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.

This volume traces the origins and evolution of the idea of human extinction, from the ancient Presocratics through contemporary work on "existential risks." Many leading intellectuals agree that the risk of human extinction this century may be higher than at any point in our 300,000-year history as a species. This book provides insight on the key questions that inform this discussion, including when humans began to worry about their own extinction and how the debate has changed over time. It establishes a new theoretical foundation for thinking about the ethics of our extinction, arguing that extinction would be very bad under most circumstances, although the outcome might be, on balance, good. Throughout the book, graphs, tables, and images further illustrate how human choices and attitudes about extinction have evolved in Western history. In its thorough examination of humanity’s past, this book also provides a starting point for understanding our future. Although accessible enough to be read by undergraduates, Human Extinction contains new and thought-provoking research that will benefit even established academic philosophers and historians.

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.

In the 'encyclopaedic' fourteenth century, Arabic chronicles produced in Mamluk cities bore textual witness to both recent and bygone history, including that of the Fatimids (969-1171CE). For in two centuries of rule over Egypt and North Africa, the Isma'ili Fatimids had left few self-generated historiographical records. Instead, it fell to Ayyubid and Mamluk historians to represent the dynasty to posterity. This monograph sets out to explain how later historians preserved, interpreted and re-organised earlier textual sources. Mamluk historians engaged in a sophisticated archival practice within historiography, rather than uncritically reproducing earlier reports. In a new diplomatic edition, translation and analysis of Mamluk historian Ibn al-Furat's account of late Fatimid rule in The History of Dynasties and Kings, a widely known but barely copied universal chronicle of Islamic history, Fozia Bora traces the survival of historiographical narratives from Fatimid Egypt. Through Ibn al-Furat's text, Bora demonstrates archivality as the heuristic key to Mamluk historical writing. This book is essential for all scholars working on the written culture and history of the medieval Islamic world, and paves the way for a more nuanced reading of pre-modern Arabic chronicles and of the epistemic environment in which they were produced.

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.

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.

Providing an intellectual biography of Pope Pius II, this book offers an understanding of the formation of the concept of ‘European’ ensuring students studying the formation of modern Europe, intellectual history and the history of early modern political thought, and cultural studies have a better understanding of how this concept was formed and disseminated. This volume will be in demand for students of a wide range of topics because it will demonstrate to them how important it is to understand how and when this concept of ‘Europe’ and being ‘European was formed to better understand the later revolutions, slave trade, Empire building and wars. This book is authored by Nancy Bisaha who has expertise on Renaissance humanism and identity and has authored another book Pope Pius II. It contains close readings of his letters, orations, histories, autobiography, and other works.

This collection of essays, written by leading experts, showcases historiographical problems, fresh interpretations, and new debates in medieval and Renaissance history and political thought. Recent scholarship on medieval and Renaissance political thought is witness to tectonic movements. These involve quiet, yet considerable, re-evaluations of key thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas and Machiavelli, as well as the string of lesser known "political thinkers" who wrote in western Europe between Late Antiquity and the Reformation. Taking stock of thirty years of developments, this volume demonstrates the contemporary vibrancy of the history of medieval and Renaissance political thought. By both celebrating and challenging the perspectives of a generation of scholars, notably Cary J. Nederman, it offers refreshing new assessments. The book re-introduces the history of western political thought in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the wider disciplines of History and Political Science. Recent historiographical debates have revolutionized discussion of whether or not there was an "Aristotelian revolution" in the thirteenth century. Thinkers such as Machiavelli and Marsilius of Padua are read in new ways; less well-known texts, such as the Irish On the Twelve Abuses of the Age, offer new perspectives. Further, the collection argues that medieval political ideas contain important lessons for the study of concepts of contemporary interest such as toleration. The volume is an ideal resource for both students and scholars interested in medieval and Renaissance history as well as the history of political thought.

This book traces the translation history of twentieth-century German philosophy into English, with significant layovers in Paris, and proposes an innovative approach to long-standing difficulties in its translation. German philosophy’s reputation for profundity is often understood to lie in German’s polysemous vocabulary, which is notoriously difficult to translate even into its close relative, English. Hawkins shows the merit in a strategy of “differential translation,� which involves translating conceptually dense German terms with multiple different terms in the target text, rather than the conventional standard of selecting one term in English for consistent translation. German Philosophy in English Translation explores how debates around this strategy have polarized both the French-language and English-language translation landscapes. Well-known translators and commissioners such as Jean Beaufret, Adam Phillips, and Joan Stambaugh come out boldly in favor, and others such as Jean Laplanche and Terry Pinkard polemically against it. Drawing on Hans Blumenberg’s work on metaphor, German Philosophy in English Translation questions prevalent norms around the translation of terminology that obscure the metaphoric dimension of German philosophical vocabulary. This book is a crucial reference for translators and researchers interested in the German language, and particularly for scholars in translation studies, philosophy, and intellectual history.

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 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.

This book presents a series of case studies and reflections on the historiographical assumptions, methods, and approaches that shape the way in which philosophers construct their own past. The chapters in the volume advance discussion of the methods of historians of philosophy, while at the same time illustrating the various ways in which philosophical canons come into existence, debunking the myth of analytical philosophy's ahistoricism, and providing a deeper understanding of the roles historiographical devices play in philosophical thought. More importantly, the contributors attempt to understand history of philosophy in connection with other historical and historiographical approaches: contributors engage classical history of science, sociology of knowledge, history of psychology and historiography, in dialogue with historiographical practices in philosophy more narrowly construed. Additionally, select chapters adopt a more diverse perspective, by making place for non-Western approaches and for efforts to construe new philosophical narratives that do justice to the voice of women across the centuries. Historiography and the Formation of Philosophical Canons will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in history of philosophy, meta-philosophy, philosophy of history, historiography, intellectual history, and sociology of knowledge.

For better and worse, the future is often conceived in technological terms. Technology is supposed to meet the challenge of climate change or resource depletion. And when one asks about the world in 20 or 100 years, answers typically revolve around AI, genome editing, or geoengineering. There is great demand to speculate about the future of work, the future of mobility, Industry 4.0, and Humanity 2.0. The humanities and social sciences, science studies, and technology assessment respond to this demand but need to seek out a responsible way of taking the future into account. This collection of papers, interviews, debates grew out of disagreements about technological futures, speculative ethics, plausible scenarios, anticipatory governance, and proactionary and precautionary approaches. It proposes Hermeneutic Technology Assessment as a way of understanding ourselves through our ways of envisioning the future. At the same time, a hermeneutic understanding of technological projects and prototypes allows for normative assessments of their promises. Is the future an object of design? This question can bring together and divide policy makers, STS scholars, social theorists, and philosophers of history, and it will interest also the scientists and engineers who labor under the demand to deliver that future.

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.

Heritage Conservation in the United States begins to trace the growth of the American historic preservation movement over the last 50 years, viewed from the context of the civil rights and environmental movements. The first generation of the New Preservation (1966-1991) was characterized by the establishment of the bureaucratic structures that continue to shape the practice of heritage conservation in the United States. The National Register of Historic Places began with less than a thousand historic properties and grew to over 50,000 listings. Official recognition programs expanded, causing sites that would never have been considered as either significant or physically representative in 1966 now being regularly considered as part of a historic preservation planning process. The book uses the story of how sites associated with African American history came to be officially recognized and valued, and how that process challenged the conventions and criteria that governed American preservation practice. This book is designed for the historic preservation community and students engaged in the study of historic preservation.

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 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.

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.

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.

The first decades of the new century shake old certainties. In a whirlwind of profound changes, do we have more history or less? Does history overwhelm us in all domains of life or is historical understanding in yet another crisis? The answers do not come easily. The recent demise of humanities education, the technological alterations of our social lifeworlds and the human condition, the anthropogenic changes in the Earth system, the growing sense of memory, trauma and historical injustice as alternative approaches to the past, seem to entail contradictions and complexities that do not fit very well with our existing notions of historical understanding. Historical thought as we know it is facing manifold challenges, and we struggle to grasp a larger picture that could encompass them. Boasting a range of contributions from leading scholars, this volume attempts just that. In an innovative collection of short essays, Historical Understanding explores the current shape of historical understanding today, by surveying a variety of historical relations to the past, present, and future in the face of socio-political, ecological and technological upheavals. This book is an invaluable research tool for students and researchers alike, presenting a kaleidoscope-like overview of manifold new ways which we navigate "historically" in coping with present-day challenges, both in wider society and in historiography

This book offers a cultural history of the travels of energy in the English language, from its origins in Aristotle’s ontology, where it referred to the activity-of-being, through its English usage as a way to speak about the inherent nature of things, to its adoption as a name for the mechanics of motion (capacity for work). A distinguished literature deals with energy as matter of science history. But this literature fails to adequately answer a historical question about the rise of the science of energy: How did the commonplace word ‘energy’ end up becoming a concept in science? This account differs in important ways from the history of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary. Discovering the origins and early travels of energy is essential for understanding how the word was borrowed into physics, and therefore a cultural history of energy is a necessary companion to the science history of the term. It is important that modern scholars in a variety of fields be aware that energy did not always have a scientific content. The absence of that awareness can lead to, have led to, anachronistic interpretations of energy in historical sources from before the 1860s. A History of the Cultural Travels of Energy will be useful for those interested in the history of science and technology, cultural history, and linguistics.

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.