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This book is a major re-evaluation of the collection and interpretation of oral historical data. A comparative framework is adopted, though the principal emphasis is on Africa and is based upon the author's extensive knowledge of the continent. Concluding chapters point to the distinction between oral tradition and oral history, and stress the necessity to conserve and make available information collected by oral methods in the field.
In the past forty years an entirely new paradigm has developed regarding the contact population of the New World. Proponents of this new theory argue that the American Indian population in 1492 was ten, even twenty, times greater than previous estimates. In Numbers From Nowhere David Henige argues that the data on which these high counts are based are meager and often demonstrably wrong. Drawing on a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, Henige illustrates the use and abuse of numerical data throughout history. He shows that extrapolation of numbers is entirely subjective, however masked it may be by arithmetic, and he questions what constitutes valid evidence in historical and scientific scholarship.
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A comprehensive evaluation of how to read African history. Writing African History is an essential work for anyone who wants to write, or even seriously read, African history. It will replace Daniel McCall's classic Africa in Time Perspective as the introduction to African history for the next generation and as a reference for professional historians, interested readers, and anyone who wants to understand how African history is written. Africa in Time Perspective was written in the 1960s, when African history was a new field of research. This new book reflects the development of African history since then. It opens with a comprehensive introduction by Daniel McCall, followed by a chapter by ...
In providing a carefully assembled chronology of the 290 most significant of the 600 states in India, the author provides new research for all scholars of South Asia, as well as Sikkim and the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, in the colonial period.
In 1952, a young Belgian scholar of European medieval history traveled to the Belgian Congo (now Zaire) to live in a remote Kuba village. Armed with a smattering of training in African cultures and language, Jan Vansina was sent to do fieldwork for a Belgian cultural agency. As it turned out, he would help found the field of African history, with a handful of other European and African scholars. "I'm not an ethnologist, I'm a historian!" Vansina was to repeat again and again to those who assumed that people without written texts have no history. His discovery that he could analyze Kuba oral tradition using the same methods he had learned for interpreting medieval dirges was a historiographic...
Vande Brake surveys Appalachian fiction and finds a suprising number of Melungeon characters lurking in the pages of many Southern writers.
An overview of the ongoing methods used to understand African history. Spurred in part by the ongoing re-evaluation of sources and methods in research, African historiography in the past two decades has been characterized by the continued branching and increasing sophistication of methodologies and areas of specialization. The rate of incorporation of new sources and methods into African historical research shows no signs of slowing. This book is both a snapshot of current academic practice and an attempt to sort throughsome of the problems scholars face within this unfolding web of sources and methods. The book is divided into five sections, each of which begins with a short introduction by...
To understand the genocide and other dramatic events of Rwanda’s recent past, one must understand the history of the earlier realm. Jan Vansina provides a critique of the history recorded by early missionaries and court historians and provides a bottom-up view, drawing on hundreds of grassroots narratives. He describes the genesis of the Hutu and Tutsi identities, their growing social and political differences, their bitter feuds, revolts, and massacres, and the relevance of this dramatic history to the post-genocide Rwanda of today. 2001 French edition, Katharla Publishers