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What is history? What are historians doing, when we create our histories? The need for answers is more urgent than ever. We live in an era when history is often rejected or ignored, and when all teachers of history confront formidable challenges. In the culture of screen capitalism and social media, historical knowledge is evaded in an expanding present-minded consciousness. How can history be defended, and what is it that we are defending? This book argues that history is a mode of thinking, a form of imaginative reasoning with its own informal logic. In non-technical language and using examples from important works of history, the book defines core elements in historical thinking. These in...
This collection brings together fifteen essays from practitioners of a variety of disciplines that concern themselves with the past, not only historians, but scholars from other branches of the humanities and social sciences (including theology, art history, public history, and archival science) and natural sciences (including geology, paleontology, astronomy, and paleoanthropology). What is the relationship between the past and the present? This essential and seemingly straightforward question, of central importance to many fields of study, in fact yields a variety of answers, with significant repercussions for methodology, epistemology, and pedagogy. This volume’s contributors describe h...
How has migration shaped Mediterranean history? And what role did conflicting temporalities and the politics of departure play in the age of decolonisation? Using a microhistorical approach, Migration at the End of Empire explores the experiences of over 55,000 Italian subjects in Egypt during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Before 1937, Ottoman-era legal regimes fostered the coupling of nationalism and imperialism among Italians in Egypt, particularly as the fascist government sought to revive the myth of Mare Nostrum. With decolonisation, however, Italians began abandoning Egypt en masse. By 1960, over 40,000 had deserted Egypt; some as 'emigrants,' others as 'repatriates,'and still others as 'national refugees.' The departed community became an emblem around which political actors in post-colonial Italy and Egypt forged new ties. Anticipated, actual, and remembered departures of Italians from Egypt are at the heart of this book's ambition to rethink European and Mediterranean periodisation.
The World Wide Web (WWW) and digitisation have become important sites and tools for the history of the Holocaust and its commemoration. Today, some memory institutions use the Internet at a high professional level as a venue for self-presentation and as a forum for the discussion of Holocaust-related topics for potentially international, transcultural and interdisciplinary user groups. At the same time, it is not always the established institutions that utilise the technical possibilities and potential of the Internet to the maximum. Creative and sometimes controversial new forms of storytelling of the Holocaust or more traditional ways of remembering the genocide presented in a new way with...
Historical time is a notoriously elusive notion. Yet, as societies attempt to make sense of rapidly changing worlds, it gains a new significance in the twenty-first century. This Element sketches a theory of historical time as based on a distinction between temporality and historicity. It approaches the fabric of historical time as varying relational arrangements and interactions of multiple temporalities and historicities. In the fabric, kinds of temporalities and historicities emerge, come to being, fade out, transform, cease to exist, merge, coexist, overlap, arrange and rearrange in constellations, and clash and conflict in a dynamic without a predetermined plot. The Element pays special attention to the more-than-human temporalities of the Anthropocene, the technology-fueled historicities of runaway changes, and the conflicts in the fabric of historical time at the intersections of technological, ecological, and social change.
Postkoloniale Theorie polarisiert: Den einen gilt sie als »Supertheorie« für das Zeitalter der Globalisierung, anderen dagegen als elitärer Diskurs, der zu konfliktfördernder Identitätspolitik führt. Doch welche Rolle kann sie für die geschichtsdidaktische Theorie und den Geschichtsunterricht spielen? Philipp Bernhard prüft diese Frage anhand einer systematischen geschichtsdidaktischen Analyse »postkolonialer« Lehr-Lernmaterialien. Er leitet daraus vier Grundüberlegungen (»Claims«) für eine Umsetzung postkolonialer Theorieansätze in der Geschichtsvermittlung ab. Dabei zeigt sich: Die Geschichtsdidaktik muss die Postkoloniale Theorie kritisch reflektieren, kann aber auf deren Impulse für die Weiterentwicklung von Theorie und (Unterrichts-)Praxis nicht verzichten.
Different from literary works (prose, drama etc.) with techniques like montage and contemporary media (film, documentaries, video games, internet) where time-lines are being questioned through flashbacks and flashwords, historiography seems to have resisted such challenges. Most historiographical works (biographies, scholarly studies) still adhere to chronological narratives, even though the boundaries between history and literary fiction have been blurred over the past decades. Responding to 20th/21st c. attempts like Walter Benjamin’s prophetic historian, this volume asks: How to write history without following the chronologically oriented trajectory of time? The interdisciplinary contri...
The idea of progress is a product of historical thinking. It is a bold interpretation of history that combines understandings of the past, perceptions of the present and expectations of the future. This Element examines the shifting scale of this past, present and future configuration from antiquity to the present day. It develops five categories that reveal the conceptual features of progress together with the philosophies of history in which they have been enmeshed, from temporal outlooks that held no notion of progress to universal histories that viewed progress as a law of nature, from speculation on the meaning and direction of history to the total rejection of all historical constructions. Global in scope and conversant with present-day debates in the theory and philosophy of history, the argument throughout is that the scale on which we conceive history plays a determining role in how we think about progress.
This volume introduces key terms of public history and makes them accessible via the most important subject areas and central research perspectives. It is aimed at students, teachers and practitioners who deal with history in the public sphere and offers approaches to the theoretical foundation of public history as part of historical cultural studies.
The past decades public interest in history is booming. This creates new opportunities but also challenges for professional historians. This book asks how historians deal with changing public demands for history and how these affect their professional practices, values and identities. The volume offers a great variety of detailed studies of cases where historians have applied their expertise outside the academic sphere. With contributions focusing on Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Pacific and Europe the book has a broad geographical scope. Subdivided in five sections, the book starts with a critical look back on some historians who broke with mainstream academic positions by combining thei...