The XXXIII Conference of the American Italian Historical Asso-ciation was held in Lowell Massachusetts, where Greek immi-grants settled at the turn of the century and established a vibrant community. Italians from Calabria, Naples and Sicily soon followed. Throughout the years the two ethnic groups collaborated in many cultural activities, among which the Lowell Opera Company, under the directorship of Vito Selvaggio, originally from "Magna Graecia" in Italy, became a community leader in the cultural life of Lowell. Selvaggio, with his directorship of The Lowell Opera Company, provided a beautiful performance of Italian Operatic pieces to the conference participants.

Many of the foremost experts in the study of European fascism unite to provide a contemporary analysis of the theories and historiography of fascism. Essays discuss the most recent debates on the subject and how changes in the social sciences over the past forty years have impacted on the study of fascism from various perspectives.

Angela Zusman offers an informative guidebook with step-by-step directions for planning and implementing intergenerational oral history projects, using youth to interview elders. An expert on these programs, Zusman uses her experiences and those of other oral historians to show how community projects are organized, youthful historians located and trained, interviews conducted, and the project archived for future community needs. Included are a variety of sample documents and case studies designed to ease the process for the uninitiated.

From Hannah Adams, born in 1755, to Vicki Ruiz, born in 1955, this book profiles some 200 women historians. Between Hannah Adams, who began compiling historical information while working as a bobbin lace weaver, and Vicki Ruiz, a third generation Chicana hailed for pioneering inclusive multicultural women's history, the reader will encounter women of diverse backgrounds, motivations, and accomplishments. They come from a variety of occupations, including public history, academia, archival work, and popular history writing and a variety of fields, including biography, art history, military history, and history based on issues of region, gender, race, ethnicity, class, or sexuality.

Neglected by the very field they have practiced, these women provide compelling and impressive examples of the historian at work. Selection for inclusion in this volume was based primarily on publications, but other criteria were considered as well, including participation in defining a field of study, influence on other historians or related scholars, cross-disciplinary achievements, and contributions to the work of others. Many of the women were firsts, such as Louise Phelps Kellogg, the first woman president of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (now the OAH), and Mary Frances Berry, the first black woman to become chancellor at a major research university. This book offers contemporary historians, and all readers, the opportunity to explore women historians' motivations, accomplishments, and above all, rich legacies.

With the end of the Cold War, the American political establishment perceived Islam as the new enemy. The 1993 explosion at the World Trade Center, the 1998 bombing of the American embassies in Africa, and the events of 9/11 - all culminated in substantiating this perception.

The War on Terrorism has raised several complicated issues surrounding the relationship between the United States and Islam. With America's increasing involvement in the Middle East, it is imperative for Muslims to understand America; but at the same time, Americans must learn to understand Islam. The progress of civilization hangs on the ability for cooperation and understanding between these cultures.

Although this challenge of removing the "clash" between these two cultures is indeed pressing, it is not new. Negative images of Islam have persisted in the United States throughout its history.

This volume of "The Annals" reflects on how damaging images of Islam have endured in the United States and how Americans' perceptions and misconceptions about Islam is inexorably linked to United States' policy in the Middle East.

The articles in this special issue will spark intriguing debate and discussion as well as shed light on the complex concerns engulfing Americans' ideas about Islam and Muslim states and how this relationship influences global politics.

With the end of the Cold War, the American political establishment perceived Islam as the new enemy. The 1993 explosion at the World Trade Center, the 1998 bombing of the American embassies in Africa, and the events of 9/11 - all culminated in substantiating this perception.

The War on Terrorism has raised several complicated issues surrounding the relationship between the United States and Islam. With America's increasing involvement in the Middle East, it is imperative for Muslims to understand America; but at the same time, Americans must learn to understand Islam. The progress of civilization hangs on the ability for cooperation and understanding between these cultures.

Although this challenge of removing the "clash" between these two cultures is indeed pressing, it is not new. Negative images of Islam have persisted in the United States throughout its history.

This volume of "The Annals" reflects on how damaging images of Islam have endured in the United States and how Americans' perceptions and misconceptions about Islam is inexorably linked to United States' policy in the Middle East.

The articles in this special issue will spark intriguing debate and discussion as well as shed light on the complex concerns engulfing Americans' ideas about Islam and Muslim states and how this relationship influences global politics.

Memory has a history. The Classical world ordered and valued events differently than the Medieval world; which, in turn, was replaced by "the memory" of the Renaissance. Matt Matsuda's compelling, multidisciplinary argument in The Memory of the Modern is that the understanding, value, and uses of memory changed yet again at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, becoming distinctively "modern". Matsuda proves his argument by visiting a remarkable array of "memory-sites": the destruction of a monument to Napoleon during the 1871 Paris Commune; the frantic selling of futures on the Paris stock-exchange; the state's forensic search for a vagabond rapist and murderer; a child's perjured testimony on the witness stand; a scientist's dissecting of the human brain; the invention of cameras and the cinema. Each chapter studies a distinct moment when new representations of the past were forged, contested, and put to cultural and ideological use. And all these diverse events cohere as Matsuda repeatedly shows which "memories" were celebrated and which forgotten, which traditions invented and appropriated and which discarded. More importantly, he explains why, and in doing so answers the broader question, Who controls what is remembered and who is believed?

Throughout the many political and social upheavals of the early modern era, names were words to conjure by, articulating significant historical trends and helping individuals and societies make sense of often dramatic periods of change. Centered on onomastics-the study of names-in the German-speaking lands, this volume, gathering leading scholars across multiple disciplines, explores the dynamics and impact of naming (and renaming) processes in a variety of contexts-social, artistic, literary, theological, and scientific-in order to enhance our understanding of individual and collective experiences.

Historians traditionally claim to be myth-breakers, but national history since the nineteenth century shows quite a record in myth-making. This exciting new volume compares how national historians in Europe have handled the opposing pulls of fact and fiction and shows which narrative strategies have contributed to the success of national histories.

This compact, forcefully argued work calls Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and the rest of the so-called 'New Atheists' to account for failing to take seriously the historical record to which they so freely appeal when attacking religion. The popularity of such books as Harris's The End of Faith, Dawkins's The God Delusion, and Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great set off a spate of reviews, articles, and books for and against, yet in all the controversy little attention has focused on the historical evidence and arguments they present to buttress their case. This book is the first to challenge in depth the distortions of this New Atheist history. It presents the evidence that the three authors and their allies ignore. It points out the lack of historical credibility in their work when judged by the conventional criteria used by mainstream historians. It does not deal with the debate over theism and atheism nor does it aim to defend the historical record of Christianity or religion more generally. It does aim to defend the integrity of history as a discipline in the face of its distortion by those who violate it.

How can we take history seriously as real and relevant? Despite the hazards of politically dangerous or misleading accounts of the past, we live our lives in a great network of cooperation with other actors; past, present, and future. We study and reflect on the past as a way of exercising a responsibility for shared action. In each of the chapters of Full History Smith poses a key question about history as a concern for conscious participants in the sharing of action, starting with "What Is Historical Meaningfulness?" and ending with "How Can History Have an Aim?" Constructing new models of historical meaning while engaging critically with perspectives offered by Ranke, Dilthey, Rickert, Heidegger, Eliade, Sartre, Foucault, and Arendt, Smith develops a philosophical account of thinking about history that moves beyond postmodernist skepticism. Full History seeks to expand the cast of significant actors, establishing an inclusive version of the historical that recognizes large-scale cumulative actions but also encourages critical revision and expansion of any paradigm of shared action.

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.

On the surface, historical scholarship might seem thoroughly incompatible with political engagement: the ideal historian, many imagine, is a disinterested observer focused exclusively on the past. In truth, however, political action and historical research have been deeply intertwined for as long as the historical profession has existed. In this insightful collection, practicing historians analyze, reflect on, and share their experiences of this complex relationship. From the influence of historical scholarship on world political leaders to the present-day participation of researchers in post-conflict societies and the Occupy movement, these studies afford distinctive, humane, and stimulating views on historical practice and practitioners

Is history factual, or just another form of fiction?

Are there distinct boundaries between the two, or just extensive borderlands?

How do novelists represent historians and history?

The relationship between history and fiction has always been contentious and sometimes turbulent, not least because the two have traditionally been seen as mutually exclusive opposites.

However, new hybrid forms of writing from historical fiction to docudramas to fictionalised biographies have led to the blurring of boundaries, and given rise to the claim that history itself is just another form of fiction.

In his thought-provoking new book, Beverley Southgate untangles this knotty relationship, setting his discussion in a broad historical and philosophical context. Throughout, Southgate invokes a variety of writers to illuminate his arguments, from Dickens and Proust, through Virginia Woolf and Daphne du Maurier, to such contemporary novelists as Tim O Brien, Penelope Lively, and Graham Swift.

Anyone interested in the many meeting points between history and fiction will find this an engaging, accessible and stimulating read.

The last several decades have witnessed an explosion of new empirical research into representations of the past and the conditions of their production, prompting claims that we have entered a new era in which the past has become more "present" than ever before. Contemplating Historical Consciousness brings together leading historians, ethnographers, and other scholars who give illuminating reflections on the aims, methods, and conceptualization of their own research as well as the successes and failures they have encountered. This rich collective account provides valuable perspectives for current scholars while charting new avenues for future research.

Tacitus, writing early in the second century AD, is acknowledged to be ancient Rome's greatest historian; his Annals, describing the emperors from Tiberius to Nero (AD 14 - 68), is his greatest work. This book gathers together Professor Woodman's writings on Tacitus over the past twenty-five years, focusing almost exclusively on the AnnalsR. He starts from, and argues for, the basic premiss that, as a historian, Tacitus must be seen in ancient rather than in modern terms. The Annals is a literary text of immense subtlety and acknowledged difficulty and complexity; it is also a very familiar text, read and reread by generations of scholars who want to find out about the Roman empire. One of Professor Woodman's principal contentions is that, through familiarity, these readers have misread significant passages of the text, thereby gaining and perpetuating a distorted view of what Tacitus has to say, especially about Tiberius. This distorted view is revealed, and the true meaning disclosed, by minute and detailed literary analysis. The author offers radically new or different interpretations of some of the most famous passages: the murder of Agrippa Postumus, the notorious accession debate of Tiberius, Tacitus' statement of the so-called `highest function of history', Tiberius' obituary, Nero's debauched water-borne party, and the Pisonian conspiracy against Nero in AD 65. There is also discussion of major narrative sections of Books 1 and 4, concentrating on such matters as structure, vivid representation, imitation and allusion, and dramatic and generic manipulation of the narrative. The new interpretations have profound implications for those who wish to use Tacitus' Annals as a source for what happened in the first century AD.

Norma Thompson opens a new angle of political vision in this imaginative and engaging interpretation of Herodotus' History. She claims for the "father of history" a position in the canon of political thought, finding modern validity in his fundamental perceptions about the importance of stories to the coherence of political communities. Thompson arrives at a unique explanation for Herodotus' side-by-side placement of factual and fanciful historical stories. She contends that he recognized the central importance of compelling stories, even imaginary ones like the tale of Arion, the poet and singer who leaped into the sea to escape Corinthian pirates and was carried to safety on the back of a dolphin. Such stories can become the "facts" of a people's past and thereby the core of the political community. Herodotus understood that stories define and bind together one polity as distinct from others. Further, a polity evolves in reference to its own defining story. Thompson relates Herodotus' work to historical and cultural debate among such scholars as Martin Bernal, Francois Hartog, and Edward Said, and she invites philosophers, philologists, anthropologists, historiographers, and political theorists into the discussion.

Collecting sixteen thought-provoking new essays by leading medievalists, this volume celebrates the work of the late Rees Davies. Reflecting Davies' interest in identities, political culture and the workings of power in medieval Britain, the essays range across ten centuries, looking at a variety of key topics. Issues explored range from the historical representations of peoples and the changing patterns of power and authority, to the notions of 'core' and 'periphery' and the relationship between local conditions and international movements. The political impact of words and ideas, and the parallels between developments in Wales and those elsewhere in Britain, Ireland and Europe are also discussed. Appreciations of Rees Davies, a bibliography of his works, and Davies' own farewell speech to the History Faculty at the University of Oxford complete this outstanding tribute to a much-missed scholar.

While Karl Leyser was pre-eminent in the English-speaking world as the historian of medieval Germany, his work has increased our understanding of European society as a whole. In particular, he brought to life nobles and ecclesiastics, by combining a profound knowledge of the primary sources with an imaginative ability to understand motives and attitudes. Warriors and Churchmen in the High Middle Ages brings together essays by Karl Leyser's pupils, many of them distinguished historians in their own right, on subjects which he himself illuminated.

Race Riots and Resistance uncovers a long-hidden, tragic chapter of American history. Focusing on the «Red Summer of 1919 in which black communities were targeted by white mobs, the book examines the contexts out of which white racial violence arose. It shows how the riots transcended any particularity of cause, and in doing so calls into question many longstanding beliefs about racial violence. The book goes on to portray the riots as a phenomenon, documenting the number of incidents, describing the events in detail, and analyzing the patterns that emerge from looking at the riots collectively. Finally and significantly, Race Riots and Resistance argues that the response to the riots marked an early stage of what came to be known as the Civil Rights Movement.

This is an introduction to the most important theological work of the Middle Ages. In the intellectual tradition of the Christian faith, few thinkers have had a more profound effect upon both the nature of theology and the materials with which it deals than Thomas Aquinas. A knowledge, therefore, of his major work, the "Summa Theologiae", is necessary for the student of theology, let alone any who are concerned with the Western intellectual tradition, so pervasive is Aquinas' thought to the fabric of Western thought. This, together with the immensity, length, and difficulty of the Summa, make a Reader's Guide valuable, even crucial, to a student's first exposure to this work. To address the needs of undergraduates who attempt a reading of this work, Stephen Loughlin presents the basic principles that underlie the "Summa Theologiae" both as a whole and with respect to its three parts, and the varying treatises found within them. "Continuum Reader's Guides" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to key texts in literature and philosophy. Each book explores the themes, context, criticism and influence of key works, providing a practical introduction to close reading, guiding students towards a thorough understanding of the text. They provide an essential, up-to-date resource, ideal for undergraduate students.

The visual turn recovers new pasts. With education as its theme, this book seeks to present a body of reflections that questions a certain historicism and renovates historiographical debate about how to conceptualize and use images and artifacts in educational history, in the process presenting new themes and methods for researchers. Images are interrogated as part of regimes of the visible, of a history of visual technologies and visual practices. Considering the socio-material quality of the image, the analysis moves away from the use of images as mere illustrations of written arguments, and takes seriously the question of the life and death of artifacts - that is, their particular historicity. Questioning the visual and material evidence in this way means considering how, when, and in which regime of the visible it has come to be considered as a source, and what this means for the questions contemporary researchers might ask.

No other North African legend had been adopted, transformed, and used by as many social groups as that of the Kahina myth. In this book, Abdelmajid Hannoum examines the role the myth played in what may be called an ideological conquest. Since its inception in the 9th century, the Kahina legend has provided the ideological armature for use in anticolonial struggles, North African nationalism, Berber nationalism, and Arab feminism. But the Kahina story has also provided the ideological justification for incursions into North Africa by various groups who used the legend to articulate the region as Arab, sometimes French, sometimes Berber, and sometimes Jewish. His book further explores the processes and context in which memories of the past are transformed and shaped, not only by those recounting the legend orally, but by historians writing about North Africa, Islam, and French colonial rule in the region. In the tradition of Edward Said's Orientalism, Abdelmajid Hannoum's study of the Ka In the tradition of Edward Said's Orientalism, Abdelmajid Hannoum's study of the Kahina myth is a vibrant account of the spread of Islam, Arab, and French colonialism in the North African region. Colonial Histories, Postcolonial Memories, through its innovative methodology and extensive use or oral accounts, is also an illuminating exploration of the complexities involved in the production of historical knowledge.

Of the thousands of children and young adults who fled Nazi Germany in the years before the Second World War, a remarkable number went on to become trained historians in their adopted homelands. By placing autobiographical testimonies alongside historical analysis and professional reflections, this richly varied collection comprises the first sustained effort to illuminate the role these men and women played in modern historiography. Focusing particularly on those who settled in North America, Great Britain, and Israel, it culminates in a comprehensive, meticulously researched biobibliographic guide that provides a systematic overview of the lives and works of this "second generation."