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Offers an introduction to the writers of history from the Classical times to the present day - Christian historiography - Enlightment to Rankean tradition - From Karl Marx to the Annales School - Defining history - Gives a framework for evaluating historians' work and provides extracts from their writings.
Though history and autobiography both claim to tell true stories about the past, historians have traditionally rejected first-person accounts as subjective and therefore unreliable. What then, asks Jeremy D. Popkin in History, Historians, and Autobiography, are we to make of the ever-increasing number of professional historians who are publishing stories of their own lives? And how is this recent development changing the nature of history-writing, the historical profession, and the genre of autobiography? Drawing on the theoretical work of contemporary critics of autobiography and the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, Popkin reads the autobiographical classics of Edward Gibbon and Henry Adams and the memoirs of contemporary historians such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Peter Gay, Jill Ker Conway, and many others, he reveals the contributions historians' life stories make to our understanding of the human experience. Historians' autobiographies, he shows, reveal how scholars arrive at their vocations, the difficulties of writing about modern professional life, and the ways in which personal stories can add to our understanding of historical events such as war, political movements, and the traumas of the Holocaust. An engrossing overview of the way historians view themselves and their profession, this work will be of interest to readers concerned with the ways in which we understand the past, as well as anyone interested in the art of life-writing.
Bringing together in one volume the key writings of many of the major historians from the last few decades, Historians on History provides an overview of the evolving nature of historical enquiry, illuminating the political, social and personal assumptions that have governed and sustained historical theory and practice. John Tosh’s Reader begins with a substantial introductory survey charting the course of historiographical developments since the second half of the nineteenth century. He explores both the academic mainstream and more radical voices within the discipline. The text is composed of readings by historians such as Braudel, Carr, Elton, Guha, Hobsbawm, Scott and Jordanova. This third edition has been brought up to date by taking the 1960s as its starting point. It now includes more recent topics like public history, microhistory and global history, in addition to established fields like Marxist history, gender history and postcolonialism. Historians on History is essential reading for all students of historiography and historical theory.
Veteran historian Robert Tracy McKenzie offers a concise, clear, and beautifully written introduction to the study of history. Laying out necessary skills, methods, and attitudes for historians in training, this resource is loaded with concrete examples and insightful principles that show how the study of history—when faithfully pursued—can shape your heart as well as your mind.
This book poses a major revisionist challenge to 20th century British labour history, aiming to look beyond the Marxist and Fabian exclusion of working class experience, notably religion and self-help, in order to exaggerate ‘labour movement’ class cohesion. Instead of a ‘forward march’ to secular state-socialism, the research presented here is devoted to a rich diversity of social movements and ideas. In this collection of essays, the editors establish the liberal-pluralist tradition, with the following chapters covering three distinct sections. Part One, ‘Other Forms of Association’ covers subjects such as trade unions, the Co-operative Party, women’s community activism and Protestant Nonconformity. Part Two, ‘Other Leaders’, covers employer Edward Cadbury; Trades Union Congress leader Walter Citrine; and the electricians’ leader, Frank Chapple. Part Three, ‘Other Intellectuals’, considers G.D.H. Cole, Michael Young and left libertarianism by Stuart White. Readers interested in the British Labour movement will find this an invaluable resource.
A collection of over 150 speeches reflecting a broad range of issues before the American public between 1937 and 1997, organized around sixteen interconnected themes, including civil rights, education, and war.
Between the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars and the outbreak of the First World War, Europe underwent a transformation unparalleled in its history. No comparable degree of change had occurred on the Continent since the New Stone Age. Theodore Hamerow examines the innovations that challenged nineteenth-century Europe, using a perspective that transcends events that occurred within national boundaries. He brings together political, social, diplomatic, and national developments to demonstrate how they relate to the profound transformations brought about by the industrial revolution. Using a wealth of statistics and other documentation to buttress insightful generalizations, Hamerow broadly appraises the implications of the shift in Europe from an agricultural to an industrial society. Among the subjects he considers are the rise of the middle and working classes, the spread of literacy and the enfranchisement of the masses, the growth of urban centers of manufacture and trade, the acquisition of colonies, the spread of military technologies, and the changes in the functions of governments.
This book takes a fresh look at the connection between history and policy, proposing that historians rediscover a sense of ‘public purpose’ that can embrace political decision-making – and also enhance historical practice. Making policy is a complex and messy affair, calling on many different forms of expertise and historians have often been reluctant to get involved in policy advice, with those interested in ‘history in public’ tending to work with museums, heritage sites, broadcasters and community organisations. Green notes, however, that historians have also insisted that ‘history matters’ in public policy debate, and been critical of politicians’ distortions or neglect of the past. She argues that it is not possible to have it both ways.
What is history and why should we study it? Is there such a thing as historical truth? Is history a science? One of the most accomplished historians at work today, John Lewis Gaddis, answers these and other questions in this short, witty, and humane book. The Landscape of History provides a searching look at the historian's craft, as well as a strong argument for why a historical consciousness should matter to us today. Gaddis points out that while the historical method is more sophisticated than most historians realize, it doesn't require unintelligible prose to explain. Like cartographers mapping landscapes, historians represent what they can never replicate. In doing so, they combine the techniques of artists, geologists, paleontologists, and evolutionary biologists. Their approaches parallel, in intriguing ways, the new sciences of chaos, complexity, and criticality. They don't much resemble what happens in the social sciences, where the pursuit of independent variables functioning with static systems seems increasingly divorced from the world as we know it. So who's really being scientific and who isn't? This question too is one Gaddis explores, in ways that are certain to spark interdisciplinary controversy. Written in the tradition of Marc Bloch and E.H. Carr, The Landscape of History is at once an engaging introduction to the historical method for beginners, a powerful reaffirmation of it for practitioners, a startling challenge to social scientists, and an effective skewering of post-modernist claims that we can't know anything at all about the past. It will be essential reading for anyone who reads, writes, teaches, or cares about history.
This book is a response to the binary thinking and misuse of history that characterize contemporary immigration debates. Subverting the traditional injunction directed at migrants to ‘go back to where they came from’, it highlights the importance of the past to contemporary discussions around migration. It argues that historians have a significant contribution to make in this respect and shows how this can be done with chapters from scholars in, Asia, Europe, Australasia and North America. Through their work on global, transnational and national histories of migration, an alternative view emerges – one that complicates our understanding of 21st-century migration and reasserts movement as a central dimension of the human condition. History, Historians and the Immigration Debate makes the case for historians to assert themselves more confidently as expert commentators, offering a reflection on how we write migration history today and the forms it might take in the future.
