History: An Introduction to Theory, Method and Practice

Description

This book provides an accessible introduction to a wide range of concerns that have preoccupied historians over time. Global in scope, it explores historical perspectives not only from historiography itself but from related areas such as literature, sociology, geography and anthropology which have entered into productive dialogues with history. Clearly written and accessible, this third edition is fully revised with an updated structure and new areas of historical enquiry and themes added, including the history of emotions, video history and global pandemics. In all of this, the authors have attempted to think beyond the boundaries of the West and consider varied approaches to history. They do so by engaging with theoretical perspectives and methodologies that have provided the foundation for good historical practice. The authors analyse how historians can improve their skills by learning about the discipline of historiography, that is, how historians go about the task of exploring the past and determining where the line separating history from other disciplines, such as sociology or geography, runs. History: An Introduction to Theory and Method 3ed is an essential resource for students of historical theory and method working at both an introductory and more advanced level. Cover Half Title Title Copyright Dedication Contents List of Figures List of Tables Prologue Part 1 Philosophies 1 From the Ancients to the Christians 1.1 Herodotus and Gold-digging Ants 1.2 Thucydides and Reason: an Historian for Our Times? 1.3 What Did the Romans Ever Do for history? 1.4 Late Antiquity, Christianity and the End of Days 2 From the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Introduction 2.1 European Christendom and the ‘Age of Bede’ 2.2 Peoples of the Book: Jewish and Islamic Conceptions of History 2.3 The Renaissance, Humanism and the Rediscovery of the Classics 2.4 The Battle of Books: Camden, Clarendon and English Historical Writing 3 Enlightenment and Romanticism Introduction 3.1 The English Enlightenment? 3.2 Secular Histories 3.3 Romanticism, Nationalism and the Hero in History: Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Carlyle 4 The English Tradition Introduction 4.1 Responses to the Enlightenment: Edmund Burke 4.2 Constitutionalism and the Whig Interpretation of History 4.3 The ‘New Whigs’?: the School of J. H. Plumb 5 The North American Tradition Introduction 5.1 America and the New Order of the Ages 5.2 The Progressive or ‘New’ Historians 5.3 The Consensus Historians 5.4 The Other America 5.5 Black Lives Matter: a Coda 6 Histories of Revolutions; Revolutionary Histories Introduction 6.1 Thomas Paine and the Radical Tradition 6.2 Contemporary Responses to the American and French Revolutions 6.3 Germany, G. W. F. Hegel and the Spirit of History 6.4 Karl Marx and ‘Historical Materialism’ 6.5 Marxism in the Twentieth Century 7 Postmodernism and Postcolonialism Introduction 7.1 Modernity and the Enlightenment 7.2 Postmodernism 7.3 Postcolonialism and the West Part 2 Varieties 8 Political History Introduction 8.1 Theories of the State 8.2 High and Low Politics: the Case of the British Labour Party 8.3 Beyond State and Party: Political Histories and Civil Society 9 Economic History Introduction 9.1 Economics, Population and Social Change 9.2 Economic Historians and the Big Historical Questions 9.3 The Business of Business History 10 Social History Introduction 10.1 The Emergence of Social History 10.2 Class and Authority 10.3 The Family in History 10.4 The Social History of Faith 11 Cultural History Introduction 11.1 Towards a Definition of Cultural History 11.2 Survival of the Carnival 11.3 Empire and the Cultural Turn 11.4 History of Emotions 12 Feminism, Gender and Queer History Introduction 12.1 Feminism and History 12.2 The Attack on Class 12.3 Gender and Identity 12.4 Sexuality and Identity 13 Public History Introduction 13.1 What Is Public About History? 13.2 Consumption of Public History 13.3 Producing Public History 13.4 Public History as Contested Knowledge 14 Visual History Introduction 14.1 Visual Histories in Film and Television 14.2 Ways of Seeing: Paintings 14.3 Ways of Seeing: Prints and Photographs 14.4 Playing With History: the Rise of the Video Game 15 Global History Introduction 15.1 The Challenge of Global History 15.2 Origins of the Global Imagination 15.3 Enter ‘New World History’ 15.4 Global Pandemics 16 Environmental History Introduction 16.1 The Scope of Environmental History and Historical Precedents 16.2 European Colonialism and the Environment 16.3 Modern Environmentalism Part 3 Interdisciplinarities 17 Archaeology Introduction 17.1 The Lure of Archaeology 17.2 The Theoretical Turn: Collingwood and Childe 17.3 Historical Archaeology 17.4 Jerusalem and Its Layers 18 Anthropology Introduction 18.1 Pens and Pith Helmets: the Influence of Anthropology on History 18.2 Functionalism and Structuralism: Understanding the Lord Mayor’s Show 18.3 Myths and History: Jewish Conspiracies and the ‘Blood Libel’ 18.4 The ‘Dying God’: Captain Cook and Ethnohistory 18.5 Microhistories: Cheese, Worms, Night Battles and Ecstasies 19 Literature Introduction 19.1 Literature as History 19.2 Historicism: Text and Context 19.3 Nostalgia and the Graphic Novel 19.4 Writing the Metropolis 20 Geography Introduction 20.1 History, Space and Place 20.2 Geographies of Empire 20.3 ‘How to Lie With Maps’: Maps, Methodology and the Metropolis Part 4 Methods 21 Proof and the Problem of Objectivity Introduction 21.1 History: a Science or an Art? 21.2 History and the Status of Historical Knowledge 21.3 Choosing Evidence, Challenging Interpretations 21.4 Causes in History 22 Ordering of Time Introduction 22.1 Time, History, Modernity 22.2 Newton and the ‘Time Reckoner’ 22.3 Time, History and the Shape of Things to Come 22.4 Events, People and Periods: What Is ‘Victorian’? When were the ‘Sixties’? 23 Archives in a Digital World Introduction 23.1 What Is an Archive? 23.2 ‘When We Return as Human Beings Again’: Archives and the Ashes 23.3 ‘Speaking for Ourselves’: State and Community Archives 23.4 Archives and the Digital Turn 23.5 Social Media 24 Oral History Introduction 24.1 ‘Anthropologists of Ourselves’: Urban, Rural, Foreign 24.2 Oral Historiography 24.3 Interviewing Techniques and the Limits of Memory: Arthur Harding and the East End Underworld 24.4 The Wider Conceptual Problems Bibliography Index