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Books > Humanities > History > Theory & methods
This book explores cases of decapitation found in sources on the reign of Alexander the Great. Despite the enormous literature on the career of Alexander the Great, this is the first study on the characterisation of violent deaths during his hectic reign. This historiographical omission has involved the tacit and blind acceptance of the details found in the ancient sources. Therefore, this book seeks to illustrate how cultural expectations, literary models, and ideological taboos shaped these accounts and argues for a close and critical reading of the sources. Given the different cultural considerations surrounding decapitation in Greek and Roman cultures, this book illustrates how those biases could have differently shaped certain episodes depending on the ultimate writer. This book, therefore, can be especially interesting for scholars focused on the career of Alexander the Great, but also valuable for other Classicists, philologists, and even for anthropologists because it represents a good case of study of cultural symbolism of violent death, semantics of power, imperial domination and the confrontation between opposite cultural appreciations of a practice.
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.
Ordering Emotions in Europe, 1100-1800 investigates how emotions were conceptualised and practised in the medieval and early modern period, as they ordered systems of thought and practice-from philosophy and theology, music and literature, to science and medicine. Analysing discursive, psychic and bodily dimensions of emotions as they were experienced, performed and narrated, authors explore how emotions were understood to interact with more abstract intellectual capacities in producing systems of thought, and how these key frameworks of the medieval and early modern period were enacted by individuals as social and emotional practices, acts and experiences of everyday life. Contributors are: Han Baltussen, Susan Broomhall, Louis C. Charland, Louise D'Arcens, Raphaele Garrod, Yasmin Haskell, Danijela Kambaskovic, Clare Monagle, Juanita Feros Ruys, Francois Soyer, Robert Weston, Carol J. Williams, R.S. White, and Spencer E. Young.
Specifically structured around research questions and avenues for further study, and providing the historical context to enable this further research, Modern Naval History is a key historiographical guide for students wishing to gain a deeper understanding of naval history and its contemporary relevance. Navies play an important role in the modern world, and the globalisation of economies, cultures and societies has placed a premium on maritime communications. Modern Naval History demonstrates the importance of naval history today, showing its relevance to a number of disciplines and its role in understanding how navies relate to their host societies. Richard Harding explains why naval history is still important, despite slipping from the attention of policy makers and the public since 1945, and how it can illuminate answers to questions relating to economic, diplomatic, political, social and cultural history. The book explores how naval history has informed these fields and how it can produce a richer and more informed historical understanding of navies and sea power.
The controversial matters surrounding the notion of anachronism are difficult ones: they have been broached by literary and art critics, by philosophers, as well as by historians of science. This book adopts a bottom-up approach to the many problems concerning anachronism in the history of mathematics. Some of the leading scholars in the field of history of mathematics reflect on the applicability of present-day mathematical language, concepts, standards, disciplinary boundaries, indeed notions of mathematics itself, to well-chosen historical case studies belonging to the mathematics of the past, in European and non-European cultures. A detailed introduction describes the key themes and binds the various chapters together. The interdisciplinary and transcultural approach adopted allows this volume to cover topics important for history of mathematics, history of the physical sciences, history of science, philosophy of mathematics, history of philosophy, methodology of history, non-European science, and the transmission of mathematical knowledge across cultures.
This open access book addresses the protection of privacy and personality rights in public records, records management, historical sources, and archives; and historical and current access to them in a broad international comparative perspective. Considering the question "can archiving pose a security risk to the protection of sensitive data and human rights?", it analyses data security and presents several significant cases of the misuse of sensitive personal data, such as census data or medical records. It examines archival inflation and the minimisation and reduction of data in public records and archives, including data anonymisation and pseudonymisation, and the risks of deanonymisation and reidentification of persons. The book looks at post-mortem privacy protection, the relationship of the right to know and the right to be forgotten and introduces a specific model of four categories of the right to be forgotten. In its conclusion, the book presents a set of recommendations for archives and records management.
This book explores the contours of civic identity in the town of Vichy, France. Over the course of its history, Vichy has been known for three things: its thermal spa resort; its products (especially Vichy water and Vichy cosmetics); and its role in hosting the Etat Francais, France's collaborationist government in the Second World War. This last association has become an obsession for the residents of Vichy, who feel stigmatized and victimized by the widespread habit of referring to France's wartime government as the 'Vichy regime'. This book argues that the stigma, victimhood, and decline suffered by Vichyssois are best understood by placing Vichy's politics of identity in a broader historical context that considers corporate, as well as social and cultural, history.
Promoted as virtually unsinkable, the ultimate luxury liner, the largest ship in the world, the RMS "Titanic" sank on its maiden voyage in April 1912, taking some 1,500 people to their death. Aboard the ship were the wealthy and famous as well as hundreds of immigrants seeking a new life in America. The most dramatic marine disaster of modern times, the "Titanic" tragedy captured the interest and imagination of the entire world. The intensity of interest in the catastrophe has increased, particularly after discovery of the wreck off the coast of Newfoundland in the mid-1980s. The resulting literature is vast, including both scholarly and popular sources. Covering more than the published literature, the book also surveys memorabilia, artifacts, cultural icons, music, film, and exhibitions. Divided into three sections, the work opens with a historiographical survey of the literature, then includes descriptive lists of more peripheral material, and concludes with a bibliography of 674 entries. All items covered in the historiographical survey are included in the bibliography. This useful guide will appeal to researchers - both laymen and scholars - interested in the "Titanic."
In a series of interviews that are as valuable as they are engrossing, today's best and brightest historians weigh in on the crucial moments in American history. Up close and personal, unscripted and passionate, here is history at its most vital—so rich both with broad insight and gossipy detail that it seems as if the figures being discussed are living acquaintances. Whether it's the First Continental Congress or the Cold War, American Heritage(r) Great Minds of History takes you there, imbuing the past with an immediacy that goes well beyond the scope of formal histories. In the book's casual forum, the legacies of history shine through with electric urgency as Roger Mudd's highly knowledgeable questions illuminate five truly first-rate minds: Stephen Ambrose, discussing the turbulent years between World War II and the world we inhabit today, eloquently underscores the immense achievement and consequence of D-day—"the pivot point of the twentieth century"—and candidly discusses history's complex assessments of Eisenhower and Nixon. David McCullough not only enlarges the traditional vision of the Industrial Era—that tumultuous epoch of brilliant lights and dark shadows that gave birth to the modern world—but goes beyond that to explain why he finds history intimate, compelling, and fresh: "There is no such thing as the past." James McPherson tells how his experience with the civil rights movement of the 1960s led to his career as a student of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and his examination of the ideology that drove the Confederacy enriches our understanding of how the bitter legacy of defeat has shaped events both North and South ever since. Richard White, discussing westward expansion, traces the evolution of how historians have viewed the American frontier, from a cherished national legend of intrepid pioneers taming an empty wilderness to a complex and often violent story of the melding of many different cultures. Gordon Wood takes our Revolution from its enshrinement as an inevitable civic event and shows what a chancy, desperate business it really was, along the way offering crisp, telling details about the very human Founding Fathers, and reminding us that, above all, the conflict was a sweeping social revolution whose consequences continue to remake the entire world. Probing, provocative, and always entertaining, this timely compilation captures five historians at the very top of their profession. Rich in anecdote and deeply felt assessments, American Heritage(r) Great Minds of History not only offers fresh and sometimes startling insight into our common past and our national character—it is nothing less than an informal history of the United States from the beginning of the colonies to the end of the Cold War. American Heritage magazine, the country's leading magazine of history, has published dozens of highly acclaimed books, including American Heritage(r) History of the United States, American Heritage(r) New History of the Civil War, American Heritage(r) New History of World War II, and American Heritage(r) Encyclopedia of American History. American Heritage is a registered trademark of Forbes Inc. Its use is pursuant to a license agreement with Forbes Inc. Great Minds of... is a trademark of Unapix Entertainment, Inc. Its use is pursuant to a license agreement. Unapix Entertainment, Inc. and WGBH/Boston produced the television series on which this book is based. This series is sponsored by Travelers Group. "These discussions offer something beyond the scope of the authors' published works: an intimate immediacy, a sense of the fizz and crackle of the events actually taking place." —Richard Snow, from his Introduction
The meaning of the American Revolution has always been a much-contested question, and asking it is particularly important today: the standard, easily digested narrative puts the Founding Fathers at the head of a unified movement, failing to acknowledge the deep divisions in Revolutionary-era society and the many different historical interpretations that have followed. Whose American Revolution Was It? speaks both to the ways diverse groups of Americans who lived through the Revolution might have answered that question and to the different ways historians through the decades have interpreted the Revolution for our own time. As the only volume to offer an accessible and sweeping discussion of the period's historiography and its historians, Whose American Revolution Was It? is an essential reference for anyone studying early American history. The first section, by Alfred F. Young, begins in 1925 with historian J. Franklin Jameson and takes the reader through the successive schools of interpretation up to the 1990s. The second section, by Gregory H. Nobles, focuses primarily on the ways present-day historians have expanded our understanding of the broader social history of the Revolution, bringing onto the stage farmers and artisans, who made up the majority of white men, as well as African Americans, Native Americans, and women of all social classes.
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.
More scholars are showing interest in Disney research, especially for the theme parks and their cultural messages Will benefit researchers and students of all levels exploring this topic, has a clear historical approach and the written level is clear and appropriate to a college level Utilising the author's knowledge of the topic and upcoming exhibition, this volume takes a public history approach to the theme parks and their cultural messages.
Understanding and Teaching Native American History is a timely and urgently needed remedy to a long-standing gap in history instruction. While the past three decades have seen burgeoning scholarship in Indigenous studies, comparatively little of that has trickled into classrooms. This volume is designed to help teachers effectively integrate Indigenous history and culture into their lessons, providing richly researched content and resources across the chronological and geographical landscape of what is now known as North America. Despite the availability of new scholarship, many teachers struggle with contextualizing Indigenous history and experience. Native peoples frequently find themselves relegated to historical descriptions, merely a foil to the European settlers who are the protagonists in the dominant North American narrative. This book offers a way forward, an alternative framing of the story that highlights the ongoing integral role of Native peoples via broad coverage in a variety of topics including the historical, political, and cultural. With its scope and clarity of vision, suggestions for navigating sensitive topics, and a multitude of innovative approaches authored by contributors from multidisciplinary backgrounds, Understanding and Teaching Native American History will also find use in methods and other graduate courses. Nearly a decade in the conception and making, this is a groundbreaking source for both beginning and veteran instructors.
History, Historians, and Conservatism in Britain and America
examines the subjects, motives, and personal and intellectual
origins of conservative historians who were also successful public
intellectuals. In their search for a persuasive and wide appeal,
conservatives depended until at least the 1960s upon history and
historians to provide conservative concepts with authority and
authenticity. Beginning with the Great War in Britain and the
Second World War in America, conservative historians participated
actively and influentially in debates about the heart, soul, and
especially the mind of conservatism. Particular emphasis is placed
on four historians in Britain--F. J. C. Hearnshaw, Keith Feiling,
Arthur Bryant, and Herbert Butterfield--and three in America-Daniel
Boorstin, Peter Viereck, and Russell Kirk-who developed
conservative responses to unprecedented and threatening events both
at home and abroad. These historians shared basic assumptions about
human nature and society, but their subjects, interpretations,
conclusions, and prescriptions were independent and idiosyncratic.
Uniquely close to powerful political figures, each historian also
spoke directly to a large public, which bought their books, read
their contributions to newspapers and journals, listened to them on
the radio, and watched them on television.
Jaan Valsiner has made numerous contributions to the development of psychology over the last 40 years. He is internationally recognized as a leader and innovator within both developmental psychology and cultural psychology, and has received numerous prizes for his work: the Alexander von Humboldt prize, the Hans Killian prize, and the Outstanding International Psychologist Award from the American Psychological Association. Having taught at Universities in Europe, Asia and north and south America, he is currently Niels Bohr professor at Aalborg University, Denmark. This book is the first to discuss in detail the different sides of Valsiner's thought, including developmental science, semiotic mediation, cultural transmission, aesthetics, globalization of science, epistemology, methodology and the history of ideas. The book provides an overview, evaluation and extension of Valsiner's key ideas for the construction of a dynamic cultural psychology, written by his former students and colleagues from around the world.
A biographical dictionary in the field of historiography, this volume consists of brief articles on the life and work of 600 historians from all over the world. The introduction by Boia traces the evolution of the field. Entries are arranged alphabetically by country or geographic area, and include brief bibliographies. "Reference & Research Book NewS" The result of an extensive international collaboration between scholars and researchers, this volume is the first biographical dictionary in the field of the history of historiography ever published. The work includes brief articles on the life and work of 600 historians from all over the world, from the beginnings of historiography to 1800. The historians covered include both those of international renown and those whose focus and reputation are national. Boia's introductory essay traces the evolution of historiography from its beginnings in antiquity around 3000 B.C. through the end of the eighteenth century when history began to be professionalized. Entries are arranged alphabetically by country or geographic area. Each entry includes a brief bibliography for the convenience of readers wishing to consult additional sources. An index of historians and a general subject index complete the work. Of particular value to teachers and students of history, this volume will also be of significant interest to the general reader wishing an authoritative and easy-to-use guide to historians and historiography.
This book examines a diverse set of civic war memorials in North East England commemorating three clusters of conflicts: the Crimean War and Indian Rebellion in the 1850s; the 'small wars' of the 1880s; and the Boer War from 1899 to 1902. Encompassing a protracted timeframe and embracing disparate social, political and cultural contexts, it analyses how and why war memorials and commemorative practices changed during this key period of social transition and imperial expansion. In assessing the motivations of the memorial organisers and the narratives they sought to convey, the author argues that developments in war commemoration were primarily influenced by - and reflected - broader socio-economic and political transformations occurring in nineteenth-century and early-twentieth century Britain.
This book is about how Australian and Turkish historical understanding of the First World War Gallipoli Campaign has been shaped by travel to the battlefield for the purposes of commemoration. Utilizing a cultural historical method, the study begins with examining how cultural conceptions of travel influenced the experience of those fighting in the 1915 Battle, and ends with the way that new global insecurities and the withdrawal of Western troops from Afghanistan in 2021 is reflecting and influencing Australia and Turkey's social memory of their military past. This wide historical lens and the author's original fieldwork and analysis of documents allows for an in-depth exploration of the ways in which cultural patterns of social memory develop over time and mapping of how specific cultural representations in the past are reclaimed. The book argues that travel is a key factor influencing social change by providing distinctive ritual experiences that afford unique, discursive opportunities and empowering particular carriers and custodians of social memory.
This book tells the story of how information evolved since the mid-nineteenth century. It argues that information increased in quantity, became more specialized by discipline (e.g., mathematics, science, political science), and more organized. Information increased in volume due to a series of innovations, such as the electrification of communications and the development of computers, but also due to the organization of facts and knowledge by discipline, making it easier to manage and access. I do this by looking at what major disciplines have done to shape the nature of modern information, devoting chapters to the most obvious ones. I argue that understanding how some features of information evolved is useful for those who work in subjects that deal with their very construct and application, such as computer scientists and those exploring social media and, most recently, history. The book continues my more than twenty years of studying how information became a central feature of modern society, building on prior books I have written, most notably as a sequel to All the Facts: A History of Information in the United States since 1870 (OUP, 2016) and Building Blocks of Society: History, Information Ecosystems, and Infrastructures (R&L, 2021).
Sandscapes: Writing the British Seaside reflects on the unique topography of sand, sandscapes, and the seaside in British culture and beyond. This book brings together creative and critical writings that explore the ways sand speaks to us of holidays and respite, but also of time and mortality, of plenitude and eternity. Drawing together writers from a range of backgrounds, the volume explores the environmental, social, personal, cultural, and political significance of sand and the seaside towns that have built up around it. The contributions take a variety of forms including fiction and nonfiction and cover topics ranging from sand dunes to sand mining, from seaside stories to shoreline architecture, from sand grains to global sand movements, from narratives of the setting up of bed and breakfasts to stories of seaside decline. Often a symbol of aridity, sand is revealed in this book to be an astonishingly fertile site for cultural meaning.
In this ambitious work of political and intellectual history, Charles Hartman surveys the major sources that survive as vestiges of the official dynastic historiography of the Chinese Song dynasty (960-1279). Analyzing the narratives that emerge from these sources as products of Song political discourse, Hartman offers a thorough introduction to the texts and the political circumstances surrounding their compilation. Distilling from these sources a 'grand allegory of Song history', he argues that the narratives embedded within reflect tension between a Confucian model of political institutionalism and the Song court's preference for a non-sectarian, technocratic model. Fundamentally rethinking the corpus of texts that have formed the basis of our understanding of the Song and of imperial China more broadly, this far-reaching account of historiographical process and knowledge production illuminates the relationship between official history writing and political struggle in China.
Robert Crowcroft has assembled a world-class, international cast of outstanding scholars and international figures to produce a stimulating collection of essays on applied history and policy making. With contributors such as Philip Bobbitt, Margaret MacMillan, and Jeremy Black, this collection of essays addresses some of the most important geopolitical challenges confronting the world today. From reconstructing collapsed political regimes to security competition in the China Seas and the evolution of Salafi-Jihadi ideology, it explores a range of statecraft, policy, and strategy. The essays span a number of policy areas and historical problems, tackling important questions about what historians do (and should do), and considering the nature and limits of historical judgement. With some examining how applied history can be used to rethink contemporary challenges, others explore how it has been used and abused in the past. Making a splash in intellectual debate by making a definitive case for Applied History, this book demonstrates that a knowledge of the past, and the insight it provides, is imperative to effective statecraft.
Narratives of Forced Mobility and Displacement in Contemporary Literature and Culture: Border Violence focuses on the evidence of the effects of displacement as seen in narratives-cinematic, photographic, and literary-produced by, with, or about refugees and migrants. The book explores refugee journeys, asylum-seeking, trafficking, and deportation as well as territorial displacement, the architecture of occupation and settlement, and border separation and violence. The large-scale movement of people from the global South to the global North is explored through the perspectives of the new mobilities paradigm, including the fact that, for many of the displaced, waiting and immobility is a common part of their experience. Through critical analysis drawing on cultural studies and literary studies, Roger Bromley generates an alternative "map" of texts for understanding displacement in terms of affect, subjectivity, and dehumanization with the overall aim of opening up new dialogues in the face of the current stream of anti-refugee rhetoric.
Arabic-Islamic Views of the Latin West provides an insight into how the Arabic-Islamic world perceived medieval Western Europe in an age that is usually associated with the rise and expansion of Islam, the Spanish Reconquista, and the Crusades. Previous scholarship has maintained that the Arabic-Islamic world regarded Western Europe as a cultural backwater at the periphery of civilization that clung to a superseded religion. It holds mental barriers imposed by Islam responsible for the Muslim world's arrogant and ignorant attitude towards its northern neighbours. This study refutes this view by focussing on the mechanisms of transmission and reception that characterized the flow of information between both cultural spheres. By explaining how Arabic-Islamic scholars acquired and processed data on medieval Western Europe, it traces the two-fold 'emergence' of Latin-Christian Europe - a sphere that increasingly encroached upon the Mediterranean and therefore became more and more important in Arabic-Islamic scholarly literature. Chapter One questions previous interpretations of related Arabic-Islamic records that reduce a large and differentiated range of Arabic-Islamic perceptions to a single basic pattern subsumed under the keywords 'ignorance', 'indifference', and 'arrogance'. Chapter Two lists channels of transmission by means of which information on the Latin-Christian sphere reached the Arabic-Islamic sphere. Chapter Three deals with the general factors that influenced the reception and presentation of this data at the hands of Arabic-Islamic scholars. Chapters Four to Eight analyse how these scholars acquired and dealt with information on themes such as the western dimension of the Roman Empire, the Visigoths, the Franks, the papacy and, finally, Western Europe in the age of Latin-Christian expansionism. Against this background, Chapter Nine provides a concluding re-evaluation.
In a critical, comparative study of the sociological literature, this book explores the term "time," and the various interconnections between time and a broad cluster of topics that create a conceptual labyrinth. Various understandings of time manifest themselves in the context of many individual social problems-there is no single vision in sociology of how to grasp time and address within social theory. This book, therefore, attempts to define an approach to the concept of time and its associated terms (duration, temporality, acceleration, compression, temporal structures, change, historical consciousness, and others). The volume is guided by a critical engagement with three main questions: a) the formation of human understanding of time; b) the functioning of temporal structures at different levels of social reality; c) the role and place of time in general sociological theory. |
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