The period in which we live is marked by increasingly frequent and intense cultural encounters of all kinds. However we react to it, the global trend towards mixing or hybridization is impossible to miss, from curry and chips - recently voted the favourite dish in Britain - to Thai saunas, Zen Judaism, Nigerian Kung Fu, "Bollywood" films or salsa or reggae music. Some people celebrate these phenomena, whilst others fear or condemn them. No wonder, then, that theorists such as Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and Ien Ang, have engaged with hybridity in their work and sought to untangle...

Peter Burke follows up his magisterial Social History of Knowledge, picking up where the first volume left off around 1750 at the publication of the French Encyclopedie and following the story through to Wikipedia. Like the previous volume, it offers a social history (or a retrospective sociology of knowledge) in the sense that it focuses not on individuals but on groups, institutions, collective practices and general trends.

The book is divided into 3 parts. The first argues that activities which appear to be timeless - gathering knowledge, analysing, disseminating and employing it...

The concept of cultural history has in the last few decades come to the fore of historical research into early modern Europe. Due in no small part to the pioneering work of Peter Burke, the tools of the cultural historian are now routinely brought to bear on every aspect of history, and have transformed our understanding of the past. First published in 1978, this study examines the broad sweep of pre-industrial Europe's popular culture. From the world of the professional entertainer to the songs, stories, rituals and plays of ordinary people, it shows how the attitudes and values of the...

Examining the overlooked subject of non-disabled siblings in families where there is a disabled child, Brothers and Sisters of Disabled Children details the experiences of these children and explores what it means to them to have a disabled brother or sister. Through family interviews and one-to-one meetings, Peter Burke records siblings' views on issues ranging from the everyday social restrictions on their lives, the discrimination they face at school, through to their concerns about the future. He also considers the difficulties for siblings of finding their own identity in disabled'...

Disability and Impairment introduces professionals working with families to the everyday issues faced by disabled people of all ages in family life. Peter C Burke shows how social attitudes shape the world of the 'disabled family' either positively or negatively and the effects of stigma. He demonstrates the normality of disability - that children are children whatever their label - and the need for a sensitive professional understanding of the impact of both physical and learning disabilities on family members, in order to improve their quality of life. This book covers the spectrum of...

This book Introduces the idea that the Renaissance in Italy, elsewhere in Europe, and in the world beyond Europe is an example of cultural hybridization.

Sociologists and historians are not always the best of neighbours, each group tending to perceive the other in terms of the crudest of stereotypes. However, the two approaches are obviously complementary - change is structured, and structures change. Each discipline can free the other from its own kind of parochialism and the aim of this book is to bridge the gap between these tow subcultures, to give historians a more acute sense of structure and sociologists a more acute sense of change.

This work focuses on the ideological intertwining between Czech, Magyar, Polish and Slovak, and the corresponding nationalisms steeped in these languages. The analysis is set against the earlier political and ideological history of these languages, and the panorama of the emergence and political uses of other languages of the region.

The leading cultural historian Professor Peter Burke offers here several innovative approaches to cultural history.

The volume is introduced by an important autobiographical essay in which the author attempts to place his own career in its historical context.

A key topic, from which the volume derives its name, is 'secret history', a phrase that came into use in the later seventeenth century to describe a new genre of historical writing by authors who claimed to be able to go behind the scenes and tell the public the real reasons for important events.

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