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Books > History > Theory & methods
This edited collection explores the histories of trade, a peculiar literary genre that emerged in the context of the historiographical and cultural changes promoted by the histoire philosophique movement. It marked a discontinuity with erudition and antiquarianism, and interacted critically with universal history. By comparing and linking the histories of individual peoples within a common historical process, this genre enriched the reflection on civilisation that emerged during the long eighteenth century. Those who looked to the past wanted to understand the political constitutions and manners most appropriate to commerce, and grasp the recurring mechanisms underlying economic development. In this sense, histories of trade constituted a declination of eighteenth-century political economy, and thus became an invaluable analytical and practical tool for a galaxy of academic scholars, journalists, lawyers, administrators, diplomats and government ministers whose ambition was to reform the political, social and economic structure of their nations. Moreover, thanks to these investigations, a lucid awareness of historical temporality and, more particularly, the irrepressible precariousness of economic hegemonies, developed. However, as a field of tension in which multiple and even divergent intellectual sensibilities met, this literary genre also found space for critical assessments that focused on the ambivalence and dangers of commercial civilisation. Examining the complex relationship between the production of wealth and civilisation, this book provides unique insights for scholars of political economy, intellectual history and economic history.
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.
Narratives of Forced Mobility and Displacement in Contemporary Literature and Culture: Border Violence focuses on the evidence of the effects of displacement as seen in narratives-cinematic, photographic, and literary-produced by, with, or about refugees and migrants. The book explores refugee journeys, asylum-seeking, trafficking, and deportation as well as territorial displacement, the architecture of occupation and settlement, and border separation and violence. The large-scale movement of people from the global South to the global North is explored through the perspectives of the new mobilities paradigm, including the fact that, for many of the displaced, waiting and immobility is a common part of their experience. Through critical analysis drawing on cultural studies and literary studies, Roger Bromley generates an alternative "map" of texts for understanding displacement in terms of affect, subjectivity, and dehumanization with the overall aim of opening up new dialogues in the face of the current stream of anti-refugee rhetoric.
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 develops a comprehensive framework for applying the theory of hauntology to everyday life from ethnographic and clinical points of view. The central argument of the book is that all human experience is fundamentally haunted, and that a shift from ontological theory of subjective experience to a hauntological one is necessary and has urgent implications. Building on the notion of hauntology outlined by Derrida, the discussions are developed within the frameworks of psychoanalytic theory, specifically Jacques Lacan's object relational theory of ego development and his structural reading of Freud's theory of the psychic apparatus and its dynamics; along with the Hegelian ontology of the negative and its later modifications by 20th century philosophers such as Heidegger and Derrida; and the semiotics of difference introduced by Saussure and worked by Jakobson and others. This book argues and demonstrates the immediate relevance of hauntological analysis in everyday life by providing a microanalysis of the roles played by power, meaning and desire; and by using vignettes and data from ethnographic research and clinical settings, as well as references to literature, movies and other cultural products.
This book explores how First World War commemoration events are presented, reported and mediated on the websites of mainstream daily newspapers from seven European countries. The book is the result of a research group - DIREPA-EUROPE (Discours, representations, passe de l'Europe), part of Lemel research network - characterized by a shared interest in media discourse and online newspapers. It presents a fluid analysis chain on the commemoration discourse generated by the WWI Armistice Centenary in 2018, and will be of interest not only to scholars of discourse and media studies, but also of European history, cultural memory, journalism and conflict studies.
This book focuses on the myriad ways that people collectively remember or forget shared pasts through popular dance. In dance classes, nightclubs, family celebrations, tourist performances, on television, film, music video and the internet, cultural memories are shared and transformed by dancing bodies adapting yesterday's steps to today's concerns. The book gathers emerging and seasoned scholarly voices from a wide range of geographical and disciplinary perspectives to discuss cultural remembering and forgetting in diverse popular dance contexts. The contributors ask: how are Afro-diasporic memories invoked in popular dance classes? How are popular dance genealogies manipulated and reclaimed? What is at stake for the nation in the nationalizing of folk and popular dances? And how does mediated dancing transmit memory as feelings or affects? The book reveals popular dance to be vital to cultural processes of remembering and forgetting, allowing participants to pivot between alternative pasts, presents and futures.
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.
In ""The Historian's Conscience"", Macintyre and thirteen other Australian historians put history and the history profession under the microscope. Eminent contributors include Alan Atkinson, Graeme Davison, Greg Dening, John Hirst, Beverley Kingston, Marilyn Lake, and Iain McCalman. They not only ask but answer the hard questions about writing and researching history. How do historians choose their histories? What sort of emotional investment do they make in their subjects, and how do they control their sympathies? How do they deal with unpalatable discoveries? To whom are historians responsible? And for whom are they entitled to speak? Intellectually provocative, often personally revealing, always engaged, ""The Historian's Conscience"" is a 'must read'.
It was not only in his histories that Voltaire thought, worried and wrote about history. In fact, many of Voltaire's most provocative and tantalising remarks on history lie outside the province of the so-called OEuvres historiques, in the vast expanses of his complete works, and historical events and historical figures elicit some of his most imaginative writing. Voltaire's propensity to write about history in works that are not histories sheds new light on his historiographical thought and temper. The historian that emerges from these pages is, by turns, a feverish, bed-ridden man haunted by the St Bartholomew massacre (an overwhelming preoccupation of Voltaire's, although it receives only cursory attention in the prose histories) an inspired poet mythologising Henri IV's epic adventures, a bawdy satirist amused by Joan of Arc, a raconteur nourished by historical anecdotes, even a doting uncle winking at his niece as he elaborates a philosophy of history. In all these forms and at all these times, an interest in history is integral and abiding. Far from being marginal or oblique, these works yield important insights into a pervasive Voltairean sense of history which finds in these different forms both the freedoms and the traditions - and indeed often the readers - denied to the OEuvres historiques. Moreover, innovative works like the Henriade and Candide, which fall into this category, prove as influential to historians as Voltaire's recognised histories. Voltaire's prodigious energy and versatility in fields other than history have probably harmed his reputation as a historian when, already in the eighteenth century, historians were increasingly expected to be specialists. This study shows that Voltaire's historiographical thought ranges across areas and texts artificially sundered by subsequent editorial compartmentalisations, and it reveals a restlessly complex, inventive writer confronting history in numerous different guises.
This volume considers how the act through which historians interpret the past can be understood as one of epistemological and cognitive translation. The book convincingly argues that words, images, and historical and archaeological remains can all be considered as objects deserving the same treatment on the part of historians, whose task consists exactly in translating their past meanings into present language. It goes on to examine the notion that this act of translation is also an act of synchronization which connects past, present, and future, disrupting and resetting time, as well as creating complex temporalities differing from any linear chronology. Using a broad, deep interpretation of translation, History as a Translation of the Past brings together an international cast of scholars working on different periods to show how their respective approaches can help us to better understand and translate the past in the future.
Tsar Ivan the Terrible (Ivan IV, 1533-1584) is one of the most controversial rulers in Russian history, infamous for his cruelty. He was the first Russian ruler to use mass terror as a political instrument, and the only Russian ruler to do so before Stalin. Comparisons of Ivan to Stalin only exacerbated the politicization of his image. Russians have never agreed on his role in Russian history, but his reign is too important to ignore. Since the abolition of censorship in 1991 professional historians and amateurs have grappled with this problem. Some authors have manipulated that image to serve political and cultural agendas. This book explores Russia's contradictory historical memory of Ivan in scholarly, pedagogical and political publications.
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.
This open access book uses Finland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an empirical case in order to study the emergence, shaping and renewal of a nation through histories of experience and emotions. It revolves around the following questions: What kinds of experiences have engendered national mobilization and feelings of national belonging? How have political and societal conflicts turned into new communities of experience and emotion? What kinds of experiences have been integrated into, or excluded from, the national context in different instances? How have people internalized or contested the nation as a context for their personal, family and minority-group experiences? In what ways has the nation entered and affected people's intimate spheres of life? How have "national" experiences been transmitted to children in the renewal of the nation? This edited collection points to the histories of experience and emotions as a novel way of studying nations and nationalism. Building on current debates in nationalism studies, it offers a theoretical framework for analyzing the historical construction of "lived nations," and introduces a number of new methodological approaches to understand the experiences of the nation, extending from the investigation of personal reminiscences and music records to the study of dreams and children's drawings.
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.
As the world negotiates immense loss and questions of how to memorialize, the contributions in this volume evaluate the role of culture as a means to promote reconciliation, either between formerly warring parties, perpetrators and survivors, governments and communities, or within the self. Post-Conflict Memorialization: Missing Memorials, Absent Bodies reflects on a distinct aspect of mourning work: the possibility to move towards recovery, while in a period of grief, waiting, silence, or erasure. Drawing on ethnographic data and archival material from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Argentina, Palestine, Israel, Wales, Peru, Colombia, Hungary, Chile, Pakistan, and India, the authors analyze how memorialization and commemoration is practiced by communities who have experienced trauma and violence, while in the absence of memorials, mutual acknowledgement, and the bodies of the missing. This timely volume will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and scholars with an interest in memory studies, sociology, history, politics, conflict, and peace studies
The purpose of this study is to assess the importance of Switzerland in the life and writings of Edward Gibbon. Whereas the choice of Lausanne as a place of exile for Gibbon to undo his youthful conversion to Roman Catholicism was largely accidental, the society and intellectual resources of that city, perched on its hills overlooking the shores of Lake Geneva, proved to be of lasting influence for the rest of his life. During his period of exile, he began to write in French his first work to be published, the Essai sur l'etude de la litterature, and the subject of Switzerland was his preferred choice of research until his Grand Tour, in which he renewed his residence in Lausanne for a further eleven months, stimulated the idea of writing a history of Rome. Eventually he decided to retire to Lausanne at the end of his parliamentary career to finish the last three volumes of The Decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Brian Norman shows that the liberalism of Gibbon's political philosophy in his criticism of Lausanne's subjection to the aristocratic rule of Berne surprised the patriots of the new canton of Vaud when his Letter on the Government of Berne, which is here established as a youthful work of the late 1750s, was posthumously published at the end of the eighteenth century. The author then proceeds to examine Gibbon's other early writings relating to Switzerland, his letters and journals, The Decline and fall of the Roman Empire and his Memoirs in order to show the abiding effect of the society, language, history, constitution and military organisation of Switzerland on his beliefs and assumptions.
The historian Wolfgang Mommsen was one of the foremost experts on Max Weber as well as an insightful and accessible interpreter of his work. Mommsen's classic book, first published in 1974 under the title The Age of Bureaucracy, not only concisely explains the basic concepts underlying Weber's worldview, but also explores the historical, social, and intellectual contexts in which he operated, including Weber's development as an academic, his relationship to German nationalism, and his engagement with Marxism. Supplemented with a new foreword, a bibliography that includes recent studies, and a postscript by Volker Berghahn that surveys the most important debates on Weber's work since his death, this short volume serves as an excellent resource for scholars and students alike.
In all societies-but especially those that have endured political violence-the past is a shifting and contested terrain, never fixed and always intertwined with present-day cultural and political circumstances. Organized around the Argentine experience since the 1970s within the broader context of the Southern Cone and international developments, The Struggle for the Past undertakes an innovative exploration of memory's dynamic social character. In addition to its analysis of how human rights movements have inflected public memory and democratization, it gives an illuminating account of the emergence and development of Memory Studies as a field of inquiry, lucidly recounting the author's own intellectual and personal journey during these decades.
Prompted by the 'linguistic turn' of the late 20th century, intellectual and conceptual historians continue to devote a great deal of attention to the study of concepts in history. This innovative and interdisciplinary volume builds on such scholarship by providing a new history of the term 'economy'. Starting from the Greek idea of the law of the household, Luigi Alonzi traces the different meanings assumed by the word 'economy' during the middle ages and early modern era, highlighting the semantic richness of the word and its uses in various political and cultural contexts. Notably, there is a particular focus on the so-called Oeconomica literature, tracking the reception of works by Plato, Aristotle, the 'pseudo' Aristotle and Xenophon in the Italian and France Renaissance. This tradition was incredibly influential in civic humanism and in texts devoted to power and command and thus affected later debates on Natural Law and the development of new scientific disciplines in the 17th and 18th centuries. In exploring this, the analysis of the function of translations in the transmission and transformation of meanings becomes central. 'Economy' in European History shines much-needed light on an important challenge that many historians repeatedly face: the fact that words can, and do, change over time. It will thus be a vital resource for all scholars of early modern and European economic history.
This volume explores ways in which the literary trope of the palimpsest can be applied to ethnic and postcolonial literary and cultural studies. Based on contemporary theories of the palimpsest, the innovative chapters reveal hidden histories and uncover relationships across disciplines and seemingly unconnected texts. The contributors focus on diverse forms of the palimpsest: the incarceration of Native Americans in military forts and their response to the elimination of their cultures; mnemonic novels that rework the politics and poetics of the Black Atlantic; the urban palimpsests of Rio de Janeiro, Marseille, Johannesburg, and Los Angeles that reveal layers of humanity with disparities in origin, class, religion, and chronology; and the palimpsestic configurations of mythologies and religions that resist strict cultural distinctions and argue against cultural relativism.
Drawing on theories of historiography, memory, and diaspora, as well as from existing genre studies, this book explores why contemporary writers are so fascinated with history. Pei-chen Liao considers how fiction contributes to the making and remaking of the transnational history of the U.S. by thinking beyond and before 9/11, investigating how the dynamics of memory, as well as the emergent present, influences readers' reception of historical fiction and alternate history fiction and their interpretation of the past. Set against the historical backdrop of WWII, the Vietnam War, and the War on Terror, the novels under discussion tell Jewish, Japanese, white American, African, Muslim, and Native Americans' stories of trauma and survival. As a means to transmit memories of past events, these novels demonstrate how multidirectional memory can be not only collective but connective, as exemplified by the echoes that post-9/11 readers hear between different histories of violence that the novels chronicle, as well as between the past and the present. |
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