Debating medieval Europe serves as an entry point for studying and teaching medieval history. Rather than simply presenting foundational knowledge or introducing sources, it provides the reader with frameworks for understanding the distinctive historiography of the period, digging beneath the historical accounts provided by other textbooks to expose the contested foundations of apparently settled narratives. It opens a space for discussion and debate, as well as providing essential context for the sometimes overwhelming abundance of specialist scholarship. Volume I addresses the early Middle Ages, covering the period c. 450-c. 1050. The chapters are organised chronologically, and cover such topics as the Carolingian Order, England and the 'Atlantic Archipelago', the Vikings and Ottonian Germany. It features a highly distinguished selection of medieval historians, including Paul Fouracre and Janet L. Nelson. -- .

Drawing on theories of historiography, memory, and diaspora, as well as from existing genre studies, this book explores why contemporary writers are so fascinated with history. Pei-chen Liao considers how fiction contributes to the making and remaking of the transnational history of the U.S. by thinking beyond and before 9/11, investigating how the dynamics of memory, as well as the emergent present, influences readers' reception of historical fiction and alternate history fiction and their interpretation of the past. Set against the historical backdrop of WWII, the Vietnam War, and the War on Terror, the novels under discussion tell Jewish, Japanese, white American, African, Muslim, and Native Americans' stories of trauma and survival. As a means to transmit memories of past events, these novels demonstrate how multidirectional memory can be not only collective but connective, as exemplified by the echoes that post-9/11 readers hear between different histories of violence that the novels chronicle, as well as between the past and the present.

This book focuses on discourses of the politics of history education and history textbooks. It offers a new insight into understanding of the nexus between ideology, the state, and nation-building, as depicted in history education and school textbooks. It especially focuses on the interpretation of social and political change, significant events, looking for possible biases and omissions, leadership and the contribution of key individuals, and continuities. The book discusses various aspects of historical narratives, and some selected key events in defining identity and nation-building. It considers the role of historiography in dominant historical narratives. It analyses history education, in both local and global settings, and its significance in promoting values education and intercultural and global understanding. It is argued that historical narratives add pedagogies, grounded in constructivist, metacognitive and transformational paradigms, have the power to engage the learner in significant and meaningful learning experiences, informed by multiple discourses of our historical narratives and those of other nations.

Niketas Choniates' History is the single most important source for a crucial period in Byzantine history, which began with the death of Alexios I Komnenos in 1118 and culminated with the capture of Constantinople by the armies of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. In this first book-length study of the History in English, Simpson reviews the complex manuscript tradition and transmission of the text, and examines the substantial differences in style, content, and purpose between the two main versions in which it has been preserved. Investigating issues related to historical narrative and imperial biography, including genre and characteristic features, narrative structure, and character depiction, the volume also explores the sources from which Niketas Choniates compiled his account and the literary models and historical concepts which guided him. It emphasizes his literary mimesis of earlier writers, his creative and often innovative use of rhetorical forms and techniques, and his historical methodology and outlook. Finally, the book delves into the author's world in order to uncover his personal prejudices and preoccupations, and takes into account his other works, namely the orations and letters as well as the theological treatise, the Dogmatike Panoplia.

This volume explores ways in which the literary trope of the palimpsest can be applied to ethnic and postcolonial literary and cultural studies. Based on contemporary theories of the palimpsest, the innovative chapters reveal hidden histories and uncover relationships across disciplines and seemingly unconnected texts. The contributors focus on diverse forms of the palimpsest: the incarceration of Native Americans in military forts and their response to the elimination of their cultures; mnemonic novels that rework the politics and poetics of the Black Atlantic; the urban palimpsests of Rio de Janeiro, Marseille, Johannesburg, and Los Angeles that reveal layers of humanity with disparities in origin, class, religion, and chronology; and the palimpsestic configurations of mythologies and religions that resist strict cultural distinctions and argue against cultural relativism.

This book redefines the relationship between Marxism and history. At its roots, Marxism was aimed at analyzing society in order to change it, reflecting on the past to create the 'poetry of the future.' No single event of the past was as important to early Marxists as the French Revolution of 1789. Studying the varying uses of the history of that past event among Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and prominent European Marxists before 1914 (Karl Kautsky, V.I. Lenin, and others), this book argues that we should take the historiography of concrete past events seriously. It was not only an auxiliary element of Marxism, but a core constitutive element in its formation. Thus, this book calls for transcending traditional approaches to Marxism as a fixed set of social theories combined with strategies for the present and future. Important to students of Marxism, the labor movement, and the French Revolution alike, this study contains refreshing perspectives on the interplay between past, present, and future and on the role of states, social classes, socio-economic determination, and political organization in history.

This work takes familiar historical narratives and provides alternative readings for them. It endeavours to expand the parameters of comparative history by focusing on the economic, social, political and historiographical connections among societies, and by observing these intertwined histories from different vantage points. The author aims to take the reader beyond culture and society into the imperial webs of association found inside and outside the discipline of history.

Karl Leyser's intuitive and imaginative historical writing drew on deep reading in the primary sources and, above all, on an intimate knowledge of the major historians of the period displayed in this collection of his work. It was his contention that only through an understanding of the minds of such historians as Nithard, Regino of Prum, Widukind of Corvey and Thietmar of Merseburg, and a reconstruction of their outlook on the world, can we appreciate the aristocratic worlds which these historians depicted in their works.

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.

In November 1918 a revolution overthrew the old imperial system in Germany and inaugurated a republic. The revolution was formally completed in August 1919 when the social democrat Friedrich Ebert was sworn in as president. By this time, however, many of the revolution's original aims and intentions had been swallowed up by new political concerns and lived experiences. For contemporaries the meaning of '9 November' changed, becoming increasingly contested between rival parties, military experts and scholars. This book examines how the debate on the revolution has evolved from August 1919 to the present day. It takes the reader through the ideological battles of the 1920s and 30s into the equally politicised historical writing of the cold war period. It ends with a consideration of the marginalisation of the revolution in academic research since the 1980s, and its revival from 2010. -- .

Ludwig Wittgenstein's brief Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) is one of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century, yet it offers little orientation for the reader. The first-time reader is left wondering what it could be about, and the scholar is left with little guidance for interpretation. In Tractatus in Context, James C. Klagge presents the vital background necessary for appreciating Wittgenstein's gnomic masterpiece. Tractatus in Context contains the early reactions to the Tractatus, including the initial reviews written in 1922-1924. And while we can't talk with Wittgenstein, we can do the next best thing-hear what he had to say about the Tractatus. Klagge thus presents what Wittgenstein thought about germane issues leading up to his writing the book, in discussions and correspondence with others about his ideas, and what he had to say about the Tractatus after it was written-in letters, lectures and conversations. It offers, you might say, Wittgenstein's own commentary on the book. Key Features: Illuminates what is at stake in the Tractatus, by providing the views of others that engaged Wittgenstein as he was writing it. Includes Wittgenstein's earlier thoughts on ideas in the book as recorded in his notebooks, letters, and conversations as well as his later, retrospective comments on those ideas. Draws on new or little-known sources, such as Wittgenstein's coded notebooks, Hermine's notes, Frege's letters, Hansel's diary, Ramsey's notes, and Skinner's dictations. Draws connections between the background context and specific passages in the Tractatus, using a proposition-by-proposition commentary.

This book explores and discusses emerging perspectives of Ubuntu from the vantage point of "ordinary" people and connects it to human rights and decolonizing discourses. It engages a decolonizing perspective in writing about Ubuntu as an indigenous concept. The fore grounding argument is that one's positionality speaks to particular interests that may continue to sustain oppressions instead of confronting and dismantling them. Therefore, a decolonial approach to writing indigenous experiences begins with transparency about the researcher's own positionality. The emerging perspectives of this volume are contextual, highlighting the need for a critical reading for emerging, transformative and alternative visions in human relations and social structures.

In this new study of George Eliot's fiction, textual attempts to imagine a coherent and unified national past are seen as producing a contradictory vision of Englishness. It is a historiographical national identity, constructing the image of predominant, and conflicting, trends in the Victorian writing of history. The inherent uncertainty caused by the shift between different perceptions of English history leads, in later fiction, to an abandonment of contemporaneous grand narratives. The consequence is a history that anticipates a more modern, radical philosophy of history.

This book investigates the representation of the Axis War - the wars of aggression that Fascist Italy fought in North Africa, Greece, the Soviet Union, and the Balkans, from 1940 to 1943 - in three decades of Italian literature. Building on an innovative and interdisciplinary methodology, which combines memory studies, historiography, thematic criticism, and narratology, this book explores the main topoi, themes, and masterplots of an extensive corpus of novels and memoirs to assess the contribution of literature to the reshaping of Italian memory and identity after the end of Fascism. By exploring the influence that public memory exercises on literary depictions and, in return, the contribution of literary texts to the formation and dissemination of a discourse about the past, the book examines to what extent Italian literature helped readers form an ethical awareness of the crimes committed by members of their national community during World War II.

The Histories Against the Pagans of Orosius, written in 416/7, has been one of the most influential works in the history of Western historiography. Often read as a theology of history, it has been rarely been set against the background of ancient historiography and rhetorical practice in the time of Orosius. Arguing for the closeness of rhetoric and historiography in Antiquity, this book shows how Orosius situates himself consciously in the classical tradition and draws on a variety of rhetorical tools to shape his narrative: a subtle web of interextual allusions, a critical engagement with traditional exempla, a creative rewriting of the sources, and a skilled deployment of the rhetoric of pathos. In this way, Orosius aims at opening the eyes of his adversaries; instead of remaining blinded by the traditional, glorious view of the past, he wishes his readers to see the past and the present in their true colours. The book paints a more complex picture of theHistories, and argues against the tendency to see Orosius as a naive apologist of the Roman empire. In fact, he can be shown to put the Church at the heart of view of Roman history. Setting Orosius in the context of contemporary historiography and literature, it sheds new light on the intellectual life in the early fifth century AD.

This book explores hybrid memoirs, combining text and images, authored by photographers. It contextualizes this sub-category of life writing from a historical perspective within the overall context of life writing, before taking a structural and cognitive approach to the text/image relationship. While autobiographers use photographs primarily for their illustrative or referential function, photographers have a much more complex interaction with pictures in their autobiographical accounts. This book explores how the visual aspect of a memoir may drastically alter the reader's response to the work, but also how, in other cases, the visual parts seem disconnected from the text or underused.

In November 1918 a revolution overthrew the old imperial system in Germany and inaugurated a republic. The revolution was formally completed in August 1919 when the social democrat Friedrich Ebert was sworn in as president. By this time, however, many of the revolution's original aims and intentions had been swallowed up by new political concerns and lived experiences. For contemporaries the meaning of '9 November' changed, becoming increasingly contested between rival parties, military experts and scholars. This book examines how the debate on the revolution has evolved from August 1919 to the present day. It takes the reader through the ideological battles of the 1920s and 30s into the equally politicised historical writing of the cold war period. It ends with a consideration of the marginalisation of the revolution in academic research since the 1980s, and its revival from 2010. -- .

The topic of history was not a principal theme of the classical American Pragmatists, but in this book Marnie Binder presents the case for a pragmatist philosophy of history, examining supporting material from William James, John Dewey, F.C.S. Schiller, C.S. Peirce, George Herbert Mead, and Jane Addams. While the thinkers explored here have significant differences among themselves, together they provide distinct contributions to a fuller picture of what guides our selective memory and our present attention, and they indicate how this is all maintained via confirmation in the future. Philosophy needs history to help clarify meanings and concepts; part of the methodology of pragmatism is derived from history, as it is attested over time. History needs philosophy to critically analyze historical data; pragmatic interests influence how we study and record history. A Pragmatist Philosophy of History, therefore, provides a rich context for a method that brings the two disciplines together.

This volume is made up of essays in first presented as papers at the conference held in May 2015 at the POLIN museum of the history of Polish Jews in Warsaw is divided into two sections. The first deals with museological questions-the voices of the curators, comments on the museum and discussions of museums and education. The second examines the current state of the historiography of the Jews on the Polish lands from the first Jewish settlement to the present-day. Making use of the leading scholars in the field from Poland, Western Europe, North America and Israel, the volume provides a definitive overview of the history and culture of one of the most important communities in the long history of the Jewish people.

This edited volume maps dialogues between science and technology studies research on the arts and the emerging field of artistic research. The main themes in the book are an advanced understanding of discursivity and reasoning in arts-based research, the methodological relevance of material practices and things, and innovative ways of connecting, staging, and publishing research in art and academia. This book touches on topics including studies of artistic practices; reflexive practitioners at the boundaries between the arts, science, and technology; non-propositional forms of reasoning; unconventional (arts-based) research methods and enhanced modes of presentation and publication.

The island of Cyprus has been bitterly divided for more than four decades. One of the most divisive elements of the Cyprus conflict is the writing of its history, a history called on by both communities to justify and explain their own notions of justice. While for Greek Cypriots the history of Cyprus begins with ancient Greece and Hellenistic culture, for the Turkish Cypriot community the history of the island begins with the Ottoman invasion of 1571. The singular narratives both sides often employ to tell the story of the island are, as this volume argues, a means of continuing the battle which has torn the island apart, and an obstacle to resolution.

The Cyprus Conflict and History re-orientates history-writing on Cyprus from a tool of division to a form of dialogue, and explores a way forward for the future of conflict resolution in the region.

This book looks at the memory of the communist past in Central and Eastern Europe, with a particular focus on Bulgaria: its "official" memory, constructed by institutions, its public memory, molded by media, rituals, books and films and the urban environment, and the everyday or 'vernacular' memory. It investigates how the recent past is remembered and the circumstances upon which this memory is conditioned - how is communism/socialism construed as a public recollection? Do these processes differ in the distinct post-communist countries? The book's first part traces the institutional and political dimensions of coping with the communist past and the second part concentrates on personal reminiscences and vernacular memory. The book will be of interest for researchers and students in the fields of memory studies, Central and East European studies, oral history and contemporary history, as well as for specialists at institutions of memory and memory activists and organisations.

This book is a microhistory study of village settlements in early modern Northwest Italy that aims to expand the notion of place to include the process of producing a locality; that is, the production of native local subjects through practices, rituals and other forms of collective action. Undertaking a micro-analytical approach, the book examines the customs and practices associated with typically fragmented and polycentric Italian village settlements to analyze the territorial tensions between various segments of a village and its neighbors. The microspatial analysis reveals how these tensions are the expressions of conflictual relationships between lay, ecclesiastical and charitable bodies culminating in a "culture of fragmentation" that impacts local economic and political practices. The book also traces how the production of locality survived throughout the nineenth and twentieth century and is still observed today. In this light, the study of practices and policies of locality over time that this book undertakes is an essential tool to better understand the nature and role of these social bonds in today's society. Archival records and the methods for approaching this source material are included within the text, making it an accessible and invaluable book for students and teachers of social and cultural history.

This book takes a sociocultural, developmental and dialogical perspective to explore the constructive and interconnected nature of remembering and imagining. Conceived as cognitive-affective processes, both emerge at the border of the person and his or her socio-cultural world. Memory is approached as a functional adaption to the environment using the resources of the past in preparation for action in the present. Imagination is tightly related to memory in that both aim to escape the confines of the concrete here-and-now situation; however, while memory is primarily oriented to the past, imagination looks to the future. Both are embedded in the exchanges with the social and cultural milieu, and thus theorizing them has relied on key ideas from Lev Vygotsky, Frederic Bartlett and Mikhail Bakhtin. Thus, this book aims to integrate theories of remembering and imagining, through rich empirical studies in diverse cultural settings and concerning the development of self and identity. These two groups of studies compose the subparts that organize the book.

The classic guide to exploring English local history, brought up to date and expanded. This is a book for anyone wanting to explore local history in England. It summarises, in an accessible and authoritative way, current knowledge and approaches, bringing together and illustrating the key sources and evidence, the skills and tools, the contexts and interpretations for successive periods. Case studies show these ingredients in use, combined to create histories of people and place over time. A standard text since its first edition in 1992, this new edition features extensive fresh material, updated to reflect additional availability of evidence, changing interpretations, new tools and skills (not least the use of IT), and developments in the time periods and topics tackled by local historians. The interdisciplinary character of twenty-first-century local, family and community history is a prominent feature. Complemented by 163 illustrations, this book offers an unrivalled introduction to understanding and researching local history.