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Books > Humanities > History > Theory & methods
This book is a fascinating collection of various neuroscience terms coined over the last centuries. Each of the 45 chapters in this book dives deep into the etymologies, vernacular subtleties and historical anecdotes relating to these terms. The book illustrates the rich and diverse history of neuroscience, which has borrowed and continues to borrow terms and concepts from across cultures, literature and languages. The ever-increasing number of terms that needed to be coined with the mushrooming of the field required neuroscientists to show astonishing imagination and creativity, leading them to draw inspiration from Graeco-Roman mythology (Elpenor's syndrome), literature (Lasthenie de Ferjol's syndrome), theatre (Ondine's curse), Japanese folklore (Kanashibari), and even the Bible (Matthew effect). This book will of be immense interest to scholars and researchers studying neuroscience, history of science, anatomy, psychology and linguistics. It will also appeal to any reader interested in learning more about neuroscience and its history. All the chapters included in this book were originally published in a column that appeared from 1997 to 2020 in the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences.
This book analyses the concept of patriotism and the contestation over its meaning in key public debates in Poland over the last twenty-five years. It focuses on the strategies used to define, re-shape and "bend" the notion of patriotism, which during this period has become a central issue in Polish political discourse. Contemporary Polish society is characterized by a growing polarization of the public sphere. Rivalry between former communists and former dissidents has been progressively replaced by internal opposition within the ranks of once-dissident allies, now divided into civic-minded "critical" patriots and nationalist-oriented "traditional" patriots. This division re-emerges regularly during key moments in Polish public life - most recently in the aftermath of the highly contested 2015 parliamentary elections. By tracing the evolution of the debate over patriotism since 1989, this book provides crucial insights into the current political situation.
A wide-ranging and up-to-date overview of the conceptual issues that history as a discipline and mode of thought gives rise to that offers the reader both historical and systematic treatments of these issues, as well as addressing their contemporary relevance. Written by an international team of experts who both discuss the basis of their topic and also present their own view, thereby offering the reader a cutting-edge contribution while ensuring their chapters are of interest to both to students and specialists in the field of historical theory. An indispensible companion to the study of history that provides essential reading for anyone interested in the reflection on the nature of history and our historical existence.
This book presents original studies of how a cultural concept of Jewishness and a coherent Jewish history came to make sense in the experiences of people entangled in different historical situations. Instead of searching for the inconsistencies, discontinuities, or ruptures of dominant grand historical narratives of Jewish cultural history, this book unfolds situations and events, where Jewishness and a coherent Jewish history became useful, meaningful, and acted upon as a site of causal explanations. Inspired by classical American pragmatism and more recent French pragmatism, we present a new perspective on Jewish cultural history in which the experiences, problems, and actions of people are at the center of reconstructions of historical causalities and projections of future horizons. The book shows how boundaries between Jewish and non-Jewish are not a priori given but are instead repeatedly experienced in a variety of situations and then acted upon as matters of facts. In different ways and on different scales, these studies show how people's experiences of Jewishness perpetually probe, test, and shape the boundaries between what is Jewish and non-Jewish, and that these boundaries shape the spatiotemporal linkages that we call history.
Exploring the Renaissance from a cognitive perspective, this book sheds light on the Renaissance as a cognitive and creative phenomenon providing researchers and postgraduate students of cognitive history with a new case study on which to apply their tools and the apparatus to do so. This book views the Italian Renaissance not only in the realms of art, architecture, and literature but also in the physical sciences, medicine, craft technology, engineering, and self-discovery. Allowing researchers and postgraduate students to see how viewing the renaissance as a creative phenomenon, through a cognitive approach, can broaden their understanding of the Renaissance period.
Exploring the Renaissance from a cognitive perspective, this book sheds light on the Renaissance as a cognitive and creative phenomenon providing researchers and postgraduate students of cognitive history with a new case study on which to apply their tools and the apparatus to do so. This book views the Italian Renaissance not only in the realms of art, architecture, and literature but also in the physical sciences, medicine, craft technology, engineering, and self-discovery. Allowing researchers and postgraduate students to see how viewing the renaissance as a creative phenomenon, through a cognitive approach, can broaden their understanding of the Renaissance period.
Throughout photography's history, failure has played an essential, recurring part in the development and perceived value of this medium. Exploring a range of failures - individual and institutional, technological and historiographical - Photography and Failure asks what it means to fail and considers how this narrative of failure has shaped our understanding of photography. From the trial-and-error beginnings of photochemistry to poor business decisions influenced by fickle public opinion and taste, the founders and early practitioners of photography frequently faced bankruptcy and ignominy. Alongside these individual 'failures', this collection of essays examines the role of museums in rediscovering, preserving and presenting photographs within institutions, as well as technological limitations, such as the problematic panoramic lens or the digital, archival failures of Snapchat. Moving beyond the physical photograph and these processes, the book also investigates the limitations of photographs themselves, as purveyors of truth, time, space, documentary realism and social change, whether these failures are used to effect or not. Finally, the book probes the historiographical failures affecting the discipline, drawing on key debates, such as the perceived over-emphasis on European and American photography, and the place of photography theory in contemporary art practice. Blurring the boundaries between traditional binaries of art and non-art photography, amateur and professional practice, and individual and corporate perspectives, Photography and Failure presents a new approach to understanding and evaluating photographic history.
Cameralism and the Enlightenment reassesses the relationship between two key phenomena of European history often disconnected from each other. It builds on recent insights from global history, transnational history and Enlightenment studies to reflect on the dynamic interactions of cameralism, an early modern set of practices and discourses of statecraft prominent in central Europe, with the broader political, intellectual and cultural developments of the Enlightenment world. Through contributions from prominent scholars across the field of Enlightenment studies, the volume analyzes eighteenth-century cameralist authors' engagements with commerce, colonialism and natural law. Challenging the caricature of cameralism as a German, land-locked version of mercantilism, the volume reframes its importance for scholars of the Enlightenment broadly conceived. This volume goes beyond the typical focus on Britain and France in studies of political economy, widening perspectives about the dissemination of ideas of governance, happiness and reform to focus on multidirectional exchanges across continental Europe and beyond during the eighteenth century. Emphasizing the practice of theory, it proposes the study of the porosity of ideas in their exchange, transmission and mediation between spaces and discourses as a key dimension of cultural and intellectual history.
Drawing on rich qualitative data, as well as theoretical and conceptual frameworks, this text explores how institutions of higher education in the US can effectively remember incidents of campus crisis through physical memorials and commemoration. Recognizing memorialization as a process of group and individual recovery, the book foregrounds the performative functions of physical memorials, and highlights their utility for the extended campus community. Profiling existing campus memorials in the US, and offering insights from students, faculty, community members, and the loved ones of those memorialized, the text illustrates how institutional decisions and long-term strategy can serve to effectively navigate the politics of memorialization, helping communities move beyond incidents of collective trauma. This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in emergency management, student affairs practice and higher education administration, and commemorative literature more broadly. Those specifically interested in heritage studies, public history, and American history will also benefit from this book.
Since the eighteenth century, the one-to-one singing lesson has been the most common method of delivery. The scenario allows the teacher to familiarise and individualise the lesson to suit the needs of their student; however, it can also lead to speculation about what is taught. More troubling is the heightened risk of gossip and rumour with the private space generating speculation about the student-teacher relationship. Venanzio Rauzzini (1746-1810), an Italian castrato living in England who became a highly sought-after singing master, was particularly susceptible since his students tended to be women, whose moral character was under more scrutiny than their male counterparts. Even so in 1792, The Bath Chronicle proclaimed the Italian castrato: 'the father of a new style in English singing'. Branding Rauzzini as a founder of an English style was not an error, but indicative of deep-seated anxieties about the Italian invasion on England's musical culture. This book places teaching at the centre of the socio-historical narrative and provides unique insight into musical culture. Using a microhistory approach, this study is the first to focus in on the impact of teaching and casts new light on issues of celebrity culture, gender and nationalism in Georgian England.
"This is the first intellectual biography, in any language, on post-war Germany's greatest theorist of history, Reinhart Koselleck. It not only illuminates Koselleck's role in founding conceptual history, but also introduces his important accounts of historical time, of historical anthropology, and of political iconology. Both students of post-war German intellectual history and, broadly speaking, of philosophies of history will find this an immensely rich and stimulating volume." Jan-Werner Muller, Professor of Politics and Founding Director, Project in the History of Political Thought, Princeton University "This is a very thorough and, at the same time, original take on Reinhard Koselleck's work...As the major representative of German" Begriffsgeschichte, "he deserves to be better known in the English-speaking world, and this volume will go a long way to achieve this aim...It is an excellent contribution to historical theory and the history of historiography." Stefan Berger, University of Manchester ."..an impressive book, especially in the way in which the author succeeds in integrating biographical, historical, and philosophical elements in an elegant and lucid way-something achieved by only the best introductions to Western thinkers and intellectuals." Helge Jordheim, University of Oslo Reinhart Koselleck (1923-2006) was one of most imposing and influential European intellectual historians in the twentieth century. Constantly probing and transgressing the boundaries of mainstream historical writing, he created numerous highly innovative approaches, absorbing influences from other academic disciplines as represented in the work of philosophers and political thinkers like Hans Georg Gadamer and Carl Schmitt and that of internationally renowned scholars such as Hayden White, Michel Foucault, and Quentin Skinner. An advocate of "grand theory," Koselleck was an inspiration to many scholars and helped move the discipline into new directions (such as conceptual history, theories of historical times and memory) and across disciplinary and national boundaries. He thus achieved a degree of international fame that was unusual for a German historian after 1945. This book not only presents the life and work of a "great thinker" and European intellectual, it also contributes to our understanding of complex theoretical and methodological issues in the cultural sciences and to our knowledge of the history of political, historical, and cultural thought in Germany from the 1950s to the present. Niklas Olsen received his PhD in History from the European University Institute in Florence. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen working on a project on the variants of liberalism in Denmark and Western Europe, 1945-1990.
How was the history of post-classical Rome and of the Church written in the Catholic Reformation? Historical texts composed in Rome at this time have been considered secondary to the city's significance for the history of art. The Invention of Papal History corrects this distorting emphasis and shows how historical writing became part of a comprehensive formation of the image and self-perception of the papacy. By presenting and fully contextualising the path-breaking works of the Augustinian historian Onofrio Panvinio (1530-1568), Stefan Bauer shows what type of historical research was possible in the late Renaissance and the Catholic Reformation. Crucial questions were, for example: How were the pontiffs elected? How many popes had been puppets of emperors? Could any of the past machinations, schisms, and disorder in the history of the Church be admitted to the reading public? Historiography in this period by no means consisted entirely of commissioned works written for patrons; rather, a creative interplay existed between, on the one hand, the endeavours of authors to explore the past and, on the other hand, the constraints of ideology and censorship placed on them. The Invention of Papal History sheds new light on the changing priorities, mentalities, and cultural standards that flourished in the transition from the Renaissance to the Catholic Reformation.
Bede's Ecclesiastical History is our main source for early Christian Anglo-Saxon England, but how was it written? When? And why? Scholars have spent much of the last half century investigating the latter question - the 'why'. This new study is the first to systematically consider the 'how' and the 'when'. Richard Shaw shows that rather than producing the History at a single point in 731, Bede was working on it for as much as twenty years, from c. 715 to just before his death in 735. Unpacking and extending the period of composition of Bede's best-known book makes sense of the complicated and contradictory evidence for its purposes. The work did not have one context, but several, each with its own distinct constructed audiences. Thus, the History was not written for a single purpose to the exclusion of all others. Nor was it simply written for a variety of reasons. It was written over time - quite a lot of time - and as the world changed during that time, so too did Bede's reasons for writing, the intentions he sought to pursue - and the patrons he hoped to please or to placate.
This book gives explanations for the growing gap in wealth and income and the rise of anti-democratic movements. The power of the elites today is supposedly founded on merit (education, intelligence etc.), but a closer look shows that a well-marked-out pool is just self-re-producing. The power these in-groups wield often leads to moral insensibility, made worse by a condescending attitude towards people further down the food chain. The pre-dominance of the model of the nation-state, with its centralism and top-down structure, is one of the roots of this problem, as is the lack of comparisons and value judgements; examples from transport and urbanism show that they are possible. The deplorable situation is made worse by the "anti-"social-media scuppering open and productive discussions.
This book primarily focuses on the concept of forgetting, with particular emphasis on how we can trace the forgotten in contemporary life writing and memory texts. It consists of two main parts: the first concentrates on life writing in particular and what the author calls "scenes of forgetting"; the second examines both fiction and autobiographies that deal with questions of collective memory/forgetting. The book's principal aim is to map methods and strategies writers employ when writing the forgotten - it argues that forgetting is a constant companion in any memory text and plays a decisive role in the memory work performed in the texts. The main theoretical objective is to examine carefully the connection between collective memory and personal memory, by drawing from two disciplines at once: memory studies and theories on life writing. By considering both areas of research, the conclusions of this study are able to feed into both theoretical perspectives.
Reinhart Koselleck (1923-2006) was one of most imposing and influential European intellectual historians in the twentieth century. Constantly probing and transgressing the boundaries of mainstream historical writing, he created numerous highly innovative approaches, absorbing influences from other academic disciplines as represented in the work of philosophers and political thinkers like Hans Georg Gadamer and Carl Schmitt and that of internationally renowned scholars such as Hayden White, Michel Foucault, and Quentin Skinner. An advocate of "grand theory," Koselleck was an inspiration to many scholars and helped move the discipline into new directions (such as conceptual history, theories of historical times and memory) and across disciplinary and national boundaries. He thus achieved a degree of international fame that was unusual for a German historian after 1945. This book not only presents the life and work of a "great thinker" and European intellectual, it also contributes to our understanding of complex theoretical and methodological issues in the cultural sciences and to our knowledge of the history of political, historical, and cultural thought in Germany from the 1950s to the present.
The Operatic Archive: American Opera as History extends the growing interdisciplinary conversation in opera studies by drawing on new research in performance studies and the philosophy of history. Moving beyond traditional aesthetic conceptions of opera, this book argues for opera's powerful potential for historical impact and engagement in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century works by American composers. Considering opera's ability to serve as a vehicle for memory, historical experience, affect, presence, and the historical sublime, this volume demonstrates how opera's ability to represent and evoke historical events and historical experience differs fundamentally from the representations and recreations of other modes (specifically, literary and dramatic representations). Building on the work of performance scholars such as Joseph Roach, Rebecca Schneider, and Diana Taylor, and in consultation with recent debates in the philosophy of history, the book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and researchers, particularly those working in the areas of opera studies and performance studies.
This book aims to further a debate about aspects of "playing" and "gaming" in connection with history. Reaching out to academics, professionals and students alike, it pursues a dedicated interdisciplinary approach. Rather than only focusing on how professionals could learn from academics in history, the book also ponders the question of what academics can learn from gaming and playing for their own practice, such as gamification for teaching, or using "play" as a paradigm for novel approaches into historical scholarship. "Playing" and "gaming" are thus understood as a broad cultural phenomenon that cross-pollinates the theory and practice of history and gaming alike.
In Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History: Alt/Histories, historians, sociologists, neuroscientists, lawyers, cultural critics, and literary and media scholars come together to offer an interconnected and comparative collection for understanding how contemporary far-right, neo-fascist, Alt-Right, Identitarian and New Right movements have proposed revisions and counter-narratives to accepted understandings of history, fact and narrative. The innovative essays found here bring forward urgent questions to diverse public, academic, and politically minded audiences interested in how historical understandings of race, gender, class, nationalism, religion, law, technology and the sciences have been distorted by these far-right movements. If scholars of the last twenty years, like Francis Fukuyama, believed that neoliberalism marked an 'end of history', this volume shows how the far right is effectively threatening democracy and its institutions through the dissemination of alt-facts and histories.
Deposing Monarchs analyses depositions in Northern Europe between 1500 and 1700 as a type of frequent political conflict which allows to present new ideas on early modern state formation, monarchy, and the conventions of royal rulership. The book revises earlier conceptualizations of depositions as isolated, unique events that emerged in the context of national historiographies. An examination of the official legitimations of depositions reveals that in times of crisis, concepts of tradition, rule of law, and political consensus are much more influential than the divine right of kings. Tracing the similarities and differences of depositions in Northern Europe transnationally and diachronically, the book shows monarchical succession as more non-linear than previously presumed. It offers a transferable model of the different elements needed in depositions, such as opposition to the monarch by multiple groups in a realm, the need for a convincing rival candidate, and a legitimation based on political traditions or religious ideas. Furthermore, the book bolsters our understanding of authority and rule as a constant process of negotiation, adding to recent research on political culture, and on the cultural history of politics.
What does obscene mean? What does it have to say about the means through which meaning is produced and received in literary, artistic and, more broadly, social acts of representation and interaction? Early modern France and Europe faced these questions not only in regard to the political, religious and artistic reformations for which the Renaissance stands, but also in light of the reconfiguration of its mediasphere in the wake of the invention of the printing press. The Politics of Obscenity brings together researchers from Europe and the United States in offering scholars of early modern Europe a detailed understanding of the implications and the impact of obscene representations in their relationship to the Gutenberg Revolution which came to define Western modernity.
Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was the product of the rich tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment but the book's fame immediately spread across the whole of Europe. This book looks at the long journey of Smith's ideas from Scotland to peninsular Spain, reconstructing in detail the reception, adaptation, interpretation, and application of Smith's central concepts from 1777 up to 1840. In light of methodological advances during the last two decades in the history of economic thought and the studies on the late Spanish Enlightenment and early Liberalism, the book tackles a series of significant issues and gaps in the historiography. In particular: this book sheds new light on the role of France as an intermediate step as the ideas spread from Britain southwards; the analysis draws not just on translations but also handwritten materials, book reviews, syntheses, summaries, plagiarism and rebuttals; a wide range of methods of dissemination are considered including the printing press and periodicals, parliamentary debates, academic chairs and societies; the role of individual translators and agents is given due prominence; the political interpretations of the Wealth of Nations and the ways in which the book was incorporated into the work of Spanish economists in the decades following publication are also considered. This book marks a significant contribution to the literature on the reception of Smith's Wealth of Nations, studies of the Spanish Enlightenment and history of economic thought more broadly.
This book analyses issues of language and Jewish identity among the Sephardim in Sarajevo. The author examines how Sephardim belonging to three different generations in Sarajevo deal with the challenge of cultivating hybrid and hyphenated identities under destabilizing conditions, exploring how a group of interviewees define and describe the language they speak since Yugoslavia's collapse. Their self-identification through language is then placed within the context of other cases of linguistic and ethnic identity formation in European minority groups. This book will be of interest to students and scholars working in several related fields and disciplines, including Slavic studies, Historical Anthropology, Jewish History and Holocaust studies, Sociolinguistics, and Memory studies.
Since the Enlightenment, the definition of terms such as humanity, citizenship and rights has fluctuated and these ideas continue to have relevance for contemporary discussions of globalization from a "cosmopolitan" perspective. This volume goes back to the conception of cosmopolitanism in Greek antiquity in order to trace it through history, resulting in an unmasking of its many myths. The concept is reconstructed with reference not only to well-known (and some lesser known) historical thinkers of cosmopolitanism, but also to noted "anti-cosmopolitans". The first aim of the book is to display historical perspectives on a discourse which has been dominated by ahistorical presumptions. The second is to critically explore alternative paths beyond the Western imagination, redefining the Enlightenment legacy and the centre-periphery dichotomy. Most notably, Eastern Europe and the Arab world are integrated within the analysis of cosmopolitanism. Within a framework of conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), cosmopolitan reason is criticized from the viewpoints of comparative literature, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, postcolonialism and moral philosophy. The book's critical approach is an attempt to come to terms with the anachronism, essentialism, ethnocentrism and anthropocentrism that sometimes underlie contemporary theoretical and methodological uses of the term "cosmopolitanism". By adding historical and contextual depth to the problem of cosmopolitanism, a reflexive corrective is presented to enhance ongoing discussions of this topic within as well as outside academia.
Matters of Time provides an unorthodox array of perspectives on materialist thought and representation in twentieth-century French intellectual culture. Time is figured as the quintessential revolutionary concept, through key historical moments from Jean Jaures' orientation of the socialists at the turn of the century to the inter-generational conflict and politicization of everyday life in May '68. Essays on dialectics and theories of teleological progress are placed side by side with accounts of the existential turn in Marxist thought in France. Contributions on Heidegger and Sartre inject meditations on human mortality into considerations of a new politics of finitude. The volume also emphasizes the inseparability of aesthetic and political thought for the French avant-gardes: chapters on Sade, Artaud and Jarry place Marx's theories of production and commodity fetishism into contact with bodily abjection. The manipulation of time in cinema and matter in painting are examined as a testament to the twentieth century as a period of continuing experimental tension between form and signification. Generational futurity is explored through Genet's spatial representations of filiation and Verlaine's proto-ecological attunement to nature. The volume as a whole constructs a necessarily fragmented timeline of the breaks, tensions and antagonisms in twentieth-century French thought, culture and politics, with particular focus on questions of late capitalism and political, intellectual and aesthetic progress and regress. |
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