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Books > Humanities > History > Theory & methods
This book is an exploration of political memory and disgrace in the reigns of Constantine and his sons. It uses the conditions of the early to mid-fourth century to argue that the deconstruction of political legitimacy should be viewed, first and foremost, as a collective phenomenon, the result of the actions of a diverse range of people responding to political change. It also challenges many positivist and teleological narratives of the 'Age of Constantine'. Shifting the focus from the emperor and his sons onto their rivals and opponents, the Constantinian dynasty is placed back into the messy and ambiguous political environment from which it emerged.
Creates a dialogue between the histories of imperialism and of women and gender. By engaging critically with both traditional history and colonial discourse analysis, the essays demonstrate how feminist historians can play a central role in creating new histories of British imperialism. arranged into three sections, dealing respectively with the imposition and impact of British imperial control, reactions and resistances, and the impact of the Empire within Britain. Chronologically, the focus is on the late-18th to early-20th centuries, while geographically the essays range from the Caribbean to Australia and span India, Africa, Ireland and Britain itself. Topics explored include the question of female agency in imperial contexts, the relationships between feminisms and nationalisms, and questions of sexuality, masculinity and imperial power.
This volume is an interdisciplinary attempt to insert a broader, historically informed perspective into current political and academic debates on the issue of evidence and the reliability of scientific knowledge. The tensions between competing paradigms, different bodies of knowledge and the relative hierarchies between them are a crucial element of the historical and contemporary dynamics of scientific knowledge production. The negotiation of evidence is at the heart of this process. Starting from the premise that evidence constitutes a central, but also essentially contested concept in contemporary knowledge-based societies, this volume focuses on how evidence is generated and applied in practice-in other words, on "evidence in action." The contributions analyze and compare different evidence practices within the field of science and technology, how they interlink with different forms of power, their interaction with and impact on the legal and political domain, and their relationship to other, more heterodox forms of evidence that challenge traditional notions of evidence. In doing so, this volume provides much-needed context and historical background to contemporary debates on the so-called "post-truth" society. Evidence in Action is the perfect resource for all those interested in the relationship between science, technology, and the role of knowledge in society.
This volume brings together important articles from the Cambridge historian A. G. Hopkins and reflect the enlargement and evolution of historical studies during the last half century. The essays cover four of the principal historiographical developments of the period: the extraordinary revolution that has led to the writing of non-Western indigenous history; the revitalization of new types of imperial history; the now ubiquitous engagement with global history, including a reinterpretation of American Empire, and the current revival of economic history after several decades of neglect.
Genres of Recollection brings to life the social and textual worlds in which the representation of contemporary Greek historical experience has been passionately debated. Building on contemporary research in history and anthropology concerning the social production of the past, this study considers how people who admit they are "not historians"--from a housewife to an award-winning novelist, a farmer to an aristocratic lady of leisure--mediate their personal, family and community histories by compiling archives and writing diverse genres of historical texts. "Re-collecting" the recent Greek past of labor migration, refugee flight, civil war and urbanization is shown to powerfully shape contemporary social relations and political culture, but also to open a captivating field for imagining redemptive futures.
In this innovative book, historian Matthew Crow unpacks the legal and political thought of Thomas Jefferson as a tool for thinking about constitutional transformation, settler colonialism, and race and civic identity in the era of the American Revolution. Thomas Jefferson's practices of reading, writing, and collecting legal history grew out of broader histories of early modern empire and political thought. As a result of the peculiar ways in which he theorized and experienced the imperial crisis and revolutionary constitutionalism, Jefferson came to understand a republican constitution as requiring a textual, material culture of law shared by citizens with the cultivated capacity to participate in such a culture. At the center of the story in Thomas Jefferson, Legal History, and the Art of Recollection, Crow concludes, we find legal history as a mode of organizing and governing collective memory, and as a way of instituting a particular form of legal subjectivity.
This work details the theological sources and moral significance of the life and work of the Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith (1723-1790). The panel of contributors deepens our understanding of Adam Smith in his religious and theological context and the significance of this understanding for contemporary moral, economic, and political challenges to modern social life. The chapters cover a broad range of disciplinary and historical concerns, from Smith's view of providence and his famous "invisible hand" to the role of self-interest and benevolence in Smith's social and economic thought. A better appreciation for the moral and theological dimensions of Smith's thought provides not only a better understanding of Smith's own context and significance in the Scottish Enlightenment but also promises to assist in meeting the perennial challenges of properly connecting economic realities to moral responsibility. The book is of interest to advanced students and scholars of the history of economic thought, historical and moral theology, intellectual history, political science, and philosophy.
Drawing on a wide range of texts and using an interdisciplinary approach, this volume shows how Chinese and Japanese intellectuals mobilized the past to create a better future. It is especially significant today given a world where, amidst tensions within Asia and the rise of China, East Asian intellectuals and governments constantly find new political meanings in their traditions. The essays illuminate how throughout Chinese and Japanese history, thinkers constantly weaved together nationalism, internationalism, and a politics of time. This volume explores a broad range of subjects such as premodern and early modern attempts to conjure a politics of Confucianism, twentieth-century Japanese Marxist interpretations of Buddhism, and Japanese and Chinese endeavors to imagine a new world order. In sum, this book shows us why understanding East Asian pasts are essential to making sense of ideological trends in contemporary China and Japan. For example, without understanding Confucianism and how modern intellectuals in China grappled with this body of thought, we would be unable to make sense of the Chinese government's current promotion of the Chinese classics. This book will interest students and scholars of political science, history, Asian studies, sociology, and philosophy.
How are our personal soundtracks of life devised? What makes some pieces of music more meaningful to us than others? This book explores the role of memory, both personal and cultural, in imbuing music with the power to move us. Focusing on the relationship between music and key life moments from birth to death, the text takes a cross-disciplinary approach, combining perspectives from a 'history of emotions' with modern day psychology, empirical surveys of modern-day listeners and analysis of musical works. The book traces the trajectory of emotional response to music over the past 500 years, illuminating the interaction between personal, historical and contextual variables that influence our hard-wired emotional responses to music, and the key role of memory and nostalgia in the mechanisms of emotional response.
Since the 1970s West German historiography has been one of the main arenas of international comparative history. It has produced important empirical studies particularly in social history as well as methodological and theoretical reflections on comparative history. During the last twenty years however, this approach has felt pressure from two sources: cultural historical approaches, which stress microhistory and the construction of cultural transfer on the one hand, global history and transnational approaches with emphasis on connected history on the other. This volume introduces the reader to some of the major methodological debates and to recent empirical research of German historians, who do comparative and transnational work.
The long period from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century supplied numerous sources for Kierkegaard's thought in any number of different fields. The present, rather heterogeneous volume covers the long period from the birth of Savonarola in 1452 through the beginning of the nineteenth century and into Kierkegaard's own time. The Danish thinker read authors representing vastly different traditions and time periods. Moreover, he also read a diverse range of genres. His interests concerned not just philosophy, theology and literature but also drama and music. The present volume consists of three tomes that are intended to cover Kierkegaard's sources in these different fields of thought. Tome I is dedicated to the philosophers of the early modern period and the Enlightenment who played a role in shaping Kierkegaard's intellectual development. He was widely read in German and French philosophy of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, making reference to the leading rationalist philosophers Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz in his journals and published works. Further, connections have also been pointed out between his thought and the writings of the French thinkers Montaigne, Pascal and Rousseau, who share with Kierkegaard a form of philosophy that is more interested in life and existence than purely conceptual analysis. Through the works of the authors explored here Kierkegaard became acquainted with some of the major philosophical discussions of the modern era such as the beginning of philosophy, the role of doubt, the status of autonomy in ethics and religion, human freedom, the problem of the theodicy found in thinkers such as Bayle and Leibniz, and the problem of the relation of philosophy to religion as it appears in the German writers Jacobi and Lessing.
Traversed by masses of migrants and wracked by environmental and economic change, the Mediterranean has come to connote crisis. In this context, Critically Mediterranean asks how the theories and methodologies of Mediterranean studies may be brought to bear upon the modern and contemporary periods. Contributors explore how the Mediterranean informs philosophy, phenomenology, the poetics of time and space, and literary theory. Ranging from some of the earliest twentieth-century material on the Mediterranean to Edmond Amran El Maleh, Christoforos Savva, Orhan Pamuk, and Etel Adnan, the essays ask how modern and contemporary Mediterraneans may be deployed in political, cultural, artistic, and literary practice. The critical Mediterranean that emerges is plural and performative-a medium through which subjects may negotiate imagined relations with the world around them. Vibrant and deeply interdisciplinary, Critically Mediterranean offers timely interventions for a sea in crisis.
In 1600, Giordano Bruno, one of the leading intellectuals of the Renaissance, was burned at the stake on the charge of heresy by the Roman Inquisition. He is remembered primarily for his cosmological theories, particularly that the universe was infinite with the Earth not being at its centre. Today, he has become a symbol of the struggle for religious and philosophical tolerance. The Trial of Giordano Bruno, originally published in Italian in 2018, provides English audiences with a complete and updated reconstruction of the inquisitorial trial by analysing the accusations, witnesses, and legal proceedings in detail. The author also gives a detailed profile of Bruno as well as the body which arrested and accused him - the Inquisition. This book will appeal to all those interested in the life and death of Giordano Bruno, as well as those interested in Early Modern legal proceedings, the Roman Inquisition, and the history of religious and philosophical tolerance.
How we define border studies is transforming from focussing on "a line in the sand" to the more complex notions of how constituting a border is practiced, sustained and modified. In the expansion of borders studies, the areas explored across Europe and Asia have been numerous, but the specific themes that arise through comparative case studies are novel when approach Europe and Asian borderlands. Comparing the border experiences in East Asia and Europe in a number of thematic clusters ranging from economics, tourism, and food production to ethnicity, migration and conquest, Borders in East and West aims to decenter border studies from its current focus on the Americas and Europe.
Veblen was an original thinker, responsible for introducing and popularising a host of important concepts and insights. He ignited controversy not only in economics, but also in sociology, history and political science. The number and quality of the responses to his work provide evidence of the novelty and explanatory power of his ideas. These comprehensive volumes will enable the reader to sample the broad spectrum of Veblen's thought and that of his critics and interpreters. They include critical appraisals of the corpus of his published work as well as reinterpretations of his life and influence on the social sciences particularly economics, political science and sociology. This authoritative collection includes reprints of materials previously published by leading scholars on nearly every aspect of Veblen's life and work. It will be invaluable to professional scholars and graduate students who wish to heighten their understanding of the alternatives to formalism in the social studies.
This book provides the first comprehensive study of diverse migrant memories and what they mean for Australia in the twenty-first century. Drawing on rich case studies, it captures the changing political and cultural dimensions of migration memories as they are negotiated and commemorated by individuals, communities and the nation. Remembering Migration is divided into two sections, the first on oral histories and the second examining the complexity of migrant heritage, and the sources and genres of memory writing. The focused and thematic analysis in the book explores how these histories are re-remembered in private and public spaces, including museum exhibitions, heritage sites and the media. Written by leading and emerging scholars, the collected essays explore how memories of global migration across generations contribute to the ever-changing social and cultural fabric of Australia and its place in the world.
Employing an innovative methodological toolkit, Doing Conceptual History in Africa provides a refreshingly broad and interdisciplinary approach to African historical studies. The studies assembled here focus on the complex role of language in Africa's historical development, with a particular emphasis on pragmatics and semantics. From precolonial dynamics of wealth and poverty to the conceptual foundations of nationalist movements, each contribution strikes a balance between the local and the global, engaging with a distinctively African intellectual tradition while analyzing the regional and global contexts in which categories like "work," "marriage," and "land" take shape.
This book describes and analyses a particular literary mode that challenges the aesthetics of testimony by approaching the past through detection, analysis, and 'archaeological' digging. How does forensic literature narrate the past in terms of plot, language, narration, and use of visual media? This volume examines how forensic literature provides an important corrective to the forensic paradigm and a means of exploring the relationship between visual and material evidence and various forms of testimony. This literary engagement with the past is investigated in order to challenge a forensic paradigm that aims to eliminate the problems related to human testimony through scientific objectivity, resulting in a fresh and original text in which Bondergaard argues literature's potential to explore the mechanisms of representation, interpretation, and narration.
The volume takes a field which has become established over the past 40 years, and applies it to a marginalized sector of society, enabling students of oral history, and history more generally to engage with, question and develop new conversations around the field. Oral history is increasingly becoming an established part of the modern history canon and more and more developments within its parameters are being raised and studied - this book represents a key up-coming area. The only book to look specifically at LGBTQ positions and the specific issues it raises within oral history.
Auerbach was one of the foremost literary critics of the 20th century whose work has relevance within the fields of literary criticism, historiography and postcolonial theory. The opening chapter of this book explains how he understood the task of interpretation and his role as an interpreter. The following chapter outlines the important phases in his life with reference to the writers and thinkers who influenced him in his thinking and practice. The central chapters of the book focus on specific themes in his work: the historical grounding of the 'figural' imagination; the relation between the secular and the sacred; the emergence of tragic realism; and the notion of 'inner history' as a defining feature of early 20th-cenntury modernism. The final two chapters focus on broader issues relating to the development of Auerbach's understanding of the development of an educated readership within Europe and of his concerns regarding the emergence of what he terms 'a world literature'.
Understanding Early Modern Primary Sources is an introduction to the rich treasury of source material available to students of early modern history. During this period, political development, economic and social change, rising literacy levels, and the success of the printing press, ensured that the State, the Church and the people generated texts and objects on an unprecedented scale. This book introduces students to the sources that survived to become indispensable primary material studied by historians. After a wide-ranging introductory essay, part I of the book, 'Sources', takes the reader through seven key categories of primary material, including governmental, ecclesiastical and legal records, diaries and literary works, print, and visual and material sources. Each chapter addresses how different types of material were produced, whilst also pointing readers towards the most important and accessible physical and digital source collections. Part II, 'Histories', takes a thematic approach. Each chapter in this section explores the sources that are used to address major early modern themes, including political and popular cultures, the economy, science, religion, gender, warfare, and global exploration. This collection of essays by leading historians in their respective fields showcases how practitioners research the early modern period, and is an invaluable resource for any student embarking on their studies of the early modern period.
2284: World Society, Iaian Vernier's Memoir is a fascinating study of mankind. Written as a work of fiction, it looks at the human condition 200 years in the future. Predicting the outcome of today's social policies, 2284 is a cultural anthropology study that adds to Itzkoff's extensive writing on the topic. Iaian Vernier writes in 2284 of the revolutionary internationalism that has been established in Nairobi, Africa. He chronicles the disasters that almost destroyed the twenty-first-century world. He describes in anecdote and philosophical depth the new scientific and secular world that has been established to bring peace, equality, ethnic diversity and democracy to humanity, while scrutinizing the plans for demographic stability that will sustain humanity into the future. In the twenty-third century, the forbidden rationality of the scientific minds of the twenty-first century have been unleashed.
Focusing on why neoliberalism gained such a unique strong hold in the United States, philosopher Bruce N. Waller in this book traces the source back to the country's origins and the entwined core values of the nation's Founding Fathers. Their extreme commitment to private property rights (as evinced in a unanimous vote for the Constitution's Fugitive Slave Clause), an aversion to widespread democracy, and a deep belief in the uniquely just nature of their new country together created the ideal conditions for neoliberalism's growth and success. Waller also provides a clear analysis of the moral and psychological conditions so hospitable to neoliberalism, including the compatibility of a faith in the "invisible hand" of the free market with the widespread belief - which remains prevalent in the United States - that the world is just and people generally get what they deserve. Waller examines how the ideal of moral responsibility in the United States provides the core belief that holds in place the basic principles of American neoliberalism. The book ends by shedding light on the deleterious effects of neoliberalism and shows that its replacement requires not only the amelioration of enormous inequity in wealth, but also the opportunity for all citizens to exercise autonomy, control, and critical thought in their lives and workplaces. Key Features Traces neoliberal values deep into American history and culture Uses empirical psychological research to explain the broad appeal of neoliberalism Describes the strong interconnected neoliberal value system of belief in a just world, personal responsibility, and radical individualism, and their combined influence on American culture Examines the influence of neoliberal values on the American criminal justice and educational systems
Focusing on why neoliberalism gained such a unique strong hold in the United States, philosopher Bruce N. Waller in this book traces the source back to the country's origins and the entwined core values of the nation's Founding Fathers. Their extreme commitment to private property rights (as evinced in a unanimous vote for the Constitution's Fugitive Slave Clause), an aversion to widespread democracy, and a deep belief in the uniquely just nature of their new country together created the ideal conditions for neoliberalism's growth and success. Waller also provides a clear analysis of the moral and psychological conditions so hospitable to neoliberalism, including the compatibility of a faith in the "invisible hand" of the free market with the widespread belief - which remains prevalent in the United States - that the world is just and people generally get what they deserve. Waller examines how the ideal of moral responsibility in the United States provides the core belief that holds in place the basic principles of American neoliberalism. The book ends by shedding light on the deleterious effects of neoliberalism and shows that its replacement requires not only the amelioration of enormous inequity in wealth, but also the opportunity for all citizens to exercise autonomy, control, and critical thought in their lives and workplaces. Key Features Traces neoliberal values deep into American history and culture Uses empirical psychological research to explain the broad appeal of neoliberalism Describes the strong interconnected neoliberal value system of belief in a just world, personal responsibility, and radical individualism, and their combined influence on American culture Examines the influence of neoliberal values on the American criminal justice and educational systems
How to Write About the Holocaust is a contribution to ongoing debates in historiography and Holocaust studies. More specifically, it combines the theoretical framework that has developed in historiography in the last half a century with the demands of Holocaust representation. The first part of the book analyzes the newest trends in theory of history, focusing especially on postmodernism, starting from the works of the American historian and theorist Hayden White and tracing the genealogy of the postmodern influence in history both from an epistemological and from a political perspective. The second part continues by incorporating these theoretical developments into specific written examples on the Holocaust. By analyzing major works about it, including Saul Friedlander's and Dan Stone's histories of the Holocaust, the book attempts to answer questions like: what is the most appropriate way to write about the Holocaust and what can theory teach us about the practice of history? To conclude, the volume explores the connection between history and literature and asks if the distinction between fact and fiction has become outdated. |
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