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Books > History > Theory & methods
A brilliant meditation on politics, morality, and history from one of the most courageous and controversial authors of our age Renowned Eastern European author Adam Michnik was jailed for more than six years by the communist regime in Poland for his dissident activities. He was an outspoken voice for democracy in the world divided by the Iron Curtain and has remained so to the present day. In this thoughtful and provocative work, the man the Financial Times named "one of the 20 most influential journalists in the world" strips fundamentalism of its religious component and examines it purely as a secular political phenomenon. Comparing modern-day Poland with postrevolutionary France, Michnik offers a stinging critique of the ideological "virus of fundamentalism" often shared by emerging democracies: the belief that, by using techniques of intimidating public opinion, a state governed by "sinless individuals" armed with a doctrine of the only correct means of organizing human relations can build a world without sin. Michnik employs deep historical analysis and keen political observation in his insightful five-point philosophical meditation on morality in public life, ingeniously expounding on history, religion, moral thought, and the present political climate in his native country and throughout Europe.
At the end of the 19th century, German historical scholarship had grown to great prominence. Academics around the world imitated their German colleagues. Intellectuals described historical scholarship as a foundation of the modern worldview. To many, the modern age was an 'age of history'. This book investigates how German historical scholarship acquired this status. Modern Historiography in the Making begins with the early Enlightenment, when scholars embraced the study of the past as a modernizing project, undermining dogmatic systems of belief and promoting progressive ideals, such a tolerance, open mindedness and reform-readiness. Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen looks at how this modernizing project remained an important motivation and justification for historical scholarship until the 20th century. Eskildsen successfully argues that German historical scholarship was not, as we have been told since the early 20th century, a product of historicism, but rather of Enlightenment ideals. The book offers this radical revision of the history of scholarship by focusing on practices of research and education. It examines how scholars worked and why they cared. It shows how their efforts forever changed our relationship not only to the past, but also to the world we live in.
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the use of experimental approaches to the study of media histories and their cultures. Doing media archaeological experiments, such as historical re-enactments and hands-on simulations with media historical objects, helps us to explore and better understand the workings of past media technologies and their practices of use. By systematically refl ecting on the methodological underpinnings of experimental media archaeology as a relatively new approach in media historical research and teaching, this book aims to serve as a practical handbook for doing media archaeological experiments. Doing Experimental Media Archaeology: Practice is the twin volume to Doing Experimental Media Archaeology: Theory, authored by Andreas Fickers and Annie van den Oever.
This book offers a plea to take the materiality of media technologies and the sensorial and tacit dimensions of media use into account in the writing of the histories of media and technology. In short, it is a bold attempt to question media history from the perspective of an experimental media archaeology approach. It offers a systematic reflection on the value and function of hands-on experimentation in research and teaching. Doing Experimental Media Archaeology: Theory is the twin volume to Doing Experimental Media Archaeology: Practice, authored by Tim van der Heijden and Aleksander Kolkowski.
Using Non-Textual Sources provides history students with the theoretical background and skills to interpret non-textual sources. It introduces the full range of non-textual sources used by historians and offers practical guidance on how to interpret them and incorporate them into essays and dissertations. There is coverage of the creation, production and distribution of non-textual sources; the acquisition of skills to 'read' these sources analytically; and the meaning, significance and reliability of these forms of evidence. Using Non-Textual Sources includes a section on interdisciplinary non-textual source work, outlining what historians borrow from disciplines such as art history, archaeology, geography and media studies, as well as a discussion of how to locate these resources online and elsewhere in order to use them in essays and dissertations. Case studies, such as William Hogarth's print Gin Lane (1751), the 1939 John Ford Western Stagecoach and the Hereford Mappa Mundi, are employed throughout to illustrate the functions of main source types. Photographs, cartoons, maps, artwork, audio clips, film, places and artifacts are all explored in a text that provides students with a comprehensive, cohesive and practical guide to using non-textual sources.
In today's world, we can point to many international disputes and interstate conflicts fueled by past events. Historical resentments or memories of past suffering or fame are often used to justify political, economic and even territorial demands. Inter-state disputes and historical conflicts should be understood as evidence of political and social tensions related to active, serious differences in the assessment of the common past. The book explains the role of such conflicts in international relations and suggests ways of classifying them. It presents examples of the internationally relevant instrumentalisation of history from different regions of the world and outlines ways of overcoming them.
The application of digital technologies to historical newspapers have changed the research landscape historians were used to. An Eldorado? Despite undeniable advantages, the new digital affordance of historical newspapers also transforms research practices and confronts historians with new challenges. Drawing on a growing community of practices, the impresso project invited scholars experienced with digitised newspaper collections with the aim of encouraging a discussion on heuristics, source criticism and interpretation of digitized newspapers. This volume provides a snapshot of current research on the subject and offers three perspectives: how digitisation is transforming access to and exploration of historical newspaper collections; how automatic content processing allows for the creation of new layers of information; and, finally, what analyses this enhanced material opens up. 'impresso - Media Monitoring of the Past' is an interdisciplinary research project that applies text mining tools to digitised historical newspapers and integrates the resulting data into historical research workflows by means of a newly developed user interface. The question of how best to adapt text mining tools and their use by humanities researchers is at the heart of the impresso enterprise.
The objective of this book is to identify the narrative strategy and chronology applied in The Chronicle of Halych-Volhynia, and to consider whether this source was intended to form part of a historical collection from the beginning. From the early 13th century in Rus', chronicling began to be cultivated in various centres, focusing on the history of the local area, and therefore in this period historiographical material was collected for specific ideological purposes, providing a genesis of the history of the Rus'. By re-working this history, subsequent authors gave their writings a novel quality, albeit one that remained firmly rooted in older historiographic collections. This study offers a fresh new look at the complexities of Rus'ian historiography in the Middle Ages.
This book develops a new energetic/thermodynamic basis for the cyclic nature of civilizations. The growth of a civilization is due to the ability of the civilization to acquire and utilize resources for growth. The theory developed turns out to be identical to Blaha's previously developed theory, which successfully matches the history of 50+ civilizations. The energetic/thermodynamic theory appears in studies of superorganisms such as ant and bee colonies as well as other organisms including colonies of microbes. It also appears in theories of predator-prey populations such as wolves and rabbits. The consideration of superorganisms, predator-prey population cyclicity, and human civilization cyclicity suggests that there is an underlying unity in Nature in the growth of large groups of organisms and leads to the conclusion that civilizations are superorganisms. Thus this new model of civilizations is called SuperCivilizations. The book begins by overviewing superorganisms including some exciting new evidence for microbial superorganisms on land and in the deep sea. Subsequently we discuss almost all of the known human civilizations within the framework of this theory. We also consider the Richardson theory of arms races and show that Richardson's equations are identical to those of our energetic/thermodynamic model of civilization dynamics. With a suitable choice of parameters the arms race theory has cyclic solutions (as well as the exponential solutions studied by Richardson) that describe the dynamics of armaments growth in the United States - Russia confrontations from 1981 - 2010. The book also describes a program for the exploration and the colonization of the Solar System and a new means of travel to the stars and galaxies with a view towards the development of a space civilization. The probable effects on contemporary human civilizations of meeting an alien civilization are also described in detail. Because of a close analogy with Newtonian dynamics, and realizing that chance plays a major role in human history, the book also develops a probabilistic theory of civilization dynamics. The cyclic theory of civilizations is also generalized to a civilization theory for populations with three interconnected population segments: a dominant minority/leadership, followers, and external immigrants. This generalized theory leads to the cyclic theory of civilizations under reasonable conditions.
In Making Sense of History: Narrativity and Literariness in the Ottoman Chronicle of Na'ima, Gul Sen offers the first comprehensive analysis of narrativity in the most prominent official Ottoman court chronicle. Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines methods from history and literary studies, Sen focuses on the purpose and function of the chronicle-not just what the text says but why Na'ima wrote it and how he shaped the narrated reality on the textual level. As a case study on the literalization of historical material, Making Sense of History provides insights into the historiographical and literary conventions underpinning Na'ima's chronicle and contributes to our understanding of elite mentalities in the early modern Ottoman world by highlighting the author's use of key concepts such as history and time.
Held in Florence in 1929, the First National Exhibition of History of Science was a pivotal event in the shaping of Italian cultural panorama. With more than 8000 items on display coming from public and private lenders, it showed the general public how rich the Italian scientific heritage was and how it could be regarded as part of a general nation-claiming narrative, thus laying the foundation for today's protection policy and scholarly research. Moreover, it is also a telling case-study that offers precious insights into the complex relationships between cultural enterprises and political power during the fascist era, helping us understand how today's geography of Italian cultural institutions have been shaped and reshaped through time.
Staging History unites essays by nine specialists in the field of late medieval and early Renaissance drama. Their focus is on English, Dutch and Humanist German drama, as well as on a modern Swiss adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry V. Featuring prominently in this book are plays by, among others, John Bale, Jacob Schoepper, Johannes Agricola and Jacob Duym. Special attention is also paid to the Croxton Play of the Sacrament and the Dutch abele spelen. So far this topic has not received wide attention within the world of medieval and early Renaissance studies. This exploration aims at arousing more interest in this field by scholars working on European drama from the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance.
Raffaele Pettazzoni (1883-1959), Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Rome and one of the leading historians of religions in the twentieth century, maintained a long correspondence with Herbert Jennings Rose (1883-1961), the gifted Canadian scholar who was Professor of Greek at St Andrews and is best known for his work in the field of ancient religion and folklore. These letters, spanning the years 1927 to 1958, bear witness to the close relationship between the two scholars and focus on two of Pettazzoni's books, both translated by Rose: Essays on the History of Religions (1954) and The All-Knowing God (1956). They also shed light on Pettazzoni's initiative to the foundation of the journal NVMEN (1954), and reveal Rose's brilliant personality.
Chinese Visions of Progress, 1895 to 1949 offers a panoramic view of reflections on progress in modern China. Since the turn of the twentieth century, the discourses on progress shape Chinese understandings of modernity and its pitfalls. As this in-depth study shows, these discourses play a pivotal role in the fields of politics, society, culture, as well as philosophy, history, and literature. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that the Chinese ideas of progress, their often highly optimistic implications, but also the criticism of modernity they offered, opened the gateway for reflections on China's past, its position in the present world, and its future course.
This book involves a new historiographical study of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia that defines its relationship with fifth- and fourth-century historical works as well as its role as a source of Diodorus' Bibliotheke. The traditional and common approach taken by those who studied the HO is primarily historical: scholars have focused on particular, often isolated, topics such as the question of the authorship, the historical perspective of the HO against other Hellenica from the 4th century BC. This book is unconventional in that it offers a study of the HO and fifth- and fourth-century historical works supported by papyrological enquiries and literary strategies, such as intertextuality and narratology, which will undoubtedly contribute to the progress of research in ancient historiography.
This study examines how Tacitus' representation of speech determines the roles of speakers within the political sphere, and explores the possibility of politically effective speech in the principate. It argues against the traditional scholarly view that Tacitus refuses to offer a positive view of senatorial power in the principate: while senators did experience limitations and changes to what they could achieve in public life, they could aim to create a dimension of political power and efficacy through speeches intended to create and sustain relations which would in turn determine the roles played by both senators or an emperor. Ellen O'Gorman traces Tacitus' own charting of these modes of speech, from flattery and aggression to advice, praise, and censure, and explores how different modes of speech in his histories should be evaluated: not according to how they conform to pre-existing political stances, but as they engender different political worlds in the present and future. The volume goes beyond literary analysis of the texts to create a new framework for studying this essential period in ancient Roman history, much in the same way that Tacitus himself recasts the political authority and presence of senatorial speakers as narrative and historical analysis.
Elie Wiesel: Humanist Messenger for Peace is part biography and part moral history of the intellectual and spiritual journey of Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, human rights activist, author, university professor, and Nobel Peace Prize winner. In this concise text, Alan L. Berger portrays Wiesel's transformation from a pre-Holocaust, deeply God-fearing youth to a survivor of the Shoah who was left with questions for both God and man. An advisor to American presidents of both political parties, his nearly 60 books voiced an activism on behalf of oppressed people everywhere. The book illuminates Wiesel's contributions in the areas of religion, human rights, literature, and Jewish thought to show the impact that he has had on American life. Supported by primary documents about and from Wiesel, the volume gives students a gateway to explore Wiesel's incredible life. This book will make a great addition to courses on American religious or intellectual thought.
Design and the Question of History is not a work of Design History. Rather, it is a mixture of mediation, advocacy and polemic that takes seriously the directive force of design as an historical actor in and upon the world. Understanding design as a shaper of worlds within which the political, ethical and historical character of human being is at stake, this text demands radically transformed notions of both design and history. Above all, the authors posit history as the generational site of the future. Blindness to history, it is suggested, blinds us both to possibility, and to the foreclosure of possibilities, enacted through our designing. The text is not a resolved, continuous work, presented through one voice. Rather, the three authors cut across each other, presenting readers with the task of disclosing, to themselves, the commonalities, repetitions and differences within the deployed arguments, issues, approaches and styles from which the text is constituted. This is a work of friendship, of solidarity in difference, an act of cultural politics. It invites the reader to take a position - it seeks engagement over agreement.
This volume discusses a broad range of themes and methodological issues around images, photography and film. It is about sharing a fascination about the visual history of education and how images became the most influential (circulating) media within the field of education on local, regional, national and international levels. Within this volume images are primarily analyzed as presenters, mediators, and means of observation. Images are seen as mobile reproducible media which play an active role within the public and educational sphere. They are means of observation and storytelling, they shape identities by presenting models of how we should act in and perceive the world, they circulate though different contexts and media, all of which impacts their meanings.
This volume historicizes the use of the notion of self-interest that at least since Bernard de Mandeville and Adam Smith's theories is considered a central component of economic theory. Having in the twentieth century become one of the key-features of rational choice models, and thus is seen as an idealized trait of human behavior, self-interest has, despite Albert O. Hirschman's pivotal analysis of self-interest, only marginally been historicized. A historicization(s) of self-interest, however, offers new insights into the concept by asking why, when, for what reason and in which contexts the notion was discussed or referred to, how it was employed by contemporaries, and how the different usages developed and changed over time. This helps us to appreciate the various transformations in the perception of the notion, and also to explore how and in what ways different people at different times and in different regions reflected on or realized the act of considering what was in their best interest. The volume focuses on those different usages, knowledges, and practices concerned with self-interest in the modern Atlantic World from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, by using different approaches, including political and economic theory, actuarial science, anthropology, or the history of emotions. Offering a new perspective on a key component of Western capitalism, this is the ideal resource for researches and scholars of intellectual, political and economic history in the modern Atlantic World.
The Hegel Lectures Series Series Editor: Peter C. Hodgson Hegel's lectures have had as great a historical impact as the works he himself published. Important elements of his system are elaborated only in the lectures, especially those given in Berlin during the last decade of his life. The original editors conflated materials from different sources and dates, obscuring the development and logic of Hegel's thought. The Hegel Lectures series is based on a selection of extant and recently discovered transcripts and manuscripts. The original lecture series are reconstructed so that the structure of Hegel's argument can be followed. Each volume presents an accurate new translation accompanied by an editorial introduction and annotations on the text, which make possible the identification of Hegel's many allusions and sources. This new edition of Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy sets forth clearly, for the first time for the English reader, what Hegel actually said. These lectures challenged the antiquarianism of Hegel's contemporaries by boldly contending that the history of philosophy is itself philosophy, not just history. It portrays the journey of reason or spirit through time, as reason or spirit comes in stages to its full development and self-conscious existence, through the successive products of human intellect and activity. These lectures proved to be extremely influential on the intellectual history of the past two centuries. They are crucial to understanding Hegel's own systematic philosophy in its constructive aspect, as well as his views on the centrality of reason in human history and culture. Volume I holds additional importance because, as well as setting out Hegel's discussion of the history of Chinese and Indian philosophy, it presents the interesting and significant changes that Hegel made to the stage-setting introduction to these lectures across the years from 1819 to 1831. This edition adapts the considerable editorial resources of the German edition that it translates, to the needs of the general reader as well as the serious scholar, so as to constitute an unparalleled resource on this topic in the English language.
In this concise volume, historian David Bebbington offers a summary of various theories of history from ancient times down to the present. Patterns in History provides Christian students of history with a trusted guidein what Mark Noll has described as "the best evangelical introduction to the history of history writing." The updated and expanded fourth edition contains a new chapter on postmodern history, making an already important book even more essential. Bebbington begins by asking "what is history?" He organizes his answer, and the book, around the interplay between history as the historical process (how it has been understood and interpreted in the past) and historiography (the account of the past written by historians). In six chapters Bebbington describes and evaluates each of what he identifies as the main schools of thought about the nature and meaning of the historical process: cyclical history, Christian history, the idea of progress, historicism, Marxist history, and postmodern history. Bebbington analyzes theories of historiography before returning to the question of meaning in history. He argues that Christianity offers scholarly, as well as religious, answers to questions and contradictions that abound in both areas. By assessing how the Christian philosophy of history parallels, informs, and corrects secular theories, Bebbington suggests a chastened way forward for Christian historians. Even as they must acknowledge and wrestle with the complexities of the human story, Christian historians come to the task with an understanding of history as the realm of providence and purpose. Whether that conviction is implicit or explicit in the historian's writing, it is the distinctive element of faithful historical analysis.
Whether it's creating their own teachable moments in costume or coaching students, many educators want to use historic characters in the classroom but lack strategies and resources. The types of questions they ask are answered in Living History in the Classroom: Performance and Pedagogy by outstanding content experts with practical insights into performance, public history, and education. The conceptual framework is based on an instructional model of performance pedagogy, developed by observing outstanding historical character portrayals and analyzing them based on intent, content and action. Written by master teachers and professionals who collaborate nationwide with teachers and students, this work is designed to help educators use the powerful tools of storytelling and interpretation to make history and social studies "come alive" for K-12 students. The professionals who have contributed to this book understand the challenges of a classroom environment, either as teachers, guest artists, or administrators. All have real-world experience with teacher development programs in the disciplines of history and social studies along with recognized content knowledge.. |
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