One of the major intellectual debates at the beginning of the new century concerns the status of accounts of the past. Do historians discover or invent, construct or reconstruct the objects they study? The discussion has been particularly lively in France and in the USA, and it is therefore appropriate that a group of distinguished historians from Britain should now engage with this subject. These ten essays present a historical and critical overview of British historical thought and writing since 1900, focusing on selected periods, regions, disciplines, and themes. This challenging volume...

Louis XIV was a man like any other, but the money and attention lavished on his public image by the French government transformed him into a godlike figure. In this engrossing book, an internationally respected historian gives an account of contemporary representations of Louis XIV and shows how the making of the royal image illuminates the relationship between art and power. Images of Louis XIV included hundreds of oil paintings and engravings, three-hundred-odd medals struck to commemorate the major events of the reign, sculptures, and bronzes, as well as plays, ballets (in which the king...

In the last few years, social historians have discovered what might be called the ?linguistic dimension? of their discipline, just as sociolinguists have been discovering the ?historical dimension? and historians of language the ?social dimension?. They have become interested in language both as a source for social history and also as a historical phenomenon in its own right. This volume of essays brings together some of this recent work by social historians of Britain, France and Italy from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. The authors concern themselves with the politics as well as...

In this collection of essays, of which four are published here for the first time, Peter Burke explores the theory and practice of what is called "new cultural history." He focuses on the varieties of cultural history which have emerged since the writings of Jacob Burckhardt and Johan Huizinga. No new orthodoxy has emerged to replace the classic model, Burke suggests, despite the importance of innovative approaches inspired by social and cultural anthropology.After discussing the origins and identity of cultural history, Burke explores the social history of dreams and the relation between...

The aim of this book is to analyze, to describe and to evaluate the achievement of the Annales School, a journal of historical studies founded in 1929 in France. The journal was founded in order to promote a new kind of historythe substitution of a problem-oriented analytical history for a traditional narrative of events, and the history of the whole range of human activities in place of a mainly political history.
This critical text describes, analyzes, and evaluates the acheivements of the Annales School, combining chronological and thematic approaches. The author distinguishes three...

This is a fascinating account of the geography, chronology and sociology of one of the major cultural movements in European history.

In seinem klar und anregend geschriebenen Buch führt Peter Burke durch den Bildersaal der Geschichte und erweitert so den Fundus historischer Quellen. Bilder sind fern aller Kunstbetrachtung auch als Materialien zur historischen Erkenntnis zu lesen und bieten dem Historiker eine bisher kaum genutzte Chance, Geschichte zu schreiben. Gemälde, Drucke, Karikaturen, Landkarten, Plakate, Photographien und die bewegten Bilder des Films sind vielsagend, sie können aber auch lügen oder die Wirklichkeit verschleiern und manipulieren. Anhand vieler Beispiele von der Antike bis heute, vom...

Ludwig XIV., König von Frankreich, trat 1643 im Alter von vier Jahren die Nachfolge seines Vaters an und regierte 72 Jahre bis zu seinem Tode 1715. In dieser Zeit wurde unter Aufbietung aller damals verfügbaren Medien ein umfassendes Herrscherbild des "Sonnenkönigs" hergestellt.§Diese Inszenierung des königlichen Spektakels fand statt in ausgefeilten Porträts, Gemälden, Münzen, Standbildern, Triumphbögen, Opern und Gedichten. Der Kunsthistoriker Peter Burke rekonstruiert - chronologisch vorgehend - die allmählichen Entwicklungen sowie Wendepunkte der Geschichte und spannt den Bogen...

Peter Burke presents a social and cultural history of the Italian Renaissance. He discusses the social and political institutions which existed in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and analyses the ways of thinking and seeing which characterized this period of extraordinary artistic creativity.