Are historians story-tellers? Is it possible to tell true stories about the past? These are just two of the questions raised in this comprehensive collection of texts about philosophy, theory and methodology of writing history. Drawing together seminal texts from philosophers and historians, including Hayden White, David Carr and Frederick Olafson, this volume presents the great debate over the narrative character of history from the 1960s onwards.
The History and Narrative Reader combines theory with practice to offer a unique overview of this debate and illuminates the practical implications of these philosophical debates for the writing of history. The editor's introduction offers a succinct survey of the subject to support the readings, which explore the role of narrative in:
* historical understanding
* human action
* linguistics and structure
* the practice of history.

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? -- .

This book shows how the study of the evolving discourse employed during a political process spanning more than a decade can provide insights for critical discourse analysis on the one hand, and understanding of a real world political process on the other, thereby demonstrating the potential role for critical discourse analysis in historiography.

How and why did Indians move within and across the West? What effects did this have on their identities? Despite the burgeoning scholarship on the postcolonial South Asian Diaspora, histories and geographies of colonial Indian mobility have received much less scrutiny. Focusing on a range of individuals who moved within and across Europe and North America, including a champion of London's female poor, a tourist and a war-time spy, this book addresses that gap by examining the production of Indian mobility within the West over the course of the first half of the twentieth century. By analyzing the lives of individual Indian men and, in particular, women it articulates new perspectives on transnational histories and geographies of mobility, gender, performance, and embodiment.

First published in 2000. This is Volume I of six in the Library of Philosophy series on Ethics and Political Philosophy. Written in 1952, this is a selection of essays from public lectures and articles on the biographies on Sir Issac Newton and John Locke, sections on the philosophy of science, and ethics.

Series Information:
CultureWork: A Book Series from the Center for Literacy and Cultural Studies at Harvard

Published yearly since 1930, the International Bibliography of Historical Sciences (IBOHS) is an international bibliography of the most important historical monographs and periodical articles. Volume 67 contains 8,701 entries from the period 1998.

Listed in this bibliography are monographs and periodicals published throughout the world, which deal with history from the earliest to the most recent times. Included within the scope of the historical sciences is the field of international relations. The IBOHS is thus currently the only continuous bibliography of its kind covering such a broad subject period and geographical range.

The IBOHS is compiled according to stringent academic standards, it keeps scholars and academic organisations informed of yearly developments in the field of historical studies. The systematic and chronological arrangement was developed by the Bibliographic Commission of the International Committee of Historical Sciences. The new edition of the IBOHS has retained this familiar tried and tested format. The works are arranged systematically according period, region or historical discipline, and alphabetically according to authors names or, in the case of anonymous works, by the characteristic main title word. The newest bibliographies and source material are emphasised and the bibliographies contain a geographical index and an index of persons.

Contents:
1. Introduction Part 1. Philosophical Foundations 2. Presuppositions 3. Subject and Infinite Power 4. Concept and Spirit 5. Freedom 6. From System to History 7. Passion and Conquest 8. The Cunning of Reason 9. Peoples 10. States 11. The End of History 12. The Ways of God

This collection of the best new and recent work on historical consciousness and practice in late Imperial Russia assembles the building blocks for a fundamental reconceptualization of Russian history and history writing.

Few of the major campaigns of World War II aroused as much controversy as the War in North Africa, 1940-1943. Figures such as Rommel, Montgomery, and Eisenhower would become world famous because of the fighting in North Africa. This book opens with seven historiographical essays that evaluate and critically assess the major contributions to the literature on the War in North Africa. It then includes an alphabetically arranged bibliography of the 504 entries cited in the essays. The material is easily accessible, with cross-references between the text and the bibliography and a full index.

The volume includes chapters on the Desert War, 1940-42; the Axis Powers in North Africa; Montgomery, Alam Halfa and El Alamein; TORCH: the Landings in French North Africa, and the Tunisian Campaign. Full attention is given to questions and issues historians have raised on such controversies as the Auchinleck-Montgomery dispute, the debate over Operation TORCH, and the Darlan affair. Emphasis is on English-language works, but the most significant Italian, German, and French works are cited and assessed. The book has been written for use in public, college, university, and institutional libraries, and to serve general readers and military historians.

One of the twentieth century's most influential books, this classic work of anthropology offers a groundbreaking exploration of what culture is With The Interpretation of Cultures, the distinguished anthropologist Clifford Geertz developed the concept of thick description, and in so doing, he virtually rewrote the rules of his field. Culture, Geertz argues, does not drive human behavior. Rather, it is a web of symbols that can help us better understand what that behavior means. A thick description explains not only the behavior, but the context in which it occurs, and to describe something thickly, Geertz argues, is the fundamental role of the anthropologist. Named one of the 100 most important books published since World War II by the Times Literary Supplement, The Interpretation of Cultures transformed how we think about others' cultures and our own. This definitive edition, with a foreword by Robert Darnton, remains an essential book for anthropologists, historians, and anyone else seeking to better understand human cultures.

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

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.

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 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.

We may yet find a precise use for the notoriously elusive category 'postcolonial', but only on the condition that we abandon its usual associations with plurality, fragmentation, particularity and resistance. This book argues that the category is best used to describe an ultimately singular configuration. A singularity is something that generates the medium of its own existence, in the eventual absence of external criteria and other existences. Like other singularities - pertinent comparisons include aspects of Buddhism and Islam, as well as concepts drawn from the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou - what is distinctive about a postcolonial discourse or literature is its abstraction from the domain of relationality. Here, Hallward offers a new conceptual distinction between singular and specific modes of differentiation, which should prove influential in a range of discourses. -- .

This book explores and explains the reasons why the idea of universal history, a form of teleological history which holds that all peoples are travelling along the same path and destined to end at the same point, persists in political thought. Prominent in Western political thought since the middle of the eighteenth century, the idea of universal history holds that all peoples can be situated in the narrative of history on a continuum between a start and an end point, between the savage state of nature and civilized modernity. Despite various critiques, the underlying teleological principle still prevails in much contemporary thinking and policy planning, including post-conflict peace-building and development theory and practice. Anathema to contemporary ideals of pluralism and multiculturalism, universal history means that not everyone gets to write their own story, only a privileged few. For the rest, history and future are taken out of their hands, subsumed and assimilated into other people's narrative.

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.

Succinct analysis and detailed case-studies, based on recent archaeological research, are the basis of this social and economic study of the Roman Imperial frontiers. It examines the concept of "frontier" within the Roman Empire, from the first century AD to the sixth, suggesting that it was a fuzzy set of interlocking zones - political, military, judicial and financial. Elton focuses on how the frontier worked and how it affected life for all those in the frontier zone, not just the Roman army. Each chapter outlines a major problem and illustrates it with examples from different regions and periods. The text examines the key features and periods of the Roman Empire in the light of the most recent archaeological research. The author includes an analysis of the acquisition of the empire and the ways in which it was ruled, and also relationships with allied kingdoms. Finally, he highlights the central importance of trade by special consideration of Palmyra.

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.

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.

This is a survey of current debates over the significance and role of Puritanism in 17th-century England. It is intended for undergraduate courses on 17th-century England.

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.