The claim, often made, that India--uniquely among civilizations--lacks historical writing distracts us from a more pertinent question, according to Romila Thapar: how to recognize the historical sense of societies whose past is recorded in ways very different from European conventions. In The Past Before Us, a distinguished scholar of ancient India guides us through a panoramic survey of the historical traditions of North India. Thapar reveals a deep and sophisticated consciousness of history embedded in the diverse body of classical Indian literature.

The history recorded in such texts as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata is less concerned with authenticating persons and events than with presenting a picture of traditions striving to retain legitimacy and continuity amid social change. Spanning an epoch of nearly twenty-five hundred years, from 1000 BCE to 1400 CE, Thapar delineates three distinct historical traditions: an Itihasa-Purana tradition of Brahman authors; a tradition composed mainly by Buddhist and Jaina scholars; and a popular bardic tradition. The Vedic corpus, the epics, the Buddhist canon and monastic chronicles, inscriptions, regional accounts, and royal biographies and dramas are all scrutinized afresh--not as sources to be mined for factual data but as genres that disclose how Indians of ancient times represented their own past to themselves.

Historical landmarks, such as wars, coups, and revolutions, seem to arise under unique conditions. Indeed, what seems to distinguish history from the natural and social sciences is its inability to be dissected or generalized in any meaningful way. Yet even complex and large-scale events like the American Revolutionary War and the French Revolution can be broken down into their component parts, and, as Bertrand Roehner and Tony Syme show, these smaller modules are rarely unique to the events they collectively compose.

The aim of this book is to analyze clusters of similar "elementary" occurrences that serve as the building blocks of more global events. Making connections between seemingly unrelated case studies, Roehner and Syme apply scientific methodology to the analysis of history. Their book identifies the recurring patterns of behavior that shape the histories of different countries separated by vast stretches of time and space. Taking advantage of a broad wealth of historical evidence, the authors decipher what may be seen as a kind of genetic code of history.

Antiquarian, lawyer, and cat lover Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637) was a “prince” of the Republic of Letters and the most gifted French intellectual in the generation between Montaigne and Descartes. From Peiresc’s study in Aix-en-Provence, his insatiable curiosity poured forth in thousands of letters that traveled the Mediterranean, seeking knowledge of matters mundane and exotic. Mining the remarkable 70,000-page archive of this Provençal humanist and polymath, Peter N. Miller recovers a lost Mediterranean world of the early seventeenth century that was dominated by the sea: the ceaseless activity of merchants, customs officials, and ships’ captains at the center of Europe’s sprawling maritime networks. Peiresc’s Mediterranean World reconstructs the web of connections that linked the bustling port city of Marseille to destinations throughout the Western Mediterranean, North Africa, the Levant, and beyond.

“Peter Miller’s reanimation of Peiresc, the master of the Mediterranean, is the best kind of case study. It not only makes us appreciate the range and richness of one man’s experience and the originality of his thought, but also suggests that he had many colleagues in his deepest and most imaginative inquiries. Most important, it gives us hope that their archives too will be opened up by scholars skillful and imaginative enough to make them speak to us.”
—Anthony Grafton, New York Review of Books

Garden history is a discipline of contested purposes. Perspectives on Garden Histories contributes to a self-critical examination of this emergent field of study, at the same time offering an overview of its main achievements in several domains—such as Italian and Mughal gardens—and of the new kinds of investigation to which they have led.

In its early years garden history centered on architectural studies of garden design, but in the 1960s the emphasis shifted from garden design to garden meaning. The new paradigm considered gardens as complex works of art and demanded an extensive documentation of the historical context as well as of the figurative and discursive sources. This approach, in its turn, was challenged by neo-Marxist scholars who proceeded to view landscape appreciation as an ideological superstructure, an outgrowth of agricultural production processes.

Garden designs and their histories can also be viewed as expressions of ideological conflicts in society. Neither gardens nor their history can thus be studied independently of the social, cultural, and political movements that give prominence to the contested ideologies. Gardens can be used to foster some ideologies or reflect a reaction against a social change.

Comparative research offers another fascinating approach, exploring the relations between European landscape concepts and other cultural contexts and discussing issues of cultural dominance and interpretation.

The emergence of various perspectives has led to the incorporation of further questions into the domain of garden studies, which has been moving in new directions and using new methods in search of an adapted theoretical framework. This volume offers a striking view of changes taking place in the discipline.

The working classes, colonial subjects, European nationalists, and Roman Catholics—these groups generated intense anxiety for Victorian England’s elite public, which often responded by accusing them of being dangerous conspirators. Bringing together a wide range of literary and historical evidence, Albert D. Pionke argues that the pejorative meanings attached to such opportunistic accusations of conspiracy were undermined by the many valorized versions of secrecy in Victorian society.

After surveying England’s evolving theories of representative politics and individual and collective secretive practices, Pionke traces the intersection of democracy and secrecy through a series of case histories. Using works by Thomas Carlyle, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, John Henry Newman, and others, along with periodicals, histories, and parliamentary documents of the period, he shows the rhetorical prominence of groups such as the Freemasons, the Thugs, the Carbonari, the Fenians, and the Jesuits in Victorian democratic discourse.

By highlighting the centrality of representations of conspiracy in every case, Plots of Opportunity shows for the first time the markedly similar strategies of repression, resistance, and concealment used by competing agents in the democracy debate.

An interdisciplinary study of the Persian Period

Various disciplines that deal with Achaemenid rule offer starkly different assessments of Persian kingship. While Assyriologists treat Cyrus's heirs as legitimate successors of the Babylonian kings, biblical scholars often speak of a "kingless era" in which the priesthood took over the function of the Davidic monarch. Egyptologists see their land as uniquely independently minded despite conquests, while Hellenistic scholarship tends to evaluate the interface between Hellenism and native traditions without reference to the previous two centuries of Persian rule. This volume brings together in dialogue a broad array of scholars with the goal of seeking a broader context for assessing Persian kingship through the anthropological concept of political memory.

Features

• Articles present the results of an international symposium held in Leiden, the Netherlands, 2014
• More than twenty illustrations
• Seventeen articles, an introduction, and a summary response

In this bold, provocative collection, Wang Hui confronts some of the major issues concerning modern China and the status quo of contemporary Chinese thought.

The book’s overarching theme is the possibility of an alternative modernity that does not rely on imported conceptions of Chinese history and its legacy. Wang Hui argues that current models, based largely on Western notions of empire and the nation-state, fail to account for the richness and diversity of pre-modern Chinese historical practice. At the same time, he refrains from offering an exclusively Chinese perspective and placing China in an intellectual ghetto. Navigating terrain on regional language and politics, he draws on China’s unique past to expose the inadequacies of European-born standards for assessing modern China’s evolution. He takes issue particularly with the way in which nation-state logic has dominated politically charged concerns like Chinese language standardization and “The Tibetan Question.” His stance is critical—and often controversial—but he locates hope in the kinds of complex, multifaceted arrangements that defined China and much of Asia for centuries.

The Politics of Imagining Asia challenges us not only to re-examine our theories of “Asia” but to reconsider what “Europe” means as well. As Theodore Huters writes in his introduction, “Wang Hui’s concerns extend beyond China and Asia to an ambition to rethink world history as a whole.”

This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

Popularizing the Past tells the stories of five postwar historians who changed the way ordinary Americans thought about their nation’s history.
 
What’s the matter with history? For decades, critics of the discipline have argued that the historical profession is dominated by scholars unable, or perhaps even unwilling, to write for the public. In Popularizing the Past, Nick Witham challenges this interpretation by telling the stories of five historians—Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Howard Zinn, and Gerda Lerner—who, in the decades after World War II, published widely read books of national history.
 
Witham compellingly argues that we should understand historians’ efforts to engage with the reading public as a vital part of their postwar identity and mission. He shows how the lives and writings of these five authors were fundamentally shaped by their desire to write histories that captivated both scholars and the elusive general reader. He also reveals how these authors’ efforts could not have succeeded without a publishing industry and a reading public hungry to engage with the cutting-edge ideas then emerging from American universities. As Witham’s book makes clear, before we can properly understand the heated controversies about American history so prominent in today’s political culture, we must first understand the postwar effort to popularize the past.

Jacob Katz (1904–1998) was one of the greatest Jewish historians of the twentieth century. A pioneer of new foci and methods, Katz brought extraordinary insights to many aspects of Jewish life and its surrounding contexts.

With a keen eye for both “forests” and “trees,” Katz transformed our understanding of many areas of Jewish history, among them: Jewish-Christian relations in the Middle Ages, the social-historical significance of Jewish law, the rise of Orthodoxy in Germany and Hungary, and the emergence of modern anti-Semitism. In this volume, ten leading scholars critically discuss Katz’s work with an appreciation for Katz’s importance in reshaping the way Jewish history is studied.

Printing Landmarks tells the story of the late Tokugawa period’s most distinctive form of popular geography: meisho zue. Beginning with the publication of Miyako meisho zue in 1780, these monumental books deployed lovingly detailed illustrations and informative prose to showcase famous places (meisho) in ways that transcended the limited scope, quality, and reliability of earlier guidebooks and gazetteers. Putting into spellbinding print countless landmarks of cultural significance, the makers of meisho zue created an opportunity for readers to experience places located all over the Japanese archipelago.

In this groundbreaking multidisciplinary study, Robert Goree draws on diverse archival and scholarly sources to explore why meisho zue enjoyed widespread and enduring popularity. Examining their readership, compilation practices, illustration techniques, cartographic properties, ideological import, and production networks, Goree finds that the appeal of the books, far from accidental, resulted from specific choices editors and illustrators made about form, content, and process. Spanning the fields of book history, travel literature, map history, and visual culture, Printing Landmarks provides a new perspective on Tokugawa-period culture by showing how meisho zue depicted inspiring geographies in which social harmony, economic prosperity, and natural stability made for a peaceful polity.

Depictions of the Holocaust in history, literature, and film became a focus of intense academic debate in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, with the passing of the eyewitness generation and the rise of comparative genocide studies, the Holocaust’s privileged place not only in scholarly discourse but across Western society has been called into question.

Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture is a searching reappraisal of the debates and controversies that have shaped Holocaust studies over a quarter century. This landmark volume brings international scholars of the founding generation of Holocaust studies into conversation with a new generation of historians, artists, and writers who have challenged the limits of representation through their scholarly and cultural practices. Focusing on the public memorial cultures, testimonial narratives, and artifacts of cultural memory and history generated by Holocaust remembrance, the volume examines how Holocaust culture has become institutionalized, globalized, and variously contested. Organized around three interlocking themes—the stakes of narrative, the remediation of the archive, and the politics of exceptionality—the essays in this volume explore the complex ethics surrounding the discourses, artifacts, and institutions of Holocaust remembrance.

From contrasting viewpoints and, in particular, from the multiple perspectives of genocide studies, the authors question if and why the Holocaust should remain the ultimate test case for ethics and a unique reference point for how we understand genocide and crimes against humanity.

Can the Holocaust be compellingly described or represented? Or is there some core aspect of the extermination of the Jews of Europe which resists our powers of depiction, of theory, of narrative? In this volume, twenty scholars probe the moral, epistemological, and aesthetic limits of an account or portrayal of the Nazi horror.

Christopher Browning, Hayden White, Carlo Ginzburg, Martin Jay, Dominick LaCapra, and others focus first on the general question: can the record of his historical event be established objectively through documents and witnesses, or is every historical interpretation informed by the perspective of its narrator? The suggestion that all historical accounts are determined by a preestablished narrative choice raises the ethical and intellectual issues of various forms of relativization. In more specific terms, what are the possibilities of historicizing National Socialism without minimizing the historical place of the Holocaust?

Also at issue are the problems related to an artistic representation, particularly the dilemmas posed by aestheticization. John Felstiner, Yael S. Feldman, Sidra Ezrahi, Eric Santner, and Anton Kaes grapple with these questions and confront the inadequacy of words in the face of the Holocaust. Others address the problem of fitting Nazi policies and atrocities into the history of Western thought and science. The book concludes with Geoffrey Hartman’s evocative meditation on memory.

These essays expose to scrutiny questions that have a pressing claim on our attention, our conscience, and our cultural memory. First presented at a conference organized by Saul Friedlander, they are now made available for the wide consideration and discussion they merit.

Faith in progress is a characteristic we often associate with the Victorian era. Victorian intellectuals and free-thinkers who believed in progress and wrote history from a progressive point of view—men such as Leslie Stephen, John Morley, W. E. H. Lecky, and James Anthony Froude—are usually thought to have done so because they were optimistic about their own times. Their optimism has been seen as the result of a successful Liberal campaign for political reform in the sixties and seventies, carried out in alliance with religious dissenters—a campaign that removed religion from the arena of public debate.

Jeffrey Paul von Arx challenges this long-standing view of the Victorian intellectual aristocracy. He sees them as preoccupied with and even fearful of a religious resurgence throughout their careers, and demonstrates that their loss of confidence in contemporary liberalism began with their disillusionment over the effects of the Franchise Reform Act of 1867. He portrays their championing of the idea of progress as motivated not by optimism about the present, but by their desire to explain away and reverse if possible contemporary religious and political trends, such as the new mass politics in England and Ireland.

This is the first book to explore how pessimism could be the psychological basis for the Victorians’ progressive conception of history. Throughout, von Arx skillfully interweaves threads of religion, politics, and history, showing how ideas in one sphere cannot be understood without reference to the others.

Chicana/o history has reached an intriguing juncture. While academic and intellectual studies are embracing new, highly nuanced perspectives on race, class, gender, education, identity, and community, the field itself continues to be viewed as a battleground, subject to attacks from outside academia by those who claim that the discipline promotes racial hatred and anti-Americanism. Against a backdrop of deportations and voter suppression targeting Latinos, A Promising Problem presents the optimistic voices of scholars who call for sophisticated solutions while embracing transnationalism and the reality of multiple, overlapping identities.

Showcasing a variety of new directions, this anthology spans topics such as growth and reassessment in Chicana/o history manifested in a disruption of nationalism and geographic essentialism, the impact of legal history, interracial relations and the experiences of Latino subpopulations in the US South, race and the politics of religious history, transborder feminism in the early twentieth century, and aspirations for a field that increasingly demonstrates the relational dynamics of cultural production. As they reflect on the state of their field, the contributors offer significant insights into sociology, psychology, anthropology, political science, education, and literature, while tracing the history of activism throughout the last century and debating the very concepts of “Chicano” and “Chicano history.” Although the political landscape is fraught with closed-off rhetoric, A Promising Problem encourages diversity of thought and opens the possibilities of historical imagination.