Eighteenth-century Britain saw an explosion of interest in its own past, a past now expanded to include more than classical history and high politics.
Antiquaries, men interested in all aspects of the past, added a distinctive new dimension to literature in Georgian Britain in their attempts to reconstruct and recover the past. Corresponding and publishing in an extended network, antiquaries worked at preserving and investigating records and physical remains in England, Scotland and Ireland. In doing so they laid solid foundations for all future study in British prehistory, archaeology and numismatics, and for local and national history as a whole. Naturally, they saw the past partly in their own image. While many antiquaries were better at fieldwork and recording than at synthesis, most were neither crabbed eccentrics nor dilettanti. At their best, as in the works of Richard Gough or William Stukeley, antiquaries set new standards of accuracy and perception in fields ranging from the study of the ancient Britons to that of medieval architecture. Antiquaries is the definitive account of a great historical enterprise.

This book discusses the merits of the theory of agonistic memory in relation to the memory of war. After explaining the theory in detail it provides two case studies, one on war museums in contemporary Europe and one on mass graves exhumations, which both focus on analyzing to what extent these memory sites produce different regimes of memory. Furthermore, the book provides insights into the making of an agonistic exhibition at the Ruhr Museum in Essen, Germany. It also analyses audience reaction to a theatre play scripted and performed by the Spanish theatre company Micomicion that was supposed to put agonism on stage. There is also an analysis of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) designed and delivered on the theory of agonistic memory and its impact on the memory of war. Finally, the book provides a personal review of the history, problems and accomplishments of the theory of agonistic memory by the two editors of the volume.

Institutions, networks and communities "standardized" the historical discipline and profession in the nineteenth and twentieth century, in both the old and the new European nation states. This collection focuses on the growth of the infrastructure of historiography: the archives, journals, biographical dictionaries and the historical museums.

This volume brings together 25 defining texts in global history. These pieces cover approaches to the subject from antiquity to the present century and, taken together, show the development of the discipline, providing a solid historiographical, theoretical and methodological overview that will be invaluable for students. The collection gives a unique sense of how, at different times, in different cultural circumstances, students of the past have approached the problems of encompassing the world in a single narrative or theory. This is a reader with an implicit story to unfold. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto tracks how a global understanding of history originated in prophetic writings, how the "Renaissance discovery of the world" multiplied the opportunities for historians to think about history globally, how scientific investigations of change came to exert influence and inspire new thinking among global historians, how "culture wars" ensued between advocates of scientific and cultural models and how changing contexts in the 20th century produced new thematic approaches to the world as a whole. Each part is introduced, setting it in context and explaining the impact of its subject matter on the discipline, as well as the relations between the texts and their place in the overall development of global history.

This book offers a unique perspective on contemporary Polish cinema's engagement with histories of Polish violence against their Jewish neighbours during the Holocaust. Moving beyond conventional studies of historical representation on screen, the book considers how cinema reframes the unwanted knowledge of violence in its aftermaths. The book draws on Derridean hauntology, Didi-Huberman's confrontations with art images, Levinasian ethics and anamorphosis to examine cinematic reconfigurations of histories and memories that are vulnerable to evasion and formlessness. Innovative analyses of Birthplace (Lozinski, 1992), It Looks Pretty From a Distance (Sasnal, 2011), Aftermath (Pasikowski, 2012), and Ida (Pawlikowski, 2013) explore how their rural filmic landscapes are predicated on the radical exclusion of Jewish neighbours, prompting archaeological processes of exhumation. Arguing that the distressing materiality of decomposition disturbs cinematic composition, the book examines how Poland's aftermath cinema attempts to recompose itself through form and narrative as it faces Polish complicity in Jewish death.

This interdisciplinary edited collection establishes a new dialogue between translation, conflict and memory studies focusing on fictional texts, reports from war zones and audiovisual representations of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco Dictatorship. It explores the significant role of translation in transmitting a recent past that continues to resonate within current debates on how to memorialize this inconclusive historical episode. The volume combines a detailed analysis of well-known authors such as Langston Hughes and John Dos Passos, with an investigation into the challenges found in translating novels such as The Group by Mary McCarthy (considered a threat to the policies established by the dictatorial regime), and includes more recent works such as El tiempo entre costuras by Maria Duenas. Further, it examines the reception of the translations and whether the narratives cross over effectively in various contexts. In doing so it provides an analysis of the landscape of the Spanish conflict and dictatorship in translation that allows for an intergenerational and transcultural dialogue. It will appeal to students and scholars of translation, history, literature and cultural studies.

This book asks the question: what is the role of memory during a political transition? Drawing on Ethiopian history, transitional justice, and scholarly fields concerned with memory, museums and trauma, the author reveals a complex picture of global, transnational, national and local forces as they converge in the story of the creation and continued life of one modest museum in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa-the Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum. It is a study from multiple margins: neither the case of Ethiopia nor memorialization is central to transitional justice discourse, and within Ethiopia, the history of the Red Terror is sidelined in contemporary politics. From these nested margins, traumatic memory emerges as an ambiguous social and political force. The contributions, meaning and limitations of memory emerge at the point of discrete interactions between memory advocates, survivor-docents and visitors. Memory from the margins is revealed as powerful for how it disrupts, not builds, new forms of community.

From the Treaty of Versailles to the 2018 centenary and beyond, the history of the First World War has been continually written and rewritten, studied and contested, producing a rich historiography shaped by the social and cultural circumstances of its creation. Writing the Great War provides a groundbreaking survey of this vast body of work, assembling contributions on a variety of national and regional historiographies from some of the most prominent scholars in the field. By analyzing perceptions of the war in contexts ranging from Nazi Germany to India's struggle for independence, this is an illuminating collective study of the complex interplay of memory and history.

How we define border studies is transforming from focussing on "a line in the sand" to the more complex notions of how constituting a border is practiced, sustained and modified. In the expansion of borders studies, the areas explored across Europe and Asia have been numerous, but the specific themes that arise through comparative case studies are novel when approach Europe and Asian borderlands. Comparing the border experiences in East Asia and Europe in a number of thematic clusters ranging from economics, tourism, and food production to ethnicity, migration and conquest, Borders in East and West aims to decenter border studies from its current focus on the Americas and Europe.

This book is about the ways U.S. cities have responded to some of the most pressing political, cultural, racial issues of our time as agentic, remembering actors. Our case studies include New York City's securitized remembrances at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum; Charlottesville's Confederate monument controversies in the wake of the 2017 Unite the Right Rally; and Montgomery's "double consciousness" at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and Legacy Museum. By tracing the genealogies that can be found across three contested cityscapes-New York, Charlottesville, and Montgomery-this book opens up new vistas for research for communication studies as it shows how cities are agentic actors that can wage "war" on urban landscapes as massive actor-networks struggling to remember (and forget). With the rise of sanctuary cities against nativistic immigration policies, "invasions" from white supremacists and neo-Nazis objecting to "the great replacement," and rhizomic uprisings of Black Lives Matter protests in response to lethal police force against persons of color, this timely book speaks to the emergent realities of how cities have become battlegrounds in America's continuing cultural wars.

This edited collection traces the impact of monographic exhibitions on the discipline of art history from the first examples in the late eighteenth century through the present. Roughly falling into three genres (retrospectives of living artists, retrospectives of recently deceased artists, and monographic exhibitions of Old Masters), specialists examine examples of each genre within their social, cultural, political, and economic contexts. Exhbitions covered include Nathaniel Hone's 1775 exhibition, the Holbein Exhibition of 1871, the Courbet retrospective of 1882, Titian's exhibition in Venice, Poussin's Louvre retrospective of 1960, and El Greco's anniversaty exhibitions of 2014.

Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts: Narrating Spaces, Reading Urbanity explores the narrative formations of urbanity from an interdisciplinary perspective. Within the framework of the "spatial turn," contributors from disciplines ranging from geography and history to literary and media studies theorize narrative constructions of the city and cities, and analyze relevant examples from a variety of discourses, media, and cities. Subdivided into six sections, the book explores the interactions of city and text-as well as other media-and the conflicting narratives that arise in these interactions. Offering case studies that discuss specific aspects of the narrative construction of Berlin and London, the text also considers narratives of urban discontinuity and their theoretical implications. Ultimately, this volume captures the narratological, artistic, material, social, and performative possibilities inherent in spatial representations of the city.

This book explores modern representations of the Black Death, a medieval pandemic. The concept of cultural memory is used to examine the ways in which journalists, writers of fiction, scholars and others referred to, described and explained the Black Death from around 1800 onwards. The distant medieval past was often used to make sense of aspects of the present, from the cholera pandemics of the nineteenth-century to the climate crisis of the early twenty-first century. A series of overlapping myths related to the Black Death emerged based only in part on historical evidence. Cultural memory circulates in a variety of media from the scholarly article to the video game and online video clip, and the connections and differences between mediated representations of the Black Death are considered. The Black Death is one of the most well-known aspects of the medieval world, and this study of its associated memories and myths reveals the depth and complexity of interactions between the distant and recent past.

Focusing on the memory of the German Democratic Republic, Towards a Collaborative Memory explores the cross-border collaborations of three German institutions. Using an innovative theoretical and methodological framework, drawing on relational sociology, network analysis and narrative, the study highlights the epistemic coloniality that has underpinned global partnerships across European actors and institutions. Sara Jones reconceptualizes transnational memory towards an approach that is collaborative not only in its practices, but also in its ethics, and shows how these institutions position themselves within dominant relationship cultures reflected between East and West, and North and South.

The earliest development of Arabic historical writing remains shrouded in uncertainty until the 9th century CE, when our first extant texts were composed. This book demonstrates a new method, termed riwaya-cum-matn, which allows us to identify citation-markers that securely indicate the quotation of earlier Arabic historical works, proto-books first circulated in the eighth century. As a case study it reconstructs, with an edition and translation, around half of an annalistic history written by al-Layth b. Sa'd in the 740s. In doing so it shows that annalistic history-writing, comparable to contemporary Syriac or Greek models, was a part of the first development of Arabic historiography in the Marwanid period, providing a chronological framework for more ambitious later Abbasid history-writing. Reconstructing the original production-contexts and larger narrative frames of now-atomised quotations not only lets us judge their likely accuracy, but to consider the political and social relations underpinning the first production of authoritative historical knowledge in Islam. It also enables us to assess how Abbasid compilers combined and augmented the base texts from which they constructed their histories.

This book explores the conflict between the Catalan project to become independent and the Spanish state's opposition to any attempt of secessionism. The volume addresses some of the key political and academic issues of contemporary European societies: nationalism, separatism and sovereignty. The banned referendum in Catalonia in October 2017 unveiled the existence of multiple crises, from territorial to economic and political. Indeed, the Catalan issue is about the crisis of sovereignty: who holds legitimacy to make decisions, and who is in power legally and politically? The book is structured according to three themes: sovereignty and its people, where the realignment to independence, populism and the definition of the demos are discussed; collective identities and actions, to account for the shaping of 'us', the importance of collective memory and the cross-alliances forged during the referendum; and internationalization, focusing on Europeanisation, international media and comparative constitutional perspectives.

This book is the first to bring together analyses of the full range of post-war testimony given by survivors of the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Auschwitz Sonderkommando were slave labourers in the gas chambers and crematoria, forced to process and dispose of the bodies of those who were murdered. They have been central to a number of key topics in post-war debates about the Shoah: collaboration, moral compromise and survival, resistance, representation, and the possibility of bearing witness. Their testimony however has mostly met with a reluctance to engage in depth with it. Moving from testimonies produced within the event, the Scrolls of Auschwitz and the Sonderkommando photographs, to testimonies given at trials and for video archives, and to the paintings of David Olere and the film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, this book demonstrates the importance of their witnessing in the post-war memory of the Holocaust, and provides vital new insights into the questions of representation, memory, gender, and the Shoah.

This book explores the contribution of discursive psychology and discourse analysis to researching the relationship between history and collective memory. Analysing significant manifestations of the moral vocabulary of the Romanian transition from communism to democracy, the author demonstrates how discursive psychology can be used to understand some of the enduring and persistent dilemmas around the legacy of communism. This book argues that an understanding of language as an action-oriented, world-building resource can fill an important gap in the theorizing of public controversies over individual and collective meaning of the recent (communist) past. The author posits that discursive social psychology can serve as an intellectual and empirical bridge that can overcome several of the difficulties faced by researchers working in transitional justice studies and cognate fields. This reflective book will appeal to students and scholars of transitional justice, discursive psychology, memory studies, and the sociology of change.

Drawing on a wide range of texts and using an interdisciplinary approach, this volume shows how Chinese and Japanese intellectuals mobilized the past to create a better future. It is especially significant today given a world where, amidst tensions within Asia and the rise of China, East Asian intellectuals and governments constantly find new political meanings in their traditions. The essays illuminate how throughout Chinese and Japanese history, thinkers constantly weaved together nationalism, internationalism, and a politics of time. This volume explores a broad range of subjects such as premodern and early modern attempts to conjure a politics of Confucianism, twentieth-century Japanese Marxist interpretations of Buddhism, and Japanese and Chinese endeavors to imagine a new world order. In sum, this book shows us why understanding East Asian pasts are essential to making sense of ideological trends in contemporary China and Japan. For example, without understanding Confucianism and how modern intellectuals in China grappled with this body of thought, we would be unable to make sense of the Chinese government's current promotion of the Chinese classics. This book will interest students and scholars of political science, history, Asian studies, sociology, and philosophy.

Oswald Spengler was one of the most important thinkers of the Weimar Republic. In Oswald Spengler and the Politics of Decline, Ben Lewis completely transforms our understanding of Spengler by showing how well-connected this philosopher was and how, at every stage of his career, he attempted to intervene politically in the very real-life events unfolding around him. The volume explains Spengler's politics as the outcome of a dynamic interplay between his meta-historical considerations on world history on the one hand, and the practical demands and considerations of Realpolitik on the other hand.

In 1600, Giordano Bruno, one of the leading intellectuals of the Renaissance, was burned at the stake on the charge of heresy by the Roman Inquisition. He is remembered primarily for his cosmological theories, particularly that the universe was infinite with the Earth not being at its centre. Today, he has become a symbol of the struggle for religious and philosophical tolerance. The Trial of Giordano Bruno, originally published in Italian in 2018, provides English audiences with a complete and updated reconstruction of the inquisitorial trial by analysing the accusations, witnesses, and legal proceedings in detail. The author also gives a detailed profile of Bruno as well as the body which arrested and accused him - the Inquisition. This book will appeal to all those interested in the life and death of Giordano Bruno, as well as those interested in Early Modern legal proceedings, the Roman Inquisition, and the history of religious and philosophical tolerance.

This book provides a critical engagement with the idea of the 'security society' which has been the focus of so much attention in criminology and the social sciences more broadly. 'Security' has been argued to constitute a new mode of social ordering, displacing the 'disciplinary society' that Foucault saw as characteristic of the liberal era. He saw a 'control society' (or 'risk society') characteristic of Neo-Liberalism, in which the deviant behaviour of particular individuals, as less important than general attempts to offset risk and reduce harm. Dodsworth argues that much of this literature is extraordinarily present-ist in orientation, denying the long history of attempts to mitigate risk, prevent harm and manage security which have always been a part of the government of order. This book develops a 'critical history' of security: a thematic analysis of debates about security and aspects of the security society which puts contemporary arguments and practices in dialogue with the texts and practices of the past. In doing so the book develops a cultural analysis of the meanings of security and the way these meanings have been articulated in particular practical contexts in order to understand how the promise of security has so effectively captured the imagination and channeled the effective engagement of people throughout the modern period.

While there is an growing body of work on space and place in many disciplines, less attention has been paid to how a spatial approach illuminates the societies and cultures of the past. Here, leading experts explore the uses of space in two respects: how space can be applied to the study of history, and how space was used at specific times.

Volume III of The Oxford History of Historical Writing contains essays by leading scholars on the writing of history globally during the early modern era, from 1400 to 1800. The volume proceeds in geographic order from east to west, beginning in Asia and ending in the Americas. It aims at once to provide a selective but authoritative survey of the field and, where opportunity allows, to provoke cross-cultural comparisons. This is the third of five volumes in a series that explores representations of the past from the beginning of writing to the present day, and from all over the world.

Empathy and History offers a comprehensive and dual account of empathy's intellectual and educational history. Beginning in an influential educational movement that implanted the concept in R.G. Collingwood's re-enactment doctrine, the book goes back to reveal the fundamental role that empathy played in the foundation of the history discipline before tracing its reception and development in twentieth-century hermeneutics and philosophy of history. Attentive to matters of practice, it illuminates the distinct character of the historical context that empathetic understanding seeks to capture and sets out a new approach to empathy as a special variety of historical questioning.