front cover of Histories
Histories
Richer of Saint-Rémi
Harvard University Press, 2011

The Historia of Richer of Saint-Rémi (ca. 950–ca. 1000), an invaluable source for understanding tenth-century West Francia (present-day France), provides a rare contemporary account of the waning Carolingian dynasty, accession of Hugh Capet, and failed rebellion of Charles of Lorraine. Beginning in 888, the Historia surveys a tumultuous century in which two competing dynasties struggled for supremacy, while great magnates seized upon the opportunity to carve out their own principalities. Richer’s descriptive talents are on display as he tells of synods and coronations, deception and espionage, battles and sieges, disease and death, and even the difficulties of travel.

The Historia also sheds light on a controversial figure of the Middle Ages, the legendary cleric and scholar Gerbert of Aurillac. Gerbert, the dedicatee of the Historia, rose from humble beginnings to become archbishop of Rheims, archbishop of Ravenna, and eventually pope (as Sylvester II). The Historia contains a fascinating description of his teaching at the cathedral school of Rheims, where his innovations involved instruments such as the monochord, armillary sphere, and abacus.

Translated into English here for the first time, the Historia holds particular attractions for historians and for anyone interested in the cultural and intellectual developments in the Latin West around the year 1000.

[more]

front cover of Histories
Histories
Richer of Saint-Rémi
Harvard University Press, 2011

The Historia of Richer of Saint-Rémi (ca. 950–ca. 1000), an invaluable source for understanding tenth-century West Francia (present-day France), provides a rare contemporary account of the waning Carolingian dynasty, accession of Hugh Capet, and failed rebellion of Charles of Lorraine. Beginning in 888, the Historia surveys a tumultuous century in which two competing dynasties struggled for supremacy, while great magnates seized upon the opportunity to carve out their own principalities. Richer’s descriptive talents are on display as he tells of synods and coronations, deception and espionage, battles and sieges, disease and death, and even the difficulties of travel.

The Historia also sheds light on a controversial figure of the Middle Ages, the legendary cleric and scholar Gerbert of Aurillac. Gerbert, the dedicatee of the Historia, rose from humble beginnings to become archbishop of Rheims, archbishop of Ravenna, and eventually pope (as Sylvester II). The Historia contains a fascinating description of his teaching at the cathedral school of Rheims, where his innovations involved instruments such as the monochord, armillary sphere, and abacus.

Translated into English here for the first time, the Historia holds particular attractions for historians and for anyone interested in the cultural and intellectual developments in the Latin West around the year 1000.

[more]

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Histories
Books 1–3
Tacitus
Harvard University Press

The paramount historian of the early Roman empire.

Tacitus (Cornelius), famous Roman historian, was born in AD 55, 56 or 57 and lived to about 120. He became an orator, married in 77 a daughter of Julius Agricola before Agricola went to Britain, was quaestor in 81 or 82, a senator under the Flavian emperors, and a praetor in 88. After four years’ absence he experienced the terrors of Emperor Domitian’s last years and turned to historical writing. He was a consul in 97. Close friend of the younger Pliny, with him he successfully prosecuted Marius Priscus.

Works: (i) Life and Character of Agricola, written in 97–98, specially interesting because of Agricola’s career in Britain. (ii) Germania (98–99), an equally important description of the geography, anthropology, products, institutions, and social life and the tribes of the Germans as known to the Romans. (iii) Dialogue on Oratory (Dialogus), of unknown date; a lively conversation about the decline of oratory and education. (iv) Histories (probably issued in parts from 105 onwards), a great work originally consisting of at least twelve books covering the period AD 69–96, but only Books 1–4 and part of Book 5 survive, dealing in detail with the dramatic years 69–70. (v) Annals, Tacitus’s other great work, originally covering the period AD 14–68 (Emperors Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius, Nero) and published between 115 and about 120. Of sixteen books at least, there survive Books 1–4 (covering the years 14–28); a bit of Book 5 and all Book 6 (31–37); part of Book 11 (from 47); Books 12–15 and part of Book 16 (to 66).

Tacitus is renowned for his development of a pregnant concise style, character study, and psychological analysis, and for the often terrible story which he brilliantly tells. As a historian of the early Roman empire he is paramount.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Tacitus is in five volumes.

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Histories
Books 4–5. Annals: Books 1–3
Tacitus
Harvard University Press

The paramount historian of the early Roman empire.

Tacitus (Cornelius), famous Roman historian, was born in AD 55, 56 or 57 and lived to about 120. He became an orator, married in 77 a daughter of Julius Agricola before Agricola went to Britain, was quaestor in 81 or 82, a senator under the Flavian emperors, and a praetor in 88. After four years’ absence he experienced the terrors of Emperor Domitian’s last years and turned to historical writing. He was a consul in 97. Close friend of the younger Pliny, with him he successfully prosecuted Marius Priscus.

Works: (i) Life and Character of Agricola, written in 97–98, specially interesting because of Agricola’s career in Britain. (ii) Germania (98–99), an equally important description of the geography, anthropology, products, institutions, and social life and the tribes of the Germans as known to the Romans. (iii) Dialogue on Oratory (Dialogus), of unknown date; a lively conversation about the decline of oratory and education. (iv) Histories (probably issued in parts from 105 onwards), a great work originally consisting of at least twelve books covering the period AD 69–96, but only Books 1–4 and part of Book 5 survive, dealing in detail with the dramatic years 69–70. (v) Annals, Tacitus’s other great work, originally covering the period AD 14–68 (Emperors Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius, Nero) and published between 115 and about 120. Of sixteen books at least, there survive Books 1–4 (covering the years 14–28); a bit of Book 5 and all Book 6 (31–37); part of Book 11 (from 47); Books 12–15 and part of Book 16 (to 66).

Tacitus is renowned for his development of a pregnant concise style, character study, and psychological analysis, and for the often terrible story which he brilliantly tells. As a historian of the early Roman empire he is paramount.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Tacitus is in five volumes.

[more]

front cover of Histories of Computing
Histories of Computing
Michael Sean MahoneyEdited and with an introduction by Thomas Haigh
Harvard University Press, 2011

Computer technology is pervasive in the modern world, its role ever more important as it becomes embedded in a myriad of physical systems and disciplinary ways of thinking. The late Michael Sean Mahoney was a pioneer scholar of the history of computing, one of the first established historians of science to take seriously the challenges and opportunities posed by information technology to our understanding of the twentieth century.

Mahoney’s work ranged widely, from logic and the theory of computation to the development of software and applications as craft-work. But it was always informed by a unique perspective derived from his distinguished work on the history of medieval mathematics and experimental practice during the Scientific Revolution. His writings offered a new angle on very recent events and ideas and bridged the gaps between academic historians and computer scientists. Indeed, he came to believe that the field was irreducibly pluralistic and that there could be only histories of computing.

In this collection, Thomas Haigh presents thirteen of Mahoney’s essays and papers organized across three categories: historiography, software engineering, and theoretical computer science. His introduction surveys Mahoney’s work to trace the development of key themes, illuminate connections among different areas of his research, and put his contributions into context. The volume also includes an essay on Mahoney by his former students Jed Z. Buchwald and D. Graham Burnett. The result is a landmark work, of interest to computer professionals as well as historians of technology and science.

[more]

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Histories of Dirt
Media and Urban Life in Colonial and Postcolonial Lagos
Stephanie Newell
Duke University Press, 2020
In Histories of Dirt Stephanie Newell traces the ways in which urban spaces and urban dwellers come to be regarded as dirty, as exemplified in colonial and postcolonial Lagos. Newell conceives dirt as an interpretive category that facilitates moral, sanitary, economic, and aesthetic evaluations of other cultures under the rubric of uncleanliness. She examines a number of texts ranging from newspaper articles by elite Lagosians to colonial travel writing, public health films, and urban planning to show how understandings of dirt came to structure colonial governance. Seeing Lagosians as sources of contagion and dirt, British colonizers used racist ideologies and discourses of dirt to justify racial segregation and public health policies. Newell also explores possibilities for non-Eurocentric methods for identifying African urbanites’ own values and opinions by foregrounding the voices of contemporary Lagosians through interviews and focus groups in which their responses to public health issues reflect local aesthetic tastes and values. In excavating the shifting role of dirt in structuring social and political life in Lagos, Newell provides new understandings of colonial and postcolonial urban history in West Africa.
[more]

front cover of The Histories of HIVs
The Histories of HIVs
The Emergence of the Multiple Viruses That Caused the AIDS Epidemics
William H. Schneider
Ohio University Press, 2021

This new collection of essays on HIV viruses spans disciplines to topple popular narratives about the origins of the AIDS pandemic and the impact of the disease on public health policy.

With a death toll in the tens of millions, the AIDS pandemic was one of the worst medical disasters of the past century. The disease was identified in 1981, at the height of miraculous postwar medical achievements, including effective antibiotics, breakthrough advances in heart surgery and transplantations, and cheap, safe vaccines—smallpox had been eradicated just a few years earlier. Arriving as they did during this era of confidence in modern medicine, the HIV epidemics shook the public’s faith in health science. Despite subsequent success in identifying, testing, and treating AIDS, the emergence of epidemics and outbreaks of Ebola, Zika, and the novel coronaviruses (SARS and COVID-19) are stark reminders that such confidence in modern medicine is not likely to be restored until the emergence of these viruses is better understood.

This collection combines the work of major social science and humanities scholars with that of virologists and epidemiologists to provide a broader understanding of the historical, social, and cultural circumstances that produced the pandemic. The authors argue that the emergence of the HIV viruses and their epidemic spread were not the result of a random mutation but rather broader new influences whose impact depended upon a combination of specific circumstances at different places and times. The viruses emerged and were transmitted according to population movement and urbanization, changes in sexual relations, new medical procedures, and war. In this way, the AIDS pandemic was not a chance natural occurrence, but a human-made disaster.

Essays by: Ernest M. Drucker, Tamara Giles-Vernick, Ch. Didier Gondola, Guillaume Lachenal, Amandine Lauro, Preston A. Marx, Stephanie Rupp, François Simon, Jorge Varanda

[more]

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Histories of Infamy
Francisco López de Gómara and the Ethics of Spanish Imperialism
Cristián A. Roa-de-la-Carrera
University Press of Colorado, 2005
"Roa-de-la-Carrera convincingly shows that Gómara, as well as other historians in the period, cannot easily ignore nor erase the contradictions of the Spanish colonial project."
- Luis Fernando Restrepo, University of Arkansas

“In an eloquent and thorough exegesis, Roa-de-la-Carrera reveals how and why López de Gómara, having written the best of all possible books in exultation of Spanish imperialism, nevertheless failed to convince the readers of his time."
- Susan Schroeder, Tulane University

In Histories of Infamy, Cristián Roa-de-la-Carrera explores Francisco López de Gómara's (1511-ca.1559) attempt to ethically reconcile Spain's civilizing mission with the conquistadors' abuse and exploitation of Native peoples.

The most widely read account of the conquest in its time, Gómara's Historia general de las Indias y Conquista de México rationalized the conquistadors' crimes as unavoidable evils in the task of bringing "civilization" to the New World. Through an elaborate defense of Spanish imperialism, Gómara aimed to convince his readers of the merits of the conquest, regardless of the devastation it had wrought upon Spain's new subjects. Despite his efforts, Gómara's apologist text quickly fell into disrepute and became ammunition for Spain's critics. Evaluating the effectiveness of ideologies of colonization, Roa-de-la-Carrera's analysis will appeal to scholars in colonial studies and readers interested in the history of the Americas.

[more]

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Histories of Race and Racism
The Andes and Mesoamerica from Colonial Times to the Present
Laura Gotkowitz, ed.
Duke University Press, 2012
Ninety percent of the indigenous population in the Americas lives in the Andean and Mesoamerican nations of Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Guatemala. Recently indigenous social movements in these countries have intensified debate about racism and drawn attention to the connections between present-day discrimination and centuries of colonialism and violence. In Histories of Race and Racism, anthropologists, historians, and sociologists consider the experiences and representations of Andean and Mesoamerican indigenous peoples from the early colonial era to the present. Many of the essays focus on Bolivia, where the election of the country’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales, sparked fierce disputes over political power, ethnic rights, and visions of the nation. The contributors compare the interplay of race and racism with class, gender, nationality, and regionalism in Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru. In the process, they engage issues including labor, education, census taking, cultural appropriation and performance, mestizaje, social mobilization, and antiracist legislation. Their essays shed new light on the present by describing how race and racism have mattered in particular Andean and Mesoamerican societies at specific moments in time.

Contributors
Rossana Barragán
Kathryn Burns
Andrés Calla
Pamela Calla
Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld
María Elena García
Laura Gotkowitz
Charles R. Hale
Brooke Larson
Claudio Lomnitz
José Antonio Lucero
Florencia E. Mallon
Khantuta Muruchi
Deborah Poole
Seemin Qayum
Arturo Taracena Arriola
Sinclair Thomson
Esteban Ticona Alejo

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Histories of Scientific Observation
Edited by Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck
University of Chicago Press, 2010

Observation is the most pervasive and fundamental practice of all the modern sciences, both natural and human. Its instruments include not only the naked senses but also tools such as the telescope and microscope, the questionnaire, the photographic plate, the notebook, the glassed-in beehive, and myriad other ingenious inventions designed to make the invisible visible, the evanescent permanent, the abstract concrete. Yet observation has almost never been considered as an object of historical inquiry in itself. This wide-ranging collection offers the first examination of the history of scientific observation in its own right, as both epistemic category and scientific practice.

Histories of Scientific Observation features engaging episodes drawn from across the spectrum of the natural and human sciences, ranging from meteorology, medicine, and natural history to economics, astronomy, and psychology. The contributions spotlight how observers have scrutinized everything—from seaweed to X-ray radiation, household budgets to the emotions—with ingenuity, curiosity, and perseverance verging on obsession. This book makes a compelling case for the significance of the long, surprising, and epistemologically significant history of scientific observation, a history full of innovations that have enlarged the possibilities of perception, judgment, and reason.

[more]

front cover of Histories of Southeastern Archaeology
Histories of Southeastern Archaeology
Edited by Shannon Tushingham, Jane Hill, and Charles H. McNutt
University of Alabama Press, 2002
This volume provides a comprehensive, broad-based overview, including first-person accounts, of the development and conduct of archaeology in the Southeast over the past three decades.

Histories of Southeastern Archaeology originated as a symposium at the 1999 Southeastern Archaeological Conference (SEAC) organized in honor of the retirement of Charles H. McNutt following 30 years of teaching anthropology. Written for the most part by members of the first post-depression generation of southeastern archaeologists, this volume offers a window not only into the archaeological past of the United States but also into the hopes and despairs of archaeologists who worked to write that unrecorded history or to test scientific theories concerning culture.

The contributors take different approaches, each guided by experience, personality, and location, as well as by the legislation that shaped the practical conduct of archaeology in their area. Despite the state-by-state approach, there are certain common themes, such as the effect (or lack thereof) of changing theory in Americanist archaeology, the explosion of contract archaeology and its relationship to academic archaeology, goals achieved or not achieved, and the common ground of SEAC.
 

This book tells us how we learned what we now know about the Southeast's unwritten past. Of obvious interest to professionals and students of the field, this volume will also be sought after by historians, political scientists, amateurs, and anyone interested in the South.

Additional reviews:

"A unique publication that presents numerous historical, topical, and personal perspectives on the archaeological heritage of the Southeast."—Southeastern Archaeology
[more]

front cover of Histories of Technology, the Environment, and Modern Britain
Histories of Technology, the Environment, and Modern Britain
Edited by Jon Agar and Jacob Ward
University College London, 2018
Histories of Technology, the Environment, and Modern Britain brings together historians with a wide range of interests to take a broad, multifaceted look at how technology and the environment have become intimately and irreversibly entangled in Britain over the last three hundred years. For the first time, the book brings together two perspectives with ample insights into the history of Britain since the Industrial Revolution: the history of technology and environmental history. Both technologies and our living and nonliving environment comprise material forms of organization—or self-organization—and both have changed over time, sometimes in intersecting ways. Among the technologies discussed in the collection are bulldozers, submarine cables, automobiles, flood barriers, medical devices, museum displays, and biotechnologies. Environments discussed include both places of natural beauty and pollution, bogs, cities, farms, land, and sea. The book explores this diversity and offers an integrated framework for understanding these intersections.
 
[more]

front cover of Histories of the Present
Histories of the Present
People and Power in Ecuador
Norman E. Whitten Jr. and Dorothea Scott Whitten
University of Illinois Press, 2011
The wellspring of critical analysis in this book emerges from Ecuador's major Indigenous Uprising of 1990 and its ongoing aftermath in which indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian action transformed the nation-state and established new dimensions of human relationships. The authors weave anthropological theory with longitudinal Ecuadorian ethnography to produce a unique contribution to Latin American studies.
[more]

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Histories of the Transgender Child
Jules Gill-Peterson
University of Minnesota Press, 2018

A groundbreaking twentieth-century history of transgender children


With transgender rights front and center in American politics, media, and culture, the pervasive myth still exists that today’s transgender children are a brand new generation—pioneers in a field of new obstacles and hurdles. Histories of the Transgender Child shatters this myth, uncovering a previously unknown twentieth-century history when transgender children not only existed but preexisted the term transgender and its predecessors, playing a central role in the medicalization of trans people, and all sex and gender.

Beginning with the early 1900s when children with “ambiguous” sex first sought medical attention, to the 1930s when transgender people began to seek out doctors involved in altering children’s sex, to the invention of the category gender, and finally the 1960s and ’70s when, as the field institutionalized, transgender children began to take hormones, change their names, and even access gender confirmation, Julian Gill-Peterson reconstructs the medicalization and racialization of children’s bodies. Throughout, they foreground the racial history of medicine that excludes black and trans of color children through the concept of gender’s plasticity, placing race at the center of their analysis and at the center of transgender studies.

Until now, little has been known about early transgender history and life and its relevance to children. Using a wealth of archival research from hospitals and clinics, including incredible personal letters from children to doctors, as well as scientific and medical literature, this book reaches back to the first half of the twentieth century—a time when the category transgender was not available but surely existed, in the lives of children and parents.

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Histories on Econometrics, Volume 43
Marcel Boumans, Ariane Dupont-Kieffer, Dou Qin, editors
Duke University Press
This volume considers the history of econometrics, a field of economics that combines statistics, mathematics, and economic theory. Contributors scrutinize accounts of the field’s shifting boundaries and the development of a cohesive scholarly community of econometricians. These essays consider applied research and methodologies in context and connect the history of econometrics to contemporary developments in related disciplines and technologies. Analyzing the practice of econometrics around the world since its introduction in the 1920s, contributors examine the relationship between sociology and welfare in Italian econometrics, the extraordinary investment in macroeconometric models and input-output models in Japan, practices of econometrics in relation to computation and philosophy, and the recognition of unusual methodological stances in both theoretical and applied work. Reinterpreting the accepted history of econometrics allows historians to focus on new alliances, methods, and entrepreneurial models that resolve past obscurities and open up new areas for future inquiry.

Contributors: John Aldrich, Jeff E. Biddle, Olav Bjerkholt, Marcel Boumans, Chao-Hsi Huang, Robert W. Dimand, Duo Qin, Ariane Dupont-Kieffer, Hsiang-Ke Chao, Aiko Ikeo, Francisco Louçã, Mary S. Morgan, Daniela Parisi, Alain Pirotte, Charles G. Renfro, Thomas Stapleford, Sofia Terlica

Marcel Boumans is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Amsterdam. Ariane Dupont-Kieffer is a Researcher at the French National Institute of Research on Transport and Safety. Duo Qin is Reader of Economics at the University of London.

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The Histories, Volume I
Books 1–2
Translated by W. R. PatonRevised by F. W. Walbank and Christian Habicht
Harvard University Press, 2010

Hellenistic history.

The historian Polybius (ca. 200–118 BC) was born into a leading family of Megalopolis in the Peloponnese (Morea) and served the Achaean League in arms and diplomacy for many years, favoring alliance with Rome. From 168 to 151 he was held hostage in Rome, where he became a friend of Lucius Aemilius Paulus and his two sons, especially Scipio Aemilianus, whose campaigns, including the destruction of Carthage, he later attended. Late in his life he became a trusted mediator between Greece and the Romans; helped in the discussions that preceded the final war with Carthage; and after 146 was entrusted by the Romans with the details of administration in Greece.

Polybius’ overall theme is how and why the Romans spread their power as they did. The main part of his history covers the years 264–146 BC, describing the rise of Rome, her destruction of Carthage, and her eventual domination of the Greek world. It is a great work: accurate, thoughtful, largely impartial, based on research, and full of insight into customs, institutions, geography, the causes of events, and the character of peoples. It is a vital achievement of the first importance despite the incomplete state in which all but the first five of its original forty books have reached us.

For this edition, W. R. Paton’s excellent translation, first published in 1922, has been thoroughly revised, the Büttner-Wobst Greek text corrected, and explanatory notes and a new introduction added, all reflecting the latest scholarship.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Polybius is in six volumes.

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logo for Harvard University Press
The Histories, Volume I
Books 1-2
Polybius
Harvard University Press

Polybius (born ca. 208 BCE) of Megalopolis in the Peloponnese (Morea), served the Achaean League in arms and diplomacy for many years, favouring alliance with Rome. From 168 to 151 he was hostage in Rome where he became a friend of Aemilius Paulus and his two sons, and especially adopted Scipio Aemilianus whose campaigns he attended later. In late life he was trusted mediator between Greece and the Romans whom he admired; helped in the discussions which preceded the final war with Carthage; and, after 146, was entrusted by the Romans with details of administration in Greece. He died at the age of 82 after a fall from his horse.

The main part of Polybius's history covers the years 264–146 BCE. It describes the rise of Rome to the destruction of Carthage and the domination of Greece by Rome. It is a great work, accurate, thoughtful, largely impartial, based on research, full of insight into customs, institutions, geography, causes of events and character of people; it is a vital achievement of first rate importance, despite the incomplete state in which all but the first five of the forty books have reached us. Polybius's overall theme is how and why the Romans spread their power as they did.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Polybius is in six volumes.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Histories, Volume II
Books 3–4
PolybiusTranslated by W. R. PatonRevised by F. W. Walbank and Christian Habicht
Harvard University Press, 2010

Hellenistic history.

The historian Polybius (ca. 200–118 BC) was born into a leading family of Megalopolis in the Peloponnese (Morea) and served the Achaean League in arms and diplomacy for many years, favoring alliance with Rome. From 168 to 151 he was held hostage in Rome, where he became a friend of Lucius Aemilius Paulus and his two sons, especially Scipio Aemilianus, whose campaigns, including the destruction of Carthage, he later attended. Late in his life he became a trusted mediator between Greece and the Romans; helped in the discussions that preceded the final war with Carthage; and after 146 was entrusted by the Romans with the details of administration in Greece.

Polybius’ overall theme is how and why the Romans spread their power as they did. The main part of his history covers the years 264–146 BC, describing the rise of Rome, her destruction of Carthage, and her eventual domination of the Greek world. It is a great work: accurate, thoughtful, largely impartial, based on research, and full of insight into customs, institutions, geography, the causes of events, and the character of peoples. It is a vital achievement of the first importance despite the incomplete state in which all but the first five of its original forty books have reached us.

For this edition, W. R. Paton’s excellent translation, first published in 1922, has been thoroughly revised, the Büttner-Wobst Greek text corrected, and explanatory notes and a new introduction added, all reflecting the latest scholarship.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Polybius is in six volumes.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Histories, Volume II
Books 3-4
Polybius
Harvard University Press

Polybius (born ca. 208 BCE) of Megalopolis in the Peloponnese (Morea), served the Achaean League in arms and diplomacy for many years, favouring alliance with Rome. From 168 to 151 he was hostage in Rome where he became a friend of Aemilius Paulus and his two sons, and especially adopted Scipio Aemilianus whose campaigns he attended later. In late life he was trusted mediator between Greece and the Romans whom he admired; helped in the discussions which preceded the final war with Carthage; and, after 146, was entrusted by the Romans with details of administration in Greece. He died at the age of 82 after a fall from his horse.

The main part of Polybius's history covers the years 264–146 BCE. It describes the rise of Rome to the destruction of Carthage and the domination of Greece by Rome. It is a great work, accurate, thoughtful, largely impartial, based on research, full of insight into customs, institutions, geography, causes of events and character of people; it is a vital achievement of first rate importance, despite the incomplete state in which all but the first five of the forty books have reached us. Polybius's overall theme is how and why the Romans spread their power as they did.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Polybius is in six volumes.

[more]

front cover of The Histories, Volume III
The Histories, Volume III
Books 5–8
Translated by W. R. PatonRevised by F. W. Walbank and Christian Habicht
Harvard University Press, 2010

Hellenistic history.

The historian Polybius (ca. 200–118 BC) was born into a leading family of Megalopolis in the Peloponnese (Morea) and served the Achaean League in arms and diplomacy for many years, favoring alliance with Rome. From 168 to 151 he was held hostage in Rome, where he became a friend of Lucius Aemilius Paulus and his two sons, especially Scipio Aemilianus, whose campaigns, including the destruction of Carthage, he later attended. Late in his life he became a trusted mediator between Greece and the Romans; helped in the discussions that preceded the final war with Carthage; and after 146 was entrusted by the Romans with the details of administration in Greece.

Polybius’ overall theme is how and why the Romans spread their power as they did. The main part of his history covers the years 264–146 BC, describing the rise of Rome, her destruction of Carthage, and her eventual domination of the Greek world. It is a great work: accurate, thoughtful, largely impartial, based on research, and full of insight into customs, institutions, geography, the causes of events, and the character of peoples. It is a vital achievement of the first importance despite the incomplete state in which all but the first five of its original forty books have reached us.

For this edition, W. R. Paton’s excellent translation, first published in 1922, has been thoroughly revised, the Büttner-Wobst Greek text corrected, and explanatory notes and a new introduction added, all reflecting the latest scholarship.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Polybius is in six volumes.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Histories, Volume III
Books 5-8
Polybius
Harvard University Press

Polybius (born ca. 208 BCE) of Megalopolis in the Peloponnese (Morea), served the Achaean League in arms and diplomacy for many years, favouring alliance with Rome. From 168 to 151 he was hostage in Rome where he became a friend of Aemilius Paulus and his two sons, and especially adopted Scipio Aemilianus whose campaigns he attended later. In late life he was trusted mediator between Greece and the Romans whom he admired; helped in the discussions which preceded the final war with Carthage; and, after 146, was entrusted by the Romans with details of administration in Greece. He died at the age of 82 after a fall from his horse.

The main part of Polybius's history covers the years 264–146 BCE. It describes the rise of Rome to the destruction of Carthage and the domination of Greece by Rome. It is a great work, accurate, thoughtful, largely impartial, based on research, full of insight into customs, institutions, geography, causes of events and character of people; it is a vital achievement of first rate importance, despite the incomplete state in which all but the first five of the forty books have reached us. Polybius's overall theme is how and why the Romans spread their power as they did.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Polybius is in six volumes.

[more]

front cover of The Histories, Volume IV
The Histories, Volume IV
Books 9–15
Translated by W. R. PatonRevised by F. W. Walbank and Christian Habicht
Harvard University Press, 2010

Hellenistic history.

The historian Polybius (ca. 200–118 BC) was born into a leading family of Megalopolis in the Peloponnese (Morea) and served the Achaean League in arms and diplomacy for many years, favoring alliance with Rome. From 168 to 151 he was held hostage in Rome, where he became a friend of Lucius Aemilius Paulus and his two sons, especially Scipio Aemilianus, whose campaigns, including the destruction of Carthage, he later attended. Late in his life he became a trusted mediator between Greece and the Romans; helped in the discussions that preceded the final war with Carthage; and after 146 was entrusted by the Romans with the details of administration in Greece.

Polybius’ overall theme is how and why the Romans spread their power as they did. The main part of his history covers the years 264–146 BC, describing the rise of Rome, her destruction of Carthage, and her eventual domination of the Greek world. It is a great work: accurate, thoughtful, largely impartial, based on research, and full of insight into customs, institutions, geography, the causes of events, and the character of peoples. It is a vital achievement of the first importance despite the incomplete state in which all but the first five of its original forty books have reached us.

For this edition, W. R. Paton’s excellent translation, first published in 1922, has been thoroughly revised, the Büttner-Wobst Greek text corrected, and explanatory notes and a new introduction added, all reflecting the latest scholarship.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Polybius is in six volumes.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Histories, Volume IV
Books 9-15
Polybius
Harvard University Press

Polybius (born ca. 208 BCE) of Megalopolis in the Peloponnese (Morea), served the Achaean League in arms and diplomacy for many years, favouring alliance with Rome. From 168 to 151 he was hostage in Rome where he became a friend of Aemilius Paulus and his two sons, and especially adopted Scipio Aemilianus whose campaigns he attended later. In late life he was trusted mediator between Greece and the Romans whom he admired; helped in the discussions which preceded the final war with Carthage; and, after 146, was entrusted by the Romans with details of administration in Greece. He died at the age of 82 after a fall from his horse.

The main part of Polybius's history covers the years 264–146 BCE. It describes the rise of Rome to the destruction of Carthage and the domination of Greece by Rome. It is a great work, accurate, thoughtful, largely impartial, based on research, full of insight into customs, institutions, geography, causes of events and character of people; it is a vital achievement of first rate importance, despite the incomplete state in which all but the first five of the forty books have reached us. Polybius's overall theme is how and why the Romans spread their power as they did.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Polybius is in six volumes.

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The Histories, Volume V
Books 16–27
Translated by W. R. PatonRevised by F. W. Walbank and Christian Habicht
Harvard University Press, 2010

Hellenistic history.

The historian Polybius (ca. 200–118 BC) was born into a leading family of Megalopolis in the Peloponnese (Morea) and served the Achaean League in arms and diplomacy for many years, favoring alliance with Rome. From 168 to 151 he was held hostage in Rome, where he became a friend of Lucius Aemilius Paulus and his two sons, especially Scipio Aemilianus, whose campaigns, including the destruction of Carthage, he later attended. Late in his life he became a trusted mediator between Greece and the Romans; helped in the discussions that preceded the final war with Carthage; and after 146 was entrusted by the Romans with the details of administration in Greece.

Polybius’ overall theme is how and why the Romans spread their power as they did. The main part of his history covers the years 264–146 BC, describing the rise of Rome, her destruction of Carthage, and her eventual domination of the Greek world. It is a great work: accurate, thoughtful, largely impartial, based on research, and full of insight into customs, institutions, geography, the causes of events, and the character of peoples. It is a vital achievement of the first importance despite the incomplete state in which all but the first five of its original forty books have reached us.

For this edition, W. R. Paton’s excellent translation, first published in 1922, has been thoroughly revised, the Büttner-Wobst Greek text corrected, and explanatory notes and a new introduction added, all reflecting the latest scholarship.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Polybius is in six volumes.

[more]

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The Histories, Volume V
Books 16-27
Polybius
Harvard University Press

Polybius (born ca. 208 BCE) of Megalopolis in the Peloponnese (Morea), served the Achaean League in arms and diplomacy for many years, favouring alliance with Rome. From 168 to 151 he was hostage in Rome where he became a friend of Aemilius Paulus and his two sons, and especially adopted Scipio Aemilianus whose campaigns he attended later. In late life he was trusted mediator between Greece and the Romans whom he admired; helped in the discussions which preceded the final war with Carthage; and, after 146, was entrusted by the Romans with details of administration in Greece. He died at the age of 82 after a fall from his horse.

The main part of Polybius's history covers the years 264–146 BCE. It describes the rise of Rome to the destruction of Carthage and the domination of Greece by Rome. It is a great work, accurate, thoughtful, largely impartial, based on research, full of insight into customs, institutions, geography, causes of events and character of people; it is a vital achievement of first rate importance, despite the incomplete state in which all but the first five of the forty books have reached us. Polybius's overall theme is how and why the Romans spread their power as they did.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Polybius is in six volumes.

[more]

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The Histories, Volume VI
Books 28-39
Polybius
Harvard University Press

Polybius (born ca. 208 BCE) of Megalopolis in the Peloponnese (Morea), served the Achaean League in arms and diplomacy for many years, favouring alliance with Rome. From 168 to 151 he was hostage in Rome where he became a friend of Aemilius Paulus and his two sons, and especially adopted Scipio Aemilianus whose campaigns he attended later. In late life he was trusted mediator between Greece and the Romans whom he admired; helped in the discussions which preceded the final war with Carthage; and, after 146, was entrusted by the Romans with details of administration in Greece. He died at the age of 82 after a fall from his horse.

The main part of Polybius's history covers the years 264–146 BCE. It describes the rise of Rome to the destruction of Carthage and the domination of Greece by Rome. It is a great work, accurate, thoughtful, largely impartial, based on research, full of insight into customs, institutions, geography, causes of events and character of people; it is a vital achievement of first rate importance, despite the incomplete state in which all but the first five of the forty books have reached us. Polybius's overall theme is how and why the Romans spread their power as they did.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Polybius is in six volumes.

[more]

front cover of The Histories, Volume VI
The Histories, Volume VI
Books 28–39. Unattributed Fragments
Translated by W. R. PatonRevised by F. W. Walbank and Christian HabichtFragments edited and translated by S. Douglas Olson
Harvard University Press, 2010

Hellenistic history.

The historian Polybius (ca. 200–118 BC) was born into a leading family of Megalopolis in the Peloponnese (Morea) and served the Achaean League in arms and diplomacy for many years, favoring alliance with Rome. From 168 to 151 he was held hostage in Rome, where he became a friend of Lucius Aemilius Paulus and his two sons, especially Scipio Aemilianus, whose campaigns, including the destruction of Carthage, he later attended. Late in his life he became a trusted mediator between Greece and the Romans; helped in the discussions that preceded the final war with Carthage; and after 146 was entrusted by the Romans with the details of administration in Greece.

Polybius’ overall theme is how and why the Romans spread their power as they did. The main part of his history covers the years 264–146 BC, describing the rise of Rome, her destruction of Carthage, and her eventual domination of the Greek world. It is a great work: accurate, thoughtful, largely impartial, based on research, and full of insight into customs, institutions, geography, the causes of events, and the character of peoples. It is a vital achievement of the first importance despite the incomplete state in which all but the first five of its original forty books have reached us.

For this edition, W. R. Paton’s excellent translation, first published in 1922, has been thoroughly revised, the Büttner-Wobst Greek text corrected, and explanatory notes and a new introduction added, all reflecting the latest scholarship.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Polybius is in six volumes.

[more]

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Historiography
Ancient, Medieval, and Modern
Ernst Breisach
University of Chicago Press, 1995
In this pioneering work, Ernst Breisach presents an effective, well-organized, and concise account of the development of historiography in Western culture. Neither a handbook nor an encyclopedia, this updated second edition narrates and interprets the development of historiography from its origins in Greek poetry to the present, with sections on such current topics as postmodernism, deconstructionism, black history, women's history, microhistory, Historikerstreit, the linguistic turn, and more.
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Historiography
Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, Third Edition
Ernst Breisach
University of Chicago Press, 2007
In this pioneering work, Ernst Breisach presents an effective, well-organized, and concise account of the development of historiography in Western culture. Neither a handbook nor an encyclopedia, this up-to-date third edition narrates and interprets the development of historiography from its origins in Greek poetry to the present, with compelling sections on postmodernism, deconstructionism, African-American history, women’s history, microhistory, the Historikerstreit, cultural history, and more. The definitive look at the writing of history by a historian, Historiography provides key insights into some of the most important issues, debates and innovations in modern historiography.

Praise for the first edition: “Breisach’s comprehensive coverage of the subject and his clear presentation of the issues and the complexity of an evolving discipline easily make his work the best of its kind.”—Lester D. Stephens, American Historical Review
[more]

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The Historiography of Communism
Michael E. Brown
Temple University Press, 2008
In this fresh appraisal of communism and anti-communism, with an emphasis on the American case, respected scholar Michael E. Brown examines the methods, controversies and difficulties involved in writing the history of communism. Arguing that one important way of understanding communism—other than as a concrete political or ideological force—is as an expression of an essentially reflexive aspect of society that typically manifests itself in social movements. In this regard, Brown understands the history of communism as part of the history of society. Examining works by E. P. Thompson, Karl Marx, and Pierre Clastres, Brown develops the idea of history as an immanent feature of human activities. Taken together, the essays in this book—written over a period of 20 years–offer a distinctive approach to the connections between social theory, criticism, and historiography and to what is “social” about “social movements.”
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Historiography of the Taiping Rebellion
Ssu-yu Têng
Harvard University Press

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The History
Michael Attaleiates
Harvard University Press, 2012

In 1039 Byzantium was the most powerful empire in Europe and the Near East, controlling the Balkans south of the Danube and all of Asia Minor into Armenia and Syria. By 1079 it had become a politically unstable state half the size, menaced by powerful enemies on all sides. The History of Michael Attaleiates is our main source for this astonishing reversal, and offers a gripping narrative of the foreign and civil wars of those years. Attaleiates was a highly placed legal and military official of the empire with first-hand knowledge of the events he describes. He knew many of the emperors and includes an eyewitness account of the battle of Mantzikert (1071), where the Seljuk Turks crushed the Byzantine armies and opened the door for the permanent Turkish conquest of Asia Minor. He also provides vivid narratives of civil unrest and decries the corruption and economic exploitation of his society, looking to the heroes of the Roman Republic for models of nobility.

Michael Attaleiates’ History has never before been translated into English. The present translation, based on the most recent critical edition, makes the text accessible through its notes, maps, and glossary of Byzantine terms.

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The History
Herodotus
University of Chicago Press, 1987
David Grene, one of the best known translators of the Greek classics, splendidly captures the peculiar quality of Herodotus, the father of history.

Here is the historian, investigating and judging what he has seen, heard, and read, and seeking out the true causes and consequences of the great deeds of the past. In his History, the war between the Greeks and Persians, the origins of their enmity, and all the more general features of the civilizations of the world of his day are seen as a unity and expressed as the vision of one man who as a child lived through the last of the great acts in this universal drama.

In Grene's remarkable translation and commentary, we see the historian as a storyteller, combining through his own narration the skeletal "historical" facts and the imaginative reality toward which his story reaches. Herodotus emerges in all his charm and complexity as a writer and the first historian in the Western tradition, perhaps unique in the way he has seen the interrelation of fact and fantasy.

"Reading Herodotus in English has never been so much fun. . . . Herodotus crowds his fresco-like pages with all shades of humanity. Whether Herodotus's view is 'tragic,' mythical, or merely common sense, it provided him with a moral salt with which the diversity of mankind could be savored. And savor it we do in David Grene's translation."—Thomas D'Evelyn, Christian Science Monitor

"Grene's work is a monument to what translation intends, and to what it is hungry to accomplish. . . . Herodotus gives more sheer pleasure than almost any other writer."—Peter Levi, New York Times Book Review

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History & Subjectivity
Roger Gottlieb
Temple University Press, 1987
"...rescues the probing spirit of Marx from the dead hand of Marx-ism. In this bold and argumentative book, Gottlieb joins other contemporary theorists in challenging the primacy of class and relations of production as keys to understanding our collective predicament. The result is an important contribution to left theory- both for its summation of the insights drawn from recent movements and for its provocative confrontation with the wisdom of the past." --Barbara Ehrenreich Can Marxism still serve the American left? History and Subjectivity answers this question by synthesizing the conflicting perspectives of traditional Marxism, Western and neo-Marxism, socialist-feminism, and various minority political movements into a comprehensive and original social theory. In the last seventy years, social change and the failure of leftist movements have made it necessary to transform Marxist theory. Undermined by its own theoretical success, traditional Marxism mistakenly assumed that Marx's understanding of competitive capitalism could be the model for theories of any society. Roger Gottlieb argues convincingly that the transformation of Marxist theory requires a fundamentally new understanding of social primacy. Gottlieb draws on resources from virtually all areas of contemporary radical social theory. This interdisciplinary approach results in a sweeping synthesis of existing Marxist thought and an original and compelling social theory. "Roger Gottlieb has written a very rich and often brilliant book.... [His] general thesis is developed, argued, and tested in the course of an impressive series of reconsiderations of debates in the Marxist tradition--impressive for the sheer breadth of the material mastered, as well as the critical acumen with which Gottlieb finds his way through the thicket of arguments and counter arguments. The result is an always lively, frequently exciting journey through the Marxist tradition, as well as a major contribution to the transformation which Marxism is currently undergoing." --Richard Schmitt "This is a serious and ambitious book. Its attempt to incorporate socialist feminism, and its interesting discussion of the American left are major strengths. It is a distinctive argument, framed within a personal sensibility, which should encourage wide response." --Marx W. Wartofsky
[more]

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History 31st Regiment
Illinois Volunteers Organized by John A. Logan
W. S. Morris, J. B. Kuykendall, and L. D. Hartwell. Foreword by John Y. Simon
Southern Illinois University Press, 1998

The story of John A. Logan’s famed 31st Regiment Illinois Volunteers, told by three veterans, follows the regiment from the battles of Belmont, Fort Donelson, Vicksburg, Kenesaw Mountain, and Atlanta through the March to the Sea and into North Carolina. "Few regiments," notes historian John Y. Simon in the foreword, "fought longer or more fiercely, suffered more casualties, or won more victories."

Logan proved a valiant and valuable Union commander, yet when the Civil War first began, it was far from clear whether he would lead Union or Confederate troops. In dramatic fashion, however, he broke what Simon calls an "ominous silence ... interpreted by many as sympathy for the South." Speaking from a wagon platform in Marion, Illinois, Logan proclaimed: "[The] time has come when a man must be for or against his country." Logan accepted a commission from Illinois governor Richard Yates, recruited heavily in southern Illinois, and formed the 31st Regiment Illinois Volunteers.

The 31st became a prime component in Grant’s western campaigns, fighting for the first time at Belmont, Missouri. In February of 1862, the 31st foiled Confederate general Gideon J. Pillow’s dramatic escape from the Union siege at Fort Donelson. Although this is often listed as one of the proudest moments for the 31st, casualties ran high (fifty-eight killed), with Logan so severely wounded that at first he was reported dead. Logan’s valor at Fort Donelson won him promotion to brigadier general.

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History 4° Celsius
Search for a Method in the Age of the Anthropocene
Ian Baucom
Duke University Press, 2020
In History 4° Celsius Ian Baucom continues his inquiries into the place of the Black Atlantic in the making of the modern and postmodern world. Putting black studies into conversation with climate change, Baucom outlines how the ongoing concerns of critical race, diaspora, and postcolonial studies are crucial to understanding the Anthropocene. He draws on materialist and postmaterialist thought, Sartre, and the science of climate change to trace the ways in which evolving political, cultural, and natural history converge to shape a globally destructive force. Identifying the quest for limitless financial gain as the primary driving force behind both the slave trade and the continuing increase in global greenhouse gas emissions, Baucom demonstrates that climate change and the conditions of the Black Atlantic, colonialism, and the postcolony are fundamentally entwined. In so doing, he argues for the necessity of establishing a method of critical exchange between climate science, black studies, and the surrounding theoretical inquiries of humanism and posthumanism.
[more]

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History Afield
Stories from the Golden Age of Wisconsin Sporting Life
Robert C Willging
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2011
Stories of sportsmen past come to life in History Afield, an account of the many and varied sporting pursuits that are part of the Wisconsin tradition. Author and outdoorsman Robert Willging shares more than two dozen tales of Wisconsin sporting history, highlighting the hunt for waterfowl, upland birds, and deer; trout fishing in wild north Wisconsin rivers; and recreating at early Wisconsin lakeside resorts.
 
Anecdotes of fishing exploits on our plentiful waterways and presidential visits to northern Wisconsin reveal a unique slice of sporting culture, and chapters on live decoys and the American Water Spaniel demonstrate the human-animal bond that has played such a large part in that history. Tales of nature’s fury include a detailed account of the famous Armistice Day storm, as well as the dangers of ice fishing on Lake Superior. These historical musings and perspectives on sporting ethos provide a strong sense of the lifestyle that Willging has preserved for our new century.
 
Featuring first-hand interviews and a variety of historic photos depicting the Wisconsin sporting life, History Afield shows how the intimate relationship between humans and nature shaped this important part of the state’s heritage.
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History after Apartheid
Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa
Annie E. Coombes
Duke University Press, 2003
The democratic election of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa in 1994 marked the demise of apartheid and the beginning of a new struggle to define the nation’s past. History after Apartheid analyzes how, in the midst of the momentous shift to an inclusive democracy, South Africa’s visual and material culture represented the past while at the same time contributing to the process of social transformation. Considering attempts to invent and recover historical icons and narratives, art historian Annie E. Coombes examines how strategies for embodying different models of historical knowledge and experience are negotiated in public culture—in monuments, museums, and contemporary fine art.

History after Apartheid explores the dilemmas posed by a wide range of visual and material culture including key South African heritage sites. How prominent should Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress be in the museum at the infamous political prison on Robben Island? How should the postapartheid government deal with the Voortrekker Monument mythologizing the Boer Trek of 1838? Coombes highlights the contradictory investment in these sites among competing constituencies and the tensions involved in the rush to produce new histories for the “new” South Africa.

She reveals how artists and museum officials struggled to adequately represent painful and difficult histories ignored or disavowed under apartheid, including slavery, homelessness, and the attempted destruction of KhoiSan hunter-gatherers. Describing how contemporary South African artists address historical memory and the ambiguities uncovered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Coombes illuminates a body of work dedicated to the struggle to simultaneously remember the past and move forward into the future.

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History after Liberty
Tacitus on Tyrants, Sycophants, and Republicans
Thomas E. Strunk
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Roman historian Tacitus wrote a damning critique of the first century CE Roman empire. The emperors in Tacitus’ works are almost universally tyrants surrounded by flatterers and informants, and the image Tacitus creates is of a society that has lost the liberty enjoyed under the Roman Republic. Yet Tacitus also poignantly depicts those who resist this tyranny and seek to restore a sense of liberty to Rome. In his portrayal of autocrats, sycophants, and republicans Tacitus provides an enduring testament to the value of liberty and the evils of despotism.
 
History after Liberty explores Tacitus’ political thought through his understanding of liberty. Influenced by modern republican writers such as Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit, this study defines Tacitean libertas as the freedom from the rule of a dominus and as freedom to participate in the traditional politics of Rome through military service, public service in the senate and magistracies, and public speech. All of these elements are balanced in Tacitus’ writings with examples of those resisting the corruption of politics in an effort to restore a sense of free civic engagement. The work concludes with an exploration of Tacitus’ own writings as an act of restoring liberty. In contrast to most studies on Tacitus, History after Liberty argues that Tacitus is a republican who writes both to demonstrate that Rome had become a tyranny and to show a way out of that tyranny.
 
History after Liberty addresses the political thought of Tacitus’ writings. As such it will be of most interest to those who study the history and historiography of the early Roman empire, namely classicists and ancient historians. The work will also be of use to those interested in the antecedents to modern political thought, particularly the history of republicanism and freedom; readers from this category will include political scientists, philosophers, and modern historians.
 

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History And 9/11
Joanne Meyerowitz
Temple University Press, 2003
The contributors to this landmark collection set the attacks on the United States in historical perspective. They reject the simplistic notion of an age-old "clash of civilizations" and instead examine the particular histories of American nationalism, anti-Americanism, U.S. foreign policy, and Islamic fundamentalism among other topics. With renewed attention to Americans' sense of national identity, they focus on the United States in relation to the rest of the world. A collection of recent and historical documents—speeches, articles, and book excerpts—supplement the essays. Taken together, the essays and sources in this volume comment on the dangers of seeing the events of September 11 as splitting the nation's history into "before" and "after." They argue eloquently that no useful understanding of the present is possible without an unobstructed view of the past.
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The History and Archaeology of Phoenicia
Hélène Sader
SBL Press, 2019

An insightful historical account of Phoenicia that illustrates its cities, culture, and daily life

Hélène Sader presents the history and archaeology of Phoenicia based on the available contemporary written sources and the results of archaeological excavations in Phoenicia proper. Sader explores the origin of the term Phoenicia; the political and geographical history of the city-states Arwad, Byblos, Sidon, and Tyre; and topography, climate, and natural resources of the Phoenician homeland. Her limited focus on Phoenicia proper, in contrast to previous studies that included information from Phoenician colonies, presents the bare realities of the opportunities and difficulties shaping Phoenician life. Sader’s evaluation and synthesis of the evidence offers a corrective to the common assumption of a unified Phoenician kingdom.

Features

  • Historical as well as modern maps with the locations of all relevant archaeological sites
  • Faunal and floral analyses that shed light on the Phoenician diet
  • Petrographic analysis of pottery that sheds light on trading patterns and developments
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History and Context in Comparative Public Policy
Douglas E. Ashford
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992

Douglas E. Ashford joins a growing number of scholars who have questioned the behavioralist assumptions of much policy science. The essays in this volume show why policy analysis cannot be confined to prevailing methods of social science. Policy-making behavior involves historical, contextual, and philosophical factors that also raise critical questions about the concepts and theory of the discipline. Ashford asks difficult questions about the contextual, conjunctural, and unintentional circumstances that affect actual decision-making. His bridging essays summarize opposing viewpoints and conflicting interpretations to help form a new agenda for comparative policy analysis.

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History and Health Policy in the United States
Putting the Past Back In
Stevens, Rosemary A
Rutgers University Press, 2006
In our rapidly advancing scientific and technological world, many take great pride and comfort in believing that we are on the threshold of new ways of thinking, living, and understanding ourselves. But despite dramatic discoveries that appear in every way to herald the future, legacies still carry great weight. Even in swiftly developing fields such as health and medicine, most systems and policies embody a sequence of earlier ideas and preexisting patterns.

In History and Health Policy in the United States, seventeen leading scholars of history, the history of medicine, bioethics, law, health policy, sociology, and organizational theory make the case for the usefulness of history in evaluating and formulating health policy today. In looking at issues as varied as the consumer economy, risk, and the plight of the uninsured, the contributors uncover the often unstated assumptions that shape the way we think about technology, the role of government, and contemporary medicine. They show how historical perspectives can help policymakers avoid the pitfalls of partisan, outdated, or merely fashionable approaches, as well as how knowledge of previous systems can offer alternatives when policy directions seem unclear.

Together, the essays argue that it is only by knowing where we have been that we can begin to understand health services today or speculate on policies for tomorrow.

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History and Hope in the Heart of Dixie
Scholarship, Activism, and Wayne Flynt in the Modern South
Edited by Gordon E. Harvey, Richard D. Starnes and Glenn Feldman
University of Alabama Press, 2006
Social and political history of the modern South.
 
This collection of essays on the social and political history of the modern South consider the region’s poor, racial mores and race relations, economic opportunity, Protestant activism, political coalitions and interest groups, social justice, and progressive reform.
History and Hope in the Heart of Dixie illuminates the dual role of historian and public advocate in modern America. In a time when the nation’s eyes have been focused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita onto the vulnerability and dire condition of poor people in the South, the applicability of research, teaching, and activism for this voiceless element seems all the more relevant.
 
Responding to the example of Wayne Flynt, whose fierce devotion to his state of Alabama and its region has not blinded his recognition of the inequities and despair that define southern life for so many, the scholars assembled in this work present contributions to the themes Flynt so passionately explored in his own work. Two seasoned observers of southern history and culture—John Shelton Reed and Dan T. Carter—offer assessments of Flynt’s influence on the history profession as a whole and on the region of the South in particular.
 
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History and Human Responsibility
The Unbearable Weight of Freedom in a Dystopian World
Marcel van Herpen
St. Augustine's Press, 2023
"The present crisis is felt more acutely than previous crisis situations," observes Dutch security expert Marcel van Herpen, largely because human beings are now projecting
responsibility into history on all fronts––past and future, in addition to the present. Learning from the past has become an imperative to safeguard the well-being of
future generations by never repeating negative experiences, so much so that it demands an explanation of culpability into the past that burdens the present under a
weight that does not properly belong to actors who did not commit the deeds of the past and have yet to decide their futures.

In a time of crisis we face the accusations of history, however distant, and are subjected to the sound of its echoing ahead of us. But, Van Herpen asks, to what
exactly (or to what extent) should we listen as we strive to respond to the challenges of present day? "Is it true that history is a teacher for our lives? And has it ever been?
In crisis periods this question becomes more urgent: old certainties disappear and––independently from our wishes––a new, unknown world is emerging, which
seems to be at odds with our established ways of thinking and our existing value patterns."

Van Herpen scrutinizes modern European history and the post-modern man and offers the reader a compelling account of human freedom in politics, morality, and the
ways in which history will or will not ever guide us into the future. He proves himself to be a very capable political scientist and sociologist, but more importantly he has
now pronounced himself to be an optimistic (yet sober) observer of both human beings and history, willing to confront the present generation with possible future
outcomes of contemporary crises.
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History and Legend
Ideas and Images in the Ming Historical Novels
Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang
University of Michigan Press, 1990
History, according to the Confucian tradition, was a “comprehensive mirror” for aid in government: it was part of the great Way (ta-tao), the tradition of the governing elite. Fiction, which was originally referred to as “the talk of the streets,” belonged to the small Way (hsia-tao), the tradition of the governed masses. In History and Legend: Ideas and Images in the Ming Historical Novels, Shelly Hsueh-Iun Chang maintains that the historical novels blended legends with historical fact, making them a medium of interplay between the elite and popular traditions.
 
This combination of influences in the historical novels was especially significant during the Ming dynasty because of the rise of both urban culture of great refinement and diversity and a popularizing vernacular designed to promote learning among all people. These two exuberant movements came together in the historical novel to propagate the difficult and complex Official Histories of the governing elite, as well as to adapt unofficial histories and fictitious narratives, thus opening the way to the influence of the common people in literature.
 
This book is the first study of the novels from a historical standpoint. Combining traditional historical research with new source material of the historical novels and with analytical strategies, Chang creates a three-dimensional picture of the “historical world” of the Ming people. Chang compares issues of the dynastic cycle and political legitimacy of a regime, human ambitions and immortality, ethics in the relations between historical personages and legendary heroes, ideals of government and grandiose imperial institutions, and supernatural power and the justice of history that emerged from the historical novels with those in the Official Histories and Confucian canon.
 
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History and Mythology of the Aztecs
The Codex Chimalpopoca
John Bierhorst
University of Arizona Press, 1992
One of the great documents of colonial Mexico, the Codex Chimalpopoca chronicles the rise of Aztec civilization and preserves the mythology on which it was based. Its two complementary texts, Annals of Cuauhtitlan and Legend of the Suns, record the pre-Cortésian history of the Valley of Mexico together with firsthand versions of that region's myths.

Of particular interest are the stories of the hero-god Quetzalcoatl, for which the Chimalpopoca is the premier source. John Bierhorst's work is the first major scholarship on the Codex Chimalpopoca in more than forty years. His is the first edition in English and the first in any language to include the complete text of the Legend of the Suns. The precise, readable translation not only contributes to the study of Aztec history and literature but also makes the codex an indispensable reference for Aztec cultural topics, including land tenure, statecraft, the role of women, the tribute system, warfare, and human sacrifice.
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History and Philanthropy
Past, Present, Future
Edited by David Cannadine and Jill Pellew
University of London Press, 2008

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History and Philosophy of Modern Mathematics
Volume XI
William Aspray and Philip Kitcher, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, 1988

History and Philosophy of Modern Mathematics was first published in 1988. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The fourteen essays in this volume build on the pioneering effort of Garrett Birkhoff, professor of mathematics at Harvard University, who in 1974 organized a conference of mathematicians and historians of modern mathematics to examine how the two disciplines approach the history of mathematics. In History and Philosophy of Modern Mathematics, William Aspray and Philip Kitcher bring together distinguished scholars from mathematics, history, and philosophy to assess the current state of the field. Their essays, which grow out of a 1985 conference at the University of Minnesota, develop the basic premise that mathematical thought needs to be studied from an interdisciplinary perspective.

The opening essays study issues arising within logic and the foundations of mathematics, a traditional area of interest to historians and philosophers. The second section examines issues in the history of mathematics within the framework of established historical periods and questions. Next come case studies that illustrate the power of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of mathematics. The collection closes with a look at mathematics from a sociohistorical perspective, including the way institutions affect what constitutes mathematical knowledge.

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History and Philosophy of the Humanities
An Introduction
Michiel Leezenberg
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
The humanities include disciplines as diverse as literary theory, linguistics, history, film studies, theology, and philosophy. Do these various fields of study have anything in common that distinguishes them from, say, physics or sociology? The tripartite division between the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities may seem self-evident, but it only arose during the course of the 19th century and is still contested today.History and Philosophy of the Humanities: An Introduction presents a reasoned overview of the conceptual and historical backgrounds of the humanities. In four sections, it discusses:- the most influential views on scientific knowledge from Aristotle to Thomas Kuhn;- the birth of the modern humanities and its relation to the natural and social sciences;- the various methodological schools and conceptual issues in the humanities;- several themes that set the agenda for current debates in the humanities: critiques of modernity; gender, sexuality and identity; and postcolonialism.Thus, it provides students in the humanities with a comprehensive understanding of the backgrounds of their own discipline, its relation to other disciplines, and the state of the art of the humanities at large.
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History and Philosophy of the Humanities
An Introduction
Michiel Leezenberg
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
The humanities include disciplines as diverse as literary theory, linguistics, history, film studies, theology, and philosophy. Do these various fields of study have anything in common, which distinguishes them from e.g. physics or sociology? The tripartite division between the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities may seem self-evident, but it has arisen only in the course of the 19th century, and has been contested ever since.History and Philosophy of the Humanities: An Introduction presents a reasoned overview of the conceptual and historical backgrounds of the humanities. In four sections, it discusses:- The most influential views on scientific knowledge from Aristotle to Thomas Kuhn;- The birth of the modern humanities;- The various methodological schools and conceptual issues in the humanities;- Some themes that set the agenda for current debates in the humanities: critiques of modernity; gender, sexuality and identity; and post-colonialism.Thus, it provides students in the various disciplines of the humanities with a comprehensive understanding of the backgrounds of their field, its relation with other disciplines, and the state of the art in the humanities at large. Intended readership: advanced undergraduate and graduate students.
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History and Poetics in the Early Writings of William Morris, 1855–1870
Florence Saunders Boos
The Ohio State University Press, 2015
Florence S. Boos’s History and Poetics in the Early Writings of William Morris, 1855–1870 examines Morris’s literary development in the context of his Victorian contemporaries, probing the cross-influences of temperament, cultural ambiance, early reader reactions, and his restless search for an authentic poetic voice. Boos argues that to understand this development, we must understand how Morris reinterpreted and transformed medieval history and legend into modern guise. In doing so, Morris preserved a duality of privacy and detachment—the intimacy of personal lyrics and the detachment (and silences) of historical judgment.              
Boos’s study is the first to utilize surviving original manuscripts, periodical publications, and poems unpublished during Morris’s lifetime. History and Poetics in the Early Writings of William Morris, 1855–1870traces Morris’s literary evolution through his juvenile poems; the essays, poems, and prose romances of the Oxford and CambridgeMagazine; the startlingly original verses of The Defence of Guenevere; and the ten years of experimentation that preceded his two best-known epics, The Life and Deathof Jason and The Earthly Paradise. This book explores the young poet’s successive efforts to find a balancing ethical framework through poetry—a framework that was at once a motivation for action and a template for authentic, shared popular art, one that reemerges forcefully in his later work.
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The History and Power of Writing
Henri-Jean Martin
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Cultural history on a grand scale, this immensely readable book—the summation of decades of study by one of the world's great scholars of the book—is the story of writing from its very beginnings to its recent transformations through technology.

Traversing four millennia, Martin offers a chronicle of writing as a cultural system, a means of communication, and a history of technologies. He shows how the written word originated, how it spread, and how it figured in the evolution of civilization. Using as his center the role of printing in making the written way of thinking dominant, Martin examines the interactions of individuals and cultures to produce new forms of "writing" in the many senses of authorship, language rendition, and script.

Martin looks at how much the development of writing owed to practical necessity, and how much to religious and social systems of symbols. He describes the precursors to writing and reveals their place in early civilization as mnemonic devices in service of the spoken word. The tenacity of the oral tradition plays a surprisingly important part in this story, Martin notes, and even as late as the eighteenth century educated individuals were trained in classical rhetoric and preferred to rely on the arts of memory. Finally, Martin discusses the changes to writing wrought by the electronic revolution, offering invaluable insights into the influence these new technologies have had on children born into the computer age.
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History and Presence
Robert A. Orsi
Harvard University Press, 2016

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year

Beginning with metaphysical debates in the sixteenth century over the nature of Christ’s presence in the host, the distinguished historian and scholar of religion Robert Orsi imagines an alternative to the future of religion that early moderns proclaimed was inevitable.

“Orsi’s evoking of the full reality of the holy in the world is extremely moving, shot through with wonder and horror.”
—Caroline Walker Bynum, Common Knowledge

“This is a meticulously researched, humane, and deeply challenging book. The men and women studied in this book do not belong to ‘a world we have lost.’ They belong to a world we have lost sight of.”
—Peter Brown, Princeton University

“[A] brilliant, theologically sophisticated exploration of the Catholic experience of God’s presence through the material world… On every level—from its sympathetic, honest, and sometimes moving ethnography to its astute analytical observations—this book is a scholarly masterpiece.”
—A. W. Klink, Choice

“Orsi recaptures God’s breaking into the world … The book does an excellent job of explaining both the difficulties and values inherent in recognizing God in the world.”
Publishers Weekly

“This book is classic Orsi: careful, layered, humane, and subtle…a thought-provoking, expertly arranged tour of precisely those abundant, excessive phenomena which scholars have historically found so difficult to think.”
—Sonja Anderson, Reading Religion

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History and Silence
Purge and Rehabilitation of Memory in Late Antiquity
By Charles W. Hedrick Jr.
University of Texas Press, 2000

The ruling elite in ancient Rome sought to eradicate even the memory of their deceased opponents through a process now known as damnatio memoriae. These formal and traditional practices included removing the person's name and image from public monuments and inscriptions, making it illegal to speak of him, and forbidding funeral observances and mourning. Paradoxically, however, while these practices dishonored the person's memory, they did not destroy it. Indeed, a later turn of events could restore the offender not only to public favor but also to re-inclusion in the public record.

This book examines the process of purge and rehabilitation of memory in the person of Virius Nicomachus Flavianus(?-394). Charles Hedrick describes how Flavian was condemned for participating in the rebellion against the Christian emperor Theodosius the Great—and then restored to the public record a generation later as members of the newly Christianized senatorial class sought to reconcile their pagan past and Christian present. By selectively remembering and forgetting the actions of Flavian, Hedrick asserts, the Roman elite honored their ancestors while participating in profound social, cultural, and religious change.

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History and Society in Central America
By Edelberto Torres Rivas
University of Texas Press, 1993

First published in Chile in 1969 as Interpretación del desarrollo social centroamericano, this classic is now available in English. The first attempt at an integrated analysis of modern Central America's socioeconomic structure, Torres Rivas's work traces the social development of Central America from independence (1871) up to the 1960s.

Using a dependency framework, but not limited by it, Torres Rivas describes the various divisions of Central American society and their evolution within the liberal development model that has been so much a part of the past century of Central American economic history. The book is compelling in its explanation of the relationship between foreign and native elements in the social development of the region. Torres Rivas describes and analyzes the resulting long-term problems this development has posed for Central America. With a new chapter added for the English edition, History and Society in Central America remains vital for readers interested in the region.

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History and the Climate Crisis
Environmental History in the Classroom
Kate Hawkey
University College London, 2023
A case for including an environmental focus in the secondary school history curriculum by locating its arguments within established historiographical and revisionist debates.

History education has a key contribution to make in developing a deeper understanding of the current environmental crisis, but its role is too often overlooked. When embedded in the school curriculum, environmental history adds crucial layers of knowledge to the learning from other subjects and can enable students to make their own informed contributions to one of the most pressing concerns of the twenty-first century.

History and the Climate Crisis provides much-needed environmental knowledge, an area that is new for most history teachers. The author considers the disciplinary and pedagogical challenges and demonstrates how including an environmental focus can strengthen students’ disciplinary knowledge. She also builds her argument through many examples and offers practical strategies for use in classrooms, including developed inquiries suitable for the secondary history curriculum. The book focuses on environmental history within a strong subject-bound curriculum and will be relevant to teachers, academics, and policymakers in the United Kingdom and internationally.
 
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History and the New Left
Madison, Wisconsin, 1950-1970
Paul Buhle
Temple University Press, 1991

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History and the Social Web
A Collection of Essays
August C. Krey
University of Minnesota Press, 1955

History and the Social Web was first published in 1955. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In this volume of twelve essays a distinguished historian demonstrates that the roots and branches of history form a continuous social web, that the events and societies of pasts eras and modern times form a complex and interlocking pattern when seen as a whole, and that a knowledge of history has a profound application to the problems and pleasures of the present. The volume includes the well-known essay, "A City That Art Built," which has long been out of print. The first group of essays is devoted to aspects of medieval and renaissance history, and those in the second section point up the continuity of the thread of world history. The essays on law, education, and medicine which form a part of the first section will be of particular interest to members of these professions.

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History and Theory after the Fall
An Essay on Interpretation
Fred Weinstein
University of Chicago Press, 1990
In this ambitious work, Fred Weinstein confronts the obstacles that have increasingly frustrated our attempts to explain social and historical reality. Traditionally, we have relied on history and social theory to describe the ways people understand the world they live in. But the ordering explanations we have always used—derived from the classical social theories originally forged by Marx, Tocqueville, Weber, Durkheim, Freud—have collapsed.

In the wake of this collapse or "fall," the rival claims of fiction, psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology, and history have created the dilemma of radical relativism, the prospect of multiple interpretations of any complex historical event. The basic strategy of social theory and the social sciences—the search for underlying unities—proves so inherently contradictory and has provided so little in the way of reliable knowledge of social and historical relationships that to many critics it seems no longer worth pursuing.

Weinstein enters the debate by rejecting any search for underlying structural unities, dynamic or social, through which historians have attempted to find continuity with the past. He looks instead to ideological processes, to the construction of successive and changing versions of reality that mediate between the power of fantasy on the one side and the power of the social world on the other. He argues further that the need to use ideological constructs in this way accounts for the heterogeneous and changing content of social movements and for the persistent need people have always had for authoritative leaders, even in democratized societies. He suggests that people have historically been able to take a step away from leaders only by substituting the possession of objects such as property or money. This book is a breakthrough in poststructuralist theory that is sure to stimulate considerable discussion, especially about the shape of the social sciences and the future of historical interpretation.
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History and Theory
Feminist Research, Debates, Contestations
Edited by Barbara Laslett, Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres, Mary Jo Maynes, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
University of Chicago Press, 1997
This volume of recent Signs articles offers a number of significant contributions to feminist debates on history and theory. It illustrates the uses of theories in recent feminist historical research and the often contentious arguments that surround them. The readings are organized into three sections. The first draws on the tradition of political economy, and discusses the importance of class relations for understanding historical events and social relationships and the expansion of concepts of political economy to include race. The second section, on "The Body," demonstrates how feminist scholars have increasingly worked to re-place the body, to move it from its traditionally less valued position in the hierarchal Enlightenment mind/body split to an approach that emphasizes the body as both material and discursive, both "real" and "representational." The final section, "Discourse," focuses on an examination of the productive power of language in both reflecting and shaping experience and in the contestation of social relations of power.
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History and Truth
Paul Ricoeur, Foreward by David M. Rasmussen, Introduction by Charles Kelbley
Northwestern University Press, 2007
In this volume, Paul Ricoeur investigates the antinomy between history and truth, or between historicity and meaning. He argues that history has meaning insofar as it approaches universality and system, but has no meaning insofar as this universality violates the singularity of individuals' lives. Imposing unity upon truth, or unifying the diversity of knowledge and opinion, creates a singular and universal history but destroys historicity and subjectivity. Allowing for singularities in history promotes a multiplicity of truths over a single, unique truth, and thereby annihilates system
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History and Truth
Paul Ricoeur
Northwestern University Press, 1965
In this volume, Paul Ricoeur investigates the antinomy between history and truth, or between historicity and meaning. He argues that history has meaning insofar as it approaches universality and system, but has no meaning insofar as this universality violates the singularity of individuals' lives. Imposing unity upon truth, or unifying the diversity of knowledge and opinion, creates a singular and universal history but destroys historicity and subjectivity. Allowing for singularities in history promotes a multiplicity of truths over a single, unique truth, and thereby annhilates system.
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History and Utopia
E. M. Cioran
University of Chicago Press, 1998
In this book, Cioran writes of politics, of history, and of the utopian dream.

"A small masterwork . . . a stringent examination of some persistent and murky notions in human history. . . . It is best to read Cioran while sitting. The impact upon the intellect can be temporarily stunning, and motor systems may give way under the assault."—Joseph Patrick Kennedy, Houston Chronicle

"Cioran has a claim to be regarded as among the handful of original minds . . . writing today."—New York Times

"A sort of final philosopher of the Western world. [Cioran's] statements have the compression of poetry and the audacity of cosmic clowning."—Washington Post

E. M. Cioran (1911-1995) was born and educated in Romania and lived in Paris from 1937 until his death. He is the author of numerous works, including On the Heights of Despair, also available from the University of Chicago Press.
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History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic
Michael Murrin
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Although the Renaissance epic was the principal literary means of representing war in its time, modern readers of the epic often lack a basic understanding of the history of warfare. Michael Murrin here offers the first analysis to bring an understanding of both the history of literature and the history of warfare to the study of the epic.

Analyzing English, Italian, and Iberian epics published between 1483 and 1610, Murrin focuses on particular aspects of warfare (cavalry clashes, old and new style sieges, the tactical use of the gun, naval warfare) and the responses to them by authors from Malory to Milton. Throughout, Murrin traces a parallel development in the art of war and in the epic as it emerged from the romance.

Murrin demonstrates that with new technology and increasing levels of carnage, the practice of war gradually drifted from traditional epic modes. But before changes in warfare completely doomed the tradition in which the epic was rooted, this crisis provoked an unprecedented range of experiment which marks heroic narrative in the late Renaissance and ultimately led to the epic without war.

A much-needed introduction to the neglected subject of warfare in epic literature, this work is an uncommonly wide-ranging exercise in comparative criticism that will appeal to historians and students of literature alike.
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History as a Kind of Writing
Textual Strategies in Contemporary French Historiography
Philippe Carrard
University of Chicago Press, 2017
In academia, the traditional role of the humanities is being questioned by the “posts”—postmodernism, poststructuralism, and postfeminism—which means that the project of writing history only grows more complex. In History as a Kind of Writing, scholar of French literature and culture Philippe Carrard speaks to this complexity by focusing the lens on the current state of French historiography.

Carrard’s work here is expansive—examining the conventions historians draw on to produce their texts and casting light on views put forward by literary theorists, theorists of history, and historians themselves. Ranging from discussions of lengthy dissertations on 1960s social and economic history to a more contemporary focus on events, actors, memory, and culture, the book digs deep into the how of history. How do historians arrange their data into narratives? What strategies do they employ to justify the validity of their descriptions? Are actors given their own voice? Along the way, Carrard also readdresses questions fundamental to the field, including its necessary membership in the narrative genre, the presumed objectivity of historiographic writing, and the place of history as a science, distinct from the natural and theoretical sciences.
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History as an Art of Memory
Patrick H. Hutton
Brandeis University Press, 1993
With a broad, interdisciplinary command of the subject, Patrick H. Hutton considers the ideas of philosophers, poets, and historians, focusing especially on the work of Giambattista Vico, Maurice Halbwachs, Philippe Ariès, and Michel Foucault. He surveys such questions as the roots of contemporary historical interest in the memory topic, the eternal paradox of repetition and recollection as moments of memory,the ways in which the art of memory has been refashioned to serce the needs of the modern age and becomes integrated into historical thinking, and historians’ changing attitudes toward the historiographical tradition of scholarship on the French Revolution.
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History as Art and as Science
Twin Vistas on the Past
H. Stuart Hughes
University of Chicago Press, 1975
"Professor Hughes offers an earnest warning: 'Unless there is some emotional tie, some elective affinity linking the student to his subject of study, the results will be pedantic and perfunctory.' In other words, it is only a step from the sublime to the meticulous. Those eager to guard against that sad descent will find History as Art and as Science a guide, a tonic, and an inspiration. Its short, electrifying essays are so magnificently sane and persuasive they should be required reading for every student who contemplates a major in history."—Geoffrey Bruun, Saturday Review
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History as They Lived It
A Social History of Prairie du Rocher, Illinois
Margaret Kimball Brown, Foreword by Carl J. Ekberg
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

“His­tory as They Lived It deserves to be placed within the rich context of Illinois Country historiography going back more than a century. . . . It brings together the fully ripened thoughts of a mature scholar at the very moment that students of the Illinois Country need such a book.”—from the foreword by Carl J. Ekberg

Settled in 1722, Prairie du Rocher was at the geographic center of a French colony in the Mississippi Valley, which also included other villages in what is now Illinois and Missouri: Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Fort de Chartres, St. Philippe, Ste. Genevieve, and St. Louis.  Located in an alluvial valley near towering limestone bluffs, which inspired the village’s name—French for “prairie of the rock”— Prairie du Rocher is the only one of the seven French colonial villages that still exists today as a small compact community.

The village of Prairie du Rocher endured governance by France, Great Britain, Virginia, and the Illinois territory before Illinois became a state in 1818. Despite these changes, the villagers persisted in maintaining the community and its values. Margaret Kimball Brown looks at one of the oldest towns in the region through the lenses of history and anthropology, utilizing extensive research in archives and public records to give historians, anthropologists, and general readers a lively depiction of this small community and its people.

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History by Hollywood, Second Edition
Robert Brent Toplin
University of Illinois Press, 2010

This newly updated edition of History by Hollywood explores the question of what happens to history when Hollywood filmmakers get their hands on it. With a fresh look at recent films and television productions such as Titanic, Pearl Harbor, The Patriot, and John Adams, Robert Brent Toplin examines how filmmakers have interpreted American history through their movies. Toplin discusses how writers, producers, and directors become involved in making historical films, what influences their interpretations of the past, and the responses they make to the controversies their works excite. With a realistic appreciation of the challenges filmmakers face, he effectively measures the strengths and weaknesses of Hollywood's presentation of history in the films Mississippi Burning, JFK, Sergeant York, Missing, Bonnie and Clyde, Patton, All the President's Men, and Norma Rae.

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History
Choice and Commitment
Felix Gilbert
Harvard University Press

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History Continues
Georges Duby
University of Chicago Press, 1994
In this engaging intellectual autobiography, Georges Duby looks back on a career that has led him to be called one of the most distinguished historians in the Western world.

Since its beginning in the 1940s, Duby's career has been rich and varied, encompassing economic history, social history, the history of mentalites, art history, microhistory, urban history, the history of women and sexuality, and, most recently, the Church's influence on feudal society. In retracing this singular career path, Duby candidly remembers his life's most formative influences, including the legendary historians Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, the Annales School so closely associated with them, and the College de France.

Duby also offers insights about the proper methods of gathering and using archival data and on constructing penetrating interpretations of the documents. Indeed, his discussion of how he chose his subjects, collected his materials, developed the arguments, erected the scaffolding and constructed his theses offers the best introduction to the craft available to aspiring historians.

Candid and charming, this book is both a memoir of one of this century's great scholars and a history of the French historical school since the mid-twentieth century. It will be required reading for anyone interested in the French academic milieu, medieval history, French history, or the recording of history in general.

Georges Duby, a member of the Academie francaise, for many years held the distinguished chair in medieval history at the College de France. His numerous books include The Age of Cathedrals; The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest; Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages; and The Three Orders—all published by the University of Chicago Press.
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History From South Africa
Alternative Visions and Practices
Joshua Brown
Temple University Press, 1991

More starkly than any other contemporary social conflict, the crisis in South Africa highlights the complexities and conflicts in race, gender, class, and nation. These original articles, most of which were written by South African authors, are from a special issue of the Radical History Review, published in Spring 1990, that mapped the development of interpretations of the South African past that depart radically from the official history. The articles range from the politics of black movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to studies of film, television, and theater as reflections of modern social conflict.

History from South Africa is presented in two main sections: discussions of the historiography of South Africa from the viewpoint of those rewriting it with a radical outlook; and investigations into popular history and popular culture—the production and reception of history in the public realm. In addition, two photo essays dramatize this history visually; maps and a chronology complete the presentation. The book provides a fresh look at major issues in South African social and labor history and popular culture, and focuses on the role of historians in creating and interacting with a popular movement of resistance and social change.

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History from the Bottom Up and the Inside Out
Ethnicity, Race, and Identity in Working-Class History
James R. Barrett
Duke University Press, 2017
In History from the Bottom Up and the Inside Out James R. Barrett rethinks the boundaries of American social and labor history by investigating the ways in which working-class, radical, and immigrant people's personal lives intersected with their activism and religious, racial, ethnic, and class identities. Concerned with carving out space for individuals in the story of the working class, Barrett examines all aspects of individuals' subjective experiences, from their personalities, relationships, and emotions to their health and intellectual pursuits. Barrett's subjects include American communists, "blue-collar cosmopolitans"—such as well-read and well-traveled porters, sailors, and hoboes—and figures in early twentieth-century anarchist subculture. He also details the process of the Americanization of immigrant workers via popular culture and their development of class and racial identities, asking how immigrants learned to think of themselves as white. Throughout, Barrett enriches our understanding of working people’s lives, making it harder to objectify them as nameless cogs operating within social and political movements. In so doing, he works to redefine conceptions of work, migration, and radical politics.
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History, Historians, and Autobiography
Jeremy D. Popkin
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Though history and autobiography both claim to tell true stories about the past, historians have traditionally rejected first-person accounts as subjective and therefore unreliable. What then, asks Jeremy D. Popkin in History, Historians, and Autobiography, are we to make of the ever-increasing number of professional historians who are publishing stories of their own lives? And how is this recent development changing the nature of history-writing, the historical profession, and the genre of autobiography?

Drawing on the theoretical work of contemporary critics of autobiography and the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, Popkin reads the autobiographical classics of Edward Gibbon and Henry Adams and the memoirs of contemporary historians such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Peter Gay, Jill Ker Conway, and many others, he reveals the contributions historians' life stories make to our understanding of the human experience. Historians' autobiographies, he shows, reveal how scholars arrive at their vocations, the difficulties of writing about modern professional life, and the ways in which personal stories can add to our understanding of historical events such as war, political movements, and the traumas of the Holocaust.

An engrossing overview of the way historians view themselves and their profession, this work will be of interest to readers concerned with the ways in which we understand the past, as well as anyone interested in the art of life-writing.
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A History in Indigenous Voices
Menominee, Ho-Chunk, Oneida, Stockbridge, and Brothertown Interactions in the Removal Era
Carol Cornelius
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2023
A history of Wisconsin’s Indigenous past, present, and future—in Native peoples’ own words.  

Treaties made in the 1800s between the United States and the Indigenous nations of what is now Wisconsin have had profound influence on the region’s cultural and political landscape. Yet few people realize that in the early part of that century, the Menominee and Ho-Chunk Nations of Wisconsin signed land treaties with several Indigenous nations from New York State. At the onset of the removal era, these eastern nations, including the Oneida Nation and the Six Nations Confederacy, were under constant pressure from the federal government and land speculators to move to lands around Green Bay and Lake Winnebago. In this groundbreaking book, Carol A. Cornelius has compiled a careful account of these nation-to-nation treaties, in large part in the words of those Indigenous leaders who served as the voices and representatives of their nations. Drawing on a rich collection of primary sources, Cornelius walks readers through how, why, and for whom these treaties were made and how the federal government’s failure and unwillingness to acknowledge their legitimacy led to the further loss of Indigenous lands. The living documents transcribed here testify to the complexity and sovereignty of Indigenous governance then and now, making this volume a vital resource for historians and an accessible introduction to Indigenous treatymaking in Wisconsin.
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A History in Sum
150 Years of Mathematics at Harvard (1825–1975)
Steve Nadis and Shing-Tung Yau
Harvard University Press, 2013

In the twentieth century, American mathematicians began to make critical advances in a field previously dominated by Europeans. Harvard’s mathematics department was at the center of these developments. A History in Sum is an inviting account of the pioneers who trailblazed a distinctly American tradition of mathematics—in algebraic geometry and topology, complex analysis, number theory, and a host of esoteric subdisciplines that have rarely been written about outside of journal articles or advanced textbooks. The heady mathematical concepts that emerged, and the men and women who shaped them, are described here in lively, accessible prose.

The story begins in 1825, when a precocious sixteen-year-old freshman, Benjamin Peirce, arrived at the College. He would become the first American to produce original mathematics—an ambition frowned upon in an era when professors largely limited themselves to teaching. Peirce’s successors—William Fogg Osgood and Maxime Bôcher—undertook the task of transforming the math department into a world-class research center, attracting to the faculty such luminaries as George David Birkhoff. Birkhoff produced a dazzling body of work, while training a generation of innovators—students like Marston Morse and Hassler Whitney, who forged novel pathways in topology and other areas. Influential figures from around the world soon flocked to Harvard, some overcoming great challenges to pursue their elected calling.

A History in Sum elucidates the contributions of these extraordinary minds and makes clear why the history of the Harvard mathematics department is an essential part of the history of mathematics in America and beyond.

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HISTORY IN URBAN PLACES
THE HISTORIC DISTRICTS OF THE UNITED STA
DAVID HAMER
The Ohio State University Press, 1998

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"History Is Bunk"
Assembling the Past at Henry Ford's Greenfield Village
Jessie Swigger
University of Massachusetts Press, 2014
In 1916 a clearly agitated Henry Ford famously proclaimed that "history is more or less bunk." Thirteen years later, however, he opened the outdoor history museum Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. It was written history's focus on politicians and military heroes that was bunk, he explained. Greenfield Village would correct this error by celebrating farmers and inventors.

The village eventually included a replica of Thomas Edison's Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory, the Wright brothers' cycle shop and home from Dayton, Ohio, and Ford's own Michigan birthplace. But not all of the structures were associated with famous men. Craft and artisan shops, a Cotswold cottage from England, and two brick slave cabins also populated the village landscape. Ford mixed replicas, preserved buildings, and whole-cloth constructions that together celebrated his personal worldview.

Greenfield Village was immediately popular. But that only ensured that the history it portrayed would be interpreted not only by Ford but also by throngs of visitors and the guides and publicity materials they encountered. After Ford's death in 1947, administrators altered the village in response to shifts in the museum profession at large, demographic changes in the Detroit metropolitan area, and the demands of their customers.

Jessie Swigger analyzes the dialogue between museum administrators and their audiences by considering the many contexts that have shaped Greenfield Village. The result is a book that simultaneously provides the most complete extant history of the site and an intimate look at how the past is assembled and constructed at history museums.
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History Is Bunk
Assembling the Past at Henry Ford's Greenfield Village
Swigger Jessie
University of Massachusetts Press

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History Just Ahead
A Guide to Wisconsin's Historical Markers
Sarah Davis McBride
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 1999
This guide to Wisconsin's historical markers is designed to acquaint readers and travelers with many of the dramatic events and noteworthy achievements that help to comprise Wisconsin history. History Just Ahead can be a companion book for the thousands of curious visitors, travelers, and residents who pause to read Wisconsin's markers every year. Containing over 400 marker texts and 100 illustrations, conveniently organzied by regions and counties with accompanying maps, this guidebook celebrates the Wisconsin heritage from geological epochs to recent ethnic settlement. Wisconsin's rich history is brought to life in this compendium, reminding us that historical markers are truely an important educational tool — helping to strengthen respect and understanding of state history and raising public awareness of the need to preserve our historical and natural environment.
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History, Literature and the Writing of the Canadian Prairies
Alison Calder
University of Manitoba Press, 2005
The Canadian Prairie has long been represented as a timeless and unchanging location, defined by settlement and landscape. Now, a new generation of writers and historians challenge that perception and argue, instead, that it is a region with an evolving culture and history. This collection of ten essays explores a more contemporary prairie identity, and reconfigures "the prairie" as a construct that is non-linear and diverse, responding to the impact of geographical, historical, and political currents. These writers explore the connections between document and imagination, between history and culture, and between geography and time.The subjects of the essays range widely: the non-linear structure of Carol Shield's The Stone Diaries; the impact of Aberhart's Social Credit, Marshall McLuhan, and Mesopotamian myth on Robert Kroetsch's prairie postmodernism; the role of document in long prairie poems; the connection between cultural tourism and heritage; the theme of regeneration in Margaret Laurence's Manawaka writing; the influence of imagination on geography in Thomas Wharton's Icefields; and the effects on an alpine climber of pre-WWII ideological concepts of time and individualism.
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History Matters
Contemporary Poetry on the Margins of American Culture
Ira Sadoff
University of Iowa Press, 2009
In this capacious and energetic volume, Ira Sadoff argues that poets live and write within history, our artistic values always reflecting attitudes about both literary history and culture at large. History Matters does not return to the culture war that reduced complex arguments about human nature, creativity, identity, and interplay between individual and collective identity to slogans. Rather, Sadoff peels back layers of clutter to reveal the important questions at the heart of any complex and fruitful discussion about the connections between culture and literature.

Much of our most adventurous writing has occurred at history’s margins, simultaneously making use of and resisting tradition. By tracking key contemporary poets—including John Ashbery, Olena Kaltyiak Davis, Louise Glück, Czeslaw Milosz, Frank O’Hara, and C. K. Williams—as well as musing on jazz and other creative enterprises, Sadoff investigates the lively poetic art of those who have grappled with late twentieth-century attitudes about history, subjectivity, contingency, flux, and modernity. In plainspoken writing, he probes the question of the poet’s capacity to illuminate and universalize truth. Along the way, we are called to consider how and why art moves and transforms human beings.
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History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning
Nancy G. Siraisi
University of Michigan Press, 2007

A major, path-breaking work, History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning is Nancy G. Siraisi's examination into the intersections of medically trained authors and history in the period 1450 to 1650. Rather than studying medicine and history as separate disciplinary traditions, Siraisi calls attention to their mutual interaction in the rapidly changing world of Renaissance erudition. Far from their contributions being a mere footnote in the historical record, medical writers had extensive involvement in the reading, production, and shaping of historical knowledge during this important period. With remarkably detailed scholarship, Siraisi investigates doctors' efforts to explore the legacies handed down to them from ancient medical and anatomical writings and the difficult reconciliations this required between the authority of the ancient world and the discoveries of the modern. She also studies the ways in which sixteenth-century medical authors wrote history, both in their own medical texts and in more general historical works. In the course of her study, Siraisi finds that what allowed medical writers to become so fully engaged in the writing of history was their general humanistic background, their experience of history through the field of medicine's past, and the tools that the writing of history offered to the development of a rapidly evolving profession.

Nancy G. Siraisi is one of the preeminent scholars of medieval and Renaissance intellectual history, specializing in medicine and science. Now Distinguished Professor Emerita of History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and a 2008 winner of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, she has written numerous books, including Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils (Princeton, 1981), which won the American Association for the History of Medicine William H. Welch Medal; Avicenna in Renaissance Italy (Princeton, 1987); The Clock and the Mirror (Princeton, 1997); and the widely used textbook Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine (Chicago, 1990), which won the Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize from the History of Science Society. In 2003 Siraisi received the History of Science Society's George Sarton Medal, in 2004 she received the Paul Oskar Kristellar Award for Lifetime Achievement of the Renaissance Society of America, and in 2005 she was awarded the American Historical Association Award for Scholarly Distinction.

"A fascinating study of Renaissance physicians as avid readers and enthusiastic writers of all kinds of history: from case narratives and medical biographies to archaeological and environmental histories. In this wide-ranging book, Nancy Siraisi demonstrates the deep links between the medical and the humanistic disciplines in early modern Europe."
---Katharine Park, Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University

"This is a salient but little explored aspect of Renaissance humanism, and there is no doubt that Siraisi has succeeded in throwing light onto a vast subject. The scholarship is wide-ranging and profound, and breaks new ground. The choice of examples is fascinating, and it puts Renaissance documents into a new context. This is a major book, well written, richly learned and with further implications for more than students of medical history."
---Vivian Nutton, Professor, The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London, and author of From Democedes to Harvey: Studies in the History of Medicine

"Siraisi shows the many-dimensioned overlaps and interactions between medicine and 'history' in the early modern period, marking a pioneering effort to survey a neglected discipline. Her book follows the changing usage of the classical term 'history' both as empiricism and as a kind of scholarship in the Renaissance before its more modern analytical and critical applications. It is a marvel of erudition in an area insufficiently studied."
---Donald R. Kelley, Emeritus James Westfall Thompson Professor of History, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and Executive Editor of Journal of the History of Ideas

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History, Memory, and the Law
Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2002
The essays in this book examine law as an active participant in the process through which history is written and memory is constructed. Instead of seeing law as a "victim" of history, the writers treat law as an author of history, not just in the instrumental sense in which law can be said to make a difference in society, but in the ways that law constructs and uses history.
Law looks to the past as it speaks to present needs. In the production of judicial opinions--supposedly definitive statements of what the law is--judges reconstruct law's past, tracing out lines of legal precedent that arguably "compel" their decisions. These essays consider how law treats history, how history appears in legal decisions, and how the authority of history is used to authorize legal decisions.
Furthermore, law plays a role in the construction of memory. The writers here ask how law remembers and records the past as well as how it helps us to remember our past. Law in the modern era is one of the most important of our society's technologies for preserving memory. In helping to construct our memory in certain ways law participates in the writing of our collective history. It plays a crucial role in knitting together our past, present, and future.
The essays in this volume present grounded examinations of particular problems, places, and practices and address the ways in which memory works in and through law, the sites of remembrance that law provides, the battles against forgetting that are fought in and around those sites, and the resultant role law plays in constructing history. The writers also inquire about the way history is mobilized in legal decision making, the rhetorical techniques for marshalling and for overcoming precedent, and the different histories that are written in and through the legal process.
The contributors are Joan Dayan, Soshana Felman, Dominic La Capra, Reva Siegel, Brook Thomas, and G. Edward White.
Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science and Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, Amherst College. He is past President of the Law and Society Association and current President of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities. Thomas R. Kearns is William H. Hastie Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, Amherst College.
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History, Memory, and the Literary Left
Modern American Poetry, 1935-1968
John Lowney
University of Iowa Press, 2006
In this nuanced revisionist history of modern American poetry, John Lowney investigates the Depression era’s impact on late modernist American poetry from the socioeconomic crisis of the 1930s through the emergence of the new social movements of the 1960s. Informed by an ongoing scholarly reconsideration of 1930s American culture and concentrating on Left writers whose historical consciousness was profoundly shaped by the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, Lowney articulates the Left’s challenges to national collective memory and redefines the importance of late modernism in American literary history. The late modernist writers Lowney studies most closely---Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Thomas McGrath, and George Oppen---are not all customarily associated with the 1930s, nor are they commonly seen as literary peers. By examining these late modernist writers comparatively, Lowney foregrounds differences of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, and social class and region while emphasizing how each writer developed poetic forms that responded to the cultural politics and socioaesthetic debates of the 1930s. In so doing he calls into question the boundaries that have limited the scholarly dialogue about modern poetry.No other study of American poetry has considered the particular gathering of careers that Lowney considers. As poets whose collective historical consciousness was profoundly shaped by the turmoil of the Depression and war years and the Cold War’s repression or rewriting of history, their diverse talents represent a distinct generational impact on U.S. and international literary history.
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The History of a Periphery
Spanish Colonial Cartography from Colombia's Pacific Lowlands
Juliet B. Wiersema
University of Texas Press, 2024

An exploration of Colombian maps in New Granada.

During the late Spanish colonial period, the Pacific Lowlands, also called the Greater Chocó, was famed for its rich placer deposits. Gold mined here was central to New Granada’s economy yet this Pacific frontier in today’s Colombia was considered the “periphery of the periphery.” Infamous for its fierce, unconquered Indigenous inhabitants and its brutal tropical climate, it was rarely visited by Spanish administrators, engineers, or topographers and seldom appeared in detail on printed maps of the period.

In this lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched volume, Juliet Wiersema uncovers little-known manuscript cartography and makes visible an unexamined corner of the Spanish empire. In concert with thousands of archival documents from Colombia, Spain, and the United States, she reveals how a "periphery" was imagined and projected, largely for political or economic reasons. Along the way, she unearths untold narratives about ephemeral settlements, African adaptation and autonomy, Indigenous strategies of resistance, and tenuous colonialisms on the margins of a beleaguered viceroyalty.

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History of a Tragedy
THE EXPULSION OF THE JEWS FROM SPAIN
Joseph Perez
University of Illinois Press, 2006

Few events in the history of Spain have provoked as much controversy as the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. Conflicts within the Catholic Church, suspicions within the newly unified Spain, and the claims of Spanish merchants combined to make the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella intolerant and inquisitorial. Yet the roots of Spanish anti-Semitism went deeper.  In this concise survey of the expulsion of the Sephardic Jews, Joseph Pérez studies the evolution of the Jewish community in Spain from the time of the Visigoths to the reign of the Catholic kings. He explores the Jewish community’s role in creating and sustaining the vibrant cultural, political, and economic world of medieval Spain, and how growing religious intolerance, a pervasive resentment of the “others,” and a string of escalating encroachments culminated in expulsion.

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A History of Accountancy in the United States
The Cultural Significance of Accounting. Revised Edition.
GARY JOHN PREVITS
The Ohio State University Press, 1998

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The History of Akbar
Abu'l-Fazl
Harvard University Press, 2014

The exemplar of Indo-Persian history, at once a biography of Emperor Akbar and a chronicle of sixteenth-century Mughal India.

Akbarnāma, or The History of Akbar, by Abu’l-Fazl (d. 1602), is one of the most important works of Indo-Persian history and a touchstone of prose artistry. Marking a high point in a long, rich tradition of Persian historical writing, it served as a model for historians across the Persianate world. The work is at once a biography of the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) that includes descriptions of political and martial feats and cultural achievements, and a chronicle of sixteenth-century India.

The eighth and final volume spans the thirty-ninth to fiftieth years of Akbar’s reign, detailing the conquest of Ahmadnagar, Prince Salim’s rebellion, and the emperor’s final days.

The Persian text, presented in the Naskh script, is based on a careful reassessment of the primary sources.

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The History of Akbar
Abu'l-Fazl
Harvard University Press, 2014

The exemplar of Indo-Persian history, at once a biography of Emperor Akbar and a chronicle of sixteenth-century Mughal India.

Akbarnāma, or The History of Akbar, by Abu’l-Fazl (d. 1602), is one of the most important works of Indo-Persian history and a touchstone of prose artistry. Marking a high point in a long, rich tradition of Persian historical writing, it served as a model for historians across the Persianate world. The work is at once a biography of the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) that includes descriptions of political and martial feats and cultural achievements, and a chronicle of sixteenth-century India.

The seventh volume details the twenty-ninth to thirty-eighth years of Akbar’s reign, including accounts of the marriage of his son and heir Salim (Jahangir); conquests of Swat, Orissa, Kashmir, Sind, and the Saurashtra Peninsula; the pacification of Bengal; and the emperor’s visits to Kashmir, the Punjab, and Kabul.

The Persian text, presented in the Naskh script, is based on a careful reassessment of the primary sources.

[more]

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The History of Akbar
Abu'l-Fazl
Harvard University Press, 2014

The exemplar of Indo-Persian history, at once a biography of Emperor Akbar and a chronicle of sixteenth-century Mughal India.

Akbarnāma, or The History of Akbar, by Abu’l-Fazl (d. 1602), is one of the most important works of Indo-Persian history and a touchstone of prose artistry. Marking a high point in a long, rich tradition of Persian historical writing, it served as a model for historians across the Persianate world. The work is at once a biography of the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) that includes descriptions of his political and martial feats and cultural achievements, and a chronicle of sixteenth-century India.

The sixth volume details the twenty-third to twenty-eighth years of Akbar’s reign, including accounts of the quelling of rebellions in Bihar, Bengal, and Kabul, and final victory in Gujarat.

The Persian text, presented in the Naskh script, is based on a careful reassessment of the primary sources.

[more]

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The History of Akbar
Abu'l-Fazl
Harvard University Press, 2014

The exemplar of Indo-Persian history, at once a biography of Emperor Akbar and a chronicle of sixteenth-century Mughal India.

Akbarnāma, or The History of Akbar, by Abu’l-Fazl (d. 1602), is one of the most important works of Indo-Persian history and a touchstone of prose artistry. Marking a high point in a long, rich tradition of Persian historical writing, it served as a model for historians across the Persianate world. The work is at once a biography of the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) that includes descriptions of his political and martial feats and cultural achievements, and a chronicle of sixteenth-century India.

The fifth volume details the bellicose seventeenth to twenty-second years of Akbar’s reign, including accounts of the conquest of Gujarat, the capture of Rohtas fort from rebel Afghans, and the invasions of Patna and Bengal.

The Persian text, presented in the Naskh script, is based on a careful reassessment of the primary sources.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The History of Akbar
Abu'l-Fazl
Harvard University Press, 2014

The exemplar of Indo-Persian history, at once a biography of Emperor Akbar and a chronicle of sixteenth-century Mughal India.

Akbarnāma, or The History of Akbar, by Abu’l-Fazl (d. 1602), is one of the most important works of Indo-Persian history and a touchstone of prose artistry. Marking a high point in a long, rich tradition of Persian historical writing, it served as a model for historians across the Persianate world. The work is at once a biography of the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) that includes descriptions of his political and martial feats and cultural achievements, and a chronicle of sixteenth-century India.

The fourth volume narrates the second eight years of Akbar’s reign, including an account of his visit to Ajmer, the arrival of an embassy from the Safavid court, and the beginning of the author’s brother Faizi’s career as court poet.

The Persian text, presented in the Naskh script, is based on a careful reassessment of the primary sources.

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The History of Akbar
Abu'l-Fazl
Harvard University Press, 2014

The exemplar of Indo-Persian history, at once a biography of Emperor Akbar and a chronicle of sixteenth-century Mughal India.

Akbarnāma, or The History of Akbar, by Abu’l-Fazl (d. 1602), is one of the most important works of Indo-Persian history and a touchstone of prose artistry. Marking a high point in a long, rich tradition of Persian historical writing, it served as a model for historians across the Persianate world. The work is at once a biography of the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) that includes descriptions of his political and martial feats and cultural achievements, and a chronicle of sixteenth-century India.

The third volume details the first eight years of Akbar’s reign, when he consolidated his power, quelled the rebellion of his guardian Bayram Khan, conquered Malwa, and married a Rajput princess.

The Persian text, presented in the Naskh script, is based on a careful reassessment of the primary sources.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The History of Akbar
Abu'l-Fazl
Harvard University Press, 2014

The exemplar of Indo-Persian history, at once a biography of Emperor Akbar and a chronicle of sixteenth-century Mughal India.

Akbarnāma, or The History of Akbar, by Abu’l-Fazl (d. 1602), is one of the most important works of Indo-Persian history and a touchstone of prose artistry. Marking a high point in a long, rich tradition of Persian historical writing, it served as a model for historians across the Persianate world. The work is at once a biography of the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) that includes descriptions of his political and martial feats and cultural achievements, and a chronicle of sixteenth-century India.

The second volume details the turbulent reign of his father Humayun, his years in exile, his return to power, and his untimely death that brought Akbar to the throne as a youth.

The Persian text, presented in the Naskh script, is based on a careful reassessment of the primary sources.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The History of Akbar
Abu'l-Fazl
Harvard University Press, 2014

The exemplar of Indo-Persian history, at once a biography of Emperor Akbar and a chronicle of sixteenth-century Mughal India.

Akbarnāma, or The History of Akbar, by Abu’l-Fazl (d. 1602), is one of the most important works of Indo-Persian history and a touchstone of prose artistry. Marking a high point in a long, rich tradition of Persian historical writing, it served as a model for historians throughout the Persianate world. The work is at once a biography of the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) that includes descriptions of his political and martial feats and cultural achievements, and a chronicle of sixteenth-century India.

The first volume details the birth of Akbar, his illustrious genealogy, and in particular the lives and exploits of his grandfather, Babur, and his father, Humayun, who laid the foundations of the Mughal Empire.

The Persian text, presented in the Naskh script, is based on a careful reassessment of the primary sources.

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A History of ALA Policy on Intellectual Freedom
A Supplement to the Intellectual Freedom Manual
Trina Magi
American Library Association, 2015

Collecting several key documents and policy statements, this supplement to the tenth edition of the Intellectual Freedom Manual traces a history of ALA's commitment to fighting censorship. Beginning with an introductory essay that chronicles ALA policy making on intellectual freedom, this important resource includes sections discussing such foundational issues as

  • library advocacy on social and political issues, from post-World War I disarmament, to Vietnam-era protests, to the call to revisit the field’s rhetoric concerning neutrality;
  • the evolution of the Library Bill of Rights, such as the 1978 revision that eliminated its use of sex-linked pronouns and ALA Council actions rescinding the 2018 interpretation on meeting rooms;
  • protecting the freedom to read;
  • diverse collections and equity, diversity, and inclusion, new to this edition;
  • ALA’s complicated history on race, including a 1936 statement opposing discrimination, inaction amidst litigation to desegregate libraries in the 1950s and 1960s, and protests over Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law;
  • ALA's Code of Ethics;
  • how to respond to challenges and concerns about library resources;
  • internet filtering, minors and online activity, and education and information literacy;
  • programs and displays;
  • policy on governmental intimidation; 
  • copyright; and
  • privacy and confidentiality, including the retention of library usage records.

 

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History of Alexander, Volume I
Books 1–5
Quintus Curtius
Harvard University Press

Adventurous history.

Quintus Curtius was apparently a rhetorician who lived in the first century of the Roman empire and, early in the reign of Claudius (AD 41–54), wrote a history of Alexander the Great in ten books in clear and picturesque style for Latin readers. The first two books have not survived—our narrative begins with events in 333 BC—and there is material missing from books 5, 6, and 10. One of his main sources is Cleitarchus who, about 300 BC, had made Alexander’s career a matter of marvelous adventure.

Curtius is not a critical historian; and in his desire to entertain and to stress the personality of Alexander, he elaborates effective scenes, omits much that is important for history, and does not worry about chronology. But he does not invent things, except speeches and letters inserted into the narrative by traditional habit. “I copy more than I believe,” he says. Three features of his story are narrative of exciting experiences, development of a hero’s character, and a disposition to moralize. His history is one of the five extant works on which we rely for the career of Alexander the Great.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Quintus Curtius is in two volumes.

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History of Alexander, Volume II
Books 6–10
Quintus Curtius
Harvard University Press

Adventurous history.

Quintus Curtius was apparently a rhetorician who lived in the first century of the Roman empire and, early in the reign of Claudius (AD 41–54), wrote a history of Alexander the Great in ten books in clear and picturesque style for Latin readers. The first two books have not survived—our narrative begins with events in 333 BC—and there is material missing from books 5, 6, and 10. One of his main sources is Cleitarchus who, about 300 BC, had made Alexander’s career a matter of marvelous adventure.

Curtius is not a critical historian; and in his desire to entertain and to stress the personality of Alexander, he elaborates effective scenes, omits much that is important for history, and does not worry about chronology. But he does not invent things, except speeches and letters inserted into the narrative by traditional habit. “I copy more than I believe,” he says. Three features of his story are narrative of exciting experiences, development of a hero’s character, and a disposition to moralize. His history is one of the five extant works on which we rely for the career of Alexander the Great.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Quintus Curtius is in two volumes.

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