Narrative explanations are preferred over non-narrative, axiomatically, in the humanities. They are more truthful in two senses. Firstly they correspond more closely than a-narrative theories to reality. Secondly they enable, at the very least, value-loaded normative inferences. This is particularly the case when aesthetics is added to the mix. Emslie examines this argument over a wide terrain and over materials ranging from high to popular culture and from close analysis to anecdote, including Marxist Humanism, Feminist literary praxis, Freud, German idealism, discourse ethics, realist aesthetics, Brecht, and sports.

Robert Rosenstone was among the first 'postmodern' historians, and remains one of the most renowned. In this honest, revealing and often funny memoir, he shows us how he got there and why. Adventures of a Postmodern Historian chronicles Rosenstone's research journeys over half a century. Beginning in the 1960s, his offbeat trajectory took him on adventures through the police states of Franco Spain and the Soviet Union, to the Shinto shrines and Zen temples of Japan and ultimately to Hollywood. Alongside his own memoirs, Rosenstone reflects upon developments and changes within the realm of professional history, which in turn reflect the social, cultural, and intellectual shifts of the late 20th century. A pioneer of experimental and creative history, he suggests how the experience of the historian can inflect the written history, and provides a defence of innovation in historical writing that is both intellectually rigorous and entertaining. In doing so he offers a window into the state of history today - and points to exciting new ways of writing the past. This is a book about the craft of history, about both doing research and writing it. It should be required reading for all historians.

This book offers students and scholars an introduction to and insight into the wealth of historiographies produced in various Muslim milieus. Four articles deal with the classical period: archaeology and history in early Islamic Amman; an analysis of sources dealing with Muwahhid North Africa; al-Maqrizi's prosopographical production; the rise of early Ottoman historiography. Three examine sacred history as historiography: in 10th century Fatimid Egypt; in the 16th century Indian Chishti Sufi milieu; and in the Sino-Muslim Confucian tradition in Qing China. The final two articles provide fresh approaches to historiography by respectively looking into the sijils of Ottoman Cairo as historical sources and by highlighting the regional approach to the writing of the history of the Indian Ocean. Contributors: Frederic Bauden, Heather J. Empey, Derryl MacLean, Sami G. Massoud, Murat Cem Menguc, Reem Meshal, Hyondo Park, Patricia Risso, Shafique N. Virani and Michael Wood.

This book offers a new theoretical basis for urban studies and for historical studies in general by addressing one of the main problems that confronts contemporary historians. How is it possible to process and synthesize an increasingly overwhelming amount of specialist research in the face of the theoretical deadlock caused by postmodernism? How can we move beyond its claim that the past is unknowable? Jansen’s approach - in which he claims there is a reality that is accessible to our cognitive capacities - is based on Systems Theory, which has already been applied so successfully in the fields of management and organization.
While focusing his attention on urban historiography, Jansen argues that an integrative systems approach can be used in any field of historical enquiry to create a meaningful picture of the past. He illustrates the importance of structuring data in this way by looking at the profound complexity of the urban environment. This book is therefore important reading not only for urban historians and geographers but also for all social scientists interested in the future study of the European city.

The archaeological study of the Ancient World has become increasingly popular in recent years. A Research Guide to the Ancient World: Print and Electronic Sources, is a partially annotated bibliography. The study of the ancient world is usually, although no exclusively, considered a branch of the humanities, including archaeology, art history, languages, literature, philosophy, and related cultural disciplines which consider the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean world, and adjacent Egypt and southwestern Asia. Chronologically the ancient world would extend from the beginning of the Bronze Age of ancient Greece (ca. 1000 BCE) to the fall of the Western Roman Empire (ca. 500 CE). This book will close the traditional subject gap between the humanities (Classical World; Egyptology) and the social sciences (anthropological archaeology; Near East) in the study of the Ancient World. This book is uniquely the only bibliographic resource available for such holistic coverage. The volume consists of 17 chapters and seven appendices. Arrangement is according to the traditional types of library research materials (bibliographies, dictionaries, atlases, etc.) and the appendices are most subject specific, including graduate programs in the Ancient World, significant archaeologyical sites reports, numismatics, and paleography and writing systems.Access to the contents of the volume is facilitated by extensive author and subject indexes.

This book analyses the international development of the census by comparing the history of census taking on all continents and in many countries. The timeframe is wide, from male censuses in the Bible to current censuses covering the whole population. There is a focus on the efforts and destinies of census takers and the development of methods used to collect information into the census questionnaires. The book highlights international cooperation in census taking, as well as how computerized access to census data facilitates genealogical studies and statistical research on both historical and contemporary societies. It deals with such questions as "Why did the French and British gentry block efforts at census taking in the 18th century?"; "What role did German censuses play during Holocaust?"; Why were the Soviet census directors executed as part of the Moscow processes?"; "Why did US states sue the Census Bureau in the 1970s?"; "How do wars and revolutions affect census taking?". The text ends by discussing whether the days of the population census as we know it are numbered, since countries exceedingly construct censuses by combining information from population registers rather than with questionnaires.

This volume investigates the different attitudes of historians and other social scientists to questions of causality. It argues that historical theorists after the linguistic turn have paid surprisingly little attention to causes in spite of the centrality of causation in many contemporary works of history. Such neglect or criticism of causality in history on a theoretical level contrasts with persisting interest in causal analysis in sociology, political science, international relations and economics; historians have criticised these disciplines for searching in vain for quantitative proofs, probabilities and covering laws. Hewitson demonstrates, through a critical analysis of a series of overlapping linguistic, cultural and post-colonial 'turns', the extent to which intellectual, social, cultural and other historians have come to renounce the very idea of causality. It uncovers the nexus between the formulation of questions, selection of evidence, use of comparison and counterfactuals, and the refinement of theories, all of which are necessary for description and narrative.

Is history more than (in Boswell's words) a chronological series of remarkable events'? Does it have a pattern? Is it fraught with meaning'? Can we discern its trends? What determines its course? In short, can a substantial and coherent philosophy of history be devised that offers answers to these questions? These issues, which have intrigued -and bedeviled - historians for centuries, are explored in this thoughtful book.

In the last two decades our empirical knowledge of the Holocaust has been vastly expanded. Yet this empirical blossoming has not been accompanied by much theoretical reflection on the historiography. This volume argues that reflection on the historical process of (re)constructing the past is as important for understanding the Holocaust-and, by extension, any past event-as is archival research. It aims to go beyond the dominant paradigm of political history and describe the emergence of methods now being used to reconstruct the past in the context of Holocaust historiography.

In recent years, the enemies of Christopher Columbus have succeeded in damaging, if not demolishing, his historical reputation. Today, Columbus is seen not as a hero but as an inept sailor turned brutal conqueror, and his voyage is taught as the opening assault in a genocidal campaign by cruel imperialists bent on exterminating the peaceful natives who inhabited an idyllic wilderness in harmony with the environment. In this highly controversial book, Thomas Bowden challenges all of these assumptions. As he says in his introductory comments, "The real victim of the incessant attacks on Christopher Columbus is Western civilization itself."

This book offers a fresh account of the Anzac myth and the bittersweet emotional experience of Gallipoli tourists. Challenging the straightforward view of the Anzac obsession as a kind of nationalistic military Halloween, it shows how transnational developments in tourism and commemoration have created the conditions for a complex, dissonant emotional experience of sadness, humility, anger, pride and empathy among Anzac tourists. Drawing on the in-depth testimonies of travellers from Australia and New Zealand, McKay shines a new and more complex light on the history and cultural politics of the Anzac myth. As well as making a ground breaking, empirically-based intervention into the culture wars, this book offers new insights into the global memory boom and transnational developments in backpacker tourism, sports tourism and "dark" or "dissonant" tourism.

Theophylact Simocatta, the last historian of classical antiquity, has in the past deterred investigators by the idiosyncrasies of his style. Through examination of Theophylact's narrative, and collation with other available evidence, Dr Whitby has unpicked the obscurities, biases, and errors to clear the way for a more accurate appreciation of the events of the reign of Emperor Maurice (582-602). Maurice's reign witnessed great struggles as the Romans attempted to defend their traditional frontiers on the Danube and in Mesopotamia and Armenia. In both areas, Maurice achieved great successes: in the Balkans, migrations of Slavs and invasions by Avars were held in check, if not completely halted; and in the east the emperor reinstated Khusro II, the legitimate Persian king, and attempted to forge a long-term peace. These events are important both in the historical geography of the Balkans and eastern frontier, and for understanding the fate of the post-Justinian Roman Empire. Whitby reveals the History as a work worthy of serious study in its own right as a product of the last flowering of classical Greek literature in antiquity.

This book uncovers the wealth of philosophical problems that history presents, and encourages further thought on how these issues grow out of historical questions. Its focus on the convergence of history, philosophy and social science makes it ideal for use on undergraduate courses in philosophy of history and philosophy of social science.

Beginning with an energetic and lucid discussion covering traditional issues such as epistemology and metaphysics, the author continues to explore in more detail the current debates surrounding philosophical issues of concern to both history and the social sciences. Tackling a wide range of topics such as truth, objectivity, explanation, communication and narrative, gender, deconstruction and postmodernism, the book affords students in philosophy and social science departments a deeper and wider perspective on the philosophical problems within their areas of study.

Throughout its history, the discipline of ecology has always been profoundly entangled with the history of space and place. On the one hand, ecology is a field science that has thrived on the study of concrete spatial entities, such as islands, forests or rivers. These spaces are the workplaces in which ecological phenomena are identified, observed and experimented on. They provide both epistemic opportunities and constraints that structure the agenda and the analytical sensibilities of ecological researchers. On the other hand, ecological knowledge and practices have become important resources through which spaces and places are classified, delineated, explained, experienced and managed. The impact of these activities reaches far beyond the realms of the ecological discipline. Many ecological concepts such as "biotopes," "ecosystems" and "the biosphere" have become entities that widely resonate in public life and policy making. This book explores the mutual entanglement between space and knowledge-making in the history of ecology. Its first goal is to explore to which extent a spatial perspective can shed new light on the history of ecological science. Second, it uses ecology as a critical site to gain broader insights into the history of the environment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Via a series of case studies - discussing topics that range from ecological field stations in the early-twentieth century Caribbean over wisent breeding in Nazi Germany to computer modelling in North American deserts - the book offers a tour through the changing landscapes of modern ecology.

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.

Starting with an essay on the Renaissance as the concluding phase of the Middle Ages and ending with appreciations of Paul Oskar Kristeller, the great twentieth-century scholar of the Renaissance, this new volume by John Monfasani brings together seventeen articles that focus both on individuals, such as Erasmus of Rotterdam, Angelo Poliziano, Marsilio Ficino, and NiccolA(2) Perotti, and on large-scale movements, such as the spread of Italian humanism, Ciceronianism, Biblical criticism, and the Plato-Aristotle Controversy. In addition to entering into the persistent debate on the nature of the Renaissance, the articles in the volume also engage what of late have become controversial topics, namely, the shape and significance of Renaissance humanism and the character of the Platonic Academy in Florence.

..".an important, indeed significant, collection of essays that examine the historiography of presenting 'nationhood.' There is a shared point of view in the historiographical perspectives of the contributors that warrants the collection being considered as a 'transitional formulation' in Jaspers's sense of the term... The volume] can thus be seen as a watershed book for our time, opening an avenue for a global historiography of 'in-common historiographical premises, ' even as it insists on discerning the diverse and complex perspectives that constitute any particular study." . H-Net Habsburg "The bulk of the analytical essays are well-written, informative and acute in pursuing the theoretical ambitions of the volume...Narrating the Nationis highly interesting and has a lot to offer. It is, at the same time, a focused and many-facetted volume, which everyone can draw inspiration from, both theoretically and thematically. Against this background, the book can be warmly recommended." . H-Soz-u-Kult A sustained and systematic study of the construction, erosion and reconstruction of national histories across a wide variety of states is highly topical and extremely relevant in the context of the accelerating processes of Europeanization and globalization. However, as demonstrated in this volume, histories have not, of course, only been written by professional historians. Drawing on studies from a number of different European nation states, the contributors to this volume present a systematic exploration, of the representation of the national paradigm. In doing so, they contextualize the European experience in a more global framework by providing comparative perspectives on the national histories in the Far East and North America. As such, they expose the complex variables and diverse actors that lie behind the narration of a nation."

International Relations and the Philosophy of History examines the concept of civilization in relation to international systems through an extensive use of the literature in the philosophy of history. A. Nuri Yurdusev demonstrates the relevance of a civilizational approach to the study of contemporary international relations by looking at the multi-civilizational nature of the modern international system, the competing claims of national and civilizational identities and the rise of civilizational consciousness after the Cold War.

..".brings together an array of scholars' perspectives and approaches on how to rework and reframe traditional histories in order to foster and serve as the foundation for future political and economic integration in Europe...overall this volume critically examines the historiography of integration and the foundations of the constantly evolving European community. It successfully provides its readers with a refreshing framework in which European history can be studied and is highly recommended for graduate students and scholars of contemporary European history." . H-German Despite the growing interest in general European history, the European dimension is surprisingly absent from the writing of contemporary history. In most countries, the historiography on the 20th century continues to be dominated by national perspectives. Although there is cross-national work on specific topics such as occupation or resistance, transnational conceptions and narratives of contemporary European history have yet to be worked out. This volume focuses on the development of a shared conception of recent European history that will be required as an underpinning for further economic and political integration so as to make lasting cooperation on the old continent possible. It tries to overcome the traditional national framing that ironically persists just at a time when organized efforts to transform Europe from an object of debate to an actual subject have some chance of succeeding in making it into a polity in its own right."

The 'classical tradition' is no invention of modernity. Already in ancient Greece and Rome, the privileging of the ancient played a role in social and cultural discourses of every period. A collaboration between scholars in diverse areas of classical studies, this volume addresses literary and material evidence for ancient notions of valuing (or disvaluing) the deep past from approximately the fifth century BCE until the second century CE. It examines how specific communities used notions of antiquity to define themselves or others, which models from the past proved most desirable, what literary or exegetic modes they employed, and how temporal systems for ascribing value intersected with the organization of space, the production of narrative, or the application of aesthetic criteria.

"This volume illustrates what it means to do intellectual history and demonstrates why intellectual history remains important, especially in the context of... the 'political history of ideas'." . German Studies Review

"Each essay, in its own right, is accomplished, well written, and highly engaging (even when one disagrees with its claims)." . H-German

Some of the most exciting and innovative work in the humanities currently takes place at the intersection of intellectual history and critical theory. Just as critical theorists are becoming more aware of the historicity of theory, contemporary practitioners of modern intellectual history are recognizing their potential contributions to theoretical discourse. No one has done more than Martin Jay to realize the possibilities for mutual enrichment between intellectual history and critical theory. This carefully selected collection of essays addresses central questions and current practices of intellectual history and asks how the legacy of critical theory has influenced scholarship across a wide range of scholarly disciplines. In honor of Martin Jay's unparalleled achievements, this volume includes work from some of the most prominent contemporary scholars in the humanities and social sciences.

Warren Breckman is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and executive editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas.

Peter E. Gordon is Professor of European History at Harvard University.

A. Dirk Moses is Professor of Global and Colonial History at the European University Institute, Florence

Samuel Moyn is Professor of European History at Columbia University.

Elliot Neaman is Professor of European History at the University of San Francisco.

Creating an unconventional portrait of the life and thought of an Enlightenment historian and scientist, this study focuses upon Jeremy Belknap's letters, journals, and essays, which provide a clear sense of how a dialogue with the past can yield an appreciation of life and acceptance of self. Author of the three volume "History of New Hampshire" and the two volume "American Biography," Jeremy Belknap (1744-1798) was the American Plutarch because he used the past to learn more about his own life and the lives of others. He experienced the past vicariously through his imagination and experientially through his journeys throughout New England in search of clues to the explanation of the natural and human past of America.

The book is built around Belknap's engaging correspondence with his friend Ebenezer Hazard, as well as Belknap's own travel journals of his expeditions to upstate New York and throughout New Hampshire. His journey to the White Mountains of New Hampshire in 1784 was the climax of his active inquiry into the past. Far from a dry, historiographical account, this study provides a fluid and descriptive narrative of Belknap, his journeys, and his times. This is a unique portrayal of human nature in general and 18th century society in particular.

British knowledge about China changed fundamentally in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rather than treating these changes in British understanding as if Anglo-Sino relations were purely bilateral, this study looks at how British imperial networks in India and Southeast Asia were critical mediators in the British encounter of China.