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The Historian's Toolbox: A Student's Guide to the Theory and Craft of History
by Robert C. WilliamsNow in its fifth edition, The Historian’s Toolbox is designed to help students become skilled in the intellectual process and craft of history, offering an overview of the field and techniques for reading and writing about history.The fifth edition expands the selection of tools available to students entering the workshop of history. These include new chapters on digital history, Indigenous peoples, and gender history and new sections on the Voynich manuscript, LGBTQ+ history, slavery, and a historian who survived the war in Ukraine. The book has been fully updated to address the possibilities and limits of computerized approaches to doing history, with careful attention paid to the benefits and controversies of artificial intelligence, chatbots, and the internet. It demonstrates the continuing relevance of history in a cacophonous world of misinformation and censorship, emphasizing critical thinking, facts, and evidence as valuable means of understanding the past and shaping the future.Engaging and accessible, this volume is ideal for undergraduate courses in historiography and historical methods.
The Historians’ Paradox: The Study of History in Our Time
by Peter Charles HofferHoffer argues for a new methodological philosophy of history that mitigates fallibility and paradoxHow do we know what happened in the past? We cannot go back, and no amount of historical data can enable us to understand with absolute certainty what life was like “then.” It is easy to demolish the very idea of historical knowing, but it is impossible to demolish the importance of historical knowing. In an age of cable television pundits and anonymous bloggers dueling over history, the value of owning history increases at the same time as our confidence in history as a way of knowing crumbles. Historical knowledge thus presents a paradox—the more it is required, the less reliable it has become. To reconcile this paradox—that history is impossible but necessary—Peter Charles Hoffer proposes a practical, workable philosophy of history for our times, one that is robust and realistic, and that speaks to anyone who reads, writes and teaches history.Covering a sweeping range of philosophies (from ancient history to game theory), methodological approaches to writing history, and the advantages and disadvantages of different strategies of argument, Hoffer constructs a philosophy of history that is reasonable, free of fallacy, and supported by appropriate evidence that is itself tenable.
The Historical Austen
by William H. GalperinSelected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic TitleJane Austen, arguably the most beloved of all English novelists, has been regarded both as a feminist ahead of her time and as a social conservative whose satiric comedies work to regulate rather than to liberate. Such viewpoints, however, do not take sufficient stock of the historical Austen, whose writings, as William Galperin shows, were more properly oppositional rather than either disciplinary or subversive.Reading the history of her novels' reception through other histories--literary, aesthetic, and social--The Historical Austen is a major reassessment of Jane Austen's achievement as well as a corrective to the historical Austen that abides in literary scholarship. In contrast to interpretations that stress the conservative aspects of the realistic tradition that Austen helped to codify, Galperin takes his lead from Austen's contemporaries, who were struck by her detailed attention to the dynamism of everyday life. Noting how the very act of reading demarcates an horizon of possibility at variance with the imperatives of plot and narrative authority, The Historical Austen sees Austen's development as operating in two registers. Although her writings appear to serve the interests of probability in representing "things as they are," they remain, as her contemporaries dubbed them, histories of the present, where reality and the prospect of change are continually intertwined.In a series of readings of the six completed novels, in addition to the epistolary Lady Susan and the uncompleted Sanditon, Galperin offers startling new interpretations of these texts, demonstrating the extraordinary awareness that Austen maintained not only with respect to her narrative practice--notably, free indirect discourse--but also with attention to the novel's function as a social and political instrument.
The Historical Imagination of G.K. Chesterton: Locality, Patriotism, and Nationalism (Studies in Major Literary Authors)
by Joseph R. McClearyThis study examines a selection of Chesterton’s novels, poetry, and literary criticism and outlines the distinctive philosophy of history that emerges from these writings. Looking at Chesteron's relationship with and influence upon authors including William Cobbett, Sir Walter Scott, Belloc, Shaw, H.G. Wells, Christopher Dawson, Evelyn Waugh, and Marshall McLuhan, McCleary contends that Chesterton’s recurring use of the themes of locality, patriotism, and nationalism embodies a distinctive understanding of what gives history its coherence. The study concludes that Chesterton’s emphasis on locality is the hallmark of his historical philosophy in that it blends the concepts of free will, specificity, and creatureliness which he uses to make sense of history.
The Historical Literature of the Jack Cade Rebellion
by Alexander L. KaufmanAccounts of Jack Cade's 1450 Rebellion-an uprising of some 30,000 middle-class citizens, protesting Henry VI's policies, and resulting in hundreds of deaths as well as the leaders' execution-form the dominant entry in a group of quasi-historical documents referred to as the London chronicles of the Fifteenth Century. However, each chronicle is inherently different and highly subjective. In the first study of the primary documents related to the Cade Rebellion, Alexander L. Kaufman shows that the chroniclers produced multiple representations of the event rather than a single, unified narrative. Aided by contemporary theories of historiography and historical representation, Kaufman scrutinizes the differing representations and distinguishes the writers' objectiveness, their underrated literary skills, and their ideological positions on the rebellion and fifteenth-century politics. He demonstrates how the use of figurative language is related to writing about trauma, and how descriptions of Cade's procession through London are a violent parody of midsummer festivals. In an exploration of authenticity in the descriptions of Cade, Kaufman also examines the characterization and plot devices that push Cade towards the realm of myth, showing that representations of Cade are influenced by popular fifteenth-century stories of Robin Hood.
The Historical Novel (The New Critical Idiom)
by Jerome De GrootThe historical novel is an enduringly popular genre that raises crucial questions about key literary concepts, fact and fiction, identity, history, reading, and writing. In this comprehensive, focused guide, Jerome de Groot offers an accessible introduction to the genre and critical debates that surround it, including: the development of the historical novel from early eighteenth-century works through to postmodern and contemporary historical fiction different genres, such as sensational or ‘low’ fiction, crime novels, literary works, counterfactual writing and related issues of audience, value, and authenticity the many functions of historical fiction, particularly the challenges it poses to accepted histories and postmodern questioning of ‘grand narratives’ the relationship of the historical novel to the wider cultural sphere with reference to historical theory, the internet, television, and film key theoretical concepts such as the authentic fallacy, postcolonialism, Marxism, queer and feminist reading. Drawing on a wide range of examples from across the centuries and around the globe The Historical Novel is essential reading for students exploring the interface of history and fiction.
The Historical Novel, Transnationalism, and the Postmodern Era: Presenting the Past (Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature)
by Susan BrantlyThis volume explores the genre of the historical novel and the variety of ways in which writers choose to represent the past. How does an author’s nationality or gender impact their artistic choices? To what extent can historical novels appeal to a transnational audience? This study demonstrates how histories can communicate across national borders, often by invoking or deconstructing the very notion of nationhood. Furthermore, it traces how the concerns of the postmodern era, such as postmodern critiques of historiography, colonialism, identity, and the Enlightenment, have impacted the genre of the historical novel, and shows this impact has not been uniform throughout Western culture. Not all historical novels written during the postmodern era are postmodern. The historical novel as a genre occupies a problematic, yet significant space in Cold War literary currents, torn between claims of authenticity and the impossibility of accessing the past. Historical novels from England, America, Germany, and France are compared and contrasted with historical novels from Sweden, testing a variety of theoretical perspectives in the process. This pitting of a center against a periphery serves to highlight traits that historical novels from the West have in common, but also how they differ. The historical novel is not just a local, regional phenomenon, but has become, during the postmodern era, a transnational tool for exploring how we should think of nations and nationalism and what a society should, or should not, look like.
The Historical Phonology of Vowel Length (Routledge Library Editions: Linguistics)
by Brent de CheneData from a variety of languages are offered in support of the claim that although there are several processes by which languages commonly add to an already existing stock of long vowels, there is only one mechanism by which a language without a distinction of vocalic length commonly introduces such a distinction. This mechanism is the coalescence of vowel sequences, typically after loss of intervocalic consonants. This book examines vowels lengths, their differences and their effects on language.
The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature
by Heather Dubrow Richard SprierInciteful essays with substantial bibliographies.
The Historical Uncanny: Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory
by Susanne C. KnittelThe Historical Uncanny explores how certain memories become inscribed into the heritage of a country or region while others are suppressed or forgotten. In response to the erasure of historical memories that discomfit a public’s self-understanding, this book proposes the historical uncanny as that which resists reification precisely because it cannot be assimilated to dominant discourses of commemoration.Focusing on the problems of representation and reception, the book explores memorials for two marginalized aspects of Holocaust: the Nazi euthanasia program directed against the mentally ill and disabled and the Fascist persecution of Slovenes, Croats, and Jews in and around Trieste. Reading these memorials together with literary and artistic texts, Knittel redefines “sites of memory” as assemblages of cultural artifacts and discourses that accumulate over time; they emerge as a physical and a cultural space that is continually redefined, rewritten, and re-presented.In bringing perspectives from disability studies and postcolonialism to the question of memory, Knittel unsettles our understanding of the Holocaust and its place in the culture of contemporary Europe.
The Historical Value of Myths
by John KarabelasThis book explores the connection between history and mythology by engaging with myths not as allegories or falsehoods, but as representations of historical experience. Historical approaches to myth are often absent from discussions of mythology, which favour symbolic and psychological interpretations. This analysis traces certain episodes of myths’ complex ancestries, from when their relationship with history could not so easily be severed, to subsequent attempts, which misunderstood myths as confused, undeveloped lenses for humanity to view the world. Drawing on the works of English philosopher R.G. Collingwood and the Romanticism movement, the book argues for the expansion of methodological approaches to myths. It explores the ways in which myths have served as clues for the history of civilization and humanity’s ever-changing complexities. The Historical Value of Myths is an illuminating read for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers in the fields of mythology, the philosophy of history, and anthropology.
The Historical Web and Digital Humanities: The Case of National Web Domains (Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities)
by Niels Brügger Ditte LaursenThe Historical Web and Digital Humanities fosters discussions between the Digital Humanities and web archive studies by focussing on one of the largest entities of the web, namely national and transnational web domains such as the British, French, or European web. <P><P>With a view to investigating whether, and how, web studies and web historiography can inform and contribute to the Digital Humanities, this volume contains a number of case studies and methodological and theoretical discussions that both illustrate the potential of studying the web, in this case national web domains, and provide an insight into the challenges associated with doing so. Commentary on and possible solutions to these challenges are debated within the chapters and each one contributes in its own way to a web history in the making that acknowledges the specificities of the archived web. <P><P>The Historical Web and Digital Humanities will be essential reading for those with an interest in how the past of the web can be studied, as well as how Big Data approaches can be applied to the archived web. As a result, this volume will appeal to academics and students working and studying in the fields of Digital Humanities, internet and media studies, history, cultural studies, and communication.
The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House (Chawton House Library: Women's Novels)
by Jennie Batchelor Megan HiattFirst published in 1759, this novel aims to promote the cause of the Magdalen House, a charity which sought to rehabilitate prostitutes by fitting them for a life of virtuous industry. It challenges long-standing prejudices against prostitutes by presenting them as victims of inadequate education, male libertinism and sexual double standards.
The Historiography of Transition: Critical Phases in the Development of Modernity (1494-1973) (Routledge Approaches to History)
by Paolo PombeniDefining a “historic transition” means understanding how the complex system of intellectual, social, and material structures formed that determined the transition from a certain “universe” to a “new universe,” where the old explanations were radically rethought. In this book, a group of historians with specializations ranging from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries and across political, religious, and social fields, attempt a reinterpretation of “modernity” as the new “Axial Age.”
The History Behind Game of Thrones: The North Remembers
by David C. WeinczokThe true history behind the hit HBO fantasy show and George R. R. Martin&’s bestselling Fire and Ice series. A wall in the distant north cuts the world in two. Ruthless sea-born warriors raid the coasts from their war galleys. A young nobleman and his kin are slaughtered under a banner of truce within a mighty castle. A warrior king becomes a legend when he smites his foe with one swing of his axe during a nation-forging battle. Yet this isn&’t Westeros—it&’s Scotland. Game of Thrones is history re-imagined as fantasy. The History Behind Game of Thrones turns the tables, using George R. R. Martin&’s extraordinary fictional universe as a way to understand the driving forces and defining moments from Scotland&’s story. Why were castles so important? Was there a limit to the powers a medieval king could use—or abuse? What was the reality of being under siege? Was there really anything that can compare to the destructive force of dragons? By joining forces, Westeros and Scotland hold the answers. Writer and presenter David C. Weinczok draws on a vast array of characters, events, places, and themes from Scottish history that echo Game of Thrones at every dramatic turn. Visit the castle where the real Red Wedding transpired, encounter the fearsome historical tribes beyond Rome&’s great wall, learn how a blood-red heart became the most feared sigil in Scotland, and much more. By journey&’s end, the cogs in the wheels of Martin&’s world and Scottish history will be laid bare, as well as the stories of those who tried to shape—and sometimes even break—them.
The History Of The Book In 100 Books: The Complete Story, From Egypt To E-book
by Roderick Cave Sara AyadIn The History of the Book in 100 Books, the author explores 100 books that have played a critical role in the creation and expansion of books and all that they bring -- literacy, numeracy, expansion of knowledge, religion, political theory, oppression, liberation, and much more. The book is ordered chronologically and divided thematically. Each of the 100 sections focuses on one book that represents a particular development in the evolution of books and in turn, world history and society. Abundant photographs inform and embellish.
The History and Theory of Rhetoric: An Introduction
by James A. HerrickThe History and Theory of Rhetoric offers an accessible discussion of the history of rhetorical studies in the Western tradition, from ancient Greece to contemporary American and European theorists. By tracing the historical progression of rhetoric from the Greek Sophists of the 5th Century B. C. to contemporary studies--such as the rhetoric of science and feminist rhetoric--this concise yet comprehensive text helps students better understand what rhetoric is and what unites differing rhetorical theories throughout history.
The History and Theory of Rhetoric: An Introduction
by James A. HerrickBy tracing the traditional progression of rhetoric from the Greek Sophists to contemporary theorists, this textbook gives students a conceptual framework for evaluating and practicing persuasive writing and speaking in a wide range of settings and in both written and visual media. The book’s expansive historical purview illustrates how persuasive public discourse performs essential social functions and shapes our daily worlds, drawing on the ideas of some of history’s greatest thinkers and theorists. The seventh edition includes greater attention to non-Western rhetorics, feminist rhetorics, the rhetoric of science, and European and American critical theory. Known for its clear writing style and contemporary examples throughout, The History and Theory of Rhetoric emphasizes the relevance of rhetoric to today’s students. This revised edition serves as a core textbook for rhetoric courses in both English and communication programs covering both the historical tradition of rhetoric and contemporary rhetoric studies. This edition includes an instructor’s manual and practice quizzes for students at www.routledge.com/cw/herrick
The History and Theory of Rhetoric: An Introduction (Subscription)
by James A. HerrickThe History and Theory of Rhetoric offers discussion of the history of rhetorical studies in the Western tradition, from ancient Greece to contemporary American and European theorists that is easily accessible to students. By tracing the historical progression of rhetoric from the Greek Sophists of the 5th Century B.C. all the way to contemporary studies-such as the rhetoric of science and feminist rhetoric-this comprehensive text helps students understand how persuasive public discourse performs essential social functions and shapes our daily worlds. Students gain conceptual framework for evaluating and practicing persuasive writing and speaking in a wide range of settings and in both written and visual media. Known for its clear writing style and contemporary examples throughout, The History and Theory of Rhetoric emphasizes the relevance of rhetoric to today's students.
The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting
by Anne TrubekIn the digital age of instant communication, handwriting is less necessary than ever before, and indeed fewer and fewer school children are being taught how to write in cursive. Signatures--far from John Hancock’s elegant model--have become scrawls. In her recent and widely discussed and debated essays, the author argues that the decline and even elimination of handwriting from daily life does not signal a decline in civilization, but rather the next stage in the evolution of communication. In this book, the author uncovers the long and significant impact handwriting has had on culture and humanity--from the first recorded handwriting on the clay tablets of the Sumerians some four thousand years ago and the invention of the alphabet as we know it, to the rising value of handwritten manuscripts today. Each innovation over the millennia has threatened existing standards and entrenched interests: Indeed, in ancient Athens, Socrates and his followers decried the very use of handwriting, claiming memory would be destroyed; while Gutenberg’s printing press ultimately overturned the livelihood of the monks who created books in the pre-printing era. And yet new methods of writing and communication have always appeared. Establishing a novel link between our deep past and emerging future. The author offers a colorful lens through which to view our shared social experience.
The History of Basque (Current Issues In Linguistic Theory Ser. #131)
by R. L. TraskBasque is the sole survivor of the very ancient languages of Western Europe. This book, written by an internationally renowned specialist in Basque, provides a comprehensive survey of all that is known about the prehistory of the language, including pronunciation, the grammar and the vocabulary. It also provides a long critical evaluation of the search for its relatives, as well as a thumbnail sketch of the language, a summary of its typological features, an external history and an extensive bibliography.
The History of British Women's Writing, 1970-Present: Volume Ten (History of British Women's Writing)
by Mary Eagleton Emma ParkerThis book maps the most active and vibrant period in the history of British women's writing. Examining changes and continuities in fiction, poetry, drama, and journalism, as well as women's engagement with a range of literary and popular genres, the essays in this volume highlight the range and diversity of women's writing since 1970.
The History of British Women’s Writing, 1610–1690
by Mihoko SuzukiDuring the seventeenth century, in response to political and social upheavals such as the English Civil Wars, women produced writings in both manuscript and print. This volume represents recent scholarship that has uncovered new texts as well as introduced new paradigms to further our understanding of women's literary history during this period.
The History of British Women’s Writing, 1690–1750: Volume Four
by Ros BallasterThis volume charts the most significant changes for a literary history of women in a period that saw the beginnings of a discourse of 'enlightened feminism'. It reveals that women engaged in forms old and new, seeking to shape and transform the culture of letters rather than simply reflect or respond to the work of their male contemporaries.
The History of British Women’s Writing, 1750–1830
by Jacqueline M. LabbeThis period witnessed the first full flowering of women's writing in Britain. This illuminating volume features leading scholars who draw upon the last 25 years of scholarship and textual recovery to demonstrate the literary and cultural significance of women in the period, discussing writers such as Austen, Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley.