Frontiers of Historical Imagination

Frontiers of Historical Imagination

Author: Kerwin Lee Klein

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1999-11-10

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 0520221664

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"A thorough and breathtaking review of modern historiography, anthropology, and literary criticism as they relate to the American frontier."—Robert V. Hine, author of Second Sight


Frontiers of Historical Imagination

Frontiers of Historical Imagination

Author: Kerwin Lee Klein

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-11-10

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 0520924185

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The American frontier, a potent symbol since Europeans first stepped ashore on North America, serves as the touchstone for Kerwin Klein's analysis of the narrating of history. Klein explores the traditions through which historians, philosophers, anthropologists, and literary critics have understood the story of America's origin and the way those understandings have shaped and been shaped by changing conceptions of history. The American West was once the frontier space where migrating Europe collided with Native America, where the historical civilizations of the Old World met the nonhistorical wilds of the New. It was not only the cultural combat zone where American democracy was forged but also the ragged edge of History itself, where historical and nonhistorical defied and defined each other. Klein maintains that the idea of a collision between people with and without history still dominates public memory. But the collision, he believes, resounds even more powerfully in the historical imagination, which creates conflicts between narration and knowledge and carries them into the language used to describe the American frontier. In Klein's words, "We remain obscurely entangled in philosophies of history we no longer profess, and the very idea of 'America' balances on history's shifting frontiers."


From History to Theory

From History to Theory

Author: Kerwin Lee Klein

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2011-05-19

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0520948297

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From History to Theory describes major changes in the conceptual language of the humanities, particularly in the discourse of history. In seven beautifully written, closely related essays, Kerwin Lee Klein traces the development of academic vocabularies through the dynamically shifting cultural, political, and linguistic landscapes of the twentieth century. He considers the rise and fall of "philosophy of history" and discusses past attempts to imbue historical discourse with scientific precision. He explores the development of the "meta-narrative" and the post-Marxist view of history and shows how the present resurgence of old words—such as "memory"—in new contexts is providing a way to address marginalized peoples. In analyzing linguistic changes in the North American academy, From History to Theory innovatively ties semantic shifts in academic discourse to key trends in American society, culture, and politics.


Looking Beyond Borderlines

Looking Beyond Borderlines

Author: Lee Rodney

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-19

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 1317552741

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

American territorial borders have undergone significant and unparalleled changes in the last decade. They serve as a powerful and emotionally charged locus for American national identity that correlates with the historical idea of the frontier. But the concept of the frontier, so central to American identity throughout modern history, has all but disappeared in contemporary representation while the border has served to uncomfortably fill the void left in the spatial imagination of American culture. This book focuses on the shifting relationship between borders and frontiers in North America, specifically the ways in which they have been imaged and imagined since their formation in the 19th century and how tropes of visuality are central to their production and meaning. Rodney links ongoing discussions in political geography and visual culture in new ways to demonstrate how contemporary American borders exhibit security as a display strategy that is resisted and undermined through a variety of cultural practices.


Florida's Frontiers

Florida's Frontiers

Author: Paul E. Hoffman

Publisher: History of the Trans-Appalachi

Published: 2002-01-11

Total Pages: 506

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Florida has had many frontiers. Imagination, greed, missionary zeal, disease, war, and diplomacy have created its historical boundaries. Bodies of water, soil, flora and fauna, the patterns of Native American occupation, and ways of colonizing have defined Florida's frontiers. Paul E. Hoffman tells the story of those frontiers and how the land and the people shaped them during the three centuries from 1565 to 1860. For settlers to La Florida, the American Southeast ca. 1500, better natural and human resources were found on the piedmont and on the western side of Florida's central ridge, while the coasts and coastal plains proved far less inviting. But natural environment was only one important factor in the settlement of Florida. The Spaniards, the British, the Seminole and Miccosuki, the Spaniards once again, and finally Americans constructed their Florida frontiers in interaction with the Native Americans who were present, the vestiges of earlier frontiers, and international events. The near-completion of the range and township surveys by 1860 and of the deportation of most of the Seminole and Miccosuki mark the end of the Florida frontier, though frontier-like conditions persisted in many parts of the state into the early 20th century. For this major work of Florida history, Hoffman has drawn from a broad range of secondary works and from his intensive research in Spanish archival sources of the 16th and 17th centuries. Florida's Frontiers will be welcomed by students of history well beyond the Sunshine State.


Nature's Imagination

Nature's Imagination

Author: John Cornwell

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This collection from a 1992 symposium explores how and why mathematicians, astronomers, neuroscientists, and philosophers are moving beyond classic reductionism toward a new paradigm that accounts for the whole and emphasizes events and relationships. Essays examine the irreducibility of mathematics, the incompleteness theorem, consciousness and the mind-body problem, and the social implications of artificial intelligence. For scientists, philosophers, students, and adventurous readers. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR


Metahistory

Metahistory

Author: Hayden White

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2014-12-30

Total Pages: 483

ISBN-13: 1421415615

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This penetrating analysis of eight classic nineteenth-century thinkers explains how historians use literary techniques to write sophisticated historical works. Since its initial publication in 1973, Hayden White's Metahistory has remained an essential book for understanding the nature of historical writing. In this classic work, White argues that a deep structural content lies beyond the surface level of historical texts. This latent poetic and linguistic content—which White dubs the "metahistorical element"—essentially serves as a paradigm for what an "appropriate" historical explanation should be. To support his thesis, White analyzes the complex writing styles of historians like Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt, and philosophers of history such as Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Croce. The first work in the history of historiography to concentrate on historical writing as writing, Metahistory sets out to deprive history of its status as a bedrock of factual truth, to redeem narrative as the substance of historicality, and to identify the extent to which any distinction between history and ideology on the basis of the presumed scientificity of the former is spurious. This fortieth-anniversary edition includes a new preface in which White explains his motivation for writing Metahistory and discusses how reactions to the book informed his later writing. In a new foreword, Michael S. Roth, a former student of White's and the current president of Wesleyan University, reflects on the significance of the book across a broad range of fields, including history, literary theory, and philosophy. This book will be of interest to anyone—in any discipline—who takes the past as a serious object of study.


Frontiers of the Ottoman Imagination

Frontiers of the Ottoman Imagination

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2014-10-30

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 900428351X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Frontiers of the Ottoman Imagination is a compilation of articles celebrating the work of Rhoads Murphey, the eminent scholar of Ottoman studies who has worked at the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham for more than two decades. This volume offers two things: the versatility and influence of Rhoads Murphey is seen here through the work of his colleagues, friends and students, in a collection of high quality and cutting edge scholarship. Secondly, it is a testament of the legacy of Rhoads and the CBOMGS in the world of Ottoman Studies. The collection includes articles covering topics as diverse as cartography, urban studies and material culture, spanning the Ottoman centuries from the late Byzantine/early Ottoman to the twentieth century. Contributors include: Ourania Bessi, Hasan Çolak, Marios Hadjianastasis, Sophia Laiou, Heath W. Lowry, Konstantinos Moustakas, Claire Norton, Amanda Phillips, Katerina Stathi, Johann Strauss, Michael Ursinus, Naci Yorulmaz.


Frontiers of Boyhood

Frontiers of Boyhood

Author: Martin Woodside

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2020-02-27

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 0806166649

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

When Horace Greeley published his famous imperative, “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country,” the frontier was already synonymous with a distinctive type of idealized American masculinity. But Greeley’s exhortation also captured popular sentiment surrounding changing ideas of American boyhood; for many educators, politicians, and parents, raising boys right seemed a pivotal step in securing the growing nation’s future. This book revisits these narratives of American boyhood and frontier mythology to show how they worked against and through one another—and how this interaction shaped ideas about national character, identity, and progress. The intersection of ideas about boyhood and the frontier, while complex and multifaceted, was dominated by one arresting notion: in the space of the West, boys would grow into men and the fledgling nation would expand to fulfill its promise. Frontiers of Boyhood explores this myth and its implications and ramifications through western history, childhood studies, and a rich cultural archive. Detailing surprising intersections between American frontier mythology and historical notions of child development, the book offers a new perspective on William “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s influence on children and childhood; on the phenomenon of “American Boy Books”; the agency of child performers, differentiated by race and gender, in Wild West exhibitions; and the cultural work of boys’ play, as witnessed in scouting organizations and the deployment of mass-produced toys. These mutually reinforcing and complicating strands, traced through a wide range of cultural modes, from social and scientific theorizing to mass entertainment, lead to a new understanding of how changing American ideas about boyhood and the western frontier have worked together to produce compelling stories about the nation’s past and its imagined future.


Untaming the Frontier in Anthropology, Archaeology, and History

Untaming the Frontier in Anthropology, Archaeology, and History

Author: Bradley J. Parker

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2023-01-24

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 0816551286

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Despite a half century of attempts by social scientists to compare frontiers around the world, the study of these regions is still closely associated with the nineteenth-century American West and the work of Frederick Jackson Turner. As a result, the very concept of the frontier is bound up in Victorian notions of manifest destiny and rugged individualism. The frontier, it would seem, has been tamed. This book seeks to open a new debate about the processes of frontier history in a variety of cultural contexts, untaming the frontier as an analytic concept, and releasing it in a range of unfamiliar settings. Drawing on examples from over four millennia, it shows that, throughout history, societies have been formed and transformed in relation to their frontiers, and that no one historical case represents the normal or typical frontier pattern. The contributors—historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists—present numerous examples of the frontier as a shifting zone of innovation and recombination through which cultural materials from many sources have been unpredictably channeled and transformed. At the same time, they reveal recurring processes of frontier history that enable world-historical comparison: the emergence of the frontier in relation to a core area; the mutually structuring interactions between frontier and core; and the development of social exchange, merger, or conflict between previously separate populations brought together on the frontier. Any frontier situation has many dimensions, and each of the chapters highlights one or more of these, from the physical and ideological aspects of Egypt’s Nubian frontier to the military and cultural components of Inka outposts in Bolivia to the shifting agrarian, religious, and political boundaries in Bengal. They explore cases in which the centripetal forces at work in frontier zones have resulted in cultural hybridization or “creolization,” and in some instances show how satellite settlements on the frontiers of core polities themselves develop into new core polities. Each of the chapters suggests that frontiers are shaped in critical ways by topography, climate, vegetation, and the availability of water and other strategic resources, and most also consider cases of population shifts within or through a frontier zone. As these studies reveal, transnationalism in today’s world can best be understood as an extension of frontier processes that have developed over thousands of years. This book’s interdisciplinary perspective challenges readers to look beyond their own fields of interest to reconsider the true nature and meaning of frontiers.