Questioning History

Questioning History
Author: Joe Regenbogen
Publisher: Vernon Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2020-10-06
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1622739930

Since the days of the Ancient Greeks, history has been perceived as the academic study of the past. Unfortunately, it has generally been taught as a litany of rigid, boring facts intended to be accepted rather than questioned. This has been reinforced for decades by weighty textbooks that overwhelm the reader with mind-numbing details presented in a chronological sequence. The end result is that students see little relevance of what they learn in history class to the real world, and many simply struggle to stay awake. Compared to other subjects taught at the secondary level, history is frequently judged to be the most boring. This is largely because it is viewed as an intellectually lifeless subject that presents few opportunities for active engagement. Questioning History is a book built around 16 essential questions designed to challenge this common assumption. Each question is broad, open-ended and subject to vigorous debate. By examining the historical background behind each question and by analyzing the ways in which the question can be answered, the reader will come away with a deeper understanding of the past and a new appreciation for history as a cognitively dynamic subject. In addition, by using each chapter as a platform for engaging discussions and Socratic seminars, the reader will be able to refine the decision-making skills necessary for effective citizenship in a democratic society. Depending on the classroom or the setting in which it is being used, Questioning History can either take the place of the more traditional textbook or at least be used as a supplement to make it come more alive. The best way to learn and to appreciate a subject is through active engagement. Questioning History provides a shot of adrenalin to the study of history.

Questioning History

Questioning History
Author: Greg Clingham
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 1998
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780838753835

Traditional eighteenth-century paradigms of reason, truth, and nature underlie modern concepts of self, gender, sex, etc. that are challenged today in the name of a more liberated and pluralistic problematics. This book is the first of two volumes of essays that identify this postmodern challenge. It examines the historiography of postmodern phenomena in relation to the eighteenth-century texts that they ventriloquize. More essays on the topic are contained in Making History (Bucknell Review, Vol. 42, No. 1).

The Ends of History

The Ends of History
Author: Amy Swiffen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2013-05-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1136157751

The Ends of History? considers how, despite the fact that events in the past 20 years have called Francis Fukuyama’s infamous announcement of the end of history into question, the issue of the end of history is now a matter of renewed interest and debate. Two decades ago we were confronted by the end of the Soviet Union and collapse of the geo-political divisions that had defined much of the twentieth century. From this particular end, the ‘end of history’ was proclaimed. But is it still possible to argue that liberal democracy and free market capitalism are the final form of law and mode of production in human history? Recent events have called this thesis into question: from 9/11 and the War on Terror, to the current global economic collapse and looming ecological crises, it seems that history if far from over. And yet, oddly enough, the question of ‘the end’ has returned. For example, in the often predicted, but still uncertain, establishment of either a new international American Empire or a new era of International Law, and the global resurgence of religion as a dominant source of political identification. On the other hand, perhaps the ‘end’ is still yet to come, slowly accumulating, mustering at the periphery of the geo-political landscape and outside the productive sphere. Responses taking up these questions range from a return to Universalism, political theology, Messianism, and even the old specter of communism. This volume assesses these responses, exploring what is at stake in proclaiming ‘the end’ in the current historical moment. Is it a matter of reading the writing on the wall? Or is the proclamation itself a political act? Furthermore is there a desire for the ‘end’? In addressing these questions, the contributors to The Ends of History? confront the various ‘ends’ that we now live, and in so doing they open new lines of sight into the future.

Rescuing History from the Nation

Rescuing History from the Nation
Author: Prasenjit Duara
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 1996-11-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226167232

Prasenjit Duara offers the first systematic account of the relationship between the nation-state, nationalism, and the concept of linear history. Focusing primarily on China and including discussion of India, Duara argues that many historians of postcolonial nation-states have adopted a linear, evolutionary history of the Enlightenment/colonial model. As a result, they have written repressive, exclusionary, and incomplete accounts. The backlash against such histories has resulted in a tendency to view the past as largely constructed, imagined, or invented. In this book, Duara offers a way out of the impasse between constructionism and the evolving nation; he redefines history as a series of multiple, often conflicting narratives produced simultaneously at national, local, and transnational levels. In a series of closely linked case studies, he considers such examples as the very different histories produced by Chinese nationalist reformers and partisans of popular religions, the conflicting narratives of statist nationalists and of advocates of federalism in early twentieth-century China. He demonstrates the necessity of incorporating contestation, appropriation, repression, and the return of the repressed subject into any account of the past that will be meaningful to the present. Duara demonstrates how to write histories that resist being pressed into the service of the national subject in its progress—or stalled progress—toward modernity.

Big Questions in History

Big Questions in History
Author: Harriet Swain
Publisher: Arrow
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN:

A distinguished group of historians answers key questions about the past and about the present and future. What wins wars? Why do empires rise and fall? What makes a great leader? What causes nationalism? How do spiritual movements spread? These are the questions in the forefront of our minds today but they meant just as much to people in the past. How did earlier generations tackle them, and how far can historians use the lessons of the past to help find some answers? Drawing on examples from ancient Greece to Tony Blair s Britain, leading historical thinkers address twenty of the really big questions that have been asked over the centuries: What is history? How does personality affect politics? What is the impact of technology on social change? How do intellectual movements start? How do our physical bodies and our private lives impact history? Each essay is accompanied by commentary by a journalist, discussing the views of other leading thinkers, today and in the past. The result is a stimulating ride over continents and across centuries in search of answers that are sometimes surprising, often controversial, and all of great relevance to how we live today. "From the Hardcover edition.""

The Age of Questions

The Age of Questions
Author: Holly Case
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2020-08-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691210373

A groundbreaking history of the Big Questions that dominated the nineteenth century In the early nineteenth century, a new age began: the age of questions. In the Eastern and Belgian questions, as much as in the slavery, worker, social, woman, and Jewish questions, contemporaries saw not interrogatives to be answered but problems to be solved. Alexis de Tocqueville, Victor Hugo, Karl Marx, Frederick Douglass, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and Adolf Hitler were among the many who put their pens to the task. The Age of Questions asks how the question form arose, what trajectory it followed, and why it provoked such feverish excitement for over a century. Was there a family resemblance between questions? Have they disappeared, or are they on the rise again in our time? In this pioneering book, Holly Case undertakes a stunningly original analysis, presenting, chapter by chapter, seven distinct arguments and frameworks for understanding the age. She considers whether it was marked by a progressive quest for emancipation (of women, slaves, Jews, laborers, and others); a steady, inexorable march toward genocide and the "Final Solution"; or a movement toward federation and the dissolution of boundaries. Or was it simply a farce, a false frenzy dreamed up by publicists eager to sell subscriptions? As the arguments clash, patterns emerge and sharpen until the age reveals its full and peculiar nature. Turning convention on its head with meticulous and astonishingly broad scholarship, The Age of Questions illuminates how patterns of thinking move history.

Suspicious History

Suspicious History
Author: Jack Zevin
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2021-04-15
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1475853181

Suspicious aims at providing teachers and students of history and related social sciences with ideas for critical thinking about past and present applied to documentation, images, and historical writing. Issues of perspective, bias, storytelling, patriotism and heroism, as well as interpretation are distributed among different chapters, along with guidance for making discussion provocative and involving, in light of principles for rethinking history.

On the Teaching and Writing of History

On the Teaching and Writing of History
Author: Bernard Bailyn
Publisher: UPNE
Total Pages: 104
Release: 1994
Genre: Electronic books
ISBN: 9780874517200

Bailyn, a professor at Harvard and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, writes of the impossibility of teaching history without bias, and that history itself is constantly open to new interpretations and viewpoints.

33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask

33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask
Author: Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
Publisher: Forum Books
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2007-07-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307406121

Guess what? The Indians didn’t save the Pilgrims from starvation by teaching them to grow corn. Thomas Jefferson thought states’ rights—an idea reviled today—were even more important than the Constitution’s checks and balances. The “Wild” West was more peaceful and a lot safer than most modern cities. And the biggest scandal of the Clinton years didn’t involve an intern in a blue dress. Surprised? Don’t be. In America, where history is riddled with misrepresentations, misunderstandings, and flat-out lies about the people and events that have shaped the nation, there’s the history you know and then there’s the truth. In 33 Questions About American History You’re Not Supposed to Ask, Thomas E. Woods Jr., the New York Times bestselling author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, sets the record straight with a provocative look at the hidden truths about our nation’s history—the ones that have been buried because they’re too politically incorrect to discuss. Woods draws on real scholarship—as opposed to the myths, platitudes, and slogans so many other “history” books are based on—to ask and answer tough questions about American history, including: - Did the Founding Fathers support immigration? - Was the Civil War all about slavery? - Did the Framers really look to the American Indians as the model for the U.S. political system? - Was the U.S. Constitution meant to be a “living, breathing” document—and does it grant the federal government wide latitude to operateas it pleases? - Did Bill Clinton actually stop a genocide, as we’re told? You’d never know it from the history that’s been handed down to us, but the answer to all those questions is no. Woods’s eye-opening exploration reveals how much has been whitewashed from the historical record, overlooked, and skewed beyond recognition. More informative than your last U.S. history class, 33 Questions About American History You’re Not Supposed to Ask will have you wondering just how much about your nation’s past you haven’t been told.

Feminism And Art History

Feminism And Art History
Author: Norma Broude
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 539
Release: 2018-02-23
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0429980167

A long-needed corrective and alternative view of Western art history, these seventeen essays by respected scholars are arranged chronologically and cover every major period from the ancient Egyptian to the present. While several of the essays deal with major women artists, the book is essentially about Western art history and the extent to which it has been distorted, in every period, by sexual bias. With 306 illustrations.