Analysing Historical Narratives

Analysing Historical Narratives
Author: Stefan Berger
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2021-05-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1800730470

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Histories of the Self

Histories of the Self
Author: Penny Summerfield
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2018-07-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0429945299

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.

How History Gets Things Wrong

How History Gets Things Wrong
Author: Alex Rosenberg
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2018-10-09
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 026234842X

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.

21st-Century Narratives of World History

21st-Century Narratives of World History
Author: R. Charles Weller
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 428
Release: 2017-11-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 3319620789

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.

Women's Early American Historical Narratives

Women's Early American Historical Narratives
Author: Sharon M. Harris
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2003-06-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1440626596

This fascinating collection presents a rare look at women writers' first-hand perspectives on early American history. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries many women authors began to write historical analysis, thereby taking on an essential role in defining the new American Republicanism. Like their male counterparts, these writers worried over the definition and practice of both public and private virtue, human equality, and the principles of rationalism. In contrast to male authors, however, female writers inevitably addressed the issue of inequality of the sexes. This collection includes writings that employ a wide range of approaches, from straightforward reportage to poetical historical narratives, from travel writing to historical drama, and even accounts in textbook format, designed to provide women with exercises in critical thinking—training they rarely received through their traditional education. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Historical Narratives

Historical Narratives
Author: Mariana Imaz-Sheinbaum
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 104
Release: 2023-10-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000987965

This book explains some of the psychological processes that go into narrative construction and why it is that we have so much variability of historical accounts about a single historical event. A central focus of this book is how historians go from having unconnected units of data to having a coherent, structured, and organized flow of experiences. The author argues that the way these connections are established responds to certain Gestalt psychological principles that allow us to understand not only how histories are constructed but also how this construction can be rather different depending on how these principles are applied. To illustrate how these principles are present in histories, the author analyzes classic historical writers such as Burckhardt, Huizinga, Vico, and Marx. As well as an explanation of why historical multiplicity happens, the book also offers a way to evaluate different historical narratives about the same historical event. To illustrate how the evaluative framework is at play, the author analyzes two views about the so-called discovery of America. The first one explains what happens in 1492 by using the term "discovery." The second one uses the notion of "invention" to talk about the same set of circumstances. The book provides an important epistemic tool to evaluate these different accounts—one that can be applied not only to this case but also others. This book appeals to scholars, graduate students, and upper-level undergraduate students of history and philosophy. In addition, the book may also attract intellectuals, generally considered, who are interested in how philosophy can inform and question historical practice.

Historical Narratives of East Asia in the 21st Century

Historical Narratives of East Asia in the 21st Century
Author: Hitoshi Tanaka
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2020-03-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000053172

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.

The Art of History

The Art of History
Author: Christopher Bram
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2016-07-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1555979394

One has to look no further than the audiences hungry for the narratives served up by Downton Abbey or Wolf Hall to know that the lure of the past is as seductive as ever. But incorporating historical events and figures into a shapely narrative is no simple task. The acclaimed novelist Christopher Bram examines how writers as disparate as Gabriel García Márquez, David McCullough, Toni Morrison, Leo Tolstoy, and many others have employed history in their work. Unique among the "Art Of" series, The Art of History engages with both fiction and narrative nonfiction to reveal varied strategies of incorporating and dramatizing historical detail. Bram challenges popular notions about historical narratives as he examines both successful and flawed passages to illustrate how authors from different genres treat subjects that loom large in American history, such as slavery and the Civil War. And he delves deep into the reasons why War and Peace endures as a classic of historical fiction. Bram's keen insight and close reading of a wide array of authors make The Art of History an essential volume for any lover of historical narrative.

Historical Narratives of Global Modern Art

Historical Narratives of Global Modern Art
Author: Irina D. Costache
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2023-07-31
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000898059

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.

The Politics of Viewing in Xenophon’s Historical Narratives

The Politics of Viewing in Xenophon’s Historical Narratives
Author: Rosie Harman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2023-01-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350159042

This book considers cultural identity and power relations in early fourth-century BCE Greece through a reading of Xenophon's historical narratives, the Hellenica, Anabasis and Cyropaedia. These texts depict conflicts between Greek states, conflicts between Greeks and non-Greeks, and relations between the elite individual and society. In all three texts, politically significant moments are imagined in visual terms. We witness spectacles of Spartan military victory, vistas of Asian landscape or displays of Persian imperial pomp, and historical protagonists are presented as spectators viewing and responding to events. Through this visual form of narration, the reader is encouraged imaginatively to place themselves in the position of the historical protagonists. In viewing events from different perspectives, and therefore occupying multiple, often conflicting political positions, the reader not only experiences the problems faced by historical actors, but becomes engaged in the political conflicts acted out in the narratives. The reader is prompted to take pleasure in the sight of Panhellenic achievement, but also to witness the divisions and conflicts between Greeks on class and ethnic lines. Similarly the reader is invited to identify with spectacular Greek and non-Greek figures of power as emblems of Greek imperial potential, but also to see through the eyes of those communities subjugated at their hands. The depiction of spectacles and spectators draws the reader into an active participation in the ideological contradictions of their time, in a period when Panhellenic aspiration co-existed with hegemonic competition between Greek states, and when Greeks could be both beneficiaries and victims of imperialism.