Studies English historical writing in the late 1800's and early 1900's in two ways: first, as it saw a succession of works of merit, and second as it marked the transition from the rationalist ideals of traditional historic writings.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
This monograph is a wide-ranging and sophisticated analysis of representations in text and image of the English past between 1830 and 1870. It consists of a series of inter-related case-studies of illustrated history books, ranging from editions of David Humes History of England to W. H. Ainsworths The Tower of London (1840). It contributes to present debates on nationalism, highlighting the complex and variable nature of cultural constructions of identity. Simultaneously, if offers an overall interpretation of historiographical change in early and mid-Victorian Britain, focusing in particular on the transition from picturesque reconstructions of the English past to the scientific approaches of the professional historian. Genuinely interdisciplinary, Picturing the Past presents new perspectives on traditional studies of Victorian historiography, literature, and illustration. It explores relationships between text and image, author, illustrator, and publisher, in the production of illustrated historical texts, often drawing on neglected material in publishers archives. The tendency to analyse text and image, fiction and non-fiction, popular and elite publications in isolation from each other is challenged in the interests of a more complex and nuanced portrait of the middle-class Victorian historical consciousness.
The Idea of English Ethnicity “Robert Young has written a compelling and thorough textual history of English ethnicity and its discursive relation to the history of racial theory. Comprehensive, carefully considered, and clearly written, this book sets the standard against which any future study of Englishness will be assessed. The bar has been lifted a couple of notches higher.” David Theo Goldberg, University of California “What is Englishness?, Robert J. C. Young asks, and in The Idea of English Ethnicityhe offers an impressively well-researched and eminently readable answer.” Werner Sollors, Harvard University
When Thomas Gossett's Race: The History of an Idea in America appeared in 1963, it explored the impact of race theory on American letters in a way that anticipated the investigation of race and culture being conducted today. Bold, rigorous, and broad in scope, Gossett's book quickly established itself as a critical resource to younger scholars seeking a candid, theoretically sophisticated treatment of race in American cultural history. Here, reprinted without change, is Gossett's classic study, making available to a new generation of scholars a lucid, accessibly written volume that ranges from colonial race theory and its European antecedents, through eighteenth- and nineteenth- century race pseudoscience, to the racialist dimension of American thought and literature emerging against backgrounds such as Anglo- Saxonism, westward expansion, Social Darwinism, xenophobia, World War I, and modern racial theory. Featuring a new afterword by the author, an introduction by series editors Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Arnold Rampersad, and a bibliographic essay by Maghan Keita, this indispensable book, whose first edition helped change the way scholars discussed race, will richly reward scholars of American Studies, American Literature, and African-American Studies.
Originally published in 1970. Professor Callcott's analysis of the rise of historical consciousness in the United States from 1800 to 1860 offers a new dimension to American historiography. Other books have provided insight into the works of Bancroft, Parkman, and others, but Callcott goes beyond to explain the meaning of the past itself rather than the contributions of particular historians. As the anatomy of an idea, this is an important contribution to American intellectual history; and as a study of humans' need for the past and their use of it, it is an important contribution to American social history. The author begins by analyzing the European and Romantic background for American historical thought. He then explores the rise of historical themes in literature, education, the arts, and scholarship. By describing the type of historical subject matter, the methods of writing history, the interpretive themes historians used, and the standards by which critics judged history, Callcott offers a new understanding of the social and personal meaning that history had for Americans at the time. The American people were especially convinced of the utility of history—its social use in supporting accepted values, its personal utility in extending human experience, and its philosophical value in pointing people toward ultimate reality. The idea of history possessed a remarkable coherence that reflected the preoccupations and aspirations of the young nation. Callcott also demonstrates, however, that when basic historical assumptions were challenged by controversy, the entire edifice collapsed.
Eighteenth-century Britain saw an explosion of interest in its own past, a past now expanded to include more than classical history and high politics. Antiquaries, men interested in all aspects of the past, added a distinctive new dimension to literature in Georgian Britain in their attempts to reconstruct and recover the past. Corresponding and publishing in an extended network, antiquaries worked at preserving and investigating records and physical remains in England, Scotland and Ireland. In doing so they laid solid foundations for all future study in British prehistory, archaeology and numismatics, and for local and national history as a whole. Naturally, they saw the past partly in their own image. While many antiquaries were better at fieldwork and recording than at synthesis, most were neither crabbed eccentrics nor dilettanti. At their best, as in the works of Richard Gough or William Stukeley, antiquaries set new standards of accuracy and perception in fields ranging from the study of the ancient Britons to that of medieval architecture. Antiquaries is the definitive account of a great historical enterprise.