Kategoria BISAC: History >> Historiography

Like scholars in other fields, historians have long occupied themselves in self-justification. In a society which calibrates all measures by a single standard, the proof of scientific worth became relevance, which in turn was interpreted as a search not for truth but for political correctness. In a blistering professional critique of this tendency in academic scholarship, perhaps the first of its kind, Oscar Handlin offers an analysis that, if anything, has grown more pertinent over the past decade.

In seventeen chapters, written with the brilliant assurance of a master craftsman,...

For thousands of years we have recorded real lives--the lives of others, and of ourselves. For what purpose and for whom has this universal and timeless pursuit endured? What obstacles have lain in the path of biographers in the past, and what continues to confound biographers today? Above all, how is it that biographies and autobiographies play such a contested, popular role in contemporary Western culture, from biopics to blogs, from memoir to docudrama?

Award-winning biographer and teacher Nigel Hamilton addresses these questions in an incisive and vivid narrative that will appeal...

How do we know what happened in the past? We cannot go back, and no amount of historical data can enable us to understand with absolute certainty what life was like -then.- It is easy to demolish the very idea of historical knowing, but it is impossible to demolish the importance of historical knowing. In an age of cable television pundits and anonymous bloggers dueling over history, the value of owning history increases at the same time as our confidence in history as a way of knowing crumbles. Historical knowledge thus presents a paradox -- the more it is required, the less reliable it...

This is an analysis of the American Revolutionary generation's attempt to create a national history that would justify the Revolution and develop a sense of nationhood. Shaffer pursues a number of themes and establishes a connection between the historians' republican ideology, political concerns and outlook, and the precise ways in which they interpreted American history. He also includes an analysis of their background, education, profession, political persuasion, personal ambitions and circumstances, and attitudes toward the problem of union during the 1780s.

The writings here...

Although Antiquity itself has been intensively researched, together with its reception, to date this has largely happened in a compartmentalized fashion. This series presents for the first time an interdisciplinary contextualization of the productive acquisitions and transformations of the arts and sciences of Antiquity in the slow process of the European societies constructing a scientific system and their own cultural identity, a process which started in the Middle Ages and has continued up to the Modern Age.

The series is a product of work in the Collaborative Research Centre...

The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II by Fernand Braudel revolutionized the study of Mediterranean history on its publication in 1949. Now, 60 years ""after Braudel,"" this book brings together work by area specialists and the latest research on the sea itself in the early modern period, the maritime trade that flourished there, the ships which travelled it and the men who sailed them. It opens up the subject to English-speaking readers interested in maritime history, naval history, the history of the early modern world and the historiographical...

A new perspective on the cultural politics of Charles Brockden Brown

The novels of Charles Brockden Brown, the most accomplished literary figure in early America, redefined the gothic genre and helped shape some of America's greatest writers, including Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. However, little has been said about the latter years of Brown's career. While his early novels are celebrated for their innovative and experimental style, Brown's later historical narratives are often dismissed as uninteresting, and Brown himself has been...

Inschriften, Munzen, literarische Modelle und das klassische Latein sind Elemente antiker Kultur, die in der Renaissance aufgegriffen wurden. Wie weit pragten sie dabei die Geschichtsschreibung der Humanisten? Die Autoren diskutieren die Frage, indem sie die Folgen untersuchen, die die Nutzung einer bestimmten Sprache auf die Geschichtswerke hatte, und beleuchten, wie historiografische Vorbilder der eigenen Zeit angepasst wurden. Schlielich wird danach gefragt, wie sich die Begeisterung der Humanisten fur antike Uberreste in der Historiografie manifestierte.