How is historical knowledge produced? And how do silence and forgetting figure in the knowledge we call history? Taking us through time and across the globe, David William Cohen's exploration of these questions exposes the circumstantial nature of history. His investigation uncovers the conventions and paradigms that govern historical knowledge and historical texts and reveals the economic, social, and political forces at play in the production of history.
Drawing from a wide range of examples, including African legal proceedings, German and American museum exhibits, Native American...

These ten essays constitute a distinctive contribution to the enticing but treacherous domain of a comparative history. (The book) succeeds because it is written by qualified scholars who address a delimited, manageable subject (American Historical Review).

The authors of this highly original book set out to remove the persistent boundary between the authors and readers of ethnography on one hand and the subjects of ethnography on the other - those who observe and those who are observed. The authors use stories to reveal Siaya, the Luo-speaking area of Western Kenya down near the Lake but still surprisingly vulnerable to drought. There are the stories of survival by a woman with her carpenter husband in Nairobi, there is the launching of a boat as bride into the Lake and there is the great Boro Christmas disco riot. The book finishes with an...

Historically, nonclassical physics developed in three stages. First came a collection of ad hoc assumptions and then a cookbook of equations known as "quantum mechanics." The equations and their philosophical underpinnings were then collected into a model based on the mathematics of Hilbert space. From the Hilbert space model came the abstaction of "quantum logics." This book explores all three stages, but not in historical order. Instead, in an effort to illustrate how physics and abstract mathematics influence each other we hop back and forth between a purely mathematical development...

The texts, both written and aural, provide valuable perspectives on the second half of the 19th century in particular.