Nation and the Writing of History in China and Britain explores, through a comparative approach, the reception of the nationalist worldview and its effects on the practice of history in China and Britain. This book proposes that nationalism, rather than a political doctrine, is a way of making sense of the world which results from the combination of a set of definite assumptions. The work analyzes how each one of these premises was accepted and negotiated by literati, intellectuals, historians, and other scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The results of this research showcase how the reception of the new nationalist worldview crucially affected images of the past, the present, and the future in both societies and decisively framed cultural, social, and political debate. In addition, they likewise evidence the fundamental role that historical narratives play in the crystallization of national identities. This book is perfect for readers interested in China and Britain during this time period, but also to anyone attracted to new ways of conceiving nationalism and its role in our world.

Clarifying the Past provides a comprehensive analysis of state-sponsored historical commissions operating in conflicted and divided societies, developing a theoretical and methodological framework within the historical dialogue paradigm, key to understanding the work of such commissions. The theoretical and methodological framework is complemented with an extensive empirical analysis of 27 historical commissions that operated in different social and political contexts from 1990s to the present. The detailed examination of these cases gives a broad perspective into the potential capacities of historical commissions in different settings. Although only sampling the most recent cases, this volume shows how the steady increase of the number of historical commissions indicates that we are not dealing with a marginal phenomenon. The increased recognition of the potential of historical commissions to address the legacies of contested pasts and potential introduction of such commissions to transitional justice, makes this book highly relevant. This book has been written with the objective of deepening and broadening the existing knowledge on state-sponsored historical commissions. Its intended audiences are scholars and practitioners in the fields of historical theory, public history, and historical dialogue, transitional justice, peace and conflict studies.

This book traces the development of the Polish theory of history, analysing how Jerzy Topolski, Krzysztof Pomian, and Olga Tokarczuk have both built upon and transgressed the metahistorical theories of American historian Hayden White. Poland’s reception of White’s work has gone through different phases, from distancing to a period of fascination and eventual critical analysis, beginning with Topolski's methodological school in the 1980s. Topolski played a major role in international debates on historical theory in the second half of the 20th century. The book’s second study is a rare opportunity for English-speaking audiences to engage with the thoughts of Pomian, a philosopher and historian of ideas who has both complemented and developed theories of historical cognition independently from White. In the final chapter, the book presents a study of the historical imagination in 21st-century Central and Eastern Europe through the work of novelist Tokarczuk, the winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. In considering the contributions of these three thinkers, the book explores the active process by which past becomes history and thus motivates contemporary actions and realities. By deconstructing and reconstructing contemporary theories of history, this research is a unique contribution to the fields of historiography and the philosophy of history.

This study of Lebanese historical thought and its role in national identity formation in the eighteenth century focuses on a sample of historians, mainly Christians, who lived and wrote during the Shihabi Emirate from 1697 till the Egyptian invasion in 1831. These historians, who represent different trends in historical writing, were able to develop the idea of Lebanon as a unique entity and as a haven and to underline its specificity and distinctiveness. With a focus on primary sources, this book endeavors to penetrate into the main concerns and ways of thinking at this time when a Lebanese identity started to bloom. In doing so, it discovers a neglected century as a fruitful and rich period in the history of Lebanon and a prelude to nineteenth-century awakening. This book will be of interest to scholars of the history and historiography of Lebanon and the Middle East, with relevance for specialized courses in the fields of history and historiography at universities.

This book shows how a multidisciplinary approach combining conceptual and methodological tools from political history and political science can help to develop a deeper understanding of contemporary political phenomena including democracy, populism, war, and forced migrations, among others. Throughout the eleven chapters, the volume brings together senior academics and early-career scholars to explore this innovative approach through a broad range of case studies which are not specific to any particular nation but are characteristic of contemporaneity worldwide. Both the international character and the interdisciplinary appeal of this book are reinforced by the fact that the editors and contributors come from different countries and diverse academic traditions. This book is aimed at scholars, researchers and postgraduate students interested in interdisciplinary approaches and working on politics and global phenomena in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This book explores the versatile nature of historical methodology and its use in interdisciplinary research. Based on the historical overview of the appearance of one sort of historical ideas and disappearance of another, the book aims to demonstrate a wide range of possibilities of research in the field and to show how the pursuit of historical truth may facilitate the formation of collective memory and how the application of research tools can explain events in the contemporary world.

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.

At its very center, The Cultivation of Character and Culture in Roman Rhetorical Education: The Available Means is a study of the subtle, organic ways that rhetoric can work to cultivate a particular character. This is an extension of the current work in composition studies, which focus on the ways that writing instruction contributes to the development of individual power and agency in students, combined with an ancient understanding of the ways that students learned to act within a particular, accepted cultural framework. It recognizes and reclaims a lost dimension of rhetoric, a dimension that is conceptually linked to the martial culture of the ancient world, to show how ancient rhetorical theory framed the discipline as an education in thinking, speaking, and acting in ways that were necessary to be both a persuasive speaker and an effective leader. Through close readings and analysis of particular rhetorical exercises, the book shows how rhetorical education shaped characters that were appropriate in the eyes of the dominant culture but were also capable of working independently to progressively alter that culture. In showing the ways that rhetorical education shaped a particular character, the book demonstrates the ways that the combination character, culture, and virtue are vital to leadership in any time.

This book re-thinks the relationship between the world of the traditional Jewish study hall (the Beit Midrash) and the academy: Can these two institutions overcome their vast differences? Should they attempt to do so? If not, what could two methods of study seen as diametrically opposed possibly learn from one another? How might they help each other reconceive their interrelationship, themselves, and the broader study of Jews and Judaism? This book begins with three distinct approaches to these challenges. The chapters then follow the approaches through an interdisciplinary series of pioneering case studies that reassess a range of topics including religion and pluralism in Jewish education; pain, sexual consent, and ethics in the Talmud; the place of reason and devotion among Jewish thinkers as diverse as Moses Mendelssohn, Jacob Taubes, Sarah Schenirer, Ibn Chiquitilla, Yair Ḥayim Bacharach, and the Rav Shagar; and Jewish law as a response to the post-Holocaust landscape. The authors are scholars of rabbinics, history, linguistics, philosophy, law, and education, many of whom also have traditional religious training or ordination. The result is a book designed for learned scholars, non-specialists, and students of varying backgrounds, and one that is sure to spark debate in the university, the Beit Midrash, and far beyond.

This book presents a range of new research on British-Chinese relations in the period from Britain’s first imperial intervention in China up to the 1960s. Topics covered include economic issues such as fi nance, investment and Chinese labour in British territories, questions of perceptions on both sides, such as British worries about, and exaggeration of, the ‘China threat’, including to India, and British aggression towards, and eventual withdrawal from, China.