The Object of the Atlantic is a wide-ranging study of the transition from a concern with sovereignty to a concern with things in Iberian Atlantic literature and art produced between 1868 and 1968. Rachel Price uncovers the surprising ways that concrete aesthetics from Cuba, Brazil, and Spain drew not only on global forms of constructivism but also on a history of empire, slavery, and media technologies from the Atlantic world. Analyzing Jose Marti's notebooks, Joaquim de Sousandrade's poetry, Ramiro de Maeztu's essays on things and on slavery, 1920s Cuban literature on economic...

Hayden White borrows the title for "The Practical Past "from philosopher Michael Oakeshott, who used the term to describe the accessible material and literary-artistic artifacts that individuals and institutions draw on for guidance in quotidian affairs. "The Practical Past," then, forms both a summa of White s work to be drawn upon and a new direction in his thinking about the writing of history.

White s monumental "Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe "(1973) challenged many of the commonplaces of professional historical writing and wider assumptions...