Bringing sophisticated philosophy to bear on real-life historiography, Values, Objectivity, and Explanation in Historiography rekindles and invigorates the debate on two perennials in the theory and methodology of history. One is the tension between historians' values and the ideal-or illusion-of objective historiography. The other is historical explanation. The point of departure for the treatment of values and objectivity is an exceptionally heated debate on Cold War historiography in Denmark, involving not only historians but also the political parties, the national newspapers, and the courts. The in-depth analysis that follows concludes that historians can produce accounts that deserve the label "objective," even though their descriptions are tinged by ineluctable epistemic instability. A separate chapter dissects the postmodern notion of situated truths. The second part of the book proffers a new take on historical explanation. It is based on the notion of the ideal explanatory text, which allows for not only causal-including intentional-but also nomological, structural, and functional explanations. The approach, which can accommodate narrative explanations driven by causal plots, is ecumenical but not all-encompassing. Emergent social properties and supernatural entities are excluded from the ideal explanatory text, making scientific historiography methodologically individualistic-albeit with room for explanations at higher levels when pragmatically justified-and atheist.

This book represents the first systematic study of the role of the Devil in English witchcraft pamphlets for the entire period of state-sanctioned witchcraft prosecutions (1563-1735). It provides a rereading of English witchcraft, one which moves away from an older historiography which underplays the role of the Devil in English witchcraft and instead highlights the crucial role that the Devil, often in the form of a familiar spirit, took in English witchcraft belief. One of the key ways in which this book explores the role of the Devil is through emotions. Stories of witches were made up of a complex web of emotionally implicated accusers, victims, witnesses, and supposed perpetrators. They reveal a range of emotional experiences that do not just stem from malefic witchcraft but also, and primarily, from a witch's links with the Devil. This book, then, has two main objectives. First, to suggest that English witchcraft pamphlets challenge our understanding of English witchcraft as a predominantly non-diabolical crime, and second, to highlight how witchcraft narratives emphasized emotions as the primary motivation for witchcraft acts and accusations.

This book explores the notions of space and extension of major early modern empiricist philosophers, especially Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Condillac. While space is a central and challenging issue for early modern empiricists, literature on this topic is sparse. This collection shows the diversity and problematic unity of empiricist views of space. Despite their common attention to the content of sensorial experience and to the analytical method, empiricist theories of space vary widely both in the way of approaching the issue and in the result of their investigation. However, by recasting the questions and examining the conceptual shifts, we see the emergence of a programmatic core, common to what the authors discuss. The introductory chapter describes this variety and its common core. The other contributions provide more specific perspectives on the issue of space within the philosophical literature. This book offers a unique overview of the early modern understanding of these issues, of interest to historians of early modern philosophy, historians and philosophers of science, historians of ideas, and all readers who want to expand their knowledge of the empiricist tradition.

Two of the most commonly alleged features of Japanese society are its homogeneity and its encouragement of conformity, as represented by the saying that the nail that sticks up gets pounded. This volume's primary goal is to challenge these and a number of other long-standing assumptions regarding Tokugawa (1600-1868) society, and thereby to open a dialogue regarding the relationship between the Japan of two centuries ago and the present. The volume's central chapters concentrate on six aspects of Tokugawa society: the construction of individual identity, aggressive pursuit of self-interest, defiant practice of forbidden religious traditions, interest in self-cultivation and personal betterment, understandings of happiness and well-being, and embrace of "neglected" counter-ideological values. The author argues that when taken together, these point to far higher degrees of individuality in early modern Japan than has heretofore been acknowledged, and in an Afterword the author briefly examines how these indicators of individuality in early modern Japan are faring in contemporary Japan at the time of writing.

To learn about the ""Age of Revolutions"" in Europe and the Americas is to engage with the emergence of the modern world. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, nations were founded, old empires collapsed, and new ones arose. Struggles for emancipation-whether from royal authority, colonial rule, slavery, or patriarchy-inspired both hopes and fears. This book, designed for university and secondary school teachers, provides up-to-date content and perspectives, classroom-tested techniques, innovative ideas, and an exciting variety of pathways to introduce students to this complex era of history. The volume includes chapters on sources and methods for stimulating student debate and learning, including Tom Paine's Common Sense, the Haitian Declaration of Independence, and other key documents; role-playing games; visual arts and culture; and music, including opera and popular songs. Other chapters delve into specific themes, including revolution and riot, revolutionary terror, enlightenment, gender, slavery, nationalism, environment and climate, and the roles of politically excluded groups. Collectively, the contributions ensure a broad Atlantic scope, discussing the revolutions in Britain's North American colonies, Haiti, and Latin America, and European revolutions including France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

This text explores a variety of themes developed from successive years of the University of California, Davis, multidisciplinary graduate conference. It draws out connections on a wide array of topics among the arts, humanities, and sciences in history for multidisciplinary study. This text presents a rare forum for multidisciplinary connections researched and presented by junior specialists in their respective fields. It enables both creativity and flexibility in drawing out connections that are frequently overlooked by more specialized senior scholars. This book is a unique exercise in the promotion of junior scholarly achievement and multidisciplinary research.

Defining a "historic transition" means understanding how the complex system of intellectual, social, and material structures formed that determined the transition from a certain "universe" to a "new universe," where the old explanations were radically rethought. In this book, a group of historians with specializations ranging from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries and across political, religious, and social fields, attempt a reinterpretation of "modernity" as the new "Axial Age."

Globalization has carried vast consequences for the lives of children. It has spurred unprecedented waves of immigration, contributed to far-reaching transformations in the organization, structure, and dynamics of family life, and profoundly altered trajectories of growing up. Equally important, globalization has contributed to the world-wide dissemination of a set of international norms about children's welfare and heightened public awareness of disparities in the lives of children around the world. This book's contributors - leading historians, literary scholars, psychologists, social geographers, and others - provide fresh perspectives on the transformations that globalization has produced in children's lives.

This book considers how history is not just objectively lived but subjectively experienced by people in the process of orienting their present toward the past. It analyses affectivity in historical experience, examines the digital mediation of history, and assesses the current politics of competing historical genres. The contributors explore the diverse ways in which the past may be activated and felt in the here and now, juxtaposing the practices of professional historiography with popular modes of engaging the past, from reenactments, filmmaking/viewing and historical fiction to museum collections and visits to historical sites. By examining the divergent forms of historical experience that flourish in the shadow of historicism in the West, this volume demonstrates how, and how widely (socially), the understanding of the past exceeds the expectations and frameworks of professional historicism. It makes the case that historians and the discipline of History could benefit from an ethnographic approach in order to assess the social reception of their practice now, and into a near future increasingly conditioned by digital media and demands for experiential immediacy.

This book maps out the state of China Studies in seven Southeast Asian countries from different perspectives. It looks at the history, current status, and characteristics of the study of China in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, and Myanmar, and what factors shaped the development and prospects of Sinology and Chinese Studies in these countries. For the first time, China experts from within and outside of this region, using a wide range of biographical, historical, bibliographical and comparative methodologies, tell the stories of how intellectuals and scholars in selected Southeast Asian countries understand, study, and research China. Their studies are providing different perspectives and discourses on China. Chapters discover and explore common factors such as the presence of sizeable ethnic Chinese communities, historical and current interactions between China and Southeast Asia, and the diverse intellectual influences in the region. A novel insight into the study of China in Southeast Asia, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of China-Southeast Asia relations, the intellectual history of Southeast Asia, the intellectual history of Chinese Studies in the world and the politics of Knowledge production.

The aim of this book is to explore the body in various historical contexts and to take it as a point of departure for broader historiographical projects. The chapters in the volume present the ways in which the body constitutes a valuable and productive object of historical analysis, especially as a lens through which to trace histories of social, political, and cultural phenomena and processes. More specifically, the authors use the body as a tool for critical re-examination of particular histories of human experience, and of societal and cultural practices, thus contributing to the burgeoning area of body history in terms of both specific case studies as well as historiography in general.

The Intellectual Origins of Modernity explores the long and winding road of modernity from Rousseau to Foucault and its roots, which are not to be found in a desire for enlightenment or in the idea of progress but in the Promethean passion of Western humankind. Modernity is the Promethean passion, the passion of humans to be their own master, to use their insight to make a world different from the one that they found, and to liberate themselves from their immemorial chains. This passion created the political ideologies of the nineteenth century and made its imprint on the totalitarian regimes that arose in their wake in the twentieth. Underlying the Promethean passion there was modernity-humankind's project of self-creation-and enlightenment, the existence of a constant tension between the actual and the desirable, between reality and the ideal. Beneath the weariness, the exhaustion and the skepticism of post-modernist criticism is a refusal to take Promethean horizons into account. This book attests the importance of reason, which remains a powerful critical weapon of humankind against the idols that have come out of modernity: totalitarianism, fundamentalism, the golem of technology, genetic engineering and a boundless will to power. Without it, the new Prometheus is liable to return the fire to the gods.

The Historical Web and Digital Humanities fosters discussions between the Digital Humanities and web archive studies by focussing on one of the largest entities of the web, namely national and transnational web domains such as the British, French, or European web. With a view to investigating whether, and how, web studies and web historiography can inform and contribute to the Digital Humanities, this volume contains a number of case studies and methodological and theoretical discussions that both illustrate the potential of studying the web, in this case national web domains, and provide an insight into the challenges associated with doing so. Commentary on and possible solutions to these challenges are debated within the chapters and each one contributes in its own way to a web history in the making that acknowledges the specificities of the archived web. The Historical Web and Digital Humanities will be essential reading for those with an interest in how the past of the web can be studied, as well as how Big Data approaches can be applied to the archived web. As a result, this volume will appeal to academics and students working and studying in the fields of Digital Humanities, internet and media studies, history, cultural studies, and communication.

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, authorize 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.

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 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.

Since the appearance of Hayden White's seminal work Metahistory in 1973, constructivist thought has been a key force within theory of history and has at times even provided inspiration for historians more generally. Despite the radical theoretical shift marked by constructivism and elaborated in detail by its proponents, confusion regarding many of its practical and ethical consequences persists, however, and its position on truth and meaning is routinely misconstrued. To remedy this situation, The Work of History seeks to mediate between constructivist theory and history practitioners' intuitions about the nature of their work, especially as these relate to the so-called fact-fiction debate and to the literary challenges involved in the production of historical accounts. In doing so, the book also offers much-needed insight into debates about our experiential relations with the past, the political use of history and the role of facts in the contestation of power.

This book introduces a new way of looking at the writing of history. Rather than as the production of knowledge or the telling of stories, it sees writing history as an ethical, existential and emotional engagement with the people from the past. The conceptual and philosophical basis for this view is provided by the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. In the first part, the view is presented and contrasted with other, competing views, such as those of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Michel Foucault. In the second part, the view is argued for, most importantly by an in-depth discussion of one specific tradition of history-writing (microhistory), and a series of close readings of several classical works from the history of historiography. The third part, finally, explores some of the methodological consequences of this view, and applies it to a non-academic way of dealing with the past, namely historical performance practice in music. The book features a foreword by Frank Ankersmit.

Faced with the challenge of new ideological emphases and subjects of study, academic history has undergone significant changes in its contents in the past half-century. Simultaneously, pressures to change have been directed at its form, particularly in the shape of calls for more socially engaged and up-to-date modes of presentation. The demand for 'history' in this more existential sense is equally evidenced by the rise of practical and popular uses of the past outside academic history writing. Reflecting on these shifts in the broader history culture, this collection explores the entanglements and opportunities of history and historians today, moving between questions of social and institutional self-justification, desires relating to identity and self-understanding as well as the consumption and entertainment needs of audiences. The authors find inspiration in varied traditions and media ranging from ancient philosophy and classic history writing to reality TV and Twitter. In doing so, they also present exciting futures for where history may yet go. This book was originally published as a special issue of Rethinking History.

Spaces, too, have a history. And history always takes place in spaces. But what do historians mean when they use the word "spaces"? And how can spaces be historically investigated? Susanne Rau provides a survey of the history of Western concepts of space, opens up interdisciplinary approaches to the phenomenon of space in fields ranging from physics and geography to philosophy and sociology, and explains how historical spatial analysis can be methodologically and conceptually conceived and carried out in practice. The case studies presented in the book come from the fields of urban history, the history of trade, and global history including the history of cartography, but its analysis is equally relevant to other fields of inquiry. This book offers the first comprehensive introduction to the theory and methodology of historical spatial analysis. Supported by Open Access funds of the University of Erfurt

Originally published in 1986. The theory of events presented is one that construes events to be concrete particulars; and it embodies an attempt to take seriously the idea that events are the changes that objects undergo when they change. The theory is about what an event really is, about when events are identical, about what properties events have essentially, and about what relations events bear to entities of other kinds. In addition, this book contains an account of what philosophers are up to when they provide reasons for thinking that objects belonging to metaphysically interesting kinds exist. It also gives an account of the role of criteria of identity (eg. identical sets must have the same members) in such reasons, and an account of what criteria of identity must be like in order for them to be able to play such a role.

Originally published in 1937. This book addresses the importance of the theory of values that rests on a general metaphysical understanding founded on a comprehensive view of all aspects of the world. The author speaks against the absolutist theories with a realistic one encompassing a theory of space and time and considering value as an object of immediate intuition. These great philosophical questions feed into discussions of the philosophy of religion and of science. Garnett distinguishes between spiritual and other values on the ground that the spiritual values are not subjective to satiety, while other values are. He contends that our knowledge of mind is as direct and reliable as our knowledge of the physical world. This is an important early book by an influential 20th Century thinker.

Originally published in 1992. The history of Western philosophy can be seen as a battle between those that insist that the "physical universe" exists and those would claim that there is a much larger "world" which contains atemporal and nonspatial things as well. The central part of this book, and the battle, concerns the existence of universals. Starting with the mediaeval definition of the issue found in Porphry and Boethius, the author then considers modern and contemporary versions of the battle. He concludes that what is at stake between naturalists and ontologists is the existence and nature of a number of important categories, like structures, relations, sets, numbers and so on.

Originally published in 1973. In this systematic treatise, Anthony Quinton examines the concept of substance, a philosophical refinement of the everyday notion of a thing. Four distinct, but not unconnected, problems about substance are identified: what accounts for the individuality of a thing; what confers identity on a thing; what is the relation between a thing and its appearances; and what kind of thing is fundamental, in the sense that its existence is logically independent of that of any other kind of thing? In Part 1, the first two problems are discussed, while in Part 2, the third and fourth are considered. Part 3 examines four kinds of thing that have been commonly held to be in some way non-material: abstract entities; the un-observable entities of scientific theory; minds and their states; and, finally, values. The author argues that theoretical entities and mental states are, in fact, material. He gives a linguistic account of universals and necessary truths and advances a naturalistic theory of value.

Originally published in 1947. This book looks at contemporary conundrums in philosophical tendencies, bringing the reader a first-principles review of the purpose of such enquiries in relation to modern life. It presents the importance of the history of the development of philosophical thought, beginning in Part 1 with perception. Significant definitions and theories are identified and later refinements discussed - in particular conceptualism and its development from the Greeks through Berkeley to modern realism and its limitations and critiques. Part 2 brings problems identified by past thinkersto the fore, from Plato's forms to Christian theology, in an examination of the apparent dichotomy between metaphysics and scientific methods. Part 3 examines the Rationalist and the Empiricist attacks on Scepticism and Kant's reconciliation of the differences of both. This provides the context and structure for discussion of the works of Hegel, and ultimate refutation thereof as a confusion between metaphysics and theology. Part 4 identifies the developments in thinking of Positivism, both Modern and Logical, and the New Synthesis of Alexander and Whitehead as the most recent approach.