well as texts and manuscripts. The Routledge History of Medieval Magic also outlines how research on this subject could develop in the future, highlighting under-explored subjects, unpublished sources, and new approaches to the topic. It is the ideal book for both established scholars and students of medieval magic.

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

Andrea Fulvio's Illustrium imagines and the Beginnings of Classical Archaeology is a study of the book recognized by contemporaries as the first attempt (1517) to publish artifacts from Classical Antiquity in the form of a chronology of portraits appearing on coins. By studying correspondences between the illustrated coins and genuine, ancient coins, Madigan parses Fulvio's methodology, showing how he attempted to exploit coins as historical documents. Situated within humanist literary and historical studies of ancient Rome, his numismatic project required visual artists closely to study and assimilate the conventions of ancient portraiture. The Illustrium imagines exemplifies the range and complexity of early modern responses to ancient artifacts.

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

The essays in this anthology represent, in the broadest sense, an interpretive perspective of inquiry that has flourished in oral history for the past 15 years. This perspective considers oral history interviews as subjective, socially constructed and emergent events; that is, understanding, interpretation, and meaning of lived experience are interactively constructed.
The impetus for this volume was the editor's fascination with the multifaceted complexity of the oral history interview method coupled with the belief that, despite many books that address methodological issues, no single work takes as its focus those complex, interactive processes which constitute the oral history interview. The editors' purpose in developing this anthology, therefore, was to provide a variety of essays which taken together address the possibilities and constraints inherent in oral history interviewing.

When studying the origins of the First World War, scholars have relied heavily on the series of key diplomatic documents published by the governments of both the defeated and the victorious powers in the 1920s and 1930s. However, this volume shows that these volumes, rather than dealing objectively with the past, were used by the different governments to project an interpretation of the origins of the Great War that was more palatable to them and their country than the truth might have been. In revealing policies that influenced the publication of the documents, the relationships between the commissioning governments, their officials, and the historians involved, this collection serves as a warning that even seemingly objective sources have to be used with caution in historical research.

While bookstore shelves around the world have never ceased to display best-selling "life-and-letters" biographies in prominent positions, the genre became less popular among academic historians during the Cold War decades. Their main concern then was with political and socioeconomic structures, institutions, and organizations, or-more recently-with the daily lives of ordinary people and small communities. The contributors to this volume-all well known senior historians-offer self-critical reflections on problems they encountered when writing biographies themselves. Some of them also deal with topics specific to Central Europe, such as the challenges of writing about the lives of both victims and perpetrators. Although the volume concentrates on European historiography, its strong methodological and conceptual focus will be of great interest to non-European historians wrestling with the old "structure-versus-agency" question in their own work. Contributors: Volker R. Berghahn, Hartmut Berghoff, Hilary Earl, Jan Eckel, Willem Frijhoff, Ian Kershaw, Simone Lassig, Karl Heinrich Pohl, John C. G. Roehl, Angelika Schaser, Joachim Radkau, Cornelia Rauh-Kuhne, Mark Roseman, Christoph Strupp and Michael Wildt.

This volume examines the tension between the "nation" idea as a necessary language of legitimacy with which to claim liberation, and its role in disciplining people and their identities in India, in the name of national liberation. It is an attempt to open up new lines of thinking, and ways of reading Indian history.

Rather than offering yet another theory of hegemony, this book aims to give theoretical content to the notion of resistance or counterhegemony, a strikingly underdeveloped though oft-cited concept in the humanities and social sciences. The volume represents an unusual, interdisciplinary collaboration of scholars working on all the major regions of the global South. The contributors probe little-known but important episodes of resistance in the colony and postcolony for the light they shed on the vexed notion of counterhegemony, enriching our notion of resistance and pointing to new directions for research.

Persian literature is the jewel in the crown of Persian culture. It has profoundly influenced the literatures of Ottoman Turkey, Muslim India and Turkic Central Asia. It has been a source of inspiration for Goethe, Emerson, Matthew Arnold and Jorge Luis Borges among others and praised by William Jones, Tagore, E. M. Forster and many more. Yet although in the past few years the poems of Rumi have attracted the kind of popular attention enjoyed by Omar Khayyam in the 19th century, Persian literature has never received the attention it truly deserves.

A History of Persian Literature answers this need and offers a new, comprehensive and detailed history of its subject. This 18-volume, authoritative survey reflects the stature and significance of Persian literature as the single most important accomplishment of the Iranian experience.Prominent scholars in the field bring a fresh critical approach to bear on this important topic and each volume includes representative samples of this literature.

In this volume, the Editors offer an indispensable overview of Persian literature's long and rich historiography. Highlighting the central themes and ideas which inform historical writing, this book traces the development of writing about history as a literary form from its origins with the Ferdowsi Shahnameh and its evolution under the Safavids, through the twilight of the Court Chronicle Tradition and simultaneous emergence of a national historiography during the 18th century and up to the Pahlavi Era. This volume also offers a comprehensive and invaluable examination of the concurrent developments within historiography in Central Asia and Afghanistan, examining themes and subjects that are common to many fields of Persian literary study. Persian Historiography will be an indispensable source for the historiographical traditions of Iran and the essential guide to the subject.

The balance of power is one of the most influential ideas in international relations, yet it has never been systemically and comprehensively examined in pre-modern or non-European contexts. This book redresses this imbalance. The authors present eight new case studies of balancing and balancing failure in pre-modern and non-European international systems. The collective, multidisciplinary and international research effort yields an inescapable conclusion: much of the conventional wisdom about the balance of power does not survive intact with non-European evidence.

Historical Imagination examines the threshold between what historians consider to be proper, imagination-free history and the malpractice of excessive imagination, asking where the boundary between the two sits and the limits of permitted imagination for the historian. We use "imagination" to refer to a mental skill that encompasses two different tasks: the reconstruction of previously experienced parts of the world and the creation of new objects and experiences with no direct connection to the actual world. In history, imagination means using the mind's eye to picture both the actual and inactual at the same time. All historical works employ at least some creative imagination, but an excess is considered "too much". Under what circumstances are historians permitted to cross this boundary into creative imagination and how far can they go? Supporting theory with relatable examples, Staley shows how historical works are a complex combination of mimetic and creative imagination and offers a heuristic for assessing this ratio in any work of history. Setting out complex theoretical concepts in an accessible and understandable manner and encouraging the reader to consider both the nature and limits of historical imagination, this is an ideal volume for students and scholars of the philosophy of history.

These essays, by experts in the field from five countries, examine Plutarch's interpretative and artistic reshaping of his historical sources in representative lives. Diverse essays treat literary elements such as the parallelism which renders a pair of lives a unit or the themes which unify the lives. Others consider the selecting, combining, simplifying, and enlarging employed in composition. The construction of a Plutarchian life, the essays demonstrate, required careful selection and creative reworking of the historical material available.

eBook available with sample pages: 020307663X

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