What distinguishes history as a discipline from other fields of study? That's the animating question of Sarah Maza's Thinking About History, a general introduction to the field of history that revels in its eclecticism and highlights the inherent tensions and controversies that shape it. Designed for the classroom, Thinking About History is organized around big questions: Whose history do we write, and how does that affect what stories get told and how they are told? How did we come to view the nation as the inevitable context for history, and what happens when we move outside those boundaries? What is the relation among popular, academic, and public history, and how should we evaluate sources? What is the difference between description and interpretation, and how do we balance them? Maza provides choice examples in place of definitive answers, and the result is a book that will spark classroom discussion and offer students a view of history as a vibrant, ever-changing field of inquiry that is thoroughly relevant to our daily lives.

On an August evening in 1933, in a quiet, working-class neighborhood in Paris, eighteen-year-old Violette Noziere gave her mother and father glasses of barbiturate-laced 'medication', which she told them had been prescribed by the family doctor; one of her parents died, the other barely survived. Almost immediately Violette's act of 'double parricide' became the most sensational private crime of the French interwar era - discussed and debated so passionately that it was compared to the Dreyfus Affair. Why would the beloved only child of respectable parents do such a thing? To understand the motives behind this crime and the reasons for its extraordinary impact, Sarah Maza delves into the abundant case records, re-creating the daily existence of Parisians whose lives were touched by the affair. This compulsively readable book brilliantly evokes the texture of life in 1930s Paris. It also makes an important argument about French society and culture while proposing new understandings of crime and social class in the years before World War II.

Examensarbeit aus dem Jahr 2003 im Fachbereich Padagogik - Schulwesen, Bildungs- u. Schulpolitik, Note: 1, Hochschule Hannover (Erziehungswissenschaften), Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Nach dem schlechten Abschneiden der deutschen Schulern bei Studien wie PISA und TIMSS wurden vermehrt Stimmen laut, dass das deutsche Schulsystem versagt habe. Aufgrund dessen wurden Uber-legungen angestellt, wie dieser Missstand zu beheben sei. Die Bildungsministerin Buhlmann forderte am 10. Januar 2002: Wir mussen ... schon fruher als bisher anfangen unsere Kinder intensiv und individuell zu fordern und zu fordern." (Fussenich & Grassmann 2002, S. 8). In diesem Zusammenhang kommt dem Anfangsunterricht in der Schule eine besondere Bedeutung zu. Denn nach der Auffassung von Lorenz (2002) ist eine Pravention von Lernschwierigkeiten bereits im Erstunterricht sehr wichtig (S. 26). Mathematische Leistungen in hoheren Klassenstufen korrelieren am starksten mit den Leistungen in der Grundschule. Das hat auch eine Munchener Langzeitstudie herausgestellt. Der Schuleintritt und die erste Schulphase beeinflussen weitgehend - positiv oder negativ - die kunftige Schullaufbahn der Schuler." (Fahn 1981, S. 166). Daher wird dem Satz Die Kinder dort abholen, wo sie stehen" eine immer grossere Bedeutung beigemessen. Eine Forderung gestaltet sich am effektivsten, wenn sie an den indi-viduellen Vorkenntnissen und dem jeweiligen Entwicklungsstand der Kinder ansetzt. Aus diesem Grund be-schaftigt sich diese Arbeit mit der Frage, uber welche entwicklungspsychologischen Voraussetzungen Kinder am Schulanfang verfugen

This is a book about stories, about the public impact of tales of private life. The stories in question are those of the parties to a series of highly publicized court cases, or causes celebers, which gripped the attention of the French-and especially the Parisian-reading public in the two decades preceding the Revolution of 1789.

On an August evening in 1933, in a quiet, working-class neighborhood in Paris, eighteen-year-old Violette Noziere gave her mother and father glasses of barbiturate-laced "medication", which she told them had been prescribed by the family doctor; one of her parents died, the other barely survived. Almost immediately Violette's act of "double parricide" became the most sensational private crime of the French interwar era - discussed and debated so passionately that it was compared to the Dreyfus Affair. Why would the beloved only child of respectable parents do such a thing? To understand the motives behind this crime and the reasons for its extraordinary impact, Sarah Maza delves into the abundant case records, re-creating the daily existence of Parisians whose lives were touched by the affair. This compulsively readable book brilliantly evokes the texture of life in 1930s Paris. It also makes an important argument about French society and culture while proposing new understandings of crime and social class in the years before World War II.

Who, exactly, were the French bourgeoisie? Unlike the Anglo-Americans, who widely embraced middle-class ideals and values, the French--even the most affluent and conservative--have always rejected and maligned bourgeois values and identity.

In this new approach to the old question of the bourgeoisie, Sarah Maza focuses on the crucial period before, during, and after the French Revolution, and offers a provocative answer: the French bourgeoisie has never existed. Despite the large numbers of respectable middling town-dwellers, no group identified themselves as bourgeois. Drawing on political and economic theory and history, personal and polemical writings, and works of fiction, Maza argues that the bourgeoisie was never the social norm. In fact, it functioned as a critical counter-norm, an imagined and threatening embodiment of materialism, self-interest, commercialism, and mass culture, which defined all that the French rejected.

A challenge to conventional wisdom about modern French history, this book poses broader questions about the role of anti-bourgeois sentiment in French culture, by suggesting parallels between the figures of the bourgeois, the Jew, and the American in the French social imaginary. It is a brilliant and timely foray into our beliefs and fantasies about the social world and our definition of a social class.