How did people learn to distinguish between past and present? How did they come to see the past as existing in its own distinctive context? In The Birth of the Past, Zachary Sayre Schiffman explores these questions in his sweeping survey of historical thinking in the Western world. Today we automatically distinguish between past and present, labeling things that appear out of place as "anachronisms." Schiffman shows how this tendency did not always exist and how the past as such was born of a perceived difference between past and present. Schiffman takes readers on a grand tour of historical thinking from antiquity to modernity. He shows how ancient historians could not distinguish between past and present because they conceived of multiple pasts. Christian theologians coalesced these multiple pasts into a single temporal space where past merged with present and future. Renaissance humanists began to disentangle these temporal states in their desire to resurrect classical culture, creating a "living past." French enlighteners killed off this living past when they engendered a form of social scientific thinking that measured the relations between historical entities, thus sustaining the distance between past and present and relegating each culture to its own distinctive context. Featuring a foreword by the eminent historian Anthony Grafton, this fascinating book draws upon a diverse range of sources-ancient histories, medieval theology, Renaissance art, literature, legal thought, and early modern mathematics and social science-to uncover the meaning of the past and its relationship to the present.

A study of migration habits as a global phenomenon. Migration in History explores the nature and complexity of the movement of peoples, cultures, and ideas in historical context. This engaging volume presents essays from a variety of scholars to expand our understanding ofthe longstanding process and history of migration as an established global phenomenon. The articles examine population movements and their demographic, social, political, legal, and cultural causes and consequences in Medieval andModern Europe, South Asia, Israel, and China. Topics addressed include voluntary and forced movements of people within and between regions and nations; movement towards urban centers or dispersal into surrounding countryside; transfers of cultural objects, practices, and technologies; experiences of resocialization and the transfer, reconstruction, and creation of memories, myths, values and symbols; the role of local, national, and transnational legal institutions; the relationship between immigration, assimilation, religion, and acculturation; movement in the interest of ethnic autonomy or secession, and as a response to such dangers as deprivation, religious persecution, and the development of border zones within which populations move and interact. Contributors: David Abraham, Elspeth Carruthers, Hasia R. Diner, Luca Einaudi, Joshua Fogel, Gautam Ghosh, and Carl Ipsen. Anthony T. Grafton teaches European history at Princeton University; Marc S. Rodriguez is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame.

The Kunstkammer was a programmatic display of art and oddities amassed by wealthy Europeans during the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. These nascent museums reflected the ambitions of such thinkers as Descartes, Locke, and Kepler to unite the forces of nature with art and technology. Bredekamp advances a radical view that the baroque Kunstkammer is also the nucleus of modern cyberspace.

The Kunstkammer was a programmatic display of art and oddities amassed by wealthy Europeans during the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. These nascent museums reflected the ambitions of such thinkers as Descartes, Locke, and Kepler to unite the forces of nature with art and technology. Bredekamp advances a radical view that the baroque Kunstkammer is also the nucleus of modern cyberspace.

How did people learn to distinguish between past and present? How did they come to see the past as existing in its own distinctive context? Zachary Sayre Schiffman explores these questions in his sweeping survey of historical thinking in the Western world.

Today we automatically distinguish between past and present, labeling things that appear out of place as "anachronisms." Schiffman shows how this tendency did not always exist and how the past as such was born of a perceived difference between past and present.

Schiffman takes readers on a grand tour of historical thinking from antiquity to modernity. He shows how ancient historians could not distinguish between past and present because they conceived of multiple pasts. Christian theologians coalesced these multiple pasts into a single temporal space where past merged with present and future. Renaissance humanists began to disentangle these temporal states in their desire to resurrect classical culture, creating a "living past." French enlighteners killed off this living past when they engendered a form of social scientific thinking that measured the relations between historical entities, thus sustaining the distance between past and present and relegating each culture to its own distinctive context.

Featuring a foreword by the eminent historian Anthony Grafton, this fascinating book draws upon a diverse range of sources--ancient histories, medieval theology, Renaissance art, literature, legal thought, and early modern mathematics and social science--to uncover the meaning of the past and its relationship to the present.