Browse

In this collection, the memoirs of eleven historians provide a portrait of a formative generation of scholars. Born around the time of World War II, these historians came of age just before the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s and helped to transform both their discipline and the broader world of American higher education. The self-inventions they chronicle led, in many cases, to the invention of new fields—including women's and gender history, social history, and public history—that cleared paths in the academy and made the study of the past more capacious and broadly relevant. In these stories, aspiring historians will find inspiration and guidance, experienced scholars will see reflections of their own dilemmas and struggles, and all readers will discover an account of how today's seasoned historians embarked on their intellectual journeys.

Although social structural, political economic, psychological, and legal conceptions of racism competed from the 1920s through the mid 1940s, individualistic theories of the race issue proved especially influential in postwar America. This book asks how and why racial individualism—which presented prejudice and discrimination as the root cause of racial conflict, centered individuals in the study of race relations, and suggested that one could secure racial justice by changing white minds and protecting African American rights—gained traction in the two decades following Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944). A study in the racialized politics of knowledge production, the book examines institutions where social scientists, civil rights activists, and proponents of improved race relations debated the sources of and best ways to fight “the race problem.” Scientism, behavioralism, and methodological individualism intersected with antiradicalism, civil rights legal successes, rightward shifts in American liberalism, and the enduring appeal of uncontroversial tolerance education, the book argues, to favor individualistic approaches to racial research and reform. These dynamics proved influential despite ongoing critique—most notably in African American led academic spaces—of social theories that reduced racial oppression to individual prejudice and discrimination. The book traces the flowering a non-economic, power-evasive conception of racism, highlights the centrality of inflated assumptions about what education can accomplish to postwar racial liberalism, and investigates how antiracist scholar-activists negotiated competing theoretical and political commitments.

This book examines conventions of writing in contemporary French historiography. It asks how French historians organize their texts; whether they stage themselves or seek to conceal their presence; whether (and how) they give actors their own voices; on what strategies they rely to guarantee the validity of their accounts of the past; whether they turn, in the course of such accounts, to figures of speech and other rhetorical devices; and whether, their reputation as traditionalists notwithstanding, they occasionally dare to experiment with the available forms of historiographic discourse. Examining what Ricoeur calls the “representation stage” of the historians’ enterprise makes it possible to revisit some key issues, such as the assumed necessary membership of historiographic discourse in the narrative genre, the purported objectivity of that discourse, and the identity of history as a “science,” though one that is distinct from the natural and theoretical sciences. In this respect, the book takes part in debates about the status of history, and more generally of the human sciences, in the early twenty-first century.

Published in 1974, Marshall Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam was a watershed moment in the study of Islam. By locating the history of Islamic societies in a global perspective, Hodgson challenged the orientalist paradigms that had stunted the development of Islamic studies. He also provided an alternative approach to world history. Edited by Edmund Burke III, Islam and World History provides a critical reassessment of Hodgson’s relevance in the twenty-first century and introduces his influential work to a new generation of readers. Together, these essays explore the complexity of Hodgson’s generation, the daring of his ideas, and the global context of his world historical insights, notably on Islam and world history, gender in Islam, and the problem of Muslim universality. In our post-9/11 world, Hodgson’s historical vision and moral engagement have never been more relevant. A towering achievement, Islam and World History will prove the definitive statement on Hodgson’s relevance in the twenty-first century and introduce his influential work to a new generation of readers.

What does postmodernism mean for the future of history? Can one still write history in postmodernity? To answer questions such as these, this book provides an overview of postmodernism and its complex relationship to history and historiography. Placing postmodern theories in their intellectual and historical contexts, the book shows how they are part of broad developments in Western culture. The book sees postmodernism as neither just a fad nor a universal remedy. It presents and critically evaluates the major views on history held by influential postmodernists, such as Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and the new narrativists. Along the way, it introduces major debates among historians over postmodern theories of evidence, objectivity, meaning and order, truth, and the usefulness of history. The book also discusses new types of history that have emerged as a consequence of postmodernism, including cultural history, microhistory, and new historicism.

Time is the backdrop of historical inquiry, yet it is much more than a featureless setting for events. Different temporalities interact dynamically; sometimes they coexist tensely, sometimes they clash violently. In this innovative volume, editors Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley bring together essays that challenge how we interpret history by focusing on the nexus of two concepts—“power” and “time”—as they manifest in a wide variety of case studies. Analyzing history, culture, politics, technology, law, art, and science, this engaging book shows how “temporal regimes” are constituted through the shaping of power in historically specific ways. Power and Time includes seventeen essays on a wide variety of subjects: human rights; sovereignty; Islamic, European, and Indian history; slavery; capitalism; revolution; the Supreme Court; and even the Manson Family. Power and Time will be an agenda-setting volume, highlighting the work of some of the world’s most respected and innovative contemporary historians and posing fundamental questions for the craft of history.

Promiscuous Knowledge provides a genealogy of the information age from its early origins up to the reign of Google. It examines how we think about fact, image, and knowledge, centering on the various ways that claims to truth are complicated by being passed on to the public and by new modes of circulation, and it offers a backstory to the muddle we face today around facts and truth. Tracing the changing shape of truth from the early modern era and more especially in nineteenth and twentieth century America, the book shows, via many examples and case studies, how cultural arbiters have sought to contain both knowledge's inherent unruliness and popular resistance to their authority. The image is one of those strategies, and its breakdown from a once mythic container to a now fractious bone of contention is one of the chief developments of the past century. The internet exacerbates extant tensions in knowledge, but its troubles have a much longer history. Promiscuous Knowledge constructs a cultural and intellectual history of information, images, and conceptions of knowledge since the seventeenth century, with an emphasis on the American context since the nineteenth century.

Richard Hofstadter (1916–70) was America's most distinguished historian of the twentieth century. The author of several groundbreaking books, including The American Political Tradition, he was a vigorous champion of the liberal politics that emerged from the New Deal. During his nearly thirty-year career, Hofstadter fought public campaigns against liberalism's most dynamic opponents, from McCarthy in the 1950s to Barry Goldwater and the Sun Belt conservatives in the 1960s. His opposition to the extreme politics of postwar America—articulated in his books, essays, and public lectures—marked him as one of the nation's most important and prolific public intellectuals. This biography explores Hofstadter's life within the context of the rise and fall of American liberalism. A fierce advocate of academic freedom, racial justice, and political pluralism, Hofstadter charted in his works the changing nature of American society from a provincial Protestant foundation to one based on the values of an urban and multiethnic nation. Hofstadter presciently saw in rural America's hostility to this cosmopolitanism signs of an anti-intellectualism that he believed was dangerously endemic in a mass democracy. By the end of a life cut short by leukemia, Hofstadter had won two Pulitzer Prizes, and his books had attracted international attention. Yet the Vietnam years culminated in a conservative reaction to his work that is still with us. Whether one agrees with Hofstadter's critics or with the noted historian John Higham, who insisted that Hofstadter was “the finest and also the most humane intelligence of our generation,” the importance of this seminal thinker cannot be denied.

Historical “what-if” scenarios abound in our current political, academic, legal, cultural, and literary discourses. This book reveals the origins and development of the counterfactual mode of historical thought, exploring its reasoning, uses, and the analytical and narrative forms it takes. The book traces the actual history of counterfactual history from its eighteenth-century roots in religious debates, moral philosophy, and military sciences to its current applications in fields like economic history and reparative justice. And it explores the historical-counterfactual mode in narrative fictions, from nineteenth-century French utopias and dystopias to contemporary science fiction and alternate-history novels. The majority of the book concentrates on writings that cluster around two long-established counterfactual-historical loci: 1) the American Civil War and its aftermath; and 2) the summer of 1940 and the Battle of Britain, when Great Britain was Nazi Germany’s sole undefeated opponent. The two case studies demonstrate how Americans and Britons have used historical counterfactual speculations and narratives to gain perspective on their current predicaments as well as to structure and revise their national characters.