Woodrow Wilson, a practicing academic historian before he took to politics, defined the importance of history: "A nation which does not know what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today." He, like many men of his generation, wanted to impose a version of America's founding identity: it was a land of the free and a home of the brave. But not the braves. Or the slaves. Or the disenfranchised women. So the history of Wilson's generation omitted a significant proportion of the population in favour of a perspective that was predominantly white, male and Protestant. That flaw would become a fissure and eventually a schism. A new history arose which, written in part by radicals and liberals, had little use for the noble and the heroic, and that rankled many who wanted a celebratory rather than a critical history. To this combustible mixture of elements was added the flame of public debate. History in the 1990s was a minefield of competing passions, political views and prejudices. It was dangerous ground, and, at the end of the decade, four of the nation's most respected and popular historians were almost destroyed by it: Michael Bellesiles, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose and Joseph Ellis. This is their story, set against the wider narrative of the writing of America's history. It may be, as Flaubert put it, that "Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times." To which he could have added: falsify, plagiarize and politicize, because that's the other story of America's history.

This book introduces a new perspective on Claudio Monteverdi's Orfeo (1607), a work widely regarded as the 'first great opera', by exploring the influence of the Mantuan Accademia deglia Invaghiti, the group which hosted the opera's performance, and to which the libretto author, Alessandro Striggio the Younger, belonged. Arguing that the Invaghiti played a key role in shaping the development of Orfeo, the author explores the philosophical underpinnings of the Invaghiti and Italian academies of the era. Drawing on new primary sources, he shows how the Invaghiti's ideas about literature, dramaturgy, music, gender, and aesthetics were engaged and contested in the creation and staging of Orfeo. Relevant to researchers of music history, performance, and Renaissance and Baroque Italy, this study sheds new light on Monteverdi's opera as an intellectual and philosophical work.

The field of sport history is a relatively new research domain, situated at the intersection of a number of disciplines and sub-disciplines. This interdisciplinarity has created interesting avenues for growth and fresh thinking but also inherent problems of coherence and identity. Making Sport History examines the development of an academic community around sport history, exploring the roots of the discipline, its current boundaries, borders and challenges, and looking ahead at future prospects. Written by a team of world-leading sport historians, with commentaries from scholars working outside of the sport historical mainstream, the book considers key themes in the historiography of sport, including: The relationship between history, sport studies and physical education Comparative analysis of the role of historians in the writing of sport history Modern and post-modern approaches to sport history Race, gender and the sport historical establishment The role of scholarly organisations, conferences and journals in discipline-building Presenting new perspectives on what constitutes sport history and its core methodologies, the book helps explain why historians have become interested in sport, why they've chosen the topics they have, and how their work has influenced the wider world of history and been influenced by it. Making Sport History is essential reading for any advanced student, scholar or researcher with an interest in sport history, historiography, or the history and philosophy of the social sciences.

Alan S. Milward was a renowned historian of contemporary Europe. In addition to his books, as well as articles and chapters in edited books, he also wrote nearly 250 book reviews and review articles, some in French and German, which were published in journals world-wide. Taken together they reveal a remarkable degree of theoretical consistency in his approach to understanding the history of Europe since the French Revolution. This book brings together these previously unexamined pieces of historical analysis in order to trace and shed light on key intellectual debates taking place in the second half of the 20th century. Many of these discussions continue to influence us today, such as the role of Germany in Europe, the economic, social and political foundations of European integration, the European rescue of the nation-state, the reasons for launching the single currency, the conditions for retaining the allegiance of European citizens to the notions of nation and supra-nation, and ultimately the issue of democratic governance in a global environment. In bringing together these reviews and review articles, the book provides an introduction to the main scholarly achievements of Milward, in his own words. Fernando Guirao and Frances M.B. Lynch provide an introduction to the volume, which both guides the reader through many of the academic debates embedded within the text while underlining their contemporary relevance. By introducing and bringing together this hitherto overlooked treasure trove of historical analysis, this book maps a close itinerary of some of the most salient intellectual debates of the second half of the 20th century and beyond. This unique volume will be of great interest to scholars of economic history, European history and historiography.

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

Historiography is the study of the methodology of writing history, the development of the discipline of history, and the changing interpretations of historical events in the works of individual historians. Exploring the historiography of Persian art and architecture requires a closer look at a diverse range of sources, including chronicles, historical accounts, travelogues, and material evidence coming from archaeological excavations. The Historiography of Persian Architecture highlights the political, cultural, and intellectual contexts that lie behind the written history of Persian architecture in the twentieth century, presenting a series of investigations on issues related to historiography. This book addresses the challenges, complexities, and contradictions regarding historical and geographical diversity of Persian architecture, including issues lacking in the 20th century historiography of Iran and neighbouring countries. This book not only illustrates different trends in Persian architecture but also clarifies changing notions of research in this field. Aiming to introduce new tools of analysis, the book offers fresh insights into the discipline, supported by historical documents, archaeological data, treatises, and visual materials. It brings together well-established and emerging scholars from a broad range of academic spheres, in order to question and challenge pre-existing historiographical frameworks, particularly through specific case studies. Overall, it provides a valuable contribution to the study of Persian architecture, simultaneously revisiting past literature and advancing new approaches. This book would be of interest to students and scholars of Middle East and Iranian Studies, as well as Architectural History, including Islamic architecture and historiography.

Beyond Memory: Silence and the Aesthetics of Remembrance analyses the intricate connections between silence, acts of remembrance and acts of forgetting, and relates the topic of silence to the international research field of Cultural Memory Studies. It engages with the most recent work in the field by viewing silence as a remedy to the traditionally binary approach to our understanding of remembering and forgetting. The international team of contributors examine case studies from colonialism, war, politics and slavery from across the globe, as well as drawing examples from literature, philosophy and sites of memory to draw three main conclusions. Firstly, that the relationship between remembering and forgetting is relational rather than 'hermetic', and the space between the two is often occupied by silence. Secondly, silence is a force in itself, capable of stimulating more or less remembrance. Finally, that silence is a necessary and key element in the interaction between the human mind and the 'outer world', and enables people to challenge their understanding of art, music, literature, history and memory. With an introduction by the editors discussing Memory Studies, and concluding remarks by Astrid Erll, this collection demonstrates that acceptance and consideration of silence as having both a performative and aesthetic dimension is an essential component of history and memory studies.

The majority of scholarly conceptions of the Mediterranean focus on the sea's northern shores, with its historical epicentres of Spain, France or Italy. This book seeks to demonstrate the importance of economic, political and cultural networks emanating from the Mediterranean's lesser-studied southern shores. The various chapters emphasize the activities that made connections between the southern shores, sub-Saharan Africa, the lands along its northern shores, and beyond to the United States. In doing so, the book avoids a Eurocentric approach and details the importance of the players and regions of the southern hinterland, in the analysis of the Mediterranean space. The cultural aspects of the North African countries, be they music, literature, film, commerce or political activism, continue to transform the public spheres of the countries along the northern shores of the Mediterranean, and beyond to the whole of the European continent. In its focus on the often overlooked North African shore, the work is an innovative contribution to the historiography of the Mediterranean region. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of North African Studies.

This book is an analytic and historical portrait of the volatile decades at the beginning of the 20th century. Engaging with avant-garde art and thought, and concentrating on two of the most controversial and still culturally relevant personalities of Viennese modernism - Sigmund Freud and Arnold Schoenberg - it tells the story of a cultural experiment of unprecedented proportions, an experiment that attempted to redesign the senses and the concept of individual identity. The book describes the shape of this identity through its mutually overlapping artistic and intellectual dimensions, as it explores the relationship between psychoanalysis and music.

Remaking History considers the ways that historical fictions of all kinds enable a complex engagement with the past. Popular historical texts including films, television and novels, along with cultural phenomena such as superheroes and vampires, broker relationships to 'history', while also enabling audiences to understand the ways in which the past is written, structured and ordered. Jerome de Groot uses examples from contemporary popular culture to show the relationship between fiction and history in two key ways. Firstly, the texts pedagogically contribute to the historical imaginary and secondly they allow reflection upon how the past is constructed as 'history'. In doing so, they provide an accessible and engaging means to critique, conceptualize and reject the processes of historical representation. The book looks at the use of the past in fiction from sources including Mad Men, Downton Abbey and Howard Brenton's Anne Boleyn, along with the work of directors such as Terence Malick, Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese, to show that fictional representations enable a comprehension of the fundamental strangeness of the past and the ways in which this foreign, exotic other is constructed. Drawing from popular films, novels and TV series of recent years, and engaging with key thinkers from Marx to Derrida, Remaking History is a must for all students interested in the meaning that history has for fiction, and vice versa.

Marxist Historiographies is the first book to examine the ebb and flow of Marxist historiography from a global and cross-cultural perspective. Since the eighteenth century, few schools of historical thought have exerted a more lasting impact than Marxism, and this impact extends far beyond the Western world within which it is most commonly analysed. Edited by two highly respected authors in the field, this book deals with the effect of Marxism on historical writings not only in parts of Europe, where it originated, but also in countries and regions in Africa, Asia, North and South America and the Middle East. Rather than presenting the chapters geographically, it is structured with respect to how Marxist influence was shown in the works of historians in a particular area. This title takes a dual approach to the subject; some chapters are national in scope, addressing the Marxist impact on historical practices within a country, whereas others deal with the varied expressions of Marxist historiography throughout a wider region. Taking a truly global perspective on this topic, Marxist Historiographies demonstrates clearly the breadth and depth of Marxism's influence in historical writing throughout the world and is essential reading for all students of historiography.

Shows the relationship of ethics and historiography over time and in different cultural settings, and so helps readers to appreciate the different ways in which historians have thought about how the world ought to be and helps readers to appreciate how the boundaries between ethical theories can be fuzzy. Written for those new to, or with little familiarity with historiography, so makes very complex questions easy to understand. Introduces readers to both well-known and lesser-appreciated historians and ethical theorists, ensuring they have a variety of case studies upon which to draw in their own work.

This collection provides a systematic survey of the wide readership the works of Godfrey of Viterbo enjoyed in the late Middle Ages. In the last years of the twelfth century this chronicler and imperial notary wrote a series of historical collections that gained considerable and lasting popularity: between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, his works were copied in elaborate manuscripts in almost all of Latin Europe. This wide distribution is particularly surprising for an author like Godfrey whom modern historians have never credited with any importance at all, as they considered his works chaotic and historically unreliable. Yet Godfrey was certainly one of the most daring historiographers of his time. In his works, the lineage of the Hohenstaufen emperors Frederick Barbarossa and Henry VI is traced directly to Charlemagne and Augustus, to the kings of Troy and of the Old Testament, and to Jupiter and everyone who, in his view, wielded imperial power in the past. Godfrey was a herald of the new political ideas the Hohenstaufen developed after the years of defeat against the papacy and the Italian communes, but also a universal chronicler whose interests reached far beyond the political issues of his day. Bringing together a group of specialists on manuscripts and historical writing in late medieval England, Spain, Italy, Germany, Bohemia and Poland, this volume aims to revive Godfrey's reputation by demonstrating how his works were understood by medieval readers.

Religious imaginary is a way of conceiving and structuring the world within the conceptual and imaginative traditions of the religious. Using religious imaginary as a reference, this book analyses temporal ideologies and expressions of historicity in South Asia in the early modern, pre-colonial and early colonial period. Chapters explore the multiple understandings of time and the past that informed the historical imagination in various kinds of literary representations, including historiographical and literary texts, hagiography, and religious canonical literature. The book addresses the contributing forces and comparative implications of the formation of religious and communitarian sensibilities as expressed through the imagination of the past, and suggests how these relate to each other within and across traditions in South Asia. By bringing diverse materials together, this book presents new commonalities and distinctions that inform a larger understanding of how religion and other cultural formations impinge on the concept of temporality, and the representation of it as history.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Jesuit Science and the End of Nature's Secrets explores how several prominent Jesuit naturalists - including NiccolA(2) Cabeo, Athanasius Kircher, and Gaspar Schott - tackled the problem of occult or insensible causation in the seventeenth century. The search for hidden causes lay at the heart of the early modern study of nature, and included phenomena such as the activity of the magnet, the marvelous powers ascribed to certain animals and plants, and the hidden, destructive forces churning in the depths of the Earth. While this was a project embraced by most early modern naturalists, however, the book demonstrates that the Jesuits were uniquely suited to the study of nature's hidden secrets because of the complex methods of contemplation and meditation enshrined at the core of their spirituality. Divided into six chapters, the work documents how particular Jesuits sought to reveal and expose nature's myriad secrets through an innovative blending of technology, imagery, and experiment. Moving beyond the conventional Aristotelianism mandated by the Society of Jesus, they set forth a vision of the world that made manifest the works of God as Creator, no matter how deeply hidden those works were. The book thus not only presents a narrative that challenges present-day assumptions about the role played by Catholic religious communities in the formation of modern science, but also captures the exuberance and inventiveness of the early modern study of nature.

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

Linking fiction with history and historical theory, 'A New Type of History': Fictional Proposals for dealing with the Past focuses on a selection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists - Tolstoy, Proust, John Cowper Powys, Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, Penelope Lively, and James Hamilton-Paterson - who have criticized scientifically based history and proposed alternative ways of approaching the past: more subjective and personal, colourful and imaginative, and above all ethically orientated. In this, it is argued, they have been reverting to an earlier rhetorical model for history, which is now being increasingly adopted by practising historians. This 'new type of history' may lack the claimed 'objectivity' and 'truth' of its immediate predecessor, but it opens the way for an ethically focused subject that may be used (in Nietzsche's words) 'for the purpose of life'. Providing a new take on both novelists and historiography, and ranging widely from the nineteenth century to the present day, this cross-disciplinary study will be valuable reading for all those interested in the intersection and interplay between fiction and history.

This is an original and controversial reflection on the course of human history and a remarkable attempt to develop a scientific model of laws for the social sciences. It:
* considers the nature of laws and the reasons we might expect to find them in history
* employs an underlying framework concerning societal dynamics, historical change, and institutional change, which are in fact the laws of history.
This volume consolidates the author's previous research in The Dynamic Society and The Ephemeral Civilization.

Schools and circles have been a major force in twentieth-century intellectual movements. They fostered circulation of ideas within and between disciplines, thus altering the shape of intellectual inquiry. This volume offers a new perspective on theoretical schools in the humanities, both as generators of conceptual knowledge and as cultural phenomena. The structuralist, semiotic, phenomenological, and hermeneutical schools and circles have had a deep impact on various disciplines ranging from literary studies to philosophy, historiography, and sociology. The volume focuses on a set of loosely interrelated groups, with a strong literary, linguistic, and semiotic component, but extends to the fields of philosophy and history-the interdisciplinary conjunctions arising from a sense of conceptual kinship. It includes chapters on unstudied or less studied groups, such as Tel Aviv School of poetics and semiotics or the research group Poetics and Hermeneutics. The volume presents a significant supplement to the standard historical accounts of literary, critical, and related theory in the twentieth century. It enhances and complicates our understanding of the twentieth-century intellectual and academic history by showing schools and circles in the state of germination, dialogue, controversy, or decline, in their respective historical and institutional settings, while reaching simultaneously beyond those dense settings to the new cultural and ideological situations of the twenty-first century.

This is the first practical guide to cover the various stages of a history research project, from the selection of the topic and the organization and interpretation of source material, through to the completion of the written-up record.Whether it is for a dissertation, thesis article or, indeed, full-length book, Historical Research deals with the purpose of research, and the implications, limitations and benefits of different research methods, as well as the effective presentation of the finished result.

This book reconsiders the power of the idea of the future. Bringing together perspectives from cultural history, environmental history, political history and the history of science, it investigates how the future became a specific field of action in liberal democratic, state socialist and post-colonial regimes after the Second World War. It highlights the emergence of new forms of predictive scientific expertise in this period, and shows how such forms of expertise interacted with political systems of the Cold War world order, as the future became the prism for dealing with post-industrialisation, technoscientific progress, changing social values, Cold War tensions and an emerging Third World. A forgotten problem of cultural history, the future re-emerges in this volume as a fundamentally contested field in which forms of control and central forms of resistance met, as different actors set out to colonise and control and others to liberate. The individual studies of this book show how the West European, African, Romanian and Czechoslovak "long term" was constructed through forms of expertise, computer simulations and models, and they reveal how such constructions both opened up new realities but also imposed limits on possible futures.

George Orwell wrote that "history is written by the winners". Even if that seems a bit too cut-and-dried, we can say that history is always written from a viewpoint but that viewpoints change, sometimes radically. The history of workers, women and minorities challenged the once unquestioned dominance of the tales of great leaders and military victories. Then cultural studies brought fresh perspectives but those too have run their course. With globalisation emerging as a major economic, cultural and political force, Lynn Hunt examines whether it can reinvigorate the telling of history. In tandem, she proposes a sweeping re-evaluation of individuals' agency and their place in society as the keys to understanding the way people and ideas interact. Writing History in the Global Era is bound to shake up the discipline and break new ground for historical studies.

This book is about how modernity affects our perceptions of time and space. Its main argument is that geographical space is used to control temporal progress by channeling it to benefit particular political, economic and social interests, or by halting it altogether. By incorporating the ancient Greek myth of the Titanomachy as a conceptual metaphor to explore the elemental ideas of time and space, the author argues that hegemonic interests have developed spatial hierarchy into a comprehensive system of technocratic monoculture, which interrupts temporal development in order to maintain exclusive power and authority. This spatial stasis is reinforced through the control of historical narratives and geographical settings. While increasingly comprehensive, the author argues that this state of affairs can best be challenged by focusing on the development of "unmappable places" which presently exist within the socio-spatial matrix of the modern world.

This volume explores literary and material representations of Jews, Jewishness and Judaism from antiquity to the twenty-first century. Gathering leading scholars from within the field of Jewish Studies, it investigates how the debates surrounding literary and material images within Judaism and in Jewish life are part of an on-going strategy of image management - the urge to shape, direct, authorise and contain Jewish literary and material images and encounters with those images - a strategy both consciously and unconsciously undertaken within multifarious arenas of Jewish life from early modern German lands to late twentieth-century North London, late Antique Byzantium to the curation of contemporary Holocaust exhibitions.