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"What is historiography?" asked the American historian Carl Becker in 1938. Professional historians continue to argue over the meaning of the term. This book challenges the view of historiography as an esoteric subject by presenting an accessible and concise overview of the history of historical writing from the Renaissance to the present. Historiography plays an integral role in aiding undergraduate students to better understand the nature and purpose of historical analysis more generally by examining the many conflicting ways that historians have defined and approached history. By demonstrating how these historians have differed in both their interpretations of specific historical events and their definitions of history itself, this book conveys to students the interpretive character of history as a discipline and the way that the historian's context and subjective perspective influence his or her understanding of the past.
American historians of the early national period, argues Eileen Ka-May Cheng, grappled with objectivity, professionalism, and other “modern” issues to a greater degree than their successors in later generations acknowledge. Her extensive readings of antebellum historians show that by the 1820s, a small but influential group of practitioners had begun to develop many of the doctrines and concerns that undergird contemporary historical practice. The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth challenges the entrenched notion that America’s first generations of historians were romantics or propagandists for a struggling young nation. Cheng engages with the works of well-known early national historians ...
In American History in Transition, Yoshinari Yamaguchi provides fresh insights into early efforts in American history writing, ranging from Jeremy Belknap’s Massachusetts Historical Society to Emma Willard’s geographic history and Francis Parkman’s history of deep time to Henry Adams’s thermodynamic history. Although not a well-organized set of professional researchers, these historians shared the same concern: the problems of temporalization and secularization in history writing. As the time-honored framework of sacred history was gradually outdated, American historians at that time turned to individual facts as possible evidence for a new generalization, and tried different “scientific” theories to give coherency to their writings. History writing was in its transitional phase, shifting from religion to science, deduction to induction, and static to dynamic worldview.
Fascinating stories of ordinary people in the Middle Colonies who remained loyal to the Crown.
"This volume considers historical networks of knowledge creation and dissemination in early America"--
How American colonists reinterpreted their British and colonial histories to help establish political and cultural independence from Britain In Past and Prologue, Michael Hattem shows how colonists’ changing understandings of their British and colonial histories shaped the politics of the American Revolution and the origins of American national identity. Between the 1760s and 1800s, Americans stopped thinking of the British past as their own history and created a new historical tradition that would form the foundation for what subsequent generations would think of as “American history.” This change was a crucial part of the cultural transformation at the heart of the Revolution by which colonists went from thinking of themselves as British subjects to thinking of themselves as American citizens. Rather than liberating Americans from the past—as many historians have argued—the Revolution actually made the past matter more than ever. Past and Prologue shows how the process of reinterpreting the past played a critical role in the founding of the nation.
How conflicting memories of the nation's origins shaped the political culture of the early American republic
Now 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.
Between 1848 and 1865 white southerners felt the grounds of nationhood shift beneath their feet. The conflict over slavery that led to the Civil War forced them to confront the difficult problems of nationalism. What made a nation a nation? Could an individual or a group change nationality at will? What were the rights and responsibilities of national citizenship? Why should nations exist at all? As they contemplated these questions, white southerners drew on their long experience as Americans and their knowledge of nationalism in the wider world. This was true of not just the radical secessionists who shattered the Union in 1861, but also of the moderate majority who struggled to balance th...
What does it mean to be Mennonite in the modern world? And what is the witness of a peace church that is always at risk of splintering? C. Henry Smith—son of an Amish family, erudite historian, urbane bank president, and pioneer of Mennonite scholarship—sought answers to these questions in the middle of the 20th century, and his answers reverberate through the church to this day. In this engaging narrative biography, historian Perry Bush chronicles Smith’s childhood in an Illinois farming community, his youthful turn toward intellectual inquiry, and his confidence that Anabaptist faith and life offer gifts to the wider world. By recounting the story of one of the foremost Mennonite int...