21st-Century Narratives of World History

21st-Century Narratives of World History

Author: R. Charles Weller

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-11-06

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 3319620789

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This book makes a unique and timely contribution to world/global historical studies and related fields. It places essential world historical frameworks by top scholars in the field today in clear, direct relation to and conversation with one other, offering them opportunity to enrich, elucidate and, at times, challenge one another. It thereby aims to: (1) offer world historians opportunity to critically reflect upon and refine their essential interpretational frameworks, (2) facilitate more effective and nuanced teaching and learning in and beyond the classroom, (3) provide accessible world historical contexts for specialized areas of historical as well as other fields of research in the humanities, social sciences and sciences, and (4) promote comparative historiographical critique which (a) helps identify continuing research questions for the field of world history in particular, as well as (b) further global peace and dialogue in relation to varying views of our ever-increasingly interconnected, interdependent, multicultural, and globalized world and its shared though diverse and sometimes contested history.


How History Gets Things Wrong

How History Gets Things Wrong

Author: Alex Rosenberg

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2018-10-09

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 026234842X

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Why we learn the wrong things from narrative history, and how our love for stories is hard-wired. To understand something, you need to know its history. Right? Wrong, says Alex Rosenberg in How History Gets Things Wrong. Feeling especially well-informed after reading a book of popular history on the best-seller list? Don't. Narrative history is always, always wrong. It's not just incomplete or inaccurate but deeply wrong, as wrong as Ptolemaic astronomy. We no longer believe that the earth is the center of the universe. Why do we still believe in historical narrative? Our attachment to history as a vehicle for understanding has a long Darwinian pedigree and a genetic basis. Our love of stories is hard-wired. Neuroscience reveals that human evolution shaped a tool useful for survival into a defective theory of human nature. Stories historians tell, Rosenberg continues, are not only wrong but harmful. Israel and Palestine, for example, have dueling narratives of dispossession that prevent one side from compromising with the other. Henry Kissinger applied lessons drawn from the Congress of Vienna to American foreign policy with disastrous results. Human evolution improved primate mind reading—the ability to anticipate the behavior of others, whether predators, prey, or cooperators—to get us to the top of the African food chain. Now, however, this hard-wired capacity makes us think we can understand history—what the Kaiser was thinking in 1914, why Hitler declared war on the United States—by uncovering the narratives of what happened and why. In fact, Rosenberg argues, we will only understand history if we don't make it into a story.


Histories of the Self

Histories of the Self

Author: Penny Summerfield

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-07-04

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 0429945299

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Histories of the Self interrogates historians’ work with personal narratives. It introduces students and researchers to scholarly approaches to diaries, letters, oral history and memoirs as sources that give access to intimate aspects of the past. Historians are interested as never before in how people thought and felt about their lives. This turn to the personal has focused attention on the capacity of subjective records to illuminate both individual experiences and the wider world within which narrators lived. However, sources such as letters, diaries, memoirs and oral history have been the subject of intense debate over the last forty years, concerning both their value and the uses to which they can be put. This book traces the engagement of historians of the personal with notions of historical reliability, and with the issue of representativeness, and it explores the ways in which they have overcome the scepticism of earlier practitioners. It celebrates their adventures with the meanings of the past buried in personal narratives and applauds their transformation of historical practice. Supported by case studies from across the globe and spanning the fifteenth to twenty-first centuries, Histories of the Self is essential reading for students and researchers interested in the ways personal testimony has been and can be used by historians.


Narratives of Low Countries History and Culture

Narratives of Low Countries History and Culture

Author: Jane Fenoulhet

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2016-11-07

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1910634972

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This edited collection explores the ways in which our understanding of the past in Dutch history and culture can be rethought to consider not only how it forms part of the present but how it can relate also to the future. Divided into three parts – The Uses of Myth and History, The Past as Illumination of Cultural Context, and Historiography in Focus – this book seeks to demonstrate the importance of the past by investigating the transmission of culture and its transformations. It reflects on the history of historiography and looks critically at the products of the historiographic process, such as Dutch and Afrikaans literary history. The chapters cover a range of disciplines and approaches: some authors offer a broad view of a particular period, such as Jonathan Israel's contribution on myth and history in the ideological politics of the Dutch Golden Age, while others zoom in on specific genres, texts or historical moments, such as Benjamin Schmidt’s study of the doolhof, a word that today means ‘labyrinth’ but once described a 17th-century educational amusement park. This volume, enlightening and home to multiple paths of enquiry leading in different directions, is an excellent example of what a past-present doolhof might look like.


Historical Narratives of East Asia in the 21st Century

Historical Narratives of East Asia in the 21st Century

Author: Hitoshi Tanaka

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-03-17

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1000053172

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In the twenty-first century, East Asia has been increasingly marked both by tensions at a government level and a chauvinistic mood among the polity. While China’s rise is in one respect the proximate driver of these changes in tone, it draws on a range of unresolved grievances among the respective historical narratives of Mainland China, Taiwan, Japan and the Koreas. These conflicting views of the region’s past are a crucial barrier to its cohesive and stable future. This book brings together East Asian scholars from a range of academic disciplines, including China historians, political historians and political scientists to illuminate the interconnectedness of East Asia and discuss how a shared historical narrative might be constructed. Their contributions are organised into 3 parts focusing respectively on historical narratives of China, historical narratives of East Asia, and reconciling historical narratives. The book will appeal to researcher interested in the historical narratives of international relations in East Asia.


Analysing Historical Narratives

Analysing Historical Narratives

Author: Stefan Berger

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2021-05-14

Total Pages: 567

ISBN-13: 1805399187

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For all of the recent debates over the methods and theoretical underpinnings of the historical profession, scholars and laypeople alike still frequently think of history in terms of storytelling. Accordingly, historians and theorists have devoted much attention to how historical narratives work, illuminating the ways they can bind together events, shape an argument and lend support to ideology. From ancient Greece to modern-day bestsellers, the studies gathered here offer a wide-ranging analysis of the textual strategies used by historians. They show how in spite of the pursuit of truth and objectivity, the ways in which historians tell their stories are inevitably conditioned by their discursive contexts.


Historical Narratives of Global Modern Art

Historical Narratives of Global Modern Art

Author: Irina D. Costache

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-07-31

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1000898032

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Diversifying the current art historical scholarship, this edited volume presents the untold story of modern art by exposing global voices and perspectives excluded from the privileged and uncontested narrative of “isms.” This volume tells a worldwide story of art with expanded historical narratives of modernism. The chapters reflect on a wide range of issues, topics, and themes that have been marginalized or outright excluded from the canon of modern art. The goal of this book is to be a starting point for understanding modern art as a broad and inclusive field of study. The topics examine diverse formal expressions, innovative conceptual approaches, and various media used by artists around the world and forcefully acknowledge the connections between art, historical circumstances, political environments, and social issues such as gender, race, and social justice. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, imperial and colonial history, modernism, and globalization.


Medieval Narratives Between History and Fiction

Medieval Narratives Between History and Fiction

Author: Panagiotis A. Agapitos

Publisher: Museum Tusculanum Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9788763538091

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"The rise of literary fiction in medieval Europe has been a hotly debated topic among scholars for at least two decades, but until now that debate has come with severe limitations, focusing on ‘modern’ French and German romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Attempting to find common ground among scholars from various disciplines and regions, Medieval Narratives between History and Fiction seeks to clarify the subject by including a wide range of medieval narratives irrespective of their modern label and affiliation to certain disciplines. The chapters collected here broaden the discussion by moving beyond the canonical French and German romances, focusing mainly on texts in Greek, Latin and Old Norse (and also some in Serbian), and by opting for a ‘peripheral’ and a long-term view of the subject. The chapters take us from Graeco-Roman antiquity to medieval France, then to the Scandinavian lands and from there to south-eastern Europe and Byzantium as the link back to the Graeco-Roman world. This disposition also follows a spiral motion in time, leading us from antiquity to late antiquity and from the eleventh to the fifteenth century. By expanding the linguistic as well as the geographical and chronological scope of the debate, the book shows that we should not think of a ‘rise of fiction’ per se; rather, we should see fiction as a potential always imbued in and related to historical narratives – and recognize that non-fictional and non-vernacular writing are important for a modern understanding of medieval fiction."--


Narratives Unbound

Narratives Unbound

Author: Balázs Trencsényi

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2007-07-15

Total Pages: 512

ISBN-13: 6155211299

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The first work that covers the post-Communist development of historical studies in six Eastern European countries: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. A uniquely critical and qualitative analysis from a comparative and critical perspective, written by scholars from the region itself. Focusing on the first post-Communist decade, 1989–1999, the book offers a longer-term perspective that includes the immediate 'prehistory' of that momentous decade as well as its 'posthistoire'. The authors capture the spirit of 1989, that heady mix of elation, surprise, determination, and hope: l'ivresse du possible. This was the paradoxical beginning of Eastern European post-Communism: ushered in by 'anti-Utopian' revolutions, and slowly finding its course towards a bureaucratic, imitative, challenging, and anachronistic restoration of a capitalism that had changed almost beyond recognition when it had mutated into the negative double of Communism. Each individual chapter has numerous and detailed notes and references.